Our Tragic Universe (24 page)

Christopher’s father Peter lived in a big, sprawling flat above his vegetarian café in Totnes. Josh still lived in the attic, a perfectly square room with shelves and shelves of books arranged by height, a drum kit and a completely clean desk with only a white laptop on it. The rest of the flat was over two floors, both of which had polished floorboards covered with large rugs, as well as lots of wall-hangings, plants, sculptures and, I discovered when I got there, now a harp, Milly’s harp, right in the middle of the cavernous, deep-red sitting room.

Only Peter was around. He’d let me in through the café, and was now standing by the harp running his fingers through his curly white hair. He’d already thanked me for coming. Now he asked if Josh had told me what had happened.

‘Not in a lot of detail,’ I said. ‘Where’s Christopher?’

‘The boys have already gone to the hospital. Josh took Christopher in my car.’

‘The hospital?’

‘Christopher has hurt his hand. Quite badly, I think.’

‘He did this … ?’

‘Punching the wall.’ Peter looked away from me and touched the harp. ‘Milly’s gone too.’

This didn’t make sense. ‘Not to the hospital?’

‘No. I mean she’s gone. I don’t know where.’

‘She’ll be back, though?’

‘I don’t know.’ He shrugged, and his whole body seemed to slump like a sack replaced on the floor after its contents have been shaken. After a couple of moments he said, ‘You’ll follow the boys on to the hospital, won’t you?’

‘Yes, I guess so. Are you OK?’

‘I expect it’ll take a long time in casualty. Last time I went with Josh for his foot it was something like three hours. I forgot to make sure they had change for the machine. Josh gets very thirsty when he’s worried.’

Peter talked a little more about how long it might take to wait for an X-ray, and how long he and Josh last waited for an X-ray, and whether or not it would take longer at night, and how Christopher wouldn’t be able to work with a broken hand. The whole time he spoke he had his hand on the harp, and at one point stroked one of the strings so gently that it didn’t make a sound.

‘What actually happened?’ I asked, when he finished talking.

‘I expect the boys will tell you. Christopher will tell you. It’s not really a mystery to me, but I’m too tired of it all to try to understand.’

‘He’s been quite down lately,’ I said.

‘He’s always been down. Even before his mother died. She used to call him Eeyore. I bet he never told you that. Maybe every family has an Eeyore. Once, when …’ But Peter didn’t finish that sentence; he sighed instead, and then touched the harp again. ‘I’ll get you some change from the till,’ he said. ‘You can take it with you.’

We went back down the stairs into the café, which smelled
of good coffee and wholemeal pastry. There was a notice-board near the till, advertising the usual Totnes things and a few house-shares and flats for rent. Next to that was a poster for a talk in a few weeks’ time. The title was ‘Succeeding in the Second World’. The speaker was Kelsey Newman. What? Kelsey Newman coming to Totnes? This was like being haunted. I blinked, but when I opened my eyes the poster was still there. I stopped looking at it and instead watched while Peter opened the till and took out five
£
1 coins and a few 50p pieces, which he pressed into my hand. This would have been a small fortune to me just a few hours before. Now it was just change for a machine.

‘Please, Meg,’ he said, ‘could you pass on a message to Christopher for me?’

‘Of course,’ I said.

‘It’s …’ There was a long pause while Peter looked out of the window. A woman walked past, dressed in a long black skirt and a grey wool shawl. Once she was gone he looked at me again. ‘On second thoughts, there isn’t a message.’

‘I can tell him whatever it is,’ I said.

‘No. I was going to say I was sorry and I hoped his hand felt better, but actually I’m not sorry and I hope it drops off. Oh, look, I didn’t say any of that. Please forget it.’

Peter was so mild, so concerned about his sons all the time. He’d never said anything like this to me before.

‘I understand,’ I said. ‘I wouldn’t be sorry either, if I was you.’

He frowned. ‘Really?’

‘Yes. Sorry is the last thing I’d be. I hope Milly comes back soon.’

