Observatory Mansions: A Novel

by Edward Carey

  Lined up by the foot of my bed were three wooden boxes. The boxes were the same size. They were made by a carpenter to my specifications. Eight inches by thirteen inches, thirty inches in height. In all three boxes there were two vertical slats of half an inch thickness which divided the interiors perfectly in three. Two of these boxes had already been filled. They contained my gloves. My old, obsolete gloves. The two full boxes each held a total of six hundred pairs of gloves, two hundred in each compartment. I was still using the third compartment of the third box. The third box would be full in twenty-three pairs time. Between each pair of gloves I laid a piece of tracing paper and wrote on a small piece of watercolour paper, two inches by two inches, the date that I began wearing the gloves and the date that I finished. This was my glove diary. From the dates written on each piece of watercolour paper it was possible, by referring to the relevant school exercise books (numerically stacked in rows underneath the bed), to discover what had caused me to cease wearing them. I never allowed myself to wear gloves that had become remotely dirty, my hands were always to be an immaculate white.

  The new resident would be encouraged to leave the next day. Everything would be as it was.

  No one was going to touch my glove diary.

  Looking at Mother.

  Mother’s bedroom had always been a bedroom, it was a bedroom when Observatory Mansions was a country residence, it displayed old-fashioned crimson flock wallpaper which had been decorating the walls undisturbed for over sixty years. My mother’s bedroom contained a mother, a bed, books, paintings, photographs, hats, shoes, mirrors, knickers, bras, magazines, gramophone discs, empty bottles, umbrellas, pressed flowers, teacups, sherry glasses, a man’s wristwatch, a walking stick, an abacus and many other things besides. The curtains in Mother’s bedroom were closed; they were always closed, day or night. On a small teak table stood a porcelain night lamp designed for infant children. The night lamp, which was never turned off, was in the shape of a mushroom and had a hollowed-out centre where a small porcelain rabbit resided. The porcelain rabbit held up a porcelain lantern which contained a tiny twenty-watt bulb. This lamp was mine, it was given to me when I was a child.

  The objects about Mother’s room were her aids to memory. Each object opened up for her a passage of time. When Mother could not remember her happier days naturally, she opened her eyes and looked around at the objects in her room. Her looks stroked them, she closed her eyes and retaining the image of a particular object took it with her, back into her past. Mother never opened her eyes to a person, only to objects, those certain objects collected in her room. I had not seen my mother’s eyes, which were blue in colour, for some years.

  So when, the next morning, I went in to tell Mother of the new resident and to ask her for advice, she did not even acknowledge me. I would often go into her bedroom to speak to her, to tell her all my fears and, though Mother never spoke back, I felt comforted, that she was – by simply being there, quietly breathing, never interrupting – calming me. But that morning, with such news, I hoped she might say something to me, I hoped she might at least move to indicate her alarm, I hoped she might somehow show that I had her sympathy. But she didn’t take hold of a gloved hand and squeeze it tightly, she kept her eyes closed, kept her long grey hair still on the pillow, kept her breathing regular.

  Motion.

  The new resident didn’t leave her flat all morning. I listened out for her footsteps for an hour, and even twice went up to the third floor, listening at her door to make sure she was still in.

  But she couldn’t keep me indoors all day, waiting for her to make a move. I wouldn’t be trapped like that, I would leave Observatory Mansions, I could follow her later. That day of the week I customarily took off work, and on all my days off I went to the park.

  I walked out, I stood by the entrance of Observatory Mansions, there was once a gate here, now there was just a gap in the brick wall. I stood on the perimeter of our traffic-island home and watched the cars rush around. I thought: everything goes around but nothing comes in. I waited for a break in the traffic. This is a procedure that must always be enacted when leaving a traffic-island home. Sometimes it takes minutes before a break occurs, sometimes only seconds, and when it comes you must run for your life. Yes, traffic must never be underestimated when leaving a traffic-island home, the little girl from flat seventeen learnt that. Too late. She was in too much of a hurry, she went over one car and under the next.

