Observatory Mansions: A Novel

by Edward Carey

  They, we, looked everywhere. Nothing. Class was abandoned for two days, everyone was frisking everyone and everything. Mr Bugg sat in his bed with a hot-water bottle, silent in grief, trying to come to terms with his loss. But no one looked down a certain tunnel. That was out of bounds. A certain ghost of a certain fat and thin Cavalier lived there. The place: not to be disturbed. You’re not to go there, Francis, do you hear?

  On the third day, I was sent into Bugg’s bedroom. I was to be taught while he lay struggling with his loss in bed. This was a gentler, kinder Peter Bugg. He spoke in a quiet voice:

  Please, Francis, if you have Chiron return him. I swear I will never bring him into class again.

  Sir, if I had him I’d gladly bring him to you. But I’ve no idea where he could have gone. I shall miss him too, he’s taught me so much.

  He was a present from my father. That’s Father there.

  Mr Bugg pointed to a photograph in a silver picture frame (the same photograph that Peter Bugg had given to me that night so many years later for temporary safe keeping). The occupant was a mean-looking man with dark hair and sideboards.

  My father was a teacher like me. A phenomenal teacher, the best that ever there was. He’d read many thousands of books. He taught in a university. He was a real professor. When he died three hundred people came to his funeral. Never a greater man lived. So modest, so kind, so infinitely clever. Nobody lazed in his classes, everybody sat up straight, listened, was inspired, was in the presence of greatness. He published seven books. All masterpieces, all ground-breaking in their fields. Perhaps I’ll show them to you one day, when you can understand them. Chiron was his ruler. Chiron is to be found in Greek mythology, he was a centaur but unlike the rest of his race who were loud and violent, Chiron was wise and kindly. He was a teacher, a famous teacher, he taught Jason and Achilles and Asclepius. My father underlined the dominant words in his works with that ruler. He never hit anyone with it. He had no need. He turned all his pupils into little genii. He left the ruler to me in his will, to bring me luck. That was all he left me. All the money and his books went to the university library. Do you know where Chiron is?

  No, sir.

  Some of the books you see here belonged to Father. I stole them. I cannot condone my behaviour but I felt it was important for me to collect some of his knowledge. I went to the library with a briefcase, I put the books in the case and walked out with them. Soon they began searching people’s bags when they left. I changed my tactics: I put the books in dustbin bags and threw them from the library windows down on to the library bins below. I stole what should in a way have been my legacy, but it was illegal since Father had only given me his ruler. Do you know where Chiron is?

  No, sir.

  We spent the day not studying but talking. Bugg showed me many books, but never the ones written by his father. He spoke of Daedalus who lost his disobedient son in the Icarian sea; of King Minos who kept his stepson imprisoned in a labyrinth; of Oedipus who murdered his own father; of fathers and sons. He spoke often of his own father whose name was Peter Bugg. The other Peter Bugg, my tutor, was christened Ronald Peter Bugg but dropped the Ronald in preference to the Peter, in memoriam patris. At the end of each story or reminiscence he would always ask, gently, quietly – Do you know where Chiron is?

  Clearing up his bedroom – we had made such a mess studying all his books and photographs – I noticed a large bottle of ink standing on the shelf next to his basin. As I went to put it on the desk, Peter Bugg stopped me. He instructed me to return it, that was where it belonged, he explained why:

  It’s a sad story, but I’ll tell it to you. A confidence in exchange for a confidence. It’s stupid really, but here it is. My father published his first book when he was twenty-six, when his hair was jet black and he was young and life and other works lay before him. I was determined to be like Father, to publish young. But when I was twenty-six I hadn’t written anything. So I moved my goal, a more modest undertaking. I vowed to be published before my black hair turned grey. You see me here with black hair, but it greyed many years ago. It started greying when I was a mere thirty. It was as if my own hair was mocking me. One evening, in my boxroom at school, the fear that I would break my vow began to suffocate me. I sat in front of the mirror and tried to pull out each of my grey hairs. It was so difficult, such fiddly work! In frustration I took hold of a bottle of indelible black ink on my writing desk and dyed my hair with it. Since then I’ve done it regularly. I dye my hair with black ink, it gives me more time. One day I will write a book and then I will leave my hair to grey, sit out in the sun and breathe deeply. That’s why the ink. So, Francis, dear child, now I’ve told you, and now you can tell me, please, where can I find Chiron?

