Our Tragic Universe (16 page)

I was convinced that Josh had had OCD since he was a child, especially after he told me he’d had to go to the Steiner School because Pi made him throw up in normal maths lessons, but the rest of his family believed it started properly after his mother died. I’d once found him exhausted and close to tears, switching the light off and on in his bedroom. He’d done this 1,200 times already, he said, and still had to get to 5,000. I couldn’t make him stop. Later, when I asked him why he’d had to do this, he said that if he didn’t do it, then someone would die, or become very ill: perhaps his father, perhaps even me. I was flattered that he’d switch a light off and on 5,000 times to save me. Once I’d become convinced that there was a burglar in the house and
Christopher had refused to switch the light on even once. Josh didn’t quite believe that it was anything like ‘God’ that was planning to harm me or his father, but rather a complicated network of energies and cosmic checks and balances. He’d picked up on a vibration that something bad would happen, and switching the light on and off was a form of focusing his energy in order to stop the bad thing from happening. Josh had been an excellent footballer as a child, and had been selected to play in the under-13 team of a London club. But his mother hadn’t wanted him to live away from home and grow up as a footballer; she’d wanted him to be a writer or a painter. He’d been unemployed for as long as I’d known him, because he still wasn’t stable enough to hold down a job. I’d begun to fantasise that I could help him somehow, and we’d spent quite a lot of time together.

By the time I re-read
Anna Karenina
I was becoming interested in tragedy in general. I used the Sophocles play
Oedipus
Rex
on the retreats, mainly because our key text, Aristotle’s
Poetics
, referred to it all the time.
Oedipus
is an almost perfect example of the deterministic, cause-and-effect-based plot, where Y can only happen because X has happened first, and that was how I used it. But every time I re-read it I marvelled at how a narrative could do so much more than just tell a satisfying story with a beginning, a middle and an end, which was basically what I was always teaching the people on the retreat to do, and what I’d always done myself. Somehow,
Oedipus
seemed to dramatise a fundamental puzzle of human existence.
Anna Karenina
did this as well. So did
Hamlet
. I read Nietzsche’s book on tragedy and this made the situation with Josh worse for a while, because I started fancying myself as a tragic heroine with
nothing to lose. Tragedy wasn’t about people living happily ever after in banal domesticity, but going beyond the rational into a different kind of knowledge on their way to certain death. I managed to resist Josh, mainly because I was so terrified of Christopher’s reaction if anything happened between us, and instead tried to make my own novel into a great tragedy. It just ended up being depressing. I could see that most narrative was an equation that balanced, a zero-sum game, and that tragedy was special because you got more out of the equation than you put in, but I had no idea how to write like that. The mechanics of
Oedipus
were simple enough to grasp, but where did one get all that
feeling
from?

I’d once speculated about what would have happened if Zeb Ross had written
Hamlet
. There’d be no ghost, for a start. Or at least, the ghost would be reduced to a troubled teenager’s hallucination, and Hamlet, with the help of his plucky love-interest Ophelia, would come to realise that his new stepfather didn’t really do something as improbable and stupid as pour poison in his father’s ear, and in fact had actually tried to save his life! Hamlet would start seeing a counsellor – perhaps Polonius, who dabbles in the self-help industry himself, would recommend someone – and come to terms with his bereavement and realise that it’s OK for his mother to have sex with her new husband (although there’d be no ‘rank sweat of an enseamed bed’ or anything icky like that) and he’d go back to university happy, having now accepted the change in his family circumstances, with Ophelia in tow. Then I realised that if I’d written
Hamlet
it would probably have been like that too.

‘Sometimes I wish I’d never read
Anna Karenina
,’ Libby said.

‘Why?’

‘Because the ending is so perfect, but for Anna so sad. And now, whenever I think about what would happen with Mark, I think it must be something tragic, because I deserve it, and because that’s the way the story seems to be going. But what if we’d just be really happy together?’

