Our Tragic Universe

by Scarlett Thomas

  As soon as I opened the door, it was clear that everything wasn't OK. I could smell burning, and there was a plopping noise in the corridor. Plop, plop, plop. What was that?

  'Christopher?'

  I put my umbrella to dry by the door, then hung my coat and bag over the banister. I took off B's lead and she ran upstairs and sat by the bathroom, waiting to be dried with her towel. If I didn't come she would knock her towel to the ground and roll around in it until she was dry. She hated being wet.

  'Sweets?' Something watery fell on my neck. I looked down and realised I was standing in a puddle. The plopping sound was rainwater falling onto the floor in the corridor, soaking into the carpet. I went to the kitchen and found the pan we used least: an egg poacher that I'd bought after the only holiday we'd ever had. Now I was aware that Christopher was lying in a ball on the sofa, and that the air was throbbing with despair. I thought it would be most sensible to deal with the leak first.

  'What are you doing?' he said, in a dead voice.

  'Just putting a pan down. This ceiling's leaking again. It's OK.'

  'How's the adulteress of Dartmouth?'

  'Don't call her that.'

  'Why not? It's true. If you acted like her I'd kill you.'

  As I put the pan on the floor I slipped and put my knee in the water. It was like kneeling on a cold sponge. 'Fuck,' I said.

  'What's got you in a mood tonight?' he said.

  I stood up. I was wearing thick woolly tights under my jeans and so now I had two layers of wet material sticking to my skin. I'd have to get changed, but if I went upstairs now I'd probably be accused of storming off, which meant I was stuck with a wet leg.

  'Honestly, Christopher, I'm not going to have the "Who's in a mood?" argument tonight. It's obvious there's something wrong with you, but I'm not prepared to spend an hour convincing you there's nothing wrong with me before you'll discuss it. I think I'm just going to get a glass of water and go upstairs and work for a while.'

  He said nothing. As I walked into the kitchen again the burning smell got worse. The grill pan was out and two sausages, burned almost to charcoal, lay on it like the remains of a peat-bog person's fingers. I took out a clean tea-towel and started dabbing my knee with it. If Christopher saw me doing this would he think I was making a big deal about the leak, and how he hadn't put a pan down? Would it be seen as a hostile action? Suddenly I wanted to scream. This was all in my head. I had to stop thinking and just do what a normal person would do, without second-guessing everything all the time. I filled the kettle and put it on.

  'What's happened here?' I said, looking at the grill pan. 'Christopher? Sorry I snapped. I'm a bit tired. Is everything all right?'

  There was an open letter on the counter, which had obviously been screwed up and then flattened out again. A corner of it had sunk into a pool of water from where Christopher must have made coffee earlier. It was as if I'd been left clues: the kind of thing you'd get on a children's game-show or activity holiday. So he'd made sausages at some point that evening, and then abandoned them. He hadn't bothered to clean up after himself, which wasn't like him. He'd ignored the leaking ceiling and curled up in a ball on the sofa. I picked up the letter and read it. It was another rejection, this time from Moor Trees. He'd had the interview two weeks ago, and hadn't even been sure he wanted the job. He preferred walls and old buildings to trees, but most of the heritage places didn't even offer him an interview.

  'Oh, sweets, I'm sorry,' I said.

  I walked over to the sofa and sat on the edge of it, and then put my hand on his back. Now I realised that he was quietly sobbing, his body bobbing up and down like a storm-shattered boat in a calming sea. He shrugged my hand off him, and I sighed again.

  'I'm a fucking failure,' he said. 'I might as well admit it. I can't even cook sausages. I can't even put a pan down under a leak. My father's going to move in with a twenty-five-year-old waitress, my brother's going nuts and my sister told me at Christmas that she "just doesn't like me any more". Everything's shit. I can't do anything without making a mess of it.'

  'No, that's not true,' I said. 'Becca doesn't mean it; she's just trying to hurt you. She always used to get stressed and ratty at Christmas. Come on. Why don't you sit up?'

  'I can't. You don't understand. Everything has stopped.'

  'OK, well, stay there then. Hey, maybe there's something on TV.'

  'I don't want to watch TV.'

  'I can go if you want to be on your own.'

  'Don't go.' He reached for my hand and clasped it. 'Why do you put up with me?'

  'Sweets...'

  'I didn't mean what I said before. I wouldn't kill you. I wouldn't even blame you. And I don't hate Libby. Not really. Christ, my head hurts. I don't think I can move.'

  'Do you want some painkillers?'

  'Yeah.'

  'And a cup of tea?'

  'Yeah.' But he didn't let go of my hand. 'What's happened, babe?'

  'Hmm?'

  'What's happened to us? I don't know if I'm even good for you any more. I fuck everything up. It's even my fault that you reviewed the wrong book.'

  'I'll make that tea.'

  'Meg?'

  'What?'

  'Nothing. I'm sorry. I'm sorry about the book.'

  'It's all right. It wasn't your fault. I'm sorry too. Look, I'll be back in a moment. I'm just going to get changed, and then I'll get you some tea.'

