Our Tragic Universe

by Scarlett Thomas

  'How?'

  'Send me the books and I'll pick maybe four or five of them. Each one will tell me to do or think something different, and each one will promise that my life will change because of it. I'll do what each one says and see what happens. Then I'll write about it. It'll be a kind of gonzo project. Almost an ethnography, if I meet some weird people.'

  'Excellent. I love it.' He paused. 'Make it funny.'

  'Oh, I will.'

  'Deliver at the beginning of April,' he said. 'Make it three thousand words if you like. We'll do a double-page spread with a picture. Paul is very into first-person features just now.' Paul was the editor of the paper.

  'OK. That's great. Thanks, Oscar. Sorry about the fuck-up.'

  'That's all right. I know what you novelists are like.'

  Then he was gone. Before I put my phone away I checked my credit. It was down to fifteen pence. Still, my mistake had worked out quite well. I had lost £400 and some weekend time, but gained about £1,500 and whatever I could get from selling the New Age books afterwards. But by the end of the process I would have lost a lot more time. You should have said no, said my brain. Perhaps I could recoup the lost time by using the research in my novel somehow. Could my poor, bashed-about protagonist, once metafictionally called Meg, but now nameless, also do a first-person, almost-ethnographic project? The novel could always take new layers, especially as I was always stripping them out. I was a big believer in layers, and taught a whole day on them on the retreats, emphasising to the students that a novel is never one storyline, but many layers of storylines. Something like an ethnography—and I could make it full-blown in the novel—would enable my protagonist to do things she wouldn't normally do, which would be good. Lately I couldn't motivate her to even go out of the house. Perhaps she could be an anthropologist who objects to exoticism and therefore decides to do an ethnography of her home town: that would give her an excuse to be out taking part in life and I wouldn't need to mess around with rainforest locations and tribespeople. But that must already have been done. I had long ago realised that I needed a love-interest too, but my protagonist wouldn't fall in love with anyone normal. Maybe an older man?

  I thought about writing a few notes, but when I took the lid off my pen I just sat there with it poised in midair while the fluid of my conversation with Oscar drained out of my mind. Once this had happened I thought I'd be able to work, but instead I found I was left with a great amount of sediment which amounted to this: where the fuck had the Kelsey Newman book come from? How in God's name had I managed to review a book Oscar hadn't even sent? I'd messed up reviews in all sorts of ways in the past, but I'd never reviewed the wrong book. I sighed. Perhaps Vi had sent it. It didn't seem likely; I doubted Vi would send me anything ever again. But if she'd blurbed it, she'd definitely read it. But how could she have blurbed it? It sounded like the kind of project she would hate. Then again, what was it doing with a note from Oscar in it? For the rest of the afternoon my phone kept vibrating and whoever it was left messages, but I didn't have the funds left to pick them up, or call anyone back.

  On Boxing Day evening in Scotland we'd all gone to bed early. The discussion about Zen stories had looked as if it might turn nasty, and everyone was still upset about Lot's Wife, especially when Vi talked about some of the people she remembered from the monastery. The next day I went to the beach early with Frank and Vi. While Vi sat on a rock, looking out to sea, Frank did t'ai chi. I sat on my own rock, watching them both. After a while Vi stripped down to an old red-and-white striped bathing costume, screamed, dived into the freezing water and screamed again. For the next few minutes she thrashed around like a fairground goldfish, although a rare one with a voice: 'Ow, ow, it's cold, oh fucking shit, it's cold.' Then she started doing a kind of backwards butterfly stroke that looked both silly and graceful at the same time. I knew that by doing this Vi was, in her own way, becoming one with the universe, and the universe had therefore also become silly and graceful at the same time. For me this kind of connection seemed impossible. I knew that if I tried to become one with the universe it would reject me in the same way the sea rejected the boats whose skeletons framed the shore.

  'You OK?' Frank called to me.

  'Yeah. Just cold,' I said. 'Especially watching Vi. She's giving me goosebumps.'

  'Do you want to do some of this?' he asked.

  'What? T'ai chi?'

  'Yeah. Come on. It'll warm you up.'

