Our Tragic Universe

by Scarlett Thomas

  'You're not,' I said. 'Come on. Everyone's got things they find hard to do. Wait a moment while I get that book out of the car for you. Will you text me at some point and let me know you're all right?'

  'Yeah. Thanks, Meg. I really owe you one. I'm so sorry.'

  B had just woken up, and was now up at the window making a squealing sound at Josh, who didn't seem to notice. The book was still in its carrier bag on the dashboard, unchewed. I gave it to Josh, and he walked away up the road with the bag under his arm as if it held a map he'd already consulted.

  Shortly after he'd gone, Milly came back.

  'What did you do with them?' I asked.

  'Charity shop,' she said. 'Poor Josh.' She dropped her head and looked at her hands.

  'Hey—are you all right?'

  She frowned. 'I could really do with a coffee if you're free.'

  'Of course.' I didn't look at my watch, but I decided that it would be easy for the car to have broken down as well. The car was always breaking down.

  'I'm not going back to Peter,' Milly said. 'I'm moving to London.'

  We were drinking lattes outside the Barrel House, despite the cold, because B had refused to stay in the car. She was now sniffing around under the table, perhaps looking for squirrels. Milly was wearing turquoise fingerless gloves, and had her hands wrapped around her coffee as if it was the only source of warmth in her life.

  'But...'

  'I do love him,' she said. 'But it's impossible.'

  She started crying and I gave her my napkin.

  'God, I can't even talk. How are you? I wanted to meet you again after that party, but I never did, and now I probably never will again, and it's a shame, because I thought we could have been friends. Oh, I'm rambling. I'm sorry.'

  I smiled at her. 'My life's pretty complicated. But fine, really. I felt the same way after the party. But hey, maybe it won't come to this. Maybe you won't leave.'

  She carried on crying, and I gave her B's lead to hold while I went inside to get her some more napkins. When I came back, B had got onto Milly's lap and was licking her face. She hated it when people cried, and always wanted to lick their tears away.

  'Get down,' I said to B. 'Come on, you silly dog.'

  'It's all right,' Milly said. 'She's making me feel better.'

  'Oh, well, push her off when you've had enough.'

  'It's nice not being judged for once,' she said, once she'd blown her nose and composed herself. 'Animals never judge you. You know, it's not just Christopher. It's Becca too. It's become unbearable.'

  'Oh, I've been on the receiving end of Becca,' I said. 'She hasn't spoken to me for the last seven years. You do get over it.'

  'I'm not sure Peter will. He's so kind, and so thoughtful, but how can you be kind and thoughtful both with your children and with the woman they disapprove of? Josh has been great, but the other two ... Well. It's over now. I'm going back to London to stay with my parents. I reckon it'll take me about a year or so to get over Peter, and then maybe I can find an ambitious young conductor, or someone else my mother will approve of. But I won't love anyone the way I love Peter. It's absurd. He's sixty-five and I'm twenty-eight. If only he was ten years younger and I was ten years older. That might be just about OK. Or if he was the woman and I was the man. There aren't so many clichés then.'

  'I guess that's true,' I said. 'I've got a couple of friends in a relationship like that, sort of. She's in her sixties and he's just turned fifty-three. She jokes about him being her toyboy and everyone just laughs. It's really unfair that it should work one way and not the other. But you know, not everyone is judging you. Everyone's got something that other people would think was awful if they knew. People like to attack the people who can't or won't hide, because that's all part of their own camouflage.'

