Our Tragic Universe (32 page)

I imagined being with Christopher until we were both in our
sixties and realised I’d probably rather shoot myself. I didn’t say so to Milly, but if either Christopher or I was much older or younger than the other it wouldn’t have worked at all. One of the few things we had left in common was both being in our late thirties; another was the fact that we were already together and inertia was winning out over entropy. I remembered seeing Rowan’s tanned, ageless forearms resting on the table in Lucky’s the first time we’d been there, and realising that I wanted to touch them. This had surprised me, because I’d never found older men particularly attractive. It was when I’d noticed the agelessness of his arms that I’d first realised he was a man, like any other man, and that he would also have feelings and memories and hopes and a heart and a naked body, just there under his clothes.

‘You know, Peter told me he was going to tell Christopher not to come round any more,’ I said.

‘Seriously?’

‘Yeah.’

Milly looked up at the blackening sky, and then back at me.

‘And has he actually told him that?’

I thought of the get-well card with a
£
20 note in it that had come that morning. Christopher had torn up the card, but not the
£
20 note. He’d given it to me to buy the remedies, and I’d taken it, because I hadn’t known what else to do.

‘I’m not sure,’ I said.

By the time I got home it was six o’clock. I’d tried to ring before I left Totnes, but there had been no answer. Surely Christopher
could answer the phone with his left hand? I imagined him passed out on the floor after taking too many painkillers; in bed, overcome with pain, all on his own; or just not hearing the phone because his throbbing despair had become so loud. As I drove down the Lanes I developed a kind of acid indigestion that felt like a monster inside me trying to eat its way out. But when I opened the front door the only throb came from some hip-hop bassline that I half-remembered from the early nineties.

‘Sweets?’ I said. ‘You won’t believe …’

Christopher was on the sofa grinning and half-dancing. My copy of
The Science of Living Forever
was on the sitting-room table in front of him. I didn’t remember leaving it there.

‘Hey, babe,’ he said. ‘I’ve found a new channel. Old-school hip-hop. Come and watch it with me. It’ll bring back memories.’

‘OK, I’ll just put the kettle on. You won’t believe the afternoon I’ve had.’

‘Maybe I can manage to put the kettle on for you? You look knackered.’

‘No, it’s all right. I can do it. Do you want a cup of tea? Have you had your painkillers? If not, don’t take them, because I’ve got some white willow bark for you. It took ages to find, but it looks really good, and …’

‘Thanks, babe. I will have a cup of tea, if that’s OK, and some new tablets. You do look after me. Sorry I’ve been a dick recently.’

‘You haven’t exactly …’

‘No. I have. I’ve been thinking about it all afternoon. I’m sorry. And I read that book Josh gave you. It’s amazing. We’re all going to live for ever! I can’t believe you didn’t tell me, although you probably thought I wouldn’t understand it. I
haven’t been that good at science things in the past. But it’s like life has opened up again. I think I’m going to read a lot more science books now.’

On TV, a guy in a shellsuit was pointing at a clock around his neck.

‘Really?’ I said, filling the kettle. ‘Wow.’

‘Yeah. It’s like, it’s so easy to start thinking that life is totally meaningless. I don’t think I ever told you this, but after Mum died I used to get terrible night sweats, and I’d wake up cold and shivering and think about all the black nothingness out there. When I was a kid I thought death would happen to other people, but not to me. Then when I grew up and realised it was inevitable for everyone, and then saw it happening to Mum, it was just such a fucking downer, you know? This book has made me feel like a child again. I think I might write to Kelsey Newman and thank him. He made the science so easy to understand as well. I totally get how the collapsing universe would provide all that energy and create the Omega Point. It makes total sense. The only thing I can’t work out is this Second World stuff. Have you got the new book somewhere? Oscar sent it to you, didn’t he? I’d love to read it.’

‘Sorry, sweets, I lent it to someone else. But when they’ve finished with it you can have it. I didn’t know you’d be interested, otherwise I’d have kept it for you, obviously.’

There was a pause, and then he said, ‘Who?’

