Читать книгу The End Of Mr. Y - Scarlett Thomas - Страница 9
ОглавлениеSOMETIMES 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.
It’s not that I didn’t enjoy hanging around with the other kids, playing chicken in the main road, stealing rich children’s bikes, setting fire to things and letting the older boys grope me for fifty pence a go. In fact, I got pretty rich on the money and was eventually able to buy a bike that didn’t have to be given back or dumped in the river. After that I gave up sex and rode to the library every day. That was when I got into the habit of binge-reading. It’s easy to do when you spend hours of every day surrounded by more books than you can ever read. You start one, but you’re distracted by the idea that you could, equally, have started a different one. By the end of the day you’ve skimmed two and started four and read the ends of about seven. You can read your way through a library like that without ever properly finishing any of the books. I did finish novels, though. But I wasn’t one of those kids who read Tolstoy. I read the kinds of adult books that they didn’t let you actually borrow.
The grammar school started off feeling sorry for me, with my secondhand uniform and my weird hair. But (thanks, Mum; thanks, Dad) I wasn’t allowed to attend assembly and never believed anything I was taught, which made me stand out as one of the ‘difficult’ children. I also had to do my own laundry after I was about thirteen, and usually I didn’t bother. The other kids didn’t care that my shirt collars were grubby, or that my too-short skirt hadn’t been ironed in weeks. But the teachers would occasionally take me to one side and say things like, ‘Maybe you could mention to your mother that school uniform should be … ?’ My mother? You could communicate with her, in theory, but only if you had a CB radio and could do a convincing impression of something from outer space.
So I did what you’d expect and ran away to university as soon as I could. But I couldn’t even do that properly. I expect that someone in my position should have sat on a coach quietly reading Jane Eyre and occasionally sobbing into a handkerchief as she considered the nasty stains on her life. I drove down the M4 to Oxford in a car with no tax disc, stopping on the way to have a torrid weekend affair with a biker, get a tattoo, and have my broken tooth replaced with a silver one.
I sit up in bed slowly, feeling the disappointment trickle away like puddles after a rain shower. I have an old coffee-making alarm clock that I got from a jumble sale, so I’m able to lie in bed sipping thick black coffee while this happens and the fog of sleep and slivovitz hangover slowly thins out. I think it’s fair to say I hate mornings. I hate the honesty of the morning; the time before your consciousness switches on the light and gets rid of all the nasty shadows. Yuck. But my coffee’s OK.
The End of Mr. Y. I take it out from under my pillow and slowly start reading from the beginning of the main narrative. I read the first line several times: ‘By the end I would be nobody, but in the beginning I was known as Mr. Y.’ Then I read on. The story begins with the protagonist, a respectable draper, on his way to Nottingham on the train. He has some business there the following morning. Once there, he can’t help but notice that the annual Goose Fair has taken over the town, and, the following day, after his business is concluded, he happens to wander past it.
There was a persistent drizzle hanging over the town, as if it were being gently smothered by a damp veil. Having no previous experience of anything like the Goose Fair, I nevertheless willed myself to avoid what I felt certain would be the most diabolical sort of entertainment, and instead resolved to find a respectable establishment in which to take tea. However, I soon found myself drawn into the fair, as if by mesmerism. It comprised side-shows and stalls with several mechanical attractions, and, fringed by the ramshackle vehicles of its considerable staff of animal trainers, performers and penny-showmen, extended to the edges of the Market Square. Once within its perimeter, it felt somewhat as though I had entered another world, one perceptibly warmer, and, once under cover of the various tents and stalls, certainly drier than the one I had just left. Curiosity’s crooked finger beckoned me further. A hand-bill, tacked to a post and flapping in the breeze, informed me of the appearance at the fair of Wombwell’s Menagerie, and assured me that this was the Queen’s favourite exhibition. Other gaudy posters alerted me to such spectacles as the Strange Girl, the Indian Snake Charmer, the Wonderful Talking Horse, a Beautiful Serpentine Dancer on a Rolling Globe with Lime-light Effects and Professor England’s Performing Fleas, including an ‘entirely new and original novelty’: the Funeral of the Flea.
The breeze reduced as I proceeded further into the fair, although the air seemed to darken and thicken despite the freshly illuminated naphtha lamps which hung from the openings to the tents, and which decorated the frontispieces of the various stalls. A glance upward confirmed the appearance of the darkest rain-cloud I had ever seen. Eager to escape a thorough drenching, I looked for a covered diversion. I soon came upon a wax-work exhibition, outside which stood figures of the most unhealthy complexion I have ever seen. This seemed singularly unappealing, as did the promise of the ‘living skeleton’ just beyond, so I continued onwards towards a tent in which there were taking place, a young woman promised me as I walked past, marionette shows of the very highest quality. She was playing an organ; an old, battered thing from which emanated the most harrowing bombilations. I was informed that the next show was about to start and, mostly out of pity for the girl, I paid my penny and went in.
