Observatory Mansions: A Novel Read online

  Acclaim for Edward Carey’s

  OBSERVATORY

  MANSIONS

  “Observatory Mansions is a striking debut, not simply for the skill with which it conjures its bizarrerie but for the way it wrings pity from an incredible setting. When Carey alternates the reveries and recollections of his narrator’s parents, the resulting fugue is a tour de force.”

  —Times Literary Supplement

  “The humor and ingenuity with which Carey presents his characters and the entropic universe which surrounds them are reminiscent not only of Beckett, but also of Georges Perec.… In his world, there are no ordinary people; everything is a seething mass of repressed desires, murderous impulses, and obsessive-compulsive tics. While this view of human nature might sound disturbing, it is conveyed with so much sympathy and acute observation that it is hard not to be beguiled. Far from being grotesque, the other tenants of Carey’s lovingly built microcosm come across as rather admirable in their last-ditch resistance to the forces of conventional reality.”

  —The Times (London)

  “With this extraordinary character, and the appealingly deranged inhabitants of Observatory Mansions, Carey has created and imaginary world brimming with the weird, the wonderful, and the unexpected.”

  —The Guardian

  “Carey is nothing short of a genius.… Brilliant.”

  —Daily Mail

  “Edward Carey has an imagination of tremendous range and power. He transforms the familiar stuff of life into shapes utterly strange and marvelous. This is a novel of truly startling originality.”

  —Patrick McGrath

  Edward Carey

  OBSERVATORY

  MANSIONS

  Edward Carey is a playwright and illustrator in London. This is his first novel.

  FIRST VINTAGE CONTEMPORARIES EDITION, FEBRUARY 2002

  Copyright © 2000 by Edward Carey

  Illustrations copyright © 2000 by Edward Carey

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York. Originally published in hardcover in Great Britain by Picador in 2000, and subsequently in hardcover in the United States by Crown Publishers, New York, in 2001.

  Grateful acknowledgment is made to Marin Sorescu for permission to reprint an excerpt from The Biggest Egg in the World, translated by Paul Muldoon with Ioana Russell-Gebbett (Newcastle upon Tyne, England:

  Bloodaxe Books, 1987).

  Vintage is a registered trademark and Vintage Contemporaries and colophon are trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the Crown edition as follows: Carey, Edward, 1970–

  Observatory mansions / Edward Carey. –1st. ed.

  p. cm.

  1. Eccentrics and eccentricities—Fiction. 2. Collectors and collecting—Fiction. 3. Apartment houses—Fiction. I. Title.

  PR6053.A6813 O27 2001

  823′.92—dc21 0-034645

  eISBN: 978-0-307-55872-5

  Author photograph © Elizabeth Carter

  www.vintagebooks.com

  v3.1

  For my mother and father

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Acknowledgements

  Epigraph

  I: The Arrival

  II: Meetings

  III: The Four Objects

  IV: Observatory Mansions and Tearsham Park

  V: Saint Lucy’s Day

  VI: Little People

  VII: Demolition

  VIII: City Heights

  Appendix: Francis Orme’s Exhibition of Love

  Acknowledgements

  Very many thanks are due to Elizabeth Carter, Pascal Morisset, Sonja Müller and Claudia Woolgar for providing me with places in which to write this book, and also to Robert Coover, Isobel Dixon, Ann Patty and Richard Milner for their excellent advice in helping me to finish it.

  I gloved and greaved

  my hands, my legs, my thoughts,

  leaving no part of my person

  exposed to touch

  or other poisons.

  Marin Sorescu

  I

  THE ARRIVAL

  I wore white gloves. I lived with my mother and father. I was not a child. I was thirty-seven years old. My bottom lip was swollen. I wore white gloves though I was not a servant. I did not play in a brass band. I was not a waiter. I was not a magician. I was the attendant of a museum. A museum of significant objects. I wore white gloves so that I would not damage any of the nine hundred and eighty-six objects in the museum. I wore white gloves so that I would not have to touch anything with my bare hands. I wore white gloves so that I would not have to look at my own hands.

