Our Tragic Universe (9 page)

The next morning I went straight back to the strange little cottage. There was a beautiful young woman there who was wearing a long, wine-coloured dress. She seemed to be Robert’s wife, although there were other times when I thought she was his daughter, or even his granddaughter. She would sit and play the flute all morning, and on market-day afternoons she would gather up her things in a drawstring bag and go off into the local town. The first thing that Robert taught me was the Waterwheel. We were sitting in the gazebo, and Bethany was inside the cottage playing a melody that sounded like half-finished birdsong. ‘You breathe like this’, he said, ‘when you want to concentrate, or when you’re scared, or’, he smiled, ‘if you want to do magic.’ But he didn’t show me any actual magic.

Each day of the rest of the holiday was more or less the same. I’d arrive early at the cottage and Robert would give me some task to do, like organising the woodshed or filling bird feeders, because, he said, Bethany loved seeing the birds, and feeding them ‘made the other Faeries happy too’. One day we planted bulbs in the garden: snake’s-head fritillaries, irises and grape hyacinths. Another day we made some sort of moonshine in a still at the back of the cottage. Another day we pickled walnuts. One day I gathered blackberries, hawthorn berries and rosehips with Bethany. It was the first time I’d been with her alone. She didn’t say much, but at one point she smiled and said,
‘Robert’s taken a shine to you. He must think you are one of us.’ Then she skipped off to the next bush and didn’t say another word. Later, we made jam. On the last day of my holiday, I asked Robert if he would please show me just a little bit of magic, because I wouldn’t be able to come back again. He sighed and said, ‘Are you sure you want to learn?’

‘Yes,’ I said.

Bethany was still out in the town. I was sitting at the big, pine table in the kitchen, where I had been shelling peas for her. Copper pans, skillets and griddles hung from the ceiling, and there was an axe propped up by the back door. I’d done so many tasks at the table, and I’d got used to gazing over at the strange objects on the dresser, one of which was a ship in a bottle, which particularly fascinated me. I wondered how the ship had come to be in the bottle. It couldn’t have fitted through the neck. Perhaps it had come to be there by magic. One time Robert had been out collecting mushrooms and I’d picked up the bottle and looked at the ship inside. It had white muslin sails, and writing on its hull in a white, chalky script. When I looked closely I saw that the writing said ‘Cutty Sark’. The ship sat on a waxy blue sea, and the bottle had a cork in its neck. I’d wanted to pull the cork to see if it came out, but hadn’t.

‘Do you believe you already have the ability to do magic?’ Robert asked me.

‘Yes,’ I said solemnly. ‘I think so.’

He smiled. ‘I think so too. So does Bethany. Not everybody sees Bethany, you know.’ Now he looked down at his hands. ‘Some people think you need to be initiated to do magic, and that you need to understand the relationship between the world of the Faeries, this world and the world above before you can
even attempt a spell. It’s a big commitment, and once you open the doors to the Otherworld, you can’t go back. But I happen to think there’s a lot of magic you can do on your own. Some people might say that every time you cook something or give someone medicine you’re doing magic, because you’re changing the states of things by redirecting energy.’

I bit my lip. ‘But that’s not real magic, is it?’

‘That depends on your point of view. You need to understand that good magic is always about bringing harmony to the world, not disorder. And you must also accept that magic has consequences. Do you understand that idea?’

I shook my head. ‘Do you mean getting into trouble?’

‘When you do magic, you are always involved in the redirecting of energy. You might choose to focus lots of healing energy on someone who is sick, or you might simply sew a good-luck charm into the patchwork quilt you are making for a friend. But you must never do this lightly, because you are always taking energy from somewhere else. Depending on the sort of magic you are doing, you will usually ask for help from the spirits of the underworld – the Faeries; or the spirits from Middle Earth; or the higher spirits that dance among the stars. You might call on the Lord and Lady of Middle Earth to help you with a sick cat, for example, or a Faerie to help you interpret a dream. Some people believe that these magical creatures and deities really exist. Other people believe that they are manifestations of an energy that we can only understand metaphorically, as stories and pictures. In any case, when you ask the Faeries for help with a spell or charm, for example, you always need to do something in return. You might feed the birds in your garden, or plant some new flowers. Faeries like nature. Indeed, they
don’t come to our world much any more because of what we’ve done to the natural world. If you don’t do what you’ve promised … Well, all I can say is that it’s fairly easy to use what you would call “magic” to redirect energy, but it always has consequences.’ He frowned and then smiled. ‘Oh, dear. You’re not following me, are you? Bethany said you were far too young. Maybe she’s right.’

I shook my head. ‘I’m not too young.’ But I was beginning to worry about this. I already had some idea of what ‘consequences’ were. They were always bad things like burning yourself because you played with matches, or being run over because you didn’t use the pelican crossing correctly, or being sent to your room, or being beaten with a slipper, or having to write lines. I didn’t like the idea of magic so much any more if it had consequences. I didn’t like the idea of offending Faeries who lived in some underworld. What if I forgot to do what I’d promised and they came to get me in the middle of the night?

‘Also,’ Robert said, ‘everything you do returns to you three times. In other words, if you do something magical you get it back multiplied by three. The problem is sometimes not knowing if what you’re doing is good or bad. In magic there aren’t easy definitions of good and bad, and you can still make mistakes. It’s a tricky business. You can create monsters, if you’re not very careful. If you use a lot of energy and find you can’t redirect it properly, then you can end up with ghosts and ghouls and magical creatures roaming around. It’s unpleasant when that happens, because someone with higher powers has to come and put it right.’