The show turned out to be a trivial moral spectacle involving a pair of village idiots who are stuck on a country road with a donkey that will not move. At some point the devil appears and offers to help the idiots. Needless to say, the story did not end well. The tent in which this took place was made from canvas, and included a small proscenium of a somewhat mouldy appearance, made of what seemed to be packing boxes draped with two pieces of worn black velvet. The closed space soon overwhelmed me with its peculiar olfactory mixture of old snuff, tobacco, treacle, sour milk and pomade and I was pleased when the show was complete.
I left the marionette show to find that the rain-cloud was, as I had feared, spilling its contents with an alarming intensity. In my attempt to keep dry, I found myself part of a crowd that had gathered under a dirty white canopy to the left of the marionette tent. There a man was offering an entertainment which he called ‘Pik-a-Straw’. He had, he claimed, various envelopes containing a secret so grave that the authorities would not let him sell them. Instead, he was selling – quite legitimately, he assured us – lengths of straw. The person to choose a long length of straw would win one of the envelopes. He who had the ill-fortune to pick a short straw would win nothing. The straws were a penny each. I observed several gentlemen and one lady approach him. Of these, the lady and two of the gentlemen drew the longer straws and were handed an envelope each. All eyes were on them as they drew out the paper from within and, after considering the contents for a few moments, made startled exclamations. I wasn’t about to be fooled by such an old trick, and I felt pleased when my suspicions were confirmed by a more thorough examination of the lady in question. The mud on her shoes, combined with the redness and strength of her hands, suggested that she was either engaged in service, or she was a fair-ground girl. A wink from her accomplice soon confirmed the latter.
Having turned away from this spectacle, my eyes were soon drawn to a far more intriguing advertisement outside a large marquee. It told of something called a Spectral Opera, featuring Pepper’s Ghost and Gompertz’s Spectrescope, and boasted royal patronage. It was a ghost show, the sort of entertainment I had heard men talk of in my club, but which I myself had never attended. Bowing my head under the pounding rain, I ventured out from under the canopy and towards the tent, which, after climbing several steps, I entered.
The make-shift theatre was half full and the lights dimmed as soon as I had alighted on the hard wooden bench. Shortly thereafter, the beginning of the performance was heralded by the most singularly spectral and dissonant music I have ever heard. I was reminded of a music box from my childhood, a small, silver contraption, used primarily by one of my sisters as a church organ for the extravagant funerals of broken dolls and dead mice. Soon, still bathed in this eerie music, I was able to behold a truly intriguing spectacle, as, by some ingenious science, transparent phantoms did indeed appear on the stage. There were three of them, each the height and breadth of a living man, but with flesh as pale and insubstantial as a dandelion clock. At first I half believed these to be actors in particularly perlaceous costumes; they were of human form and did not jerk about like marionettes. Indeed, they appeared to float across the stage, with their feet never touching the board beneath them. Then, quite suddenly, a solid actor strode onto the stage and put a sword through the nearest phantom with neither resistance, nor blood. I confess that I, along with the other members of the audience, let out a gasp of horror as the sword penetrated the frail and pitiable body of the ghost. It was at this moment that my reason must have deserted me. After the show was complete, I confess I dawdled, hoping for some indication of the construction of this elaborate hoax. I did not then believe in ghosts, and I had no doubt that science and reason were behind this display of phantasmagoria, but I became frustrated that I could not deduce the method for myself.
Very soon I was left alone in the tent with a thin-framed man. He walked over to me slowly and pointed in the direction of the stage.
‘It is certainly an intriguing spectacle,’ he said.
‘Indeed it is,’ I concurred.
‘And it is my guess that you are trying to find an explanation for it.’
‘Yes,’ I said.
The man was silent for a moment, as if he was making a calculation.
‘For two shillings I will show you.’
Before I had even had time to protest at the price, I was following the man towards the stage. At first I believed that he was going to show me the mechanics of the illusion, and explain it in that manner: by a simple demonstration. Instead, he led me through a flap in the tent into a smaller canvas structure in which there was a medicine chest balanced on a small table along with a large lamp, a more vulgar example of which I had never seen. Its ceramic base seemed to combine the deep variegated reds of an old wound, and on this base were painted sickly yellow flowers of a sort, I felt certain, not known to nature. From the rim of its ceramic shade dangled several glass beads, clearly intended to refract the light in the manner of a chandelier, but in fact only managing to create an eerie spattering of shadow on the back of the tent. Beyond the table was a slab that looked like a closed coffin, but which I assumed was intended as some sort of bed.
‘I don’t believe I caught your name,’ I said.
