The End Of Mr. Y (10 page)

concocted. Mr. Y realises that there is no way he’ll be able to find the concoction by chance. The only way he will ever be able to revisit the Troposphere is by finding that doctor and persuading him to tell him how.

By the beginning of Chapter Twelve, Mr. Y has discovered that many of the people who travel the country with fairs in the summer end up in London in the winter, exhibiting their sideshow horrors in run-down shops and backstreet houses. As a last resort, Mr. Y has taken to spending his evenings, and much of his money, touring these establishments, trying to find some clue to lead him to the fairground doctor.

My search continued into November. The weather had turned bitterly cold but I kept at it every night, even as I began to doubt that I would ever find my man. It seemed to me that London had become a sort of Vanity Fair, with many of the establishments in the back streets of the West End – and beyond – dressed up with gaudy crimson hangings and advertising, by way of vast painted representations and pictorial facsimiles, such unsavoury offerings as the Bearded Lady, the Spotted Boy, the Giantess of Peru and various other mutants, savages and freaks of nature.

Although most of these establishments remained open all day, I had discovered that it was in the evening and nighttime hours that one should expect to encounter the fullest range of their offerings. And so it was that I would venture out after supper every evening and pay my penny at the doors of establishments both gaudy and drab, populated by crowds of people or empty. In every place I asked the same question, and in every place I received the same response. No one had ever heard of the fair-ground doctor.

November grew older and greyer, and each night it snowed a little more. I decided to confine my investigations to my own locality until such time as the weather improved, although I confess that by that time there was barely a waxwork or living skeleton in London that I had not already seen. However, I had been told of a new premises on the Whitechapel Road, opposite the London Hospital, formerly the site of an undertakers, and, previously to that, a drapery business with which I had been familiar. So, after a small supper of bread and dripping, I set off on foot towards Whitechapel Road. My journey took me past the Jews’ Burial Ground and the back of the Coal Depot and then along the Southern side of the workhouse behind Baker’s Row. Not for the first time I experienced the direst of premonitions that, if I did not succeed in my undertaking, my own family would be forced inside such an establishment. I did not imagine worse, because I knew of no worse.

I followed the railway line down towards the London Hospital, looking behind me all the time for the thieves who dwell in areas such as this. I was not carrying very much money with me but I had of course read the horrible stories of the new breed of East End thieves who, if they find you with only a few pence, will easily kick out one of your eyes – or worse – as thanks for it. The snow fell softly on me as I walked through the smoky air, with coal dust from the depot mingling with the smog already thick around me. I coughed a little, and rubbed my hands to keep warm. I thought then that if I were fully in possession of all my senses I would surely not have been out on a night such as this one. Yet on I walked.

As I turned into Whitechapel Road, my eyes almost immediately fell upon the establishment of which I had heard. The upper part of the house was adorned with a large sheet of canvas, on which various entertainments and spectacles were depicted, including yet another Fat Lady, along with the World’s Strongest Woman and various other oddities. It is alarming how one so quickly tires of these sorts of spectacles, especially when one visits these establishments with such regularity as did I over those months, and if one chances, as I did, to observe the dreary

reality behind the lurid and gruesome teratology presented by the showmen. Once, early on a Saturday morning, I happened to walk past an establishment I had visited two or three nights previously. There, in an overgrown garden, I observed the ‘amazing’ bearded woman, who by evenings was a sombre, backlit, half-human spectacle, pegging out her washing and engaging in an argument with an African ‘savage’ who was to be found after sunset adorned with a straw skirt, golden tunic and hoop earrings, and who apparently made only the utterances ‘Ug, ug,’ but was at that moment wearing the rather less exotic outfit of shabby stockings, corduroy britches and a grey cloth cap, and was demonstrating an advanced grasp not only of English, but of its myriad vernacular words and expressions. I also once chanced upon the Boy with the Gigantic Head, a child of perhaps twelve or thirteen years, outside of his darkened room, and removed from all costume, lime-light, and painted advertisement. He was no longer a gaudy freak but clearly a sick child who required medical attention.

