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 wax-work 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 my 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 tomorrow 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 for ever? And why on earth would someone have removed it?
MONDAY MORNING, AND THE SKY is the colour 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 3 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 grey 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’s 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-coloured 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