‘You can think of me as the fair-ground doctor,’ said he. ‘And you?’
His manner made me reluctant to introduce myself in the proper way and so I simply suggested that he address me as Mr. Y.
I was suddenly overcome with the peculiar sensation that everyone else had gone home and that I was the only man left at the fair-ground. I could hear the many fists of rain beating on the top of the tent but fancied that I could not hear anything else from outside: no laughter or voices. Even the infernal drone of the organ would have been welcome. I suddenly felt vexed, and I did not trust this doctor. Yet, when he motioned for me to sit on the slab I did as he suggested.
‘You wish to know the nature of the illusion you just witnessed,’ said he. ‘I can show you this, and more. But –’ Here he faltered. ‘Perhaps you do not have the constitution for the illumination I am about to offer. Perhaps –’
‘I have two shillings,’ I said to him curtly, and withdrew the money. ‘Now, do as you promised.’
The doctor opened his medicine chest and drew from it a vial of clear fluid. From this vial he poured a small measure into a glass which he then passed to me. With his other hand, he motioned to me to wait. He then withdrew another object from his chest: a white card with a small black circle at its centre. He then instructed me to drink the mixture and lie down on the slab, holding the card above my face, concentrating as hard as I could on the black spot. As I did as he asked, I wondered to what kind of trickery I was being subjected. I suspected mesmerism of the crudest sort. Not for one second did I believe that the mixture would have any effect, nor was I aware that the rest of my life would be altered as a result of drinking it.
By eleven o’clock I have finished the first chapter of The End of Mr. Y. The winter sun is peeping meekly through the thin curtains and I decide to get up. It’s freezing. I pick up my jeans from the floor and quickly exchange them for my pyjama bottoms; then I put on a random jumper. As I trot down the concrete steps to get the mail, I am suddenly possessed with a feeling that I’ve forgotten something. Have I locked myself out again? No, it’s not that. My keys are in my hand. I note the take-away flyers and taxi cards without picking any of them up, and go back upstairs. What could I have forgotten?
Porridge. Coffee. A whole day of reading ahead of me. Things could be worse. I already have the sleepy feeling I get when I’m reading a good book: like I want to curl up in bed with it and forget about the non-fictional world. At some point I still have to try to work out how to survive for the next three weeks on five pounds, but that could even be fun. Once I’ve had breakfast, I dig out my packet of ginseng cigarettes and light one. In fact, I’m feeling pretty relaxed when the buzzing sound starts in my bag. It’s my mobile phone, which is broken and can no longer ring. At first I think the buzzing represents a call and so I ignore it. But the vibrating only goes on for a few seconds and I realise it’s a text message, so I go and get the phone out of my bag. There’s a little picture of an envelope on the front and I press the button that metaphorically opens it.
r you still on for 2day where shall we meet
Shit. That’s the thing I’ve forgotten. It’s Patrick. I think quickly and then text back: Cathedral crypt 5pm. I can’t not see him. I cancelled last time, and anyway he’ll probably buy me dinner. His text messages aren’t very articulate when you consider that he’s a professor of linguistics, but then again he’s the kind of person who writes his e-mails in lower-case type because he thinks it’s the done thing. I’ve been seeing Patrick for about the last three months, and in that time we have had sex less than a dozen times. But it’s good sex; intense sex; the sort of sex you can only really get with an older man who isn’t worried about whether or not you will eventually get married; the kind of sex that is had for its own sake, and not as a deposit against something one party wants to gain in the future. Patrick is already married, of course, although his wife has affairs, too, which stops me from feeling guilty about our arrangement. Sometimes I think through the logic of all this and realise that there must be young men out there – the equivalents of me – who want infrequent sex and companionship without the complications of love and commitment. Would I sleep with one of these guys if I could find one? Probably not. There’s something too smooth about younger men. And anyway, older men really do know how to fuck. Crude, but there you are.
I don’t think Saul Burlem was married, and maybe it’s a good thing he disappeared: I did have a bit of a thing for him after all. But it is obviously a very bad idea to sleep with your supervisor, and I could have grown to really like him, if his books and online lectures are anything to go by. I would have gone home with him on the night I met him, though, before I’d had a chance to think any of it through. Did he know that? Maybe he knew it would be a bad idea, too. After we’d talked about my PhD, I excused myself and went to find the loo. I was drunk and I did get a bit lost, but I wasn’t gone that long. I do remember an amazing corridor, though. It was this low-ceilinged, whitewashed space that felt like the inside of an antique telescope: smooth and cold. I must have walked up and down it three or four times, wishing I had a camera, or a better memory. When I got back to the Upper Hall, Burlem had gone.
