Our Tragic Universe

by Scarlett Thomas

  While we had been talking, we had somehow started to hold hands again.

  'So if you saw a fairy...' Rowan said. 'What would you do?'

  'You were going to tell me something about fairies, weren't you? The Cottingley Fairies.'

  'Yes. But first I'm interested. What would you do?'

  'What would I do? I don't know. Probably tell myself I hadn't seen it.'

  'But because you want the universe to make less sense, not more? I mean, you wouldn't go out and look for evidence of more fairies, for example? You'd rather look the other way?'

  'Yeah, I think so. I'd want to be uncertain about what I'd seen.'

  'Me too. I thought I was weird.'

  'You are weird. I think most people do want to know things for definite.'

  'Oh. That's probably true.'

  'But you didn't see fairies?'

  He laughed. 'No. Neither did the girls from Cottingley who claimed they had. At least, they almost certainly didn't. My grandparents lived just down the road from where it all happened, and they believed in the Cottingley Fairies, which made it all a bit of a shock for me later when I found out they didn't exist—the fairies, that is, not my grandparents. The basic story is that in 1917 two girls, Frances Griffiths and Elsie Wright, took photographs of fairies. Frances kept getting into trouble for playing in Cottingley Beck—a kind of stream—and ended up telling her mother she went there to see the fairies. No one believed she'd seen fairies, so she borrowed her father's camera and set off to lure them out so that Elsie could take a picture of them. When he developed the photo her father thought it was a fake. But Frances's mother was involved with the Theosophists, and eventually news of this extraordinary photograph got back to Arthur Conan Doyle. He ended up writing a book about it. Perhaps like Tolstoy, Conan Doyle discovered spirituality later in life. His book The Coming of the Fairies is quite bizarre. He absolutely believed in the story of the fairies, and the photographs, and saw them as evidence for a complex spirit world. It took years for Frances and Elsie to own up to the fact that they had faked the photographs. In fact, it wasn't quite as simple as that. They kept hinting at it in the sixties—on chat-shows and in magazine interviews. At one point they admitted that the cut-out images had been stuck to trees with hat-pins. In the end they admitted that they'd faked "all but one" of them, and said that they really had seen fairies but couldn't get them to keep still for real photographs.'

  'That's amazing,' I said. 'What did they look like, these fairies?'

  'They looked like cut-out illustrations from fairy stories.'

  'Seriously?'

  'Yeah. You'd think so, if you saw them now. But Conan Doyle saw something else. Or he wanted to see something else. It wasn't just him—all sorts of "experts" looked at the pictures. One woman said that this was the discovery of a new world, even while commenting that the fairies were artificial-looking and flat, and that one of the gnomes had hands like fins. This was, of course, because Frances and Elsie hadn't done a very good job of cutting him out. What fascinated me wasn't whether or not the fairies "really existed", but why and how those girls faked them, and why people like Conan Doyle believed it would be impossible for these girls—one merely the daughter of a mechanic—to have the depth of character to forge anything. He was much more prepared to believe in fairies than to believe in these girls, in fact. But Elsie had been working in a darkroom at a greeting card factory, faking pictures of dead soldiers and their families looking happy together. She had good technical experience making composite photographs. And Frances was an interesting character. She had grown up in South Africa and must have been pretty freaked out to end up in Cottingley. I certainly was when I lived there for a while before university. One of the really strange things is going from a hot country to a cold country. The cold doesn't hit you for a few days; it's as if you've got out of a warm bath at first, and you carry some of the heat with you. But when it does hit you, it's awful. You need more clothes, and you feel like you're starting to rot inside them. And everybody stays indoors all the time, in the cold and the dark. I could easily imagine Frances going out on the first warm day of spring and seeing magic and mystery and fairies. I also like the story of how the photograph ended up in the hands of Conan Doyle. By chance, Elsie's mother's Theosophical Society meeting that night was all about fairies. So she happened to say that her daughter had this picture, and so on. The girls didn't set out to be notorious, but they were, for their whole lives.'

  'I guess they couldn't let Conan Doyle down, once he believed in their fairies?'

  'Exactly.'

