YOU LOOK IN THE MIRROR and this time it tells you that, yes, you are cursed.
The sun is only just rising by the time I get to the university library on Tuesday morning, about five minutes before it opens. I’m a little mind-numbed by the experience of walking up the hill in the weak grey light, smothered by the winter sky and my own breath, which is itself a winter sky in miniature. For the first time ever I walked along listening to my iPod, and the music I felt most fitted this experience of walking up a hill at dawn, on my first day as someone who may be cursed, was Handel’s Dixit Dominus, the same piece that was playing the night I met Burlem in Greenwich. I both love and hate this piece of music, and while it plays it feels as though it’s something that’s crawling on me, on the inside and the outside surfaces of my skin.
Patrick may think I am tremendously postmodern because I have an iPod, but I still prefer libraries to the Internet when it comes to research. And although I know what holy water is, and where I am likely to get some, I have no idea about the other ingredient in Mr Y’s recipe: Carbo Vegetabilis (or vegetable charcoal). Well, OK, I understand that vegetable charcoal implies burnt wood or vegetation, but what is a homoeopathic potency? I guess the Internet probably would tell me this quickly, but it may not tell me accurately. I also need to know what a nineteenth-century writer would have meant by it – who knows? The term may not be in existence any more, or it might mean something different now. Look at how the word ‘atom’ has changed over the centuries. I have definitely decided that I am going to make this tincture and try it out. Even though this morning I was slashed into consciousness by that jagged honesty you sometimes get when you wake up, and something inside me told me to stop. But why should I? And it’s not as if this mixture can do me any harm. Charcoal isn’t poisonous, and neither is water. And it seems to me that this recipe is a part of the book, and that, for whatever reason, Lumas intended the reader to try it out.
The History of Medicine section of the library turns out to be on the fourth floor, beyond the religion and philosophy books, in a little corner by some stairs. There is a whole section on homoeopathy: lots of aged hardbacks with muted binding in dark green, dark red, and grey. I pick up a thick green book and see the title, Kent’s Repertory, and the publication date, 1897. I sit cross-legged on the faded carpet and flick through it, intrigued by the odd format that I don’t understand. The book seems to contain lists of symptoms, grouped under headings such as ‘Sleep’, ‘Eyes’, ‘Genitalia’, and ‘Mind’. I flick to the ‘Sleep’ section and find a curious poetry there in a section entitled ‘Dreams’. I read down the page and see one-word or, occasionally, one-sentence entries saying things like serpents, sexual, shameful, shooting, skeletons, smelling sulphur and, further down, stars falling, stealing fruit and struck by lightning, that he was. After each small piece of text are letters I don’t understand, but that look like abbreviations. Under the entry ‘dreams, snakes’ there are a lot of these: Alum., arg-n., bov., grat., iris., kali-c., lac-c., ptel., ran-s., rat., sep., sil., sol-n., spig., tab. I don’t know why some of these are in italics, nor what the abbreviations mean.
I flick backwards in the book to the ‘Mind’ section and, under ‘Delusions’, find some very odd entries, including the delusions ‘alive on one side, dead on the other’ and the more vague ‘fancy, illusions of ’. In the ‘Genitalia, Male’ section I find references to erections that can be ‘impetuous’ or can only happen in the afternoon, or while coughing. I like this, but I don’t understand it, so I close the heavy volume and browse some of the other books on the shelf. It’s strange: I always thought homoeopathy was some kind of cranky herbalism, but looking at all these books makes me realise just how seriously some people must take it, or, more accurately, must have taken it around the turn of the century when most of these books were originally published. All the authors have very grand or strange names: Constantine Hering, MD; John Henry Clarke, MD; William Boericke, MD, and even some women, including Margaret Tyler, MD and Dorothy Shepard, MD. They all have those letters after their names, implying that all the important people who practiced homoeopathy at that time were doctors. Eventually I have amassed a pile of books from 1880 until the early 1900s; I take these to a small table and start trying to understand it all.