  Sir, I do not know. Please believe me.

  Tomorrow I’ll get up. Perhaps when I wake I’ll find a length of mahogany beside me. Do you think so, boy?

  I couldn’t possibly say, sir.

  That’s it for today. Off you go now. I need to sleep. Seven o’clock as usual.

  Seven o’clock, sir.

  Perhaps I’ll never write a book. What do you think, Francis? Perhaps I’ll never.

  Sir?

  How could you know, you’re just a boy. I was a boy once.

  Can I go, sir?

  Father confiscated my toys, kept me studying day and night. One day he picked me up, tapped my skull – What’s in there, Ronnie? Is there anything in there at all?

  Seven o’clock, sir.

  But he wasn’t listening. I left Peter Bugg sitting on the bony lap of that other Peter Bugg, the mythical father.

  That night Peter Bugg sat up at his desk, watched only by the owls’ eyes of so many books, which glared at him, showing him no pity. He wrote a page then threw it away, wrote another, discarded that and so his torment began. At seven the next morning he did not come to the classroom. I found him in his bedroom sleeping over his desk, small clouds of repudiated pages around his feet. I took the large bottle of ink and hid it in the nursery.

  Some hours later:

  Boy, have you taken my dyeing ink?

  Yes, sir, I have.

  Return it forthwith.

  No, sir, I cannot do that, I’ve tipped it out.

  NO!

  I think it would be better, sir, if you let your hair find its proper colour, and if you turned up to lessons on time.

  The sepia returned to Bugg’s face.

  You don’t think I can do it, or is it that you’re trying to stop me? Yes, that’s it, isn’t it? I won’t be stopped. You’ll see, I shall write … Oh, such a book! You’ll see. You’ll see.

  He returned to his room. Four hours later Bugg with all his trunks of books was climbing into a taxi cab. He did not shake my hand on leaving as he had promised. His farewell was:

  Do you have Chiron?

  He closed the cab door and went out of Tearsham Park, out of Tearsham village to the city of his future.

  In time he would stop dyeing his hair and shave it all off. I still remember the shock when I first saw that bald Bugg, like an ancient baby. He came back to us, when he had nowhere else to go. He was a different Bugg then, a broken, more nervous Bugg, a Bugg who had lost all authority. We placed him in one of the empty flats in Observatory Mansions. He had been evicted from his previous home after spending years there not writing the book that he had sworn to write. You’ll see. You’ll see. But there was nothing in the end to see. Was there, sir?

  Memory pressure.

  In the days that followed the memory pressure rose. Peter Bugg occasionally visited me, though less frequently, and these visits would always be ended by an enquiry into a certain lost ruler. He told me that Twenty had remembered the telephone number of her flat in that foreign country of hers. She had called the number but the owner of the flat had changed, was no longer her husband. Claire Higg had remembered that about the last time she saw the photograph of Alec Magnitt, she had been visited in increasing amounts by Francis Orme, and wondered if I mi
ght recall the whereabouts of her beloved’s image.

  But soon Peter Bugg stopped his evening visits. And I was left alone in the evenings after plinth work with just Mother and Father for company, which is much the same as being left alone. I felt myself being suffocated by those still regurgitating memories upstairs, so that when my day off arrived I decided that rather than spend the day sitting in the park, or sitting in flat six, or wandering up and down the line of exhibits in the tunnel, that I needed to get out, to visit some other, and less over-familiar part of the city. I also remembered, with frustration, that my fingernails had grown too long, and unless I had them cut soon I was sure to ruin a pair of white, cotton hands.