The kettle had boiled and I poured water into our cups. Now I had some money I’d gone back to using one tea-bag each instead of sharing one between us. It always drove me mad that Christopher didn’t notice things like this. If he always made nicer tea when he had money, I would always know when he
had money. But he never really noticed the kind of tea I made, or even how many tea-bags there were in the bin. Would Rowan notice that kind of thing? While the tea brewed I started unpacking my shopping: the white willow bark tablets, the arnica bath and everything else I’d bought. Christopher switched off the TV, and an empty sound echoed around the kitchen.

‘Who did you lend it to?’ he said.

‘Huh? Oh, just Josh.’

‘You saw Josh? When?’

‘Well, I was in Totnes buying your remedies, so I just dropped the book off with him on my way home.’

‘So you saw him today.’

‘That’s OK, isn’t it?’

Another pause. Christopher looked away.

‘Why wouldn’t it be?’ he said.

‘I don’t know. You’re the one making a fuss about it.’

‘I’m not making a fuss. How is he?’

‘He seemed fine.’

‘Did you see my dad too?’

‘No.’

B had been on the armchair scratching behind her ear and waiting for her dinner. Now she got off and slunk upstairs. Perhaps it was because she’d detected something in my voice that she’d heard before and knew led to an argument. But it didn’t lead to an argument, exactly. Christopher got off the sofa and came and kissed me on the cheek.

‘Don’t stress, babe. What’s this?’ He picked up the white willow bark.

‘Oh, it’s a natural painkiller. From trees.’

‘Brilliant. How many do I have to take?’

I took the bottle from him and read the label.

‘Two. Up to four times a day.’

I gave the bottle back to him.

Christopher got a glass and filled it with tap water. He gulped down two of the tablets.

‘I feel better already,’ he said. ‘What’s this other stuff?’

‘It’s also to help your hand heal. The arnica bath, well, I suppose that’s self-explanatory. Arnica is for bruising and stuff. Sports people use it a lot. These flower remedies deal with the more, I guess, psychological aspects. I’ll need to do some research to make up a remedy specifically for you, but you can have some rescue remedy to start with. I’ll just put some drops in some water for you.’

At Christmas I’d asked Vi what I was taking, and that was when she’d written the label for my little brown bottle:
Gentian,
holly, hornbeam, sweet chestnut, wild oat and wild rose
. She’d learned about Bach flower remedies relatively recently, in the nursing home. They’d had an experimental programme during which the residents were given holistic therapies of different sorts. Each of them had their own Bach flower combination in a brown bottle, and one of Vi’s jobs was to mix up new bottles when the old ones ran out. I knew from what she told me that these remedies contained nothing more than the ‘vibrations of plants’. I remembered asking her how ‘nothing’ could heal. She hadn’t said anything about the placebo effect. She’d talked about male and female systems of rationality, and said that the irrational, female world, far from being non-existent, was actually the world of the void, the black hole, the spiritual cave and the ‘cosmic vagina’ in which you sense the unfathomable dark energies that are as important to the existence of the
universe as the male world of matter that you can see and touch and count. Counting numbers – all the positive and negative integers – were male, but imaginary numbers – the square roots of negative numbers – all the way to imaginary infinity, were female.
Doxa
was male, paradox was female.

‘Thanks, babe,’ Christopher said.

‘What were you thinking about exactly?’ I asked him, once I’d carefully used the pipette to put four drops of rescue remedy in the water. ‘Here. Sip this slowly.’ I gave him the glass.

‘Huh?’

‘You said you’d been thinking this afternoon as well as reading the book.’

He gulped down the water. ‘Oh, just stuff.’

‘What stuff?’

‘Just about, well, about how good things could still be. With us, and the future and everything.’

‘Why were you thinking that?’

He must have picked up on something in my voice, just as B had, because he frowned.

‘I just was. Is something wrong?’

I sighed heavily. ‘Why does something always have to be wrong?’

‘Come on, babe. Chill out. You’ve had a busy afternoon out in the cold. Let me finish the tea.’

