The End Of Mr. Y (15 page)

Should I try and find something to cure them? That might be quite quick. Maybe not, though. I almost like them.

I yawn and don’t bother to cover my mouth: no one’s been up here all morning. I still don’t know what Carbo Vegetabilis is, nor what the thousandth potency might be, so I flick through the pile of books on the desk until I eventually find two helpful documents. One is a short biography of Dr Thomas Skinner, a Scottish homoeopath who visited the United States in 1876 and developed something called the ‘centesimal fluxion machine’ for making what the book describes as ‘potencies in excess of the thousandth’. After a lot more flicking and reading, I come across the next helpful document. It’s a reproduction of a 1925 catalogue entry from the Boericke & Tafel Homoeopathic Pharmacists of Philadelphia, and it explains, in great detail, exactly how homoeopathic medicines are (or were) made. The process sounds crazy. It seems that a substance (cinchona bark, arsenic, sulphur, snake venom, whatever) is steeped in ‘the finest spirits, made of sound grain’, and then the medicine is made by taking one drop of this ‘mother tincture’ and combining it with ninety-nine drops of alcohol, then succussing (shaking or pounding) the mixture ten times; then taking one drop from this new mixture and combining it with ninety-nine new drops of alcohol, and so on. The thirtieth potency, apparently common in homoeopathic prescribing, is made by doing this thirty times. The thousandth potency, therefore (which they call the 1M potency), is made by doing this one thousand times. At least, I think I’ve got that right. It sounds impossible. I read it again. Yes.

That is right.

Shit. Do people even make this stuff any more? Is there still such a thing as Tafel’s High Potencies or the Skinner machine? Am I going to have to go out and find some charcoal and start messing around with pipettes and slivovitz (does that count as the finest spirits? Probably not). Could my wrists even cope with all that shaking? I don’t have bionic arms, and I have absolutely no stamina. Once I rubbed out the pencilled-in marginalia from a hundred pages of a book that I wanted to photocopy (long story) and afterwards it felt like I’d been wanking off a giant for a hundred years. I’m still thinking about this, and wishing there was a way of finding some sort of Victorian pharmacist to help me, when someone taps me on the shoulder. Even though I thought I was alone in here, I don’t jump. In fact, I am so absorbed in this new problem that I vaguely shrug the hand away from my shoulder and keep reading. I can already sense that it’s Patrick, anyway. I can smell his woody aftershave and the lemony scent of his clean clothes. He touches my shoulder again, and this time I have to respond.

‘Hi,’ I say, without really looking up.

‘Hello,’ he says, hovering behind my right shoulder. ‘What are you reading about?’

‘Nineteenth-century homoeopathy,’ I say, turning my hand over so it rests on the book, rather than holding it open. I don’t want him to see my wrist.

‘Gosh,’ he says. ‘Was homoeopathy around then?’ ‘I think it was its heyday,’ I say.

There’s a long pause. I wish he’d go away.

‘Ariel,’ he says.

‘What?’

‘Can I buy you a coffee to say sorry?’ I sigh. ‘I’m quite busy doing this.’ ‘Ariel?’

I don’t respond. He stands there behind me silently and I don’t know whether to turn and look at him or just to continue with this and hope he’ll just get the message and leave. I’m not quite sure exactly what message I want him to get. Something like ‘Leave me out of your fucking family shit.’ After I’ve ignored him for a while, he comes closer and looks down at the book in front of me, in the same way that people look at photographs in a lonely room.

‘OK, I’ll leave you to it,’ he says, without moving. ‘Hey,’ he puts his thin finger down on the textbook

in front of me. ‘Phosphorus; I’ve taken that.’

I look up. ‘You’ve taken homoeopathic medicine?’ ‘Yes, of course. I’m not sure it worked, but …’

‘Look. Maybe we should have a quick coffee,’ I tell him. ‘But you’ll have to give me a few minutes to finish up here and check out some of these books. Say, outside in five minutes?’

‘Wonderful.’

Shelley College (named after Mary, not Percy Bysshe) has a Fibonacci staircase, a 1960s chandelier and a bistro called Monster Munch. Monster Munch is the only bit of the college I don’t like. It’s all done out in clean orange and pithy white curves and edges, with new-looking pool tables and a plasma screen. I prefer the decrepit little bar in the Russell Building that has stand-up ashtrays and chipped MDF tables. The students don’t like the Russell Bar, which means it’s usually empty.