  Milly sipped her coffee. 'When Becca comes down for the weekend it's understood that I keep out of the way. You know that I was in the process of moving into the flat? Peter wondered if we could just "not tell Becca" for a year or so, and wanted to know whether I'd feel uncomfortable going to London or something and hiding all my stuff on the weekends that she comes. He can't say no to any of his kids, as you'll have seen, so basically all she has to do is ring up and say she's coming, and that's it—I have to change my plans. He wasn't sure about me moving my harp into the flat, because it wouldn't be that easy to hide if Becca did come down. I'm just so sick of feeling like I'm something to be ashamed of. You know, last time Becca came it was my birthday. Peter had booked for us to go to this restaurant on Dartmoor, but he cancelled it, told me he was sorry and asked if we could celebrate my birthday another day. The worst thing is that I don't have children and grandchildren of my own—never will if I stay with Peter—so my whole life's about him, and only a fraction of his is about me. And it won't ever change. I won't ever come first for him, even though I'm the one who is there all the time, and I'm actually interested in him and his life and how the cafe's doing, and how he's getting on with his sax lessons, and what book he's just read. I'm the one who makes him do his scales and runs him a bath when he doesn't feel very well. Becca only rings when she wants something, or if she's had an argument with her husband and wants to escape for a few days. She's not that interested in Peter at all. But something about them makes him panic. He doesn't mean to hurt my feelings, but he does, all the time, because he's been put in this impossible position. He can't ever suggest to Becca that she comes at a different time because it's my birthday, for example, since he knows Becca will say something back like "How old is she going to be this year? Seventeen?"'

  'I just don't understand why they've got such a problem with your relationship,' I said. 'It's not as if their mother died last week. Surely they've got to let him move on.'

  A gust of wind blew up the High Street and I did up my jacket. B was still curled up on Milly's lap. Milly now held her coffee with one hand and stroked B with the other. If B had been a cat, she would have purred.

  'They don't like it because it's embarrassing,' she said. 'They don't want to have their birthdays and Christmases and holidays spoiled by having to think of me in bed with their father. That's what it comes down to. We live in a very conservative world, really. Becca's an authority because she conforms, and she has a nice big house, I imagine, and a cleaner, and nice furniture, and a husband and three lovely children, and that gives her the right to judge me, and decide how I should live. You know, what's really sad is that she and Christopher don't understand that the spirit doesn't age. You're the same person at sixty-five as you are at twenty-eight, really, with more or less experiences, and more or less wisdom. Peter can be very childish sometimes, and, even though he's got more general knowledge than me, when we talk about really important things we're completely equal. Of course, when we talk about music it's as if I'm the wise old woman and he's just a child. He can't even work out a minor scale yet. So it's not all cut and dried. When Becca and Ant are sixty-five, they'll be the same people as when they were twenty-eight, more or less. So if one of them was twenty-eight now and the other sixty-five, that wouldn't make any difference. It's the same with Christopher. Would he reject you if you were sixty, or twenty?'

  I imagined being with Christopher until we were both in our sixties and realised I'd probably rather shoot myself. I didn't say so to Milly, but if either Christopher or I was much older or younger than the other it wouldn't have worked at all. One of the few things we had left in common was both being in our late thirties; another was the fact that we were already together and inertia was winning out over entropy. I remembered seeing Rowan's tanned, ageless forearms resting on the table in Lucky's the first time we'd been there, and realising that I wanted to touch them. This had surprised me, because I'd never found older men particularly attractive. It was when I'd noticed the agelessness of his arms that I'd first realised he was a man, like any other man, and that he would also have feelings and memories and hopes and a heart and a naked body, just there under his clothes.

&nbs
p; 'You know, Peter told me he was going to tell Christopher not to come round any more,' I said.

  'Seriously?'

  'Yeah.'

  Milly looked up at the blackening sky, and then back at me.

  'And has he actually told him that?'

  I thought of the get-well card with a £20 note in it that had come that morning. Christopher had torn up the card, but not the £20 note. He'd given it to me to buy the remedies, and I'd taken it, because I hadn't known what else to do.

  'I'm not sure,' I said.

  By the time I got home it was six o'clock. I'd tried to ring before I left Totnes, but there had been no answer. Surely Christopher could answer the phone with his left hand? I imagined him passed out on the floor after taking too many painkillers; in bed, overcome with pain, all on his own; or just not hearing the phone because his throbbing despair had become so loud. As I drove down the Lanes I developed a kind of acid indigestion that felt like a monster inside me trying to eat its way out. But when I opened the front door the only throb came from some hip-hop bassline that I half-remembered from the early nineties.

