Our Tragic Universe

by Scarlett Thomas

  After lunch I felt a bit sleepy, and I was sick of looking at my laptop screen. I hadn't yet replied to Rowan. My novel still stood at 43 words. I closed the lid of my laptop and put it on the table. I hardly ever played my guitar when Christopher was around, but since he was still out cold I picked it up, brushed off some of the dust, checked it was tuned and started playing a few of my favourite chords: B7, E7, A minor, D7. My fingers hurt a bit, but I carried on. Last time I'd played had been before Christmas. But Bob would probably get his guitar out at some point on Saturday night, and I didn't want to be too rusty in case he suggested playing something. He was into carefully structured blues licks, and practised his scales every day. I didn't know any scales, and liked chords more than notes. I loved the almost-dissonance of changing from E7 to B7, and that move from C minor up to G# always made me sigh. Somehow I played well with Josh and not so well with Bob. Josh and I were both counters, him consciously, of course, and me less so. Me on rhythm guitar and him on drums; we never lost time, and he didn't care that I occasionally made some odd chord changes. As long as we kept time, he was OK. But Christopher didn't like us playing together, so we'd stopped.

  Towards the end of the day I put on my raincoat and walked B round the Royal Avenue Gardens and down the Embankment. I went to the cashpoint as well, and withdrew £100. After that, I went to Libby's shop. I opened the door a bit and stuck my head in.

  'Can we come in?' I said. 'The dog's wet.'

  'Yeah, sure. The health-and-safety guy was here yesterday. I doubt he'll come again today. He told me some terrifying stories. A wet dog near food is nothing in his world. Come out the back. I'll find a towel.'

  The back room of the deli smelled of strong coffee, cheese, salami and raw silk. There were two really old chintz armchairs, a Turkish rug and a sink with an electric kettle in it. Libby had gone through a phase of cross-stitching her favourite quotes from books, and several of these hung on the wall. The longest one was from Anna Karenina. It read: Understanding clearly then for the first time that for every man and for himself nothing lay ahead but suffering, death and eternal oblivion, he decided that it was impossible to live that way, that he had either to explain his life so that it did not look like the wicked mockery of some devil, or shoot himself.

  There were two old towels hanging on a radiator. Libby took one of these and held it up as if she was a matador and B was a bull.

  'Can I do her?' she said, flapping the towel around. 'Come on, Bess! Who's a good girl? Come to Auntie Libby.'

  I took off B's lead and she ran over to Libby, wagging not just her tail but her whole back half, which made her look as if she was scuttling sideways, like a crab. Libby started rubbing B's face, which she knew B liked best. Then she told B to roll over and did her stomach and her paws.

  'Busy day?' I said.

  'No. It's been dead. Bloody rain. Do you want a coffee?'

  'Yes, please. Do you want me to do it? What did the health-and-safety guy say about the kettle in the sink, by the way?'

  She smiled. 'Oh, I moved it before he came.'

  'So you do agree it's dangerous?'

  'I'm still alive.'

  After filling the kettle with water from the tap, I put it back in the sink, which really was the only place it could go, because its power lead was so short. I switched it off at the wall, then pressed its 'on' switch, then turned the power back on at the wall. It started to boil slowly. I went and sat in one of the chairs.

  'How are you?' I asked. 'Beyond being alive, I mean.'

  'Pretty shit. I keep having to go and cry in the toilet. You?'

  'Yeah. Also shit. Christopher broke his hand punching a wall. I spent half of last night with him in casualty. I did a bit of crying in the bathroom when we got home too.'

  Libby groaned. 'Fucking hell.'

  'I know. I can't stay long. He's knocked out on painkillers and he'll want to know where I am when he wakes up. I don't think I can come out tonight, unfortunately, which is such a bummer because I so don't want to be at home. The damp's terrible with all this rain.'

  'Don't worry; I'd have been lame company anyway. But you'll still come on Saturday?'

  'Of course.'

  'I can't cope without you. I'm cooking nine fish. In my kitchen. I can't tell you how much I'm dreading the whole thing.'

  'I'll come really early and help.' I looked at the wall and read Libby's cross-stitch again. 'Lib?' I said.

  She was spooning coffee in a cafetière. 'What?' She looked at me. 'Are you OK?'

