Our Tragic Universe

by Scarlett Thomas

  Shallow, shallow. And the sea was deep. In a solitude of the sea / Deep from human vanity / And the Pride of Life that planned her, stilly couches she. My favourite poem, and the only one I knew by heart, was about the sinking of the Titanic. I said the rest of it out loud to the sea, as I had done to Rowan, and for a while I imagined that the sea could hear me. I wondered if it would think much of this poem, in which it functioned not as protagonist or antagonist but merely as the neutral fluid in which the iceberg and the ship are destined to collide, and in which the wreck of the Titanic eventually lies, with 'dim moon-eyed fishes' looking on. And then, quite suddenly, on that warm, wet first day of 2008, the sea did spit something out. It was a ship in a bottle, a perfect ship in a slightly chipped and sand-smoothed bottle, and it landed right at my feet. It had been in the sea a long time, but I recognised it. The bottle had a waxy blue sea inside, and the boat on this sea had the same inscription, 'Cutty Sark', on its hull. Then I told myself it was impossible that I'd recognised it, and I closed my eyes, and then opened them again. It was still there. I couldn't believe it. Was this the sea's idea of help? 'What the hell does this mean?' I said to the sea. It said nothing back. Shakily, I picked up the ship in the bottle and took it home. It had sat on a shelf ever since, while I tried to work out what it might mean, and whom I could ask about it now that I wasn't speaking to Vi any more, since I didn't know anyone else who would even believe what had happened.

  The tide was up as I drove along Torquay seafront on Monday evening and I half-hoped that waves would splash over the car, but they only did that during storms, and at spring tide. If the car got washed away I'd probably escape and then I could claim the insurance money and get a new car. Maybe I should just push it in the river like Libby had done with hers. One of the billboards at a bus stop on the main street into Paignton was still advertising the opening of the new Maritime Centre last October, although the sign was torn and flapping. I hadn't gone to the opening; I didn't even get an invitation. The rest of Paignton was the same as usual: magical mystery tours on offer in two local travel agents, and Madame Verity's fortunetelling shop doing business next to the pet beautician. The wind had picked up, and clouds moved across the sky thinly, as if being pulled from a dispenser. While I was waiting for the Higher Ferry to take me back across the river to Dartmouth I got a text message from Libby: Police totally bought car story, so did Bob. Come for dinner on Saturday week? Mark coming too!!! Yikes! You up for a drink this Friday?

  I parked illegally outside Reg's place, although the yellow line was so worn that it wasn't really there any more. I felt a bit breathless going up the steps. Maybe I needed to take iron supplements, or eat more greens? My mother was a big believer in iron. If anyone felt ill, it was always mild anaemia. Maybe I needed a jar of manuka honey. I opened the front door to find B waiting for me, with bits of shredded book-proof everywhere: rare for a Monday. I was far from famous, but I was alive and had published something not that long ago, so I was often sent proofs of new SF novels by young women, along with form letters asking for blurbs. B ate them all. Or, to be more precise, she chewed them and spat them out. She'd once done this to a book I was supposed to review for Oscar, and after that I'd had to arrange for everything important to be sent to a PO box in Totnes, and for Christopher to pick up my post on his way back from the project. Oscar's speech about how a novelist like me should be able to come up with something better than 'the dog ate it' was one of his classics. B loved books, but particularly proofs, with their cheap, shiny paper, even more than she loved the filled bones they sold in the market on a Saturday. Sometimes I imagined I saw pieces of novel coming out in her shit and always saw this as my own novel, which of course she couldn't have eaten because it wasn't finished. I saw a website once about all the weird stuff that comes out in dog shit: Barbie doll heads, toy cars, Lego, spoons. B loved books, and the bubble wrap inside padded envelopes, but never touched letters, perhaps because they were insubstantial, and I could see an intact bank statement on the floor. It would go with the others. Oh—and something that looked like it could be a cheque from the paper. Fantastic. There was also the form letter that had come with the proof. Apparently, what B had eaten this time was 'Futuristic noir for a post-MTV, post-cyberpunk generation.