  'Sweets?' I said. 'You won't believe...'

  Christopher was on the sofa grinning and half-dancing. My copy of The Science of Living Forever was on the sitting-room table in front of him. I didn't remember leaving it there.

  'Hey, babe,' he said. 'I've found a new channel. Old-school hip-hop. Come and watch it with me. It'll bring back memories.'

  'OK, I'll just put the kettle on. You won't believe the afternoon I've had.'

  'Maybe I can manage to put the kettle on for you? You look knackered.'

  'No, it's all right. I can do it. Do you want a cup of tea? Have you had your painkillers? If not, don't take them, because I've got some white willow bark for you. It took ages to find, but it looks really good, and...'

  'Thanks, babe. I will have a cup of tea, if that's OK, and some new tablets. You do look after me. Sorry I've been a dick recently.'

  'You haven't exactly...'

  'No. I have. I've been thinking about it all afternoon. I'm sorry. And I read that book Josh gave you. It's amazing. We're all going to live for ever! I can't believe you didn't tell me, although you probably thought I wouldn't understand it. I haven't been that good at science things in the past. But it's like life has opened up again. I think I'm going to read a lot more science books now.'

  On TV, a guy in a shellsuit was pointing at a clock around his neck.

  'Really?' I said, filling the kettle. 'Wow.'

  'Yeah. It's like, it's so easy to start thinking that life is totally meaningless. I don't think I ever told you this, but after Mum died I used to get terrible night sweats, and I'd wake up cold and shivering and think about all the black nothingness out there. When I was a kid I thought death would happen to other people, but not to me. Then when I grew up and realised it was inevitable for everyone, and then saw it happening to Mum, it was just such a fucking downer, you know? This book has made me feel like a child again. I think I might write to Kelsey Newman and thank him. He made the science so easy to understand as well. I totally get how the collapsing universe would provide all that energy and create the Omega Point. It makes total sense. The only thing I can't work out is this Second World stuff. Have you got the new book somewhere? Oscar sent it to you, didn't he? I'd love to read it.'

  'Sorry, sweets, I lent it to someone else. But when they've finished with it you can have it. I didn't know you'd be interested, otherwise I'd have kept it for you, obviously.'

  There was a pause, and then he said, 'Who?'

  The kettle had boiled and I poured water into our cups. Now I had some money I'd gone back to using one tea-bag each instead of sharing one between us. It always drove me mad that Christopher didn't notice things like this. If he always made nicer tea when he had money, I would always know when he had money. But he never really noticed the kind of tea I made, or even how many tea-bags there were in the bin. Would Rowan notice that kind of thing? While the tea brewed I started unpacking my shopping: the white willow bark tablets, the arnica bath and everything else I'd bought. Christopher switched off the TV, and an empty sound echoed around the kitchen.

  'Who did you lend it to?' he said.

  'Huh? Oh, just Josh.'

  'You saw Josh? When?'

  'Well, I was in Totnes buying your remedies, so I just dropped the book off with him on my way home.'

  'So you saw him today.'

  'That's OK, isn't it?'

  Another pause. Christopher looked away.

  'Why wouldn't it be?' he said.

  'I don't know. You're the one making a fuss about it.'

  'I'm not making a fuss. How is he?'

  'He seemed fine.'

  'Did you see my dad too?'

  'No.'

  B had been on the armchair scratching behind her ear and waiting for her dinner. Now she got off and slunk upstairs. Perhaps it was because she'd detected something in my voice that she'd heard before and knew led to an argument. But it didn't lead to an argument, exactly. Christopher got off the sofa and came and kissed me on the cheek.

  'Don't stress, babe. What's this?' He picked up the white willow bark.

  'Oh, it's a natural painkiller. From trees.'

  'Brilliant. How many do I have to take?'

  I took the bottle from him and read the label.

