The End Of Mr. Y (29 page)

‘Here,’ he says. ‘You might need this.’

I look at the label.
Oil blessed at the shrine of St Jude
, it says.

‘And one of these.’ Adam now gives me a small blue pendant. It has a picture of St Jude on it. ‘Thanks,’ I say. And of course usually I’d say that I don’t believe in lucky charms and snake oil, but I think homoeopathic remedies and holy water fit into the same kind of category, and look where they’ve got me. At the moment I need all the help I can get, however implausible it may seem. I take my hand from Adam’s and put on the necklace. ‘Do I need to pay for these?’ I ask.

‘I’ll do it for you later. Don’t worry. I’ve been outside God’s economy for quite a while now, but even I still understand it doesn’t run on our money. OK. Now hang on a second … In fact, can you grab and light one of those candles?’

He bends down and releases a catch that I can’t even see on the floor. It’s a trapdoor. I take a big candle in a blue holder and light it with my cigarette lighter. I notice that my hands are shaking, and then I realise that my legs feel light and wobbly, as though there’s an electric current going through them. I don’t feel at all well. My head…

Instinct makes me try to grab Adam’s shoulder. I just want to put my head down on it for a second: I think this might make everything better. Then my head fizzes with what feels like bubbles of air. ‘Adam,’ I say. But before he can reply, everything goes silent, and it’s as if I’m being dipped, head first, into a giant tin of black paint.

When I wake up I’m lying on a small, firm bed that’s been severely made up with crisp white linen and brown blankets. My bag is lying on the floor by a cupboard. There’s a small bedside table with a copy of the Bible on it, and one wooden chair. There’s a window to my right, but the curtains are drawn and so I have no idea what time it is. Then again, you can’t tell the time that easily from winter skies. In winter, there’s no difference between five in the afternoon and five in the morning. There’s no one here in the room apart from me. What happened? Did I faint? I suppose I haven’t eaten for a couple of days. The Troposphere just seems to suck all your life away. Everyone else who has ever read
The End of Mr. Y
has died. And Mr. Y himself starved to death. I can now see why. But none of this affects the part of my mind that is almost aggressively demanding to be taken back there now.

I’m still in the clothes I was wearing when I came here: old grey jeans and a black jumper. I’d like to change, but I don’t have anything more presentable, so maybe I won’t bother. Instead of changing I sit there brushing my hair, trying to get every knot out of it. It takes about fifteen minutes. Then I look at the burns on my wrists: they are little silvery-red scabs now, and I resist the urge to pick them off. No one comes into the room. What do you get in a priory? Friars, I think. I don’t imagine that any friars are going to come in here. But Maria and Adam. Where are they?

Somewhere a bell chimes. One, two, three, four, five, six, SEVEN o’clock. Oh, shit. The men will definitely have been released from their cage in the Troposphere by now. And they’re not in my brain. Yet. At least it doesn’t feel like they’re in my brain. How would I know? I tie my hair into the kind of plait I think religious people might approve of and wash my face in the hand basin. There is no mirror here. Am I going to make it through another day? Who knows. I should find Adam and Maria. I open the door softly and walk out into a dim corridor. There’s a yellowy light at the end of it, and I can hear the sound of women’s laughter and the vibration of pan lids. I can smell food, as well: something hot and savoury. It must be the kitchen. That was where I was going to have tea

before I fainted; if that’s what did happen to me.

My legs still feel weak. Am I going to faint again? No; come on. For God’s sake, Ariel, it’s just walking. But I think I need a rest. I lean on the wall for a second, breathing as if I’ve just run a marathon rather than walked about fifteen steps. What is wrong with me? Maybe I’ll just close my eyes for a moment.

‘Ariel?’

Somehow I’m now slumped on the carpet and Maria is standing over me, holding a blue-and-white checked tea towel. Her small face crunches into a frown.

‘I think you should be back in bed.’

‘I’m sorry,’ I say. ‘I don’t know what’s wrong with me.’

Those men could come now and they could do whatever they wanted. I wouldn’t be able to stop them. Maybe it would be better that way: get it over with. Would I prefer for them to finish me off in the Troposphere or out here? Apollo Smintheus said you can’t die in the Troposphere, but perhaps there are things worse than dying. So I could just stay here and wait for a clean death. But they never said they were going to kill me. They just want to send me mad and take the book.