After two hours’ solid reading I go outside for a cigarette. The sky is now a uniform, artificial blue, and for a second it feels like something has been deleted from it. A grey squirrel runs along the grass in front of me, its sleek body rising and falling like a wave. My eyes follow it as it runs up a tree and disappears. Beyond the tree, and far down the hill, the small city shimmers in the false, low light. The cathedral dominates the view as usual, and in this light it looks sepia-yellow, like a JPEG of an old photograph. As I inhale smoke in the cold air, I think about what I have learnt this morning. Homoeopathy seems to have been invented (or, perhaps, discovered) by Samuel Hahnemann in 1791. Hahnemann was a chemist who had written treatises on syphilis, and poisoning by arsenic. He was unhappy about contemporary medical practices, especially bloodletting. Hahnemann believed that King Leopold of Austria had essentially been murdered by his doctors, who had bled him four times in twenty-four hours to try to cure a high fever. While he was translating Cullen’s Materia Medica, Hahnemann had an amazing moment of insight. Cullen said that Cinchona bark cured malaria simply because it was bitter. But Hahnemann happened to know that poisoning by Cinchona bark produced symptoms similar to those produced by malaria, including internal dropsy and emaciation. He realised that the thing that cured malaria also caused very similar symptoms. Could this be true in other cases of diseases and medicines? Could it be, he wondered, that like cures like?
This was his first eureka moment. It led, eventually, to the development of a whole new system of medicine with the motto: Similia similibus curentur – let likes be cured by likes. Hahnemann’s second eureka moment was when he worked out that it is the small dose that cures. It was all very well giving someone some Cinchona bark to cure their malaria, but since the bark is poisonous, it generally harmed the person as well. Curing poisoning with a poison didn’t sound like a very sensible idea, so Hahnemann experimented with dilutions of Cinchona bark, and found that you could dilute the crude substance quite a lot and still get a reaction. Later, the nineteenth-century homoeopaths worked out that the more dilute the dose, the more effective the medicine: approach the infinitesimal, and you approach something very strange, and very powerful. Paradoxical, but there you are. Paradox never stopped the quantum physicists, or Einstein.
It’s freezing out here, despite the blue sky, and as soon as I have put out my cigarette I go back into the library and up to the fourth floor to continue reading. I get the first book I looked at back off the shelf and re-examine it. I now understand that this is something in which homoeopathic physicians look up symptoms and find the common substance listed under all of them. Those funny little abbreviations relate to homoeopathic substances, it appears. Ars. is Arsenicum; bry. is Bryonia; carb-v. is Carbo Vegetabilis. Once I understand how the system works, I am tempted to start looking up all my own strange symptoms – waking early; craving salt, cigarettes, and alcohol; liking transgressive sex; preferring my own company to that of others – but I don’t have time. My wrists and ankles have matching rope burns that glisten on my skin like little pieces of melted plastic. Should I try and find something to cure them? That might be quite quick. Maybe not, though. I almost like them.
I yawn and don’t bother to cover my mouth: no one’s been up here all morning. I still don’t know what Carbo Vegetabilis is, nor what the thousandth potency might be, so I flick through the pile of books on the desk until I eventually find two helpful documents. One is a short biography of Dr Thomas Skinner, a Scottish homoeopath who visited the United States in 1876 and developed something called the ‘centesimal fluxion machine’ for making what the book describes as ‘potencies in excess of the thousandth’. After a lot more flicking and reading, I come across the next helpful document. It’s a reproduction of a 1925 catalogue entry from the Boericke & Tafel Homoeopathic Pharmacists of Philadelphia, and it explains, in great detail, exactly how homoeopathic medicines are (or were) made. The process sounds crazy. It seems that a substance (Cinchona bark, arsenic, sulphur, snake venom, whatever) is steeped in ‘the finest spirits, made of sound grain’, and then the medicine is made by taking one drop of this ‘mother tincture’ and combining it with ninety-nine drops of alcohol, then succussing (shaking or pounding) the mixture ten times; then taking one drop from this new mixture and combining it with ninety-nine new drops of alcohol, and so on. The thirtieth potency, apparently common in homoeopathic prescribing, is made by doing this thirty times. The thousandth potency, therefore (which they call the 1M potency), is made by doing this one thousand times. At least, I think I’ve got that right. It sounds impossible. I read it again. Yes. That is right.
Shit. Do people even make this stuff any more? Is there still such a thing as Tafel’s High Potencies or the Skinner machine? Am I going to have to go out and find some charcoal and start messing around with pipettes and slivovitz (does that count as the finest spirits? Probably not). Could my wrists even cope with all that shaking? I don’t have bionic arms, and I have absolutely no stamina. Once I rubbed out the pencilled-in marginalia from a hundred pages of a book that I wanted to photocopy (long story) and afterwards it felt like I’d been wanking off a giant for a hundred years.
