The End of Mr. Y

by Scarlett Thomas

  I immediately strode over to a woman sitting in an old armchair in the far corner of the room. I presumed that it was she who was keeping watch over the waxwork display. I stood facing her for some seconds before she looked up from a costume in her lap, onto which she was sewing sequins over frayed and greying sections of material.

  'Can I help you?' she said to me.

  'I wish to enquire after the owner of that lamp,' I said to her.

  'You mean that poor girl Mary Kelly?'

  'No,' I said, quickly becoming exasperated. 'No, a gentleman. A fair-ground doctor. Perhaps he is engaged here?'

  The woman looked down at her embroidery. 'Sorry, sir,' she said. 'I don't think there is anyone of that description here.'

  She then briefly flashed her small eyes at me and I understood what she wanted. I found a shilling and showed it to her.

  'Are you certain you do not know him?' I asked.

  She eyed the shilling and then reached out and took it from me.

  'Try the fortune-teller downstairs,' she told me quickly, in a half-whisper. 'The man who owns that lamp is her husband.'

  Without hesitating further I made may way down the stairs and, full of impatience, burst into the fortune-teller's salon. There sat a bony, pale woman, with her hair arranged in a colourful scarf. Before she even began to speak, I addressed her directly.

  'I am looking for your husband.'

  As she began assuring me that she had no husband and that I could pay her directly for her services, which were of a most superior nature, there suddenly came a blast of cold air into the room, and the fair-ground doctor entered.

  'Mr. Y,' he said. 'How pleasant.'

  'Good evening, Doctor,' I said.

  'I understand that you have been looking for me,' he said.

  'How—' I began, and then stopped. We both knew the effects of his medicine. I quickly worked out how this present fortune-telling act worked. The doctor presumably read the minds of all the people to enter the establishment and primed his wife with their biographies, ready for her to exploit them. Therefore, I reasoned, he had already read my mind and knew what I was looking for. I guessed that there was a chance he would give it to me—for a price.

  'You want the recipe,' he said to me.

  'Yes,' I said, but hesitated to tell the doctor just how much I longed for it.

  'Very well. You can have it,' said he, 'for thirty pounds and no less.'

  I cursed my own mind. This man, this back-room showman, already knew that I would give everything I had for another taste of his curious mixture, and, of course, he planned to take everything I had and no less.

  'Please,' I said. 'Don't take all my money. I need to buy cloth for the shop, and to pay the wages of my assistant. There is also medicine for my dying father—'

  'Thirty pounds,' he said again. 'Come here to-morrow evening with the money and I shall give you the recipe. If you do not come I shall regard our business as concluded. Good evening.'

  He showed me the door.

  The following evening I withdrew the money from its hiding place and carefully stowed it inside my shoe, lest the East End ruffians take it from me. With a heavy heart, and a profound uneasiness, I made my way back to the establishment opposite the London Hospital. The previous evening I had witnessed only a young man playing the Pandean pipes outside ; today, the girl with the organ was in attendance as well, her instrument wailing and buzzing with the same bombilations I recalled from the Goose Fair. I strode past all this, past the boys selling plum duff, the pick-pockets and the vagrants, and into the House of Horrors, paying another penny for the privilege.

  I feared that the so-called doctor may have disappeared again, but the promise of thirty pounds must have been sufficiently enticing for him, as he greeted me as soon as I stepped into

  And this is the place where the ripped-out page would have been. My eye keeps falling on the single sentence on page 133, the next existing page:

  And so, in the freezing cold of that late November night, I walked away, each footprint in the snow a record of a further step towards my own downfall, the oblivion that faced me.

  What am I supposed to do now? There is one chapter left, starting on page 135. Do I read it, and disregard the fact that what must be the crucial scene between Mr. Y and the fairground doctor is missing? Or ... What? What are the other options? It's not as if I can just go to a bookshop tomorrow and buy a replacement copy, or simply read the page. This book is not on any library record anywhere in the world: It doesn't even exist in rare manuscript collections. Is this page lost forever? And why on earth would someone have removed it?

  Chapter Seven

  Monday morning, and the sky is the color of sad weddings. I'm going in to the university, although I'm fairly sure it's still shut. But perhaps they'll have the heating on, anyway. And, as long as our building is still standing, there'll be free tea and coffee. Will our building be OK? It had better be, because I need to try to break into Burlem's computer. He's the only person I know who has ever seen a copy of The End of Mr. Y and maybe there'll be something on his machine that will tell me where his copy came from, or whom I could contact to arrange to look at the missing page. I didn't read the last chapter in the end last night. It wouldn't be right without the missing page. Instead, I listened to Beethoven's Ninth Symphony on my iPod and wrote out everything I thought about the bulk of the novel I had read. I didn't get into bed until about three A.M., so I am not at all awake today.

