Our Tragic Universe (23 page)

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 M1 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.

I raided my coin jar, thinking there might be a couple of pounds in there, which would mean fish and chips for dinner, not beans on stale toast. But there was nothing more than 1p and 2p pieces, and I couldn’t face taking a pile of them to the chip shop. If Christopher came home and asked, as he was likely to, what was for dinner, I thought that I might explode. Could he not decide what was for dinner just once? In the end I had beans on toast, washed down by very strong coffee, with
Second World
held open in front of me on the kitchen table. I couldn’t help but be intrigued by Newman’s new book, especially with that quote from Vi on it. Had she sent me his previous book? I would have to get in touch with her if I wanted to find out, but I still didn’t know how.

While I ate my dinner, B did the same. Every night I would fill her bowl with mixer and one small tin of dog food. She would wolf down the tinned food, but then she would pick up
a single piece of mixer – a biscuit the size of a small pebble – in her front teeth, carry it to the hallway, throw it up in the air, roll on it, and then eat it,
crunch, crunch
, like a radio sound effect for someone walking across gravel. Then she would come back and take another one. It took for ever. Sometimes she would ‘bury’ a piece of mixer or a rawhide chew. She never actually buried anything, of course, because the house wasn’t full of earth, but merely went through a primal-looking set of movements that implied ‘burying’. The final one of these movements made B look as if she was pushing imaginary earth over the biscuit with her nose. She did this very carefully, with a faraway look in her eyes, as if imagining herself the heroine in some dog-story.

While B and I ate, seagulls
ack, acked
outside, and the lonely wind waltzed slowly down the Brown’s Hill steps and all around the town until it finally reached the river, where it found boats to dance with and swoon over, and everything tinkled.

Second World
was in two parts. The first part, called ‘The Science of the Second World’, recapped the idea that we are being reincarnated again and again at the end of time into a world created by, and contained within, the Omega Point, which is made of
Energia
. The second part was called ‘The Hero’s Journey’, and seemed to owe a lot to Joseph Campbell and Carl Jung. Newman referenced them both. At one point he said, ‘What Jung termed the “Collective Unconscious” I am calling the Omega Point, although of course I have been able to use Frank Tipler’s science to further hypothesise a conscious, infinite entity from which the archetypes emerge. Inside the Omega Point, we are all plagiarists: we all recognise the fundamental archetypes and use them in our dramas and dreams,
fictional or otherwise. Could it be possible that the Omega Point invented the first stories to show us the ways we should and should not live? When we meet a Wise Old Man on one of our many Roads of Adventure, are we really meeting a manifestation of the Omega Point?’

Newman’s argument was familiar. Life is a great quest, he said, and you are its hero. The purpose of life is the completion of the quest. To complete the quest you must work out what you most want to find in some faraway cave, then take some weapons, go out and find the cave and get this thing. Anything that stands in your way is a monster. How simple it all was, and how unlikely that the cave would turn out to be a vagina lined with teeth and that you would fail because of some laughing birds. But in any case, Newman didn’t solve, or even acknowledge, his own central paradox. He didn’t explain how you find out whether you are a hero or a monster. Some beings have to be monsters, because otherwise how do you define other beings as heroes? Instead of solving this problem, Newman spent a lot of time rejecting Greek tragedy as ‘depraved’, and Modernism as ‘pathetic’. His reading of
Oedipus Rex
was particularly perplexing. Oedipus was no longer a profound symbol of the curse of knowledge and desire, and became instead, in Newman’s world, a failed project, a Game Over, an aborted quest. In order to have a properly happy ending, Oedipus would need to die, be born again and start from scratch. It just wasn’t any good to find out that you are a monster and overcome yourself: the monster has to be outside you, and you have to kill it and move on until you get your treasure and your princess and become enlightened and then ascend to the Road to Perfection. This was such a profound misunderstanding of
tragedy that I wanted to email someone and rant about it. But who was there? Only Rowan. I sighed.

Reading Newman’s book made me want to hand in my resignation as a writer. Most of what he said about conventional narrative structure in the quest, the comedy and the romance was right: even the Zen novel I read for Orb Books was fuelled by desire for change and for characters to lead better lives. At first the protagonists want to get off the island, and then they realise that if they stay they may achieve enlightenment and cast off all desire – so, paradoxically, they start to want that. All narrative is about people wanting their lives to be better, and then this being fucked up, either permanently by the protagonist him- or herself, or temporarily by his or her parents – or some equivalent. All you have to do, I would tell the writers who came on my retreats, is get one of these strands, knot it, put it in the centre of your narrative, and then add as many other strands as you like and weave them together so the resulting fabric looks like a whole. When I said this I had in mind the Fair Isle garments that Libby used to knit, and I even showed the ghostwriters pictures of Fair Isle knitting so they would get the point. They always laughed at the jumpers and cardigans with giant snowflakes and reindeer, and this made everyone bond.

After closing the book I made more coffee and then ate another tangerine. It had a little mini-tangerine inside it, at the top, as if it had given birth to a miniature version of itself while it was hanging on its tree. Where was Christopher? I probably should have rung his dad’s place by now. There was that stupid royalty statement lying by the kettle. I hated those things: they were unintelligible, and came with no money. Sometimes
they told me that I’d sold three copies of my book in South Africa, and another eleven in Canada. Whoopee. As if life wasn’t disappointing enough already. But I opened it anyway, as I usually did in the end, thinking that maybe it would at least tell me I hadn’t long to break even on a particular title, even though it was probably out of print. When I took out the single sheet of paper, I saw immediately that it wasn’t an unearned-royalty statement at all. It was remittance advice from my literary agency.
Harlequin Entertainment
, it said.
£28,000, less Agency Commission of £2,800. Transfer to bank:
£25,200
.

