Our Tragic Universe

by Scarlett Thomas

  'No ... I must have lost my keys.' She started brainstorming. 'We, er, me and you went out last night and I lost my keys and had to stay at yours. I was drunk, and I didn't worry about bothering Bob because he was in Germany and I thought I'd go out and look for my keys today, and in fact that's what I was doing when he sent the messages, but I'd left my phone at yours and...'

  'But you're driving your car. Do you have separate house keys? I thought they were all on the same keyring.'

  Libby looked down. 'Maybe I found the keys ... Holy shit. Oh, Christ. Oh, Meg, what am I going to do? Why would I have driven the car to your house anyway? It's only a five-minute walk. I'm not sure I can fit this together.' She frowned. 'Come on. You're the writer; you know how to plot things.'

  I half-laughed. 'Yeah, right. You read. I'm sure you can plot things too.'

  'Yeah, but you do it for a living. And teach it.'

  'Yeah, but...'

  'What's the formula here?'

  Formula, like the stuff you feed to babies. This was my speciality; she was right. After winning a short story competition in 1997 I'd been offered a contract to write a groundbreaking, literary, serious debut novel: the kind of thing that would win more prizes and be displayed in the windows of bookshops. But I'd actually filled most of the last eleven years writing genre fiction, because it was easy money and I always needed to pay rent and bills and buy food. I'd been given a £1,000 advance for my literary novel, and instead of using it to clear my debts I'd bought a laptop, a nice pen and some notebooks. Just as I'd begun to write the plan for it, Claudia from Orb Books rang and offered me two grand if I could knock out a thriller for teenagers in six weeks. The official author of this book, Zeb Ross, needed to publish four novels a year but didn't in fact exist, and Claudia was recruiting new ghostwriters. It was a no-brainer: double my money and then write the real novel. But I was only a couple of chapters into the real novel when I realised I needed to write another Zeb Ross book, and then another one. A couple of years later I branched out and wrote four SF books in a series under my own name, all set in a place called Newtopia. I kept meaning to finish my 'proper' novel but it seemed as if this would never happen, even if I stuck around until the end of time. If Kelsey Newman was right and all possible humans were resurrected by the Omega Point at the end of the universe, then Zeb Ross would have to be one of them and then he could write his own books. But I'd probably still have rent to pay.

  I sighed. 'The thing is, when you plot a book you can go back and change things that don't work and make everything add up neatly. You can delete paragraphs, pages, whole manuscripts. I can't go back in time and put you on a bus to Mark's, which would probably be the best thing.'

  'How would that work?'

  I shrugged. 'I don't know. Then you could have walked round to mine and lost your keys and your phone like you said.'

  'But why would I have a weekend bag with me?'

  'Yeah. I don't know.'

  'There must be a way. Let's go back to basics. How do you tell a really good story? I mean, in a nutshell.'

  I looked at my watch. Christopher would be wondering where I was.

  'Isn't Bob expecting you?' I said.

  'I need to get this right, or there'll be no Bob any more.'

  'OK. Just keep it simple. Base the story on cause and effect. Have three acts.'

  'Three acts?'

  'A beginning, a middle and an end. A problem, a climax and a solution. You link them. Put someone on the wrong ship. Then make it sink. Then rescue them. Not literally, obviously. You have to have a problem and make it get worse and then solve it. Unless it's a tragedy.'

  'What if this is a tragedy?'

  'Lib...'

  'All right. So I was out with you and I lost my keys. That's bad. Then to make it worse I got gang-raped while I was looking for them, and now I've lost my memory and the kidnappers took you away because you were a witness, and only Bess knows where you are, and she's trying to tell Christopher, but...'

  'Too complicated. You need something simpler. You only need to explain the car. The story here is that we went out and you lost your keys, which was a bummer. Then maybe because you lost your keys you lost your car too, which is obviously a bigger bummer. Maybe someone found your keys and stole your car. Who knows? All you know is you lost your keys. The only glitch is you still have your car.'