  Finding the required pause, I dashed across to the street on the other side. Into an any people place, into the stupidity of the city. A girl chewed gum – I could smell her coming. An adolescent with a skin that betrayed his diet listened and hummed to thumping rhythms as he moved, his gait attempting to acknowledge the music. Young, beautiful horses of girls clopped their high-heel hooves. Men in suits walked alone, contriving to be serious. An old woman paused every six or seven steps for breath. Her mouth worked quicker than her legs – she sucked a boiled sweet. Children ran; they’re the noisiest. They barged into me. I did not complain. I would have liked to complain, but I lacked the guts. I found nothing more terrifying than youth.

  Weighing the world.

  I reached the entrance of the park. The park was not an exceptional park. It was a very ordinary, a very uninteresting park, called Tearsham Park Gardens. I stopped outside. There stood the man who worked in front of Tearsham Park Gardens. There stood a man sacred to his duty, providing the public with his everyday service. Bank holidays inclusive. He was never late, he put in long hours, he was loyal to his work. What was his work, what were the tools of his trade? There was only one implement necessary to earn him his meagre living. He stood behind it with great pride. He was, I believe, the only man in the city who worked in this way. He was an original. His object was a set of bathroom scales. For two coins you could afford yourself the pleasure of obtaining your weight in stones and pounds. I stepped on the scales, I stepped off the scales. I gave the man two coins, as I did once a week, always on this day. The man, I never knew his name, began his employment many years ago. It was an extraordinary enterprise to give up days for, it was extraordinary to put your bathroom scales at people’s disposal. At first he had few customers. This is perhaps not surprising. Bathroom scales are not uncommon objects. But he stuck to his post. His presence was noted. He was viewed with some fondness as an amiable imbecile, his list of clients grew. They were mainly old women, sometimes young men, never alone, who considered the action of weighing themselves amusing. His clients were never young women. I had never heard him speak, the procedure did not require words, I appreciated that.

  The man noted down the weight of each customer in a little notebook. I do not know why. I never asked him why. He recorded the weights of the people of the world, it was his business. Perhaps he had noticed trends in corpulence or slenderness. Perhaps he worked out the average weight of a certain height. Or of age. Or of sex. Perhaps he just wanted to be near people. (Once he misplaced his weight notebook. Confused for two weeks, he left his post vacant. Eventually though, he bought himself a new notebook and returned to work. Lot 644.)

  My weight was recorded, as it was every week in the same way. It was our routine. He noticed me as I came out of Observatory Mansions. I smiled at him, he smiled back from behind his scales. Then I rushed across the road and walked over to him.

  I never asked him about his scales, about his notebook. He never asked me about my gloves. We communicated through smiles. Once a week.

  Since it was my day off, I went and sat in the park.

  Love and hate in Tearsham Park Gardens.

  1. LOVE. I loved Tearsham Park Gardens for its beautiful white, sad trees that had been stripped of their bark by pollution and autographed by young vandals with their sweaty-handled magnifying glasses. Someone loves someone, someone loves a football team, someone burns letters of abuse, another scratches with a knife.

  I loved this park for the couple that passed me that day: an old man with his gr
andson riding a tricycle in front of him. The old man walked slowly, slowly (there’s time, there’s always time these days) from one end of the park to the other. The grandson was supposed to keep to his grandfather’s pace, but he was always at least two metres ahead. The boy stopped to observe a pair of lovers kissing on a bench. The grandfather stopped, he watched too. Eventually they set off again, but not at the same time and not at the same pace.

  There was a concrete square in the middle of the park. Its paving stones were uneven. In its centre was a rusty fountain. I do not recall the fountain ever working. It had always been dry, save when the rain came, when the rain came it flooded. I called it a fountain out of optimism perhaps, but also out of regret. By the unworking, rusting fountain, which lacked water and appreciation, sat a beautiful girl. Whenever I saw a beautiful girl I thought of my own best interests.

