Our Tragic Universe

by Scarlett Thomas

  When I got back from the shops that day the argument hadn't finished.

  'Oh, I see,' Christopher had said. 'While I've been sitting here worried sick you've been out shopping.'

  There had been a breathtakingly icy wind coming off the sea and by the time I got back I couldn't feel my toes or my fingers. It wasn't just that; I could barely feel myself. When we'd first moved to Dartmouth I'd spent afternoons browsing in the shops, imagining myself a millionaire and deciding on this cashmere sweater, that pair of £100 distressed jeans and those dark red, lace-up boots. In Dartmouth you could browse handbags, hardback books, houses, boats, holidays and even swordfish for dinner parties. Most weeks I went to look at a small, yellow, wooden breadbin that cost more than £50. But on this occasion I realised I didn't want any of it, and I suddenly hated the people that did. We all die, I wanted to shout at everyone. Why are we all bothering with these stupid fucking meaningless things? So I'd hardly had a good time at the shops. After seeing my freaked-out eyes and tired skin in too many boutique mirrors, I'd decided to find somewhere with no mirrors: thus the knitting shop. I'd never been in there before, but I liked the way it didn't sell anything, just the patterns and possibilities and materials for things. There was a bargain bin and I'd found three balls of red wool, and needles to go with them.

  'I've bought wool,' I said to Christopher. 'I thought I'd learn to make you socks.' And then I started to cry while he put the kettle on. 'I just wanted to do something nice for you, and I know you could do with some proper socks for the project and...'

  He chewed on his lip the whole time he was making my tea. 'I'm such a bastard,' he said, when he handed it to me. 'Please forgive me, babe.'

  A couple of weeks later he asked how long I thought his socks would take. I'd completely forgotten about them.

  'A while, sweets,' I said. 'I haven't even worked out how to knit a scarf yet.'

  Being in Scotland meant I actually had time for knitting. Vi and I were curled up in the sitting room, with books, Biros, pencils and notebooks strewn around us, along with Claudia's cross-stitch project and Frank's 'Rainy Day Cricket'. The open fire crackled away and B was lying in front of it with the other dogs, all of them snoring every so often like a very bored chorus. I got the wool out of my battered hemp bag and showed it to Vi. 'Do you know what to do with this?' I asked her.

  'How cool!' she said. 'I've never seen you knit. You'll look like an old auntie.'

  'Yeah, well, maybe I've reached that age.'

  'Ha,' Vi said. 'I knitted when I was a kid. Claudia was better than me, of course. I haven't knitted for years. I once made a lambswool blanket on a ship between Tasmania and England, while Frank read War and Peace in Russian. I can teach you how to cast on and get going, I reckon. Claudia will show you the rest. You know she knitted these?' Vi bent down and pulled up the legs of her jeans. I could see the tops of two striped socks emerging from her big, battered DMs. 'When I got back from Tassie that time she actually counted the mistakes in my blanket, the old cow. You can start by making a scarf in garter stitch, which is just knitting, no purling. After that you can make a scarf in a knit-two purl-two rib. I might make one too. I feel the urge, seeing your wool.'

  'I want to knit socks,' I said. 'For Christopher.'

  Vi looked horrified. 'Why?'

  I shrugged. 'I think hand-knitted socks will make him happy.'

  'Then get him to knit his own. Frank can knit. It's not that hard.'

  I laughed. 'I think the idea of me knitting them for him makes him happy.'

  'God.'

  'Not in a sinister way. I just think he feels loved when I make an effort.'

  'But hand-knitting socks? A pair of socks takes a million billion years. Make some for yourself.'

  'Claudia made socks for you.'

  'Yeah, but all that old bat does is knit, when she's not line-editing or cross-stitching. She has to make gifts for people. Anyway, she's my sister.'

  'Yeah.'

  'But socks are a long way off for you. You need to begin with a scarf.'