Occasionally they’ll go in there to revise, or to curl up on one of the stained old sofas with a hangover, but not that often. Anyway, you can’t smoke in Monster Munch. You can only do shiny things in Monster Munch; you have to be a shiny, clean person in here: the fluorescent lights and the mirrors on the walls prevent you from being anything else.

I sit on a stool at a small white table by the window and pull the arms of my jumper down to cover my wrists while Patrick gets coffee for both of us: some sort of frothed milk thing for him, and an Americano for me (they call it ‘black coffee’ in Russell). I have my pile of homoeopathy textbooks in front of me, and they look wrong in here, as do I. The mirrors reflect the unhealthy tone of my skin, pale against my red hair, and the fraying on the bottom of my jeans that I didn’t think was that noticeable. I put on this black jumper this morning without even thinking about it, but now I can see how thin the wool has become, and how smudged it makes me look. If it wasn’t for my hair, I’d basically resemble a bad-quality photocopy.

Patrick puts my coffee in front of me and looks out of the window.

‘Wow, you can see a long way today,’ he says, sitting down. The sky is still a hyperreal blue.

‘Yeah, but you can’t see the cathedral.’ All you can see from up here are fields with nothing in them and, further away, strange industrial towers.

‘Do you have to be able to see the cathedral?’

‘I think so. I mean, it’s the only thing to look at, isn’t it? From up here.’

‘Maybe.’ Patrick digs around in his froth with a thin silver spoon. I notice that his hands are shaking slightly and there’s a slight reflection on his forehead from a thin sheen of perspiration. ‘So.’

‘So,’ I say back. ‘Are you … ?’ What do I say? I was about to ask if he’s feeling any better, but then I realise that this is an absurd thing to say, because I don’t really care how he’s feeling. The ellipses hang in the air for a moment, and then Patrick fills in his own question and answers it.

‘Yes. Emma’s back. I’m …’ He prods his froth some more. ‘I’m sorry if I seemed to be in a rather strange mood yesterday. I wonder if you’ll ever forgive me.’

‘It’s OK,’ I hear myself saying. ‘It’s not as if I said … You know, I mean …’ ‘No, but. I shouldn’t …’

‘I mean, maybe we should try to avoid … In future …’

Monster Munch is not the kind of place to have this conversation. This is a post-midnight, post- watershed, jazz-bar conversation, and we’re trying to have it in a place that looks like it’s already been censored.

‘Anyway,’ I say. ‘I’m really sorry.’ ‘It’s OK.’

I think about Frankenstein’s monster, the fictional character who indirectly gave his name to this place.
She was there, lifeless and inanimate, thrown across the bed, her head hanging down, and

her pale and distorted features half covered by her hair … The murderous mark of the fiend’s grasp was on her neck, and the breath had ceased to issue from her lips
. That’s what Victor Frankenstein’s creation did to his fiancée, Elizabeth. Maybe this is the place to have this conversation after all.

‘You …’ I begin, at the same time that Patrick says ‘I …’ ‘You first,’ he says.

‘No, go on.’

‘No, really.’

‘I just … I don’t want to be a stand-in for your wife. Especially not when you’re angry with her. That was never the deal.’

‘No. I’m sorry. It won’t happen again.’

We’re silent for a couple of moments. I sip my coffee and vaguely wish I could have a cigarette. Two women walk in and order juice from the bar and then come and sit at the table behind ours.

‘So how come you took homoeopathic medicine?’ I ask Patrick.

He shrugs. ‘Someone suggested seeing a homoeopath a while ago.’ ‘What was it like?’

He sips his coffee and I notice that his hands are not shaking any more.

‘It was interesting.’ He frowns. ‘They ask you lots of odd questions. They want to know what foods you crave, what you dream about, what you do for a living and how you feel about it. It’s like seeing a therapist, in a way.’

I saw a therapist once. A gym teacher saw the scars on the tops of my legs and made me go to the doctor. The doctor referred me to some teenage unit at the local hospital. I remember watching a soap opera in the waiting room, which, as well as the smeary TV screen, had green plastic chairs and posters about AIDS. The guy who saw me was a young, moon-faced man with glasses. I told him how amazing it was to be able to give yourself pleasure through pain, and how I knew cutting was addictive but I wasn’t addicted yet. I laughed through an account of my childhood. Through all this, the therapist simply looked at me in a puzzled way, and a week later I got a letter saying they didn’t have the facilities to help me ‘at this time’. I still remember the boxy, thin-walled little room, though. It smelled of smoke, and I noticed a silver foil ashtray on the table by the box of tissues and the vase of plastic blue flowers. That was the moment it occurred to me to try smoking. That eventually replaced the cutting, but I still have the scars. Patrick likes them.

