Our Tragic Universe

by Scarlett Thomas

  Part Two looked at contemporary responses to the placebo effect. One essay referenced a study that showed that blue pills made people relax and pink pills woke them up, even when the pills were inert; another study had apparently proved that animals and plants also respond to placebos. The penultimate chapter asked whether, if animals and plants responded to placebos, the placebo effect was happening in the mind of the healer, not the patient, and what that might mean. The last chapter had been written by a fairly well-known scientist, Claude Dubois, who was still in disgrace for leading a study that proved that homoeopathic remedies had perceivable effects. There had seemed to be nothing wrong with his experiment at the time, and Nature magazine had published the results. Then a bunch of famous sceptics turned up at his lab to investigate. They tried to repeat his experiment, with no success, and found all sorts of errors in the original study. They ended up concluding that Dubois had consciously or unconsciously tampered with his results and that his study was flawed. In his essay in Radical Healing, Dubois looked at the effects of the mind not just on one's own illnesses, but also on scientific experiments. Can you 'will' a study to come out with the results you want, in the same way you can will yourself better? If that was true, he argued, then surely the opposite is possible. Did his positive result and the sceptics' negative result prove not something definite about nature, but simply about their own beliefs?

  After I'd finished reading the book, made lunch for Christopher, washed up and checked he had everything he needed, I put my coat on and got my stuff together. This included the proof of Second World, which I was planning to drop off with Josh and had therefore hidden in a carrier bag. Christopher was by then watching a programme about Atlantis, the lost continent. It seemed mainly to involve a CGI reconstruction of the beginning and end of the civilisation, according to what Plato and others had said about it. Currently, they were in about 8000 BC, and the vast, artificial-looking land mass had split into two parts. On screen there was a montage of jewelled palaces, long stone roads, a vast moat, temples with sacred eyes painted in them and olive-skinned people with very high cheekbones. Suddenly, the ground started to shake. It was a huge earthquake, followed by tidal waves and explosions. The voiceover on screen said, 'Is this the end of Atlantis?' And then they cut to commercials.

  'Good job they had camcorders back then, isn't it?' I said.

  'It's a reconstruction,' Christopher said.

  'I know that. I was joking.'

  'I know.' He turned around. 'Where are you going?'

  'To look for remedies for you. I'll walk the dog as well. She could do with some exercise. I need some air too.'

  B had been lying on the armchair, asleep, with her tennis ball by her head, for most of the last hour. But she'd jumped up as soon as I'd finished the washing up, and had been shadowing me ever since. Now she was standing by the door with the ball in her mouth, glancing from me to Christopher and then back again. I coughed a couple of times.

  'Did you find something in that book?'

  'Yeah, I think so. Might be a bit complicated to find, but I'll try.'

  'Don't be too long, babe. I can't manage on my own.'

  'I'll be as quick as I can.'

  He smiled weakly. 'Thanks for helping me out. Sorry I'm such a mess.'

  'Don't worry,' I said. 'How's it feeling now?'

  'It's better when I don't think about it.'

  'OK, well, I'll leave you to find out whether the Atlantans really did build Stonehenge, and whether lemmings really are trying to get back there when they jump off cliffs.'

  'Don't take the piss. I'm enjoying this. It's making me feel better.'

  What a killjoy I was. And I hadn't even told him about the money yet.

  I put the local radio on in the car. The Beast of Dartmoor was still a news item, and the presenter was in the middle of interviewing a historian from Exeter University about previous Beasts in Devon. I hoped Tim was listening. The professor was talking about the once-famous case of the Devil's Footprints, when on the night of 8th February 1855 an unidentifiable set of animal's footprints had been found in the snow. The footprints, which were said to be similar to those of a donkey, but cloven, seemed to belong to a single creature, and covered a distance of more than twenty miles from Exmouth to Lympstone, Powderham, Starcross, Dawlish, Teignmouth and Totnes. They scaled rooftops, and appeared to pass through walls and haystacks. The event had been the subject of much speculation in the newspapers of the time, particularly The Illustrated London News. People suggested that the prints belonged to a badger, a bird, or even a kangaroo, two of which had escaped in the region not long before. The professor said that the matter had never been satisfactorily settled.

  'So no one knows what actually happened?' asked the presenter.

  'That's right. The most compelling case so far is that the prints were made by pranksters.'

  'What, people having a laugh?'

  'Exactly. But there weren't any human footprints found. Perhaps the jokers had special shoes made. Who knows? But it is interesting to note that on the night of the seventh of February the Teignmouth Useful Knowledge Society had listened to a lecture given by a Mr Plumtre of Dawlish. The subject of the lecture was "The Influence of Superstition on Natural History". This was described by G. A. Household—one of the only authorities on this subject—as a "remarkable coincidence". It seems likely to me that there is a connection between the lecture and the footprints, but I have yet to find evidence of what it might be.'

  'And the Beast that allegedly roams Dartmoor now—you think this could be a practical joke as well? Just a fabrication?'

  'Anything's possible.'