I’m still thinking about this, and wishing there was a way of finding some sort of Victorian pharmacist to help me, when someone taps me on the shoulder. Even though I thought I was alone in here, I don’t jump. In fact, I am so absorbed in this new problem that I vaguely shrug the hand away from my shoulder and keep reading. I can already sense that it’s Patrick, anyway. I can smell his woody aftershave and the lemony scent of his clean clothes. He touches my shoulder again, and this time I have to respond.
‘Hi,’ I say, without really looking up.
‘Hello,’ he says, hovering behind my right shoulder. ‘What are you reading about?’
‘Nineteenth-century homoeopathy,’ I say, turning my hand over so it rests on the book, rather than holding it open. I don’t want him to see my wrist.
‘Gosh,’ he says. ‘Was homoeopathy around then?’
‘I think it was its heyday,’ I say.
There’s a long pause. I wish he’d go away.
‘Ariel,’ he says.
‘What?’
‘Can I buy you a coffee to say sorry?’
I sigh. ‘I’m quite busy doing this.’
‘Ariel?’
I don’t respond. He stands there behind me silently and I don’t know whether to turn and look at him or just to continue with this and hope he’ll just get the message and leave. I’m not quite sure exactly what message I want him to get. Something like ‘Leave me out of your fucking family shit.’ After I’ve ignored him for a while, he comes closer and looks down at the book in front of me, in the same way that people look at photographs in a lonely room.
‘OK, I’ll leave you to it,’ he says, without moving. ‘Hey,’ he puts his thin finger down on the textbook in front of me. ‘Phosphorus; I’ve taken that.’
I look up. ‘You’ve taken homoeopathic medicine?’
‘Yes, of course. I’m not sure it worked, but . . .’
‘Look. Maybe we should have a quick coffee,’ I tell him. ‘But you’ll have to give me a few minutes to finish up here and check out some of these books. Say, outside in five minutes?’
‘Wonderful.’
Shelley College (named after Mary, not Percy Bysshe) has a Fibonacci staircase, a 1960s chandelier and a bistro called Monster Munch. Monster Munch is the only bit of the college I don’t like. It’s all done out in clean orange and pithy white curves and edges, with new-looking pool tables and a plasma screen. I prefer the decrepit little bar in the Russell Building that has stand-up ashtrays and chipped MDF tables. The students don’t like the Russell Bar, which means it’s usually empty. Occasionally they’ll go in there to revise, or to curl up on one of the stained old sofas with a hangover, but not that often. Anyway, you can’t smoke in Monster Munch. You can only do shiny things in Monster Munch; you have to be a shiny, clean person in here: the fluorescent lights and the mirrors on the walls prevent you from being anything else.
I sit on a stool at a small white table by the window and pull the arms of my jumper down to cover my wrists while Patrick gets coffee for both of us: some sort of frothed milk thing for him, and an Americano for me (they call it ‘black coffee’ in Russell). I have my pile of homoeopathy textbooks in front of me, and they look wrong in here, as do I. The mirrors reflect the unhealthy tone of my skin, pale against my red hair, and the fraying on the bottom of my jeans that I didn’t think was that noticeable. I put on this black jumper this morning without even thinking about it, but now I can see how thin the wool has become, and how smudged it makes me look. If it wasn’t for my hair, I’d basically resemble a bad-quality photocopy.
Patrick puts my coffee in front of me and looks out of the window.
‘Wow, you can see a long way today,’ he says, sitting down. The sky is still a hyperreal blue.
‘Yeah, but you can’t see the cathedral.’ All you can see from up here are fields with nothing in them and, further away, strange industrial towers.
‘Do you have to be able to see the cathedral?’
‘I think so. I mean, it’s the only thing to look at, isn’t it? From up here.’
‘Maybe.’ Patrick digs around in his froth with a thin silver spoon. I notice that his hands are shaking slightly and there’s a slight reflection on his forehead from a thin sheen of perspiration. ‘So.’