  Yadda, yadda. I seemed to have become a plot-o-matic machine programmed to churn out this kind of thing. But when I was dispensing advice like this to the more junior Orb Books ghostwriters I always said they should believe in their project and not just follow a set of rules. Then again, if they got lost in the wilderness of originality I gently guided them back to the happy path of formula again.

  'OK. So how do me and Bob live happily ever after?'

  I thought about it for a second.

  'Well, obviously you'll have to push your car in the river,' I said, and laughed.

  Libby sat there for about ten seconds, her hands becoming paler and paler as she gripped the steering wheel. Then she got out of the car and looked around. The North Embankment still seemed deserted. There were no kids trying to steal boats, no tourists, no other dog-walkers. No men looking for me. Libby made a noise a little like the one B had made before.

  'You're right,' she said. 'It's the only thing to do.'

  'Lib,' I said. 'I was joking.'

  She got back into her car, did a haphazard three-point turn until it was facing the river and, finally, drove it up on the Embankment. For a moment it looked as if she was going to drive her car into the river. I stood there, not knowing if she was messing around, not knowing whether to laugh or try to stop her. Then she got out and walked around to the back of the car. Libby was small but as her biceps tightened I realised how strong her arms were. The car moved; she must have left the handbrake off. She pushed it again, and then the front wheels were over the edge of the Embankment.

  'Lib,' I said again.

  'I must be mad. What am I doing?' she said.

  'Nothing,' I said. 'Come on, don't do this. It's going to be very hard to explain.'

  Then she pushed her car into the river and threw the keys in after it.

  'I'll say kids must have done it,' she said, over the splashing, sucking sound. 'They must have stolen my keys. Even if it does sound crazy, no one will think I was desperate enough to push my own car in the river, will they? Nothing would motivate me to do something as stupid as that. Holy shit. Thank you, Meg. That was a brilliant idea. I'll call you tomorrow if I'm still alive.'

  She looked at her watch and then walked away down the Embankment towards Lemon Cottage, her red shawl moving like a flag in the wind. I remembered a Zen story about a flag in the wind. Does the wind move, or does the flag move? Two monks are arguing about this when a wise man turns up and says, 'The wind is not moving, the flag is not moving. Mind is moving.' I walked on slowly, with B re-sniffing benches as if nothing had happened. Libby didn't look behind her, and I saw her get smaller and smaller until she reached the corner and went off towards Bayard's Cove. Of course, as any scientist would tell you, she didn't really get smaller and smaller; she simply got further away.

  The wind breathed heavily down the river, and I half-looked at the little ripples and wakes in the blackish, greenish water as I tried to hurry B home. There was no sign of Libby's car. I was watching the river, not the benches, so when someone said 'Hello,' I jumped. It was a man, half hidden in the gloom. B was already sniffing his ancient walking boots, and he was stroking her between her ears. He was wearing jeans and a duffel coat, and his messy black and grey hair was falling over his face. Had he seen what had happened? He must have done. Did he hear me suggest the whole thing? He looked up. I already knew it was Rowan. So he had come. Had he been coming every Sunday for all this time?

  'Hi,' I said. 'You're...'

  'Hello,' he said. 'Chilly, isn't it?'

  'Freezing.'

  'You OK?'

  'Yeah. I think so. How are y
ou?'

  'Cold. Depressed. Needed to get some fresh air. I've been at the Centre all day working on my Titanic chapter. Can you believe I'm still at it? I should be grateful I'm still alive, I suppose. Everyone said retiring would kill me.'

  Rowan and his partner Lise had relocated to Dartmouth just over a year before to help look after Lise's mother. They lived in a renovated old boathouse near the castle, with spectacular views of the mouth of the harbour. Everything inside it was tasteful and minimal: nothing was old or shabby, although it must have been once. Rowan had not yet retired when I went there for a dinner party. Lise wore too much make-up and spoke to Rowan as if he was a child. She told stories about him getting lost for three hours in a shopping mall, wearing jeans to her company's black-tie Christmas party and breaking the new dishwasher just by touching it. I'd pictured him alone in an airy office at Greenwich University, with an open window and freshly cut grass outside, surrounded by books and drinking a cup of good coffee, secretly dreading these dinner parties. I'd wondered then why he was retiring at all.

