Our Tragic Universe

by Scarlett Thomas

  Oscar had sent the books he'd promised. There they were in Totnes post office, in a huge mail sack, along with what looked like an unearned-royalty statement from my literary agency, which I wasn't in a hurry to open. They contrasted oddly, the thin envelope and the big grey sack, and on the way down the hill I felt like a burglar on my way to return some stolen goods, and carrying an apology note. I remembered another Zen story. A Zen master is in his hut when a robber turns up. The Zen master has nothing to steal: all he owns are the clothes on his back. Feeling sorry for the robber, who has come such a long way and made such an effort, the Zen master offers him these clothes. The robber takes them and runs off into the night, and the Zen master looks up at the sky and thinks, 'Poor fellow. I wish I could also give him this beautiful moon.'

  It was just before four when I put the books in the car, and I realised that if I hung around for another forty-five minutes or so I could surprise Christopher by picking him up from the bus stop. I walked back up the hill and browsed for a while in the bookshop, looking for books on the Titanic, and trying to work out what Byron poem Rowan had been talking about. I tried randomly flipping open the pages of Don Juan, and then Childe Harold's Pilgrimage. On about the fourth flip I found the reference in Childe Harold's Pilgrimage. I considered buying the book, but it was almost £10 and seemed to tell a long, tragic story in verse. It was the kind of thing I would always mean to read, but never actually would. After all, I'd failed even to read an Agatha Christie novel that meant something to Rowan.

  I was planning to get something for dinner from the Happy Apple, and I couldn't really afford to spend any more money, but I went to the Barrel House for a large soya latte anyway, thinking that there was probably a can of beans in the cupboard at home. There was a big pile of newspapers on a table in the corner, including the most recent Sunday Times. And there, on the front cover, was a picture of Rosa. She was perched on a wooden table with her legs crossed, looking as deeply into the camera as she could with her pale, faraway eyes.

  Her interview was printed in one of the supplements over a double-page spread, and there was a pull-out quote of her saying, 'Of course I believe in ghosts.' It had never occurred to me that she would ever go public with the story of her family's poltergeist, but here she was talking about how terrified they'd all been to see books flying around the house every night, and how she still couldn't bring herself to buy a breakable ornament, just in case. She talked about the research she'd done for her part in Bump in the Night, and how it had further convinced her that there were unexplainable things out there. 'At some point in history, starting a fire would have looked like magic,' she said. 'Or listening to the radio, or speaking on the telephone, or using remote central locking on a car. Things seem like magic only when we don't understand the underlying forces that make them happen.' The structure of the piece followed the intertwined paths of Rosa's career and life to date, using the supernatural aspects of both as a focus. There was just one paragraph at the end about Anna Karenina, which she was due to start shooting in May. I half-read, half-scanned the article until I saw the detail that my mother had clearly felt she couldn't tell me: the actor due to play Vronsky was Andrew Grey. Drew. So they did get together in the end. Or they would now. I knew why my mother hadn't mentioned this, of course, but I wondered why she hadn't mentioned the detail about the poltergeist. Then I realised that we had never spoken about that episode since about 1980, when it had bizarrely become one of the 'irreconcilable differences' in my parents' divorce case.

  Christopher wasn't at the bus stop, and when I went round to the project he wasn't there either. As darkness fell I drove home to Dartmouth on the back roads, known as the Lanes. These were ancient tracks on which people had probably travelled when compiling the Domesday Book. They had hedgerows on both sides and witchy cottages with smoke curling out of chimneys. On the Lanes I often got a strange feeling, as if I was back in that mysterious forest that I still wasn't sure I hadn't imagined in 1978. It was almost like becoming a fictional character in a world containing something more than the Standard Model and evolutionary theory, and in this world anything was possible, and things made a different, mysterious kind of sense. I wondered about Christopher, and where he was. He was probably at home, wondering where I was. If I told him I'd tried to pick him up he'd be happy, but then when he realised I'd failed he'd be sad. Perhaps he'd been killed in an accident on the project, and that was why he hadn't been at the bus stop. If he had been killed, I found myself thinking, then I'd be free. I erased the thought from my mind, but I couldn't undo the fact that I'd had the thought in the first place.

  ***

  Christopher usually returned home at around half past five, but there was no sign of him by six. I barely noticed his continued absence until then, so busy was I with the contents of Oscar's sack. Anyone walking into the sitting room would probably think that I had lost my mind. There, laid out in front of me, were three gigantic piles of New Age, esoteric and self-help books, roughly separated into three categories: 'Stupid, 'Offensively stupid' and 'Absurd but well-meaning. Where was something sensible like New Scientist when I needed it? Here, in front of me, were so many different kinds of madness that I could hardly breathe. Even B looked baffled, and had already knocked over the 'Stupid' pile once by wagging her tail at it. This particular way B had of wagging her tail was, to my mind, her way of asking, 'What on earth are you doing?' It was a half-wag, a low wag, that stopped and started like a misfiring propeller. I re-stacked the 'Stupid' pile and wondered if there really were that many people who felt so victimised by contemporary life, with its electromagnetic fields, meetings, childcare worries, pollution, radiation, mobile-phone masts, caffeine, sugar, monosodium glutamate, logical husbands and emotional wives, that they needed a book, or several books, to get over it and learn things like downshifting, going organic, positive thinking, saying no to people, overcoming anxiety, loving without conditions, establishing boundaries, asserting themselves and breathing correctly.