  I lived in a city, as many people do, a small city, an unspectacular city, a not very famous city. I lived in a large building but had access only to a small part of it. Other people lived around me. I hardly knew them.

  The building we lived in was a huge, four-storey cube in the neo-classical design called Observatory Mansions. Observatory Mansions was dirty. Black stains like large unhealing scabs fouled the exterior, and sprayed on its grey walls in red and yellow car paint were various messages delivered at night by some anonymous vandal. The most immediately noticeable being: And even you can find love. The building’s only notable features, save for its plainness and size, were the four simple columns that supported the entrance portico. The columns were badly scratched and dented, one in particular was inclined to slouch. The building’s only other irregularity was the dome on the slate roof, directly above the entrance hall. In this dome, once upon a time, was an observatory. An observatory now lacking telescopes, now an unproclaimed sanctuary for pigeons, their shit, their young, their dying and dead.

  Observatory Mansions once sat in the countryside, surrounded by outhouses and stable buildings, parkland and fields. In time the city crept up to it, covering with each new year more fields, until it reached the parkland, which it smothered in asphalt, and the outhouses, which it knocked down. Only the house itself, that large grey cube, remained. They built a circular wall, ten foot high, around the house, a barricade, a statement that this was as far as the city would get. But the city carried on, way beyond our home, building yet more roads and houses. And as the city continued, the roads that neighboured Observatory Mansions became ever wider and more frequented, a river growing in confidence, until an ox-bow lake was formed and Observatory Mansions became an island. A roundabout, a traffic island, forgotten by the city but surrounded by its quickly flowing business.

  I often thought of our home as a solid, hairless and ancient man. This man, sitting with his flabby arms hugging his round knees, stares hopelessly down at the traffic, at the smaller, modern, neighbouring buildings, at the countless people rushing by. He sighs heavily; he’s not sure why he’s still here. The old man is not well, the old man is dying. He suffers from countless ailments, his skin is discoloured, his internal organs are haemorrhaging.

  This was our home and we were even tolerably happy living there, until a new resident came.

  Our first rumour of the new resident came to us in the form of a little note pinned on to the noticeboard in the entrance hall. It said:

  Flat 18 –

  To be occupied.

  One week.

  A simple note that filled us with fear. The Porter placed the note there. He knew what we wanted to know: we wanted to know who it was that wanted to occupy flat eighteen. He placed the note there because he knew it would upset us. He could merely have kept quiet and a week later we would be stunned
to hear someone busy about the living business in flat eighteen, unannounced. But he warned us, knowing how it would upset us. His only motive was to upset us. He knew that we would all separately be spending the week worrying over the mysterious person who was to occupy flat eighteen, and that he alone would keep the secret because no one ever spoke to him.

  The Porter would not open his mouth, except to hiss. The Porter hissed at us if we came too near to him. That hiss meant – Go away. And we did. It was not pleasant to come too close to the Porter’s hiss. It was not pleasant to come too close to the Porter. So even if we were to have enquired about the new resident the reply would have been a hiss. Go away. We had to wait. And more than anything else we hated waiting. Suspense was bad for our unfit hearts. We were left to imagine the future occupant of flat eighteen – for a whole week.

  And for a whole week we were terrified. We slept short nights. We would find each other examining flat eighteen, as if by simply being in that specific section of the building which filled us with disquiet we would immediately understand what sort of person it was that was soon to occupy it. When we saw each other there we backed away, ashamed. If we entered the flat while the Porter was cleaning it, he would hiss us out of the place. We would run back to our own homes, shaking.

  Flat eighteen, which had been a large dressing room and bedroom when Observatory Mansions was a country residence, was now similar to the other flats on the third floor; we found no clues inside it. We wanted to take floorboards out, damage the plumbing, cut the electricity lines. Anything to make the new resident know that he was unwelcome. We wanted to, but we did nothing. We sat thinking, paralysed by panic, with sweat on our foreheads, on the privacy of our lavatory seats, behind locked doors. We ate less. If the week had been any longer than a week we should all have been noticeably thinner.