  I pass my many colleagues.

  Through the city I went, choosing to walk on this occasion and not take the bus. I passed en route to my destination my many colleagues, the street professionals of our city, who earned their money from their limited talents. They survived by presenting themselves to their public bursting with confident smiles and hiding, almost convincingly, the desperation that had bored holes through their spirits. They were dented and withered displays of man’s eternal resilience.

  I passed the man with the scales. I passed, a little further on, the nervous and irritable woman with a tic, called Mad Lizzy, who spent her day taking photographs. Mad Lizzy’s photographs were all snapshots of people walking or running about the city. She was capturing, she once told me, the essence of city existence. She would later set up a stall to sell these photographs and scream at her potential customers that her photographs were great art. The fact that she sold so few of these photographs was to Mad Lizzy, by her curious logic, not only one of the great injustices of the world but also proof of their worth. I passed Pascal the blind accordionist; and Samuel the chain snapper (with his chains wrapped around his body); and I passed Moses the vociferous prophet (whose real name was Philip), with his fold-up cross folded out behind him and his three-coins-a-piece sermons lining the street before him; I passed Sad Eddy selling his red roses; I passed Claudia the tiny cellist (whose scratched and dented cello propped up a sign saying she had once played in the city’s concert hall but had fallen on bad times, though by the concert hall would have been more accurate); I passed Herbert the syphilitic magician with his one-footed white dove (though it was really a common city pigeon which he had bleached); I passed Hamish the salamander, Hamish with his scorched lips and burn-scarred body, indications of his earlier amateur days at fire-eating; I passed Carlo, the oldest of the street professionals, who remained upright by the use of his one leg and his one twisted crutch that was made from a scaffolding pole, Carlo used to strap on and pull off his wooden leg for the public, but sadly someone had stolen this leg (lot 634). I nodded to them all. And finally I passed Constantin, called Spider Boy, the contortionist, and passing Constantin meant that I had reached my destination.

  The wax museum.

  The wax museum was a large, but otherwise quite ordinary, red-brick building which had been partly disguised by the addition of huge fibreglass pillars and caryatids, a simple knock on which would reveal their hollowness. That same waxworks museum which Constantin had for many years worked outside, a popular pitch which he had to fight for and won over tiny Claudia of the cello due to his extraordinary, though not entirely tasteful, talents.

  It was in the waxworks that my only true friend worked with wax.

  Meeting my only true friend.

  The wax sculptors only took care over the heads that they sculpted, these would be painstakingly made to resemble so-called famous individuals. But the rest of the exhibit, the arms, legs, torso, being supposedly extremely similar on every human, would be cast from the bodies of the half-wax-half-human dummies. We dummies, having amongst our number both males and females, ageing from reasonably young to fairly old, were perfect for donating imprints of our bodies. In return it was a custom that the sculptor would in some way compensate the half-wax-half-human dummy for the time spent on the top floor of the waxworks, where all the exhibits were made. Sometimes this compensation took the form of money, sometimes of food, sometimes some little gift would be given, a piece of cheap jewellery or a cigarette lighter. But it was understood that the dummy must be tipped.

  I was not aware of this tradition when I first began my employment at the waxworks. We half-wax-half-human dummies rarely communicated with each other, we were not paid to be sociable after all, we were paid to keep still. Only once during my employment at the waxworks was this law of unsociability profoundly broken. One male and one female dummy used to stare at each other across the entire length of the Grand Hall and occasionally wink, blow kisses or flutter their eyelashes. In time, of course, they were discovered and dismissed. Such was the penalty for excessive friendliness. And so, when I saw half-wax-half-human dummies walking up the stairs to the mysterious top floor of the waxworks and passing through a door labelled AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY, I had no way of learning why the dummy had been sent up there, nor what lay behind the door.