‘So,’ I say back. ‘Are you . . . ?’ What do I say? I was about to ask if he’s feeling any better, but then I realise that this is an absurd thing to say, because I don’t really care how he’s feeling. The ellipses hang in the air for a moment, and then Patrick fills in his own question and answers it.
‘Yes. Emma’s back. I’m . . .’ He prods his froth some more. ‘I’m sorry if I seemed to be in a rather strange mood yesterday. I wonder if you’ll ever forgive me.’
‘It’s OK,’ I hear myself saying. ‘It’s not as if I said . . . You know, I mean . . .’
‘No, but. I shouldn’t . . .’
‘I mean, maybe we should try to avoid . . . In future . . .’
Monster Munch is not the kind of place to have this conversation. This is a post-midnight, post-watershed, jazz-bar conversation, and we’re trying to have it in a place that looks like it’s already been censored.
‘Anyway,’ I say.
‘I’m really sorry.’
‘It’s OK.’
I think about Frankenstein’s monster, the fictional character who indirectly gave his name to this place. She was there, lifeless and inanimate, thrown across the bed, her head hanging down, and her pale and distorted features half covered by her hair . . . The murderous mark of the fiend’s grasp was on her neck, and the breath had ceased to issue from her lips. That’s what Victor Frankenstein’s creation did to his fiancée, Elizabeth.
Maybe this is the place to have this conversation after all.
‘You . . .’ I begin, at the same time that Patrick says ‘I . . .’
‘You first,’ he says.
‘No, go on.’
‘No, really.’
‘I just . . . I don’t want to be a stand-in for your wife. Especially not when you’re angry with her. That was never the deal.’
‘No. I’m sorry. It won’t happen again.’
We’re silent for a couple of moments. I sip my coffee and vaguely wish I could have a cigarette. Two women walk in and order juice from the bar and then come and sit at the table behind ours.
‘So how come you took homoeopathic medicine?’ I ask Patrick.
He shrugs. ‘Someone suggested seeing a homoeopath a while ago.’
‘What was it like?’
He sips his coffee and I notice that his hands are not shaking any more.
‘It was interesting.’ He frowns. ‘They ask you lots of odd questions. They want to know what foods you crave, what you dream about, what you do for a living and how you feel about it. It’s like seeing a therapist, in a way.’
I saw a therapist once. A gym teacher saw the scars on the tops of my legs and made me go to the doctor. The doctor referred me to some teenage unit at the local hospital. I remember watching a soap opera in the waiting room, which, as well as the smeary TV screen, had green plastic chairs and posters about AIDS. The guy who saw me was a young, moon-faced man with glasses. I told him how amazing it was to be able to give yourself pleasure through pain, and how I knew cutting was addictive but I wasn’t addicted yet. I laughed through an account of my childhood. Through all this, the therapist simply looked at me in a puzzled way, and a week later I got a letter saying they didn’t have the facilities to help me ‘at this time’. I still remember the boxy, thin-walled little room, though. It smelled of smoke, and I noticed a silver foil ashtray on the table by the box of tissues and the vase of plastic blue flowers. That was the moment it occurred to me to try smoking. That eventually replaced the cutting, but I still have the scars. Patrick likes them.
I sip my coffee as Patrick keeps talking about the homoeopathic interview.
‘I don’t know why they need that level of detail about your life,’ he says, and laughs briefly. ‘I only went there with headaches and insomnia.’
I finish my coffee. ‘So you ended up with phosphorus?’
‘Yes. Now I think about it, I haven’t had any headaches since, although I still don’t sleep well.’
‘Do you actually believe in it?’
‘Mmm. I don’t know. I saw a documentary that said the remedies are just placebos, and there’s nothing in them that can have any effect on anything. They actually dilute the remedies so much that, in chemical terms, all that is left is water. Apparently, homoeopaths argue that water has a memory, which sounds pretty wacky.’
‘So what did the medicine look like?’ I ask him. ‘Where did you get it?’
‘Oh, the homoeopath gave it to me. She had this huge wooden cabinet . . .’ Patrick opens his arms about three feet wide and, with one finger pointing up on each hand, tries to show the scope of this thing. I notice that he doesn’t look at his hands as he does this, but at the wall behind me. It suddenly occurs to me that when people describe size this way, they’re relying on perspective to help them. He’s not saying ‘It’s this big.’ He’s saying ‘It would look this big from here if it was over there.’
