Our Tragic Universe (52 page)

Authors: Scarlett Thomas

BOOK: Our Tragic Universe

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‘I know,’ Vi said. ‘Well, in some ways it is. You just have to let go of the plot when it gets too much. Do something else.’

‘I wish he’d just phone me or something.’

‘He will when he’s got something to say.’

‘Why can’t he write me a love letter?’

‘Because it would be dishonest. Not because he doesn’t love you, but because he knows he’s not doing anything concrete about it. Rowan has never told a lie in all the years we’ve known him.’

‘He must lie to Lise all the time.’

Frank shrugged. ‘Maybe. Or maybe he doesn’t say anything.’

‘Be patient,’ Vi said. ‘Things will work out.’

‘I’ve got a friend who’s in a similar situation,’ I said. ‘She can’t work out whether to leave her husband for this other guy. I suppose it’s not the same situation, really.’ I thought about it some more. ‘No. They’re complicated in different ways. But she can’t act either.’

I hadn’t heard from Libby since I’d seen her the week before, which I thought meant she probably hadn’t left Bob.

‘Just wait,’ Frank said.

‘I guess I’ll have to. I guess I’ll just knit another sock and wait for the spring.’

The Labyrinth was beautiful. It was a simple pattern laid out in pale stone, with benches made from the same stone and set out so that you could sit on any of them and look at the Labyrinth and the river at the same time. The sycamore tree was there between two of the benches. It didn’t have its helicopters any more; instead, it had the beginnings of buds. Vi, Frank and I had got up at six and come to walk the Labyrinth to see what it was like so that Vi could compose her speech for later. B had come too, and sat there looking puzzled while we took it in turns to follow the single path from the edge to the centre as the sun came up over Kingswear. Vi went first, then Frank, then me. Afterwards we sat huddled together on one of the benches and said nothing. At about seven Vi looked at her watch, and then a few minutes later Rowan came, walking down the dawn-lit embankment in his duffel coat. He walked the Labyrinth too, more slowly than the rest of us had, and then we all went for breakfast.

Josh and Peter came to the opening, along with everyone else you would expect: Old Mary, Reg, Libby and Bob, everyone
I’d ever seen in the Three Ships and around town. Even Andrew came over from Torcross. Josh had his briefcase with him, and I promised to introduce him to Vi properly over a drink later on. At twelve o’clock the ceremony opened, and Vi walked the Labyrinth again, silently, slowly, while everyone watched. The town council had originally wanted her to cut a ribbon, but couldn’t work out where you’d put a ribbon on a labyrinth. In the end they’d improvised and done what Vi suggested: they’d left just a small piece of red ribbon in the pale circle at the centre. Having walked the Labyrinth myself, I had some idea of what Vi might be thinking, although of course I would never know. I had been surprised myself – we all had, we found, when we talked about it over breakfast – that just walking one short path could make you feel hopeful, frustrated, bored, excited or even nothing at all, and that this could change from one step to the next. You are aware that you want to reach the centre, and also aware that the Labyrinth keeps taking you away from it. Just as you seem to be getting close, you turn and end up walking almost around its outer limits. As you do this, you realise that there is a ring that forms the outer limit that you will never reach if you keep walking the path. This is a path all of its own, connected to nothing and going nowhere. When you get to the centre, you feel an odd sense of achievement, even though you’ve simply walked on a path that’s been laid down for you. You love the Labyrinth and you hate it at different moments, but you never feel like you’ve conquered it, because that would be ridiculous.

‘What’s perhaps most exciting about this process’, Vi said in her speech, ‘is that at any time you can choose to leave the path and just walk straight to the centre. Why does no one do that?’
I remembered that this was precisely what B had done earlier, as if to demonstrate to us where we were going wrong. Perhaps Vi remembered this too, because she looked at B and smiled. B was looking resplendent, I thought, in some of the discarded red ribbon. Vi continued, ‘Or almost no one. This is a path that is determined for you in advance, but no one can tell you what to think while you’re walking it. It’s not like a maze: you can’t get lost. No one’s playing any tricks on you. There aren’t any monsters lurking around any corners. You can see the end and yet you walk calmly towards it, following perhaps the least logical route – in mathematical terms, at least. Perhaps the Labyrinth tells us why we don’t simply read the last pages of books, why we don’t hurry through life looking for outcomes all the time, however many times we’re told that we should, and that we should be overtaking people, and overcoming things as we go. The Labyrinth doesn’t tell us how to live; it shows us how we do live. There is no drama in the centre of the Labyrinth, just a place where you have come to rest for a while before you walk the path out again. Perhaps walking the Labyrinth is the path of the storyless story, or perhaps that’s just my labyrinth. You will all find your own way, I’m sure, even though to an external observer who hasn’t walked the path it will seem to be the same objective experience for everyone.’