  'I'm not sure.'

  'What is it?'

  'I don't know. Oh, just ignore me. It's stupid.'

  'Come on. You can tell me.'

  'Well, the cosmic ordering worked. After I finished speaking to you the other night I opened this envelope that I thought was an unearned-royalty statement, but instead I found out that this TV company has bought the rights to all my science fiction books. I earned some pound-signs.'

  'That's very cool!' She came over and hugged me. 'But that's not cosmic ordering, you idiot. What did Christopher say?'

  'I haven't told him.'

  Ah. Interesting.'

  'Yeah. I know. So you don't ... You don't think I've somehow unbalanced the universe with this cosmic ordering stuff?'

  'Don't be so stupid. It's not real. I didn't get what I asked for. I haven't heard anything from Mark. I really do think it's over.'

  'Oh, Lib. I'm so sorry.'

  'It's all right. I'm OK, apart from crying in the toilet. In fact, I think it might be for the best. Bob was so nice over the weekend. I had terrible period pains and he went out and got me DVDs, magazines, painkillers and a new hot water bottle without me even saying anything.' She looked out of the small window, smeared with rain, and then looked back at me. 'Hey—do you want to hear a really gross story?'

  'Go on.'

  'So this health inspector was in a pub on Dartmoor the day before yesterday. He was looking at the kitchens, and there were feathers under the cooker, so he asked the landlord whether he let his pet cockerels or ducks come into the kitchen. He said, No, of course not. Then the next thing that happened was that a cockerel ran in, followed by a fox with one of the ducks in its mouth, and one of the other cockerels on its back, and the cockerels pecked out the fox's eyes while the fox killed the duck and then, blindly I suppose, killed the cockerels too. There was blood everywhere. The inspector closed the kitchen down.'

  'Oh, yuck,' I said. 'Poor cockerels. Poor fox. Poor duck.'

  'Bess would do the same given half a chance.'

  'She would not. She caught up with a squirrel she was chasing once on the moors and then she didn't know what to do. They both sort of looked at each other, and then they ran in opposite directions. Since then she doesn't bother to chase them.'

  Libby stroked B's head. 'You're very domesticated, aren't you?' she said. 'Oh, thinking of crazy things on Dartmoor, didn't you say that guy Tim was writing about a Beast or something?'

  'Yeah.'

  'Well, have you heard the news about the real one? You should tell him.'

  'What news about a real one?'

  'The health inspector told me about it. It was the "fun" story on the local news this morning as well. There's been howling, weird footprints, ginormous piles of foul-smelling shit and all sorts of things. People have seen "something" much larger than a cat or a dog prowling around, and some local had a photograph of a black blob that looked a bit like the Loch Ness Monster, except it was in a field. They reckon that it's probably a puma or a wolf that someone got as a pet and can't look after any more. One woman said that all the dog food she kept in her garden shed disappeared late one night, and when she got up there were just empty bags all over her garden. She said it had cost her about a hundred quid. Imagine spending that on dog food.'

  When I left the deli the evening had shrugged itself onto the town, and the whole place was slicked with the reflections of car headlamps and dim, flickering streetlamps. It was turning into the kind of
night where you walked the streets alone, heard other people's TVs and wished you were indoors yourself. I walked slowly across the market square, not much wishing I was indoors at all. When I got to Brown's Hill I remembered that if each time I took a step I covered half the distance to the front door, then I'd never get home. Was it worth a try? Was it possible to act out a paradox the way that Rowan and Vi acted out historical events? Or was it that people acted out paradoxes and historical events all the time anyway?

  On Thursday morning, the phone rang. It was Tim Small.

  'I'm sorry to ring you at home,' he said. 'Are you busy?'

  Was I busy? Christopher would need to be given his painkillers soon, because he couldn't get them out of the packet with his left hand. He was up and about today, but that meant he needed my undivided attention. He would need something for lunch, and a new, hypo-allergenic bandage, which I would have to buy and then put on. He also required constant soothing because the pain was so great, and also because the painkillers, made by a heartless corporation with a patent stolen from tribespeople somewhere, gave him unbearable side-effects, including dizziness and mild hallucinations. I'd promised to look in my Radical Healing book for a solution to all this, and then go into Totnes later that afternoon to buy whatever alternative remedies it suggested, as well as the bandage. So I was still working on my feature as well as looking after Christopher. I had no idea how much longer this was going to go on. The doctor had said six weeks, but surely Christopher would get better before that.

