Our Tragic Universe (2 page)

I put up the hood on my jacket, while B sniffed things. She liked to visit all the benches on the North Embankment, one by one, then go around the Boat Float and home via Coronation Park. She was always slower and sleepier in winter, and at home I kept finding her balled up in the bedclothes as if she was trying to hibernate. But she still followed her routine when we came out. Every day we stopped to look at the mysterious building site in Coronation Park. The previous autumn Libby had heard from Old Mary at her knitting group that it was going to be a small, stone Labyrinth set on a piece of raised and landscaped lawn with a view of the river. But it was still just a hole. The council was funding the project because a study had said it would help calm everybody down. Dartmouth was a sleepy harbour where people came to retire, die, write novels
or quietly open a shop. The only people who needed calming down were the cadets at the Royal Naval College, and they would never come to the Labyrinth. My main worry was that the builders might cut down my favourite tree, and almost every day I went and checked it was still there. The wind tore across the park and I hurried B past the building site with its flapping plastic and temporary fencing, looked at my tree and then went back to the Embankment. This February was cold, cruel and spiteful, and I wanted to be at home in bed, even though it wasn’t much warmer than outside and the damp in the house made me wheeze. B obviously wanted to go home too, and I imagined her curled under the covers with me, both of us in hibernation.

There was still no one around. Perhaps I’d been worrying over nothing all these months. Perhaps he didn’t come any more. Perhaps he’d never come.

Upriver, the Higher Ferry was chugging across the water towards Dartmouth. It had only one car on it, probably Libby’s, and its lights danced in the gloom. Things on the river tinkled. I stood there waiting for Libby, looking at all the boats, not looking for
him
. I listened to the
ding-ding-ding
sounds and wondered why they seemed ghostly. I reached into the inside pocket of my anorak. I already knew what was there: a scrap of paper with an email address on it that I knew by heart, and a brown medicine bottle with a pipette. The bottle contained the last dregs of the flower remedy my friend Vi had made me several weeks before. I’d been up to Scotland for Christmas to stay with Vi and her partner Frank in their holiday cottage while Christopher went to Brighton, but it had all gone wrong and now Vi wasn’t speaking to me. Because of this, I was
objectively lonelier than I had ever been, but it was OK because I had a house and a boyfriend and B, which was more than enough. I also had this remedy, which helped. Her handwriting was still just legible on the label.
Gentian, holly, hornbeam, sweet
chestnut, wild oat and wild rose
. I put a few drops of the mixture on my tongue and felt warm, just for a second.

After a couple more minutes the ferry arrived. There was a thump as the flap came down; then the gate opened and the single car drove off and headed down the Embankment. It was Libby’s, so I waved. Libby and her husband Bob had closed down their failing comic shop two years before and now ran Miller’s Deli, where they sold all sorts of things, including unpasteurised cheeses, goose fat, lemon tart, home-made salads, driftwood sculptures and knitted shawls and blankets made by them or their friends. I made jam and marmalade for Miller’s Deli to supplement the income I got from my writing projects. My favourite lunch was a tub of pickled garlic, some home-made fish pâté and a half-baguette, which I often picked up from the shop on winter mornings. Libby was driving slowly, with the window down, her hair going crazy in the wind. When she saw me she stopped the car. She was wearing jeans and a tight T-shirt with a hand-knitted, red shawl tied over the top, as if February was never cruel to her at all, and as if she’d never worn thick glasses, or baggy tops screen-printed with characters from horror films.

‘Meg, fuck. Thank God. Christopher isn’t here, is he?’

‘Of course not,’ I said. I looked around. ‘No one’s here. Why? Are you OK? Aren’t you cold?’

‘No. Too much adrenaline. I’m in deep shit. Can I say I was at yours?’

‘When?’

‘Today. All day. Last night as well. Bob came back early. Can you believe they diverted his flight to Exeter because of a slippery runway at Gatwick?’

‘Have you spoken to him yet?’

