The End Of Mr. Y (5 page)

The main narrative begins with a businessman, Mr. Y, visiting a fairground in the rain. But I don’t read properly now. Instead I skim the first couple of chapters, reading the odd sentence here and there. I like the first line: ‘By the end I would be nobody, but in the beginning I was known as Mr. Y.’ I keep flicking through the book until I reach the end (which, of course, I don’t read), mainly just because I like the feel of the pages, and then I turn back to the first chapter. It’s while I’m flicking backwards that I see it. There’s a page missing from the book. Between the verso page 130 and the recto page 133 there is simply a jagged paper edge. Pages 131 and 132, two sides of one folio page, are missing.

I don’t quite believe it at first. Who would want to rip a page out of
The End of Mr. Y
like this? Is it simply vandalism? I carefully check the rest of the book. There are no other missing pages, nor any other obvious sign that somebody wanted to damage it. So why rip out a page? Did someone not like that page? Or did they steal it? But if you were going to steal a page from a book, why not steal the whole book? It’s too confusing. I shiver, wishing it would heat up in here.

Downstairs, I hear the squeal of the main door that suggests Wolfgang is back. Then, a few seconds later, there’s a soft tap at my door.

‘It’s open,’ I call, putting
The End of Mr. Y
away.

Wolfgang is small and blond and was born in East Berlin. I don’t think he ever washes his hair. Today, he’s wearing what he always wears when he plays at the hotel: a pair of pale blue jeans, a

white shirt and a dark blue suit jacket. When I first met Wolfgang, on the day I moved into this flat, he told me he was so depressed he couldn’t even get the enthusiasm together to kill himself. I became worried and started doing small, life-enhancing things for him, such as making him soup and offering to bring him books from the university library. For ages he said yes to the soup and no to the books, but recently he’s been asking me for poetry: Ginsberg and Bukowski mainly.

As Wolfgang walks into the flat, I keep thinking of Lumas’s words: ‘Of life, as of dreams.’ Shall I tell Wolfgang about the book? Perhaps later.

He grins at me sadly. ‘Oh, well. I’m rich in one universe. Are you cooking baked potatoes for me?’ The ‘rich in one universe’ thing is something I told him. It’s what the Russian physicist George Gamow said after he lost all his money in an American casino. It means that, as usual, Wolfgang has gambled his tips away in the hotel casino. In a parallel universe, perhaps, some other version of him has won thousands of pounds.

‘Mmm,’ I say back. ‘Potatoes with …’ I look around the kitchen. ‘Olive oil, salt. Um … I think I’ve got an onion somewhere.’

‘Great,’ he says, sitting at the kitchen table and pouring some slivovitz. ‘Gourmet.’ This is a joke between us. Very gourmet is worse, and implies a meal costing almost nothing. I can do something very gourmet with lentils; Wolfgang’s very gourmet meals usually include fried cabbage.

I open the oven and take out the potatoes. ‘I suppose you could say I’m rich in one universe, too,’ I say, through the steam and heat. I put the baking tray on the counter and smile at Wolfgang.

He raises a blond eyebrow at me. ‘You’ve gambled also?’

‘No.’ I laugh. ‘I bought a book. I’ve got about five quid left until the magazine pays me at the end of the month. It was … it was quite an expensive book.’

‘Is it a good book?’

‘Yes. Oh, yes …’ But I still don’t want to tell him about it just yet. I start slicing the onion. ‘Oh – the university fell down today as well.’

‘It fell down?’ He laughs. ‘You blew it up? No. How?’

‘OK, well, it didn’t exactly all fall down, but one building did.’ ‘A bomb?’

‘No. A railway tunnel. Under the campus. It all kind of collapsed inside, and then …’

Wolfgang downs his drink and pours another. ‘Yes, I see. You build something on nothing and then it falls down. Ha.’ He laughs. ‘How many dead?’

‘None. They evacuated the building in the morning.’ ‘Oh. So is the university shut down?’

‘I don’t know. I suppose it must be, at least for the weekend.’

I mash olive oil into the potatoes and put them on the table with some olives, capers and mustard. We sit down to eat.

‘So how’s life, anyway?’ I ask him.

‘Life’s shit. No money. Too many mice. But I’ve got my afternoon shifts back.’ ‘Fantastic,’ I say. ‘What happened to Whatshername?’

A few months ago some talented kid came along and took some of Wolfgang’s shifts. From her point of view, the narrative must have been exciting: teenage girl gets life-changing opportunity playing piano in public. But it meant that Wolfgang couldn’t pay his rent and his bills, so he stopped paying his bills.

