Our Tragic Universe

by Scarlett Thomas

  By the time I re-read Anna Karenina I was becoming interested in tragedy in general. I used the Sophocles play Oedipus Rex on the retreats, mainly because our key text, Aristotle's Poetics, referred to it all the time. Oedipus is an almost perfect example of the deterministic, cause-and-effect-based plot, where Y can only happen because X has happened first, and that was how I used it. But every time I re-read it I marvelled at how a narrative could do so much more than just tell a satisfying story with a beginning, a middle and an end, which was basically what I was always teaching the people on the retreat to do, and what I'd always done myself. Somehow, Oedipus seemed to dramatise a fundamental puzzle of human existence. Anna Karenina did this as well. So did Hamlet. I read Nietzsche's book on tragedy and this made the situation with Josh worse for a while, because I started fancying myself as a tragic heroine with nothing to lose. Tragedy wasn't about people living happily ever after in banal domesticity, but going beyond the rational into a different kind of knowledge on their way to certain death. I managed to resist Josh, mainly because I was so terrified of Christopher's reaction if anything happened between us, and instead tried to make my own novel into a great tragedy. It just ended up being depressing. I could see that most narrative was an equation that balanced, a zero-sum game, and that tragedy was special because you got more out of the equation than you put in, but I had no idea how to write like that. The mechanics of Oedipus were simple enough to grasp, but where did one get all that feeling from?

  I'd once speculated about what would have happened if Zeb Ross had written Hamlet. There'd be no ghost, for a start. Or at least, the ghost would be reduced to a troubled teenager's hallucination, and Hamlet, with the help of his plucky love-interest Ophelia, would come to realise that his new stepfather didn't really do something as improbable and stupid as pour poison in his father's ear, and in fact had actually tried to save his life! Hamlet would start seeing a counsellor—perhaps Polonius, who dabbles in the self-help industry himself, would recommend someone—and come to terms with his bereavement and realise that it's OK for his mother to have sex with her new husband (although there'd be no 'rank sweat of an enseamed bed' or anything icky like that) and he'd go back to university happy, having now accepted the change in his family circumstances, with Ophelia in tow. Then I realised that if I'd written Hamlet it would probably have been like that too.

  'Sometimes I wish I'd never read Anna Karenina,' Libby said.

  'Why?'

  'Because the ending is so perfect, but for Anna so sad. And now, whenever I think about what would happen with Mark, I think it must be something tragic, because I deserve it, and because that's the way the story seems to be going. But what if we'd just be really happy together?'

  It hadn't stopped raining by ten o'clock, and droplets of water were still crawling like bugs down the stained glass window as B snored at my feet. Libby kept sighing and checking her phone for text messages from Mark, and we kept drinking Bloody Marys.

  'How's Christopher?' Libby asked, putting her phone away. 'Still sulking?'

  'What? Oh, probably. When did you last see him?'

  'God, it was ... Must have been at our place for that dinner before Christmas. It feels as if it must have been more recent somehow.'

  'Was he sulking then?'

  'Oh, yes.' Libby pushed her hair out of her eyes. 'What was it about? Oh, yeah, he thought he was going to be made supervisor on his building project and then he wasn't.'

  'Oh, God. That was tough. Mind you, it should have been him.'

  'Is he still working on that wall?'

  'Just for another couple of months until it's finished.'

  'But he's applying for things now? Like, real jobs?'

  'Yeah. But it's all so competitive. It'll be OK.'

  I knew Libby wondered, but didn't ask, why Christopher didn't just get a job he hated like everyone else. She checked her phone again, rolled her eyes and then shook her head at me.

  'Nothing?' I said.

  'Nothing. If we had children...' Libby began.

  'I know,' I said. 'Then we wouldn't have time to worry about everything so much. It would probably be a blessing.'

  'It would probably be a disaster. We'd turn into those people who are completely obsessed with our off spring.'

  'As opposed to being completely obsessed with ourselves.'

  Libby picked up her phone, looked at it briefly and then put it down again.

  'By the way, did I tell you that Mark got a big contract?'

  'What for? A boat?'

  'Yes. It's amazing. Good money that will last a year. But guess who the contract's with?'

  I thought about it for a minute. 'Bob's father?' I said.

  'Precisely.'