  To celebrate the money coming for delivery of my last Zeb Ross manuscript, I'd bought a hand-held vacuum cleaner to deal with B's chewed-up paper and Christopher's sawdust. Now I pulled it out of its cradle and started sucking up the pieces of paper slowly. The book had been so mangled that I couldn't even see how thick it had been, but I caught the odd undigested paragraph here and there: something about a woman penetrating herself with a gun encrusted with diamonds, and, further up the hallway, a short scene where presumably the same woman lets a man rub his dick between her breasts while she is flying a car. After the book was cleared up I moved into the sitting room to deal with the debris from Christopher's sawing. As the house filled with a concentrated smell of rancid dog, I wondered again about the Newman book. If Oscar hadn't sent it, then where had it come from? Christopher never got any mail, ever. In some part of his mind he'd never properly moved to Brighton, let alone moved in with me, and I assumed all his post still went to his father's flat in Totnes. If he had been sent a book, here, B would surely have eaten it. Not that Christopher read books. Although he read The Guardian from cover to cover every day, all the books people gave him about recycling, heritage sites and globalisation remained barely skimmed. He'd been in the middle of a politics degree when his mother died. He must have read books then, but I couldn't imagine what they would have been.

  Before walking B I went up to my study and tried to prepare the space for some proper writing later. I plugged in my laptop and switched on the lamp. Things lit up, dimly, including my poster of the Periodic Table of Elements, which I put up wherever I lived. It comforted me: whenever life got complicated I looked at it and reminded myself that all matter in the universe could be broken down in terms of those boxes. My blue shelves were crammed with uneaten proofs of my own books, finished copies of the same books, manuscripts and copies of the few interviews I'd been asked to do, mainly with small SF magazines. Their journalists, who usually conducted interviews via email at one A.M., or else were bearded and an-oraked parodies of themselves, asked me things like 'What is the role of women in science fiction?' and 'Have you seen the film The Matrix?' and told me that my author photo did me no favours. I'd never been much good at interviews, and my carefully constructed answers made me feel about as real as Zeb Ross; as if I was making myself up as I went along. Apart from my own novels—at least, while I was writing them—I didn't much like science fiction. I never admitted this; instead, every so often I would read three-quarters of an SF 'classic' so that I'd have something to say in interviews. I did like The Matrix, of course, and had read all kinds of essays on it, including Baudrillard saying it didn't represent his ideas at all and was, in fact, a re-working of Plato's Simile of the Cave. My interview answer about it now went on for about half an hour, and made even the most geeky journos glaze over.

  Zeb Ross didn't have any kind of public profile yet, which Orb Books had decided was a bad thing. He was one of the few people left in the Western world without a Facebook page or a My Space account, and he didn't even have an email address. He had good reason for this, namely that he didn't really exist; but we didn't want his readers to know that. We'd therefore decided to recruit someone to construct all his social networking pages and hang around non-paedophilic chatrooms being him, and I had promised to recommend Christopher's brother Josh at the next editorial board.

  On the top of my blue shelves my ship in a bottle was getting dusty. I still hadn't done anything with it. I'd thought about taking it to the Maritime Centre to show Rowan, but probably wouldn't. Sometimes, late at night, I visualised going there. But I couldn't tell Rowan how I'd come to have it, and I also couldn't tell him why it was important. My fantasy also ended up with us kissing again, which was a
nother reason not to go. I'd thought, of course, about simply putting all this, minus the kiss, in my novel. Perhaps the damn ship had washed up in the first place because it wanted to be in my novel. But what function would it perform? I'd already included, and then deleted, various MacGuffins, including a secret map and a mysterious statue, both of which embarrassed me when I thought of them now. I taught MacGuffins on the retreats, which of course meant I shouldn't use them in my serious novel about the Real World, in which people must want meaningful, if problematic, objects and can't just obligingly want random things that move their plots along. The term 'MacGuffin' was introduced by Alfred Hitchcock, and describes an object that has no meaning in itself, but motivates action in a plot because many of the characters want to obtain it. It could be a document, a key, a diamond, a statue or anything, even a bottle of oil. Aristotle said that using a random object to motivate action or force a recognition was lazy plotting, and I agreed. My plotting was definitely not lazy, just ineffective. I wondered if everything that everyone wanted was a MacGuffin, but the thought was so depressing I abandoned it.

