Our Tragic Universe

by Scarlett Thomas

  'I think you'll find it interesting,' my mother said now.

  'I doubt it.'

  'Now, you're not going to get silly about this again, are you?'

  'What do you mean?'

  'You know what I mean. I won't tell you if you don't want to know.'

  'Well, you've half-told me now.'

  All right, well, one thing is that she's been cast to play the lead in a big Hollywood re-make of Anna Karenina. The rumours are that she's getting millions.'

  'Oh. Well, good for Rosa.'

  'Meg...'

  'What?'

  'You could sound more happy for her.'

  'Why? I'm not happy for her. I don't care. I mean, I'd care if she wasn't doing well; I'd feel sorry for her and hope that things got better. I'm glad she's doing well, up to a point. But I hate celebrity culture; it's just another form of clichéd narrative entertainment but with real people as the protagonists. I saw some of it with Drew, don't forget. And he so wanted to be part of it all and I so didn't. It's completely blah. Also, why cast her to play Anna? She's so not Anna. Anna is dark and mysterious. Rosa's like a little puff of smoke, or a feather, or a bubble someone's just blown. She's far too insubstantial and self-obsessed. She'd make a good Princess Betsy, but not Anna. Mind you, I suppose if it's some lame Hollywood re-make...'

  My mother laughed.

  'What?' I said.

  'Are we a little bit jealous?'

  'For God's sake. No. I'm more than happy with my own life. If I'd wanted to be an actress I'd have gone to that stage school. I don't want millions of pounds. I wouldn't know what to do with it. I'd have to spend all my time worrying about my hair and whether I was wearing the right dress. It must cost millions to keep up that lifestyle. Please, Mum, can we change the subject?'

  Mum was still laughing. 'I shouldn't tease you,' she said. 'You know I'm very proud of you. I'd much rather have a daughter who writes books, even if no one buys them, than one who spends all her time on red carpets and in and out of the tabloids...'

  'You're making it worse,' I said.

  'I know. I'm sorry.'

  We both collapsed in giggles.

  'Oh, Lord,' I said. 'Bloody Rosa. How's Taz? Toby? The dogs?'

  For the rest of my walk I listened to my mother tell me about Taz's commission for the new St Pancras station, and Toby's weird boyfriend who insisted on saying Grace before dinner, and how one of the dogs had chased his own tail and actually caught it, which meant the whole place had been covered with blood until Taz came home and cleared it up. After we'd said goodbye I looked across the river. In the beginnings of the twilight the deep pink earth looked like the soft skin on the inside leg of some huge, mythical animal that had fallen asleep by the water, furred with pubic clumps of dark green trees, and scarred and stretch-marked with roads. If the other side of the river was a sleeping creature's open leg, then Kingswear would be the long, thin toe it was dipping lazily in the water. As the hills darkened I walked home the back way, thinking how much more eerie the silence seemed to be now, and how much better my mother's archive would be if I was more like Rosa, and how much more point her family tree would have if I'd had children.

  On Friday night it was raining hard. I'd left the library early, gone home, picked up B and walked to the Three Ships before Christopher got back. On Monday night when he'd got in I'd asked him about the mix-up with the books. He hadn't listened properly to what had happened and suggested that I should tidy my spare desk and actually use the two filing cabinets he'd made for me: one for Meg Carpenter and the other for Zeb Ross. Of course, I kept asking questions about the Newman book, for example whether he remembered opening the envelope, and whether it was possible that he could have lost something from the package, like a letter or a card, maybe from Vi, but this led to an argument at the end of which Christopher told me I could pick up my own 'fucking books' from the PO box if I didn't like the way he did it. This argument had thrown a shadow over the whole week and neither of us was quite over it. I had decided I would apologise for my part in it if he apologised first.

  B was lying damply under the table in the pub, growling every time someone walked in. She did this just loudly enough so that the person she was growling at could hear, but not the landlord, Tony—who spent most of his time in deep conversation with regulars at the bar—or the pub cat, George, a really mangy old tabby, who would try to scratch out B's eyes if he knew she was here. George's eyesight wasn't great, and B seemed to know that, hiding in the shadows under the table, behind my legs. I was still trying to work out how to recycle the research I would do for my feature and use it in my novel. My nameless protagonist didn't believe in anything, and maybe sending her off on an odyssey into a world of tea-leaf reading, fork-bending and jugglery would reinforce her faith in the material universe. But I wasn't sure I had any faith in the material universe, or even any kind of universe.