‘No, but he’s sent messages. He was supposed to text me when his plane landed at Gatwick, which I thought would give me loads of time to get home and change and make the place look lived-in and stuff. When I heard a text come I just thought it was Bob at Gatwick – it was the right sort of time – and I was in bed with Mark, so I didn’t look at it immediately. I mean, it’s half an hour to get off the plane and out of the airport, and then another half an hour into Victoria, then twenty minutes across to Paddington, and then three hours to Totnes to pick up his car and then another twenty-five minutes to drive back here. So I wasn’t exactly panicking. But by the time I looked there was another text saying
See you in half an hour
. Then another one came asking where I was and if I was all right. I almost had a heart attack.’

Libby was having an affair with Mark, a bedraggled guy who had washed up in Churston, a village over the river in Torbay, when he’d inherited a beach hut from his grandfather. He lived in the beach hut, ate fish and picked up any casual work he could get in the boatyards and harbours. He was saving to start his own boat-design company, but Libby said he was about a million miles away from that. Libby worked in the deli with Bob most weekdays, and spent the rest of her time knitting increasingly complicated things and writing Mark love letters in dark red ink, while Bob played his electric guitars and did the shop accounts. She had invented a book group at Churston
library and told Bob that’s where she went on a Friday night. She also saw Mark at her knitting group on a Wednesday, although that was more problematic, because there was always the chance that Bob might drop in with leftover cake from the shop, or that one of the old ladies might see Mark touching Libby’s knee. This weekend had been different, though, because Bob had gone to see his great-aunt and -uncle in Germany. She’d been with Mark since Friday.

‘So you came to mine last night? And … ?’

I frowned. We both knew there was no way Libby would ever spend a whole evening at my house. Sometimes, but not so often recently, she’d drop by with a bottle of wine from the shop. Then we’d sit at the kitchen table, while Christopher simmered on the sofa a few feet away, watching American news or documentaries about dictators on our pirated Sky system and mumbling about the corruption of the world, and the rich, and greed. He did this on purpose because Libby had money and he didn’t like it. Mostly when I saw Libby it was at the pub, although Christopher often complained about me going out and leaving him on his own. B had been sniffing the ground, but now put her paws up on the side of Libby’s car and whimpered through the window. She wanted to get in. She loved going in cars. Libby patted her head, but didn’t look at her.

‘No … I must have lost my keys.’ She started brainstorming. ‘We, er, me and you went out last night and I lost my keys and had to stay at yours. I was drunk, and I didn’t worry about bothering Bob because he was in Germany and I thought I’d go out and look for my keys today, and in fact that’s what I was doing when he sent the messages, but I’d left my phone at yours and …’

‘But you’re driving your car. Do you have separate house keys? I thought they were all on the same keyring.’

Libby looked down. ‘Maybe I found the keys … Holy shit. Oh, Christ. Oh, Meg, what am I going to do? Why would I have driven the car to your house anyway? It’s only a five-minute walk. I’m not sure I can fit this together.’ She frowned. ‘Come on. You’re the writer; you know how to plot things.’

I half-laughed. ‘Yeah, right. You read. I’m sure you can plot things too.’

‘Yeah, but you do it for a living. And teach it.’

‘Yeah, but …’

‘What’s the
formula
here?’

Formula
, like the stuff you feed to babies. This was my speciality; she was right. After winning a short story competition in 1997 I’d been offered a contract to write a groundbreaking, literary, serious debut novel: the kind of thing that would win more prizes and be displayed in the windows of bookshops. But I’d actually filled most of the last eleven years writing genre fiction, because it was easy money and I always needed to pay rent and bills and buy food. I’d been given a
£
1,000 advance for my literary novel, and instead of using it to clear my debts I’d bought a laptop, a nice pen and some notebooks. Just as I’d begun to write the plan for it, Claudia from Orb Books rang and offered me two grand if I could knock out a thriller for teenagers in six weeks. The official author of this book, Zeb Ross, needed to publish four novels a year but didn’t in fact exist, and Claudia was recruiting new ghostwriters. It was a no-brainer: double my money and then write the real novel. But I was only a couple of chapters into the real novel when I realised I needed to write another Zeb Ross book,
and then another one. A couple of years later I branched out and wrote four SF books in a series under my own name, all set in a place called Newtopia. I kept meaning to finish my ‘proper’ novel but it seemed as if this would never happen, even if I stuck around until the end of time. If Kelsey Newman was right and all possible humans were resurrected by the Omega Point at the end of the universe, then Zeb Ross would have to be one of them and then he could write his own books. But I’d probably still have rent to pay.