  I picked up my ship in a bottle and rubbed some of the dust off with my sleeve. No one wanted this object; not even me. I sighed. The top of my shelves was where I filed unfathomable things, or, at least, things that were unfathomable in a different way from my tax forms and royalty statements. There was a framed photograph of a brown, mushroomy £10 note that I had found lying in some leaves in the rain more than twenty years before, after asking the universe to please give me some money from somewhere, anywhere, because I needed to get the train out to Essex to see my friend Rosa, who'd just broken up with her boyfriend. There was also a scrap of paper with Drew's phone number on it, which I'd found five miles away from where I lost it. There was an embroidered purse that had once contained tobacco, and which I'd found a few years back when I still smoked, in Danbury Woods, miles from anywhere, just after I'd realised I'd left my tobacco at home. I'd once planned a feature for a science magazine where I explained how all these things, which had seemed to happen by 'luck, were really matters of unremarkable chance and probability. There'd been a few cases around then of people finding their wedding rings washed up on beaches three hundred miles away from where they'd lost them, and people answering ringing phones in telephone boxes to find their long-lost relative on the line. I didn't like these things, and so had wanted to plot them away. To this end, I had been planning to write about apophenia, the perception of meaningful connections where in fact there are none. But the editor who'd commissioned the piece left the magazine and I'd had to abandon it.

  I had two desks. One now had my laptop on it, along with an empty document stand, and various wrist-rests and armrests that my mother gave me to prevent RSI. The other was covered in as yet unboxed bank statements, the letters that came with the proofs B ate, book contracts, film options, incomprehensible Russian royalty statements, cheques for amounts like £5.50 and £7.95 that my overdraft would swallow if I ever banked them, increasingly nasty letters from the Inland Revenue, unfiled paperwork from Orb Books, two ring-bound notebooks and the books and proofs sent to my PO box and delivered by Christopher. Many of the items on the desk were there because whenever I wasn't around Christopher trawled the house fishing up anything belonging to me, and then put it all on this desk. So where was the book I should have reviewed? I'd come up and got the Kelsey Newman book just after Christopher left to walk Josh to the bus stop on Saturday afternoon. Of course, I didn't check the publication date because I was only looking for my deadline. This was on the compliments slip in the Newman book, and so I'd read it and reviewed it.

  Now I looked properly and found a book on the Golden Section, with a press release inside it with a publication date of 'March 08. That must have been it. If only I opened my own post things would have been different, but Christopher recycled all the padded envelopes from the PO box before I even saw them. I once told him why I didn't like all this random crap ending up on my desk, and how I wished he wouldn't open my mail. He said if I wanted things to be different I should be tidier and more organised, stay at home all day like normal writers, research using the Internet rather than the library and learn to control my dog. I thought he was probably right about all that, so I didn't push it, or say that I couldn't stay in the house all day because it was hard to breathe. I blamed him for that more than I should have: he'd organised this place on the cheap through a friend called Dougie from the project, who hadn't wanted bank references or a deposit. So how could I ask him about this? I wanted to know precisely how the compliments slip had transmigrated from one book to another without him being completely responsible. And where had the bloody Newman book come from in the first place?

  I took B on her usual evening walk: down the steps, across the Market Square, through the Royal Avenue Gardens, down the Embankment, round the Boat Float and then to Coronation Park. I couldn't quite visualise how the Labyrinth was going to look when it was finished. Today there were two yellow diggers, and jagged tracks in the mud around the hole. There were also new piles of grey, stone slabs underneath some plastic. My tree was still there. I wished I knew what kind of tree it was, but despite spending the last few years sitting in the biology section of the library, I hadn't remembered to look it up. It was brown, and had a trunk and branches. I wouldn't even know how to look it up, except that in the winter it grew these little things we used to call 'helicopters' at school. B was sniffing around the stone slabs when my phone rang. It was my mother.

  'You're there!' she said, as if she'd used a séance to reach me.

  'I'm always here,' I said, laughing. 'I've told you before to ring my mobile, especially if you want to avoid Christopher.'

  'I know. I keep forgetting I've got the number written down.'

  'How are you?'

  'We're fine,' she said. 'Busy. What's that noise?'

  'The wind. I'm walking the dog. By the way, what do you call those trees that grow little helicopters?'

  'Helicopters?'

  'Yeah; like a little seed in a case with a tail. You throw them and the little tail goes around and around like a helicopter.'