Feeling rather half-hearted, I paid a penny to enter the Whitechapel establishment. On the ground floor, and requiring no further payment, were the usual trivial spectacles of ships-in- bottles, shrunken heads and the like. There were also various wax-works of prominent political figures, and a scene depicting the glories of Empire. There were also, seated at small card- tables, various scoundrels engaged in the dark art of hiding the ‘Lady’ from those gentlemen who would find her for a shilling, and other similar forms of petty embezzlement. As I left this room and made towards the stairs, a young girl attempted to entice me into a back-room in order that I might have my fortune told by a Madame de Pompadour. I assured the woman that all the possibilities of my fortune were already well-known to me and proceeded up the stairs. Here I found a troublesome display indeed: eleven wax-works, each depicting one of the victims of the Whitechapel Murders. I confess I had to avert my gaze after briefly regarding a mutilated copy of Mary Kelly lying on a bed in a chemise with thick wax blood coming out of her neck. However, something about this gruesome little scene – something beyond the basic horror of the spectacle – troubled me as I walked into the next room and beheld a red-headed young woman lifting weights with her long plait of hair. Presently I returned to the wax-work exhibition and regarded the scene of Mary Kelly’s demise once again. And, sure enough, there it was. The gaudy red lamp that I had last seen in the fair-ground doctor’s tent was now serving as a prop for this morbid tableau.

I immediately strode over to a woman sitting in an old armchair in the far corner of the room. I presumed that it was she who was keeping watch over the wax-work display. I stood facing her for some seconds before she looked up from a costume in her lap, onto which she was sewing sequins over frayed and greying sections of material.

‘Can I help you?’ she said to me.

‘I wish to enquire after the owner of that lamp,’ I said to her.

‘You mean that poor girl Mary Kelly?’

‘No,’ I said, quickly becoming exasperated. ‘No, a gentleman. A fair-ground doctor. Perhaps he is engaged here?’

The woman looked down at her embroidery. ‘Sorry, sir,’ she said. ‘I don’t think there is anyone of that description here.’

She then briefly flashed her small eyes at me and I understood what she wanted. I found a shilling and showed it to her.

‘Are you certain you do not know him?’ I asked.

She eyed the shilling and then reached out and took it from me.

‘Try the fortune-teller downstairs,’ she told me quickly, in a half-whisper. ‘The man who owns that lamp is her husband.’

Without hesitating further I made my way down the stairs and, full of impatience, burst into the fortune-teller’s salon. There sat a bony, pale woman, with her hair arranged in a colourful scarf. Before she even began to speak, I addressed her directly.

‘I am looking for your husband.’

As she began assuring me that she had no husband and that I could pay her directly for her services, which were of a most superior nature, there suddenly came a blast of cold air into the room, and the fair-ground doctor entered.

‘Mr. Y,’ he said. ‘How pleasant.’ ‘Good evening, Doctor,’ I said.

‘I understand that you have been looking for me,’ he said.

‘How –’ I began, and then stopped. We both knew the effects of his medicine. I quickly worked out how this present fortune-telling act worked. The doctor presumably read the minds of all the people to enter the establishment and primed his wife with their biographies, ready for her to exploit them. Therefore, I reasoned, he had already read my mind and knew what I was looking for. I guessed that there was a chance he would give it to me – for a price.

‘You want the recipe,’ he said to me.

‘Yes,’ I said, but hesitated to tell the doctor just how much I longed for it.

‘Very well. You can have it,’ said he, ‘for thirty pounds and no less.’

I cursed my own mind. This man, this back-room showman, already knew that I would give everything I had for another taste of his curious mixture, and, of course, he planned to take everything I had and no less.

‘Please,’ I said. ‘Don’t take all my money. I need to buy cloth for the shop, and to pay the wages of my assistant. There is also medicine for my dying father – ’

‘Thirty pounds,’ he said again. ‘Come here tomorrow evening with the money and I shall give you the recipe. If you do not come, I shall regard our business as concluded. Good evening.’ He showed me the door.