He goes on. ‘It had all these little drawers labelled alphabetically. She opened one of them up and there were lots of little glass bottles inside, each containing tiny white sugar pills. She explained to me that the medicine is originally a liquid, but that the little pills absorb it and make it more convenient to take. Sorry. This must be boring.’
‘No, I’m really interested. I just had no picture in my mind of what any of this stuff actually looks like.’ I try to run my fingers through my hair, but there’s some huge tangle at the front, so I try to tease it out as I speak. ‘So, do you have to get these pills from a homoeopath?’
‘Oh, no.’ Patrick laughs. ‘Don’t you ever go into Boots? They sell homoeopathic remedies everywhere now. You can get them at any health food shop as well. I get Nux Vomica for indigestion.
You just buy it over the counter.’
‘Hmm,’ I say. ‘That’s interesting. I never realised it was so mainstream.’
‘It’s big business now,’ he says. ‘I’ve got some Nux in my office, if you want to see what the tablets actually look like.’
‘OK.’
Most people’s offices tend to be a mess. I’ve seen people who seem to be trapped in their rooms, still working at eight p.m. because perhaps there really is no way out across towering piles of old journals, books and printed-off e-mails. Patrick’s room, on the other hand, is large, square and spotless. It doesn’t exactly have the shine of the Monster Munch bistro, but you can see why he likes having coffee there. He has an L-shaped desk arrangement similar to mine, but his tables are larger and one has a glass top. The glass-topped one faces the door and has nothing on it apart from a heavy translucent paperweight and a white lamp. The other one faces the window has nothing on it apart from his computer and looks as if it’s been polished recently. The room is so large that there is also space for a coffee table and four comfortable chairs.
He shuts the door behind us and walks over to his desk drawer. ‘Here,’ he says, taking out a small brown glass bottle and offering it to me.
I put my library books down on the coffee table and take the bottle from him. The label says Nux Vom 30. 125 tablets. An instruction on the side tells you to take a tablet every two hours in ‘acute’ cases and three times a day otherwise. I unscrew the cap and peer inside at a pile of tiny flat tablets, pure white like miniature aspirins.
Now Patrick is locking the door and closing his blinds.
‘How forgiven am I?’ he says.
‘Hmm?’ I say, looking up, but he has already grabbed me and is kissing me hard. ‘Patrick,’ I say, once he stops. But what am I going to say next? Despite – or, weirdly, because of – yesterday, a familiar sensation trickles through me, and instead of talking about how this isn’t a good idea, I allow him to remove my jumper and pull down my jeans and knickers and then bend me over the glass table, holding me by my hair. My breasts press against the cold glass, and, while Patrick fucks me, I wonder what they look like from underneath.
‘God, Ariel,’ he says afterwards, wiping his cock with a Kleenex as I pull my jeans back up. ‘I don’t know if you bring out the best or the worst in me.’
‘I think it’s the worst,’ I say, smiling.
He smiles back. ‘Thanks for forgiving me.’
I laugh. ‘I’m not sure if I have yet.’ I pick up my books and head for the door. ‘Oh, well. Guess I’d better go and see what my new roommates are like.’
Patrick throws the Kleenex away. ‘Roommates?’
‘“Refugees” is what Mary’s calling them. People from the Newton Building. I’m sharing my office with two of them.’
‘Oh. Bad luck.’ Patrick leans against the glass-topped desk and looks at me. ‘Well, you’re always welcome here.’
‘We’ll get caught.’
‘Yes. Probably.’ He sighs. ‘Back to hotels, then.’
‘We’ll see.’ I soften this with a naughty smile, since something’s just occurred to me. ‘Oh, Patrick?’ I say, with my hand on the door handle, as though it’s an afterthought.
He’s fiddling with the buttons on his trousers, making sure they’re done up.
‘What?’
‘I’ve left my purse at home. You haven’t got like a tenner lying around, have you? It’s no big deal, but I’ve got to put some petrol in the car on the way back. I’ll give it back to you tomorrow or something.’
He immediately reaches for his wallet and pulls out a twenty.
‘Don’t worry about it,’ he says. And then, just as I’m leaving, and in a lower voice: ‘There’s always more where that came from.’
As I leave, I wonder if that was better than stealing from the tea and coffee fund in the kitchen, or worse.