Our Tragic Universe (21 page)

He looked as if he might cry again, although maybe that was the effect of the cloud that had just obscured the weak sun.

‘So the premonitions exist and don’t exist at the same time?’

‘Maybe. Mind you, and I don’t know if it’s relevant, but I did once read about a study of train crashes. Some researcher found that trains that crashed had fewer people on them than other trains. He thought this was because people “sensed” the impending accident. Also, the most badly damaged carriages had fewer people in them, suggesting, apparently, the same thing. But who knows how that study was done. It’s a narrative itself.’

‘Sounds worth following up, though,’ Rowan said. ‘Where did you read it?’

‘Just some silly book on ESP from the seventies,’ I said. ‘Probably not a good source.’

‘Oh. That’s a shame. Can you give me the title anyway?’

‘I think I’ve forgotten it. I can look it up, though.’ I finished eating my tangerine and then threw the peel in the river. ‘I’ll email you.’

‘No, don’t go to any trouble,’ he said quickly. ‘Just tell me next time I see you. Next time we’re in a shipwreck together.’

I shrugged. ‘OK.’

‘Did I tell you about the spiritualist on board the
Titanic
?’ Rowan said. I shook my head, and he continued. ‘W.T. Stead. He’d apparently drawn pictures of ocean liners, and his own death by drowning, years before. He’d also written about shipwrecks. Apparently he helped women and children into lifeboats, then went into the first-class smoking lounge, started reading a book and waited to drown. Although I don’t know how anyone actually knows that. I wonder what book he was reading.’

The ferry lurched slightly, and someone said, ‘Oh, God.’ Rowan got down off the safety rail, half pushed off by the movement of the boat. If it had lurched in the other direction
he probably would have fallen in the river. I wanted to take his arm, or his hand, but I didn’t.

‘Do you think the other people left on the
Titanic
were having conversations about great shipwrecks and disaster theory as it went down?’ I said.

Rowan laughed. ‘We’re very brave.’

Then there was a shudder, and the sound of the engines starting, and one of the ferry men came around saying, ‘Crisis over, folks.’ Then everyone got back in their cars. Rowan and I were the last to go. I almost said something about my ship in a bottle, and I suddenly wanted to arrange to take it to show Rowan one day soon, but I wasn’t sure I could explain it properly in the few seconds it took to get to our cars. Instead, just before Rowan got in his car, and before I’d stopped to think about what I was doing, I slightly breathlessly asked him if he wanted to have lunch again one day soon. He turned and looked up from reading something on his mobile phone.

‘I don’t think that would be such a good idea at the moment,’ he said, his eyes not meeting mine. ‘Sorry.’

I had a long list of things to do that day, including beginning my new draft of my novel, but I could barely concentrate on anything for hours. I had my notebook out, and, perhaps fittingly for someone planning to re-fictionalise herself, I was scribbling in it as if I’d gone crazy; as if I’d been given one of those terrible ‘automatic writing’ exercises. There were pages of this stuff in the end.
Protagonist feels rejected by Love Interest. Need to get
a sense of this as an actual, tangible, PAINFUL feeling. Show with action?
What action? She can hardly sit in the library and cry all day. Also –
there is a kind of hope in his rejection, because he obviously feels something
for her. Otherwise, of course, there’d be no harm in lunch. So what
would she do in response to this? Maybe just write in her notebook. (Ha,
ha! Is this project in danger of becoming too meta-meta-fictional?) Protagonist
writes a long list of reasons as to why he is unsuitable as a Love
Interest for her, including his age, his gloominess, the fact that he is in a
relationship. She can’t believe that he has rejected her. Can he afford to
reject her like this? Will he get any other chances? Maybe women throw
themselves at him all the time. Maybe he’ll never split up with his actual
partner, even though he obviously doesn’t love her. Or maybe he will leave
her and end up going on country walks with grey-haired, arty widows from
singles ads because the protagonist is TOO YOUNG. But also need some
sense of this connection between them, despite the age difference, and what
he does to her with his eyes and all the possibilities of his body and …
At this point I stopped writing. I just couldn’t imagine him with anything other than black hair and strong forearms, standing there in his knackered old jeans. Maybe I wouldn’t include a physical description of him in the novel. It probably wasn’t the kind of thing someone would write in a notebook, especially if they had a partner who might read it at any time.

