Our Tragic Universe

by Scarlett Thomas

  I kept wondering why a dog would want to pull a lever in the first place. The summary of the experiment hadn't mentioned what 'reward' they got. I guessed the dogs would have got treats every time they performed an action 'correctly. I made a mental list of things I thought B might pull a lever for. Food, of course, and, once, sex. Before she was spayed, she used to come into season and hump everything that moved and howl every night. But she'd also pull a lever on a machine that gave you tennis balls, pussycats, bound proofs and sunlight. There was an electric fan heater hidden in a cupboard upstairs. B couldn't quite switch it on with her paw, but she would try; at least, that's what it looked like. I was never sure whether she was trying to switch it on herself, or miming the movement to tell me to switch it on. In any case, it was impossible to have it anywhere in sight without her demanding that it was switched on. If I put it on low, she'd do the movement again until I put it on high. Once it was on, and up high, she'd turn around in front of it twice and then lie down and stay there quite happily until the room was like a sauna. Then she would start to pant, get up, find a cool section of the room and lie there. With some relief, I'd switch off the heater. Then, after about ten minutes, she would get up from her corner and start the whole process again. This was why the heater ended up in the cupboard. I wondered what a self-help manual for dogs would contain. Presumably it would tell dogs that they, not people, were the real pack leaders, and humans really enjoyed being rounded up, kept to a strict routine and having their faces licked. Perhaps it would also explain what happened to our instincts when we became domesticated, and how silly we look when we mime the movements of our ancestors and try to make our lives more interesting by imagining we are doing things that we are not really doing at all.

  When I woke up it was almost ten. The heating hadn't come on and there was a cold, mouldy smell in the house. I coughed a lot, drank a cup of coffee, changed into some tracksuit bottoms and a hoody, cleaned my teeth, put my hair in a ponytail and went to collect my car from Libby's. I hurried B down the Embankment and past the Boat Float, now full of brown water again. I let B off the lead when we got to Bayard's Cove, and she pottered around on the cobbles while I rang Libby's doorbell.

  'God, Meg, what's wrong?' she said as soon as she saw me.

  'I am leaving him. I'm leaving that bloody poky, damp house. Definitely,' I said. 'I've just come to get the car and then I'm going to pack it up with all my stuff and go to the cottage. I wanted to say it to someone.'

  'Shit. Come in and have a cup of tea. Bob's at the shop and I've got the day off because of my hangover. Check out the bags under my eyes. Come on, Bess!'

  B stopped sniffing the benches and hurried into Libby's house. I followed.

  'I can't stay long, though,' I said. 'I want to get my stuff out before Christopher gets back. I can't deal with another scene today. Oh—your house smells nice.'

  'It's lavender. Sacha brought it to say thanks for last night. Where's Christopher?'

  'I don't know. He wasn't there when I got back last night.'

  'Maybe he's left you.'

  I hadn't thought of that. 'Yeah. How are you?'

  'Oh, you know. What sort of tea do you want?'

  'Whatever.'

  Libby's kitchen was bright in the early spring sunshine and I noticed green shoots in her window boxes where bulbs were starting to come up. Libby and Bob did things like that: autumn would come and one day they'd go to a market and buy bulbs and then they would plant them and in the spring they would come up. I had never planted a bulb in my life. For me there was always some crisis or deadline and I had to ring my mother or soothe Christopher or walk B or finish reading something for Oscar. With all that out of the way there was always my novel to work on, always something there to delete. I remembered that there were only 43 words left to delete, and then it would be all gone. Perhaps then I would be able to start again. Libby handed me a cup of redbush tea with honey.

  'Well,' she said. 'This is it. This is going to be my life for the foreseeable future.'

  'Huh?'

  She laughed. 'You're leaving Christopher. Well, my news is that I'm staying with Bob. I decided last night, and I feel really good about it: kind of warm and comfortable inside. Mark wanted me back, but I said no. Didn't think I would, but I did.' She shrugged. 'I had a long talk with Bob in bed afterwards, and I suggested we go travelling together in the summer. We both need to get out of here. We're going stir-crazy.'