  I'd brought my notebook with me, and as I was reading through it, looking at rejected idea after rejected idea, all the dodgy brake pads, lockable saunas and other embarrassments, something struck me. Perhaps the notebook was the novel. Maybe the whole novel could take place inside its own construction, as our girl-hero tries, and fails, to plan out her novel in her notebook. It would be like a building made out of scaffolding, or one of those skirts with the seams on the outside. I immediately made a note—'Maybe notebook is novel?'—and then realised that if the notebook was the novel, then the note about the notebook being the novel would also be part of the novel, and then I felt a bit dizzy. I'd already tried once to make the novel metafictional. Still, the notebook idea was better. One of the big problems with the novel had been that everything I really wanted to write about was out of bounds, and so I kept making things up that didn't ring true. I'd have loved to explore my break-up with Drew and my relationship with Christopher. I wanted to write about Libby and her affair. My parents' divorce was a bit clichéd, but still interesting, at least to me. I kind of wanted to write about Rosa too, and her weird attachment to her brother Caleb.

  I'd already tried the obvious things, like changing everyone's names and hair colours, but what if these stories and characters—or very similar ones—emerged as faint outlines in the hazy spaces between the notes in the notebook, like little ghost ships? What if my protagonist—the writer of the notebook—was trying to write a crappy genre novel but real life kept breaking in? She would also write down other things, like shopping lists, and these could subtly show her life for what it was. For example, there could be some item on the list that she obviously buys for her boyfriend, something cheap and masculine like baked beans, or massive amounts of economy loo roll, and then this item could disappear from the lists. They'd have broken up, but I wouldn't need to write about it directly. In fact, maybe she'd even use her notebook to reflect on the fact that she couldn't write about what she really wanted to write about. I had a couple of old, rejected Zeb Ross plots—with authentic notes—that I could recycle as a kind of background noise, as her failing ideas. Perhaps she'd try to write about a simulated universe at the end of time too. That's how I could get Newman in, and make sure the time I'd spent reading his book hadn't been wasted. In fact, I could recycle all the work I had ever done that hadn't been published. My girl-hero could be a reluctant science fiction writer who nevertheless can't help but bring science fiction into everything. Maybe there'd also be doodles on the pages: spaceships and equations. And then all this could fade down as she falls in love with an older man and formulates a secret code so that she can express her feelings in her notebook without revealing anything solid at all. The reader would be given clues to this code, but Christopher would never work it out in a million years. The whole novel would be a trace of itself; a mirage; a half-remembered dream. Genius. But this would mean re-writing from the very beginning, again. I sighed. Notebook. It would make a good title too. Or maybe Notebooking.

  Libby came in just after seven, wearing a yellow fisherman's hat, a blue anorak and red waterproof t
rousers. I was drinking a Bloody Mary, with a big stick of celery in it, thinking that I could easily skip dinner if I was drinking two portions of vegetables. The day before, I'd taken my latest cheque to Easy Cash in Paignton, and come out with £463. Easy Cash would have been interesting had I not been one of its customers. Instead, I was still trying to forget that I was one of the spectral people who drifted in and out apologetically, looking nothing like the pictures of the colourfully clothed, white-teethed members of families in the posters on the walls. I'd decided that the rent could probably wait for a bit as long as Christopher took Dougie for a pint next week, but there were a couple of bills that now had debt collectors attached to them. Once those were paid, I'd have £230. That meant twenty days' money for food, petrol and the ferry, and £30 left over. This £30 was my 'bonus': something I needed to break the monotony of living on £10 a day. I was planning to spend only about £10 tonight, and go out tomorrow and buy shampoo and some new yarn. I wasn't sure what I would knit next, but I was feeling excited about looking at patterns in the shop, and touching all the different balls of wool. B saw Libby, made a happy little sound, came out, waited for her head to be stroked, looked around, saw George on the bar and then went back under the table.

  'Good idea,' Libby said to me, once she'd stripped off all her waterproofs. 'Drink that's also food.' She looked a bit pale, and when she ran her fingers through the damp ends of her hair I saw her hands were shaking.

  'That's what I thought,' I said. 'Celery for dinner. I'm sure there's a diet book about that. Or we could write one. Not that I'm interested in diets, but you do get bestsellers that way. Are you OK?'

  'Sort of. I reckon I can manage some celery. Do you want another one?'

  'Yeah, thanks. Only one shot of vodka, though, whatever Tony says.'

  Libby stood at the bar looking like something that has been hastily added at the end of a painting that hasn't quite dried yet. I imagined her dissolving down the canvas like Miro drips, or freezing into one of Turner's red splodges that Taz liked so much.

  'Are you sure you're OK?' I asked her when she got back.

  'No.'

  She frowned and looked at her drink. We'd first met about five years before when I'd done a signing in the local bookshop. Libby had read both of the Newtopia novels I'd published then, which seemed miraculous, because I thought no one had done that apart from me, and possibly Josh, whose OCD meant that if he'd read one book by an author he had to read all of them. Libby and I had gone for coffee the day after the signing, and been friends ever since. I'd let her into all Zeb Ross's secrets, of course, and she told me all about how she was leaving her long-term boyfriend, Richard, for Bob, a rich kid from Kingswear who played guitar in a band and wanted to start his own comic shop. She talked about knitting, food and reading; I talked about popular science, food and writing. For Christmas that year I gave her home-made jam; she knitted me 'the fabric of the universe': a black cashmere square with cross-stitched, silver stars. I used it once to demonstrate gravity to Christopher, and he said, 'That's just stupid.' Perhaps he was right. It hadn't helped that the only planet in my makeshift universe was B's well-chewed rubber ball.