We exchanged a look, and I think he understood that I meant it.

‘Why is age such a crime?’ Peter said. ‘People think that when a younger woman and an older man get together, then it’s always about sex for him and money for her. Age buys beauty. But I’m not rich and Milly’s not beautiful.’ He half-blushed. ‘She is to me, of course, but you wouldn’t find a woman like her in a glossy magazine.’ He sighed. ‘Perhaps you could get Christopher to stop calling her a “twenty-five-year-old waitress”, especially as she’s twenty-eight and has a PhD in music. She only works in the café to help me out, for goodness’ sake. And while you’re at it, tell him not to come back here. I’ve had enough of him this time.’ He paused and sighed again heavily. ‘Of course, you can’t tell him that. I’ll speak to him at some point. I’m so sorry, Meg. I’ve ranted at you. It’s unforgivable.’

‘I really don’t mind,’ I said. ‘I don’t find Christopher the easiest person in the world either. I thought it was all my fault.’

‘It’s not your fault. He’s always been like this.’

I found Josh sitting on a bench out the front of Torbay Hospital casualty. He was wearing pale blue flares, a black T-shirt and a zip-up grey cardigan, and looked as if he’d been cast to play a student in a hospital drama about the perils of drugs, skateboarding or cults. His hair was the same length as mine, but was tied back in a ponytail. I sat down next to him and peeled a tangerine from my bag. I offered Josh half, but he shook his head.

‘So?’ I said.

‘He’s in there. He’s still in a right strop.’

‘Oh.’

‘I said I’d come out and wait for you in case you didn’t know where to go. We can wait for you for a lot longer if you like. Did Dad tell you what happened?’

‘Not really. Just that he punched the wall.’

‘He’s such a complete knob sometimes.’ Josh looked at the ground in front of us. ‘I don’t understand it.’

‘What was the stuff about Milly moving in?’

‘Dad wants to clear out Christopher’s old room and redecorate the house. Christopher has hardly been in his room for years, except that time when you stayed with us. As you’ll remember, there are still Euro ’96 posters in there, and Oasis tapes. Milly’s going to use it as a study for writing her music book, which was Dad’s great idea. He must have known Christopher would freak out because of the mural. When Christopher turned up today out of the blue, Milly was cooking dinner and Dad asked if he wanted to stay. After dinner, the subject of his room came up and he hit the roof. I guess I do sort of know why. It was a bit insensitive of Dad to pick that room.’

Christopher’s mother had painted the mural for him before he was born. It was a forest scene, with an enchanted castle on the top of a faraway hill and a brown, earthy path leading to it. In the foreground, a big white unicorn bowed its head, as if waiting to be stroked. A few years before, when we were waiting to move into our current house, Christopher and I had stayed with Peter and Josh for a few weeks. We’d slept together in Christopher’s old, lumpy single bed, even though Peter offered the spare room. Every night I undressed in front of the mural and imagined what it would be like to be pregnant, to give
birth, to hope and dream for a child as well as yourself. I had never felt the urge to have children, and I kept looking at the mural and trying to have it and failing. It wouldn’t have been any use if I had conjured it up. Christopher didn’t want children either; and we hardly ever had sex, even then.

‘I asked him about the mural once,’ I said to Josh. ‘He didn’t say much. It was obviously one of those things I was supposed to know never to mention.’

‘There’s been all sorts of trouble over that mural,’ Josh said. ‘When Christopher was a teenager he thought it was childish and covered it over with posters. I remember I wanted to move into that room so I could have it, and he was like, “It’s mine,” and then covered it up. Then he took all the posters down when he came back after she died. Just those: he didn’t change anything else in the room. I guess I like the mural too, but things have to move on. I think Dad just wants to get on with his life. You can’t keep something like that for ever. If we sold the flat, or if it burned down, it would be gone anyway. Maybe memories are better on their own. Dad has offered to have a high-resolution digital photograph taken of it, and to frame a big copy for Christopher.’