  I groaned. 'So that's why Mark's coming to dinner next Saturday?' I said.

  'Yep. Me and Bob, my mother- and father-in-law, Bob's aunt and uncle, and my now ex-lover. Bob's parents were supposed to be having it at their house, but their building work's still not finished. Apparently the fireplace won't be put back in for another month. Please say you can come. I'm going to get very drunk and I may need someone to hold my hair while I throw up.'

  'How could I miss that?'

  'Holy shit, Meg, why doesn't this kind of thing happen to you?'

  'It used to. It's not as if I could ever go back to Brighton, for example.'

  'But you're settled now.'

  'I guess.' She was right. In seven years I hadn't been anywhere near another man; not really, unless you counted the kiss with Rowan. 'I don't know,' I said. 'I'm not exactly happy all the time, but maybe that's normal after seven years. And I can't imagine any man is going to be that different from Christopher. I think I only find men exciting before I actually get to know them. And look at me. I'm hardly breathtakingly gorgeous any more. It's not as if...'

  'You do sort of look the way Christopher wants you to look.'

  That wasn't strictly true. I had rejected fashion for my own reasons. I thought I looked OK in the clothes I had, though: three pairs of faded and fraying jeans, a denim skirt, four organic cotton shirts, a few black T-shirts and a couple of black cardigans. In the winter I wore trainers, and in the summer I wore flip-flops. If I wanted to cheer myself up I put on my silver bird earrings. If I went to a dinner party I wore a long black patchwork skirt with the fabric of the universe—which also functioned as a shawl. Even though my wardrobe was limited I ironed everything, and I carefully planned outfits for the week ahead on a Sunday night. I'd stopped plucking my eyebrows for several years because Christopher saw me doing it one day and said, 'I hope you're not doing that for me.' When I asked what he meant he told me how much more sexy it was to look 'natural', and how women in commercials, and, by implication, me, looked glossy and wrong, and how his ideal woman was someone who wore shapeless things in cotton and denim and didn't bother to change between working on, say, a fruit farm or a heritage site and then going down the pub afterwards. He didn't like perfume either, or make-up. 'I want the real you, Meg. Not some cardboard cut-out.' Did he say that last bit, or did I imagine it? In any case, after I'd met Rowan in the library the first time, I had started plucking my eyebrows again. Not for him, but for some unfathomable reason.

  'Hello.' Tim had left his corner of the pub and was now standing by our table holding his book. I could see now that it was the edition of Chekhov's letters that I'd admitted was my favourite book about writing when the people on the retreat last year had kept asking me. B stirred and lazily sniffed his feet and then turned around and went back to sleep. I imagined that since she'd already growled at him a couple of times she thought that job was done.

  'Hi,' I said. 'I thought it was you under that impressive raincoat. This is Libby. Libby, this is Tim Small.'

  'Can I get you more drinks?' he said.

  'Yeah. Vodka and tonics, I think,' said Libby. 'If you don't mind. I can't drink any more tomato juice. Meg?'

  'Yeah. That's really kind. Thanks.'

  Tim got our drinks, plus
another Guinness for himself, and then sat down next to Libby. He was wearing a faded blue rugby shirt, and jeans that were wearing around the knees. Tim spent a lot of time on his knees. He worked as a handyman, assembling flat-pack furniture and putting up shelves. He had a rugged, faded face, from years of spending his spare time gardening and walking on the moors. On the retreat last year we'd ended up talking about flat-packs for almost the whole first day. Clare, who already knew what she wanted to write about but had no structure, which was why she had come, started asking him a lot of questions about unusual DIY accidents, and then someone else said that they could never understand flat-packs, and most other people agreed.