‘What the fuck?’ I whispered to myself. If it was true – and it couldn’t be – then this meant I could go down the hill for fish and chips, and I could buy as many tangerines as I wanted, and I could take Libby a bunch of flowers and a bottle of wine on Saturday night, and I could buy some clothes and fix the car and God knows what else. I wouldn’t have to worry about my train fare to London for the March editorial board. I could buy a new pen. I could get some credit for my mobile phone. I could get my email account back up and running. I could pay a few months’ rent in advance and perhaps then get a good night’s sleep once in a while. Maybe I could take my mother and Taz on holiday. They kept having to remortgage their house to help Toby, and although Taz sometimes made a lot of money from his art, some months he made nothing at all. I could go to Greece after all, on my own, and I’d even be able to buy a bikini first. I would finally be able to write my novel without any distractions. Maybe I could rent some office space to work in during the day, and go there instead of the library. But it probably wasn’t true. There was probably no money. Then again,
I had met Fred, and she had made all these promises; I just hadn’t believed them.

The year the National Lottery first started I was in Brighton doing my degree, and I went home to London most weekends because I’d get free food at my mother’s place and it was warmer there in the winter. Taz said he thought the Lottery was a waste of time and a tax on optimism, but my mother and I both bought tickets for the first draw. For almost the whole afternoon before it happened we planned what we’d do with the millions one of us was bound to win. We imagined big houses with swimming pools, and travel, and all the usual stuff. But it was more interesting thinking how we’d give some of it away. My mother said she’d start a women’s refuge, with designer furniture and luxury toiletries. I said I’d find a student, someone in exactly the same situation I was in – heading for a First, but with no real career prospects, no financial stability and no house – and give them
£
100,000. By the time I lived in Dartmouth, I hadn’t bought a Lottery ticket for years, but I still wondered why more people bought them on rollover weeks. Unless you were already a millionaire, surely five million wouldn’t change your life much more than a million would. Surely a million was still worth winning. But if that was true, why didn’t I ever buy a ticket?

I went upstairs to my study and logged onto my Internet banking service, not daring to believe this might be real. But there it was: a new balance in my business account of
£
22,340. So that was the business overdraft cleared, then. I transferred some money to my personal account to clear the overdraft there, and gave myself some spending money. When I’d finished, I was roughly
£
5,000 in credit on my personal account, and
£
15,000 in credit on my business account. I’d never had that
much money in my life. I sent a PayPal payment to my email service provider, and once I’d put some credit on my phone I was able to retrieve my agent’s replacement’s messages that told me that the money was in, and they were doing a transfer. He said he was concerned because I’d never responded to the emails he’d sent about the offer, and he hoped it was OK that he’d signed the contract on my behalf. He also wondered whether we should meet to talk about current and future projects.

Just as I was about to reply I heard a scratching sound coming from downstairs: wild and insistent. B often shut herself in the bathroom and scratched on the door to tell me to let her out, but when I looked the door was open and she wasn’t there. I went downstairs and found B asleep on the sofa, and the scratching noise was gone.

PART TWO

When a piece of brown biscuit is offered to a terrier of mine and she is not hungry (and I have heard of similar instances) she first tosses it about and worries it, as if it were a rat or other prey; she then repeatedly rolls on it precisely as if it were a piece of carrion, and at last eats it. It would appear that an imaginary relish has to be given to the distasteful morsel; and to effect this the dog acts in his habitual manner, as if the biscuit was a live animal or smelt like carrion, although he knows better than we do that this is not the case.

Charles Darwin,
The Expression of the Emotions in
Man and Animals

A
T ABOUT TEN
the phone rang. It was Josh.

‘Can you come to Dad’s?’ he said. ‘Christopher’s here and he’s kicking off.’

So that’s where he was.

‘What’s happened?’ I said. ‘Why’s he kicking off?’

‘It’s about Milly moving in. But can you come?’

‘Yeah, sure. I’ll see you in a bit.’

I filled my car with petrol, bought two new bottles of Radweld and, after putting one of them into the car radiator, drove to Totnes down the Lanes. My hands, which did not look like the big, masculine hands on the diagram on the Radweld bottle, smelled of engine. At night you could go down the Lanes pretty fast, because it was so dark that any car lights ahead were visible for miles. You had to watch out for nocturnal animals, of course, and walkers without torches. But I didn’t drive fast. I drove as slowly as I would in the day. It was a beautiful night, with thousands of stars scattered across the clear black sky. All the stars I could see were long dead, of course, unless we were living in the Second World, in which case they were what? Alive again? Fictional? The backdrop to long-dead people’s heroic journeys? But I didn’t think too much about the stars that night. Sometimes badgers scuttled out of hedgerows at night on the Lanes. I wondered what it would be like in a badgers’ set. If I broke down and crawled into one, would the badgers accept me? Perhaps Christopher and his family would eventually forget that they’d been waiting for me. Of course, I’d get there and make it OK somehow. Christopher would be happy that I’d come to
rescue him, would see it as a dramatic act of love, and then I’d tell him about the money, and how we’d be able to move to a farm, and he’d be so happy. Suddenly I felt so breathless that I had to pull over. I switched off the headlamps and sat for a few seconds in almost total blackness. Then I realised: I wasn’t going to tell him about the money. I’d tell him there was some, a little bit. But I would keep the rest of the contents of my bank account a secret. There’d be no farm.