An owl hooted somewhere outside, and my stomach suddenly felt as if it was a cold dishcloth being wrung out late on a
Sunday evening. I looked out of the window and saw that dusk was falling. It had been coming a little earlier every day. ‘I’d better get back,’ I said.

He laughed. ‘Oh, dear. I’ve scared you off. Well, you’re probably too young anyway. But I can see you have the ability. Maybe when you’re older. Will you come back here again on holiday? Bethany would like to see you again.’

‘I don’t know,’ I said.

‘Well, call on us if you are ever back in the area.’

Robert started filling his pipe.

‘Will you tell my fortune before I go?’ I said, feeling suddenly tearful. ‘You did promise.’ This was the end of my holiday, and the end of coming to the forest, and I had been too much of a coward even to learn any magic. I really wanted to change my mind, but I knew it was too late. And I knew that my family would never come back. Mum had complained of damp in the house, and my father said it was too remote. I realised that I would miss Robert and Bethany and the way they lived their lives.

Robert was still standing by the sink. He put down his pipe, turned and looked out of the window for a minute. When he turned back to face me, his eyes had gone a terrifyingly bright shade of green, and his face was set in an unfamiliar way. Before, he had looked like a wise old tree. Now his face was jagged, like rocks cutting through a choppy sea. He looked as if he was in some sort of trance.

‘You will never finish what you start,’ he said, in a voice that wasn’t quite his own. ‘You will not overcome the monster. And in the end, you will come to nothing.’

This day, I knew, was going to be like any other. Because of the ferry queue it had already begun slightly too late. By the time I’d walked B and driven across Torbay it was always gone ten, but today it was already coming up for eleven and I was still driving. This in itself could be read as a good sign: sometimes the radiator overheated and I had to stop and fill it with Radweld, which made me even later. Usually I’d get an hour’s work done before lunch, less if I had lots of emails to read, and the afternoon would then be postponed until after two o’clock, and by the time I’d finished whatever I’d started before lunch and done some Orb Books admin, it would be time to go to the supermarket and drive home. How was I supposed to write a novel with no time at all to write it in? It didn’t have to be like this. When I had written the second halves of all my completed novels, time had just bloomed everywhere, even in the darkest corners. I’d write at least 500 words at the kitchen table before walking B in the mornings, and make crazy notes over lunch. I even wrote in the supermarket queue sometimes, using the tiny keyboard on my mobile phone. One day I wrote 7,000 words. But I probably wouldn’t get much done on my novel today, especially not with a book review to write.

The countryside around me looked too bright in the cold February sunshine as I drove across Torbay with the radio on low, wondering about how to begin my review. Oscar loved it when I really trashed a book, and I was sure he deliberately gave me books he knew I’d hate. I’d therefore decided to really go to town on
The Science of Living Forever
, but I didn’t quite know how. It seemed a bit of a soft target. I thought about writing something like
Regular readers will know that I should never
be provoked on the subject of infinity
. But that was way too smug. I’d
been writing for the paper long enough now that I could get away with first-person reviews, but there were limits. Perhaps I could make the point that when humans fiddle around with anything natural they completely mess it up, and messing around with infinity would therefore be an infinitely bad idea. There was also Tennyson’s poem about the Ancient Greek Tithonus, lover of Eos, queen of the day. Tithonus has been given the gift of immortality so that he can love Eos for ever, but whoever has arranged this has not also given him eternal youth. So he is doomed to age and decay for evermore. The poem opens:
The woods decay, the woods decay and fall, / The vapours weep their
burthen to the ground, / Man comes and tills the field and lies beneath, /
And after many a summer dies the swan. / Me only cruel immortality /
Consumes: I wither slowly in thine arms
. Perhaps I’d begin my review with that. But it didn’t seem quite right either.

In Newman’s never-ending universe there’d be time to write an infinite amount of novels, and even finish reading all the books I’d ever begun, and all the books I’d never begun. But who’d care about fiction any more? We only need fiction because we die. I turned up the radio when the news came on. A study had revealed that Prozac, taken by forty million people, including my brother Toby, had been working only as a placebo for all this time. As I drove past the Maritime Centre with the sea on my right, I thought again about Rowan.
I wither slowly in thine
arms
. Even if we were both single, he was still too old for me. It was a good thing we hadn’t started emailing each other. But perhaps there’d be an email from him this morning; I’d said he should email me any time. And then what would I do? I couldn’t ever kiss him again, because I wouldn’t be able to leave it there. I couldn’t face living through the aftermath all over again.

After recycling one of last week’s car park tickets, I spent the morning at what had become my usual desk in the library, writing my review. It had once been Rowan’s usual desk, but I’d taken it over. Oscar only ever had an 800-word space to spare, which often shrank as advertising came in. His assistant Justine spent most of her time sourcing cheap pictures to go with the reviews. The year before, I’d reviewed a book in which a scientist had used slicing ham as a way of explaining dimensions. The ham is three-dimensional, she’d said; and the slice is two-dimensional. It drove me mad. Two-dimensional ‘objects’ cannot exist, cannot be; however thin something is, it still has three spatial dimensions. I’d spent half the review explaining why it was impossible to experience a two-dimensional world, especially if one was attempting to travel from a three-dimensional world made of ham. Justine had come up with a nice image of a hock of ham, which she’d placed alongside an image of the scientist and a caption: ‘The universe is not ham’. I remembered checking and checking that review, worried that I’d got something wrong, and nervous about criticising a real scientist for not being scientific enough. For weeks afterwards I feared the email I’d get from her, putting me straight. But nothing ever happened. I also imagined my father reading my review and being proud of me, but as far as I knew he never read the literary pages of any newspaper.