  'OK. Is it hard?'

  'If you can write Zeb Ross novels, you can definitely knit a scarf.'

  We fiddled around for a while, casting on. Vi showed me how to make a slipknot and then a strange lasso with my fingers. She cast on a few stitches while I watched, and then she just slid them off the needle and pulled the wool into a straight line again. It was like casting a spell and then undoing it. After about an hour of copying this, I'd managed to cast on twenty stitches, so that there was a long row of red on one of the needles, as if it was a sword dripping with blood.

  'Now what do I do?' I asked her.

  Vi took the needles from me. 'You stab him,' she said, sticking the empty needle through the first cast-on stitch. 'Then you hang him,' she said, bringing the yarn around the needle. 'Then you throw him.' She brought the needle under, over and away, and I could then see that there was a new stitch on it. 'That comes from Claudia, by the way. It was the only way she could remember, when we were learning.'

  I sat there doing this for an hour or so, and a very basic fabric began to form. Vi tapped away on her laptop, but stopped every so often to check my progress.

  'You're doing very well,' Vi said. 'You're a natural. It's like your healing hands.'

  'Ha, ha. I have not got healing hands.'

  'You so have.'

  'I don't even believe in healing hands.'

  'No. But still.'

  Years before, when Vi and Frank still lived in Brighton, someone had got Vi a book on Reiki and we'd tried it out one evening. The idea was that you used energy from your hands to heal people without even touching them. When Vi passed her hands over my shoulder—sore from too much writing—it went warm and then felt a bit better. According to Frank, my hands had more energy even than Vi's. Apparently the bunion I passed my hands over just went away about a week later. But after that my shoulder got worse again and I didn't think about Reiki any more.

  I knitted a few more rows.

  'I might go into business doing this,' I said. 'Like my friend Libby.'

  'Just do it to relax,' Vi said. 'Otherwise you'll ruin it.'

  'Yeah, maybe. Oh, that reminds me of a joke. Well, it's not exactly a joke, more a story. There's a group of fishermen on a tropical island. Every day they get up when they feel like it, go out on their boats and catch enough fish for themselves and their families, and perhaps for anyone they know who is ill and can't make it out that day. They all have gardens where they grow everything else they need. When they are done fishing, they play with their children, or have a game of cards, or read books in the sunshine. Every night they eat their fish and then go around to one another's houses and tell stories or have parties. One day, an American comes for a holiday on the island—they don't get many tourists there, but the location has just featured in some book of "unspoilt destinations" or something like that. He looks at the way they live, and then says to one of the men, who has taken him out on a fishing trip, "You know, you're missing out on all kinds of opportunities here. If you organised yourselves into a company, you could spend more time fishing, and export the surplus that you don't need to live on, and you could build bigger houses and have your own swimming pools and trust funds for your kids and you could get yourself some proper clothes and travel the world. Soon you wouldn't need to fish for yourselves; you could employ other people to do it. Eventually—imagine this—you could retire with a million in the bank and then..." "Then," finished the fisherman, "I suppose I could afford to go on holidays like yours, and find true peace and harmony by simply fishing in the sunshine."'

  Vi smiled. 'I like it. It's almost a storyless story. You want a simple life, too, don't you? You said that was why you didn't go to Greece in the autumn. You said having a simple life helped with your writing. Your real writing, I mean. Maybe that's how knitting will be good for you.'

  My real writing. I thought about how real my Newtopia books were, and my Zeb Ross novels. You could go in
to any bookshop, almost, and touch at least one of them. My literary novel existed only in my head. It was only as real as the ghosts I'd believed in as a child.

  'Christopher wants a really simple life,' I said. 'More simple than the life I want, probably. He said recently that he's not going to buy any new clothes ever again, just mend the ones he's already got, which isn't going to help much with the job interviews, I suppose, but it's quite a cool idea.'

  'As long as he doesn't expect you to knit his bloody socks.'

