"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 coffeepot 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 forever, without ever realizing 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 forever and not realize 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 realize, 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 carton 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 anytime 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.
Chapter Four
Sometimes 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 anymore. 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 favorite 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 beginni
ng 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 50 percent 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 ten 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 waxwork 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.