Our Tragic Universe (28 page)

‘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 watched 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.

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 8,000 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.’