  I have never walked up to the university; I don't even know the right way. All I do know is that it is a steep climb, and I don't want to go up the way I came down on Friday because I am convinced that the right way must be shorter than that. So I do the only thing I can think of and go to the Tourist Information place by the cathedral. There's no one there apart from a woman with a gray perm and thin wire glasses. She is busy arranging a display of cathedral mugs, and I have to stand there for a few seconds before she notices me. It turns out that there's a free map of walking routes around the city, so she gives me one of those and I start following it immediately, walking around past the cathedral walls until I see a sign for the North Gate. I follow the sign and walk past some terraced houses and a noisy mill race opposite a pub where my map tells me to turn left, then right. Then I walk over a bridge and past some stinging nettles up a hill until I come to a footpath, which takes me through a tunnel under the railway: a strange cylindrical space with smooth, graffiti-spattered walls and round orange lights set to come on as you walk underneath them (at least, this is what I assume; perhaps the effect is actually the work of a poltergeist, or simply due to the fact that the lights are broken). I walk along the edge of a shabby suburban park, the kind of place where kids play football and dogs fight on a Saturday afternoon, then down an alleyway, across a main road, past a hairdresser, and into a housing estate. I think students live here, although it looks like the kind of place you'd come to only when you'd retired or given up life in some other way. All I can see as I walk up the hill are cream-colored bungalows and front gardens: no graffiti, no playgrounds, no shops, no pubs. The whole place has the kind of stillness you'd expect just before the world ended.

  On days like this I do not feel afraid of death, or pain. I don't know if it's the tiredness, the book, or even the curse, but today, as I walk through this housing estate, there's a feeling inside me like the potential nuclear fission of every atom in my body: a chain reaction of energy that could take me to the limits of everything. As I walk along, I almost desire some kind of violence: to live, to die, just for the experience of it. I'm so hyped up suddenly that I want to fuck the world, or be fucked by it. Yes, I want to be penetrated by the shrapnel of a million explosions. I want to see my own blood. I want to die with everyone: the ultimate bonding experience; the flash at the end of the world. Me becoming you; you becoming we; we becoming forever. A collapsing wavefunction of violence. On days like this I think about being cursed and all I can think is Now, now, now. I want that
missing page.

  Soon I find the beginning of the pathway up to the campus. Weather-beaten gates stop cyclists from zooming straight upwards, not that anyone would be zooming up here: It's virtually a forty-five-degree angle. Tired though I am, I do feel a bit like running, just to get this hyped feeling out of my system. But I don't run. I walk through two sets of these gates and then past a patch of woodland on my left, where I'm hidden from the pale sky under the thin fingers of the winter trees. As I near the top of the hill, it starts to rain a little, and in the distance I can see yellow construction vehicles trundling around the collapsed Newton Building like toys in a nursery. I get to my building and the crazy feeling starts to seep away. I realize that the walk has taken more then half an hour. I wish I could liberate my car for the way back, but I was going to put petrol in it on the way home on Friday and I can't afford to do that now.

  The English and American Studies Building is still standing, and isn't locked. That means someone must be in. Mind you, someone usually is. Even on Sundays I rarely have to unlock the door myself, although I did have to when I came here on Boxing Day. Even though there must be someone here, I can't sense anyone as I walk down the long corridor. It's not just that I can't hear the hum of electricity, or the monotonous sound of stressed-out fingers hitting cheap keyboards. I just can't feel the presence of anyone down here. I go into my office and find that the heating is on, although I am actually too hot from walking up the hill. I go to open the window and I see that the rain has hit the pane in these spattered patterns: broken diagonal lines that look somehow deliberate, and remind me of the pictures in my books of photographs from particle accelerators. I start up my computer and go up the stairs to the office to check my post.

  Mary is in there, talking to the secretary, Yvonne.

  "I suppose most people don't check their e-mail at home," Yvonne is saying. "I mean, on Friday they were talking about shutting down campus for a week. I'd be surprised if you saw people in here before next Monday. I suppose some might come in on Friday, out of curiosity. But of course the academics don't all come in during the vacation period, anyway."

  The department used to be run by senior academics, who rotated the role among them. Now it, like most other departments in the university, is controlled by a manager brought in specifically to run the budget. Mary has somehow adopted the air of an academic, perhaps hoping this will make us trust her. But she doesn't really know much about academic life, and I often overhear Yvonne filling her in on what sort of things the academics traditionally do.

  Mary looks pissed off. "So who is here?"

  "Max is in. Oh hello, Ariel. Ariel's in."

  Mary and I both know that my being here is of importance to nobody. I'm teaching one evening class this term and that's it. I don't have any admin responsibilities and I am not a member of any committees. I'm simply a Ph.D. student, and I don't even have a supervisor anymore. So I'm surprised when Mary looks at me as if I'm someone she needs to see.

  "Ah, Ariel," she says. "My office, if you've got a moment."

  I wait for her to walk past me into the corridor and then I follow her around the corner to her office. She unlocks the door and holds it open for me while I walk in. I don't think I've ever actually been in Mary's office before. She's got two of what they call the "comfortable" chairs set up facing a low, pale coffee table, so I sit at one of these and she sits at the other. I'm glad the days of having to face your boss across a desk are over. You can't do that kind of thing with computers in the way. Everyone faces walls or screens in offices now.