  I shrugged and walked over to him. He showed me a few movements, all of which were too subtle for me to really comprehend. I copied him for a while, but I didn't get very warm. I started jumping up and down instead, while watching him.

  'I've been struggling with this,' he said, showing me some fluid-looking movements. 'It's called "Carry Tiger to the Mountain".'

  I stopped jumping and smiled. 'That's a nice name. It looks good to me.'

  'You're also struggling a bit at the moment? Vi said something.'

  Vi's splashing was quieter now. She'd stopped complaining and was swimming out towards the lighthouse. But there was an energy in what she was doing that I just didn't seem to have. I wasn't struggling at all. There didn't seem to be any point. What would I struggle against? Christopher? My mother? Orb Books? My novel? Myself? Would I struggle for Rowan, a man who was too old for me and didn't want me anyway?

  'I think I'm a bit depressed. I'll be OK.'

  'You know we're always there. Come and stay in London if you like.'

  'Thanks. I might do,' I said, although I knew I wouldn't be able to afford the train fare or explain to Christopher why I was going.

  'Vi told me once that if you ask the sea for help it never fails you. I tried it a few times. It does make you feel better. You can just ask the sea for help and see what happens, or, alternatively, you can give it your problems. It's big enough to take them, after all. You could choose some large stones, make each one represent one of your problems and throw them in the water.' He shrugged. 'Probably sounds a bit hippy for you. I know you're more down to earth than we are—but sometimes you just need something to help you focus and let things go.'

  'Thanks, Frank. I'd feel too self-conscious doing it now, but if things get any worse I'll certainly think about it. I'll go to Slapton Sands when I get home. There are lots of big stones there.'

  On our last night in Scotland we all got drunk on sloe gin, and Claudia and I started recounting the most ridiculous Zeb Ross proposals we'd ever rejected, including one for a novel narrated by a cat, and another where one character turns out to be a manifestation of the Buddha.

  'What was that really weird Zen story from that manuscript?' Claudia asked me.

  'There were quite a lot,' I said.

  'The one with the psycho old woman who burns down the monk's hut.'

  'Oh, yes,' I said. 'That narrows it down. How did it go?'

  'There is an old woman who looks after a monk while he meditates for twenty years,' Vi said. 'Is this it? She gives him food and water and makes his clothes and eventually sends a prostitute to throw herself at him because she wants to see what he does with all his wisdom. He's taken a vow of chastity, but will he be tempted? The monk says something poetic to the prostitute about an old tree growing on a cold rock, and tells her there is "no warmth". When the spurned prostitute tells of this, the old woman is angry that she has supported someone who after twenty years has not learned compassion. Then she goes and burns his hut down.'

  'Yes. I hated that one,' Claudia said.

  'Why?' I said. 'I liked it.'

  'It doesn't tell you anything useful,' she said. All it says is that this psychotic old bitch has got this poor monk in her clutches and has resorted to violence because he isn't exactly what she thinks he should be. It's a horror story, really, of someone who sets out to ruin someone's life, like an obsessive stalker.'

  'Only if it's seen from the monk's perspective,' I said.

  We drank a bit more, and then Claudia reminded me of the manuscript about a teenager
who takes up gardening and accidentally grows lots of carnivorous plants that speak to her all the time and become her only friends. We both started giggling and trying to remember terrible lines from it, like 'We've been growing since the beginning of time, Melissa!' or 'You too will taste the exquisite blood of the bluebottle and become one of us!'

  Then, out of the blue, Vi said to me, 'My God, Meg. When exactly are you going to realise that the world is more complicated than a predictable formula? You're so scared of taking things seriously, it's no wonder you can't get on with your real novel.'

  If she hadn't begun by using my name I would have assumed she was talking to Claudia. It was the first time she'd ever said anything to me that wasn't supportive, kind or indulgent. I didn't react to it very well.

