Our Tragic Universe (12 page)

The New Year’s Day black hole had been sucking me in, which is what black holes do. While Christopher loudly brushed his teeth and went to the toilet, I took four drops of the flower remedy Vi had made me in Scotland, and looked out of the bedroom window onto the rooftops. I imagined the sea beyond them, and the castle. The castle was just a postcard to me, and the sea didn’t go anywhere. I suddenly thought that I could get up every morning for the rest of my life and look at the rooftops and it was possible that nothing would ever change. If nothing changed, I may as well be dead. Perhaps some people began every day with this thought, but it was new to me. I thought I’d already had all the depressing thoughts it was possible to have. Then I felt ungrateful, although towards whom or what
I didn’t know. It wasn’t even as if I could stand at the window yearning for something, apart from money. I’d given up yearning for Rowan. I did want to apologise to Vi, but I didn’t know how. She was due to come down and open the Labyrinth in March. Once I’d found out what it was and heard they were looking for a celebrity to open it, I’d suggested Vi. She’d been on TV a couple of times, as well as having a bestselling book, and I thought she might like the Labyrinth. I knew I’d have to find some way of apologising before then.

In the end I’d driven out to Slapton Sands with B and stood on the shingle beach wondering what it would be like to walk into the flat blue sea and never come out again. Of course, I didn’t walk into the sea. I looked down, and instead thought about the way you could move shingle around and it would still be shingle. It should have been freezing, but the air was clammy and a light, warm spray settled on my hair. B was hyper-alert at Slapton Sands, even in the winter, her paws touching the shingle lightly as if it was made of jagged pieces of broken glass. I felt almost as bleak as I had done in Dartmouth when I’d bought my wool, and on the long car journey with B back from Scotland. This time I did ask the sea for help. I stood there, looking down at the breaking waves, and I said, ‘Help me,’ and then added, ‘Please.’ The act of asking for help made my eyes fill with tears. But the sea said nothing, just splashed more waves at me. So I picked up some large stones and imagined that each of them represented one of my problems. My argument with Vi. My continuing lack of money. Christopher’s despair. My despair. The damp house. My novel. Sex. It could have gone on, but I thought I should stop there. Then I threw the stones into the sea, and didn’t feel like I had thrown them
away at all; I felt like I should go in after them. If I did, would Christopher be embarrassed at my funeral? Would there be an obituary?

Shallow, shallow. And the sea was deep.
In a solitude of the
sea / Deep from human vanity / And the Pride of Life that planned her,
stilly couches she
. My favourite poem, and the only one I knew by heart, was about the sinking of the
Titanic
. I said the rest of it out loud to the sea, as I had done to Rowan, and for a while I imagined that the sea could hear me. I wondered if it would think much of this poem, in which it functioned not as protagonist or antagonist but merely as the neutral fluid in which the iceberg and the ship are destined to collide, and in which the wreck of the
Titanic
eventually lies, with ‘dim moon-eyed fishes’ looking on. And then, quite suddenly, on that warm, wet first day of 2008, the sea did spit something out. It was a ship in a bottle, a perfect ship in a slightly chipped and sand-smoothed bottle, and it landed right at my feet. It had been in the sea a long time, but I recognised it. The bottle had a waxy blue sea inside, and the boat on this sea had the same inscription, ‘Cutty Sark’, on its hull. Then I told myself it was impossible that I’d recognised it, and I closed my eyes, and then opened them again. It was still there. I couldn’t believe it. Was this the sea’s idea of help? ‘What the hell does this mean?’ I said to the sea. It said nothing back. Shakily, I picked up the ship in the bottle and took it home. It had sat on a shelf ever since, while I tried to work out what it might mean, and whom I could ask about it now that I wasn’t speaking to Vi any more, since I didn’t know anyone else who would even believe what had happened.