Maria helps me up, and in a few minutes I am back in the bedroom.

‘Maybe you should change out of those clothes,’ Maria suggests. ‘Get your night things on.’

‘I’m OK. I think I just need to lie down for a minute.’ I don’t actually have any ‘night things’ with me. When I packed I wasn’t thinking about anything relaxing like going to sleep; I was just thinking about running away.

‘You don’t want to get into bed like that,’ Maria says. ‘I’ll get you something to wear.’

Half an hour or so later I’m lying in bed in a long white cotton nightdress thinking about going back into the Troposphere. I’m trying to work out whether it will kill me if I just go in for a little while and try to find Apollo Smintheus. Before I got back into bed, I opened the curtains and looked at the sky for a while before closing them again. The sky was screen black, and snowflakes were falling with the same rhythm of the cascading numbers on Heather’s LUCA program. When will she work out where I’ve gone? Will she tell the men?

Just after the church bells ring for eight o’clock, there’s a knock at the door.

‘Come in,’ I call.

It’s Maria again. She’s holding a large, thick, brown dressing gown.

‘Can you face some supper?’ she asks me.

‘Yes,’ I say. ‘Thanks. You’re being very kind.’

If I eat, then I can definitely go back into the Troposphere.

‘You don’t have to get dressed. You can wear this.’

I should get dressed, but I can’t. I’m sure I’ll get my strength back after eating, though. I’ll get my strength back and go to the Troposphere. Or should I leave first? I imagine parking in some anonymous rural lay-by, reclining on the back seat of the car, and knocking myself out with the mixture. What would happen then? Would I freeze to death? Maybe I’ll just stay here tonight. This bed is so warm and clean that I don’t even want to get out of it now. But I should go and eat.

The kitchen is a long, narrow room with a large porcelain sink at the far end, work surfaces along the right-hand wall, and a long pine table running down the middle. To my left, there’s probably the largest fireplace I’ve ever seen. There’s no fire in it, though. Instead there’s a fair-sized cooking range, with two large silver pans on it, steam coming from both of them and disappearing up the grey stone chimney.

I walk to the table and the wooden floorboards creak under my footsteps.

‘Sit down, dear,’ says Maria. ‘Adam will be along in a minute.’ I pull out a chair and slump into it. I feel like shit.

‘No one’s come looking for me, presumably?’ I say.

‘No, dear.’ Maria smiles a young smile. ‘And we’ve got a lookout just in case.’

I imagine a friar with a telescope. But it’s probably one of the kitchen women on an extravagant kind of Neighbourhood Watch. Both images seem comical to me, and the atmosphere here is just safe enough that I manage to smile back.

‘Thanks,’ I say.

Now Maria goes over to the range. ‘Vegetable stew and dumplings?’ she says.

‘Yes. Thanks so much,’ I say.

I’ve already started eating when Adam comes in and sits down opposite me. Maria puts a plate of the same stew in front of him, although I notice she gives him two more dumplings than she gave me. There’s a jug of water on the table, and I refill my glass for the second time and drink. I need fluid and calories: then I can spend all night in the Troposphere, if I have to. I’m not sure when I’m going to sleep, though. Perhaps I should try to divide my night into half sleep and half Troposphere. But I still don’t know how time works when you’re in there.

‘Hi,’ says Adam. ‘How are you feeling?’ ‘I’m OK,’ I say. ‘Sorry I fainted on you.’

‘I tried to stop you, but you just went down,’ he says. ‘But you didn’t bang your head or anything like that.’

Maria takes off her apron. ‘I’ll be next door, if you need anything,’ she says.

The bruised part of Adam’s face is exactly the same colour as stewed blackberries. The eye on that side is almost entirely closed.

‘It’s not as bad as what happened to you,’ I say. ‘I’m so sorry about that.’ He shrugs. ‘Oh, well. These things happen.’

‘Yeah, but they don’t, though. Not really.’ I breathe deeply and take another sip of water. ‘Things like this shouldn’t happen. Not in real life.’

‘Yeah, but what’s real life? Honestly. It’s fine. It’s over.’

‘But what if they come here? We’ll be fucked.’ I realise I’ve sworn out loud in a priory. ‘I mean …

Sorry about my language. But you know what I mean.’