  The wax sculptors were a noisy group who talked loudly in the staff cafeteria, without ever considering the sensibilities of the dummies. In truth, I am sure they thought of us as inferior creatures, as unskilled labour. They laughed, they ate noisily, scraping their cutlery against their plates. They made lunch breaks extremely unpleasant.

  One lunch break I was particularly disturbed to discover that the sculptors were talking about me. At least, the words new boy and gloves kept being repeated and I had only just managed to convince myself that it was a coincidence, when one of the wax sculptors looked up from the midst of his colleagues and smiled at me. Deliberately. Unmistakably. I always sat at my own table, as far away from anyone else as I could manage; the sculptor could not therefore have been smiling at anyone other than me. He picked me out for his smile. He had chosen to give his smile to me and to no other. The consequence of this sudden attack of friendliness was that I began to take my lunch breaks in the peace of the locker room, where I had no fears of being smiled at whatsoever.

  I had been wearing my white gloves for a number of years before I was employed at the waxworks and had worked out by then the painful routine of cutting nails. Since cutting nails meant taking hands out of gloves, meant exposing naked hands, I detested the operation. It seemed to me vile, an affront to my glove wearing. But since unchecked nails could begin to cut through white cotton, I had to submit, whenever my nails progressed too far, to removing my gloves and, never actually looking at my hands, dismissing the offending growths.

  It was on one of these unpleasant occasions, as I was bravely snipping my nails in the privacy of the locker room and, in a state of gross discomfort, moaning with despair and nausea, that I was distracted by a voice which asked the following question:

  Would you like me to cut your nails for you?

  It was the voice of the wax sculptor who had deliberately smiled at me. I hid my hands behind my back, called to the sculptor to please go away. But he wouldn’t go away, instead he said:

  I could cut them for you, if it would help. Come upstairs. I’ve some sharper scissors there.

  I can’t allow anyone to see my hands.

  It won’t take long, then they’ll be covered again.

  But it isn’t allowed.

  You’re in a state. It will be far less painful if you let me do it.

  But everyone will see.

  No, not at all. We’ll be very discreet.

  And so, hopeful but nervous, with my hands once again hidden inside their gloves, I followed the man up the forbidden stairs to the top floor, beyond the AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY door.

  We had entered one extremely long room divided into two. The first part contained numerous trestle tables on which were placed many unfinished heads and limbs of dummies yet to be. They looked as if they belonged to some extraordinary dissection academy, or an anatomy classroom, or a transplant factory, or as if the top floor of the wax museum held the remains of some sinister execution. Beyo
nd the tables, in the second part of the room, were numerous cubicles where the sculptors worked quietly by themselves, sculpting clay that would then be covered in plaster to make a mould and then the mould would be filled with wax. The sculptor ushered me into his cubicle.

  Sit down. Breathe deeply. Relax. It shouldn’t take long.

  Before he took off the gloves he kindly secured a blindfold over my eyes. He used his hands extraordinarily deftly and slipped the gloves off with ease. He managed the operation as gently as he could, but the nails had grown quite long and thick and they were not easy to cut. Each time he worked his way through one I would hear a loud snap and begin to feel slightly faint. But he managed, the nails were reduced and my gloves were replaced.

  There you are. Nice short nails. Would you care for a cup of coffee, Francis?

  I’m not sure.

  I’m having one.

  How do you know my name?

  Everyone knows everyone’s name here. You’ll learn that once you’ve been here a bit longer. My name’s William.

  The coffee was thick and black. He drank it that way, he said, to keep him awake, often he would sculpt well into the night. I noticed he was working on the head of a young man, who was, I supposed, about the same age as me. William asked me if I recognized the young man. I shook my head. At that he looked a little disappointed, he showed me various photographs of the man and I saw, and commented, that the likeness of his clay head to the photographs was exceedingly accurate. But you still don’t recognize him? The head and the photographs were apparently of a certain young, famous actor who had recently died and whose model was to be placed in the wax museum. As we talked that day, William discovered that I hardly knew who any of the wax figures represented. And so it was that I came to mention my home.