Observatory Mansions: A Novel

by Edward Carey

  Where’ve you been, Francis?

  Tearsham Park mainly and then, more recently, Observatory Mansions.

  Where are they?

  You’ve never heard of Observatory Mansions or Tearsham Park? Where’ve you been?

  William had heard of neither place and I was forced to realize, for the first time, that in fact my home, the centre of my existence, was just another human dwelling. Tearsham Park, Observatory Mansions: unexceptional.

  After I had finished my coffee I thanked William repeatedly. He said that it was nothing. He lied. It was indeed something. Something enormous. William agreed that in the future whenever my nails needed cutting he would be willing to oblige.

  I left him to the head of that young famous actor who had been at the time of his death about the same age as I was when William first cut my nails.

  A brief account of the founder of the

  waxworks museum.

  Our Founder, for so we referred to her, had been dead many years. There was a wax dummy of her in the entrance hall. I had not known that it was her, I was informed of it by William, who told me her story. Our Founder was friends with some of the most famous people of her time. She was an artist, a sculptress. Our Founder had a famous friend who was very old and likely soon to die. She decided to preserve the memory of her friend. She made a cast of her face with plaster and filled the cast with beeswax. When the friend died Our Founder had a model of that friend to keep her company. In this manner Our Founder slowly began to make wax impressions of all her friends, and in due course her models became famous. To discourage her home, populated enough as it was (though by wax dummies), from being so continuously visited, she began to charge people money to see her strange possessions. To her surprise, she discovered that people were more than willing to pay the sum she asked to see the wax impressions of those famous friends of hers. So it was that Our Founder’s home became an exhibition. Years later Our Founder, an old and wealthy woman, would often be seen walking around the waxworks of her friends. She had outlived them all, but she still kept the memories of their heights, faces, eye colour, hair colour, clothes and shoes clearly with her. She had also chosen the part of her friends’ lives that she wished to remember; some she had sculpted in youth, others in old age. Shortly before she died she had a wax model made of herself, as she was then. This she placed amongst the wax impressions of her friends. She watched her wax self watching her wax friends, the memory of her friends and of her mourning of her friends perfectly preserved in wax. Then she had a heart attack and died. At the age of one hundred and two.

  On human stupidity.

  All of the wax subjects kept in the museum were of famous people throughout the ages. Their histories slowly became known to me through William’s insistence. The wax sculptors had no freedom to choose their own subjects to sculpt. The subjects were decided by the Committee of Wax Museums which sat in the largest of all the wax museums throughout our country to be found in our capital city. The Committee decided who was famous and who was not; who would be sculpted and who would be ignored. They made and broke reputations, sometimes by commissioning sculptures of people no one had heard of, and sometimes by announcing the removal of a waxwork and plunging its subject into public ignominy.

  What I had noticed though, and much to my disgust, was that the visitors to the museum became excited by wax replicas of people they recognized. It was a habit of theirs to have themselves photographed next to these insulted wax dummies. The visitors never understood that these wax dummies had an identity separate from their fleshy counterparts. The photographs taken of those visitors (insignificant humans) resting their filthy hands on the shoulders of some of my best wax acquaintances seemed to me entirely perverse. This preoccupation was a prime example of human stupidity. The visitors were trying to fool themselves that they had actually met these so-called famous people; as if by walking up to a wax duplicate of a so-called famous personality that personality would somehow rub off on them, that they would suddenly become a little famous themselves. They looked at the wax duplicates and made, oh, such profound observations:

  I never realized she was so tall!

  I’m taller than him, who’d have thought it!

  To think I can stand so close to her!

  The visitors were unable to see exactly what the waxworks museum was. They saw a hall of fame and they fooled themselves by taking photographs that, for an instant, they could be so close to fame even, they felt, touch it. No, that is not what the waxworks were about at all. The waxworks were an immensely eloquent dissertation on the wonderful ordinariness of mankind. We could forget about fame, what was important was that here we had people too: here we had noses, ears, eyes, etc. It was an exhibition that showed mankind in all its various ages, from babies to old crones, the fact that the subjects chosen happened to be celebrated was entirely irrelevant.

