Our Tragic Universe

by Scarlett Thomas

  'Why is that stupid? Don't you think it's interesting that people spent loads of time and money building structures for no reason other than to amuse themselves, or have something better than the neighbours, or so they could pretend to be living in the past, or in a fairy tale or something? I mean, surely history is interesting because it tells us about people? I think people who built follies were probably much more interesting than people who built castles.'

  'You've lost me, babe. Anyway, Mick reckons that the timing's going to work out perfectly with the wall. We can all finish that and then move straight on to the castle, and we'll actually start getting paid. I mean, it's only going to be a temporary contract if I get it, but fantastic for the CV.'

  Christopher carried on talking and I let my thoughts drift elsewhere. As far as I could tell he still didn't say anything about being sorry for punching the wall, or making me drive around Devon in the middle of the night, or being so rude at the hospital, or going silent on me for most of the drive back. I ate another tangerine and thought about the money, and how I should really tell Christopher about it now. But in the end I just said 'Mmm' in the right places, and 'That's brilliant' every so often, and fantasised about the days I would spend alone with B in Seashell Cottage playing my guitar, knitting my slippers and writing my novel. What was wrong with me? All those years I'd wished Christopher would read an interesting book and want to talk to me about it; all those times I wished he would apologise for, as he put it, being 'a dick'. But now I couldn't give a damn about any of it.

  After Christopher had gone to bed I sat on the sofa and browsed through the book about flower remedies. What should I choose for him? Chestnut bud was for people who repeated the same mistakes over and over again. Chicory was for people who were egotistical, domineering and judge-mental. Honeysuckle was for people who lived in the past, and couldn't get over some traumatic event. Rock water was for people who liked to take the moral high ground. Willow was for moody, sensitive people who spoiled things for people around them. Was all that Christopher, or was it just my idea of him? The book said that you should not prescribe for someone else unless you could be objective about them. Fat chance of that. As I took the brown stock bottles out of the box I felt my eyes fill with tears. I missed Vi, and I was so sick of Christopher I didn't want to heal him at all; I wanted to go upstairs and smother him. I still hadn't emailed Rowan back because I didn't know what to say. Every day I composed responses to him, and every day I constructed neat apologies for Vi, but I didn't actually do anything. I labelled Christopher's remedy and left it on the kitchen table for him, with instructions. I tried to will some placebo effect into the bottle, but my heart wasn't in it.

  I made a cup of tea, wiped my eyes and sat back down on the sofa with the flower remedy book to see what it said about the combination that Vi had chosen for me. Gentian was for sceptics who had no faith. Holly was for those who were hardhearted and joyless. Hornbeam was for people who were exhausted and couldn't see the point of life any more. Sweet chestnut was for people who had lost hope. Wild oat was for people without specific ambition who couldn't settle or make up their minds about anything. And wild rose was for people who had become unable to pick up the right 'cosmic life energies. I flicked back to the entry for Gentian. 'This is a person who wants to believe but cannot,' it began. 'He or she feels the need for faith—in something—but will need this remedy in order to begin to embrace it.'

  I switched on the radio and started to mix a new batch of my remedy. The Beast of Dartmoor was now the main story on the local news. A woman from Postbridge claimed that she had seen it prowling around her garden. She described it as a black wolf, twice the size of an Alsatian, with yellow, 'glowing' eyes. 'I just didn't want to go out there,' she said. 'I've never seen an animal that big outside of a zoo. I'm staying inside from now on until it's caught.' I looked at B, lying on the chair in the sitting room. It sounded like an enormous version of her, although her eyes were brown. There were a couple of interviews with the local police and Paignton Zoo. B came and curled up on the sofa next to me, and I carried on knitting until the scratching sound started up again, this time at the front door. B wasn't bothered by it, which meant it was nothing. But I still went to bed and put my head under the duvet and tried to think about work, and daylight. I knew it was probably a seagull, a rat or even a badger, but I didn't want to think about why it would be scratching at my door rather than someone else's.

