Our Tragic Universe (13 page)

I had two desks. One now had my laptop on it, along with an empty document stand, and various wrist-rests and armrests that my mother gave me to prevent RSI. The other was covered in as yet unboxed bank statements, the letters that came with the proofs B ate, book contracts, film options, incomprehensible Russian royalty statements, cheques for amounts like
£
5.50 and
£
7.95 that my overdraft would swallow if I ever banked them, increasingly nasty letters from the Inland Revenue, unfiled paperwork from Orb Books, two ring-bound notebooks and the books and proofs sent to my PO box and delivered by Christopher. Many of the items on the desk were there because
whenever I wasn’t around Christopher trawled the house fishing up anything belonging to me, and then put it all on this desk. So where was the book I should have reviewed? I’d come up and got the Kelsey Newman book just after Christopher left to walk Josh to the bus stop on Saturday afternoon. Of course, I didn’t check the publication date because I was only looking for my deadline. This was on the compliments slip in the Newman book, and so I’d read it and reviewed it.

Now I looked properly and found a book on the Golden Section, with a press release inside it with a publication date of ‘March 08’. That must have been it. If only I opened my own post things would have been different, but Christopher recycled all the padded envelopes from the PO box before I even saw them. I once told him why I didn’t like all this random crap ending up on my desk, and how I wished he wouldn’t open my mail. He said if I wanted things to be different I should be tidier and more organised, stay at home all day like normal writers, research using the Internet rather than the library and learn to control my dog. I thought he was probably right about all that, so I didn’t push it, or say that I couldn’t stay in the house all day because it was hard to breathe. I blamed him for that more than I should have: he’d organised this place on the cheap through a friend called Dougie from the project, who hadn’t wanted bank references or a deposit. So how could I ask him about this? I wanted to know precisely how the compliments slip had transmigrated from one book to another without him being completely responsible. And where had the bloody Newman book come from in the first place?

I took B on her usual evening walk: down the steps, across the Market Square, through the Royal Avenue Gardens, down the Embankment, round the Boat Float and then to Coronation Park. I couldn’t quite visualise how the Labyrinth was going to look when it was finished. Today there were two yellow diggers, and jagged tracks in the mud around the hole. There were also new piles of grey, stone slabs underneath some plastic. My tree was still there. I wished I knew what kind of tree it was, but despite spending the last few years sitting in the biology section of the library, I hadn’t remembered to look it up. It was brown, and had a trunk and branches. I wouldn’t even know how to look it up, except that in the winter it grew these little things we used to call ‘helicopters’ at school. B was sniffing around the stone slabs when my phone rang. It was my mother.

‘You’re there!’ she said, as if she’d used a séance to reach me.

‘I’m always here,’ I said, laughing. ‘I’ve told you before to ring my mobile, especially if you want to avoid Christopher.’

‘I know. I keep forgetting I’ve got the number written down.’

‘How are you?’

‘We’re fine,’ she said. ‘Busy. What’s that noise?’

‘The wind. I’m walking the dog. By the way, what do you call those trees that grow little helicopters?’

‘Helicopters?’

‘Yeah; like a little seed in a case with a tail. You throw them and the little tail goes around and around like a helicopter.’

‘A sycamore tree?’

‘Oh, of course. Thank you.’

‘Is this for a new novel?’

‘Not exactly.
Bess!
Sorry. The dog was trying to get in this big hole.’

‘How is she?’

‘She’s fine.’ My mother always asked how I was, and how B was, but not Christopher. I just about managed to afford to take the train to London every couple of months with B to stay with Mum and Taz, my stepfather, for the weekend, but Mum never came to visit me. Often I combined my visits to them with some business in London so I could claim my fare on expenses, although I always stayed with Frank and Vi if there was an editorial board meeting, so that we could laugh about Claudia’s latest plans for Zeb Ross. I’d last gone to London before Christmas. I’d had a meeting with a woman called Fred, who was the head of a production company called Harlequin Entertainment. They were thinking of optioning my Newtopia novels for a TV series. The meeting had frightened me. Did I have any ideas for new episodes? Would I mind if they just took the characters and setting and then invented completely different stories to go with them? It felt as if I would be signing up to stop existing in yet another way. But I told my agent’s replacement that I’d take the money if they offered it, and I told my mother all about the glitzy place Fred had taken me to for lunch, and how we’d eaten velouté and swordfish. I never heard from Fred again.

‘How’s your archive going?’ I asked my mother now.

My mother was compiling an archive of all our family photos on her new laptop. Some of these were already digital, but others had to be sent by mail order to somewhere where they digitised them, put them on a CD and sent them back. She was also compiling a family tree using census websites and Mormon records of UK ancestry. My brother Toby had once pointed out that we were potentially the final generation of our
family, because neither of us planned to have children. Our family was therefore about to become extinct. I had a feeling my mother knew this, and that it was one reason for the photograph archive and the family tree. Every time we talked about her research I remembered that I had never filled in the 2001 census, even when the council chased me for it. I still felt guilty, although I wasn’t sure why. I kept imagining descendants of mine filled with despair in some futuristic archive because the records were missing, and then reminding myself that there would be no descendants, and no one in the future would ever care what I was or was not doing in 2001.

‘I’ve almost finished 1982,’ she said. ‘You must come and look at them.’

‘I will. Probably soon. I’ve got an editorial board coming up.’

‘Aren’t you staying with your friends, Frank and Whatsit?’

‘No. They’re going away.’

‘Oh, that reminds me. Have you seen the papers recently?’

‘No. Not really. Just the
Observer
crossword. Why?’

‘There was a big interview with Rosa over the weekend.’