  'So the "reasons" for the fairies are very complex, in the end—almost as complex as fairies themselves. Hmm.' I sipped my wine. 'I reckon everything is more complicated than people think, not simpler. And there's so much that people feel they can't say, or can't ever explain to anyone.'

  Rowan sighed. 'That's certainly true.'

  'Are you OK?'

  'Yes, of course.' He looked at his watch. 'I'd better go. Lise is getting the last train back from London. I need to go and pick her up from the station.'

  'Oh.'

  He took his hand away from mine. 'I'm sorry.'

  'I don't know why you're apologising to me. You're right. You should go.'

  'Meg...'

  'Look, Rowan, I'm not cross. I've got no claim on you, and who knows what would happen between us if we were single. It might be awful. Maybe I only want you because you're attached. But you said that you wanted to feel passionate and free again. So why don't you just do it? Leave Lise. Not to come and move in with me—you could go travelling, or anything you wanted. You find out what things feel like by acting them out in your professional life. I can't understand why you don't do it in your real life.'

  'You do want me?' he said.

  'Of course. I thought you knew that. You do know that, or you wouldn't keep apologising to me all the time and making me feel as if I'm making demands that you can't satisfy—which, by the way, I'm not.'

  'But you do want me.'

  'Yes.'

  'It's so complicated,' he said. 'But can I kiss you, just once more?'

  'I don't know,' I said, but I leaned towards him, and we kissed.

  'I shouldn't be doing any of this.'

  'Neither should I. I'm not going to be your mistress. You know that.'

  'Of course. I wouldn't ask you to be. But I can't leave Lise. You know that too.'

  'Why not?'

  He sighed. 'It's not simple. It's not as if we have young children—or even any children. It's not as if Lise has a terminal disease. But she does need me. I do a lot for her mother, for example. And Lise herself has terrible anxiety attacks, and I'm the only one who can talk her down from them. There are other things. We own a house. We have a holiday booked for later in the year. We've got a joint bank account. Our lives are completely bound together.'

  'I'm not being cruel,' I said, 'but it sounds like a normal relationship to me. It's never easy to leave. I didn't even know I was going to leave Christopher until the last minute. I'm not saying you should go out and pursue your own selfish adventures, having dumped someone who was holding you back. That's not exactly going to make you feel good about yourself. But can't you just talk to Lise and tell her how you feel?'

  'That would be dynamite. She'd say I was abandoning her for you, and then if we—me and you—did try something together, she'd be convinced she was right. She'd try to ruin my life. I know what she's like. If I split up with her, the one thing I couldn't do would be to get involved with you.'

  'God.'

  He looked at his watch again. 'We'll talk soon?'

  'Maybe. I guess so.'

  He got up, slipped on his jacket and walked to the door.

  'I want you too,' he said. 'Very much. I wish I could do something about it.'

  'So do I,' I said.

  And then he left.

  I sat on the sofa for a long time, watching the fire burn and listening to the sea outside sucking gently on the
sand, lapping at it and licking it and kissing it. I imagined it nibbling and nuzzling the shingle, breaking it down, breaking it down, saying 'Shhh' and 'Please'. It sounded as gentle as a whisper, as a promise. But as the night went on, the sea began to throw itself on the sand harder and harder, and the sand breathed 'Yes' and they drowned in one another, all night long.

  'I've got the answer,' Josh said.

  It was half past five on the evening of Kelsey Newman's talk, and Totnes was bathed in twilight. Rumour was half empty or half full, depending on how you looked at it. Almost all the wooden tables had little signs on them saying they were reserved at 7, or 8, or 9 P.M., and most people were just having after-work drinks. There was a family sitting looking at menus at a big table by the window. Two women with crewcuts and feminist earrings sat together at the other window. Well-thumbed newspapers were strewn around on the bar. An old Barrington Levy track was playing. I knew it from my Brighton days when I used to sometimes go with Christopher to score dope from an old Rasta DJ who kept trying to sell us vinyl as well.

  'Hello,' I said to Josh, and sat down. 'What was the question?'

  'The question was, "Why can only some people do magic in Kelsey Newman's universe?" But let's order first, and get some wine and stuff. I can drink now that I'm not on such strong medication. I'm going to dazzle you with my improved theory of the universe. Then I'm going to dazzle Kelsey Newman with a super-improved version, once you've picked up all the flaws.'