‘Pony accident.’

I smile while he fills in the details. I’m not really listening; I’m thinking about the book.

‘Oh … Wolf?’ I say, once we’ve finished eating.

‘What?’

‘Do you believe in curses?’

He looks at me with his head slightly tilted to one side. ‘Curses? Of what sort?’ ‘Like a cursed object. Can something be cursed?’

‘Now that’s interesting,’ he says. ‘You could argue that everything is cursed.’ I had a feeling he’d approach the question from this angle. ‘Yes, but …’

He pours more slivovitz. I get up to sort out some coffee.

‘Or you might ask why curses even exist. What is their purpose? I’ve been wondering this myself for a long time, ever since I first saw Wagner with Catherine.’

Wolf has a girlfriend who is aiming to ‘improve’ him by taking him to the opera.

‘I suppose maybe we have to start by defining “curse”,’ I say. ‘Is it a word or a thing?’

Wolfgang groans. He’s had enough conversations with me before that have started in this way. We usually get into an argument about Derrida and différance.

‘Stop. Please. Don’t start hurting me with your French deconstruction. Just pretend for a minute that there is something called a curse and it exists and it is a thing. Where does it come from? That’s what we need to ask.’

‘Do we?’

‘Yes. Is it something magical, or is it a prophecy that comes true because you make it come true? Or is it even just nothing at all, just a way of explaining bad things that happen to us that are actually random. I may ask: why do I have an infestation of mice? Did someone curse me? Or did I just leave too much food out one day to tempt them? Or is life just as simple as
there are mice
?’

I light a cigarette. ‘I found three today.’ ‘Three what? Curses?’

I laugh. ‘No. That would be very unlucky. No. Three mice.’ ‘And you put them where? Not in the corridor again?’

‘No. Outside. In Luigi’s backyard.’

Wolf starts talking again about getting a cat. After a few minutes the coffee pot hisses and I pour the coffee.

‘Anyway,’ he says, exhaling slowly as I put the cup in front of him. ‘This is what I am wondering about curses: can they exist if we don’t believe in them?’

I laugh. ‘How is that different from what I was saying?’ ‘It’s simpler.’

‘Not if you think it through.’

As Wolf starts talking about voodoo curses, and how they only work on people who believe in voodoo, I imagine something like a Möbius strip, the shape you get if you glue together a long strip of paper with one twist in it. You could be walking along one side of this strip quite happily for ever, without ever realising that, in a strange kind of way, you kept changing ‘sides’. Just as this world once seemed flat, so your world would seem flat. You could walk for ever and not realise that you kept going back to the beginning and starting again. Even with the twist, you wouldn’t know. Your reality would change, but as far as you were concerned, you’d just be walking on a flat path. If this Möbius strip was a spatial dimension, your whole body would flip when you travelled past the twist and your heart would be on the right side of your body for a while until you looped back. I learned this from one of the physics lectures I downloaded onto my iPod. At Christmas I made myself some paper chains that were all Möbius strips. I prepared to stay in on my own all day reading and drinking wine; then Wolf came round with a huge, misshaped plum pudding and we spent the rest of the day together.

‘What if it isn’t people who make curses?’ I say.

‘Ha,’ says Wolf. ‘You think curses are made by gods.’

‘No, of course not. It’s just a hypothetical question. Can something be created in language independently of the people who use the language? Can language become a self-replicating system or …’ I’m drunk, I suddenly realise, so I shut up. But I do wonder for a moment about this idea, that something could emerge within language – an accident, or mistake, perhaps – and the users of that language would then have to deal with the consequences of this new word being part of their system of signification. I vaguely remember some radio documentary about the Holy Grail suggesting that the whole thing was just a mistake: a wrongly used word in an old French text.

We sit in silence for a while, and a train goes past outside. Then I start to clear the plates away while Wolfgang finishes his coffee.

‘So, anyway,’ I say to him, ‘you haven’t said whether or not you do.’ ‘Whether I do what?’

‘Whether you actually believe in curses, or cursed objects.’

‘It’s not whether something is cursed that’s important,’ he says. ‘You have to find out why it is cursed, and what the curse is. Let me wash up.’

‘OK.’

Wolf gets up, walks over to the sink and squirts about half the bottle of washing-up liquid over the plates. Then he runs the hot tap, swears a bit because the water never gets as hot as he likes, and eventually boils the kettle and tips its contents all over the dishes. I’m thinking about whether or not to show him
The End of Mr. Y
. In the end I decide that I won’t. Before he leaves he gives me a look, as if his eyes are made of electricity, and he says: ‘You do have something, don’t you? Something you think is cursed.’

