After a couple more minutes I leave the room and, after walking down a dingy hallway with posters telling the students not to leave their windows open because pigeons fly in and lay eggs, I descend the steep staircase to the main part of the building. I walk through the white corridor under the white lights only to find the side door won’t open. They don’t usually lock it this early. Shit. I kick it a couple of times, but it definitely is locked, so I have to walk all the way around again, my eyes moving like a thief’s, knowing that if I bump into anyone now it will look odd, and I can’t even claim to have been to the vending machines because I’m not carrying any sweets or crisps. Am I walking strangely? After what I’ve just done, it wouldn’t be surprising. But the porter just nods at me as I escape through the main entrance and I glance blankly back at him. Back in the English Building I go and make coffee in the small, deserted kitchen, and then I take it down to my office, first ignoring the fact that I am now very hungry, and then deciding to eat the last chocolate bar.
I sit cross-legged on the floor for a while, just looking at the boxes while I drink my coffee and eat the chocolate. Then I examine the small rope burns on my wrists and ankles. There’s something interesting about the grazed areas of flesh; something pleasingly symmetrical about them. But I probably won’t see Patrick any more. I’ll do anything once for the experience, but that doesn’t mean I’ll necessarily do it again – even if at the time I enjoyed it. For a moment I think about Yvonne, who is probably at home now making tea for the kids in a bright kitchen with yellow lights everywhere and a dishwasher and a big TV ready to pump out brightness for the rest of the evening; I wonder at what point my life swerved to avoid that, and if that life would have been nicer than the one I’ve got.
It’s dark outside the window as I start putting more books into boxes. They are dusty from being on the shelves for so long, and my hands are soon almost black with the grime from them. Ignoring this, I fill the first box with as many of Saul Burlem’s nineteenth-century science books as I can bear to part with, although it takes a long time because I keep stopping to touch the pages, and to read the odd line here and there. I linger for longer than usual on Transcendental Physics by Professor Zollner. Burlem’s copy of it is a small brown hardback from 1901. I randomly open it and read a short section about Kant, God and the fourth dimension, which is opposite a picture of some knots. Another plate, further on, shows a small, freestanding table, with a wide, solid top and bottom, with two solid wooden loops encircling its thin single stem. It’s clear that if the table and loops are both solid wood, the loops would have had to have always been there; but they haven’t been. They’ve been conjured onto it somehow. I turn the page and read about the strange lights and the smell of sulphuric acid that preceded these loops being placed onto the leg by unseen, possibly higher-dimensional forces.
Somehow I manage to clear one whole bookcase via this method of selecting a book, reading a bit, then, slightly sadly, placing it in the box. After that, I try to arrange all my books, plus the ones I’m ‘borrowing’, onto one bookcase, but they won’t fit. I look again at Burlem’s books. If I boxed up his four volumes of the 1801 edition of Zoonomia, Erasmus Darwin’s book, that would leave a bit more space, especially if I boxed up some of his Aristotle as well. But Zoonomia is one of my favourite of his books, and one I was definitely planning to use for the PhD. Except … actually, I won’t be using it any more, since Burlem persuaded me not to include it. I remember his words. ‘Forget about Mr. Y. And forget about Zoonomia, as well.’ He said 1801 was too early, and that I should stick within my time frame. Well, I suppose if I change my mind there is a copy in the library. So they’re going in the box. I have to stand on a chair to reach them and I try not to get too absorbed with touching their wide green spines, then opening them and running my fingers over the thick, pulpy rag paper that still seems to contain tiny bits of tree. Perhaps it’s because it’s the end of a strange day, or because my arms are tired, but I’m not as careful with the books as I usually would be, and the thick pages flap about as I lift each volume off the shelf. In fact, the volumes don’t seem to be in the best condition, because, as I take Volume IV down, one of its pages actually falls out and flutters down onto the carpet like a leaf.
When I get down off the chair and pick up the page, I see that it isn’t the right size, or thickness, for Zoonomia. It doesn’t have that blotting paper feel, or the thick black type with the long letter s that looks like an f. In fact, I realise, it’s not a page of Zoonomia at all. The small, thin typescript is familiar to me, however, as is, in some unconscious way, the jaggedness of the tear in its edge. It also has a very faint crease: the result of having once been folded into four. This isn’t a page that’s simply fallen out of Zoonomia. This is the missing page from The End of Mr. Y.
For about five whole minutes I just stand there looking at it; not reading the words, just touching the paper and allowing the circuit in my mind to be completed. The book was Burlem’s. The whole box of books from the shop was Burlem’s. And it was Burlem who, for some reason, tore out this page and hid it. It must have been him. He must have left the page here. No one else has a key to this room except me, and if someone else had taken the page out of the book, surely they’d have hidden it in their own things, not in Burlem’s. And I don’t actually know anyone else who has ever even heard of The End of Mr. Y, except Burlem. But why would he hide a page of a book? And how on earth did the rest of the book end up in an auction? I can’t work out how all these things could possibly fit together. Apart from anything else, the book would have been so valuable whole that it must have taken something mind-boggling to make him remove a page. And why not simply put the whole book on the shelf?
Forget about Mr. Y. Sorry, Burlem. That’s not going to be possible now.
And, I now wonder, did he really want me to forget? He connected these two things, Mr. Y and Zoonomia, because he knew he’d left the page there. He connected them in language long before I connected them in the real world.
I can’t read the page here, although it is difficult to stop myself. Instead, I tuck it carefully inside the Zollner book, which I’ve decided to take home with me, and, as quickly as I can, I finish packing the boxes and leave.
An hour later, after a cold, dark walk down the hill, I sit down on my sofa in the kitchen with a large cup of coffee. This feels like a ritual, but perhaps it should be a ritual. I never thought I’d read The End of Mr. Y, and then I found a copy of it in what appeared to be the most improbable of circumstances. I never thought I’d find the missing page, but now here it is. And every one of these events is connected. But not by luck: it’s pure cause and effect. The only piece of luck involved in all of this was the university starting to collapse and creating the cracks of chaos out of which these things could emerge. Of course, I still have no idea of what happened to Burlem, but I know that whatever happened to him is the real cause for what’s happening to me now. Why did he disappear? It must have been something very bad, if whatever it was meant that his most precious book ended up in a box in an auction. And the books in the box are definitely his: I flicked through them as soon as I got in and found some marginal notes in his pointy, up-and-down handwriting that proved it. I take a big gulp of coffee and, as a train clatters underneath my window, I read the first line on page 131, the remainder of the broken-off line on page 130.
the darkened room with its single lamp. I bade him good evening.
‘Good evening to you, Mr. Y,’ said he, a cold smile spreading itself thinly across his face. ‘Shall we immediately begin this business? I trust you have the money?’
I reached down and withdrew the money from my shoe, almost losing my balance as I did so. This had the effect of thinning the doctor’s smile yet further.
‘I