‘How much is it?’ I ask carefully, my voice as small as a pin.
‘Yeah, that’s the problem,’ she says, turning the box around. ‘The owner gets boxes like this from an auction in town, I think, and if they’re upstairs it means they haven’t been priced yet.’ She smiles. ‘I probably shouldn’t have shown it to you at all. Can you come back tomorrow when she’s in?’
‘Not really …’ I start to say.
Ideas beam through my mind like cosmic rays. Shall I tell her I’m not from around here and ask her to ring the owner now? No. The owner clearly doesn’t know that the book is here. I don’t want to take the risk that she will have heard of it and then refuse to sell it to me – or try to charge thousands of pounds. What can I say to make her give me the book? Seconds pass. The girl seems to be picking up the phone on the desk.
‘I’ll just give my friend a ring,’ she says. ‘I’ll find out what to do.’
While she waits for the call to connect, I glance into the box. It’s unbelievable, but there are other Lumas books there, and a couple of Derrida translations that I don’t have, as well as what looks like a first edition of Eureka! by Edgar Allan Poe. How did these texts end up in a box together? I can’t imagine anyone connecting them, unless it was for a project similar to my PhD. Could someone else be working on the same thing? Unlikely, especially if they have given the books away. But who would give these books away? I feel as though I’m looking at Paley’s watch. It’s as if someone put this box together just to appeal to me.
‘Yeah,’ the girl is saying to her friend. ‘It’s like a small box. Upstairs. Yeah, in that pile in the toilet. Um … looks like a mix of old and new. Some of the old ones are a bit musty and stuff. Paperbacks, I think …’ She looks into the box and pulls out a couple of the Derrida books. I nod at her. ‘Yeah, just a real mix. Oh, do you? Cool. Yeah. Fifty quid? Seriously? That’s a lot. OK, I’ll ask her. Yeah. Sorry. OK. See you later.’
She puts the phone down and smiles at me. ‘Well,’ she says. ‘There’s good news and bad news. The good news is that you can have the whole box if you want, but the bad news is that I can’t sell individual books from the box, so it’s all or nothing really. Sam says she bought the box herself from an auction, and the owner hasn’t even seen it yet. But apparently she’s already said she hasn’t got the space to shelve loads more stuff … But the other bad news is that the whole box is going to cost fifty pounds. So …’
‘I’ll take it,’ I say.
‘Seriously? You’d spend that on a box of books?’ She smiles and shrugs. ‘Well, OK. I guess that’s fifty pounds, then, please.’
My hands shake as I get my purse out of my bag, pull out three crumpled ten-pound notes and a twenty and hand them over. I don’t stop to consider that this is almost the only money I have in the world, and that I am not going to be able to afford to eat for the next three weeks. I don’t actually care about anything apart from being able to walk out of this shop with The End of Mr. Y, without someone realising or remembering and trying to stop me. My heart is doing something impossible. Will I collapse and die of shock before I’ve even had a chance to read the first line of the book? Shit, shit, shit.
‘Fantastic, thanks. Sorry it was so much,’ the girl says to me.
‘No problem,’ I manage to say back. ‘I need a lot of these for my PhD, anyway.’
I place The End of Mr. Y in my rucksack, safe, and then I pick up the box and walk out of the shop, clutching it to me as I make my way home in the dark, the cold stinging my eyes, completely unable to make sense of what has just happened.
BY THE TIME I GET to my flat it’s almost half past five. Most of the shops on the street are starting to close, but the newsagent opposite glows with people stopping for a paper or a packet of cigarettes on their way home from work. The pizza restaurant underneath my flat is still dark, but I know that the owner, Luigi, will be somewhere in there, doing whatever needs to be done so that the place can open at seven. Next door the lights are out in the fancy-dress shop, but there’s a soft light upstairs in the Café Paradis, which doesn’t close until six. Behind the shops, a commuter train clatters slowly along the brittle old lines and lights flash on the level crossing at the end of the road.
The concrete passageway that leads to the stairs up to my front door is cold, as usual, and dark. There is no bicycle, which means that Wolfgang, my neighbour, isn’t in. I don’t know how he gets warm in his place (although I think the huge amount of slivovitz that he drinks probably helps), but in mine it’s a struggle. I’ve no idea when the two flats were constructed, but they are both too large, with high ceilings and long, echoey corridors. Central heating would be wonderful, but the landlord won’t put it in. Before I take my coat off, I put the box of books and my rucksack down on the large oak kitchen table, switch on my lamps, and then drag the electric fire down the hall from the bedroom and plug it in, watching its two metal bars blush dimly (and, it always seems to me, apologetically). Then I light the gas oven and all the rings on the hob. I close the kitchen door and only then take off my outdoor things.
I’m shivering, but not just from the cold. I take The End of Mr. Y carefully out of my bag and put it down on the table. It seems wrong, somehow, sitting there next to the box of other books and my coffee cup from this morning, so I move the box of books and put the coffee cup in the sink. Now the book is alone on the table. I pick it up and run my hand over it, feeling the coolness of the cream cloth cover. I turn it over and touch the back, as if it might feel different from the front; then I put it down again, my pulse going like ticker tape. I fill my little espresso maker and put it on one of the blazing gas rings, and then I pour out half a glass of the slivovitz Wolfgang gave me and down it in two gulps.
While the coffee heats up, I check the mousetraps. Both Wolfgang and I have mice in our flats. He talks about getting a cat; I have these traps. They don’t kill the mice; they just hold them for a while in a small plastic oblong until I find them and release them. I don’t think the system works: I put the mice outside and then they come straight back in, but I couldn’t kill them. Today there are three mice looking bored and pissed off in their little see-through prisons, and I take them downstairs and release them into the courtyard. I didn’t think I’d mind having mice in the flat, but they do eat everything, and one time one ran over my face while I was lying in bed.
When I get back upstairs, I take four large potatoes from the box in the vegetable rack and wash them quickly before salting them and putting them in the oven on a low heat. That’s about as much cooking as I can cope with now; and I’m not even hungry. My sofa is in the kitchen, since there’s no point having it in the empty sitting room, where there is no heat. So, as the room starts to steam up and fill with the smell of baking potatoes, I finally take off my trainers and curl up with my coffee, a packet of ginseng cigarettes and The End of Mr. Y. And then I read the opening line of the preface, first in my head, and then aloud, as another train rattles along outside: ‘The discourse which follows may appear to the reader as mere fancy or as a dream, penned on waking, in those fevered moments when one is still mesmerised by those conjuring tricks that are produced in the mind once the eyes are closed.’
I don’t die. But then I didn’t really expect to. How could a book be cursed, anyway? The words themselves – which I don’t take in properly at first – simply seem like miracles. Just the fact that they are there, that they still exist, printed in black type on rough-cut pages that are brown with age; this is the thing that amazes me. I can’t imagine how many other hands have touched this page, or how many pairs of eyes have seen it. It was published in 1893, and then what happened? Did anyone actually read it? By the time he wrote The End of Mr. Y, Lumas was already an obscure writer. He’d been notorious for a while in the 1860s, and people had known his