  'But I thought you said...'

  'What? That I can't sleep with him any more? Yeah. It is a problem. But everything else between us works so well, and I must admit that I've found that if I drink a bottle of wine and look at some porn on the Internet, and if he has a bath first so he totally smells of soap all over—then it's OK. Oh, God. That sounds awful. But it's no worse than lots of long-term couples. Is it?'

  'Me and Christopher never had sex at all, really.'

  'Well, there you go.'

  'But I am leaving him.'

  'Yeah, but for other reasons.'

  'You know,' I said, 'I can't believe he didn't want to just have sex all the time. I mean, what, otherwise, is the point of Christopher? Oh, God, I can't believe I just said that. But it's sort of true.'

  There was a pause. 'Holy shit,' she said. 'You're really doing it. You're really setting yourself free.'

  'Yeah.'

  'It's totally the right decision.'

  'Yeah. I know. I think.'

  'But don't rush into something else. Don't shag Bob's uncle, for example.'

  I rolled my eyes. 'Fat chance of that.'

  'What? So you're not denying it? He's the one you were talking about having an affair with, isn't he? I knew it. You're so evil.' She grinned.

  'Don't get carried away. I think I sort of overreacted to the whole thing. In reality he doesn't fancy me and I don't really fancy him either. We're just friends. I'm meeting him for lunch this week, but there's nothing in it. He's with someone...'

  'Like Bob's aunt.'

  'Yes, quite. Although they're not actually married. Anyway, it doesn't matter, because I'm really not into rebound things. Nothing's going to happen.'

  'He is kind of sexy. But he's very old.'

  'I get the point, Lib.' I put down my empty tea cup. 'That was lovely. OK. I'm off to move house.'

  'Good luck.'

  Before I left for Torcross I watered the peace lily, but of course I left it behind. In the end I also left most of my books to be collected at some later date, and so the entire contents of the rest of my life ended up fitting into three cardboard boxes and one big suitcase. B had a little box of her own, containing her blanket, three tennis balls in various states of existence, her rubber ball, two half-chewed pieces of rawhide, her bag of dog biscuits and the two tins of food that were left in the cupboard. I put all my unfiled paperwork and bank statements into several recycling sacks and looked for the first time in years at a clear desk. It was as if I had died and become the person lumbered with clearing the house of my useless old things. I barely looked at most of the pieces of paper before throwing them out. I could have done this months ago, and then maybe I'd have been happier there. I took my laptop, my cables, the books I needed for my feature, my notebooks, my best pen, my knitting bag, my jam-making pan and my ship in a bottle and packed them particularly carefully in the suitcase, as if they were the only things I was taking with me into the afterlife. I put everything into the car, including B, and then I went back up the steps to pick up my guitar and the sack of self-help books and check that I hadn't left anything behind. On my way down the steps I bumped into Reg, who was spraying weed-killer into the cracks between the paving stones outside his house.

  'A bit brighter today,' he said.

  For the first time ever, I didn't simply agree with him. 'You can't just kill everything because you don't like it,' I said. 'Why can't you let everything be?'

  I drove out of Dartmouth and after a while Start Bay emerged out of the brightening gloom like the
end of a set of parentheses in a book about the natural world. Inside the parentheses was a story about the sea. Outside them, the land: green, red and brown fields, and hills curling over the landscape. I saw small, delicate clumps of snowdrops, big rough patches of gorse, and along the thin road, houses with yellow roses and mimosa growing in their gardens. The mimosa buds were yellow balls that looked like little models of molecules. It was too early for them to flower.

  If I apologised, would Christopher have me back? I imagined him going home with a bunch of flowers and finding me gone, and then going straight round to Libby's to force her to tell him where I was. Somehow, in my fantasy, he turned up in Torcross at the same time as Rowan, who had established my whereabouts in roughly the same manner, and I sent Christopher away. But what if Christopher came, with his flowers, and Rowan didn't come? What sort of flowers would he bring? Knowing Christopher, he'd pick some daffodils from the Royal Avenue Gardens. 'Nature's for everyone, babe' is what he'd say when I told him off. And then I'd say that's why the council plants them in the first place, and then we'd have a big row. I hated the smell of daffodils anyway. Pages and pages of speculation clattered through my mind like something being composed on an old typewriter, and each time a page was completed— ding! —I imagined ripping it out of the machine and putting it straight in the bin. So now I was deleting writing that didn't even exist.