  Slapton Sands was deserted apart from a few fishermen in dark raincoats and a man scrubbing down a small, yellow fishing boat. Out on the misty horizon I could see the blackish shapes of huge ships. I parked at the Torcross end and then walked along with B under the pale grey sky with sea on my right. All the endless hours of dog-walking I did enabled me to contemplate many objects from nature as B peed on them, sniffed them for traces of other dogs' pee, walked on them, jumped on them, chewed them, ran away from them or brought them for me to throw. I also ended up gazing at other animals, birds and trees in the distance and thinking things my father would find repulsive: Birds must be happy when they fly, or That weird plant must really like growing in sand.

  I once tried to explain evolution and natural selection to Christopher, and I used the usual example of the giraffe. I didn't want to get into an argument about the elements of speciation that I imagined he would find hard to believe, so I told him a simplified version. In the days before giraffes had long necks, and were therefore just horse-things or donkey-things, I told him, one of them is suddenly born with a ginormously long neck, all the better to reach the leaves at the top of the tree. He's the king of the forest because of this, and his mutated genes are easily passed on because all the girl-giraffes want to be fucked by him, and his sons and daughters also get the evolutionary advantage of being able to reach the highest leaves, and eventually the other giraffes die out, perhaps from sadness, because they can't get to the leaves at the top of the tree, and this happened so long ago that you never see the in-between giraffes, only the 'finished' ones. 'That's cool, babe,' Christopher had said. Since this was the first time he'd ever understood anything scientific, I didn't point out that this all meant that even now giraffes aren't completely finished, because evolution keeps on trucking until the end of time, which is never tomorrow, even though we all think it might be. And I'd wondered to myself what else these giraffes want, beyond treetops. Do they want the moon? Or do they not want anything at all?

  I couldn't believe that Christopher just accepted evolution as 'cool' and didn't find it at all astonishing. After all, there's a big difference between all the pieces of the giraffe—and me, and you—lying around in the universe, and us all actually being here and assembled and functioning. Surely anything that existed and could think would find itself astonishing. But
we'd had a big argument about the speed of light the week before, and perhaps Christopher had just been humouring me. As I approached the kiosk, I thought again about Kelsey Newman's post-universe, where nothing would evolve ever again. Everyone would be a hero struggling for sex and victory, for no reason whatsoever. Everything would be predictable, but nothing would be astonishing.

  When I reached the kiosk I bought fish and chips for me, and a sausage for B. Then I sat on a bench looking at the sea, wondering what remedies to get for Christopher. If the book I'd read was right, then anything would do, so long as he—and possibly I—believed in it. It was cold, and I thought I might nip into the Foghorn for a quick half and warm up by the fire. When I took my rubbish back to the kiosk I noticed that a sign had just been put up. Fisherman's Cottage. Winter Let. £300 per month. That was very cheap; it was around what I'd been thinking of paying for an office.

  'Excuse me,' I said to the girl in the kiosk. 'Who would I ask about this?'

  'Andrew Glass,' she said. 'In the Foghorn.'

  'Oh, I'm just on my way there. Thanks.'

  I walked further along the esplanade until I came to a weathered red door with old crab pots, ropes and fishing nets dangled around it. You could easily miss the Foghorn if you didn't know it was there. There was a wooden sign, but it was overgrown even in the winter. I thought Andrew liked it that way: it meant he got only locals and regulars and didn't have to deal with tourists. There were enough people around who knew that the Foghorn was the place to go for real ale, half a pint of local shrimp, a dozen local oysters or fish straight out of the sea. The red wooden door opened with a tinkle. Inside there was always some interesting music playing: often it was an album I knew well, or was suddenly pleased to be hearing again after a long time. Last time I'd been in—with Libby, for oysters, her treat—it had been a compilation of contemporary sea-shanties, and we'd sat by the fire and sang along to the Tom Waits ones, and afterwards Libby told me she'd met a man called Mark who had the most amazing eyes, and she'd wanted to kiss him as soon as she saw him. He'd come to her knitting group; he was the only man who had ever come to the knitting group. Even though Libby had been knitting for years, she hadn't known that it's much easier to draw yarn out of the middle of the ball, rather than the edge. Mark had shown her this, and a few other things. In return, she'd shown him Kitchener stitch. Mark knitted with one needle tucked under his arm, like a bagpipe. He said his male ancestors in Northumberland had all knitted like that.

  Today the Carpenters song 'Superstar' was playing. Andrew Glass was about fifty and driftwood-thin, with a storm-battered face, blond hair and deep navy blue eyes that shone out from behind his round, wire-framed glasses. He was leaning on the bar reading The Guardian. There was a pile of magazines next to his elbow: The Economist, New Scientist, The Spectator, Private Eye; not what you'd usually find in a Devon pub. There was only a handful of customers, each settled in a nook or cranny with a pint of something. One man was reading a paperback thriller by the fire and B went over and sniffed his legs. He didn't even look up. He was about two-thirds of the way through his book, and it seemed as if the world could end and that wouldn't stop him reading. I called B back and leaned on the bar.

