Sometimes I like to think that I live with ghosts. Not from my own past – I don’t believe in those sorts of ghosts – but wispy bits of ideas and books that hang in the air like silk puppets. Sometimes I think I see my own ideas floating around, too, but they usually don’t last long. They’re more like mayflies: they’re born, big and gleaming, and then they fly around, buzzing like crazy before they simply fall to the floor, dead, about twenty-four hours later. I’m not sure I’ve ever thought anything original anyway, so I don’t mind. Usually I find that Derrida has already thought of whatever it is, which seems like a very grand thing to say, but actually Derrida’s not that hard; it’s just his writing that’s dense. And now he’s a ghost, too. Or perhaps he always was – I never met him, so how can I be sure he was real? Some of the most friendly ghosts I live with are those of my favourite nineteenth-century science writers. Most of them were wrong, of course, but who cares? It’s not like this is the end of history. We’re all wrong.
Sometimes I try my own thought experiment, which goes as follows: what if everyone is actually right? Aristotle and Plato; David and Goliath; Hobbes and Locke; Hitler and Gandhi; Tom and Jerry. Could that ever make sense? And then I think about my mother and I think that no, not everyone is right. To paraphrase the physicist Wolfgang Pauli, she wasn’t even wrong. Maybe that’s where human society is now, at the beginning of the twenty-first century: not even wrong. The nineteenth-century crowd were wrong, on the whole, but we’re somehow doing worse than that. We’re now living with the uncertainty principle and the incompleteness theorem and philosophers who say that the world has become a simulacrum – a copy without an original. We live in a world where nothing may be real; a world of infinite closed systems and particles that could be doing anything you like (but probably aren’t).
Maybe we’re all like my mother. I don’t like to think about her, or my childhood, too much, but it can be summed up fairly quickly. We lived on a council estate where reading books was seen as the most disgusting combination of laziness and hubris and only my mother and I – as far as I know – had library cards. While the other kids had sex with each other (from about eight years old) and the other adults drank, gambled, bred violent dogs and mangy cats, and thought up ways to get rich and famous, my mother occasionally took me to the library and left me in the kids’ area while she researched the meaning of life via books on astrology, faith healing and telepathy. If it hadn’t been for her, I probably wouldn’t have even known that libraries existed. That’s the only good thing she ever did for me. At night she used to sit downstairs in her pink dressing gown waiting for aliens, while my dad would take me to the park and photograph me picking up aluminium benches and writing graffiti on the walls of the subway, so he could send the pictures to the local paper as proof that the council was losing the war against hooligans. My father, who was at his best when approximately fifty per cent sober and used to buy me toy cars and football stickers, believed everything was a government conspiracy. My mother believed that the conspiracy went higher than that. They taught me that everything you are told by anyone is a lie. But then it turned out that they lied, too.
It’s not that I didn’t enjoy hanging around with the other kids, playing chicken in the main road, stealing rich children’s bikes, setting fire to things and letting the older boys grope me for fifty pence a go. In fact, I got pretty rich on the money and was eventually able to buy a bike that didn’t have to be given back or dumped in the river. After that I gave up sex and rode to the library every day. That was when I got into the habit of binge-reading. It’s easy to do when you spend hours of every day surrounded by more books than you can ever read. You start one, but you’re distracted by the idea that you could, equally, have started a different one. By the end of the day you’ve skimmed two and started four and read the ends of about seven. You can read your way through a library like that without ever properly finishing any of the books. I did finish novels, though. But I wasn’t one of those kids who read Tolstoy. I read the kinds of adult books that they didn’t let you actually borrow.
The grammar school started off feeling sorry for me, with my secondhand uniform and my weird hair. But (thanks, Mum; thanks, Dad) I wasn’t allowed to attend assembly and never believed anything I was taught, which made me stand out as one of the ‘difficult’ children. I also had to do my own laundry after I was about thirteen, and usually I didn’t bother. The other kids didn’t care that my shirt collars were grubby, or that my too-short skirt hadn’t been ironed in weeks. But the teachers would occasionally take me to one side and say things like, ‘Maybe you could mention to your mother that school uniform should be … ?’ My mother? You could communicate with her, in theory, but only if you had a CB radio and could do a convincing impression of something from outer space.
So I did what you’d expect and ran away to university as soon as I could. But I couldn’t even do that properly. I expect that someone in my position should have sat on a coach quietly reading Jane Eyre and occasionally sobbing into a handkerchief as she considered the nasty stains on her life. I drove down the M4 to Oxford in a car with no tax disc, stopping on the way to have a torrid weekend affair with a biker, get a tattoo, and have my broken tooth replaced with a silver one.
I sit up in bed slowly, feeling the disappointment trickle away like puddles after a rain shower. I have an old coffee-making alarm clock that I got from a jumble sale, so I’m able to lie in bed sipping thick black coffee while this happens and the fog of sleep and slivovitz hangover slowly thins out. I think it’s fair to say I hate mornings. I hate the honesty of the morning; the time before your consciousness switches on the light and gets rid of all the nasty shadows. Yuck. But my coffee’s OK.
The End of Mr. Y. I take it out from under my pillow and slowly start reading from the beginning of the main narrative. I read the first line several times: ‘By the end I would be nobody, but in the beginning I was known as Mr. Y.’ Then I read on. The story begins with the protagonist, a respectable draper, on his way to Nottingham on the train. He has some business there the following morning. Once there, he can’t help but notice that the annual Goose Fair has taken over the town, and, the following day, after his business is concluded, he happens to wander past it.
There was a persistent drizzle hanging over the town, as if it were being gently smothered by a damp veil. Having no previous experience of anything like the Goose Fair, I nevertheless willed myself to avoid what I felt certain would be the most diabolical sort of entertainment, and instead resolved to find a respectable establishment in which to take tea. However, I soon found myself drawn into the fair, as if by mesmerism. It comprised side-shows and stalls with several mechanical attractions, and, fringed by the ramshackle vehicles of its considerable staff of animal trainers, performers and penny-showmen, extended to the edges of the Market Square. Once within its perimeter, it felt somewhat as though I had entered another world, one perceptibly warmer, and, once under cover of the various tents and stalls, certainly drier than the one I had just left. Curiosity’s crooked finger beckoned me further. A hand-bill, tacked to a post and flapping in the breeze, informed me of the appearance at the fair of Wombwell’s Menagerie, and assured me that this was the Queen’s favourite exhibition. Other gaudy posters alerted me to such spectacles as the Strange Girl, the Indian Snake Charmer, the Wonderful Talking Horse, a Beautiful Serpentine Dancer on a Rolling Globe with Lime-light Effects and Professor England’s Performing Fleas, including an ‘entirely new and original novelty’: the Funeral of the Flea.
The breeze reduced as I proceeded further into the fair, although the air seemed to darken and thicken despite the freshly illuminated naphtha lamps which hung from the openings to the tents, and which decorated the frontispieces of the various stalls. A glance upward confirmed the appearance of the darkest rain-cloud I had ever seen. Eager to escape a thorough drenching, I looked for a covered diversion. I soon came upon a wax-work exhibition, outside which stood figures of the most unhealthy complexion I have ever seen. This seemed singularly unappealing, as did the promise of the ‘living skeleton’ just beyond, so I continued onwards towards a