  We both laughed. Then I knitted a few more rows.

  'I haven't admitted this before, but I do sort of wish I'd gone to Greece,' I said.

  Vi looked up from her laptop and her face slowly avalanched into a kind version of 'I told you so.'

  Back in the summer I'd been accepted to spend October in an artists' colony on a Greek island to work on my 'real' novel. The timing had been pretty good, since I'd just finished a Zeb Ross novel and agreed with Orb Books that I wouldn't do another one for a year. Vi had been to the colony in Greece the year before and said it was an amazing place. Indeed, she'd nominated me for it, written the reference and helped me select some material to submit, most of which had since been deleted. She said that the whole place had a 'campfire' atmosphere, and you got to meet nice people and drink wine and sit on the terrace in the evenings, while being left undisturbed to write, swim, walk or think in the day.

  The whole idea of it terrified me. I didn't want to meet people who might be happy and thus illuminate my own unhappiness. I also didn't want to leave Christopher, because I thought I'd never return. It hadn't been very long since Rowan and I had kissed. Although I was determined not to go and meet him on a Sunday evening in Dartmouth, I wanted to go to the opening of the Maritime Centre and at least see his face again. Of course, I didn't think in those terms at the time. I thought I'd decided not to go because there was no one to look after B, and because I didn't want to add to my carbon footprint by flying. Christopher would be lonely and might starve, because he didn't like going to the supermarket and since vowing to grow all his own fruit and vegetables in window boxes had managed only one tomato and some basil. As usual, I had no spare money at all. The trust that funded the colony paid for flights and accommodation, but residents had to pay for their own food. There was also the problem of buying sandals, sun cream, a bikini, sarongs, insect repellent and sunglasses, none of which I owned.

  I hadn't been at all sure that being in Greece would make any difference to anything. People who needed constant new thrills just weren't that good at making the most of what was around them, or even just making things up, I'd decided. I prided myself on being able to get hours—or at least minutes—of excitement from the same beach I went to with B almost every day in Devon. Why should I need anything else? I also felt by then that nothing could surprise me, perhaps apart from really out-there popular science books. Fiction didn't surprise me at all, and once I'd read the blurb on the back of a novel I rarely felt the need to read the whole thing. I sometimes got three-quarters of the way through a novel and then abandoned it, because I knew what the end was going to be. I'd also somehow got into the habit of reading each page of a novel almost-backwards, scanning the last paragraph to confirm I knew what was coming before I started at the top. After I'd played out October in Greece in my head a few different ways, I became certain that there was no need to actually go. I knew what water felt like, and sun, and I had conversations with people all the time. I drank wine. What was the point of doing all this in a slightly different way, in a slightly different time-zone? I loved flying: seeing the world below me like a doodle, and feeling like a friend of the doodler, but I'd done that before too. I had the results of the experiment already.

  I also wasn't sure I would be able to finish my novel under any circumstances, let alone somewhere strange like Greece. It had originally been due for submission in 1999, and every year since then I'd had to email my agent and ask for another extension. The editor who had commissioned the novel had left the publishing house in 2002, and her successor had left in 2004. The publishing house had been bought by another publishing house and had become an imprint. Then the second publishing house was bought by a huge media conglomerate and the imprint changed its name. Every so often I got an email from a new editor asking how the book was coming on, but I hadn't heard anything since about 2006. The contract had probably been left behind in someone's filing cabinet and sent to the dump. I'd almost certainly lost my copy. Even my original agent had long gone—down to Cornwall to work as a schoolteacher—so I didn't have anyone to ask about it.