  Late teens. Ripped trousers. Jeans. Chequered coat. Dyed ginger hair. Brown freckles. Moon face. Beautiful. She worked chalks on to the paving stones, she worked many colours into the uniform grey. She smudged them, blended them. The subject that day was an angel. The angel was by some Renaissance master, she copied it down from a postcard, the likeness was not good. A handkerchief with stones in each of its four corners had a message above it. THANK YOU. She was thanked with coins. Generously. Not because of her angel, but because she had large brown eyes. We had known each other for two years.

  I had never spoken to her.

  People, all people, old, young, ill and well, spoke to her. I would have liked to have collected her chalk drawings but they faded quickly. People walked across them as soon as she had gone. The rain diluted them and then scrubbed their faces blank. Once, in a fit of stupidity, after she had left, I rubbed my gloved hands across her art. My gloves showed dirty, ugly, smudged colours. I had to replace them. I was ill for days. She looked at me once, smiled at me. I did not smile back. I was frightened. She stopped smiling and went back to her colours.

  Whenever I saw a beautiful girl I thought of my own best interests, for a short term.

  It was late spring; with the blossom in the park there was a hint of hope.

  2. HATE. This park was detestable because of its memory. It was sad, like so many people, because of its memory. It enjoyed, like so many people, passing its sadness on to others. This sadness, though not a dangerous disease, was infectious. It had a habit of getting through the pores of a person’s skin. People sat in the park perfectly happy but before they stood up again sad thoughts would have stroked their lungs. The park remembered what it once was. It remembered other trees. It remembered grass, acres of grassland. It remembered the feet of cows and of calves. It remembered. Penned in by wrought-iron fencing was all that remained of a once wide and plentiful park. The parkland was churned up, houses were planted on its soil. The cows were moved on, people were herded in. And here I must admit that I walked on the streets surrounding this park when I was a child. I was there, the streets were not. It was all my home once.

  The Ormes had lived on this land for centuries. They lived in a house not far from this park: when I was young the building called Observatory Mansions had a different name, it was called Tearsham Park. Tearsham Park was a large eighteenth-century building. There had been an older Tearsham Park, a sixteenth-century manor house, but this had been destroyed by fire. Many objects had been rescued from inside it, but the building itself had been lost for ever – its beams and oak floorboards had ignited so easily. The new Tearsham Park, built on exactly the same spot as its predecessor, was a large grey cube with a central courtyard and, unusually, an observatory built into a domed roof directly above the entrance hall.

  When Tearsham Park became Observatory Mansions, the centre of what was once the courtyard became a lift shaft. In the remaining space of the courtyard, square passageways were constructed on each floor with stairs connecting them, all the way to the top. The original grand mahogany staircase and the back servants’ stairwell were both pulled out. Where windows had once looked into the courtyard were now doors around landings. The building was divided into twenty-four flats. The observatory, in shape though not in purpose, remained. I recalled large spacious rooms: the library, morning room, drawing room, smoking room, dining room. They had all been divided up, segmented by plasterboard. But I had remembered how it all was once. The park remembered. Father remembered too.

  It was in this park, the reduced version, that my father had a stroke. People brought him home. His skin was lime-coloured. Ever after, one of his eyes drooped, the lower lid showed its pink inside. On that day Father was sitting on a bench observing the small part of park that he was once master of. He saw people, heard noise. He had a stroke and tipped off the side of his bench on to the ground.

  Dogs and the Dog Woman.

  In the park worked the Dog Woman. The Dog Woman smelt of dogs, a smell like ammonia with a little vomit and urine and shit added in. The Dog Woman wore a dog’s collar around her neck and clothes (old, greasy) and was clothed with the hairs of dogs. She had many friends, all canine. Her clothes were ripped, as was the skin of her hands and thighs and ankles and breasts, by the clawing of dogs: memories of other times. Some were fresh, still blood-coloured, others were old, almost skin-coloured. Happy times, heavenly moments.