  On Saturday when I woke up there was an unfamiliar bird singing loudly outside. I lay there for a while just listening, but then I got up to look for it. All I could see out of the window were the usual rooftops, with the sun dribbling a thin, brothy light onto them. I couldn't see the bird, but I wished I could; it sounded like an imitation of an arcade game. Bing, bing, bing, brrr, brrr, dip, dip, dip, woo, woo, bing, bing, bing, dip, dip, ping, ping, ping, brrr. And then the same, or roughly the same, again. I'd read somewhere, or maybe someone once told me, that the older birds are, the more complex and beautiful are their songs. This song was complex, but not exactly beautiful. Was it a young bird trying out all the possibilities of its voice, or an old bird having a mid-life crisis? I was still standing by the window wondering about this when Christopher came and stood behind me and pressed his body against mine. His right hand dangled uselessly by his side, but he stroked the top of my thigh with his left hand. He smelled of unwashed hair.

  'Come back to bed, babe,' he said, his voice thickened by morning.

  I suddenly felt as if someone was offering me sand to eat, or sea to drink.

  'Oh, sweets, what about your hand?'

  'You've got two hands.'

  'I know, but...'

  He dropped his left hand from my thigh. 'Fine. Forget about it.'

  Minutes passed. The bird had stopped singing. Christopher was back in bed. He was under the covers, not moving. The air felt dense. This was probably the first time I'd ever rejected him sexually, but he was an adult, wasn't he? He rejected me all the time. He'd spent the last seven years rejecting me.

  'You know we're due at Libby and Bob's tonight?' I said.

  There was a muffled reply from under the duvet. 'What?'

  'Libby and Bob's? Tonight. I didn't know if you'd remembered.'

  'Oh, fuck.' He sat up. 'Fucking hell.'

  'Why are you swearing? Is it your hand?'

  'No, it's not my hand. I just don't want to go and play happy families with Libby and fucking Bob, of all people, especially when she's shagging someone else. We can't afford it anyway, buying wine and stuff like that. I haven't got anything to wear. Can't you just make an excuse?'

  'No,' I said, an edge appearing in my voice. 'I'm going. I just wondered what you were doing. I can afford it, as it happens. And I'm not into morally policing my friends. Or my family, for that matter.'

  'What...' He ran a shaking left hand through the top of his tangled hair. 'What the fuck did that all mean?'

  'Nothing.' I folded my arms and looked out of the window. The bird still wasn't singing and the soupy sun had been all soaked up by doughy clouds. 'I'm sorry. Look, there's some money. It came in yesterday. I wanted it to be a surprise, but I've messed it up a bit. I wondered whether...'

  'No, what was that about friends and family?'

  I sighed. 'I saw Milly yesterday.'

  'Oh. That fat cow. I'm not surprised she's behind all this somehow.'

  'For God's sake, Christopher. You can't call her that. And no one's behind anything.'

  'She's messing up my family.'

  'No. You and Becca are messing up your family. Josh is fine with it. Why can't you just let your dad be happy?'

  'Oh, I see. Now it's even clearer. This is about how wonderful Josh is.'

  'Don't be ridiculous.'

  'Anyway, me and Becca are half the family. The other half's mad. It's down to us to keep an eye on Dad and make sure he's not screwing up his life. He's been vulnerable ever since Mum died.'

  'So while you and Becca live you
r lives, you expect your father to be doing what, exactly? Just waiting for you to phone, or for Becca to come for a few weekends a year, usually not even to see him, but because she's found out Ant's fucking another London barmaid or he's found out she's been sending more naked pictures of herself over the Internet to another guy in Florida? Apart from that you'd have him just working in the café and watching TV on his own in the evenings and waiting for his boring life to be punctuated by another one of Josh's psychotic episodes?'

  'My father has nothing to do with you. Neither has my sister. I wish I'd never told you any of that stuff now. I knew you'd find some way of using it against them. Why can't you keep out of it?'

  'If you want me to keep out of it, then don't expect me to come to the bloody hospital with you in the middle of the night, and don't have a go at me because I don't do it perfectly. And don't ask me to change any more of your bandages. I wish I wasn't involved in your family, but I am, especially when you go around punching walls because you can't cope with the simple fact that your father loves someone who isn't you, and isn't your dead mother.'

  Christopher put the duvet over his head.

  'That's very grown up,' I said, half-thinking he might laugh at this, but not knowing quite what I'd do if he did.