  'Most people retire and then take up gardening or DIY, don't they?' I said. 'They don't go and get another job as director of a maritime centre. I don't think you really are retired, by most normal definitions of the word.'

  He sighed. 'Pottering about with model ships all day. Wind machines. Collections of rocks and barnacles. Interactive tide tables. It's not rocket science. Still, I've had time to take up yoga.'

  So he wasn't going to mention Libby and her car. We were going to have a 'normal' conversation, slightly gloomy, slightly flirty, like the ones we used to have when he came to Torquay library every day before the Maritime Centre opened—to do paperwork—and we ended up going for lunch and coffee all the time. Would we kiss at the end of this conversation, as we had done at the end of the last one?

  'How's your writing going?' he asked me.

  'OK,' I said. 'Well, sort of. I'm back on chapter one of my "proper" novel yet again, re-writing. The other day I worked out that I've deleted something like a million words of this novel in the last ten years. You'd think that would make it really good, but it hasn't. It's a bit of a mess now, but never mind.'

  'Are you still using the ghost ships?'

  'No. Well, sort of. They might come back.'

  'And how was Greece?'

  I frowned. 'I didn't go in the end. Had too much other work on here.'

  'Oh. That's a shame.'

  'Anyway, how about you? How's the chapter?'

  'Oh, I keep having to read new things. I just read a hundred-page poem by Hans Magnus Enzensberger about the sinking of the Titanic.'

  'Was it good?'

  'I'll lend it to you. It's about some other stuff as well as the sinking of the Titanic. There's a bit where members of a religious cult are waiting on a hill for the end of the world, which is supposed to take place that afternoon. When the world doesn't end, they all have to go out and buy new toothbrushes.'

  I laughed, although I was remembering that Rowan had already lent me a book that I hadn't read, even though I'd meant to. It was an Agatha Christie novel called The Sittaford Mystery, and I had no idea why Rowan had given it to me. He'd worked on a short local project on Agatha Christie's house on the River Dart, which was how he'd come to read the books. But I couldn't imagine he'd found anything that would interest me. I spent enough time messing around with genre fiction anyway.

  'Sounds great,' I said. 'Sounds a bit like a book I'm reviewing, except the book I'm reviewing isn't great.'

  'What is it?'

  'It's all about how the universe will never end, and how we all get to live for ever. I hate it, and I don't know why.'

  'I don't want to live for ever.'

  'No. Me neither.'

  'What's the point of living for ever? Living now is bad enough.'

  'That's what I thought.'

  'Are you OK?' he asked me again.

  'Yeah. Did you just say you're doing yoga, or did I imagine it?'

  'No, you didn't imagine it. I am doing yoga.'

  'Why?'

  He shrugged. 'Bad knees. Getting old. We're not long back from a yoga holiday in India, actually. Missed Christmas, which was good. Saw some kingfishers too.' Rowan stroked B's head again while I looked away. I knew that his casual 'we' meant he and Lise. Long-term couples often did that, I'd noticed: referred to themselves as 'we' all the time. Whenever I phoned my mother and asked, 'How are you?' she replied, 'We're fine.' I never talked about Christopher and me in that way. Maybe it would come in time. Not that I'd know how to use it, since we hardly ever did anything together. And we were never fine. We were even less fine since I'd kissed Rowan, because I knew that if I could kiss someone else, then I could never kiss Christopher again. In the last five months he hadn't really noticed this.

  'How's Lise?' I asked. 'Is she still working on her book?'

  I ran retreats twice a year for Orb Books ghostwriters in a clapped-out hotel in Torquay. These were supposed to teach already talented writers the finer points of plotting and structure and the Orb Books 'method'. Orb Books didn't mind if I charged a few local people to come too, so whenever a retreat was scheduled I put up posters in the Harbour Bookshop and usually got three or four takers. Lise had come to one the previous year. She had been planning to use some of her retirement to write a fictionalised account of her parents' experiences in the war, but as far as I knew she hadn't retired yet. She still took the train to London twice a week and worked at home the rest of the time.

