Our Tragic Universe (27 page)

The next morning it was raining again. Christopher was out of it in bed on the strong painkillers they’d given him at the hospital, but had begged me not to leave him alone. I’d been planning to see Libby that evening, but it looked as if that was going to be impossible. The rain made things trickle and gurgle outside, and while Christopher slept I sat on the sofa with my laptop, re-establishing my personal email account. There was
nothing at all from Vi. There was lots of stuff about the TV deal, though. My new agent had also asked more questions about my novel, and wanted to know whether I might finish it this year. I wrote him a long email about the notebook idea but it looked wrong, so I deleted it all. Then I wrote another long email about how I hoped my career would now be able to progress more in the way I’d originally intended. I hinted that I was embarrassed about my Newtopia books, and asked whether my name would have to appear on the credits if the TV series was actually made. I explained that I wanted to leave genre fiction behind and become known as a serious writer. I tried again to summarise the notebook idea. I looked at what I’d written and realised that I was trying to say something I could not yet say, as if I was designing my own afterlife. I deleted it all and wrote a couple of lines confirming that I would try to finish the novel this year. I’d finish the novel and let that speak for itself.

Just after I’d gone on the Internet to look at Greek islands, there was a little bleep that told me I had a new email. Had the agent responded already? I flipped from the browser to my inbox and there was a message from Rowan. The subject header was ‘Lunch?’ The email itself was brief, but it was as if there was a Catherine wheel inside me as I read it. He was sorry he’d been ‘odd’ on the ferry the other day, and was I free to have lunch any day next week after all? I didn’t know what to say back.
Yes
? Or
No
? Should I insert an Aristotelian reversal and tell him I didn’t think it was a good idea, or just accept and take the ship in a bottle along as an excuse?

In my Orb Books account there were various messages from board members and regular ghostwriters on the subject of Zeb’s
disfigurement. These had become rather silly, and Claudia had sent a new message telling everyone off for being childish, and reminding us that Zeb needed a proper character arc, based on cause and effect, and could not have been simply ‘abducted by aliens that look like taps’. Could he have learned something from his disability? How has his disability helped him to write? What everyday activities does he struggle with, and how does this help build his character? Someone had almost immediately written back:
OK, so back in the ’90s Zeb is this moronic rich kid with
a Porsche. One day he’s on his way from seeing a beautiful girl for lunch,
and he’s heading to the gym to tone his glistening abs when he gets a flat
tyre. He pulls over by the side of the road to fix it and then hears a little
yapping noise coming from the electricity generator nearby. Oh no! It’s a
puppy! Zeb jumps in to rescue the puppy, takes a few thousand
volts/amps/whatever it is you get in electricity generators and is then
paralysed for ever. In hospital he listens to audiobooks, and because they
help him through he decides to help others by writing books, which he must
now do with his EYELASHES or at least by dictation, although maybe
he has lost all speech
… Someone else had responded:
Good – but
flat tyre is too much of a random act of God. Maybe a bit episodic? Why
does Z feel compelled to save the puppy? Did he have a puppy as a child,
before all the rich-kid stuff made him hollow and shallow? Is he trying
to get back to this state?
Then Claudia had reminded everyone that the disability would probably be better as a simple disfigurement, as originally suggested, and must be attractive.
We’re
thinking more Harry Potter’s scar than the Hunchback of Notre-Dame,
people! she said. The kind of thing you’d put on a visa application as
a distinguishing feature. Under NO CIRCUMSTANCES does Zeb write
novels with his eyelashes
.

After lunch I felt a bit sleepy, and I was sick of looking at
my laptop screen. I hadn’t yet replied to Rowan. My novel still stood at 43 words. I closed the lid of my laptop and put it on the table. I hardly ever played my guitar when Christopher was around, but since he was still out cold I picked it up, brushed off some of the dust, checked it was tuned and started playing a few of my favourite chords: B7, E7, A minor, D7. My fingers hurt a bit, but I carried on. Last time I’d played had been before Christmas. But Bob would probably get his guitar out at some point on Saturday night, and I didn’t want to be too rusty in case he suggested playing something. He was into carefully structured blues licks, and practised his scales every day. I didn’t know any scales, and liked chords more than notes. I loved the almost-dissonance of changing from E7 to B7, and that move from C minor up to G# always made me sigh. Somehow I played well with Josh and not so well with Bob. Josh and I were both counters, him consciously, of course, and me less so. Me on rhythm guitar and him on drums; we never lost time, and he didn’t care that I occasionally made some odd chord changes. As long as we kept time, he was OK. But Christopher didn’t like us playing together, so we’d stopped.

Towards the end of the day I put on my raincoat and walked B round the Royal Avenue Gardens and down the Embankment. I went to the cashpoint as well, and withdrew
£
100. After that, I went to Libby’s shop. I opened the door a bit and stuck my head in.

‘Can we come in?’ I said. ‘The dog’s wet.’

‘Yeah, sure. The health-and-safety guy was here yesterday. I doubt he’ll come again today. He told me some terrifying stories. A wet dog near food is nothing in his world. Come out the back. I’ll find a towel.’

The back room of the deli smelled of strong coffee, cheese, salami and raw silk. There were two really old chintz armchairs, a Turkish rug and a sink with an electric kettle in it. Libby had gone through a phase of cross-stitching her favourite quotes from books, and several of these hung on the wall. The longest one was from
Anna Karenina
. It read:
Understanding clearly then for
the first time that for every man and for himself nothing lay ahead but
suffering, death and eternal oblivion, he decided that it was impossible to
live that way, that he had either to explain his life so that it did not look
like the wicked mockery of some devil, or shoot himself
.

There were two old towels hanging on a radiator. Libby took one of these and held it up as if she was a matador and B was a bull.