The tide was up as I drove along Torquay seafront on Monday evening and I half-hoped that waves would splash over the car, but they only did that during storms, and at spring tide. If the car got washed away I’d probably escape and then I could claim the insurance money and get a new car. Maybe I should just push it in the river like Libby had done with hers. One of the billboards at a bus stop on the main street into Paignton was still advertising the opening of the new Maritime Centre last October, although the sign was torn and flapping. I hadn’t gone to the opening; I didn’t even get an invitation. The rest of Paignton was the same as usual: magical mystery tours on offer in two local travel agents, and Madame Verity’s fortune-telling shop doing business next to the pet beautician. The wind had picked up, and clouds moved across the sky thinly, as if being pulled from a dispenser. While I was waiting for the Higher Ferry to take me back across the river to Dartmouth I got a text message from Libby:
Police totally bought car story, so did Bob.
Come for dinner on Saturday week? Mark coming too!!! Yikes! You up for
a drink this Friday?

I parked illegally outside Reg’s place, although the yellow line was so worn that it wasn’t really there any more. I felt a bit breathless going up the steps. Maybe I needed to take iron supplements, or eat more greens? My mother was a big believer in iron. If anyone felt ill, it was always mild anaemia. Maybe I needed a jar of manuka honey. I opened the front door to find B waiting for me, with bits of shredded book-proof everywhere: rare for a Monday. I was far from famous, but I was alive and had published something not that long ago, so I was often sent proofs of new SF novels by young women, along with form letters asking for blurbs. B ate them all. Or, to be more precise,
she chewed them and spat them out. She’d once done this to a book I was supposed to review for Oscar, and after that I’d had to arrange for everything important to be sent to a PO box in Totnes, and for Christopher to pick up my post on his way back from the project. Oscar’s speech about how a novelist like me should be able to come up with something better than ‘the dog ate it’ was one of his classics. B loved books, but particularly proofs, with their cheap, shiny paper, even more than she loved the filled bones they sold in the market on a Saturday. Sometimes I imagined I saw pieces of novel coming out in her shit and always saw this as my own novel, which of course she couldn’t have eaten because it wasn’t finished. I saw a website once about all the weird stuff that comes out in dog shit: Barbie doll heads, toy cars, Lego, spoons. B loved books, and the bubble wrap inside padded envelopes, but never touched letters, perhaps because they were insubstantial, and I could see an intact bank statement on the floor. It would go with the others. Oh – and something that looked like it could be a cheque from the paper. Fantastic. There was also the form letter that had come with the proof. Apparently, what B had eaten this time was ‘Futuristic noir for a post-MTV, post-cyberpunk generation’.

To celebrate the money coming for delivery of my last Zeb Ross manuscript, I’d bought a hand-held vacuum cleaner to deal with B’s chewed-up paper and Christopher’s sawdust. Now I pulled it out of its cradle and started sucking up the pieces of paper slowly. The book had been so mangled that I couldn’t even see how thick it had been, but I caught the odd undigested paragraph here and there: something about a woman penetrating herself with a gun encrusted with diamonds, and, further
up the hallway, a short scene where presumably the same woman lets a man rub his dick between her breasts while she is flying a car. After the book was cleared up I moved into the sitting room to deal with the debris from Christopher’s sawing. As the house filled with a concentrated smell of rancid dog, I wondered again about the Newman book. If Oscar hadn’t sent it, then where had it come from? Christopher never got any mail, ever. In some part of his mind he’d never properly moved to Brighton, let alone moved in with me, and I assumed all his post still went to his father’s flat in Totnes. If he had been sent a book, here, B would surely have eaten it. Not that Christopher read books. Although he read
The Guardian
from cover to cover every day, all the books people gave him about recycling, heritage sites and globalisation remained barely skimmed. He’d been in the middle of a politics degree when his mother died. He must have read books then, but I couldn’t imagine what they would have been.