  'Andrew,' I said. 'Hello. Any chance of half a pint of Beast?'

  Beast was an Exmoor ale, and it seemed even more appropriate than usual. Andrew looked up from the paper.

  'Meg,' he said, smiling, coming over and clasping one of my hands across the bar. 'Long time.'

  'I know. How's the book going?'

  He groaned. 'Been completely rushed off my feet here. So much for retiring from the Navy to have time to write. Haven't done anything for over a month now. But I've got a new barman starting next week, so it should get a bit easier. How are you? How's your writing?'

  'I think I've just deleted a whole novel, but otherwise it's fine. I guess I can't seem to get started properly. I'm jealous of you. You're, what, over twenty thousand words in now?'

  'Something like that. I did what you said, by the way.'

  'What did I say? I hope it was good.'

  'To put my own experience into it more and use a conventional narrative structure. Tell the story not just of the disaster but my experiences finding out about it, and include more of my life at sea. I'd just started in on revising the first bit when Danny got called up—you know he's gone to Iraq with the TA?' He gave me my drink. 'On the house. Anyway, once the new barman's in it'll be full steam ahead.'

  'Thanks. Oh, I'm drinking Beast partly in celebration, by the way.'

  'You always drink it.'

  'Yeah, OK. But you remember Tim Small? He's done pretty well with his proposal and Orb Books are considering commissioning it. Not just that, but there's a real Beast and Tim's off on the trail of it.'

  'Well, here's to Tim.' Andrew raised his cup of tea.

  I raised my glass. 'Absolutely. Oh, also, what's this about a winter let? That sign in the kiosk.'

  'Oh, Seashell Cottage. That's right. You interested?'

  'I don't know. Where is it? What's it like? Is it damp?'

  'It's next door. Bit basic but lovely views. No damp. You want to have a look?'

  'Yeah, I think so. I'm sort of looking for an office to work in during the day.'

  'You know it's a whole cottage?'

  'Yeah. Can I look anyway?'

  'Sure. I'll just lock up the till.' He looked around the pub. 'No one'll want me for a few minutes, I'm sure. Come on, we'll go now while it's quiet. Have your drink when we get back.'

  Seashell Cottage was certainly basic. It had a sitting room and kitchen on the ground floor and one bedroom and a bathroom upstairs. The floors were simple wooden boards throughout, except in the kitchen, where the floor was grey stone. All the walls were whitewashed. However, the sitting room had a large open fireplace and, as Andrew had said, a wonderful view straight out to sea. It had a big sofa in the middle of the room, facing the fireplace, and a little desk and chair facing the window. I breathed in deeply. The air was dry, cold and clean, if a little dusty.

  'House-clearance people take everything,' Andrew said, 'even the doorknobs if you don't stop them. I got them to leave the sofa and the desk, though. Thought they might be useful. I can take them out if you don't want them.'

  'Who does the cottage belong to? You?'

  'Yeah. It was my uncle's place when he had the pub. After he died my aunt stayed on, really made it her own. It was very different then. But she's dead now as well, of course.' I remembered something of the aunt from Andrew's book. She'd been the only person who'd believed that he'd heard the ghosts of the men in the sea.

  'I'm sorry,' I said.

  'She was in a home for years in the end. She really hated it; I felt so guilty. She'll be happier now. And I've finally inherited the cottage, which means I have to do something with it.'

  'You don't want to live in it?' I said.

  'No. Too big for me. I'm happy upstairs in the pub. I got used to confined spaces in the Navy.'

  I walked around a bit more, wondering what had been there before the house-clearance people came. They had done a good job; it was perfectly bleak and bare.

  'Does the fireplace work?' I asked.

  'Yep. Chimney's just been cleaned. And I can throw in logs if you like for twenty quid a month extra,' he said. 'You'd help yourself from the shed around the back of the pub. And you could use the pub's Wi-Fi if you wanted as well.'

  B was sniffing around the fireplace and wagging her tail.

  'Dog likes it,' Andrew said.

  I did too. I imagined sitting at the desk in the window, writing with the fountain pen Rowan had given me and watching the boats in the distance. B would be able to come to work with me. I wouldn't have asthma attacks all the time. We'd come here in the morning and light a fire and we'd walk on the beach and eat fish and chips for lunch, or even have oysters in the pub. I'd need some shelves and a couple of rugs as well as the desk. It felt like mine already. Already, I didn't want to go
home.

  'I love it,' I said. 'Can I think about it?'

  'Sure, but I've got someone else coming to look at it at four this afternoon. I suppose I could tell them I've given you first refusal, but you'd have to let me know by tomorrow morning. Sorry to rush you, but these things seem to happen quite fast.'

  'Actually, I don't really need to think about it,' I said. 'Are you happy for me to take it?'

  'Delighted.' He grinned.

  'Do you need references and stuff like that?'

  'No. I know you. Can you pay a month up front?'

  'Yeah, of course. I'll want the logs too. I'll write you a cheque now, shall I?'

  We went back into the pub. I wrote a cheque, and Andrew gave me the keys.