  'Fuck off,' he said.

  'OK. Fine. I'm going out. I'll probably be back after the dinner party.'

  Nothing.

  'Christopher?'

  'Do what you like,' he said.

  The day was in ruins, should have been in ruins. But in a sense it had been ruined all along. I felt quite calm as I drove out of Dartmouth the Warfleet way, past the road to the castle and Rowan's house, and out towards Little Dartmouth. The sky was the colour of cobblestones as I drove through Stoke Fleming and past the entrance to Blackpool Sands, where I walked B most mornings. She made her usual little whimpering sound as we approached, and then breathed all over the back window as we passed it. She would probably realise that we were going to Slapton Sands, but not how long we might be staying. The road ribboned along the cliffs through Strete, lined with a haphazard stone wall beyond which there were mimosa trees, wild primroses and pink sheep grazing in fields. The road j agged round, and down, and soon I was on the straight road between Slapton Sands on the left and Slapton Ley on the right. Torcross village was at the end of this, like the head of a tadpole. I parked by the Second World War tank and then walked along the esplanade to Seashell Cottage. Turning the key in the lock felt like breathing in after spending a long time underwater. Christopher could simmer and stew all day. I wasn't going back until midnight at the earliest. Or maybe I was never going back, or only going back to pick up my stuff. I wasn't sure.

  The desk in the bay window looked inviting as a place to sit and contemplate the rest of my life. There was nothing on the desk, of course, and all I could see beyond it were the yellow and blue stripes of shingle, sea and sky, dotted here and there with sea-birds busy with their fishing. But I couldn't settle. If I sat there now, with so much life to contemplate, I felt that I might just watch the sea for ever, and freeze with no fire and starve with no food.

  I let B sniff around the house while I nipped out to the local shop. Even though it was off season, there was a limited range of buckets and spades, as well as laxative powder, shoelaces, doorstoppers, paperclips, postcards, local pamphlets on nature and ghosts, string, firelighters, logs, milk, cheese, sandwiches and about a thousand other things. The shelves were a bit dusty and it was pretty gloomy, but I still managed to buy a campfire kettle, some firelighters, bread, a tub of fresh prawns, a dusty packet of penne, a lemon, black peppercorns, coffee, an assortment of herbal tea-bags and some local honey. I put a can of dog food and some dog biscuits in my basket as well, walked around the shop for a bit and then went back and added two more cans, a big rawhide chew and a tin bowl. Then I went to the cleaning section and picked up some dusters, bleach, cream cleanser, J-Cloths, furniture polish and a bucket. After I'd put everything on the counter the woman behind the till raised her eyebrows.

  'Anything else?' she said.

  I glanced behind her to yet another rack of local publications. There were tide-tables, birdwatching manuals and nature diaries about Slapton Ley. There was also a slim paperback called Household Tips, by Iris Glass. That must be Andrew's aunt, whose cottage I had taken over. 'Can I take that book as well, please?' I said. She sighed and reached it down for me. 'You on holiday, love?' she said.

  'Sort of.'

  When I got back to the cottage B's eyes seemed full of questions, which I half-answered with the rawhide chew. I put all my cleaning stuff in the bucket and left it in the kitchen. Then I went round the side of the pub and got some logs. I came back and started building a fire while my new kettle boiled and my grill heated up.