  My 'Absurd but well-meaning' pile was the smallest, and B knocked this over next on her way to curl up on the armchair. As well as Second World by Kelsey Newman, this pile included a book on dog psychology called The Dog Whisperer, with which I vaguely threatened B as she went past. There was also an academic-looking book called Radical Healing; a book called The Fool and His Journey that came with a pack of Tarot cards; a book called Mapping the Astral Plane; and one I'd set aside partly for myself, but also for Tim, called Taming the Beast. These might create the beginnings of a good feature, I thought.

  In contrast, my 'Offensively stupid' pile, which had remained erect, contained books that were big and brash and that each featured a TV psychic or a white-teethed guru with a list of at least twenty other publications to his or her name. Many of these books had garish covers, large type, pictures of beaches, palm trees, angels or the moon, and blurbs full of exclamation marks. They were obviously aimed at people who recognised the TV psychics as old friends, and who would use anything the cosmos had to offer in order to try to win the Lottery and go to bed with more people. There were DIY kits that enabled you to connect with your guardian angel or spirit guide; collections of love spells; teach-yourself books on harnessing the power of runes, the I-Ching and astrology; primers on connecting with your past lives and finding out whether you were indeed Cleopatra, Shakespeare or Elizabeth I; achieving success; and—heavens above—cosmic ordering. The cosmic-ordering book had a quote on it from a washed-up game-show host from the eighties. The esoteric had gone horribly mainstream. I rang Libby.

  'I can't cope,' I said.

  'What with?'

  I giggled. 'I've got a book here that says all I need to do if I want something is ask the universe for it. You can, apparently, even "super fast track" your order. I've got about fifty similar books. I said I'd write a feature on them for the paper. I must have lost my mind.'

  'Maybe you could ask the universe to write the feature for you.'

  'Good idea
. This book, which, by the way, is all of fifty pages long, was featured on afternoon TV. "You too can have everything you desire!" That's what it says on the back. Apparently the author went from "zero to hero" using this method and earned lots of pound-signs.'

  'Presumably nobody ever desires anything like world peace.'

  'No.'

  'Or hand-knitted socks.'

  'That would be useful, actually. By the way, how are you?'

  'Oh, awful. The same.'

  'Can you talk?'

  'Not really.'

  'Bob's there?'

  'Yeah. Bob's got a new book of guitar riffs. He's about to crank up his amp and start rocking out, aren't you, dear?'

  'Oh, well, say hi to him for me.'

  'Meg says "Hi",' Libby said. I could hear Bob say something cheerful back.

  'You'll never guess what,' I said.

  'What?'

  'Drew's playing Vronsky in Anna Karenina. With Rosa.'

  'What, Drew-your-ex?'

  'Yeah. How sick is that? He always fancied her.'

  'God.' She sighed. 'Why is life so complicated?'

  'Don't ask me. So what am I going to do with all these books?'

  'I don't know. All that stuff would give me a headache,' Libby said.

  'It's giving me one,' I said. 'I find it all so depressing, but I don't know why. Actually, I do know why. In the past I've always got a bit pissed off with those broadsheet sceptics who make their living being passionately angry about homoeopathy, God, synchronicity or whatever, because it's as if they can't get beyond their emotions, and in their rage they become as faith-driven as the beliefs they criticise. I always said they give scientists a bad name. After all, science has to be about asking unthinkable questions, not closing down debate. But I can honestly see where they're coming from now. I mean, so much of this New Age stuff is obviously just a total rip-off. Half the books try to get you to pay to join a premium website at the end if you want to read more, just like those tabloid horoscopes where you get a couple of sentences on your career and then have to phone in to find out if it's your week for love. How can people do this to other people? How can they exploit vulnerable people's hopes and dreams like this?'

  'Maybe people enjoy imagining this stuff. Maybe they don't think it's real.'

  'Half the books claim to be able to improve people's love lives and career prospects, though, so they kind of are being encouraged to think of it as real.'

  'It sucks.'

  'It really does.'

  'Do you think you're pissed off about Drew and Rosa and projecting it onto these books?'

  'I don't know. Probably. And Christopher's disappeared as well. But honestly, these books are really terrible. If you could see them...'

  'Well, never mind. Let's cosmically order something,' Libby said.

  I laughed. 'We don't know how.'

  'It can't be that hard if you said the book's so short. What does it say you have to do?'

  I skimmed it. 'Um. OK, well, this'll work for my feature, at least. Did I mention that it's a gonzo feature?'

  'What's that?'

  'Where you do the thing you're writing about. So if you were writing about wrestling, you'd have a go at doing it. Or instead of going and writing about a village fête, you'd try to grow a prize marrow yourself. It's a bit like travel writing, because the writer is always in the story. I don't know if I want to be in this story at all. I'll have to become a complete idiot.'

  'What's the point of being in the story, though, ideally?'