  In the city there are many dogs. They have worked themselves into a social order, into different castes: those with collars and those without. The Dog Woman, greasy, matted hair like an old mongrel, breath smelling of a dustbin diet, loved all dogs without collars. Pissy knickers. Dribbly mouthed. Dog lover. She fed the dogs in Tearsham Park Gardens. In return they whined at her, scratched her, licked her, bit her. She fed them with disowned morsels; she, in an understanding with them, shared the same diet. She barked too, and growled, and rolled on the ground and sniffed under dogs’ tails.

  She was the Dog Woman of Tearsham Park, loyal to her brood, huge and breasty like some great whelping bitch. That day I sat in the park, she wound her large-hipped, hairy way across the nearly beautiful angel of the beautiful girl that I had known for two years. The girl said nothing, immediately repaired her angel’s smudged and swollen-looking face, made her thin again.

  The Dog Woman had another name – she was also called Twenty. Two names never to be written in a passport. She was also called Twenty because she lived in flat twenty of Observatory Mansions. A convenient kennel, so close to the park. It might be considered that Twenty would surely have preferred to sleep outside with the dogs. But she chose not to, since she didn’t want to wake with one of her dog-friends pulling her insides out, since she needed somewhere to lick her wounds clean, to hide her bones.

  We called her Twenty because she had declined to give her real name. She was, before the new resident of flat eighteen arrived, the Mansions’ most recent resident. She arrived during a storm, a rare day when all the dust in the city was peeled off the walls, off the streets, off the few trees, off the people too, and rushed, in chalky, ashy colours into the darkness of drains.

  During that particular storm Twenty, the Dog Woman, climbed through an open window of one of the unoccupied flats on the ground floor of Observatory Mansions with her ailing dog, a pathetically thin Great Dane, its ribcage piercing through its scarred pelt. In the night, after many hours of sobs and groans, with one final spasm of its back legs, it died. It was a great, black, ugly corpse. It must have been a titan of a dog. A dog, Twenty’s companion, equal to her in size. The pair of them had got caught up in a fight, a dog fight, and running away from that fight the Great Dane had bounded into the roundabout traffic. And was hit. It was thrown from the corner of a car into the brick wall of Observatory Mansions, its hips smashed. And Twenty, more careful of the traffic, rushed over to stroke it during its final breaths and to carry it to our home.

  Twenty buried her husband outside Observatory Mansions the next morning, under the hard, dusty earth where flower beds used to be. She pushed down her knickers and pissed over the grave. Twenty sniffed around the flats and chos
e flat twenty. Flat twenty, top floor, outside the lift that didn’t work, outside the lift that once worked and once worked so swiftly that it killed Mr Alec Magnitt and shattered Mr Alec Magnitt’s calculator (lot 737). But Twenty knew none of this. Twenty used the stairs. Out of choice even though there was no other.

  Twenty, Dog Woman, did not pay rent.

  She had no reason to welcome a new resident either. Since the residents of Observatory Mansions were of the human kind, she detested them all. She loved only … dogs.

  And for us Twenty was the perfect resident. She did not pay rent but that was no concern of ours. She kept herself to herself. Spent her days (and most of her nights) in the park.

  That day in the park, I watched her lie down, belly sagging, on the patchy grass of Tearsham Park Gardens. She yawned, she placed her chin on the ground, wagged her bottom, closed her eyes.

  A child’s toy.

  That day in the park I saw a child. I saw a mother carrying the child, way above the ground, way above child level, somewhere high up – mummy level. I saw the child’s hand gripped around a child’s toy. A lock of love. The object, before unimportant but then, suddenly, most notable, fell to the ground. The child screamed. The mother walked on, told the child to close its mouth, separated child from child’s toy for ever. I saw that object, once smothered with attention, now abandoned and lonely, another casualty of love.

  So I stood up, approached, stopped, stooped, checked the object for unreasonable dirt, for child’s saliva and snot, for white cotton dirtying substances, for gloves’ enemies. Found none. Found the object most collectable. Found the object alone, childless, in need of a collector. And so, always friend of the friendless and quick as a magpie, I swiped it.