  'I am so sick of this,' I said back, before I'd really thought about what I should say. 'Don't you realise that anyone can put together a story that has no shape? Anyone can make up a few random actions and string them together. Children do it all the time. The real skill is as Claudia says: you need to find original ways of doing everything Aristotle said you should do, which isn't at all as easy as just following his instructions. It takes some real hard work to create a reversal that's not clichéd, to have a recognition that isn't based on a token, or a "sudden realisation", or something the hero knew all along—but on the rising action and tension in the whole plot. You should read Aristotle again, because he tells you not just how to write those bottle-of-oil stories, but proper, meaningful tragedies. And yes, they're predictable too, sort of. But he says that one of the key things the writer has to do is to make the person who hears or reads the story feel astonished, even though the story itself has a formula and is written in accordance with probability and cause and effect. It's a great art to make someone surprised to see the picture, and even more surprised when they realise they had all the pieces all along.'

  'But that's the trick,' Vi said. 'Making people feel astonished when they hear the same old story is just the same as making people want a new kitchen every two years, and new clothes, and makeovers. People somehow forget that they've "heard it all before". These narratives don't make them see anything new. They don't defamiliarise anything in their lives.'

  'How does throwing together some random events help people to see things anew? Every time I go out I see random events. It's not art. Art needs artfulness.'

  'No one said that there's nothing in the vast space between formulaic narrative and completely random events,' Vi said. 'Life at its least artful is life that is trying to follow a formulaic narrative. Don't you think?'

  I didn't know quite what she meant, so I said, 'No.' I paused, but she didn't say anything, so I went on. 'You think Chekhov's so great...' I did too, of course, as she well knew. 'But even Chekhov couldn't get it together to write a novel. He found it too hard. He kept all his best observations and images for it, and they came to nothing, because actually making a plot hang together over eighty thousand words or more is almost impossible.'

  'He was busy making money with his short fiction and his plays,' Frank said. 'He was keeping his family afloat.'

  'Aren't we all,' I said.

  Chekhov's plan for his novel had been simple. He described it in a letter in 1888: 'The novel will take in several families and a whole district, complete with woods, rivers, ferry boats, railways. At the centre of this landscape are two principal figures, a man and a woman, with other individuals grouped around them like pawns. I do not yet aspire to a coherent political, religious and philosophical world view; my opinions change every month, and therefore I must confine myself to describing how my characters love, get married, have children, die, and how they speak.' To make a novel come together, perhaps you have to have a world view, even if it's wrong. But I hadn't settled on my own world view either, even one that was wrong.

  'You're just making excuses,' Vi said, sighing. 'You have to start writing seriously before it's too late. At least Chekhov wrote classic short stories while he wasn't writing his novel. You've so far managed not much more than a few thin novels that preach neo-liberal morality to unsuspecting teenagers. You tell them that the world is OK if you can find a way of owning it, and possessing it and making "your own" sense of it. You tell them, indirectly, that everything fits into some predetermined story-structure where you can do whatever you want, but only if you're the hero. You tell them what a happy ending consists of, which is always individual success. You tell them that nothing irrational exists in this world, which is a lie. You tell them that conflict exists only to be neatly resolved, and that everyone who is poor wants to be rich, and everyone who is ill wants to get better, and everyone who gets involved with crime comes to a bad end, and that love should be pure. You tell them that despite all this they are special, that the world revolves around them...'

  'For God's sake,' I said. 'It's not that simple, and you know it. I'm not saying that Zeb Ross novels are high art, but some of them have marginalised characters who learn that it's OK to be who they are...'

  'To accept their lot in life and not make a fuss...'

  'But they do make a fuss. Stories are all about fuss. You seem to think a three-act narrative comes together like knitting a scarf, but it doesn't. It's bloody hard work. Have you ever tried it? No, of course you haven't. You haven't even tried to write one of the flabby, plotless stories you seem to think are so much better, that any six-year-old could string together in about five minutes. Your writing is easy because you go somewhere and do things and just write them down. But fiction is different. It's fucking hard and at least I try to do it, which is more than can be said for you.'

  As I got up to leave the room I saw Frank move towards Vi and put a hand on her shoulder. Before I left the next morning I saw only Claudia, who said, 'Gosh. I've been wanting to say all that for years. Good on you, girl.' Sebastian was still saying 'Good on you, girl' when I went, and Claudia was trying to bribe him, with a piece of banana, to go back to his Shakespeare quotations before Frank and Vi got up. I hadn't spoken to Frank or Vi since.