  Rowan shrugged. 'I don't think so.'

  'Oh.'

  He reached down and played with one of B's ears, making it stand up and then flop down again.

  'Your dog's quite lovely,' he said.

  'I know. Thanks. She's being quite patient while you abuse her ears.'

  'I think she likes it.'

  'Yeah, she probably does.'

  'I meant to say ... I've been looking at some of the cultural premonitions connected with the Titanic recently,' Rowan said. 'And I thought of you.' He looked down at the ground, then at one of B's ears and then up at me. 'I mean, I thought you'd be interested. I wondered if I should get in touch with you.'

  'Get in touch with me any time.' I blushed. 'Just email me. What's a cultural premonition?'

  'Writing about the disaster before it happened, or painting pictures of it. Lots of people did.'

  'Seriously?'

  'Yeah.'

  'So it's paranormal in some way?' I could feel myself wrinkling my nose.

  'No. Cultural. The premonitions are cultural rather than supernatural.'

  'How?'

  'It's like ... Have you heard of the Cottingley Fairies?'

  I shook my head. 'No.'

  'Remind me to tell you about them sometime. It's quite an interesting case-study in how people decide to believe in things, and what people want to believe. I'd guess that there are usually cultural explanations for supernatural things if you look hard enough.'

  'They weren't on the Titanic as well?'

  'Huh?'

  'These fairies.'

  'No. They were in my old home town.'

  'I thought your old home town was in the Pacific.'

  'After I left San Cristobal I was in Cottingley before I went to Cambridge. My mother came from Cottingley, although she was dead by the time I left San Cristobal. Mind you, the fairies were long before that.' He frowned. 'I'll tell you the whole story sometime, but it's too complicated now. I thought you might have heard of them. Silly, really, bringing them up.'

  'Oh. Well, I know a good joke about sheep that's all about how people decide to believe things, if that's of any interest.'

  He smiled in the gloom. 'What is it?'

  'OK. A biologist, a mathematician, a physicist and a philosopher are on a train in Scotland. They see a black sheep from a train window. The biologist says, "All sheep in Scotland are black!" The physicist says, "You can't generalise like that. But we know at least one sheep in Scotland is black." The mathema
tician strokes his beard and says, "All we can really say for sure is that one side of one sheep in Scotland is black." The philosopher looks out of the window, thinks about it all for a while and says, "I don't believe in sheep." My father used to tell it as if it said something about the perils of philosophy, although I wondered whether it said something else about the perils of science. My father is a physicist.'

  Rowan laughed. 'I like that. I like sheep. I believe in them.'

  'Did you know they can remember human faces for ten years, and recognise photographs of individual people?'

  'So when they fix you with that stupid look they're actually memorising you?'

  'I guess so.'

  'Like those machines at Heathrow. But why?'

  'Who knows? Maybe sheep will take over the world. Maybe that's their plan. Another plot for Zeb Ross, perhaps. I'll have to tell Orb Books.'

  I wasn't really supposed to talk to anyone about Zeb Ross, and everyone who worked on the series signed NDAs. But in reality you can't pretend not to be writing a novel when you are, and pretty much everyone knew that those kinds of books were ghosted—except, perhaps, for their readers, particularly the ones who sent Zeb fan mail asking what colour his eyes were, and whether he was married.

  B was now trying to get on Rowan's lap. I pulled her off, wondering what I smelled of as I leaned over him. And I didn't mean to look into his eyes, but when I did I saw that they were shining with tears. 'Hay fever' is what people usually say when they are crying; it's what I say, but not in February. I imagined Christopher walking along the river and finding me looking into Rowan's eyes, and then seeing my eyes suddenly full of tears, because when someone I care about cries I always want to cry too. He never knew about the lunches, or the kiss. Suddenly, joking about sheep didn't seem quite right, even though Rowan was still smiling. I didn't say anything for a moment.