  The whole point of the waxworks was to study in minute detail the human form, bring a magnifying glass, study the differences between human chins. But they did not see this at all. In the exhibition it was possible to do a thing that was impossible to do anywhere else: get close to the human form, close enough even to touch. With how many people in this world do individuals feel free enough to stop them mid-sentence and say – Excuse me, I’d like to examine your lips now, could you keep very still? I hope you don’t mind. It shouldn’t take more than twenty minutes. Just keep still and let me really stare at them. With how many people is that possible? Answer: very few. Even the most uninhibited person becomes coy when intensely stared at. Only in the waxworks, in that people museum, could the human being be really, truly examined.

  The many hands of Francis Orme.

  I was so impressed by William’s kindness on the day of the first nail cutting that I visited him on various occasions when no nail cutting actually took place. William hinted about that famous young (dead) actor needing some hands to go with his head. The actor, William hinted, was the same age as Francis. Really? How fascinating? I think I’d better go now.

  I did not visit William again until my nails had grown to a glove-perilous length. He refused to cut them unless I allowed him to make a mould of my hands. Was it a deal? No, never. I think I’d better go now.

  It wasn’t until I had almost begun to rip my gloves that I reluctantly returned to William and let him cast my hands so that he would cut my nails.

  I did not see the wax casts of my hands when they were first ready. I insisted on that as one of the conditions of their being cast. They would be hidden from me at all times. This of course was possible when the hands were kept in William’s cubicle but completely impossible when the dummy of the young actor arrived in the exhibition itself.

  When I first saw those hands I was disgusted, but as time progressed I became less disturbed by them. I even, much later and shortly before my employment at the waxworks was terminated, touched them.

  It was so extraordinary, watching all those other people that I had never met walking into the wax museum where my naked hands were on display. Of course, most people did not notice my hands, or if they did they gave them only the briefest of glances, but that did not matter, the fact that they were there, the fact that people did not point at them and double up with laughter, the fact that they were considered acceptable, even normal, made me feel strangely confident. But by then there were many impressions of my hands about the exhibition. My hands were not only used for male dummies, they also were to be found peeping through dress sleeves. My hands, said William, were virtually unmarked (there were some residues of Chiron’s days to be found on them), they were proportionally slightly small to the rest of my body, as if by being out of sunlight so long, like a plant, they had ceased to grow, they were delicate, he said, they were perfect for women. For the male hands he often added hair, real human hair, for the women he added long nails. Actually William did not place either hairs or nails or eyes on to his models, these were separate jobs and were performed by different departments. I ca
me, in time, to know all the other departments. The hair department was performed by a pair of twins, Laura and Linda; the nail department by a man named Julian; the eye department, by far the most fascinating of the three, by a woman named Ottila. Ottila had worked as a doll’s-eye manufacturer before she had been employed at the waxworks and her eyes were so lifelike that I was surprised when they didn’t blink.

  On William and friendship.

  William was my only true friend, and I grew ever closer to him during my employment at the waxworks. I was often to be found on the upper floor drinking his thick black coffee. I called him a friend though I have never actually publicly referred to him as such. Nor did I learn anything about how his life was spent beyond the waxworks. I never found out, for example, whether he was married or single, whether he had children, or even if he was happy in his work. Of course, I realized that he had used the excuse of cutting my nails so that he might cast my hands, that he had not cut them from any altruistic tendency, but that did not matter to me any more. In fact, it was because of this need for each other that I considered William a true friend. I could trust him, he had told me no lies about how much he liked me, he had not flattered and cajoled me into having my hands cast. And besides, he would never demand any personal favours from me, he would never cry on my shoulder. It was the business-like nature of our friendship that I cherished, I felt useful in his company. And even if William did often talk down to me, and even if he did chuckle at some of my observations, and even if he did enjoy telling stories about me to the other wax sculptors, he was, nevertheless, my only true friend. He was the man who cut my nails.