  It all reminded me of a hospital joke I should have told Josh on Tuesday night. A wife is summoned to the consultant's room. He says to her: 'Your husband has a very rare and serious illness. Unless you are able to do everything for him—cooking, cleaning, wiping his arse, washing him and so on—he will die. If you can do these things, then in about a year or so he'll recover. But you'll literally have to do everything for him before then.' The wife goes out to the husband. 'What did the doctor say?' he asks. 'I'm sorry, honey,' she says back. 'It's terminal.' Of course, people did look after others in this way, sometimes for years. What was so wrong with me that I could barely manage it for a day? I couldn't stop thinking about Rowan, and his suggestion of lunch, but I still hadn't replied to him. It wasn't clear when I'd next get out of the house for long enough to have lunch anyway.

  'No, not very,' I said to Tim. 'I'm assuming you've seen the news.'

  'Yeah,' he said. 'I'm really worried.'

  I wasn't expecting that. 'Why?'

  'Well, I got an email saying that my proposal's going to some sort of editorial board, and apparently that's really good because only one per cent of proposals go through. I've been really quite excited. But now I'm worried that this editorial board is going to think I copied the idea from real life. I mean, can I even write about this Beast, now there is one?'

  'It's OK,' I said. 'Don't worry. I'm on the editorial board. And don't worry about the Beast being real. There's no copyright on Beasts. I mean, there's already The Hound of the Baskervilles, but that certainly doesn't mean no one can ever write another novel about a supernatural creature on Dartmoor. I guess you'd need to do something different with the idea, though, and show you were aware of what's gone before, but we discussed that already.'

  'So I'm worrying about nothing?'

  'Yes.' I laughed. 'But I do understand. I'm sure I've worried about similar things in the past. In fact, one time I found out that my book had the same title as another book and I thought it would have to be pulled off the shelves or something, but there's no copyright on titles either, it turns out.'

  'That's weird.'

  'I know.'

  'Well, thanks,' he said. 'I feel better.'

  'Good.'

  'And I've been doing some research into other fictional and historical Beasts,' Tim said. 'I'm guessing you think that's the right approach?'

  'Definitely. But don't overdo it. Remember that your audience is made up of teenagers with short attention spans.'

  'There's a great Beast in Robert Louis Stevenson's Travels with a Donkey', he said. I could hear Oscar-like sounds of paper being moved and pages being turned in the background. 'Do you know the book?'

  'No.'

  'It's very funny. Stevenson is travelling around the Cévennes region of France with a donkey called Modestine, who is a real character. At one point they go to a region with a famous Beast. Can I read you a bit?'

  Christopher whimpered on the sofa. He seemed to have dropped the remote control, but I couldn't work out why he didn't just pick it up with his good hand. I turned away so I could pretend I'd been looking out of the kitchen window the whole time.

  'Yes, go on.'

  '"Wolves, alas! like bandits, seem to flee the traveller's advance; and you may trudge through all our comfortable Europe, and not meet with an adventure worth the name. But here, if anywhere, a man was on the frontiers of hope. For this was the land of the ever-memorable BEAST, the Napoleon Bonaparte of wolves. What a career was his! He lived ten months at free quarters in Gévaudan and Vivarais; he ate women and children and 'shepherdesses celebrated for their beauty'; he pursued armed horsemen; he has been seen at broad noonday chasing a post-chaise and outrider along the king's high road..." There's a bit more after that,' Tim said. 'Sometime later Stevenson is lost, and meets two young girls who won't give him directions. One pokes her tongue out at him, and the other just tells him to follow the cows. He says then, "The Beast of Gévaudan ate about a hundred children of this district; I began to think of him with sympathy."'

  I laughed. 'I don't think the Beast of Dartmoor has eaten anyone yet, although I can think of some people he could start with.'

  'Well,' he said, 'I hope I'm not the first. I'm going to look for it myself. See what it is. In fact, I'd decided to do that even if it had turned out that the whole novel was screwed up. I've brought my camping trip forward.'