Vi picked up the piece of red ribbon from the centre of the Labyrinth and walked with it back to the beginning, holding it in her left hand the whole way. Every so often I glanced beyond her, to the river. There were so many things in the Dart, unseen: pieces of old shipwrecked ferries and designs for follies; love tokens and manuscripts; Libby’s car; Tim’s gun; even the Beast, perhaps, swimming for its life. I waited for something to wash
up, but nothing did. As Vi returned to the beginning of the Labyrinth, I looked at the river again, and I was almost sure that something black swam past. I imagined it dog-shaped and wolfish: prick-eared, black-nosed, pink-tongued; and in my mind it was swimming away from this world and into another one.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Lots of people (and one dog) helped directly or indirectly with this novel: Rod Edmond, Francesca Ashurst, Couze Venn, Sam Ashurst, Hari Ashurst-Venn, Dreamer Thomas, Simon Trewin, Francis Bickmore, Sarah Moss, Dan Mandel, Jenna Johnson, Jamie Byng, Jenny Todd, Jennie Batchelor, Karen Donaghay, Alice Furse, Vybarr Cregan-Reid, Ariane Mildenberg, David Stirrup, Abdulrazak Gurnah, Jan Montefiore, Rosanna Cox, Suzi Feay, Jon Gray, Caroline Rooney, David Herd, Donna Landry, Will Norman, Graham English, Steven Hall, Tom Boncza-Tomaszewski, Mudassar Iqbal, Laurence Goldstein, Jason Kennedy, Kirsty Crawford, Leo Hollis, Zahid Warley, Sheila Browne, Murray Edmond, Andrew Crumey, Emilie Clarke, Allen Clarke, Philip Pullman, Ian Stewart, Doug Coupland, Norah Perkins, Janine Cook and Anne Makepeace. Thanks also to Tony Mann, Don Knuth and everyone else at the 2009 Mathematics and Fiction conference. I am grateful to all my colleagues in the School of English at the University of Kent, particularly those in the Centre for Creative Writing. I have learned something from (almost) all the students I have ever taught, so if you’ve ever sat through my Plato lecture or a class on compassion in writing then thanks to you too. I am hugely grateful to everyone at Canongate.

Parts of this novel were written in the following locations in Devon, UK: the Maltsters Arms, Tuckenhay; the Barrel House
café, Totnes; Number 12 B&B, Totnes; and the Sea Breeze Hotel, Torcross.

I have tried to acknowledge some of the many books I have used for research within the text of the novel. Most of the books I mention are real, except for those by Kelsey Newman and Zeb Ross,
Household Tips
by Iris Glass,
Teach Yourself Tantric Sex
and all the books in the sack sent by Oscar. The following real books are not mentioned in the text, but were very useful:
Zen
Flesh, Zen Bones
, compiled by Paul Reps;
Meaning, Medicine and
the Placebo Effect
by Daniel Moerman;
A Life in Letters
by Anton Chekhov, translated by Rosamund Bartlett and Anthony Phillips; the
Tao Te Ching
, translated by Stephen Mitchell;
Russian Fairy
Tales
, translated by Norbert Guterman (for the story called ‘The Goat Comes Back’ on pages 56–57);
Chinese Fairy Tales &
Fantasies
, translated and edited by Moss Roberts;
Trickster Makes
This World
by Lewis Hyde;
A River to Cross
by David Stranack;
The Book
by Alan Watts (for the cat image);
Knitting Socks
by Ann Budd;
The Case of the Cottingley Fairies
by Joe Cooper;
The Forgotten
Dead
by Ken Small;
A Witch Alone
by Marian Green;
Hedge Witch
by Rae Beth;
Bach Flower Therapy
by Mechthild Scheffer; and
Seventy-Eight Degrees of Wisdom
by Rachel Pollack. I could not, of course, have written my novel without Frank Tipler’s book
The Physics of Immortality
.