  In the next day's jeans I stood in the kitchen re-boiling the kettle while eating a tangerine. If Christopher had been in a normal state of mind he would probably have said something about boiling the water twice for the same cups of tea. He often said that he wanted to minimise the footprint he was making on the environment, but I sometimes wondered whether really he didn't want the environment to make a footprint on him as it trudged on into an unknown future. I wondered what it would be like if he decided to split up with me. I looked at his thin back, and his dark hair falling on his shoulders. We used to say that we'd be together for ever. We wouldn't be like other couples. No clichés, we'd promised each other. Whatever happened, we wouldn't turn into a cliché like Becca and Ant and the other couples we'd known. Now what?

  The rain was still coming down hard outside, and every so often there was a metallic sound as another drip fell into the pan in the corridor. B padded down the stairs and curled up on the armchair, not looking at either of us.

  'What if I don't ever get a job?' Christopher said.

  He'd sat up on the sofa and was drinking his tea.

  'You will,' I said.

  'But...'

  'You could look in other areas. We could move. I wouldn't mind.'

  He frowned. 'You've never said that before. I thought you liked being here.'

  'I do. It's just...' I started coughing, and reached for my inhaler.

  'What?' Christopher said, once I'd put the inhaler back down.

  'Nothing. Look, like I said, it'll all be all right.'

  'I mean, seriously, we're never really going to be able to afford to leave here, are we? Not until I get a really good job, or one of your books takes off. And even then, neither of us will ever be able to get a mortgage, and renting's impossible now with all the checks they do. I've still got a criminal record, babe, don't forget. Neither of us can get a bank reference, and we still haven't got a deposit, or any furniture. But I could look for a shit job around here. Maybe that's what I should do. Nine to five in some beige office with a boss and a photocopier.'

  'No, sweets. It's OK. We agreed that we wouldn't do that.'

  The plan when we'd moved to Devon had been simple. After everything that had happened in Brighton, we'd just be ourselves here. No bosses. No nine-to-fives. I'd always had some shit job or other in the years before we met, and I'd have one again if I had to, but Christopher was still prone to crying and punching walls if people tried to tell him what to do. When I met Christopher he owned one pair of jeans and two T-shirts and spent all his dole money on skunk. But when he bought me a pl
ant after the first night we'd spent together, he was able to tell me all about how to take care of it, and I ended up feeling that if I killed it, I would have destroyed us. This plant, my peace lily, was now finally dying in this house, but I refused to read anything into this. It was just because of the damp and lack of light, that was all, and the fact that it liked being watered more often than I remembered. It had always been a bit half dead.

  He was right. Here was quirky. Here was real. Here was also cheap, and near his family. Still, I could barely afford the price of the ferry every day now, and I wasn't sure I'd ever be able to do anything more liberating than just cross the river and then come back at the end of the day. But watching the sun go down was free, and my morning walks on the beach were free, and you could get a cup of tea in the kiosk for 35p, although Christopher didn't like the polystyrene cups. Once I'd wanted to be a university lecturer, like my father, and I'd imagined having my own office, and a little terraced house in a cathedral city with tree-lined streets, long shadows in late summer and people cycling home from work looking in through my window and seeing lots of books and flourishing plants. That wasn't going to happen now. But I did teach, sort of, and the river and the sea were beautiful, and I didn't have a boss watching me all the time. Surely it didn't matter where you were, as long as you were happy?

  'It's not a failure to not get everything you apply for,' I said. 'I fail all the time, but it's just not so obvious. No one really buys my books, for example. But life isn't all about success. We don't all have to be Rosa Cooper. It's OK to just be. That's what we're doing, isn't it?'

  'I just want to make an honest living, babe. That's all I want. Save up, maybe buy some cheap land. We could build our farm and live off the land. Then none of it would matter. You still want that, don't you?'

  'Of course. But...'

  'What?'

  'You've been completely shutting me out recently. Please—we have to try to talk more, and perhaps not judge each other so much. Can we at least try for a bit and see how we get on? If we are going to go and live on a farm together then we have to stop having these stupid arguments, and we have to be able to not get frosty with each other the whole time.'

  I didn't say it, but I suddenly thought about the process of writing a second draft of a novel. That was what we needed: a second draft of our relationship, where all the conflict was pushed into act one, and everything that was wrong with us became an obstacle that we'd already overcome. We would live happily ever after because of all that stuff, not despite it. If we stopped arguing, could I live on a farm with him? What if he started reading books? Maybe his character just needed a little tweaking. Or maybe mine did. Christopher had never much wanted to have sex, but I'd initiated it every so often. But since kissing Rowan I hadn't been able to do it either. What would we do about that?

  Christopher started crying again. 'I am a monster. Fuck. I said I wasn't, but I am. Babe, can you forgive me? I'm a real shit sometimes, but I do love you.'

  'Shh,' I said. 'It's OK.'

  'I don't deserve you.'

  'Don't be silly.'

  I yawned. Then I felt anxious because I'd yawned. But nothing happened. He didn't accuse me of not taking him seriously, or being tired for no good reason. Instead, he leaned over and kissed me on the cheek.

  'You're tired,' he said. 'Let's go to bed.'