  'It's so you can see what something's actually like, rather than make assumptions about it. I've got a friend who says that the human being is a big computer that can compute everything that machines can't—feeling, emotion and so on. For the human, no sum is too big. It's true, really. You can't learn about love from reading books. You have to experience it, especially if you want to write about it.'

  'If you can only experience things through experience and not books, what's the point in writing books of your experiences?'

  'I guess because you can only experience some things in one lifetime, so everyone experiences and writes different things. Or maybe having experienced love, or hate or whatever in one context, people are interested in reading about it in another context. You always ask such difficult questions.'

  'Sorry. So ... Cosmic ordering?'

  I skimmed some more of the book.

  'Right. You have to believe everyone's connected, which isn't that hard considering we must have a common ancestor, and then, blah, blah, just kind of ask the universe for stuff. There's lots of waffle. You have to activate your cosmic eye.'

  'Your what?'

  'It's in the middle of your forehead.'

  'OK. Is that it? I've done it. So what do you want?'

  I thought I didn't know what I wanted, but now I said, 'Money.' I breathed in deeply and felt an asthmatic crackle in my lungs. 'You know what?' I said, and coughed. 'I also want to move out of this damp, crappy house, and I want Christopher to start taking an interest in me, and I want some passion in my life. I want to know how to write my novel. Oh, and I'd quite like the ability to knit socks.'

  Libby laughed. 'Easy. OK. So what do I want?'

  'I don't know. What do you want?'

  She sighed. 'God. This is hard.'

  'You want Mark?'

  'I don't know. I think so.' She dropped her voice to a whisper as the sound of an electric guitar started up in the background, with lots of reverb. Then there was the sound of a door closing, and the guitar noise dulled. Libby's voice became normal again. 'I'm in the kitchen.' She sighed. 'Yes, I do want Mark. But I also want Bob not to hate me. And I want Saturday night not to be a disaster and I really want my yarn to come so that I can start knitting the labyrinth...'

  'I thought big men were building the Labyrinth.'

  'Ha, ha. Didn't I tell you about the crazy book I got? It's called Knit Your Own Fantasy Story. Old Mary saw me with it at knitting club and started flicking through it for ideas for raffle prizes. You know they're having a raffle for the opening of the Labyrinth? She worked out that we could easily knit a labyrinth based on the maze pattern, and then sew it onto a landscape. She also wants to knit an enchanted forest and some mythical animals. So I'm doing the labyrinth and a couple of trees. Old Mary's knitting the landscape and the rest of the forest. I don't know why we're doing the forest, but Old Mary said she wanted the challenge. Did you get your wool, by the way?'

  'Yeah. It's kind of silvery blue, with mohair in it. And I got a pattern for slippers. But I don't know when I'm going to have time to make them, what with this feature to do and my novel to write. You have to "block" them at the end. I was supposed to block my scarf. Is it worth it?'

  'Yes.'

  'Oh. It sounded a bit lame. Do you really have to pin things to a board?'

  'Sometimes. Mostly I just shape things on a towel and leave them to dry on a clear table or something.'

  'I don't have a clear table. Hang on a minute.'

  I put the phone on the arm of the sofa and took off my cardigan. This house never warmed up, not even in the summer, but it had been getting more and more humid as I spoke to Libby, as if a storm was approaching. I picked up the phone again just as lightning flashed outside. 'God,' I said to Libby. 'Lightning.'

  'Where?'

  'Didn't you see it?'

  'No.'

  'You must have done.'

  'You're probably imagining it. So what am I going to ask the universe for?'

  'I don't know. True love?'

  'Holy shit. You want money first; I want love, although I wouldn't say no to some money of my own either, and I'd like to be better at gardening. What else is there to want apart from money, love and creative talent?'

  'World peace?'

  'If everyone had money and love and creative talent there'd be no need for world peace. OK. Yes, I want love. I want Mark. Hey—what would happen if Bob found this book and cosmically ordered me to love him more than I l
ove Mark?'

  'The world would probably end,' I said.

  By eight there hadn't been any more lightning, and Christopher still wasn't home. He didn't have a mobile phone, and I thought about ringing his father but didn't. Instead I sat looking at my knitting pattern for a while. Then I cast on the three stitches I needed to start the side of one slipper at the toe, and knitted one row. This took about one minute. The next row had an Ml increase, and so I had to go upstairs and get my How to Knit book so that I could study the diagram and find out how to do it. Then I made a cup of coffee and tried to do it, failed, and unravelled all my stitches and cast on again. The beautiful silvery blue wool was becoming worn and grubby already. I cut off the end and started again.

  This was like my bloody novel. Everything I'd ever thought about it had seemed like a good idea once, and then I had another 'good idea' and had to delete the one before. Now I wondered how on earth I was going to use all these New Age books. OK, the feature provided a structure and focus for my protagonist, and would get her out and about a bit, but how would I use the notebook format to convey that she was embarking on this feature and not just randomly reading crap? And how would the books change my protagonist? Would she find that science triumphs over irrationality, or the reverse? Was there any other option? I sighed and unravelled my knitting again. Still no Christopher, and I was hungry.