Before lunch, I checked my Orb Books email account, and found nothing from Vi, as usual. Perhaps she’d written to my other address; or maybe not. Anyway, there was plenty to read from Orb Books. At our last editorial board meeting we’d ended up brainstorming a rough character outline for Zeb Ross, so that we could better think about how to present him online. Claudia had finally typed up the profile and I was reminded that we’d decided that Zeb should be a mysterious recluse, who can go on the Internet, but never appear in magazines or in
person. His vague profile on his various web pages would say that he has dark hair and blue eyes, a medium build, and dresses mainly in jeans and T-shirts. He had gone to a boys’ grammar school in Nottingham, where he was a loner who enjoyed science and English. His parents were suburban drones, who wanted him to go into finance or insurance, but Zeb had other ideas. While working in a bookshop, he decided that he could easily write a novel himself, and so he did. At the end of this Claudia had asked people for further ideas.
Why is Zeb a
recluse? Is he disfigured in some way and, if so, how? Could we invent
an accident for him? Let’s make Zeb less bland! Ideas, please, people!

Over a salad sandwich, some soup and another tangerine, I spent almost all of lunchtime disfiguring Zeb. I imagined him falling in a vat of acid, crashing his sports car, being attacked by men with knives, cutting the wrong wire when trying to defuse a bomb, running through a pane of glass or, indeed, being one of the few people who chooses to sit in a train carriage that is destined to derail and tumble over and over down an embankment until it eventually catches fire and the only way out is by smashing a window with a little hammer. I imagined him lost at sea, drowning. But drowning is total. You can’t half-drown, and come back with the scars to prove it; not really. I imagined Zeb shipwrecked, and then I wondered why the word ‘shipwrecked’, applied to a person, implies a survivor: someone marooned and alone but alive.

After lunch I opened up the remains of the last draft of my novel to see what could be saved. There it all was: just over 30,000 words that were as familiar and boring to me as my own pallid face on winter mornings. I must have read my opening paragraph more than a thousand times; I could certainly
repeat it by heart. It hadn’t changed in two years, but now it was time for it to go. I created a new file with all the same styling as the old one, and typed
NOTEBOOK
at the top of the first page. The idea was that I would copy-and-paste anything usable into this file, and then construct notebook entries around it, perhaps even including the one I’d written this morning. After an hour I hadn’t found anything I wanted to keep. This worried me, so I started a list instead in a new file:
Problems with
this novel (again)
. The items on it were:
It is boring; it has no focus;
it is self-indulgent; I hate the central character; it’s too depressing; no one
wants anything; no one does anything; there are no questions to be resolved;
there is too much narration
. Then I thought this would make a nice opening to
Notebook
, so I pasted the whole list onto the first page. I smiled at my own audacity. Surely no one, not even the most metafictional and post-modern of writers, had ever begun a novel with a list of its own faults?

My word-count for the novel was now 43, and it felt like I’d just had an enema. I spent the next hour or so reading over my real notebook, wondering how it would look in print. Then I realised that what I’d written this morning had some narrative drive, so I typed it up under the list of
Problems with
this novel (again)
. I looked at what I had. So far my new draft was a cheesy romance with some confusing metafiction. I deleted the bit about the love-interest and copied it into a new file called
Further Bits
. I checked the word-count again; it was back to a manageable 43. Then I didn’t know what to do next, so I decided I may as well ditch the library and go to pick up my post from the PO box in Totnes, since this had turned out to be the new arrangement with Christopher. Forty-three words must be a record low for a day’s writing, unmatched by even
the most ponderous modernists. I wondered whether Zeb’s disfigurement could have been the result of some early writer’s block, before he found himself miraculously able to write four novels a year. Perhaps he poked out both his eyes with the same pencil.

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.