  'Really? That's brave. When are you going?'

  'As soon as possible. Need to clear it with Heidi, and shift a few jobs around first. But I've got my tent. I'll build a campfire and wait for it to come to me. I'll take a good camera too.'

  I couldn't say what I was thinking, which was that Tim should forget about writing this novel for Orb Books, make the protagonist middle-aged and cuckolded again and write it up as a proper novel. The idea that he was going to all this trouble for a Zeb Ross book made me feel guilty for ever suggesting he write one.

  I heard a heavy thud and turned around. Christopher had fallen off the sofa.

  'Thanks,' Tim said. 'You've been a great help.'

  'Well, good luck,' I said. 'Let me know when you're going.'

  'You can pray for me.'

  'Indeed.'

  I put the phone down and went over to the sofa. Christopher was lying on the floor where he'd fallen. For a second I thought he was dead.

  'Christopher?'

  'Who was that?' he asked.

  'An Orb Books author,' I said. 'Why are you down there? What happened?'

  'What were you talking about? I heard something about Beasts. I thought I might be hallucinating again.'

  'It was just work. Don't worry about it.'

  'You were laughing.'

  'Well, sometimes work is funny.' I sighed.

  'Babe, I'm so dizzy,' he said. 'Where am I?'

  'You seem to be on the floor. Did you fall off the sofa?'

  'I can't remember. Everything's such a blur.'

  'Come on, I think you should get up. Would you like a blanket?'

  'Yes, please.'

  'And a cup of tea?'

  'Yes. Meg?'

  'What?'

  'Please don't leave me alone. The world's sort of vibrating.'

  I managed to find a blanket for Christopher that was only partially covered in dog hair and settled him back on the sofa with the remote control and a cup of tea. I willed the phone to ring again. It didn't. For the next couple of hours I sat there at the kitchen table reading Radical Healing, while Christopher loudly watch
ed a programme about Aztec civilisation, and then one on Stonehenge, both of which I was sure he'd seen before. Weak early-spring sunlight stroked the table-top, and B started to amuse herself by going to the top of the stairs, dropping a tennis ball down to the bottom and then fetching it herself and taking it back to the top again. I put this together from what I could see and hear: first an almost-regular thud, thud, thud sound of the ball on the stairs, followed by the ball itself, bald now, its green fabric long gone, bouncing and rolling into the hallway. Then I would hear the miniature galloping sound of B coming down the stairs, and then I'd see her black body gathering the ball and turning. Then I would hear the pad, pad, pad of her going back up the stairs, more slowly now she had the ball. She would lie at the top of the stairs chewing it for an unspecific amount of time, and then the whole thing would begin again. Christopher tried glaring first at her, and then at me, and then he simply turned up the volume on the TV. The next time he glared at me I had a coughing fit and had to drink three glasses of water before I could go upstairs to get my inhaler.

  Radical Healing wasn't quite what I expected, and I couldn't work out why it had been lumped in with the New Age self-help books in Oscar's cupboard. It certainly didn't seem to be something that would help Christopher. It was an anthology of writings about the placebo effect and the way that the mind can be seen to control the body, and would have been more properly filed with popular science, or the history of medicine. One of the first pieces was an excerpt from the Malleus Maleficarum, a medieval text on the evils of witchcraft. The excerpt included a discussion on the ways in which witches removed the 'virile member' of men. The medieval authors argued that the witches did not remove it exactly, but rather made the man believe it wasn't there. There was also a discussion on impotence, which included the following: 'When the member is in no way stirred, and can never perform the act of coition, this is a sign of frigidity of nature; but when it is stirred and becomes erect, but yet cannot perform, it is a sign of witchcraft.' There was also a piece by a late-nineteenth-century homoeopath about the power of Sac Lac, the homoeopathic version of a sugar pill, and how he thought it was advisable to give this to homoeopathic patients who did not believe they were being cured by very few doses of the 'real' stuff. There were essays from medical historians and anthropologists about the history of the placebo effect, and how it had affected different groups of people over time. One study suggested that cultures whose members believed they were receiving the best care available thrived, whereas those in which the rich and powerful had access to medicines denied to the rest, didn't.