  Before the new resident arrived there was perfect stagnation. Years had sat on years and we had not been able to distinguish any difference between them. We were growing older, true, but since we saw each other every day, we had all (as if in conspiracy) not noticed, or pretended not to notice, the particulars of ageing. Our home was a different matter. It is probable that many of us were keenly aware of our home’s slow but gradual disintegration – on every floor large strips of the ubiquitous blue and white wallpaper had peeled itself from the walls, the carpets were faded and full of holes, the banisters on the top floor, where the cheaper, smaller flats were, had already collapsed. The plumbing was somewhat erratic. The electricity frequently failed.

  We who lived in Observatory Mansions were a small and peculiar group of people. Group is perhaps the wrong word since it was only because we lived in the same building that we could in any way be thought of as belonging to one another. Or perhaps we had become alike after spending so much time in solitude, the more time people spend alone the more difficult they become. How strange the people are who, past a certain age, find themselves blocked in every direction, these people who are convinced they will no longer be employed, these people who live alone. And of course they spend their time working out how to get by or thinking about their pasts, but they have only themselves to reminisce with. And how dull that is, how painful it is when it is only, day after day, their own reflection that appears in the mirror. How they long to get away from themselves, not just to get out of their own skins but to get out of their pasts and presents and futures; to leave, in short, everything that has anything to do with them behind for ever.

  But I liked to think of these people as pure people, as concentrated people, or, to put it another way, as how everyday people would be if they were subtracted from work, friends, family and all the motions of life which we are told we should take part in. These people are obsessive; sometimes it is easy to spot them, sometimes not. Sometimes when you see them about the city their eccentricities make you laugh, but more often they make you feel miserable. They are a rare group of individuals, bizarre creatures, who seem to have walked out of strange, dark fairy tales, but they are real enough, they are about, they are to be found amongst cities’ Coca-Cola signs, evening paper stands, waiting for the traffic lights to change with the rest of us. We seven from Observatory Mansions were a little like that.

  We seven.

  For years we had been used to residents leaving. Residents either packed up and left, or died in their flats and were taken away. After their departure the flats remained empty and with each vacation our home seemed larger and larger. It was well known to us that the value of our individual flats, though once good, had been steadily decreasing and that if we decided to sell we would be unlikely to find a buyer.

  Observatory Mansions was designed to house twenty-four different families but, just before the new resident came, only seven individuals lived there. It was supposed that that number would be likely to gradually decrease but most unlikely ever to increase. All we were worried about was being the last person remaining. Living in our vast home, walking around all those empty flats, perpetually alone, was not something to look forward to. Though we were not happy together, and though we were only intermittently friendly towards each other, though many of us lived in virtual solitude, there was some solace to be drawn from the fact that our misery was not borne alone. It was shared, between seven. There was a certain pleasure, or fraternity, to be gathered from living with people whose lives had ended as unspectacularly as each other’s. We had little to look forward to. Little changed. The only change was the occasional arrival of demolition experts who appeared, uninvited, and never stayed very long. On their first visit, some twelve years ago, we were naturally worried. The demolition experts arrived with representatives of the property company that owned Observatory Mansions, the company that paid the Porter. We waited for something to happen. Nothing happened. The fear, though, we had been able to share, between seven. For a while we communicated with each other, dividing our anxiety. When a suitable amount of time had expired, and it appeared to us that nothing, in fact, was going to happen, we each returned to our solitude. We shut up our doors, ended communication until the next visit by the demolition experts. Each time the visits caused us less worry. We had convinced each other that nothing was actually going to happen, so much so that on the last visit, before the new resident came, we paid no attention to our uninvited demolition experts and did not even consider opening our doors to each other.

  We continued, waiting patiently for the moment when one of us would be the last person left in our home, for the time when there would be no one left to ignore. Solitude is only good when surrounded by other people. I, being the youngest resident, had the most to fear. I was thirty-seven at the time the new resident arrived. It may be presumed then that I would be glad to have another resident in our home, but that was not the case. It was not the case with any of us, and this is the great contradiction with the lonely. Though we longed not to be lonely, we also feared the pain it would take us to be brought out of our lonely states. And after that fear, could we be guaranteed that we would never be returned to a state of loneliness again? We could not.