  'What time's he on? I've forgotten.'

  'Seven P.M. in Birdwood House.'

  'OK.'

  'I think we've got enough time for dinner and pudding. In case you're worried, Christopher isn't going to burst in on us. He's gone to live with Becca.'

  'God. What about Milly?'

  'She's gone too. Having Christopher in the house didn't really make it easier for her and Dad to get back together, as you can imagine. What do you want to drink?'

  'Sauvignon? But whatever. I've got to drive back later. And of course I want to be able to concentrate on what Newman's got to say. That's such a shame about Milly.'

  'Well, shall we get a bottle? That way you can have two glasses, and I can have about three. I think that will be OK.'

  'Yeah. OK.'

  'I'll order some food when I get the wine. What do you want?'

  'Oh, a pizza with extra chillies and no cheese, thanks. Here's some money.' I gave him a £20 note. 'I've got some news for you when you get back. And then you can tell me your theory of everything.'

  'It's going to blow you away,' he said. 'It's a theory of the anti-hero. The last part of it fell into place when I read that piece in the paper at the weekend by Vi Hayes. The second-last part happened when I read your feature. I think Vi Hayes might have read your feature too; she sort of replies to it. I brought her piece along with me in case you didn't see it. Here.' He took a print-out of the online version of the article out of his leather briefcase and gave it to me. I hadn't seen it. I'd been too busy finishing my first sock and getting over my trip to London for my last-ever editorial board meeting.

  As he got up to go to the bar, I realised he was wearing aftershave: it smelled like Ceylon tea and cinnamon. I looked at my phone. I hadn't heard anything from Rowan since I saw him at my place, and there was still nothing. Then I looked at Vi's piece. It was what she'd been talking about for such a long time: her theory of the 'storyless story. She argued that, although she had named and analysed it, the storyless story was not new. However, it had almost been forgotten in the West in recent years. The whole point of a storyless story, she said, is the subtle rejection of story within its own structure. In this sense, the storyless story is almost what we would recognise as metafiction, but more delicate. Rather than being similar to a snake swallowing its own tail (or tale) the storyless story is closer to a snake letting go of itself. Vi had written a manifesto for the storyless story that suggested that the author of the storyless story would usually be a Trickster, as would his or her characters. The storyless story has no moral centre. It is not something from which a reader should strive to learn something, but rather a puzzle or a paradox with no 'answer' or 'solution, except for false ones. The reader is not encouraged to 'get into' the storyless story but to stay outside. One of the items on the manifesto was this: A story about a hermit making jam could be as interesting as a story about a hero overcoming a dragon, except that it would be likely that the writer would make the hermit overcome the jam in the same way the hero overcomes the dragon. The storyless story shows the hermit making the jam while the hero overcomes the dragon, and then the hermit giving remedies and aid—and jam—to both the hero and the dragon before going to bed with a book.

  Why jam? The only person Vi knew who made jam was me. As I read on I realised that Josh was right and she had read my feature from the week before. I smiled. Characters in storyless stories, she said, didn't worry about what they wore or said or did. They were Fools stepping over the edge of the cliff on all our behalves, so that we can also step out of the restrictive frame of contemporary Western narrative. Surely, she argued, we should have stories not to tell us how to live and turn our lives into copies of stories, but to prevent us from having to fictionalise ourselves. Maui is a Trickster who shows us the non-sense of the world. Perhaps Tricksters, the characters you're not supposed to identify with, are in the end much more interesting role models than the princes and princesses of fairy tales, and the characters in American sitcoms that only exist in order to make us feel that we should be perfect, like them. Towards the end of the piece she recounted a Chinese fairy story about a tiger who catches a fox. The fox tells the tiger that he can't eat him, because he, the fox, is revered as the most important animal in the world. 'Walk behind me for a while,' the fox says, 'and you'll see the way the other animals respect me.' The tiger agrees, and they set off. The other animals, seeing the fierce tiger walking behind the fox, decide that he must indeed be the most important animal in the world and flee. The tiger, impressed, then lets the fox go on his way.