  Almost a week later, on New Year's Day, I'd woken up in the house in Dartmouth, pressed my leg against Christopher's and then watched as he got up without looking at me and left the room. He'd clearly been unsettled by Christmas too, although he hadn't yet said why. The day ahead was gaping like a black hole. I couldn't go to the library, because it wasn't open. I couldn't read a book, because Christopher thought you should spend a day reading a book only if you were ill, or if someone was paying you to do it. He'd hardly said anything since he got back from Brighton, but he had mumbled something the day before about building a new kitchen cupboard. I imagined holding nails, sanding things and then waiting for the cupboard to fall off the wall.

  It wasn't Christopher's fault: things fell off our walls because under the white plaster they were made of nothing more than wattle and daub, a Neolithic concoction still used in the nineteenth century when our house was built. According to a History Channel documentary, wattle and daub consisted of thin wooden strips held together with dung and straw. When things like cupboards fell off walls, Christopher would weep on the sofa and I would make him cups of tea, tell him he wasn't a failure and find a historical programme for us to watch on TV. I would want to escape to the bath with a book, but I'd end up watching something about the Cheddar man, or Boadicea, or glaciers, or Stonehenge, and tell myself it wasn't a waste of time, because these things could easily find a place in a Zeb Ross novel, or even, until I felt the need to delete them, my own. Then I would start coughing, because of the damp in the house, and my lungs would put themselves in a weird kind of Safe Mode until I could go outside again. I'd never directly told Christopher that the damp in the house made my asthma worse, thinking only an idiot wouldn't be able to see that. This was a bit passive aggressive, of course, as was the way I hammed up my coughing when we were arguing. Sometimes I dredged up stuff from my lungs that felt as if it had been there since the beginning of time.

  The New Year's D
ay black hole had been sucking me in, which is what black holes do. While Christopher loudly brushed his teeth and went to the toilet, I took four drops of the flower remedy Vi had made me in Scotland, and looked out of the bedroom window onto the rooftops. I imagined the sea beyond them, and the castle. The castle was just a postcard to me, and the sea didn't go anywhere. I suddenly thought that I could get up every morning for the rest of my life and look at the rooftops and it was possible that nothing would ever change. If nothing changed, I may as well be dead. Perhaps some people began every day with this thought, but it was new to me. I thought I'd already had all the depressing thoughts it was possible to have. Then I felt ungrateful, although towards whom or what I didn't know. It wasn't even as if I could stand at the window yearning for something, apart from money. I'd given up yearning for Rowan. I did want to apologise to Vi, but I didn't know how. She was due to come down and open the Labyrinth in March. Once I'd found out what it was and heard they were looking for a celebrity to open it, I'd suggested Vi. She'd been on TV a couple of times, as well as having a bestselling book, and I thought she might like the Labyrinth. I knew I'd have to find some way of apologising before then.

  In the end I'd driven out to Slapton Sands with B and stood on the shingle beach wondering what it would be like to walk into the flat blue sea and never come out again. Of course, I didn't walk into the sea. I looked down, and instead thought about the way you could move shingle around and it would still be shingle. It should have been freezing, but the air was clammy and a light, warm spray settled on my hair. B was hyper-alert at Slapton Sands, even in the winter, her paws touching the shingle lightly as if it was made of jagged pieces of broken glass. I felt almost as bleak as I had done in Dartmouth when I'd bought my wool, and on the long car journey with B back from Scotland. This time I did ask the sea for help. I stood there, looking down at the breaking waves, and I said, 'Help me,' and then added, 'Please.' The act of asking for help made my eyes fill with tears. But the sea said nothing, just splashed more waves at me. So I picked up some large stones and imagined that each of them represented one of my problems. My argument with Vi. My continuing lack of money. Christopher's despair. My despair. The damp house. My novel. Sex. It could have gone on, but I thought I should stop there. Then I threw the stones into the sea, and didn't feel like I had thrown them away at all; I felt like I should go in after them. If I did, would Christopher be embarrassed at my funeral? Would there be an obituary?