I sighed. ‘The thing is, when you plot a book you can go back and change things that don’t work and make everything add up neatly. You can delete paragraphs, pages, whole manuscripts. I can’t go back in time and put you on a bus to Mark’s, which would probably be the best thing.’

‘How would that work?’

I shrugged. ‘I don’t know. Then you could have walked round to mine and lost your keys and your phone like you said.’

‘But why would I have a weekend bag with me?’

‘Yeah. I don’t know.’

‘There must be a way. Let’s go back to basics. How do you tell a really good story? I mean, in a nutshell.’

I looked at my watch. Christopher would be wondering where I was.

‘Isn’t Bob expecting you?’ I said.

‘I need to get this right, or there’ll be no Bob any more.’

‘OK. Just keep it simple. Base the story on cause and effect. Have three acts.’

‘Three acts?’

‘A beginning, a middle and an end. A problem, a climax and a solution. You link them. Put someone on the wrong ship.
Then make it sink. Then rescue them. Not literally, obviously. You have to have a problem and make it get worse and then solve it. Unless it’s a tragedy.’

‘What if this is a tragedy?’

‘Lib …’

‘All right. So I was out with you and I lost my keys. That’s bad. Then to make it worse I got gang-raped while I was looking for them, and now I’ve lost my memory and the kidnappers took you away because you were a witness, and only Bess knows where you are, and she’s trying to tell Christopher, but …’

‘Too complicated. You need something simpler. You only need to explain the car. The story here is that we went out and you lost your keys, which was a bummer. Then maybe because you lost your keys you lost your car too, which is obviously a bigger bummer. Maybe someone found your keys and stole your car. Who knows? All you know is you lost your keys. The only glitch is you still have your car.’

Yadda, yadda. I seemed to have become a plot-o-matic machine programmed to churn out this kind of thing. But when I was dispensing advice like this to the more junior Orb Books ghostwriters I always said they should believe in their project and not just follow a set of rules. Then again, if they got lost in the wilderness of originality I gently guided them back to the happy path of formula again.

‘OK. So how do me and Bob live happily ever after?’

I thought about it for a second.

‘Well, obviously you’ll have to push your car in the river,’ I said, and laughed.

Libby sat there for about ten seconds, her hands becoming paler and paler as she gripped the steering wheel. Then she got
out of the car and looked around. The North Embankment still seemed deserted. There were no kids trying to steal boats, no tourists, no other dog-walkers. No men looking for me. Libby made a noise a little like the one B had made before.

‘You’re right,’ she said. ‘It’s the only thing to do.’

‘Lib,’ I said. ‘I was joking.’

She got back into her car, did a haphazard three-point turn until it was facing the river and, finally, drove it up on the embankment. For a moment it looked as if she was going to drive her car into the river. I stood there, not knowing if she was messing around, not knowing whether to laugh or try to stop her. Then she got out and walked around to the back of the car. Libby was small but as her biceps tightened I realised how strong her arms were. The car moved; she must have left the handbrake off. She pushed it again, and then the front wheels were over the edge of the embankment.

‘Lib,’ I said again.

‘I must be mad. What am I doing?’ she said.

‘Nothing,’ I said. ‘Come on, don’t do this. It’s going to be very hard to explain.’

Then she pushed her car into the river and threw the keys in after it.

‘I’ll say kids must have done it,’ she said, over the splashing, sucking sound. ‘They must have stolen my keys. Even if it does sound crazy, no one will think I was desperate enough to push my own car in the river, will they? Nothing would motivate me to do something as stupid as that. Holy shit. Thank you, Meg. That was a brilliant idea. I’ll call you tomorrow if I’m still alive.’

She looked at her watch and then walked away down the Embankment towards Lemon Cottage, her red shawl moving
like a flag in the wind. I remembered a Zen story about a flag in the wind. Does the wind move, or does the flag move? Two monks are arguing about this when a wise man turns up and says, ‘The wind is not moving, the flag is not moving. Mind is moving.’ I walked on slowly, with B re-sniffing benches as if nothing had happened. Libby didn’t look behind her, and I saw her get smaller and smaller until she reached the corner and went off towards Bayard’s Cove. Of course, as any scientist would tell you, she didn’t really get smaller and smaller; she simply got further away.