It hadn’t stopped raining by ten o’clock, and droplets of water were still crawling like bugs down the stained glass window as B snored at my feet. Libby kept sighing and checking her phone for text messages from Mark, and we kept drinking Bloody Marys.

‘How’s Christopher?’ Libby asked, putting her phone away. ‘Still sulking?’

‘What? Oh, probably. When did you last see him?’

‘God, it was … Must have been at our place for that dinner before Christmas. It feels as if it must have been more recent somehow.’

‘Was he sulking then?’

‘Oh, yes.’ Libby pushed her hair out of her eyes. ‘What was it about? Oh, yeah, he thought he was going to be made supervisor on his building project and then he wasn’t.’

‘Oh, God. That was tough. Mind you, it should have been him.’

‘Is he still working on that wall?’

‘Just for another couple of months until it’s finished.’

‘But he’s applying for things now? Like, real jobs?’

‘Yeah. But it’s all so competitive. It’ll be OK.’

I knew Libby wondered, but didn’t ask, why Christopher didn’t just get a job he hated like everyone else. She checked
her phone again, rolled her eyes and then shook her head at me.

‘Nothing?’ I said.

‘Nothing. If we had children …’ Libby began.

‘I know,’ I said. ‘Then we wouldn’t have time to worry about everything so much. It would probably be a blessing.’

‘It would probably be a disaster. We’d turn into those people who are completely obsessed with our offspring.’

‘As opposed to being completely obsessed with ourselves.’

Libby picked up her phone, looked at it briefly and then put it down again.

‘By the way, did I tell you that Mark got a big contract?’

‘What for? A boat?’

‘Yes. It’s amazing. Good money that will last a year. But guess who the contract’s with?’

I thought about it for a minute. ‘Bob’s father?’ I said.

‘Precisely.’

I groaned. ‘So that’s why Mark’s coming to dinner next Saturday?’ I said.

‘Yep. Me and Bob, my mother- and father-in-law, Bob’s aunt and uncle, and my now ex-lover. Bob’s parents were supposed to be having it at their house, but their building work’s still not finished. Apparently the fireplace won’t be put back in for another month. Please say you can come. I’m going to get very drunk and I may need someone to hold my hair while I throw up.’

‘How could I miss that?’

‘Holy shit, Meg, why doesn’t this kind of thing happen to you?’

‘It used to. It’s not as if I could ever go back to Brighton, for example.’

‘But you’re settled now.’

‘I guess.’ She was right. In seven years I hadn’t been anywhere near another man; not really, unless you counted the kiss with Rowan. ‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘I’m not exactly happy all the time, but maybe that’s normal after seven years. And I can’t imagine any man is going to be that different from Christopher. I think I only find men exciting before I actually get to know them. And look at me. I’m hardly breathtakingly gorgeous any more. It’s not as if …’

‘You do sort of look the way Christopher wants you to look.’

That wasn’t strictly true. I had rejected fashion for my own reasons. I thought I looked OK in the clothes I had, though: three pairs of faded and fraying jeans, a denim skirt, four organic cotton shirts, a few black T-shirts and a couple of black cardigans. In the winter I wore trainers, and in the summer I wore flip-flops. If I wanted to cheer myself up I put on my silver bird earrings. If I went to a dinner party I wore a long black patchwork skirt with the fabric of the universe – which also functioned as a shawl. Even though my wardrobe was limited I ironed everything, and I carefully planned outfits for the week ahead on a Sunday night. I’d stopped plucking my eyebrows for several years because Christopher saw me doing it one day and said, ‘I hope you’re not doing that for me.’ When I asked what he meant he told me how much more sexy it was to look ‘natural’, and how women in commercials, and, by implication, me, looked glossy and wrong, and how his ideal woman was someone who wore shapeless things in cotton and denim and didn’t bother to change between working on, say, a fruit farm or a heritage site and then going down the pub afterwards. He didn’t like perfume either, or make-up. ‘I want the real you, Meg. Not some cardboard cut-out.’ Did he say that last bit, or
did I imagine it? In any case, after I’d met Rowan in the library the first time, I had started plucking my eyebrows again. Not for him, but for some unfathomable reason.