  My cottage in Torcross was like a sheet of paper with nothing typed on it. I couldn't unpack very much because I didn't have any furniture, so I sat at the window for hours just watching. People walked past every so often, and at one point a woman ran down the beach with her daughter, and they both splashed in the freezing cold sea. A man with a beard set up a tripod by the cliffs and started taking pictures of the rocks. An hour or so later, two people walked by my window: a woman who looked like a mountain and a man who looked like a hermit. I rushed to the door and went outside, thinking that of all people it was Vi and Frank who had come to find me here, and I was so happy and grateful. But in the daylight it wasn't them. They had Welsh accents and a West Highland terrier. I went back inside.

  Just after six everything outside turned the colour of twilight. The sea and the sky became the same inky blue, separated by a darkening horizon: a blue-black line on a washable blue background. I wanted to take a picture. If I had, it would have been all blue, with only subtle differences in the stripes of sand, sea, sky. When it became too dark to see outside I settled down in front of the fire on the big old sofa with my blankets and a bottle of wine Libby had given me, and drank myself to sleep as some cosmic force ink-jetted the last bits of sky. I thought I heard my mobile ringing a few times in the night, but when I woke up I had no missed calls.

  On Monday morning my mother rang.

  'You never answer the phone at home,' she complained. 'I'm going to give up trying it altogether and just ring you on your mobile from now on.'

  I put down Iris Glass's book, which I'd been reading since I woke up. It had household tips, of course, including instructions on cleaning a drain with baking soda and vinegar, and making your own furniture polish out of olive oil and lavender. But it also had sewing patterns, knitting patterns, music for folk songs to play in the evenings and prayers for sailors. At the end of every chapter were various 'Proverbs of Iris. Among these were: There is no such thing as change, although everything is always changing; and: Hope blooms uncertainly, like the flowers on a potted plant. I'd already turned down the page at the beginning of a chapter about knitting and mending socks. There was a shop in Totnes that did sock wool and I was planning to go there at some point and get some. Maybe I could teach myself to knit socks from Iris's instructions.

  'Did you get Christopher?'

  'No. It just rang and rang. What's wrong? Meg?'

  I hadn't thought that I felt sad, but suddenly I heard myself crying.

  'Meg? Are you OK?'

  'Yes, I am,' I said. 'I'm really OK. I've left Christopher. I've moved out.'

  'Oh, thank God. But where are you? Why aren't you here? Come home; we'll look after you.'

  'Thanks, Mum, but I'm OK here. I got some money from that TV deal. Remember I met that woman in London last year? The swordfish woman? Well, in the end they decided to option the books. I suddenly found I had some choices and so on a bit of a whim I came here.'

  'Where is "here"?'

  'Just a little cottage by the sea. Short-term let until I work out what to do.'

  'So you're still in Devon.'

  'Yeah.' Something in her tone made me add, 'It's my home. And I've got friends here, and stuff going on.'

  'Another man?'

  'No! Mum, God. I've only just broken up with Christopher.'

  'Have you got any definite plans?'

  I thought about this for a second. 'I'm writing a feature. But no, not really. I don't think it matters. I think maybe plans are overrated. I might knit some socks. I'm going to get back on with my novel, but I don't know how long that's going to take.'

  'So you're all by yourself there, in this "cottage"?'