‘Yeah. I can see why he freaked out, though.’

‘He went up quite calmly, and then the next thing we heard was a load of tearing and smashing, and we rushed upstairs and found that he’d started breaking things in the room, and ripping his posters down and kicking things about. He ended up by punching the wall, right by the unicorn, which I thought was kind of significant, not that anyone really cares what I think. Then he looked at Milly and said, “And you’re not my fucking mother,” as if that even had anything to do with it. Then he
walked out. That was when I phoned you. I found him in the pub with his hand all bleeding, and some guy trying to throw him out because of HIV. It was horrible. I hate blood, as you know. Once he was properly bandaged up I got Dad’s car and brought him here for an X-ray. It’s like a nightmare in there. Too many clocks and too much mess.’

‘I didn’t even know he was coming round to your place tonight,’ I said.

‘No. But he just turns up. Does it all the time. Usually lunchtimes.’

‘Are you OK?’

‘Yeah. Dad’s not, though.’

‘I know. He said Milly had gone.’

‘She’ll come back. But they should ban Christopher from coming round at all until he can get over whatever it is. Milly’s so nice. She doesn’t deserve all this.’

‘He’s having a pretty bad week. He got knocked back from another job.’

‘There’s always something.’

Peter had more or less said this too. But was it really true? I was sure that Christopher went for long periods without there being anything bothering him at all. I tried to remember when one of these periods had been. Perhaps in the run-up to last Christmas. We’d decided to home-make all our presents, and there was a nice weekend when I was sewing little rectangles and Christopher was filling them with lavender through a funnel he’d made, but which kept breaking. He’d had a problem with his eyes, I suddenly remembered. That was why the funnel had broken. He’d never needed glasses, but said everything had gone blurry. We couldn’t easily afford an optician’s appointment,
but I worked out that if we took a bit more money out of the Christmas fund and lived on nine, instead of ten, pounds a day for a bit, then it would be OK. I bathed his eyes and didn’t say anything when he threw the remote control across the room later that evening because he couldn’t see the buttons. I thought that once his eyes were better, then we’d go back to normal; if only his eyes hadn’t been bothering him, it would have been a perfect weekend. Maybe Josh was right. Maybe there was always something. But there was also always the sense that if the something could be fixed, then all would be perfect.

I looked into the sky. There were no stars now, just the orange haze of Torbay.

‘By the way,’ Josh said, ‘did you get the book I left for you?’

‘What book?’

‘The Kelsey Newman book.
The Science of Living Forever
. I gave it to Christopher to give to you.’

‘Ah.’ I rolled my eyes and smiled. ‘That explains everything.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Oh, I reviewed it by accident. It got mixed up with another book.’

‘Mixed up with another book?’ Josh raised both eyebrows.

I laughed. ‘Yeah. I thought my editor at the paper had sent it, and so I just reviewed it like some sort of robot.’

‘You knob.’

‘Of course, Christopher didn’t actually tell me you’d given it to me; he just left it on my desk, with a note from my editor in it. So that didn’t help.’

‘He’s such a twat. I bet he did it on purpose.’

‘Who knows. Probably they both fell on the floor and he just
stuck the note in the wrong book when he put them back. I’ll never know, because I can never ask him about it again. You know how you can only ever talk about a problem once with Christopher and then if you bring it up again he goes totally crackers? We’ve already had one big row about the mix-up.’

‘What did you think of the book?’ Josh asked.

‘I’m not sure. What about you?’

The entrance to casualty was through two sets of automatic doors. These now opened, and Christopher walked out. His hand was neatly bandaged, but apart from that he looked a mess. His hair was all over the place, and he was still wearing the clothes he used on the project: shapeless tracksuit bottoms and a paint-spattered T-shirt.

‘What’s going on?’ he said, looking first at Josh and then at me.

‘Nothing,’ Josh said, standing up. ‘Meg just got here.’

‘Well, why are you sitting out here?’

‘I was just finishing my tangerine,’ I said, standing up as well. ‘How are you?’