Our Tragic Universe (38 page)

On Monday morning my mother rang.

‘You never answer the phone at home,’ she complained. ‘I’m going to give up trying it altogether and just ring you on your mobile from now on.’

I put down Iris Glass’s book, which I’d been reading since I woke up. It had household tips, of course, including instructions on cleaning a drain with baking soda and vinegar, and making your own furniture polish out of olive oil and lavender.
But it also had sewing patterns, knitting patterns, music for folk songs to play in the evenings and prayers for sailors. At the end of every chapter were various ‘Proverbs of Iris’. Among these were:
There is no such thing as change, although everything is always
changing; and: Hope blooms uncertainly, like the flowers on a potted plant
. I’d already turned down the page at the beginning of a chapter about knitting and mending socks. There was a shop in Totnes that did sock wool and I was planning to go there at some point and get some. Maybe I could teach myself to knit socks from Iris’s instructions.

‘Did you get Christopher?’

‘No. It just rang and rang. What’s wrong? Meg?’

I hadn’t thought that I felt sad, but suddenly I heard myself crying.

‘Meg? Are you OK?’

‘Yes, I am,’ I said. ‘I’m really OK. I’ve left Christopher. I’ve moved out.’

‘Oh, thank God. But where are you? Why aren’t you here? Come home; we’ll look after you.’

‘Thanks, Mum, but I’m OK here. I got some money from that TV deal. Remember I met that woman in London last year? The swordfish woman? Well, in the end they decided to option the books. I suddenly found I had some choices and so on a bit of a whim I came here.’

‘Where is “here”?’

‘Just a little cottage by the sea. Short-term let until I work out what to do.’

‘So you’re still in Devon.’

‘Yeah.’ Something in her tone made me add, ‘It’s my home. And I’ve got friends here, and stuff going on.’

‘Another man?’

‘No! Mum, God. I’ve only just broken up with Christopher.’

‘Have you got any definite plans?’

I thought about this for a second. ‘I’m writing a feature. But no, not really. I don’t think it matters. I think maybe plans are overrated. I might knit some socks. I’m going to get back on with my novel, but I don’t know how long that’s going to take.’

‘So you’re all by yourself there, in this “cottage”?’

‘B’s here with me. She loves it. We’ve already been for a long walk down the beach this morning. We watched the sun come up. I had this amazing feeling when I got back, as if I had more empty space inside me than ever before. I made exactly the breakfast I wanted, and cleared away and washed up afterwards without anything being an issue. I haven’t brought that much with me, but I put out a few books, and my guitar, and my favourite mug, and my jam-making pan and stuff, and I knew that no one was going to move them or wreck anything or come in and start an argument. I thought I’d be sad for ages and it would take months to make the transition properly, but I already feel like I would never go back. I just feel very …
serene
by myself. It’s way less complicated. I bought so much cleaning stuff from the village shop you wouldn’t believe it. I even got rubber gloves.’ I didn’t tell my mother that I wasn’t planning to use any of it now I’d read Iris’s book. I was going to use lemons, vinegar, baking soda, lavender oil and hot water instead. I’d been pleased to find there was an alternative to the other stuff, which all reminded me of advertisements containing people with perfect teeth, heroic expressions and offspring that looked like they were on their way to Hitler Youth rallies. Even the bottle of bleach I’d bought
had a picture showing a woman’s manicured hand opening the child-proof seal.

‘Hmm,’ my mother said. ‘When I left your father I ate cakes. You probably remember; you liked eating them too. I had this feeling of just being able to do what I wanted without him disapproving of it all the time. He always disapproved of cakes. Not cheese, not wine, not meat, not salt: just cakes, probably because there’s something feminine about them. He hated cakes because they’re voluptuous and sticky and plump, and because they’re what I liked, probably. He never had a sweet tooth, which is fine, but he looked down on everyone who did. I remember once I was next door having tea and pastries with Maddy Cooper. They were these delicate little things from a patisserie in London. We were celebrating something; I can’t remember what. We had Earl Grey tea in bone china cups and these little pastries, and your father came in to lend Caleb a book, and he said – God, I remember this clearly – he said, “Are you two stuffing yourselves again?” What a bastard. And Rosa, dear little Rosa, who must have been all of about ten at the time, said seriously, “You’re very mean, Mr Carpenter.”’