  'Two. Up to four times a day.'

  I gave the bottle back to him.

  Christopher got a glass and filled it with tap water. He gulped down two of the tablets.

  'I feel better already,' he said. 'What's this other stuff?'

  'It's also to help your hand heal. The arnica bath, well, I suppose that's self-explanatory. Arnica is for bruising and stuff. Sports people use it a lot. These flower remedies deal with the more, I guess, psychological aspects. I'll need to do some research to make up a remedy specifically for you, but you can have some rescue remedy to start with. I'll just put some drops in some water for you.'

  At Christmas I'd asked Vi what I was taking, and that was when she'd written the label for my little brown bottle: Gentian, holly, hornbeam, sweet chestnut, wild oat and wild rose. She'd learned about Bach flower remedies relatively recently, in the nursing home. They'd had an experimental programme during which the residents were given holistic therapies of different sorts. Each of them had their own Bach flower combination in a brown bottle, and one of Vi's jobs was to mix up new bottles when the old ones ran out. I knew from what she told me that these remedies contained nothing more than the 'vibrations of plants'. I remembered asking her how 'nothing' could heal. She hadn't said anything about the placebo effect. She'd talked about male and female systems of rationality, and said that the irrational, female world, far from being nonexistent, was actually the world of the void, the black hole, the spiritual cave and the 'cosmic vagina' in which you sense the unfathomable dark energies that are as important to the existence of the universe as the male world of matter that you can see and touch and count. Counting numbers—all the positive and negative integers—were male, but imaginary numbers—the square roots of negative numbers—all the way to imaginary infinity, were female. Doxa was male, paradox was female.

  'Thanks, babe,' Christopher said.

  'What were you thinking about exactly?' I asked him, once I'd carefully used the pipette to put four drops of rescue remedy in the water. 'Here. Sip this slowly.' I gave him the glass.

  'Huh?'

  'You said you'd been thinking this afternoon as well as reading the book.'

  He gulped down the water. 'Oh, just stuff.'

  'What stuff?'

  'Just about, well, about how good things could still be. With us, and the future and everything.'

  'Why were you thinking that?'

  He must have picked up on something in my voice, just as B had, because he frowned.

  'I just was. Is something wrong?'

  I sighed heavily. 'Why does something always have to be wrong?'

  'Come on,
babe. Chill out. You've had a busy afternoon out in the cold. Let me finish the tea.'

  'No, it's all right. It's done now.'

  I finished making the tea and peeled and ate a tangerine while Christopher talked about how he knew everything was going to be all right because of a new job he'd seen advertised in the free paper, and how Mick from the project had rung him to say he was a definite for it if he applied. Devon Heritage were looking for people to work on restoring an old castle along the coast from there. Christopher had all the right experience, and Mick was going to be heading up the team.

  'Which castle is it?' I said.

  He told me. I could faintly visualise it. It wasn't far from Torcross. It was little more than a ruin, and, if I remembered rightly, it always had been a ruin, because it had been built that way.

  'Isn't that one actually a folly?' I said.

  There were lots of follies around South Devon, especially at the mouth of Dartmouth Harbour. The real castles were hundreds of years old, but the follies had gone up mainly in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. I wasn't really interested in old buildings and walls, but I loved follies. They were more or less completely useless buildings, but resembled something useful or real, like a watchtower or a lighthouse. Some people even built fake ruins in the grounds of their country houses to give them a 'historical feeling', and this was what I'd thought this structure was. I couldn't remember quite how I knew that, but Libby had found out a lot about Devon castles when she decided she wanted to get married in one. She'd even considered ruins, since, as she put it, she was already ruined herself, and follies, which she said would also strike the right tone.

  'No, babe,' Christopher said. 'It's the ruins of a real castle.'

  'Oh.'

  'Well, I'm not going to go and work on a folly, am I?'

  I shrugged. 'I don't know. They have historical importance as well, don't they?'

  He laughed. 'Don't be stupid.'