Our Tragic Universe (37 page)

‘Look,’ I said to her. ‘A dog experiment.’

She whimpered slightly in response.

The main part of the book, which I half-skimmed, suggested that dogs are all born with various instincts that need to be taken into account by their human companions. According to the book, dogs are pack animals who need to know who is pack leader. If you have a domestic dog, the book said, you have to be pack leader, and do the kinds of things pack leaders do, otherwise your dog will become confused and perhaps even depressed. This means never letting your dog sleep in your bed, sit beside you on the sofa, walk out of a door before you or eat before you do. As long as the dog knows you are in control, you can train it to do whatever you want and it will feel secure.

I kept wondering why a dog would want to pull a lever in the first place. The summary of the experiment hadn’t mentioned what ‘reward’ they got. I guessed the dogs would have got treats every time they performed an action ‘correctly’. I made a mental list of things I thought B might pull a lever for. Food, of course, and, once, sex. Before she was spayed, she used to come into season and hump everything that moved and howl every night. But she’d also pull a lever on a machine that gave you tennis
balls, pussycats, bound proofs and sunlight. There was an electric fan heater hidden in a cupboard upstairs. B couldn’t quite switch it on with her paw, but she would try; at least, that’s what it looked like. I was never sure whether she was trying to switch it on herself, or miming the movement to tell me to switch it on. In any case, it was impossible to have it anywhere in sight without her demanding that it was switched on. If I put it on low, she’d do the movement again until I put it on high. Once it was on, and up high, she’d turn around in front of it twice and then lie down and stay there quite happily until the room was like a sauna. Then she would start to pant, get up, find a cool section of the room and lie there. With some relief, I’d switch off the heater. Then, after about ten minutes, she would get up from her corner and start the whole process again. This was why the heater ended up in the cupboard. I wondered what a self-help manual for dogs would contain. Presumably it would tell dogs that they, not people, were the real pack leaders, and humans really enjoyed being rounded up, kept to a strict routine and having their faces licked. Perhaps it would also explain what happened to our instincts when we became domesticated, and how silly we look when we mime the movements of our ancestors and try to make our lives more interesting by imagining we are doing things that we are not really doing at all.

When I woke up it was almost ten. The heating hadn’t come on and there was a cold, mouldy smell in the house. I coughed a lot, drank a cup of coffee, changed into some tracksuit bottoms and a hoody, cleaned my teeth, put my hair in a ponytail and
went to collect my car from Libby’s. I hurried B down the Embankment and past the Boat Float, now full of brown water again. I let B off the lead when we got to Bayard’s Cove, and she pottered around on the cobbles while I rang Libby’s doorbell.

‘God, Meg, what’s wrong?’ she said as soon as she saw me.

‘I am leaving him. I’m leaving that bloody poky, damp house. Definitely,’ I said. ‘I’ve just come to get the car and then I’m going to pack it up with all my stuff and go to the cottage. I wanted to say it to someone.’

‘Shit. Come in and have a cup of tea. Bob’s at the shop and I’ve got the day off because of my hangover. Check out the bags under my eyes. Come on, Bess!’

B stopped sniffing the benches and hurried into Libby’s house. I followed.

‘I can’t stay long, though,’ I said. ‘I want to get my stuff out before Christopher gets back. I can’t deal with another scene today. Oh – your house smells nice.’

‘It’s lavender. Sacha brought it to say thanks for last night. Where’s Christopher?’

‘I don’t know. He wasn’t there when I got back last night.’

‘Maybe he’s left you.’

I hadn’t thought of that. ‘Yeah. How are you?’

‘Oh, you know. What sort of tea do you want?’

‘Whatever.’

Libby’s kitchen was bright in the early spring sunshine and I noticed green shoots in her window boxes where bulbs were starting to come up. Libby and Bob did things like that: autumn would come and one day they’d go to a market and buy bulbs and then they would plant them and in the spring
they would come up. I had never planted a bulb in my life. For me there was always some crisis or deadline and I had to ring my mother or soothe Christopher or walk B or finish reading something for Oscar. With all that out of the way there was always my novel to work on, always something there to delete. I remembered that there were only 43 words left to delete, and then it would be all gone. Perhaps then I would be able to start again. Libby handed me a cup of redbush tea with honey.

‘Well,’ she said. ‘This is it. This is going to be my life for the foreseeable future.’

‘Huh?’

She laughed. ‘You’re leaving Christopher. Well, my news is that I’m staying with Bob. I decided last night, and I feel really good about it: kind of warm and comfortable inside. Mark wanted me back, but I said no. Didn’t think I would, but I did.’ She shrugged. ‘I had a long talk with Bob in bed afterwards, and I suggested we go travelling together in the summer. We both need to get out of here. We’re going stir-crazy.’

‘But I thought you said …’

‘What? That I can’t sleep with him any more? Yeah. It is a problem. But everything else between us works so well, and I must admit that I’ve found that if I drink a bottle of wine and look at some porn on the Internet, and if he has a bath first so he totally smells of soap all over – then it’s OK. Oh, God. That sounds awful. But it’s no worse than lots of long-term couples. Is it?’

‘Me and Christopher never had sex at all, really.’

‘Well, there you go.’

‘But I am leaving him.’