  'What's wrong?' I asked Libby now.

  She looked around the pub. I'd deliberately chosen the red booth by the door because it was furthest from the bar and it was harder for anyone to overhear what we were saying. Joni, the fishmonger, was at the cigarette machine just across from us, saying something to it in Icelandic.

  'I'll tell you in a minute,' Libby said. 'How are you?'

  'I'm OK,' I said. 'I may have just had a breakthrough with my novel.'

  'What, your novel novel? Your real one?'

  'Yeah. How cool is this: I'm going to structure the whole thing as a writer's notebook, just like one of mine. It's going to be all non-linear and experimental and the reader will have to put together the story for him- or herself. I thought it meant I'd have to start again from the very beginning—again—but I've just realised I can use loads of stuff I've already written, sort of as "draft material" that's been composed in the notebook. In fact, I think I might make the writer dead. Maybe her notebook has washed up like a message in a bottle or something, and then the reader has to work out what's happened to her from fragments of her real and fictional narratives.' I was thinking as I was speaking and as usual my thoughts were taking me somewhere I didn't want to go. 'But no, that's all too plot-driven again. So it probably won't be exactly that. Still, I'm happy with the notebook idea. What do you think?'

  Libby frowned. 'So there won't be any story, just notes?'

  'Yeah, but the notes will come together to make a story, or maybe two stories. I guess it's hard to describe, but I can see exactly how it will work. I think you can have too much story. I want it to be like real life, so making the whole thing a kind of artefact could really work.'

  'But it'll be a fictional artefact?'

  'Yeah.'

  'Sounds interesting.'

  The door tinkled and a man came in wearing a full-length, black raincoat with a large hood. B growled. He raised a hand to greet me and then walked over to the bar. Once he'd taken off his dripping coat I realised it was Tim Small, whom I hadn't seen for ages. I waited for him to look again, and then I waved back. B growled again, then yawned, then fell asleep under the table with her head on my foot.

  'Who's that?' Libby asked.

  'Tim Small. He's writing a Zeb Ross novel about the Beast of Dartmoor. He's the only local who's ever got anywhere with Zeb. It's not completely final yet, but I'm very excited. Don't tell anyone.'

  'I won't.' She bit one of her nails. 'Is there a Beast of Dartmoor?'

  'No, I don't think so. It's kind of based on the Beast of Bodmin Moor, but of course we don't want the Beast of Bodmin Moor to sue, so ... No, seriously, Tim knows Dartmoor much better, so it makes sense. I think it's going to be really good. He came on the retreat last year. There were a few good projects that came out of that one, actually—not all for Zeb Ross either. You know Andrew Glass from the Foghorn? He's writing a fantastic memoir about the D-Day simulation that went wrong at Torcross.'

  People said there were ghosts there, at Slapton and Torcross, on the beach and in the sea: American and British servicemen who'd been practising for the D-Day landings. In the 1960s, when he was a boy, Andrew Glass had started hearing the sound of men screaming from the sea. He'd come up with a theory that there'd been a terrible accident at Slapton at some time during the war, but no one believed him. Then he grew up and eventually went away to sea himself, as a medical officer in the Navy. Now everyone knew that the D-Day simulation had taken place, and that more than 700 men died in one day after they were attacked by German torpedo boats that had picked up on all the wireless activity in the area. In 1984 another local man had dredged up a tank, which sat blackly, like a lump of tar, in a corner of the car park at Torcross, with Slapton Ley behind it.

  'How can it be a memoir?' Libby said. 'He wasn't there, was he?'

  'No, but he's had connections with it all his life. He's doing a first-person investigation, putting himself in the story and seeing where it leads him. I think he's working other stories into it, like some of the experiences he had when he was in the Navy. He was on a ship once where the commanding officer saw a sea monster and wouldn't admit it to anyone apart from Andrew. He went and declared that he was having a nervous breakdown, and demanded that Andrew give him something for it. From what I can remember, Andrew gave him some sort of sugar pill or placebo, because the Navy wouldn't let them have tranquillisers on the boats, and he was fine. The whole thing is about imagination, belief, and the sea of course.' I looked behind me. Joni was still hanging around, taking the Cellophane off a packet of Marlboro. I sipped my drink and carried on talking.

  'This other woman, from Kingsbridge, called Clare, I think, was writing about someone who believes she is so ugly that she can't leave the house. The woman decides she wants to die, but can't contemplate suicide, so she does all these
dangerous things in the hope that she'll die by accident and not have to take responsibility for it. She starts off doing lots of DIY and trying to have household accidents, but she only manages to cut off one thumb, so then she moves into the outside world and ends up trekking through the jungle and doing extreme sports. She loses body parts as she goes, but somehow gains herself in the process. It's very funny. I hope she finds a publisher for it. It could be quite culty.'