‘No, it’s all right. It’s done now.’

I finished making the tea and peeled and ate a tangerine while Christopher talked about how he knew everything was going to be all right because of a new job he’d seen advertised in the free paper, and how Mick from the project had rung him to say he was a definite for it if he applied. Devon Heritage
were looking for people to work on restoring an old castle along the coast from there. Christopher had all the right experience, and Mick was going to be heading up the team.

‘Which castle is it?’ I said.

He told me. I could faintly visualise it. It wasn’t far from Torcross. It was little more than a ruin, and, if I remembered rightly, it always had been a ruin, because it had been built that way.

‘Isn’t that one actually a folly?’ I said.

There were lots of follies around South Devon, especially at the mouth of Dartmouth Harbour. The real castles were hundreds of years old, but the follies had gone up mainly in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. I wasn’t really interested in old buildings and walls, but I loved follies. They were more or less completely useless buildings, but resembled something useful or real, like a watchtower or a lighthouse. Some people even built fake ruins in the grounds of their country houses to give them a ‘historical feeling’, and this was what I’d thought this structure was. I couldn’t remember quite how I knew that, but Libby had found out a lot about Devon castles when she decided she wanted to get married in one. She’d even considered ruins, since, as she put it, she was already ruined herself, and follies, which she said would also strike the right tone.

‘No, babe,’ Christopher said. ‘It’s the ruins of a real castle.’

‘Oh.’

‘Well, I’m not going to go and work on a folly, am I?’

I shrugged. ‘I don’t know. They have historical importance as well, don’t they?’

He laughed. ‘Don’t be stupid.’

‘Why is that stupid? Don’t you think it’s interesting that
people spent loads of time and money building structures for no reason other than to amuse themselves, or have something better than the neighbours, or so they could pretend to be living in the past, or in a fairy tale or something? I mean, surely history is interesting because it tells us about people? I think people who built follies were probably much more interesting than people who built castles.’

‘You’ve lost me, babe. Anyway, Mick reckons that the timing’s going to work out perfectly with the wall. We can all finish that and then move straight on to the castle, and we’ll actually start getting paid. I mean, it’s only going to be a temporary contract if I get it, but fantastic for the CV.’

Christopher carried on talking and I let my thoughts drift elsewhere. As far as I could tell he still didn’t say anything about being sorry for punching the wall, or making me drive around Devon in the middle of the night, or being so rude at the hospital, or going silent on me for most of the drive back. I ate another tangerine and thought about the money, and how I should really tell Christopher about it now. But in the end I just said ‘Mmm’ in the right places, and ‘That’s brilliant’ every so often, and fantasised about the days I would spend alone with B in Seashell Cottage playing my guitar, knitting my slippers and writing my novel. What was wrong with me? All those years I’d wished Christopher would read an interesting book and want to talk to me about it; all those times I wished he would apologise for, as he put it, being ‘a dick’. But now I couldn’t give a damn about any of it.

After Christopher had gone to bed I sat on the sofa and browsed through the book about flower remedies. What should I choose for him? Chestnut bud was for people who repeated
the same mistakes over and over again. Chicory was for people who were egotistical, domineering and judgemental. Honeysuckle was for people who lived in the past, and couldn’t get over some traumatic event. Rock water was for people who liked to take the moral high ground. Willow was for moody, sensitive people who spoiled things for people around them. Was all that Christopher, or was it just my idea of him? The book said that you should not prescribe for someone else unless you could be objective about them. Fat chance of that. As I took the brown stock bottles out of the box I felt my eyes fill with tears. I missed Vi, and I was so sick of Christopher I didn’t want to heal him at all; I wanted to go upstairs and smother him. I still hadn’t emailed Rowan back because I didn’t know what to say. Every day I composed responses to him, and every day I constructed neat apologies for Vi, but I didn’t actually do anything. I labelled Christopher’s remedy and left it on the kitchen table for him, with instructions. I tried to will some placebo effect into the bottle, but my heart wasn’t in it.