I mash olive oil into the potatoes and put them on the table with some olives, capers and mustard. We sit down to eat.
‘So how’s life, anyway?’ I ask him.
‘Life’s shit. No money. Too many mice. But I’ve got my afternoon shifts back.’
‘Fantastic,’ I say. ‘What happened to Whatshername?’
A few months ago some talented kid came along and took some of Wolfgang’s shifts. From her point of view, the narrative must have been exciting: teenage girl gets life-changing opportunity playing piano in public. But it meant that Wolfgang couldn’t pay his rent and his bills, so he stopped paying his bills.
‘Pony accident.’
I smile while he fills in the details. I’m not really listening; I’m thinking about the book.
‘Oh … Wolf?’ I say, once we’ve finished eating.
‘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 coffee pot 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 for ever, without ever realising 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 for ever and not realise 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 realise, 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 bottle 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 any time 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.
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