  'B's here with me. She loves it. We've already been for a long walk down the beach this morning. We watched the sun come up. I had this amazing feeling when I got back, as if I had more empty space inside me than ever before. I made exactly the breakfast I wanted, and cleared away and washed up afterwards without anything being an issue. I haven't brought that much with me, but I put out a few books, and my guitar, and my favourite mug, and my jam-making pan and stuff, and I knew that no one was going to move them or wreck anything or come in and start an argument. I thought I'd be sad for ages and it would take months to make the transition properly, but I already feel like I would never go back. I just feel very... serene by myself. It's way less complicated. I bought so much cleaning stuff from the village shop you wouldn't believe it. I even got rubber gloves.' I didn't tell my mother that I wasn't planning to use any of it now I'd read Iris's book. I was going to use lemons, vinegar, baking soda, lavender oil and hot water instead. I'd been pleased to find there was an alternative to the other stuff, which all reminded me of advertisements containing people with perfect teeth, heroic expressions and offspring that looked like they were on their way to Hitler Youth rallies. Even the bottle of bleach I'd bought had a picture showing a woman's manicured hand opening the child-proof seal.

  'Hmm,' my mother said. 'When I left your father I ate cakes. You probably remember; you liked eating them too. I had this feeling of just being able to do what I wanted without him disapproving of it all the time. He always disapproved of cakes. Not cheese, not wine, not meat, not salt: just cakes, probably because there's something feminine about them. He hated cakes because they're voluptuous and sticky and plump, and because they're what I liked, probably. He never had a sweet tooth, which is fine, but he looked down on everyone who did. I remember once I was next door having tea and pastries with Maddy Cooper. They were these delicate little things from a patisserie in London. We were celebrating something; I can't remember what. We had Earl Grey tea in bone china cups and these little pastries, and your father came in to lend Caleb a book, and he said—God, I remember this clearly—he said, "Are you two stuffing yourselves again?" What a bastard. And Rosa, dear little Rosa, who must have been all of about ten at the time, said seriously, "You're very mean, Mr Carpenter."'

  My mother paused. I was about to point out that Rosa always had the knack of saying what other people were thinking, but had chosen, often for very good reasons, not to say. She was like a parrot, or a toddler, in that respect. But I didn't say anything because I could hear Mum starting to cry. 'Meg,' she said, 'there's no easy way to say this, but I've phoned to tell you that Rosa is dead. She killed herself yesterday. It's in all the papers.'

  The village shop had fresh bread, and basil growing in pots, which I bought, as well as a small block of beeswax and some more lemons. I also bought a copy of every national newspaper they had. I was shaking as I picked up the papers and read all the headlines. Rosa, clearly
inspired by Anna Karenina, had thrown herself under a train.

  'Got a lot to read there,' said the woman at the till.

  'Yeah,' I said. There were hyacinths in pots on the counter. Some were already in flower: pink ones, purple ones and blue ones. I chose one that had tight green buds. It would be impossible to know what colour it would turn out to be. 'Can I take this as well?'

  'They're two pounds fifty each,' she said.

  'That's fine,' I said.

  When I got back I put the hyacinth on the kitchen windowsill, built a fire and then spent the rest of the morning poring over the tabloids. B lay there in the warmth of the fire as if no one in the world had ever died. Rosa's suicide had taken place at a train station I'd never heard of and there had been no witnesses, or at least none had come forward yet. Rosa and Drew had been on their way back from a weekend in the countryside when it happened, but Drew was too devastated to say anything about it. In the end, there wasn't that much to find out from the papers, but I looked at every picture of Rosa, and read every obituary. I imagined a thousand journos all over Drew like funereal confetti.

  After a lunch of pasta, olive oil, basil leaves and bread, I went online to look for furniture. I needed a kitchen table, chairs and a bed, at the very least. I looked again at the bed I'd decided I would buy on Saturday. It wasn't going to be available for a month. I couldn't sleep on the sofa for a month, could I? I'd never bought furniture in my life before. If I ordered it online, would men bring it in lorries? Would I have to assemble it myself? It seemed too complicated suddenly, and my eyes felt heavy, but I forced myself to at least order the basics before shutting down the laptop completely. The books for my feature were piled next to me, and I picked up Mapping the Astral Plane and yawned again. I settled down on the sofa, barely managing the first paragraph before my eyes started to close, and I pulled the blanket over me and slept.