  I'd learned to build fires back at Becca and Ant's place in Brighton. After Drew's drama series had gone into post-production he'd returned to London, the idea being that eventually I'd move there to be with him, or he'd move to Brighton to be with me. In the meantime we spent every weekend at Becca and Ant's place, because we both knew my little flat was cold and depressing. One Sunday morning we were in the four-poster bed together in 'our' room, overlooking the pond in the back garden, when Drew looked at me seriously and said he loved me, and wanted to marry me. I remember looking around at the perfect bedroom and thinking how the wallpaper—which showed scenes from contemporary Brighton—was more tasteful and eccentric than anything I'd ever manage to buy. There was an Aga downstairs, and I knew that Ant would probably be cooking us breakfast on it already. Becca would be lighting the large open fire in the sitting room, as she always did on cold weekend mornings. After breakfast we'd all read the papers together in front of the fire, and talk about things we'd found in the review and style sections. Becca dominated these discussions, and would often go up to London on a Wednesday afternoon when her shop was shut to buy something she'd seen in the paper the week before. While this was going on I'd glance at the crossword, but I wouldn't start doing it until that evening when I got home. Before lunch we'd all have a swim in the indoor pool, then a sauna, and after lunch Drew and I would go upstairs for more by-numbers sex. It felt a little as if my external life had gone from being something the size and colour of a white handkerchief to becoming several yards of beautiful fabric, printed with complicated colours and patterns. The only problem was that Drew was the dull background on this fabric, not the pattern. And I wasn't sure what you could really make out of this fabric, and whether whatever it was would really suit me. But on that Sunday morning I blushed and said I loved Drew too, and even though I didn't really believe in marriage it would probably be a good idea for us to make our relationship official and permanent.

  That had also been the day I'd first met Christopher. When Drew and I eventually emerged, newly engaged, from our room, wearing tracksuit bottoms and old hoodies and big smiles, there was no breakfast downstairs and no fire in the sitting room. The kitchen smelled of cigarette smoke, presumably from Becca, who still hadn't managed to give up, because she wasn't yet over her mother's death. But instead of Becca, there was this thin, jaggedly beautiful, blue-eyed guy in ripped jeans sitting at the kitchen table with a £20 note in front of him. When we walked in he picked up the money, stood up, pocketed it, clapped Drew on the shoulder and said something like, 'All right, mate?' Drew introduced him as Christopher, Becca's younger brother, then Ant came in and told us that Becca had gone 'somewhere' to calm down and asked us if we would light the fire while he made breakfast. So the three of us went into the sitting room and pooled our knowledge, which didn't amount to much. Christopher and I started joking around immediately, but Drew took it all very seriously, arranging three logs in the shape of a wigwam and then looking for firelighters and matches.

  'You don't want to use firelighters, mate,' Christopher had said to Drew. 'Bad for the environment.'

  'Yeah,' I said, not knowing what I was talking about. 'Aren't you supposed to use kindling or
something? Or twisted-up bits of newspaper?'

  'Firelighters are more efficient,' Drew said.

  Christopher went out of the room, and when he came back he had a bottle of vodka, a box of matches and the review section of that day's Observer newspaper. Drew still hadn't found the firelighters, and sighed while Christopher screwed up individual pages of the newspaper into little balls and threw them into the fireplace around the logs. Then he poured half the bottle of vodka over the whole lot and set it alight. For a few moments the contents of the fireplace burned like a Christmas pudding, and then, just as suddenly, it went out. We looked into the fireplace and saw a mass of newspaper pulp and wet logs. The whole house smelled of vodka. Drew rolled his eyes at me and I followed him upstairs. As we went I looked back at Christopher. He was pushing the wet logs around with his foot, coating his trainer in vodka and ash and mumbling something about how stupid everything was. I remembered quite clearly thinking at that moment that I was lucky to be with someone like Drew, who did things sensibly and carefully and never lost his temper, and that someone like Christopher, sexy though he was, would be too complicated and high-maintenance and you'd never know what he was going to do next. When we went upstairs, Drew sat on the bed, put his hands in his lap and said, 'You don't think he's attractive, do you?'

  'Who?'

  'Christopher.'

  'Of course not,' I said. 'Why?'

  'Most women think he is.'

  'Well, I don't. Well, perhaps objectively. But he's not my type. You are.'

  In Torcross, in what I was already thinking of as my new home, I used firelighters on my fire: two at the bottom, underneath several of the smaller, drier logs. I left some space for air to circulate, and then put a bigger log on the top. The fire, when it got going, smelled earthy and wintry. The kettle whistled, and I went to the kitchen and made myself some tea and toast with prawns, pepper and lemon. B lay in front of the fire concentrating on her chew. It was only one o'clock, but through the bay window I could see the sky hemmed at the bottom with pale light and then the thin band of the horizon, almost black against it. Then the grey-blue sea creasing a little and then breaking in lacy ruffles onto the shingle. I watched the sea like this, dressing and undressing, for a long time. What if? I thought, in time with the waves. What if?