The End Of Mr. Y (43 page)

While I’m waiting for my soup, I study one of the leaflets. It talks vaguely about ‘joy’. But I haven’t seen anything joyful since I’ve been in this place. I haven’t seen anything joyful since … I can’t actually remember when the last time was. And that’s why I like reading Heidegger and Derrida and Baudrillard. In that world, life isn’t a matrix of good and bad; happy and sad; joy and failure to

achieve joy. Failure and sadness are there to be examined, like a puzzle, and the puzzle is open to anyone. It doesn’t matter how many people you’ve slept with, or whether or not you smoke, or whether or not you get something out of damaging your own body. You can have a go at the puzzle that assumes imperfection and never asks you for anything.

I look down at my wrists – the pinkish, silvery marks – and then I glance around the café. Most of the other people here are middle-aged and dressed in respectably unstylish catalogue clothes. They scare me a little; not because of what they might do to me (these people never do anything: they’re benign), but because of what I am in their thoughts. These aren’t the middle-aged women I remember from the estate I grew up on – women who’d cackle and smoke and discuss the benefits of giving blow jobs without your false teeth. Neither are they like the social workers who’d come round every so often to check we weren’t being sexually abused by these women’s husbands (it was more usually the sons). No. These are of the same species as the women I remember from the bakery and the corner shop: the ones who don’t bother to stop talking about your crazy mother when you walk in because they think you’re too stupid to understand. They’re the school secretaries who could have simply told me I needed to wash my clothes more often, rather than talking about it behind my back and, eventually, reporting me to the head teacher. They’re the kind of women who would never wear flattering clothes – or anything black – because looking attractive equals sex.

There’s only one other young person in the café: a blond guy with shabby clothes who looks like the sort of RE teacher who’d spend a long time talking about world religions and not so long on Christianity. He looks at me for a moment and I see a familiar desire in his eyes. It’s not romantic desire: it’s for sex, raw sex, and it’s because I look like I’d be up for it. Compared to everyone else in here, I look like a whore. But, of course, that’s the point of these women. By being what they are, they make you a bad person by comparison, even if all you’re doing is wearing lipstick. I try to give him a look back that says ‘Not today, thanks,’ and then I pick up the leaflet and pretend to read it again until the woman with the yellow twinset comes with my soup.

When I’ve finished my soup I look around in my bag for a notebook, so I can write a list of things I’m intending to look up in the library. I take out the tobacco as well. I’ve rolled my cigarette and put it to one side on the table, when the woman comes back to collect my bowl. I drain the last of the coffee and offer her the cup, too.

‘You can’t smoke in here,’ she says.

‘Oh – I know. I wasn’t going to, don’t worry,’ I say, smiling.

‘Yes, well, just as long as you know.’

‘What’s your god like?’ I ask the woman, before I can tell myself to shut up.

‘What’s God like?’ she says.

I should never have asked this question. ‘Yes,’ I say. ‘He looks after the people who believe in him,’ she says. And then she walks away.

As I leave the café, light my cigarette, and sit on a wall to smoke it, I remember the various times in my life when I’ve tried to find out about religion. It often starts with a logical idea: that so many people around the world believe in a god, or a way of life, that there must be something in at least one of these approaches. So I go to the local library, or the university library, and there’s always that moment – perhaps similar to the moment before you choose the bread you want in the bakery

– where there seems to be so much possibility. So many books; so much ‘truth’. Surely it can’t all be false? Surely it won’t all be the same? But all the books do just seem the same to me. They all have the same hierarchies. They all have leaders. Even Buddhism has rules over who can really ‘belong’ and who can’t, who is in charge and who is not. And all the leaders are men.