‘Gosh,’ I said, in a more deadpan tone than I intended. Lately there’d been lots of news from my mother about Rosa. I hadn’t seen Rosa for years, but we’d been neighbours in Essex and, even after I moved away to London, best friends. Then we’d started to drift apart when we were about eighteen. I’d wanted to do drama but ended up doing comparative literature; she’d wanted to do drama but had ended up at art college. Our plans to go to RADA together and become famous method actresses came to nothing. When I was in my first year at Sussex, Rosa came to visit. She arrived at the station looking pale and spaced out, wearing a red dress and false eyelashes,
and with some bedraggled guy following her down the platform, begging her to marry him, while she smiled, said, ‘No, honey, but you’re very sweet for asking,’ looked over her shoulder and slowed down every so often for him to catch her up. For the rest of the weekend she ate nothing except for some acid another guy on the train had given her and kept going on about travelling to India to sort out her chakras. No one knew about chakras in those days, but Rosa’s brother Caleb had gone to India, which meant she had become an expert in everything to do with it. She slept with my boyfriend, slept with my housemate’s boyfriend, then got upset because she thought that she’d alienated us for ever and was found at 3 a.m. on the Sunday morning trying to drown herself in the duck pond in the local park. Not long after that, she was discovered by a producer while she was walking on Hampstead Heath. She’d started throwing sticks for his dog and he’d asked her to come and audition for a part in a major drama series about the supernatural goings-on in an English village. The legend went that Rosa thought he wasn’t serious and didn’t bother going for the audition, but he’d tracked her down and offered her the part on the spot. It was to play the female lead: a vicar’s psychic daughter, who falls in love with the paranormal investigator. She won a BAFTA for it, and then became one of the most sought-after actresses in Britain. My ex-fiancé, Drew, had once spent a month asking me to introduce him to her to ‘help his career’.

‘I think you’ll find it interesting,’ my mother said now.

‘I doubt it.’

‘Now, you’re not going to get silly about this again, are you?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘You know what I mean. I won’t tell you if you don’t want to know.’

‘Well, you’ve half-told me now.’

‘All right, well, one thing is that she’s been cast to play the lead in a big Hollywood re-make of
Anna Karenina
. The rumours are that she’s getting millions.’

‘Oh. Well, good for Rosa.’

‘Meg …’

‘What?’

‘You could sound more happy for her.’

‘Why? I’m not happy for her. I don’t care. I mean, I’d care if she wasn’t doing well; I’d feel sorry for her and hope that things got better. I’m glad she’s doing well, up to a point. But I hate celebrity culture; it’s just another form of clichéd narrative entertainment but with real people as the protagonists. I saw some of it with Drew, don’t forget. And he so wanted to be part of it all and I so didn’t. It’s completely blah. Also, why cast her to play Anna? She’s so not Anna. Anna is dark and mysterious. Rosa’s like a little puff of smoke, or a feather, or a bubble someone’s just blown. She’s far too insubstantial and self-obsessed. She’d make a good Princess Betsy, but not Anna. Mind you, I suppose if it’s some lame Hollywood re-make …’

My mother laughed.

‘What?’ I said.

‘Are we a little bit jealous?’

‘For God’s sake. No. I’m more than happy with my own life. If I’d wanted to be an actress I’d have gone to that stage school. I don’t want millions of pounds. I wouldn’t know what to do with it. I’d have to spend all my time worrying about my hair and whether I was wearing the right dress. It must
cost
millions
to keep up that lifestyle. Please, Mum, can we change the subject?’

Mum was still laughing. ‘I shouldn’t tease you,’ she said. ‘You know I’m very proud of you. I’d much rather have a daughter who writes books, even if no one buys them, than one who spends all her time on red carpets and in and out of the tabloids …’

‘You’re making it worse,’ I said.

‘I know. I’m sorry.’

We both collapsed in giggles.

‘Oh, Lord,’ I said. ‘Bloody Rosa. How’s Taz? Toby? The dogs?’

For the rest of my walk I listened to my mother tell me about Taz’s commission for the new St Pancras station, and Toby’s weird boyfriend who insisted on saying Grace before dinner, and how one of the dogs had chased his own tail and actually caught it, which meant the whole place had been covered with blood until Taz came home and cleared it up. After we’d said goodbye I looked across the river. In the beginnings of the twilight the deep pink earth looked like the soft skin on the inside leg of some huge, mythical animal that had fallen asleep by the water, furred with pubic clumps of dark green trees, and scarred and stretch-marked with roads. If the other side of the river was a sleeping creature’s open leg, then Kingswear would be the long, thin toe it was dipping lazily in the water. As the hills darkened I walked home the back way, thinking how much more eerie the silence seemed to be now, and how much better my mother’s archive would be if I was more like Rosa, and how much more point her family tree would have if I’d had children.

On Friday night it was raining hard. I’d left the library early, gone home, picked up B and walked to the Three Ships before Christopher got back. On Monday night when he’d got in I’d asked him about the mix-up with the books. He hadn’t listened properly to what had happened and suggested that I should tidy my spare desk and actually use the two filing cabinets he’d made for me: one for Meg Carpenter and the other for Zeb Ross. Of course, I kept asking questions about the Newman book, for example whether he remembered opening the envelope, and whether it was possible that he could have lost something from the package, like a letter or a card, maybe from Vi, but this led to an argument at the end of which Christopher told me I could pick up my own ‘fucking books’ from the PO box if I didn’t like the way he did it. This argument had thrown a shadow over the whole week and neither of us was quite over it. I had decided I would apologise for my part in it if he apologised first.