‘I don’t know,’ I say back. ‘Probably not. I’m probably just feeling a bit weird after today, with the university collapsing, and after all this cold and too much of your bloody slivovitz, and …’

‘Show me any time you like,’ he says. ‘My life can’t get any worse. Don’t worry about protecting me.’ ‘Thanks,’ I say. But … Shit. What’s happened to me? The last thing I’d thought of was protecting Wolf. I just wanted to keep the book to myself and, if I’m honest, stop him stealing it. As I go to sleep, with a dry mouth, and
The End of Mr. Y
under my other, empty pillow, I wonder if curses exist after all.

FOUR

S
OMETIMES
I
WAKE UP WITH
such an immense sense of disappointment that I can hardly breathe. Usually nothing has obviously triggered it and I put it down to some combination of an unhappy childhood and bad dreams (those two things go very well together). And most times I can shake it off pretty quickly. After all, there’s not much for me to be disappointed about. So I never got any of the publishing jobs I went for after university. Who cares? That was ten years ago and I’m happy with my magazine column, anyway. And I don’t really care that my mother ran away with a bunch of freaks and my father lives in a hostel up north and my sister doesn’t even send me Christmas cards any more. I don’t care that my ex-housemates all got married and left me on my own. I like being on my own – that wasn’t the problem – I just couldn’t afford to do it in the big house in Hackney that seemed to sprout empty rooms like baby universes. Coming here has meant that I have been able to just get on with being on my own and reading my books, so it’s hardly as if I have anything to be sad or disappointed about.

Sometimes I like to think that I live with ghosts. Not from my own past – I don’t believe in those sorts of ghosts – but wispy bits of ideas and books that hang in the air like silk puppets. Sometimes I think I see my own ideas floating around, too, but they usually don’t last long. They’re more like mayflies: they’re born, big and gleaming, and then they fly around, buzzing like crazy before they simply fall to the floor, dead, about twenty-four hours later. I’m not sure I’ve ever thought anything original anyway, so I don’t mind. Usually I find that Derrida has already thought of whatever it is, which seems like a very grand thing to say, but actually Derrida’s not that hard; it’s just his writing that’s dense. And now he’s a ghost, too. Or perhaps he always was – I never met him, so how can I be sure he was real? Some of the most friendly ghosts I live with are those of my favourite nineteenth-century science writers. Most of them were wrong, of course, but who cares? It’s not like this is the end of history. We’re all wrong.

Sometimes I try my own thought experiment, which goes as follows: what if everyone is actually right? Aristotle and Plato; David and Goliath; Hobbes and Locke; Hitler and Gandhi; Tom and Jerry. Could that ever make sense? And then I think about my mother and I think that no, not everyone is right. To paraphrase the physicist Wolfgang Pauli, she wasn’t even wrong. Maybe that’s where human society is now, at the beginning of the twenty-first century: not even wrong. The nineteenth- century crowd were wrong, on the whole, but we’re somehow doing worse than that. We’re now living with the uncertainty principle and the incompleteness theorem and philosophers who say that the world has become a simulacrum – a copy without an original. We live in a world where nothing may be real; a world of infinite closed systems and particles that could be doing anything you like (but probably aren’t).

Maybe we’re all like my mother. I don’t like to think about her, or my childhood, too much, but it can be summed up fairly quickly. We lived on a council estate where reading books was seen as the most disgusting combination of laziness and hubris and only my mother and I – as far as I know – had library cards. While the other kids had sex with each other (from about eight years old) and the other adults drank, gambled, bred violent dogs and mangy cats, and thought up ways to get rich

and famous, my mother occasionally took me to the library and left me in the kids’ area while she researched the meaning of life via books on astrology, faith healing and telepathy. If it hadn’t been for her, I probably wouldn’t have even known that libraries existed. That’s the only good thing she ever did for me. At night she used to sit downstairs in her pink dressing gown waiting for aliens, while my dad would take me to the park and photograph me picking up aluminium benches and writing graffiti on the walls of the subway, so he could send the pictures to the local paper as proof that the council was losing the war against hooligans. My father, who was at his best when approximately fifty per cent sober and used to buy me toy cars and football stickers, believed everything was a government conspiracy. My mother believed that the conspiracy went higher than that. They taught me that everything you are told by anyone is a lie. But then it turned out that they lied, too.