  Though we did not necessarily enjoy our condition of loneliness, we were at least used to it. It was dependable, almost a friend. We wanted nothing to change. Though we longed not to be the last resident, we also longed for our anodyne days to remain the same. We wanted no noises. We wanted no sudden movements.

  On the day before the new resident came we were all united in an all-consuming anxiety. We had not yet opened our doors to each other, but the option was there. We could feel the door handles twitching. We were restless. We entertained the possibility that the new resident might be a person, like us, who deplored sociability. We entertained the possibility that the new resident would be old or dying, and could perhaps even die during his first night here. We entertained the possibility that the new resident might take one look at our home and decide to leave. If that were the case we would be offended for a few minutes and afterwards relieved for eternity.

  There was nothing we
could do but wait and make his stay with us, which we were sure would be short, unpleasant. But no one was more worried than I, being the youngest resident in our home and subsequently the one, if the new resident proved neither to be old nor to be dying, most likely to suffer his company for the longest time.

  The day came.

  It was a bright morning. It should not have been, it should have been overcast. It was a pleasant late spring day. It should not have been, it should have been shrouded in miserable winter pessimism.

  I was up early, I had fed my mother, my father and myself. I suppose that many people would, if they woke up at the age of thirty-seven to find themselves living with their parents, be filled with dread. To them, spending every day with their parents would be suffocating; those people would feel cramped, they would say that the air they breathed was somehow contaminated. Perhaps they would even kneel by their beds at night, as good children do, and pray that their parents be dead by morning, as bad children do. That was not the case with me, I was not unhappy living with my parents.

  On the morning of the day that the new resident came to us, I crouched by the door waiting for noises. Silence. At half past eight I had to leave home to go to work. I climbed the stairs to flat eighteen, the door was open, the flat bare. He had still not come. The only life from the third floor was the friendliness pouring out of Miss Higg’s pet television set in flat sixteen.

  I had to go to work.

  The journey to work.

  I usually travelled to work by using the public bus service. Any person who could produce the correct amount of money on request was entitled to sit in its confines and endure the rather dubious comfort of its dirty and ripped seats. The dirt was, of course, perilous to my white gloves, and whilst on board I had to be careful not to touch anything. The bus was old, but it moved. It moved but slowly. Its driver was a young man who had surely failed all his school examinations and was thus forced to endure for the term of his working life the daily ignominy of driving this dinosaur of locomotion. This man had also to suffer the screams, giggles, dirt, loves and hates of the schoolchildren: the bus was the school bus too. It trundled all the local children to their hours of misery every day during school time. When school was on holiday it was possible to see who the bus’s other users were. There were various diagnosed imbeciles. Among the imbeciles was Michael, a giant of a man, more sensitive, I believed, than the others. Michael was always observing, he examined each of his fellow passengers, considering them through his delicate blue eyes. The imbeciles went to school too, a different type of school. This school did not teach them history or languages, mathematics or science. This school taught them to be happy, to smile, to read their digital watches and, most of all, not to worry. The other passengers were mainly old men and old women, sometimes couples, mostly not. The old were off for a trip in the city centre where they would sit in cafés, underneath flashing electric signs, listening bemused to the vapid music, sipping tea and coffee, sighing and drooping. Two other passengers I found worthy of attention. The first was a small boy with bright fair hair, who was always accompanied by his dark-haired mother (though she barely deserves a mention and is easily forgotten). The boy wore glasses and one of the lenses was gummed over so that it could not be looked out of. This was because the boy had a squint. By using only his squinty eye, that eye was supposed to slowly repair itself. I do not think it ever did. The other passenger was a man in his forties, stunted by timidity. This man was a poet, he wrote beautiful odes to trees, flowers and country animals which he had not seen since he was a child. He was reminded of them by photographs he found in the city library. And it was the city library where the bus would drop him. And myself too.