  An example of how even the truest friend can

  prove irritating.

  When I met William that day, to escape from the pressure of memories in Observatory Mansions, he simply pulled up the familiar chair for me and took out his scissors. I placed on the blindfold, he took off my gloves and cut my nails. When the nails had been cut, when my gloves were safely returned and I had taken off my blindfold, we sat, as was our custom, drinking William’s thick, black coffee.

  I was somewhat overcome by a need to communicate and told my only true friend of the terrible experience I was undergoing in Observatory Mansions. I told him all there was to tell about Miss Anna Tap, calling her at times Miss Tap or the new resident or the orphan.

  What does she look like?

  Pasty, round face, glasses. Pointy nose.

  As I described her William began to sculpt her face in miniature out of clay, fiercely trying to capture her likeness. We became excited trying to pin her features down, trying to make my words guide William’s hands around that upturned nose, that round chin, that high forehead. I thought I had remembered her quite well but the head we managed to produce together had few similarities to Anna Tap’s.

  Francis, don’t be angry with me, but there’s something I’d like to ask. You seem to be talking about this girl a lot. Would you like her to be your special friend, Francis?

  What do you mean?

  Would you like to hold her perhaps? To kiss her?

  I think I’d better go now.

  I left William with my thick, black cup of coffee half finished on his worktop.

  Cigarette ends.

  On my way back from William I came across Anna Tap leaving the church. I watched her walk through the graveyard, back towards Observatory Mansions. I followed her, always a few metres behind, and, careful for my gloves, retrieved all the cigarette ends that she dropped as she walked on. By the time I was safely in my bedroom, I had collected no less than four Lucky Strike cigarette ends and I laid them out on my desk and numbered them on their yellow filters. I had collected them to answer William’s ridiculous questions; to find out whether I wanted to be closer to Anna Tap or not. I believed, of course, that I didn’t, that I couldn’t possibly, but I thought I needed to be sure. I considered the cigarette ends. Did I want to be closer to those cigarette ends that had been so close, that had even been kissed and bitten by Anna Tap? No, I considered, I did not.

  I found the cigarette ends unattractive.

  Lots 988 and 989.

  We were by then far into the Time of Memories and had even started on the Time of the Four Objects. I was deeply concerned, as I have suggested, for my fellow occupants of Observatory Mansions, though they in their turn seemed not to be thinking of me at all.

  In an attempt to end that Time of Memories, and longing for the time before Anna Tap arrived, feeling a little left out and disturbed by forming the collection of cigarette ends, I went to work that night.

  Still were the inhabitants of Observatory Mansions, tossed only by their deep three-in-the-morning sleep. But someone was out of his place, leaving his bedroom all alone. This someone, named Francis Orme, tiptoed in the blackness to the outside night and leant the ladder against the window of flat eighteen. I climbed up to flat eighteen and entered its cigarette smelling confines. I tiptoed into the bedroom and found a woman, late twenties to mid-thirties, fast asleep, dreaming of orphanages and museums and the minuscule strands of textile fibres. Beside her bed was a spectacles case and in the spectacles case a pair of spectacles. Round frames. Steel. Containing thick lenses (lot 988).

  Then I ventured up beyond the always-open door of flat twenty and found Twenty there snoring and barking in her sleep. Clasped in one of her paws was the dog collar with the name tag inscribed MAX. By sniffing around her head and hands – not a pleasant thing to do – in the fashion of a dog, I noted to my satisfaction, that Twenty let go of the dog collar to rest her hands on my shoulders and lick my face, whining happily. And when Twenty had licked enough, I took the collar (lot 989).