‘Yeah, but for other reasons.’

‘You know,’ I said, ‘I can’t believe he didn’t want to just have sex all the time. I mean, what, otherwise, is the point of Christopher? Oh, God, I can’t believe I just said that. But it’s sort of true.’

There was a pause. ‘Holy shit,’ she said. ‘You’re really doing it. You’re really setting yourself free.’

‘Yeah.’

‘It’s totally the right decision.’

‘Yeah. I know. I think.’

‘But don’t rush into something else. Don’t shag Bob’s uncle, for example.’

I rolled my eyes. ‘Fat chance of that.’

‘What? So you’re not denying it? He’s the one you were talking about having an affair with, isn’t he? I knew it. You’re so evil.’ She grinned.

‘Don’t get carried away. I think I sort of overreacted to the whole thing. In reality he doesn’t fancy me and I don’t really fancy him either. We’re just friends. I’m meeting him for lunch this week, but there’s nothing in it. He’s with someone …’

‘Like Bob’s
aunt
.’

‘Yes, quite. Although they’re not actually married. Anyway, it doesn’t matter, because I’m really not into rebound things. Nothing’s going to happen.’

‘He is kind of sexy. But he’s very old.’

‘I get the point, Lib.’ I put down my empty tea cup. ‘That was lovely. OK. I’m off to move house.’

‘Good luck.’

Before I left for Torcross I watered the peace lily, but of course I left it behind. In the end I also left most of my books to be collected at some later date, and so the entire contents of the rest of my life ended up fitting into three cardboard boxes and one big suitcase. B had a little box of her own, containing her blanket, three tennis balls in various states of existence, her rubber ball, two half-chewed pieces of rawhide, her bag of dog biscuits and the two tins of food that were left in the cupboard. I put all my unfiled paperwork and bank statements into several recycling sacks and looked for the first time in years at a clear desk. It was as if I had died and become the person lumbered with clearing the house of my useless old things. I barely looked at most of the pieces of paper before throwing them out. I could have done this months ago, and then maybe I’d have been happier there. I took my laptop, my cables, the books I needed for my feature, my notebooks, my best pen, my knitting bag, my jam-making pan and my ship in a bottle and packed them particularly carefully in the suitcase, as if they were the only things I was taking with me into the afterlife. I put everything into the car, including B, and then I went back up the steps to pick up my guitar and the sack of self-help books and check that I hadn’t left anything behind. On my way down the steps I bumped into Reg, who was spraying weed-killer into the cracks between the paving stones outside his house.

‘A bit brighter today,’ he said.

For the first time ever, I didn’t simply agree with him. ‘You can’t just kill everything because you don’t like it,’ I said. ‘Why can’t you let everything be?’

I drove out of Dartmouth and after a while Start Bay emerged out of the brightening gloom like the end of a set of
parentheses in a book about the natural world. Inside the parentheses was a story about the sea. Outside them, the land: green, red and brown fields, and hills curling over the landscape. I saw small, delicate clumps of snowdrops, big rough patches of gorse, and along the thin road, houses with yellow roses and mimosa growing in their gardens. The mimosa buds were yellow balls that looked like little models of molecules. It was too early for them to flower.

If I apologised, would Christopher have me back? I imagined him going home with a bunch of flowers and finding me gone, and then going straight round to Libby’s to force her to tell him where I was. Somehow, in my fantasy, he turned up in Torcross at the same time as Rowan, who had established my whereabouts in roughly the same manner, and I sent Christopher away. But what if Christopher came, with his flowers, and Rowan didn’t come? What sort of flowers would he bring? Knowing Christopher, he’d pick some daffodils from the Royal Avenue Gardens. ‘Nature’s for everyone, babe’ is what he’d say when I told him off. And then I’d say that’s why the council plants them in the first place, and then we’d have a big row. I hated the smell of daffodils anyway. Pages and pages of speculation clattered through my mind like something being composed on an old typewriter, and each time a page was completed –
ding!
– I imagined ripping it out of the machine and putting it straight in the bin. So now I was deleting writing that didn’t even exist.

My cottage in Torcross was like a sheet of paper with nothing typed on it. I couldn’t unpack very much because I didn’t have any furniture, so I sat at the window for hours just watching. People walked past every so often, and at one point a woman ran down the beach with her daughter, and they both splashed
in the freezing cold sea. A man with a beard set up a tripod by the cliffs and started taking pictures of the rocks. An hour or so later, two people walked by my window: a woman who looked like a mountain and a man who looked like a hermit. I rushed to the door and went outside, thinking that of all people it was Vi and Frank who had come to find me here, and I was so happy and grateful. But in the daylight it wasn’t them. They had Welsh accents and a West Highland terrier. I went back inside.

Just after six everything outside turned the colour of twilight. The sea and the sky became the same inky blue, separated by a darkening horizon: a blue-black line on a washable blue background. I wanted to take a picture. If I had, it would have been all blue, with only subtle differences in the stripes of sand, sea, sky. When it became too dark to see outside I settled down in front of the fire on the big old sofa with my blankets and a bottle of wine Libby had given me, and drank myself to sleep as some cosmic force ink-jetted the last bits of sky. I thought I heard my mobile ringing a few times in the night, but when I woke up I had no missed calls.