Before walking B I went up to my study and tried to prepare the space for some proper writing later. I plugged in my laptop and switched on the lamp. Things lit up, dimly, including my poster of the Periodic Table of Elements, which I put up wherever I lived. It comforted me: whenever life got complicated I looked at it and reminded myself that all matter in the universe could be broken down in terms of those boxes. My blue shelves were crammed with uneaten proofs of my own books, finished copies of the same books, manuscripts and copies of the few interviews I’d been asked to do, mainly with small SF magazines. Their journalists, who usually conducted interviews via email at one a.m., or else were bearded and anoraked parodies of themselves, asked me things like ‘What is the role of women
in science fiction?’ and ‘Have you seen the film
The Matrix
?’ and told me that my author photo did me no favours. I’d never been much good at interviews, and my carefully constructed answers made me feel about as real as Zeb Ross; as if I was making myself up as I went along. Apart from my own novels – at least, while I was writing them – I didn’t much like science fiction. I never admitted this; instead, every so often I would read three-quarters of an SF ‘classic’ so that I’d have something to say in interviews. I did like
The Matrix
, of course, and had read all kinds of essays on it, including Baudrillard saying it didn’t represent his ideas at all and was, in fact, a re-working of Plato’s
Simile of the Cave
. My interview answer about it now went on for about half an hour, and made even the most geeky journos glaze over.

Zeb Ross didn’t have any kind of public profile yet, which Orb Books had decided was a bad thing. He was one of the few people left in the Western world without a Facebook page or a MySpace account, and he didn’t even have an email address. He had good reason for this, namely that he didn’t really exist; but we didn’t want his readers to know that. We’d therefore decided to recruit someone to construct all his social networking pages and hang around non-paedophilic chatrooms being him, and I had promised to recommend Christopher’s brother Josh at the next editorial board.

On the top of my blue shelves my ship in a bottle was getting dusty. I still hadn’t done anything with it. I’d thought about taking it to the Maritime Centre to show Rowan, but probably wouldn’t. Sometimes, late at night, I visualised going there. But I couldn’t tell Rowan how I’d come to have it, and I also couldn’t tell him why it was important. My fantasy also ended up with
us kissing again, which was another reason not to go. I’d thought, of course, about simply putting all this, minus the kiss, in my novel. Perhaps the damn ship had washed up in the first place because it wanted to be in my novel. But what function would it perform? I’d already included, and then deleted, various MacGuffins, including a secret map and a mysterious statue, both of which embarrassed me when I thought of them now. I taught MacGuffins on the retreats, which of course meant I shouldn’t use them in my serious novel about the Real World, in which people must want meaningful, if problematic, objects and can’t just obligingly want random things that move their plots along. The term ‘MacGuffin’ was introduced by Alfred Hitchcock, and describes an object that has no meaning in itself, but motivates action in a plot because many of the characters want to obtain it. It could be a document, a key, a diamond, a statue or anything, even a bottle of oil. Aristotle said that using a random object to motivate action or force a recognition was lazy plotting, and I agreed. My plotting was definitely not lazy, just ineffective. I wondered if everything that everyone wanted was a MacGuffin, but the thought was so depressing I abandoned it.

I picked up my ship in a bottle and rubbed some of the dust off with my sleeve. No one wanted this object; not even me. I sighed. The top of my shelves was where I filed unfathomable things, or, at least, things that were unfathomable in a different way from my tax forms and royalty statements. There was a framed photograph of a brown, mushroomy
£
10 note that I had found lying in some leaves in the rain more than twenty years before, after asking the universe to please give me some money from somewhere, anywhere, because I needed to get the
train out to Essex to see my friend Rosa, who’d just broken up with her boyfriend. There was also a scrap of paper with Drew’s phone number on it, which I’d found five miles away from where I lost it. There was an embroidered purse that had once contained tobacco, and which I’d found a few years back when I still smoked, in Danbury Woods, miles from anywhere, just after I’d realised I’d left my tobacco at home. I’d once planned a feature for a science magazine where I explained how all these things, which had seemed to happen by ‘luck’, were really matters of unremarkable chance and probability. There’d been a few cases around then of people finding their wedding rings washed up on beaches three hundred miles away from where they’d lost them, and people answering ringing phones in telephone boxes to find their long-lost relative on the line. I didn’t like these things, and so had wanted to plot them away. To this end, I had been planning to write about
apophenia
, the perception of meaningful connections where in fact there are none. But the editor who’d commissioned the piece left the magazine and I’d had to abandon it.