  In my entire life I'd never used any version of the phrase 'making love'. I'd noticed it about myself, and I had never been sure why. I'd had some boyfriends who'd used it, but I always talked about 'having sex' or 'fucking. Was it because making love sounded like a drippy, hippy thing from my parents' era? In darker moments I asked myself whether it was simply because I'd never been in love. Sometimes Libby talked about what she felt for Mark, and I just couldn't understand it. She seemed to want him, not what he could give her. Sex, when it worked, was just a physical pleasure for me, like eating and exercise, or even sneezing. That night we went through three condoms before we could even get started. Christopher hated condoms because he could never put them on properly, and I didn't like them much either. But as we hardly ever had sex it seemed pointless to use any other form of contraception. Eventually I managed to get a condom to stay on, and then Christopher pulled me on top of him and started poking around, looking for a way in. 'You're too dry, babe,' he said, so I did something I'd never done before: I thought of Rowan until my body did what it was supposed to do. Then we had sex.

  I got up afterwards and went to the kitchen and found some cocoa. Then I realised that I felt quite nauseous, as if Christopher was a stranger I'd just fucked in the toilet during a party while my real partner slept at home. I couldn't face cocoa, so I just drank a glass of water instead. Then I fed the burned sausages to B and washed up the grill pan. I sat and did the crossword for a while, wishing I could have a shower without Christopher knowing. Before I went back to bed I went upstairs to my study and looked at my ship, and tried to fathom how it had washed up at my feet. For a second, it was just me and the ship there, in our bottle, and nothing outside existed. There were no bank statements, no dust and neglect, and no man sleeping downstairs who I knew needed me, but did not really love me.

  I'd just turned nine when the Coopers moved into the house next door. We were the end terrace in a street near the cathedral, and the house next to us had been empty for a long time. Mr Cooper had a big beard and taught at the same university as my father, but in humanities, not science. He went off every morning on his bicycle with a large brown satchel and a flask full of oxtail soup. Mrs Cooper wore jeans all the time and had her red hair cut short. She was a mature student at the university, studying psychology. They had one son and one daughter. Caleb was a teenager with long hair who didn't wear shoes, except when he was at school. Rosa was a year younger than me and pale all over: her skin was bright white, her hair was light red and her freckles were the colour of very weak tea. The Coopers had several cats, and not long after they moved in I saw Mrs Cooper on her hands and knees by their back door installing a cat-flap. There was lots of banging and drilling for the first couple of weeks. My father said we had to be understanding about this, but my mother complained all the time that the banging woke Toby. Still, our two families quickly became friends. For some reason we rarely went to their house, but there was usually a Cooper in our house, even if it was just one of the cats. Every Tuesday afternoon I walked home with Rosa and she had her tea at our place, because Mrs Cooper had a late seminar. My father and Mr Cooper played chess together in our dining room every Friday evening, and were always talking about the university: the relative merits of the different deans, the underlying motivation of the Vice Chancellor and which common room had the best cheese rolls. Even Caleb came sometimes to talk about the true nature of the universe with my father, who lent him books full of equations.

  After the Coopers had been in the house for about a month, strange things began happening. Every night, at about nine o'clock, just after I went to bed, there'd be a big crashing sound, followed by a series of dense thuds, like books falling on the floor. After this there would be the sound of footsteps, and sometimes someone crying: I knew it was Rosa, although I never said anything. The cats would make echoey mewling sounds and clatter out of the cat-flap as if they were being chased by a pack of dogs. This would go on until about one in the morning, and then I'd finally get to sleep for an hour or so before Toby woke up. Then I'd lie there awake again, listening to my mother as she padded down to his room and then up and down the corridor trying to soothe him. Sometimes my father would come out and remind her that the best thing to do with a crying baby is leave it to cry. It was almost impossible to get any sleep.

  My mother and father had long conversations about the noises next door. Should they say something to the Coopers or not? If they did, would it embarrass them? Would they be seen as interfering? My mother thought that maybe mild Mr Cooper was beating his wife. My father suggested that what we were hearing was probably just the radio, or Caleb doin
g something crazy, or even our imaginations. It was a cold November, and the air smelled of smoke, apples and fireworks. I was back at school after the strike finished, and was still haunted by my experiences in the forest with Robert and Bethany. Every night when I went to bed I imagined the monster coming, and not being able to overcome it. At one point I decided that this monster couldn't see you unless you could see it, and I could almost fall asleep with my blankets over my head even though it was hot, and a bit difficult to breathe. Of course, the noises next door made all this worse, and soon I was falling asleep at school, and crying whenever we had a spelling test.

  My teacher was called Miss Scott, and everyone loved her. She was young and beautiful and wore long dresses in soft colours. Other classrooms had gerbils and guinea pigs, but we had a bright white rat called Herman. Other classes did science experiments with litmus paper and lemon juice, but Miss Scott brought in a camping stove one day and boiled eggs and told us that the whole process was science, but made it sound magical. One day she asked me to stay in the classroom when the other children went out for playtime.

  'Meg,' she said. 'You seem very unhappy.'

  I couldn't help it. I started to cry again. 'I am,' I said.