  At the end of the article Vi said she was putting the finishing touches on a book that covered not just the storyless story, which was her theory of folklore and fairy tales, but also the historyless history, the fictionless fiction, the romanceless romance, the unproven proof and the uncertain certainty. The idea of the whole book was the rejection of what she called 'totalitarian' structures in science and the humanities, and the acceptance of paradox in all disciplines. Fictionless fiction, I realised, was what all realist writers, including me, wanted to create: something super-authentic and with so much emotional truth that none of it seems like a story at all. I remembered Chekhov saying that a writer should practise 'total objectivity. At the time I hadn't understood how that could be possible. But fictionless fiction would be totally objective; it would have to be.

  'What's the news?' Josh said when he came back.

  I put the print-out down on the table.

  'It's good news, I think. You are now officially Zeb Ross.'

  'Wow! That's amazing. Thank you. Have I got a disability?'

  'Yes. You've got a disability. I hope this doesn't freak you out too much, but your "disability", not that I should probably call it that, is OCD. This was a complete coincidence. They'd already decided that this was something "romantic" and "cool" that might nevertheless stop Zeb appearing in public. I have to say it helped when I said that you really had it. I hope you don't mind.'

  'I don't think I do. Will you be my boss?'

  'No. No, in fact I've left Orb Books, as of Friday. You're on your own. Do feel free to turn them down if you want to. But it's a pretty good job, and the pay's OK.'

  'Why did you leave?'

  'I want to spend some proper time on my novel. My'—I glanced down at the print-out of Vi's article—' "fictionless fiction". I've also got some more work at the paper, which means I can leave genre writing behind completely for a while. I think it'll be good for me. Unlike Kelsey Newman I don't think we're immo
rtal beings and I want to try to do something worthwhile while I'm still alive. Not to get to some other dimension, but because this is probably my only chance. I'm not doing down Zeb Ross, and I think you'll have fun being him, but I think I've had enough for a while.'

  'No more narrative arcs in Torquay for you, then?'

  'I guess not.'

  'Are you abandoning the three-act structure as well?'

  'I don't know. Maybe.' I sighed and then sipped my wine. 'You know, I really don't understand why Vi blurbed Kelsey Newman's book, when she's obviously so against it. It's a puzzle.'

  'One that may well be solved later. Or now, if you like.'

  'Huh?'

  'Vi Hayes is coming to Kelsey Newman's talk. She's going to confront him about it.'

  'Confront him about what? And how do you know this?'

  'I Googled her. I've been reading and re-reading Second World since you gave it to me. Her quote has been staring at me the whole time. So when I saw her piece in the paper, and it said the opposite of what Kelsey Newman had said, I emailed her to ask why she'd given such a good quote to his book when she'd mentioned it in her piece as an example of bad narrative theory. I said I knew you; I hope you don't mind. She emailed back and told me that her quote had been taken out of context.' Josh pulled another piece of paper from his briefcase. 'What she'd actually written to the publishers was this: "No doubt many people will think this provides a blueprint for living based on what we have learned from the most well-loved fiction. But we don't need blueprints for living, and all we learn from the most well-loved fiction is that the moral high ground protects you from almost anything, and the way you get on in this world is to go out and kill anything monstrous, other or different because you don't like it, and that if you do this you end up with treasure and a princess—money and sex. I have studied forms of fiction for the last thirty-five years, on Pacific islands, in Russia, in South America and even in the kitchen of a nursing home in Brighton, and I have discovered that the Hero's Journey is not as universal as Joseph Campbell and now Kelsey Newman have suggested. The Hero's Journey is actually the colonial journey. It's the journey of the American Dream. There are many different types of story-pattern all over the world that don't show a hero going to good fortune from bad fortune through overcoming. Of course, at the moment, the loudest voices do tell these hero-myths, and claim that this has been so since the beginning of time. In fact, the abundance of this story-type at this point in history is a cultural, not an essential, fact. It's an interesting word, Overcoming. Newman uses it all the time in his book and each time it occurs I read it as a verb applied to a man who ejaculates too much, also in every sense. He comes onto everything. There are enough moralising neo-liberal forces in the world without Kelsey Newman adding a cosmic version, and therefore making the logic of globalisation universal."'