Читать книгу The End Of Mr. Y - Scarlett Thomas - Страница 15

NINE

YOU LOOK IN THE MIRROR and this time it tells you that, yes, you are cursed.

The sun is only just rising by the time I get to the university library on Tuesday morning, about five minutes before it opens. I’m a little mind-numbed by the experience of walking up the hill in the weak grey light, smothered by the winter sky and my own breath, which is itself a winter sky in miniature. For the first time ever I walked along listening to my iPod, and the music I felt most fitted this experience of walking up a hill at dawn, on my first day as someone who may be cursed, was Handel’s Dixit Dominus, the same piece that was playing the night I met Burlem in Greenwich. I both love and hate this piece of music, and while it plays it feels as though it’s something that’s crawling on me, on the inside and the outside surfaces of my skin.

Patrick may think I am tremendously postmodern because I have an iPod, but I still prefer libraries to the Internet when it comes to research. And although I know what holy water is, and where I am likely to get some, I have no idea about the other ingredient in Mr. Y’s recipe: Carbo Vegetabilis (or vegetable charcoal). Well, OK, I understand that vegetable charcoal implies burnt wood or vegetation, but what is a homoeopathic potency? I guess the Internet probably would tell me this quickly, but it may not tell me accurately. I also need to know what a nineteenth-century writer would have meant by it – who knows? The term may not be in existence any more, or it might mean something different now. Look at how the word ‘atom’ has changed over the centuries. I have definitely decided that I am going to make this tincture and try it out. Even though this morning I was slashed into consciousness by that jagged honesty you sometimes get when you wake up, and something inside me told me to stop. But why should I? And it’s not as if this mixture can do me any harm. Charcoal isn’t poisonous, and neither is water. And it seems to me that this recipe is a part of the book, and that, for whatever reason, Lumas intended the reader to try it out.

The History of Medicine section of the library turns out to be on the fourth floor, beyond the religion and philosophy books, in a little corner by some stairs. There is a whole section on homoeopathy: lots of aged hardbacks with muted binding in dark green, dark red and grey. I pick up a thick green book and see the title, Kent’s Repertory, and the publication date, 1897. I sit cross-legged on the faded carpet and flick through it, intrigued by the odd format that I don’t understand. The book seems to contain lists of symptoms, grouped under headings such as ‘Sleep’, ‘Eyes’, ‘Genitalia’ and ‘Mind’. I flick to the ‘Sleep’ section and find a curious poetry there in a section entitled ‘Dreams’. I read down the page and see one-word or, occasionally, one-sentence entries saying things like serpents, sexual, shameful, shooting, skeletons, smelling sulphur and, further down, stars falling, stealing fruit and struck by lightning, that he was. After each small piece of text are letters I don’t understand, but that look like abbreviations. Under the entry ‘dreams, snakes’ there are a lot of these: alum., arg-n., bov., grat., iris., kali-c., lac-c., ptel., ran-s., rat., sep., sil., sol-n., spig., tab. I don’t know why some of these are in italics, nor what the abbreviations mean.

I flick backwards in the book to the ‘Mind’ section and, under ‘Delusions’, find some very odd entries, including the delusions ‘alive on one side, dead on the other’ and the more vague ‘fancy, illusions of’. In the ‘Genitalia, Male’ section I find references to erections that can be ‘impetuous’ or can only happen in the afternoon, or while coughing. I like this, but I don’t understand it, so I close the heavy volume and browse some of the other books on the shelf. It’s strange: I always thought homoeopathy was some kind of cranky herbalism, but looking at all these books makes me realise just how seriously some people must take it, or, more accurately, must have taken it around the turn of the century when most of these books were originally published. All the authors have very grand or strange names: Constantine Hering, MD; John Henry Clarke, MD; William Boericke, MD; and even some women, including Margaret Tyler, MD and Dorothy Shepard, MD. They all have those letters after their names, implying that all the important people who practised homoeopathy at that time were doctors. Eventually I have amassed a pile of books from 1880 until the early 1900s; I take these to a small table and start trying to understand it all.

After two hours’ solid reading I go outside for a cigarette. The sky is now a uniform, artificial blue, and for a second it feels like something has been deleted from it. A grey squirrel runs along the grass in front of me, its sleek body rising and falling like a wave. My eyes follow it as it runs up a tree and disappears. Beyond the tree, and far down the hill, the small city shimmers in the false, low light. The cathedral dominates the view as usual, and in this light it looks sepia-yellow, like a JPEG of an old photograph. As I inhale smoke in the cold air, I think about what I have learnt this morning. Homoeopathy seems to have been invented (or, perhaps, discovered) by Samuel Hahnemann in 1791. Hahnemann was a chemist who had written treatises on syphilis and poisoning by arsenic. He was unhappy about contemporary medical practices, especially bloodletting. Hahnemann believed that King Leopold of Austria had essentially been murdered by his doctors, who had bled him four times in twenty-four hours to try to cure a high fever. While he was translating Cullen’s Materia Medica