  Mary doesn't say anything.

  "Did you have a nice weekend?" I ask her.

  "What? Oh, yes, thanks. Now." She goes silent again, but I assume that she's about to say whatever it is, so I don't attempt any more small talk. "Now," she says again. "You're in quite a big office on your own, aren't you?"

  Damn. I knew this would come up one day.

  "It's Saul Burlem's office," I say. "I've just got a corner of it, really."

  This is a lie. Once Burlem had been gone for a couple of months, I cleared the surface of his desk, moved his computer to the coffee table, and made myself a large L-shaped arrangement out of his desk and mine. I've filled all the shelf space with my books, in case I ever have to do a runner from the flat in town, and generally populated the office with moldy coffee cups and all my research notes. I have a whole drawer full of things I believe might come in useful one day. There are three small bars of bitter chocolate, a Phillips screwdriver, a flathead screwdriver, a socket set, a spanner, a pair of binoculars, some random pieces of metal, several plastic bags, and, most worryingly, a vibrator that Patrick sent me through the internal post as a risqué present.

  "Well, it's quite clear that Saul isn't coming back to us for the foreseeable future, so that means that a large portion of your space is unused?"

  I can't do anything else but agree with this, at least as a theory.

  "Right," says Mary. "Look. All heads of department have agreed to provide temporary office accommodation for the members of staff who have had to leave the Newton Building. It's going to be a squash for most of us but still, it has to be done. We've agreed to take four. Two are going to share the Interview Room, and two are going to come in with you. OK?"

  "OK," I say. But I must look horrified. I love my office. It's the only really warm and comfortable space I've got in the whole world.

  "Come on, Ariel, I'm not asking you to leave your office or anything like that. Just to share it for a while. You'd be sharing it anyway if Saul was around."

  "I know. Don't worry. I'm not complaining or—"

  "And we all have a responsibility for refugees."

  "Yes, I know. As I said, it's fine." I bite my lip. "So ... Who are they? Do we know yet? I mean, do I know who I'm going to be sharing with?"

  "Well." Mary gets up and picks up a sheet of paper from her desk. "You can choose, if you want. There's ... Let's see. There's a theology lecturer, a postdoctoral fellow in evolutionary biology, a professor of bacteriology, and an administrative assistant."

  Well, I'm not having a bacteriologist in my office, although he or she would probably find a lot in there to study. And I fear an admin assistant might take the same view of my office as a bacteriologist.

  "Um," I say. "Can I have the theology person and the evolutionary biologist?"

  Mary writes something on her sheet of paper and smiles at me. "There. That's not so bad, is it?"

  I leave Mary's office, wondering if she speaks to everyone as if they are children. I do try to like her, but she makes it difficult. I think she's been to some management training that tells you how to "empower" staff and let them feel that they've made the terrible decision that, after all, they're going to have to live with. Oh well. I still haven't even checked my post, so I go into the office to do that.

  Yvonne already knows about the new office arrangements.

  "I'll come down later and help arrange the desks," she says to me. "And Roger will be in with another desk as well, and some more shelving. We're going to put Professor Burlem's computer into storage, and any bits and pieces from his desk, so if you could maybe start sorting those out...?"

  There is no post for me, in the end.

  When's "later"? Whenever it is, it leaves me less time to get into Burlem's computer than I'd thought, especially now they're going to put it in storage. I lift it back up onto the desk and plug it in and switch it on. This won't be the first time I've tried to get into it, although the first time was really just a halfhearted attempt to see if there was any clue to where he'd gone. Then, as now, I was confronted with the login screen that asks for your user name and password. I know his user name: It's sabu2. But I have no way of knowing his password. The last time I did this I pretended I was in a film and confidently typed in several guesses before realizing that it was a stupid idea. This time I am going to use a more sophisticated hacking technique. And I learned in a book last year that the most sophisticated h
acking technique doesn't involve guesses, algorithms, logarithms, dictionary files, or letter-scrambling software. The most sophisticated hacking technique is where you simply convince someone to give you the password.

  Who knows our passwords? Computing Services definitely do, but does Yvonne? I think for a minute. Yvonne can't have our passwords, but what if she needed to get one for some reason? Presumably she'd just get in touch with Computing Services. It can't be that big a deal: Everything here officially belongs to the university anyway, including all the files on our computers. And Burlem has disappeared, so ... Could I just ring up Computing Services and pretend to be Yvonne? Probably not. She probably rings them all the time. They'll know her voice. Um. I think for a minute; then I run my fingers through my tangled hair a couple of times, set my expression to "very worried," and go back upstairs.

  "Ah," I say, as soon as I walk in. "Yvonne?"

  She's drinking tea. "Yes, Ariel? What can I do for you?"

  "Um, I'm having a bit of a problem. A huge problem, actually, and I don't quite know what to do about it."