  'But they're completely logical,' Tim had said. 'Of course, I'm not complaining that most people can't understand them. After all, I get work out of it. But flat-packs are probably the greatest invention of the twentieth century. Everything there in a box, with a picture of an object on the outside, and everything you need to construct it inside. You follow each step and at the end the object is made.' He'd looked at me. 'Please tell me writing a novel is like that,' he'd said, and we all laughed as I shook my head. I didn't say what I was thinking, though, which was that writing Zeb Ross novels was like that once you knew how. My next thought I hardly admitted to myself: My Newtopia novels, and everything I have ever written, are also flat-packs, and all I've done is screw the parts together in exactly the way anyone would expect. Almost everyone who came along to spend the week in the hotel in Torquay seemed to have the idea that all novels possessed the same sort of value, and took roughly the same amount of effort from the author, and that Tolstoy was 'a novelist' in the same way that the latest chick-lit author was 'a novelist'. 'How do you even begin to write eighty thousand words?' someone would always ask, admiringly. And I'd always explain that 80,000 words is not that much, really, and that you could do it in eight weekends if you really wanted to, using Aristotle's Poetics as an instruction manual. Making the 80,000 words any good is the hard bit: making them actually important. But I didn't really need to talk about importance on the Orb Books retreats, so I would usually talk about unified plots instead, and how hard it can sometimes be to make the 80,000 words hang together the way Aristotle said they should, in a deterministic, three-act plot. On the retreats I ignored what he said about creating fiction as an imitation of life in order that one can examine life more easily.

  'Hey,' Tim said to me now. 'Guess what I'm doing at Easter?'

  'What?'

  'Research trip. Camping on Dartmoor. I've bought a new tent. I got it off the Internet. Can you believe they deliver tents nowadays, to your door? It's fantastic.'

  'It's going to be freezing at Easter,' said Libby. 'It's really early this year.'

  'Sounds like it'll be fun, though,' I said. 'Who's going with you?'

  'No one. Not Heidi. Heidi'll welcome the chance to have her lover over, I'm sure.' He looked at Libby and smiled sadly. 'My wife's having an affair. I like to make it easy for her sometimes. Go away on trips so she can have the house to herself. It's like a kind of compromise, I guess. The kind of thing old people in the local paper say is the secret of their fifty-year marriage.' He shrugged and sipped his drink.

  Libby's eyebrows almost hit her hairline. 'Seriously? You have an open relationship? You're fine with it and everything?'

  'Between you and me? When I first found out, I wanted to kill him. I've never been violent, but I used to have fantasies about all the different ways I could do it. Machete, chain-saw, toothpick. The toothpick was the best. It sounds improbable, but in the eyes, and the throat ... And I used to cry in my van between jobs, thinking it was all over, and we'd get divorced, and I'd have to go speed-dating or something else that I wouldn't understand.' He smiled. 'I gave it all a lot of thought. But then I realised that it was probably best not to say anything. I thought that if she wanted to leave me, she would. But she obviously didn't. And I suppose I do still love her. She's very nice to me when we are together, and maybe I am a bit past it in some ways, so—this is going to sound awful—I sort of thought, why not let him do all the work, and provide all the romance? I'm not so good at that kind of thing; I know I'm not. So now I've got time to write my novel, and go camping, which she hates, and do my garden in peace. It's worked out fine. I've realised you just have to consider these things from all angles before making a decision. Every Christmas we go to my parents and she and my mum cook dinner, and everyone gets on well. Every New Year I pretend to have a terrible headache and she goes out with him. He's married too. It's functional. It's modern.' He laughed. 'My marriage is basically a piece of furniture. Probably too bulky to get rid of too. Probably nailed together at the back.'

  'And she knows you know?'

  'God, no. No, she just feels very guilty all the time. And so she...'

  'What?'

  'I'm a bit pissed. Sorry; I shouldn't say anything else. You'll think I'm...'

  'No, go on. Just say it. What? She feels so guilty that she gives you blow jobs whenever you want them? Runs you nice baths? Rubs your calloused feet?' Libby looked down at the table. 'God, I think I'm pissed too. Shit. Sorry, Bob.'

  'It's Tim,' he said, blushing. 'And you're right. Yeah. I'm a bastard.'

  What was worse? Getting home first, or getting home second? If I was first, I'd wait for Christopher's mood; if I was second, I'd walk into it. Christopher was one of those people—there are others, including my brother Toby and my father—who could fill an entire house with emotion. When Christopher was happy, everyone couldn't help being happy too. But when he wasn't, it was terrible. Sometimes there were signs: sawing, or heavy footsteps on the stairs, or sighing, or having the TV on too loud. But sometimes when all wasn't well there was nothing except an emotional rumble, like the heavy throb of a diesel engine turning over and over right outside the window while you are trying to sleep, or think, or just be. Sometimes the rumbling and the throbbing became so intense that it was more like having a Chinook helicopter hovering over the house.