  Through the eyes of Anna Tap.

  After placing Twenty’s former dog collar neatly within a transparent polythene bag and having catalogued the object, I turned my attention to the pair of spectacles. With one of the cigarette ends in my mouth and the pair of spectacles on my nose, I attempted to discover how it felt to be Anna Tap. I saw a blur. A thick blur. Blurred colours, blurred division between light and darkness. This, I thought, must be something similar to what she saw when she wasn’t wearing her glasses. In this way I imitated Anna Tap, sucking her already smoked cigarettes and looking through her spectacles, for half an hour, just to be sure of my feelings for her. And I concluded that William had somehow been mistaken. I looked through them and smoked on for another ten minutes, just to be sure. Nothing.

  Then I catalogued the spectacles, placed them inside a polythene bag, went upstairs to bed and fell into a happy sleep.

  The next morning I was at work a little earlier than usual, and was out of the Mansions before any of the others had left their beds. I considered what a kind thing I had done for them all, for all that is except Anna Tap. Twenty had been happy as the Dog Woman of Tearsham Park Gardens, now she was reported to be sad, now she had no idea who she was. Claire Higg had been happily watching her television set until the presence of Anna Tap turned it off and reminded her of Alec Magnitt. Peter Bugg, too, had been tolerably content with his life until he had been reminded of his father, of his father’s ruler and of school terms long since broken up. By removing the dog collar I had hoped to take away all evidence of Twenty’s dead dog which had sparked off all her other memories, and so return Twenty to her former dog days. By returning Claire to her television and Bugg to his life filled with sweat and tears but not of worry, I had hoped to break up the Time of Memories in flat sixteen. By stealing Anna Tap’s spectacles I had hoped to show her that she was still unwelcome in Observatory Mansions. If Twenty went back to the park, if Claire went back to her television, if Bugg stopped worrying, then Anna Tap would realize, only too clearly, that she was not needed here. She could sit in her bedroom, blind as a mole, and think about it. Then she could go elsewhere.

  These were my happy thoughts as I stood, some time before the public arrived, on my plinth in the centre of the city. Waiting for a coin to drop.

  Hand Armageddon.

&nb
sp; On my way back from work I did not find Anna Tap coming out of the church, nor did I find her inside. She had been there though, or I presumed she had. Cigarette ends, Lucky Strikes with teeth marks, dotted the route back to Observatory Mansions. I gathered them but soon stopped: impaled on top of one of the spikes of Tearsham Park Gardens’ fencing was a single white glove, my brand. My glove. I picked it up. Yes, mine! A little further on, lying this time on the dirty pavement, was another glove, not its pair. A left hand again. Further still, across the road, a pair of gloves were to be found nailed on to the Observatory Mansions sign. Spacious apartments of quality design:

  OBSERVATORY MANSIONS

  Spacious (Glove) Apartments of Quality (Glove) Design

  My gloves, mine! Pierced in the palms, like Christ had been before me! My gloves. I pulled them down. My gloves ripped. My gloves dirty. On the ground floor a glove had been covered in dirt and was more black than white in colour – had the Porter used it as a duster? Up the stairs of Observatory Mansions, past the Porter’s desk and all the way to the first floor were hands (some, I noted to my horror, had even been trodden on). The gloves on the stairs, looking like unhappy anaemic insects, seemed to be attempting to crawl their way back to their home. My home! Then I saw it: the door of flat six! A new lock had been fitted! The empty fingers of a white glove were peeping out from under the door, but flat six was locked from me. I screamed repeatedly. I sat on the stairs, gloves on hands, different gloves in my lap, trembling. Then with the help of that white, that cotton, I calmed myself enough to realize that the new lock was in fact the same new lock that I had purchased on behalf of Anna Tap and that I had the second key in my pocket. I let myself in. I wish I had not, for the sight before my eyes that cruel evening was not a thing that delicate Francises should ever be subjected to.