I remember once flirting with Roman Catholicism, when I was seeing a guy who’d been a choirboy

as a kid, and who seemed to get something out of the whole thing (and had worked it all out so you could be a Catholic and still have dirty sex). I got a couple of books and magazines from the local church and started to read up on it. I’d kind of bought all that stuff about the Virgin Mary, and was in the process of trying to convince myself that a religion that took a woman so seriously must have something going for it. Then I read a humorous anecdote in one of the magazines about a time when Pope John Paul II was visiting some town, and the nuns who were supposed to cook for him messed it up and ended up giving him fish fingers. Obviously the point of the story was that it was funny that the Pope had eaten fish fingers, but I couldn’t get over the detail that the Pope had nuns to cook for him. Surely religious leaders are supposed to be somehow wiser than the rest of us? But I realised then that there was nothing special about this system at all, nothing that made it more profound and extraordinary than the rest of society. If someone who had given up his whole life to thinking about goodness and rightness and truth still expected nuns to cook him his fish fingers (because after all, nuns haven’t got anything else better to do, and none of them are ever going to be priests or become the Pope, because women aren’t good enough for that), then something was very wrong. How could he have missed the bit about everyone being equal in the eyes of God? If this was the wisest Catholic, I certainly never wanted to meet the stupidest one.

Perhaps this is similar to the anthropic principle, but I am a woman, and after a lifetime of experiment I know I am capable of everything men can do, except things that specifically require a penis (like pissing standing up). I mean, it’s so obvious it even sounds a bit silly to repeat it, a bit like saying ‘All humans have heads.’ So what does religion know about me that I’m missing? Am I worth less in an
a priori
sense? But that would be utterly nonsensical. How is it possible that religion, which claims to be more profound than anything else, still has less of a grasp on humanity than any personnel department in the country?

It’s not just Christianity, either: how could the Buddhists have missed the bit in their thinking about freedom from desire, when most of them seem to desire to be reincarnated well, and in such a way that they can be a man, and be called a ‘venerable master’, and tell other people what to do? Why is religion so disappointing? You expect it to tell you something you don’t know, and all it ends up telling you is the stuff you’ve known for years, and that you long ago decided is wrong.

Over to my left is the big grey wall in front of the church.

Are we the Thoughts of God?
a poster asks. No, I realise. It’s the reverse.

I put out my cigarette and stop thinking.

The library is a large square space with two floors. There’s a checkout desk in the middle of the ground floor, and bookshelves all around it. The second floor is basically just a gallery with a big hole in the middle, so you can stand up there and watch what’s going on downstairs, or sit at one of the small desks and try to work, if you don’t mind all the noise. I remember the library I went to as a kid. It was always deadly quiet and, at least in my memory, everything in it was orange, including a little sunken bit in the kids’ section that to me felt like a huge abyss, and that I would beg my mother to let me go and sit in.

I walk up to the counter.

‘Hi,’ I say, when a bearded librarian walks over to me. ‘I want to use the Internet.’ ‘Are you a member?’

‘Of this library?’ ‘Yes.’

‘Oh, no. Sorry. I’m not.’

‘Are you a foreign student?’ ‘No.’

He smiles. ‘We can give you a day pass. You’ll need to fill in this form …’

He gives it to me. But I’m wondering whether I can lie on it, and if so, whether they will check. I certainly don’t want to leave any written record of myself.

‘Maybe I’ll see if I can find the information I want in a book first,’ I say. ‘But I’ll try this if that fails.’ I did want to look up the website of the cult of Apollo Smintheus, as well as look for the information on the castle, but maybe I won’t bother. After all, I am vaguely in debt to these people.

‘Fine with me,’ he says. ‘Can I help you locate a book?’

I think this is the most helpful librarian I’ve ever come across. All the university librarians just act as though you’re getting in their way. That’s not to say I’m not missing the university, though, and I don’t know where else I’ll ever find a secular green space with no take-away cartons on the ground. For about the thousandth time today, I have a pang: I’m not going back; I’m not going back.

‘Um, I’m interested in local castles,’ I say.

‘Ah. Any in particular?’

I smile. ‘No. Just generally. I want to look at the shapes of castles.’ That sounds mad. I think quickly. ‘It’s research for a book.’

He looks impressed. ‘And it’s Devon castles you want?’ ‘Yeah, I think so.’

‘Well, you’ll need the local history library then.’ Oh, shit. ‘Where’s that?’ I say.

‘Oh, it’s that little room over there,’ he says, pointing to a door in the corner. ‘You shouldn’t really go in if you’re not a member, but I should think it’ll be all right. Obviously you can’t take any of the books out. And I’m afraid you can’t take your bag in with you.’