By half past four I have had a bath, got dressed again – this time with more sense of purpose – and completed a short inventory of the food items I have in the house. The list isn’t very inspiring. It tells me that if I am happy to live on porridge, tinned soup and noodles, I can do so for roughly one week. Can five pounds therefore stretch to cover the remaining two weeks? I could buy a big bottle of soy sauce for about fifty pence at the market and, say, fourteen bags of slightly out-of-date noodles at twenty pence each. That would leave a bit of change that I could use to buy a large bar of bitter chocolate. But what about cigarettes and petrol? What about coffee? I can’t buy bad coffee, but I certainly can’t afford the good sort. I could drink tap water and slivovitz for the duration, I suppose. And what about vegetables? How long before I got scurvy? The idea of suffering scurvy and both nicotine and caffeine withdrawal at the same time doesn’t give me happy thoughts. Is it all going to be worth it for the book? Probably. I’d make the same decision again in any case.
Mr. Y, I think, smiling. Mr. Y.
A mouse runs across the kitchen floor and I instinctively draw my legs up and hug my knees. I’ve read so little about The End of Mr. Y. All I really know about it is the curse. It’s a strange experience, coming to such an old book without the benefit of a thousand TV adaptations and study guides and reading groups. What is it about? What thought experiment of Lumas’s does it represent? And what about this question of fiction? ‘It is only as fiction that I wish this work to be considered.’ I guess I’ll have to finish the book to find out what that means.
Already, though, the fiction has become blurred. Am I Mr. Y? Do I have to be for the book to work? When I was a kid I always made an agreement with myself never to identify with main protagonists, because bad things or, more troublingly, big things tended to happen to them and I couldn’t cope with the feeling that these things were also happening to me, to the self that you project into fiction when you read. So I would decide on a secondary character that I would ‘be’ for the duration of the book. Sometimes I died; sometimes I turned out to be evil. But I never had to take centre stage. Now I’m older, I read more conventionally. Right now I’m scared for Mr. Y/me and I feel as though it must be raining outside, even though it isn’t. How does his/my/our life change as a result of drinking this potion? I remember the missing page and suddenly it means more, now that I am involved in the story. I hope I can work out the bit that’s missing. And I hope that Mr. Y’s end isn’t too painful, although I suspect it will be. Lumas’s books and stories never have anything like a happy ending.
I leave the house at about twenty to five and start walking up Castle Street towards the cathedral. In this town you can see the cathedral from almost anywhere. When I was new here, I used it to navigate by. The sun has almost completely set, and the sky behind the pale gold spires is smeared with a cold, waxy pink. As on any other Saturday afternoon in winter, I walk past shops advertising the football scores, and young academics out buying a paper or something for dinner. My breath freezes in the air in front of me and I wonder when the university will be open again. I think of the free heat in my office, and the free coffee in the staff kitchen. OK – the coffee’s not really free: you are supposed to pay about five pence a time, I think, but most of us just put in a pound or two when we remember. Will Patrick buy me dinner? I can’t see why not. I usually insist on paying half, but I just won’t today.
Only a couple of weeks ago the courtyard outside the cathedral was full of carollers and Christmas shoppers; now the space is virtually empty. The cobbles have taken on a dark, pinkish hue in the sunset, and I hurry across them and through the Christ Church entrance. Then I cross the precinct gardens and enter the cathedral. I walk up the left-hand side of the nave towards the crypt and then down the stairs into its pale stone interior. I love the cathedral crypt, despite (or even because of) what happened here, which feels more like a story than a real thing. I love the soft, hollow sounds of the few people walking around, and the single candle burning in the Chapel of Our Lady Undercroft. A while ago it felt like everything in London was being blown up and the prayer desk seemed only to contain Post-it notes asking for world peace. I would come here just to sit quietly, but I’d always read the prayers first. I remember once imagining a bomb going off in the cathedral itself. But the place is so vast, and the walls so solid, that it would surely have as little effect as a firework.
Patrick is standing by the Eastern Crypt, so I walk over to him.
‘Hello,’ he says quietly, kissing me on both cheeks.
‘Hi,’ I whisper back.
‘This is a rather sombre meeting place,’ he says, raising an eyebrow.
I smile. ‘I know. Sorry. I just wanted to light a candle, then we’ll go.’
I walk over to the small altar and pick a small tealight candle from the box underneath it. I put forty pence in the collection slot. I’m not sure why I am even lighting a candle: it’s not something I’ve made a habit of in the past. There’s no breeze in here, but I watch the small flame of my candle flicker uncertainly for about half a minute before it seems to decide not to go out and starts to glow, uniformly, along with the others. I look at it for a moment and then turn away, wondering what happens to all the energy generated in places like this. It’s as if we make God ourselves out of all that energy. Is God made from the thoughts of people, or are people made from the thoughts of God? I’m sure I came across that idea in my research, but I can’t remember where.