I sip my coffee as Patrick keeps talking about the homoeopathic interview.

‘I don’t know why they need that level of detail about your life,’ he says, and laughs briefly. ‘I only went there with headaches and insomnia.’

I finish my coffee. ‘So you ended up with phosphorus?’

‘Yes. Now I think about it, I haven’t had any headaches since, although I still don’t sleep well.’ ‘Do you actually believe in it?’

‘Mmm. I don’t know. I saw a documentary that said the remedies are just placebos, and there’s nothing in them that can have any effect on anything. They actually dilute the remedies so much that, in chemical terms, all that is left is water. Apparently, homoeopaths argue that water has a memory, which sounds pretty wacky.’

‘So what did the medicine look like?’ I ask him. ‘Where did you get it?’

‘Oh, the homoeopath gave it to me. She had this huge wooden cabinet …’ Patrick opens his arms about three feet wide and, with one finger pointing up on each hand, tries to show the scope of this thing. I notice that he doesn’t look at his hands as he does this, but at the wall behind me. It suddenly occurs to me that when people describe size this way, they’re relying on perspective to help them. He’s not saying ‘It’s this big.’ He’s saying ‘It would look this big from here if it was over there.’

He goes on. ‘It had all these little drawers labelled alphabetically. She opened one of them up and there were lots of little glass bottles inside, each containing tiny white sugar pills. She explained to me that the medicine is originally a liquid, but that the little pills absorb it and make it more convenient to take. Sorry. This must be boring.’

‘No, I’m really interested. I just had no picture in my mind of what any of this stuff actually looks like.’ I try to run my fingers through my hair, but there’s some huge tangle at the front, so I try to tease it out as I speak. ‘So, do you have to get these pills from a homoeopath?’

‘Oh, no.’ Patrick laughs. ‘Don’t you ever go into Boots? They sell homoeopathic remedies everywhere now. You can get them at any health food shop as well. I get Nux Vomica for indigestion. You just buy it over the counter.’

‘Hmm,’ I say. ‘That’s interesting. I never realised it was so mainstream.’

‘It’s big business now,’ he says. ‘I’ve got some Nux in my office, if you want to see what the tablets actually look like.’

‘OK.’

Most people’s offices tend to be a mess. I’ve seen people who seem to be trapped in their rooms, still working at 8 p.m. because perhaps there really is no way out across towering piles of old journals, books and printed-off e-mails. Patrick’s room, on the other hand, is large, square and spotless. It doesn’t exactly have the shine of the Monster Munch bistro, but you can see why he likes having coffee there. He has an L-shaped desk arrangement similar to mine, but his tables are larger and one has a glass top. The glass-topped one faces the door and has nothing on it apart from a heavy translucent paperweight and a white lamp. The other one faces the window, has nothing on it apart from his computer and looks as if it’s been polished recently. The room is so large that there is also space for a coffee table and four comfortable chairs.

He shuts the door behind us and walks over to his desk drawer.

‘Here,’ he says, taking out a small brown glass bottle and offering it to me.

I put my library books down on the coffee table and take the bottle from him. The label says
Nux Vom 30. 125 tablets
. An instruction on the side tells you to take a tablet every two hours in ‘acute’ cases and three times a day otherwise. I unscrew the cap and peer inside at a pile of tiny flat tablets, pure white like miniature aspirins.

Now Patrick is locking the door and closing his blinds.

‘How forgiven am I?’ he says.

‘Hmm?’ I say, looking up, but he has already grabbed me and is kissing me hard. ‘Patrick,’ I say, once he stops. But what am I going to say next? Despite – or, weirdly, because of – yesterday, a familiar sensation trickles through me, and instead of talking about how this isn’t a good idea, I allow him to remove my jumper and pull down my jeans and knickers and then bend me over the glass table, holding me by my hair. My breasts press against the cold glass, and, while Patrick fucks me, I wonder what they look like from underneath.

‘God, Ariel,’ he says afterwards, wiping his cock with a Kleenex as I pull my jeans back up. ‘I don’t know if you bring out the best or the worst in me.’