The following evening I withdrew the money from its hiding place and carefully stowed it inside my shoe, lest the East End ruffians take it from me. With a heavy heart, and a profound uneasiness, I made my way back to the establishment opposite the London Hospital. The previous evening I had witnessed only a young man playing the Pandean pipes outside; today, the girl with the organ was in attendance as well, her instrument wailing and buzzing with the same bombilations I recalled from the Goose Fair. I strode past all this, past the boys selling plum duff, the pick-pockets and the vagrants, and into the House of Horrors, paying another penny for the privilege.

I feared that the so-called doctor may have disappeared again, but the promise of thirty pounds must have been sufficiently enticing for him, as he greeted me as soon as I stepped into

And this is the place where the ripped-out page would have been. My eye keeps falling on the single sentence on page 133, the next existing page:

And so, in the freezing cold of that late November night, I walked away, each footprint in the snow a record of a further step towards my own downfall, the oblivion that faced me.

What am I supposed to do now? There is one chapter left, starting on page 135. Do I read it, and disregard the fact that what must be the crucial scene between Mr. Y and the fairground doctor is missing? Or … what? What are the other options? It’s not as if I can just go to a bookshop tomorrow

and buy a replacement copy, or simply read the page. This book is not on any library record anywhere in the world: it doesn’t even exist in rare manuscript collections. Is this page lost for ever? And why on earth would someone have removed it?

SEVEN

M
ONDAY MORNING, AND THE SKY
is the colour of sad weddings. I’m going in to the university, although I’m fairly sure it’s still shut. But perhaps they’ll have the heating on, anyway. And, as long as our building is still standing, there’ll be free tea and coffee. Will our building be OK? It had better be, because I need to try to break into Burlem’s computer. He’s the only person I know who has ever seen a copy of
The End of Mr. Y
and maybe there’ll be something on his machine that will tell me where his copy came from, or whom I could contact to arrange to look at the missing page. I didn’t read the last chapter in the end last night. It wouldn’t be right without the missing page. Instead, I listened to Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony on my iPod and wrote out everything I thought about the bulk of the novel I had read. I didn’t get into bed until about 3 a. m., so I am not at all awake today. I have never walked up to the university; I don’t even know the right way. All I do know is that it is a steep climb, and I don’t want to go up the way I came down on Friday because I am convinced that the right way must be shorter than that. So I do the only thing I can think of and go to the Tourist Information place by the cathedral. There’s no one there apart from a woman with a grey perm and thin wire glasses. She is busy arranging a display of cathedral mugs, and I have to stand there for a few seconds before she notices me. It turns out that there’s a free map of walking routes around the city, so she gives me one of those and I start following it immediately, walking around past the cathedral walls until I see a sign for the North Gate. I follow the sign and walk past some terraced houses and a noisy mill race opposite a pub where my map tells me to turn left, then right. Then I walk over a bridge and past some stinging nettles up a hill until I come to a footpath, which takes me through a tunnel under the railway: a strange cylindrical space with smooth, graffiti- spattered walls and round orange lights set to come on as you walk underneath them (at least, this is what I assume; perhaps the effect is actually the work of a poltergeist, or simply due to the fact that the lights are broken). I walk along the edge of a shabby suburban park, the kind of place where kids play football and dogs fight on a Saturday afternoon, then down an alleyway, across a main road, past a hairdresser’s and into a housing estate. I think students live here, although it looks like the kind of place you’d come to only when you’d retired or given up life in some other way. All I can see as I walk up the hill are cream-coloured bungalows and front gardens: no graffiti, no playgrounds, no shops, no pubs. The whole place has the kind of stillness you’d expect just before the world ended.

On days like this I do not feel afraid of death, or pain. I don’t know if it’s the tiredness, the book, or even the curse, but today, as I walk through this housing estate, there’s a feeling inside me like the potential nuclear fission of every atom in my body: a chain reaction of energy that could take me to the limits of everything. As I walk along, I almost desire some kind of violence: to live, to die, just for the experience of it. I’m so hyped up suddenly that I want to fuck the world, or be fucked by it. Yes, I want to be penetrated by the shrapnel of a million explosions. I want to see my own blood. I want to die with everyone: the ultimate bonding experience; the flash at the end of the world. Me becoming you; you becoming we; we becoming for ever. A collapsing wavefunction of violence. On days like this I think about being cursed and all I can think is
Now, now, now
. I want that missing