  Once I said this to him, sort of, and he said, 'How do you know it's not you?'

  He was right. I was a common factor. Maybe it was my throb, not his. After all, I had once apparently been able to fill houses with my emotions as well. Sometimes I wondered if everything that went wrong with Christopher and me was actually my fault.

  The weekly rubbish collection was due the next morning, and as I walked back there were black bags outside most of the houses, and seagulls beginning to break them apart and ack, ack, acking at one another in the rain. Seagulls in Dartmouth are fat. They have yellow beaks, red webbed feet, white heads and necks, black and white wing-tips and mean eyes. When they are not ack, acking they screech from the million-greyed sky, you, you, like the chorus in a tragedy. I had to keep pulling B away; she was fascinated with these big ugly creatures that weren't at all interested in her. When I got to the bottom of Brown's Hill steps I saw Reg, back from the pub and now out in full waterproofs, putting his rubbish in the wooden box he had built to stop the seagulls getting to it. The steps were strewn with rubbish from other people's bags that had already been split open. In Dartmouth there are three options with rubbish. You put it out five minutes before the bin men come, you put it in a wooden box with a locked lid, or you make sure you don't throw away anything that you wouldn't want your neighbours to see laid out in front of their houses. But there were new people in one of the cottages on Brown's Hill, and in front of me I saw tampons, plastic cartons from ready meals, takeaway pizza boxes, empty dog food tins and a pair of old trainers with holes in both soles.

  When I saw the dog food tins, which would have been recycled had they not been so dangerous to wash out, and the trainers, I realised that at least some of this rubbish was ours, and that Christopher, who wasn't at all bothered about the embarrassment the seagulls could cause, had put the rubbish out too early again. I hoped he hadn't seen the trainers. They were his, and they were revolting. I'd finally thrown them out because I couldn't cope with the smel
l coming from the bedroom cupboard. He wouldn't have thrown them out by himself. He never threw anything away. It struck me then that he would say the same about me, and I wondered whether we needed one another, even just to sub-edit each other's existence.

  'Disgusting,' Reg said, nodding at all the debris in the rain.

  'I know,' I said. 'Bloody seagulls.'

  'I'm going to exterminate them all,' he said. 'They're the plague of this town. Rats with wings, that's what they are.'

  We'd had this conversation many times.

  'I suppose they're just trying to live, like the rest of us,' I said. 'It can't be easy being a seagull in winter. I mean, they annoy me too, but I understand why they're doing it. They probably think we put the rubbish out specially for them as a treat.'

  'Pah! You young people. You're too bloody understanding. You wait. You'll see. These monsters need to be vanquished. They're vermin. They're pests. Everyone will thank me when they're gone. Of course, the council should do it but they've spent all their money on that stupid maze in the park. Mrs Morgan up the hill says she'll throw a big party to celebrate once I've got rid of them. You know one of them made off with her cat? Picked it up and carried it out to sea, just like that.'

  I did know this. I wasn't sure whether I believed it, though.

  'Well, good luck,' I said, stepping over one of the trainers. I already knew I wouldn't say anything to Christopher about the rubbish. As I climbed the remaining wet steps to the house I decided that once I got in I'd check my email. Maybe I would find that something amazing had happened to me. This wasn't very likely; nothing amazing happened to me. Even if it had I wouldn't know. Well, if it had anything to do with Orb Books I'd know. I couldn't access my personal email account because I hadn't paid the ISP for so long that, even though they were friends of Christopher's from school, they'd cut me off months ago. Still, if I went straight up to my study, I could avoid a conversation about the rubbish, and if I distracted myself with new proposals and admin, then I wouldn't think about Libby crying all the way back to her place, and I wouldn't think about all these broken relationships, and everything would be OK. Maybe Vi would have sent a message to my Orb Books account about the Newman book. Perhaps Claudia would have sent an email telling me how Vi had been trying to contact me for ages, and wanted me to know she'd forgiven me. Maybe there was some cocoa in the cupboard. I'd check my email, wait for Christopher to go to bed, and then I'd make cocoa and read the paper, and there'd be a world outside this one and everything would be OK. Perhaps I'd even finish the crossword and think about what knitting pattern I would get the next day.