‘Can I do her?’ she said, flapping the towel around. ‘Come on, Bess! Who’s a good girl? Come to Auntie Libby.’

I took off B’s lead and she ran over to Libby, wagging not just her tail but her whole back half, which made her look as if she was scuttling sideways, like a crab. Libby started rubbing B’s face, which she knew B liked best. Then she told B to roll over and did her stomach and her paws.

‘Busy day?’ I said.

‘No. It’s been dead. Bloody rain. Do you want a coffee?’

‘Yes, please. Do you want me to do it? What did the health-and-safety guy say about the kettle in the sink, by the way?’

She smiled. ‘Oh, I moved it before he came.’

‘So you do agree it’s dangerous?’

‘I’m still alive.’

After filling the kettle with water from the tap, I put it back in the sink, which really was the only place it could go, because its power lead was so short. I switched it off at the wall, then
pressed its ‘on’ switch, then turned the power back on at the wall. It started to boil slowly. I went and sat in one of the chairs.

‘How are you?’ I asked. ‘Beyond being alive, I mean.’

‘Pretty shit. I keep having to go and cry in the toilet. You?’

‘Yeah. Also shit. Christopher broke his hand punching a wall. I spent half of last night with him in casualty. I did a bit of crying in the bathroom when we got home too.’

Libby groaned. ‘Fucking hell.’

‘I know. I can’t stay long. He’s knocked out on painkillers and he’ll want to know where I am when he wakes up. I don’t think I can come out tonight, unfortunately, which is such a bummer because I so don’t want to be at home. The damp’s terrible with all this rain.’

‘Don’t worry; I’d have been lame company anyway. But you’ll still come on Saturday?’

‘Of course.’

‘I can’t cope without you. I’m cooking nine fish. In my kitchen. I can’t tell you how much I’m dreading the whole thing.’

‘I’ll come really early and help.’ I looked at the wall and read Libby’s cross-stitch again. ‘Lib?’ I said.

She was spooning coffee in a cafetière. ‘What?’ She looked at me. ‘Are you OK?’

‘I’m not sure.’

‘What is it?’

‘I don’t know. Oh, just ignore me. It’s stupid.’

‘Come on. You can tell me.’

‘Well, the cosmic ordering worked. After I finished speaking to you the other night I opened this envelope that I thought was an unearned-royalty statement, but instead I found out
that this TV company has bought the rights to all my science fiction books. I earned some pound-signs.’

‘That’s very cool!’ She came over and hugged me. ‘But that’s not cosmic ordering, you idiot. What did Christopher say?’

‘I haven’t told him.’

‘Ah. Interesting.’

‘Yeah. I know. So you don’t … You don’t think I’ve somehow unbalanced the universe with this cosmic ordering stuff?’

‘Don’t be so stupid. It’s not real. I didn’t get what I asked for. I haven’t heard anything from Mark. I really do think it’s over.’

‘Oh, Lib. I’m so sorry.’

‘It’s all right. I’m OK, apart from crying in the toilet. In fact, I think it might be for the best. Bob was so nice over the weekend. I had terrible period pains and he went out and got me DVDs, magazines, painkillers and a new hot water bottle without me even saying anything.’ She looked out of the small window, smeared with rain, and then looked back at me. ‘Hey – do you want to hear a really gross story?’

‘Go on.’

‘So this health inspector was in a pub on Dartmoor the day before yesterday. He was looking at the kitchens, and there were feathers under the cooker, so he asked the landlord whether he let his pet cockerels or ducks come into the kitchen. He said, No, of course not. Then the next thing that happened was that a cockerel ran in, followed by a fox with one of the ducks in its mouth, and one of the other cockerels on its back, and the cockerels pecked out the fox’s eyes while the fox killed the duck and then, blindly I suppose, killed the cockerels too. There was blood everywhere. The inspector closed the kitchen down.’

‘Oh, yuck,’ I said. ‘Poor cockerels. Poor fox. Poor duck.’

‘Bess would do the same given half a chance.’

‘She would not. She caught up with a squirrel she was chasing once on the moors and then she didn’t know what to do. They both sort of looked at each other, and then they ran in opposite directions. Since then she doesn’t bother to chase them.’

Libby stroked B’s head. ‘You’re very domesticated, aren’t you?’ she said. ‘Oh, thinking of crazy things on Dartmoor, didn’t you say that guy Tim was writing about a Beast or something?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Well, have you heard the news about the real one? You should tell him.’

‘What news about a real one?’

‘The health inspector told me about it. It was the “fun” story on the local news this morning as well. There’s been howling, weird footprints, ginormous piles of foul-smelling shit and all sorts of things. People have seen “something” much larger than a cat or a dog prowling around, and some local had a photograph of a black blob that looked a bit like the Loch Ness Monster, except it was in a field. They reckon that it’s probably a puma or a wolf that someone got as a pet and can’t look after any more. One woman said that all the dog food she kept in her garden shed disappeared late one night, and when she got up there were just empty bags all over her garden. She said it had cost her about a hundred quid. Imagine spending that on dog food.’

When I left the deli the evening had shrugged itself onto the town, and the whole place was slicked with the reflections of car headlamps and dim, flickering streetlamps. It was turning
into the kind of night where you walked the streets alone, heard other people’s TVs and wished you were indoors yourself. I walked slowly across the market square, not much wishing I was indoors at all. When I got to Brown’s Hill I remembered that if each time I took a step I covered half the distance to the front door, then I’d never get home. Was it worth a try? Was it possible to act out a paradox the way that Rowan and Vi acted out historical events? Or was it that people acted out paradoxes and historical events all the time anyway?

On Thursday morning, the phone rang. It was Tim Small.