  I sent the email cancelling my trip to Greece about two weeks before I was due to go. I thought this act would make me stop lying awake wheezing for hours every night after Christopher had gone to sleep, but it made it worse. I spent the whole of October Googling the weather in Greece while yawning and almost falling asleep in the library. Since then I'd written about 2,000 words of my novel and deleted about 20,000, which was a net gain of –18,000 words. Was it possible to submit a novel with a negative number of words? I'd changed the title a few more times too, and it was currently called The Death of the Author. It was all very frustrating. I had no problem writing formulaic genre books totalling about half a million words to date, and I never deleted things from them or changed their titles. Maybe I was just a formulaic genre writer, and that was why.

  'How's it going between you and Christopher now?' Vi asked. 'Really.'

  'Oh, it's the same.' I sighed. 'I know I've got to pull myself together. I guess I can learn something from the Greece experience. Next time I get that sort of chance I will take it, I suppose, perhaps. But I guess that's got nothing to do with Christopher.'

  'Just don't knit socks for him.'

  'No.'

  And I'll make you up a flower remedy. You look exhausted.'

  'Thanks.'

  The next day Vi went to the village and bought herself some black alpaca and started making a ribbed scarf. It turned out that Claudia had a half-knitted Regency dress tucked away in one of her bags, so she got that out and worked on it beside us. It was like being in a club. My knitting felt real in my hands, and all I had to do was knit stitch after stitch and the fabric got longer. It was much easier than writing my novel. At first I'd stop knitting after every row and look at how long my scarf was, and calculate how long it might be in half an hour, or the following day, but after a while I stopped doing that. It was easier if I kept the yarn wrapped around my fingers in the way Vi had shown me, and each time I finished a row to just turn the needles and begin again on the next one. Whenever I made a mistake, Claudia would take the needles from me and fix it, saying things like 'Yes, this stitch is twisted—look, Vi, at what she's done—and you've dropped this one,' and then she'd give it back to me and I'd tell myself not to make any more mistakes, because they sounded very difficult to undo.

  While we knitted, Frank read Russian fairy tales aloud to us. He was writing an introduction to a new edition of Aleksandr Afanas'ev's nineteenth-century collection, and was getting to grips with the translation. On Christmas Eve he finished with a story called 'The Goat Comes Back'. He cleared his throat, and said to Vi, 'You'll like this, my love. Propp has nothing to say about this one.' Then he began.

  Billy goat, billy goat, where have you been?

  I was grazing horses.

  And where are the horses?

  Nikolka led them away.

  And where is Nikolka?

  He went to the larder.

  And where is the larder?

  It was flooded with water.

  And where is the water?

  The oxen drank it.

  And where are the oxen?

  They went to the mountain.

  And where is the mountain?

  The worms gnawed it away.

  And where are the worms?

  The geese ate them all.

  And where are the geese?

  They went to the junipers.

  A
nd where are the junipers?

  The maids broke them.

  And where are the maids?

  They all got married.

  And where are their husbands?

  They all died.

  When he'd finished reading it, we were all laughing.

  'Sounds like one of my authors explaining why their manuscript is late,' Claudia said, knitting so fast it looked like she had invented a new dance.

  Vi smiled and didn't say anything.

  'Can you read it again, Frank?' I said. 'And a few more times. It's a great rhythm for my knitting.'

  By Christmas Day I'd knitted all my red yarn, and I didn't know what I was going to do next—Claudia suggested starting a new Zeb Ross book. But when I opened my presents from Vi and Frank, I found, as well as a Moleskine notebook and a new translation of Chekhov's letters, several balls of soft, turquoise yarn and some beautiful rosewood needles. We exchanged the rest of our gifts and then ate a late lunch at the big dining-room table. It wasn't until early evening when we found out that a TV satellite had come down in the Pacific and caused a tidal wave that had devastated Lot's Wife, one of the Japanese islands Vi had written about years ago. She'd stayed in a Buddhist monastery there for almost six months. We didn't have a TV in the cottage, but we listened on the radio. Vi was quiet for a long time after this, and knitted next to me for hours, but by Boxing Day evening she had something to say about it.

  'So many innocent people killed by bottles of oil,' she said, shaking her head.