‘Hello.’ Tim had left his corner of the pub and was now standing by our table holding his book. I could see now that it was the edition of Chekhov’s letters that I’d admitted was my favourite book about writing when the people on the retreat last year had kept asking me. B stirred and lazily sniffed his feet and then turned around and went back to sleep. I imagined that since she’d already growled at him a couple of times she thought that job was done.

‘Hi,’ I said. ‘I thought it was you under that impressive raincoat. This is Libby. Libby, this is Tim Small.’

‘Can I get you more drinks?’ he said.

‘Yeah. Vodka and tonics, I think,’ said Libby. ‘If you don’t mind. I can’t drink any more tomato juice. Meg?’

‘Yeah. That’s really kind. Thanks.’

Tim got our drinks, plus another Guinness for himself, and then sat down next to Libby. He was wearing a faded blue rugby shirt, and jeans that were wearing around the knees. Tim spent a lot of time on his knees. He worked as a handyman, assembling flat-pack furniture and putting up shelves. He had a rugged, faded face, from years of spending his spare time gardening and walking on the moors. On the retreat last year we’d ended up talking about flat-packs for almost the whole first day. Clare, who already knew what she wanted to write about but had no structure, which was why she had come, started asking him a lot of questions about unusual DIY accidents, and then someone else said that they could never understand flat-packs, and most other people agreed.

‘But they’re completely logical,’ Tim had said. ‘Of course, I’m not complaining that most people can’t understand them. After all, I get work out of it. But flat-packs are probably the greatest invention of the twentieth century. Everything there in a box, with a picture of an object on the outside, and everything you need to construct it inside. You follow each step and at the end the object is made.’ He’d looked at me. ‘Please tell me writing a novel is like that,’ he’d said, and we all laughed as I shook my head. I didn’t say what I was thinking, though, which was that writing Zeb Ross novels was like that once you knew how. My next thought I hardly admitted to myself:
My Newtopia novels, and everything I have ever
written, are also flat-packs, and all I’ve done is screw the parts together
in exactly the way anyone would expect
. Almost everyone who came along to spend the week in the hotel in Torquay seemed to have the idea that all novels possessed the same sort of value, and took roughly the same amount of effort from the author, and that Tolstoy was ‘a novelist’ in the same way that the latest chick-lit author was ‘a novelist’. ‘How do you even begin to write eighty thousand words?’ someone would always ask, admiringly. And I’d always explain that 80,000 words is not that much, really, and that you could do it in eight weekends if you really wanted to, using Aristotle’s
Poetics
as an instruction manual. Making the 80,000 words any good is the hard bit: making them actually important. But I didn’t really need to talk about importance on the Orb Books retreats, so I would usually talk about unified plots instead, and how hard it can sometimes be to make the 80,000 words hang together the way Aristotle said they should, in a deterministic, three-act plot. On the retreats I ignored what he said about creating
fiction as an imitation of life in order that one can examine life more easily.

‘Hey,’ Tim said to me now. ‘Guess what I’m doing at Easter?’

‘What?’

‘Research trip. Camping on Dartmoor. I’ve bought a new tent. I got it off the Internet. Can you believe they deliver tents nowadays, to your door? It’s fantastic.’

‘It’s going to be freezing at Easter,’ said Libby. ‘It’s really early this year.’

‘Sounds like it’ll be fun, though,’ I said. ‘Who’s going with you?’

‘No one. Not Heidi. Heidi’ll welcome the chance to have her lover over, I’m sure.’ He looked at Libby and smiled sadly. ‘My wife’s having an affair. I like to make it easy for her sometimes. Go away on trips so she can have the house to herself. It’s like a kind of compromise, I guess. The kind of thing old people in the local paper say is the secret of their fifty-year marriage.’ He shrugged and sipped his drink.