Adam smiles now. ‘It’s only language,’ he says. ‘Just don’t do it in front of the friars. They’ll get confused.’ Smiling obviously hurts him a little. He winces now. ‘Ouch,’ he says.

‘So what exactly did happen?’ I say. ‘I mean, they obviously beat you up. But why?’ ‘I wouldn’t tell them where you live.’

Shit. How guilty is it possible to feel?

‘But why were they asking you? I don’t understand.’

‘They’d interviewed Heather already, and when she couldn’t answer their questions she sent them to find me. They seemed to assume that we knew a lot about you, even though Heather kept telling them we’d been sharing an office for a total of two days. So she told them I’d gone to show a new sessional teacher around the university, and they caught up with me at the chapel. The woman I was showing around – her children’s school had phoned and said they were shutting because of the snow, and she’d left about five minutes before. When I walked out of the chapel, I ran straight into these two blond men.

‘I asked if I could help them, then they asked me who I was and I told them.

‘“We’d like to ask you a few questions,” one of them said.

‘I agreed, obviously – there was no reason not to – and invited them into the chapel. It was absolutely freezing and snow was settling on their hair and eyebrows. I was going to suggest making them hot drinks in the chapel kitchen. One of them looked around, as if he wanted to find some other building to go into, but as you know, there’s nothing around the chapel. Then they said

that they’d rather talk to me outside. I remember wondering what was wrong with the chapel. For some reason, I thought about bombs and terrorists, and I thought that maybe the men were here to evacuate the building or something. I asked them if everything was OK. Then it all got confusing. ‘“Since we’ve got to stand in the freezing cold, we’ll make this quick,” one of them said. “Where is Ariel Manto?”

‘“I don’t have any idea,” I said. “Why?”

‘“We need to find her. It’s a matter of international security,” said the other one.’

I’ve been eating while Adam talks. Not the most dignified of responses to what he’s telling me, I know, but I just have to keep forking in the calories. But this bit makes me stop and frown. ‘“International security”? What does that mean?’

Adam sips his water. ‘I don’t know,’ he says. ‘I didn’t get the chance to ask. The next thing that happened was that I tried to invite them into the chapel again, and this seemed to make them angry. They swore at me and said to just tell them where you were or something bad would happen to me. They were saying, “You fucked her and you don’t know where she lives?” And I was thinking, “What?” Then I realised that Heather probably thought we’d gone off and had sex the other night.

Anyway, they kept asking me really crude, sexually explicit questions about you. At that point I realised that these men were dangerous and I decided not to tell them anything. I realised as well that they didn’t need to ask me where you lived: they could just go and look it up in Personnel. So I told them again that I didn’t know anything. Then they threatened me. They said something like, “Tell us, or take the consequences.”’ Adam shrugs. ‘I thought to myself that they couldn’t do anything to me except hurt me, so I simply braced myself for what came next.’ He points at his face. ‘This is the result.’

‘I can’t apologise enough …’ I begin.

Adam now smiles, but mainly with the bottom half of his face. ‘Well, that’s not even the strangest thing that happened, though. To begin with, they did start hitting me. One of them grabbed me and pinned my arms back while the other one punched me in the face, I don’t know … three times?

Maybe four. It reminded me of being at school on a lunchtime punishment, and this guy seemed to think he had all the time in the world to just keep on hitting me. He’d hit me, then pause, then blow on his hand because it was so cold, then hit me again.’

‘My God,’ I say.

‘Then the man who was holding me said, “This isn’t working. This is some religious guy who probably thinks he’s Jesus or something. We could crucify him and not get any fucking information out of him.” The other one then said something like, “Well, the Romans didn’t have these, did they?” And then he took out his gun. I must admit that he was right: I did become a lot more frightened then. I struggled and the man holding me slipped on the ice and released his hold on me. Not knowing what else to do, I half ran, half fell into the chapel and shut the door behind me. I kept thinking of St Thomas, and I tried to reconcile myself with the idea of death. It was easier than I’d thought. I knew I was probably going to die, although I was equally aware that it would be absurd to be shot dead in the university chapel. Instinct made me hide under one of the pews, but I knew that the next moment the door would open and they’d come in and shoot me. There was nowhere else for me to go.’