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together.
    ‘What if it isn’t people who make curses?’ I say.
    ‘Ha,’ says Wolf. ‘You think curses are made by gods.’
    ‘No, of course not. It’s just a hypothetical question. Can something be created in language independently of the people who use the language? Can language become a self-replicating system or …’ I’m drunk, I suddenly realise, so I shut up. But I do wonder for a moment about this idea, that something could emerge within language – an accident, or mistake, perhaps – and the users of that language would then have to deal with the consequences of this new word being part of their system of signification. I vaguely remember some radio documentary about the Holy Grail suggesting that the whole thing was just a mistake: a wrongly used word in an old French text.
    We sit in silence for a while, and a train goes past outside. Then I start to clear the plates away while Wolfgang finishes his coffee.
    ‘So, anyway,’ I say to him, ‘you haven’t said whether or not you do.’ ‘Whether I do what?’
    ‘Whether you actually believe in curses, or cursed objects.’
    ‘It’s not whether something is cursed that’s important,’ he says. ‘You have to find out why it is cursed, and what the curse is. Let me wash up.’
    ‘OK.’
    Wolf gets up, walks over to the sink and squirts about half the bottle of washing-up liquid over the plates. Then he runs the hot tap, swears a bit because the water never gets as hot as he likes, and eventually boils the kettle and tips its contents all over the dishes. I’m thinking about whether or not to show him The End of Mr. Y . In the end I decide that I won’t. Before he leaves he gives me a look, as if his eyes are made of electricity, and he says: ‘You do have something, don’t you? Something you think is cursed.’
    ‘I don’t know,’ I say back. ‘Probably not. I’m probably just feeling a bit weird after today, with the university collapsing, and after all this cold and too much of your bloody slivovitz, and …’
    ‘Show me any time you like,’ he says. ‘My life can’t get any worse. Don’t worry about protecting me.’ ‘Thanks,’ I say. But … Shit. What’s happened to me? The last thing I’d thought of was protecting Wolf. I just wanted to keep the book to myself and, if I’m honest, stop him stealing it. As I go to sleep, with a dry mouth, and The End of Mr. Y under my other, empty pillow, I wonder if curses exist after all.

    FOUR

    S OMETIMES I WAKE UP WITH such an immense sense of disappointment that I can hardly breathe. Usually nothing has obviously triggered it and I put it down to some combination of an unhappy childhood and bad dreams (those two things go very well together). And most times I can shake it off pretty quickly. After all, there’s not much for me to be disappointed about. So I never got any of the publishing jobs I went for after university. Who cares? That was ten years ago and I’m happy with my magazine column, anyway. And I don’t really care that my mother ran away with a bunch of freaks and my father lives in a hostel up north and my sister doesn’t even send me Christmas cards any more. I don’t care that my ex-housemates all got married and left me on my own. I like being on my own – that wasn’t the problem – I just couldn’t afford to do it in the big house in Hackney that seemed to sprout empty rooms like baby universes. Coming here has meant that I have been able to just get on with being on my own and reading my books, so it’s hardly as if I have anything to be sad or disappointed about.
    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