  'A sycamore tree?'

  'Oh, of course. Thank you.'

  'Is this for a new novel?'

  'Not exactly. Bess! Sorry. The dog was trying to get in this big hole.'

  'How is she?'

  'She's fine.' My mother always asked how I was, and how B was, but not Christopher. I just about managed to afford to take the train to London every couple of months with B to stay with Mum and Taz, my stepfather, for the weekend, but Mum never came to visit me. Often I combined my visits to them with some business in London so I could claim my fare on expenses, although I always stayed with Frank and Vi if there was an editorial board meeting, so that we could laugh about Claudia's latest plans for Zeb Ross. I'd last gone to London before Christmas. I'd had a meeting with a woman called Fred, who was the head of a production company called Harlequin Entertainment. They were thinking of optioning my Newtopia novels for a TV series. The meeting had frightened me. Did I have any ideas for new episodes? Would I mind if they just took the characters and setting and then invented completely different stories to go with them? It felt as if I would be signing up to stop existing in yet another way. But I told my agent's replacement that I'd take the money if they offered it, and I told my mother all about the glitzy place Fred had taken me to for lunch, and how we'd eaten velouté and swordfish. I never heard from Fred again.

  'How's your archive going?' I asked my mother now.

  My mother was compiling an archive of all our family photos on her new laptop. Some of these were already digital, but others had to be sent by mail order to somewhere where they digitised them, put them on a CD and sent them back. She was also compiling a family tree using census websites and Mormon records of UK ancestry. My brother Toby had once pointed out that we were potentially the final generation of our family, because neither of us planned to have children. Our family w
as therefore about to become extinct. I had a feeling my mother knew this, and that it was one reason for the photograph archive and the family tree. Every time we talked about her research I remembered that I had never filled in the 2001 census, even when the council chased me for it. I still felt guilty, although I wasn't sure why. I kept imagining descendants of mine filled with despair in some futuristic archive because the records were missing, and then reminding myself that there would be no descendants, and no one in the future would ever care what I was or was not doing in 2001.

  'I've almost finished 1982,' she said. 'You must come and look at them.'

  'I will. Probably soon. I've got an editorial board coming up.'

  Aren't you staying with your friends, Frank and Whatsit?'

  'No. They're going away.'

  'Oh, that reminds me. Have you seen the papers recently?'

  'No. Not really. Just the Observer crossword. Why?'

  'There was a big interview with Rosa over the weekend.'

  'Gosh,' I said, in a more deadpan tone than I intended. Lately there'd been lots of news from my mother about Rosa. I hadn't seen Rosa for years, but we'd been neighbours in Essex and, even after I moved away to London, best friends. Then we'd started to drift apart when we were about eighteen. I'd wanted to do drama but ended up doing comparative literature; she'd wanted to do drama but had ended up at art college. Our plans to go to RADA together and become famous method actresses came to nothing. When I was in my first year at Sussex, Rosa came to visit. She arrived at the station looking pale and spaced out, wearing a red dress and false eyelashes, and with some bedraggled guy following her down the platform, begging her to marry him, while she smiled, said, 'No, honey, but you're very sweet for asking,' looked over her shoulder and slowed down every so often for him to catch her up. For the rest of the weekend she ate nothing except for some acid another guy on the train had given her and kept going on about travelling to India to sort out her chakras. No one knew about chakras in those days, but Rosa's brother Caleb had gone to India, which meant she had become an expert in everything to do with it. She slept with my boyfriend, slept with my housemate's boyfriend, then got upset because she thought that she'd alienated us for ever and was found at 3 A.M. on the Sunday morning trying to drown herself in the duck pond in the local park. Not long after that, she was discovered by a producer while she was walking on Hampstead Heath. She'd started throwing sticks for his dog and he'd asked her to come and audition for a part in a major drama series about the supernatural goings-on in an English village. The legend went that Rosa thought he wasn't serious and didn't bother going for the audition, but he'd tracked her down and offered her the part on the spot. It was to play the female lead: a vicar's psychic daughter, who falls in love with the paranormal investigator. She won a BAFTA for it, and then became one of the most sought-after actresses in Britain. My ex-fiancé, Drew, had once spent a month asking me to introduce him to her to 'help his career'.