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.
PATRICK HAS BOOKED A HOTEL somewhere over by the ring road. We walk through town to the underpass and then, once we come out from that, down the main road towards the hotel. This is a night-time space, with neon signs hanging off takeaways, video shops, late-night supermarkets and nightclubs. We check in and walk up a broad wooden staircase to our room, which is airy and clean, if a bit