He signs me in and takes my bag. Then he gives me a laminated pass.

‘Just go straight in,’ he says.

The local history library is a dusty, low-ceilinged room split into three distinct sections by the layout of the shelves and the position of several desks and one microfiche reader. I instantly feel comfortable in here, around the musty smell of old books. There’s no one else here but me, and I wonder if I’d get arrested for just crashing out here at the end of the day. Probably.

I drift around looking at faded old spines of parish records and biographies before I realise I’ll need the computerised records to find what I’m looking for. There’s a terminal in the corner, just under a CCTV playback of what’s going on in here. I sit down, but it feels odd seeing myself on TV, and I’m a vague shadow in the corner of my eye as I type in the keywords ‘castles’ and ‘Devon’.

There are several books on Devon castles, and I choose a couple with pictures and take them to one of the desks. I flick through the largest book, which contains line drawings of all the major castles in the area. Exeter Castle and Powderham Castle are too grand and rectangular, as are Berry Pomeroy Castle and Bickleigh Castle. Gidley Castle and Lydford Castle are both too square. There are several castles by the sea. But the castle Burlem was thinking of was on a little mound. Finally, I find pictures of two castles that are on mounds. They’re both circular. My heart is like a machine that’s been turned up a notch. I’ve now got two choices. I almost know where I need to go. I have to look at another book – this one with more recent photographs – before I see that one of the castles is now really just a ruin, like a tooth left in a giant’s mouth.

But the other one looks exactly like Burlem described: like a giant’s ring thrown on a hilltop. And I can see what he meant about the absence, as well. The picture I’ve got here in this book, this aerial view, certainly does make it seem like the space – the thing that isn’t there – is more important than the walls, which are. If you look at the castle for long enough the walls blur, and it’s as if they don’t have any point at all, except to keep all the nothingness in.

TWENTY – THREE

B
Y FOUR O’CLOCK
I’
M STANDING
outside the house from Burlem’s memory: the one he lives in with Lura (or, at least, the one where he lived in December); the one you get to by walking past the cheese shop and turning right and walking up the narrow cobbled street. It’s a tallish, thin grey stone cottage with green wooden shutters over the front windows. It looks cosy, but it also has an air of the fortress about it. Maybe that’s the effect of the shutters, or just my paranoia. I’m not actually sure I should be here at all, but I’m fairly certain no one’s been following me. Well, at least, no one in the physical world. I realise suddenly that I should have gone into a church just in case one of those Project Starlight guys (or the dead KIDS) is in my mind. It’s too late now, though. It was probably too late almost from the moment I set off this morning. If they’ve been with me at any stage, they’ll know where I’m going. But if they’ve been with me at any stage, they won’t need to know where I’m going: they’ll have their recipe.

But I don’t think they are here, anyway. I think I’m on my own.

In fact, I know I’m on my own. I don’t think I’ve ever been so alone in my life. I hesitate before lifting the heavy brass door knocker. My eyes are filling with tears, but I don’t want to seem unbalanced when, and if, someone opens the door. When did I last cry? I didn’t cry after Patrick fucked me at the university, or in the service-station toilet; I didn’t cry when my parents finally abandoned me for good; I didn’t even cry when I left Adam at the priory, probably hating me, probably gone for ever. But now, standing here in the early twilight, in the cold air, with seagulls squawking above me and stars already beginning to prick the sky, I want to cry more than I ever have before. I gulp it back. But if this doesn’t work, then I’m totally fucked. I have no home. I have no money. I have no family.

I lift the knocker and bang it twice against the door.

Please be there, please be there, please be there
.

I see smoke coming from the chimney: someone is in.

After two minutes or so I’m just about to knock again, but then a woman opens the door. It’s Lura. I recognise everything about her, from the flowing clothes to the grey shoulder-length hair streaked with pink. I suddenly realise that I haven’t worked out how I should play this. I know what it’s like to make love to this woman; to lie to her; to live with her. But I should probably pretend I don’t know her at all. As long as I remember I am me, that’s perfectly true.