My mother paused. I was about to point out that Rosa always had the knack of saying what other people were thinking, but had chosen, often for very good reasons, not to say. She was like a parrot, or a toddler, in that respect. But I didn’t say anything because I could hear Mum starting to cry. ‘Meg,’ she said, ‘there’s no easy way to say this, but I’ve phoned to tell you that Rosa is dead. She killed herself yesterday. It’s in all the papers.’

The village shop had fresh bread, and basil growing in pots, which I bought, as well as a small block of beeswax and some more lemons. I also bought a copy of every national newspaper they had. I was shaking as I picked up the papers and read all the headlines. Rosa, clearly inspired by
Anna Karenina
, had thrown herself under a train.

‘Got a lot to read there,’ said the woman at the till.

‘Yeah,’ I said. There were hyacinths in pots on the counter. Some were already in flower: pink ones, purple ones and blue ones. I chose one that had tight green buds. It would be impossible to know what colour it would turn out to be. ‘Can I take this as well?’

‘They’re two pounds fifty each,’ she said.

‘That’s fine,’ I said.

When I got back I put the hyacinth on the kitchen windowsill, built a fire and then spent the rest of the morning poring over the tabloids. B lay there in the warmth of the fire as if no one in the world had ever died. Rosa’s suicide had taken place at a train station I’d never heard of and there had been no witnesses, or at least none had come forward yet. Rosa and Drew had been on their way back from a weekend in the countryside when it happened, but Drew was too devastated to say anything about it. In the end, there wasn’t that much to find out from the papers, but I looked at every picture of Rosa, and read every obituary. I imagined a thousand journos all over Drew like funereal confetti.

After a lunch of pasta, olive oil, basil leaves and bread, I went online to look for furniture. I needed a kitchen table, chairs and a bed, at the very least. I looked again at the bed I’d decided I would buy on Saturday. It wasn’t going to be
available for a month. I couldn’t sleep on the sofa for a month, could I? I’d never bought furniture in my life before. If I ordered it online, would men bring it in lorries? Would I have to assemble it myself? It seemed too complicated suddenly, and my eyes felt heavy, but I forced myself to at least order the basics before shutting down the laptop completely. The books for my feature were piled next to me, and I picked up
Mapping the Astral Plane
and yawned again. I settled down on the sofa, barely managing the first paragraph before my eyes started to close, and I pulled the blanket over me and slept.

‘Oh, good,’ Rosa said. ‘I’ve been trying to phone you.’

This was a really bizarre dream, which I believed and didn’t believe all at the same time. In the dream I knew I’d fallen asleep on the sofa and had begun to imagine that I’d just finished reading the book about the astral plane. One of the things it told me to do was communicate with a dead person. In a dream-sense kind of way, I’d therefore decided to set up a séance with the only person I’d known who had died – thanks, Rosa! – and now we were in conversation.

‘Me?’ I said to her. We were standing in a vast, featureless landscape of the kind I used to imagine when describing the spaces between the cells in the cellphone network in my Newtopia books. She was wearing a nurse’s uniform, and I was wearing my usual jeans. The astral plane kept fading in and out and crackling at first, and then it settled into a dreamy hyacinth-blue.

‘Yes. You’re almost the only person I know who isn’t famous. No offence.’

I thought, not for the first time in a dream, that this dream would be something really good to write in a dream diary. I imagined someone like Josh’s analyst or one of the authors of the New Age books in my sack telling me that this was very significant. I noted, also in the dream, that I was glad I was not in analysis.

‘I’m not dead, you know,’ she said. ‘You should ring Drew and ask him.’

‘I haven’t spoken to Drew for seven years,’ I said.

‘I can see why you ditched him,’ she said. ‘My God, he’s self-obsessed.’

‘I left him for someone else,’ I said. ‘I thought he was very nice. I just wasn’t desperately in love with him, and I thought I was desperately in love with his friend. What do you mean you’re not dead?’

‘I’m not dead. I’m in Hertfordshire.’

‘If you’re not dead, then how am I speaking to you?’

‘That’s the stupidest question I have ever heard. And that’s saying something.’

‘If you’re not dead, well, then … I mean, all the tabloids think you’re dead.’

‘We had a big argument,’ Rosa said. ‘Me and Drew. About superobjectives. Then I pretended to kill myself.’

Rosa talked for ages about this argument and then her voice somehow faded out and I saw her getting out of a train and sitting on a bench at a deserted station, where she watched another woman pacing up and down until a train came and the other woman stepped in front of it.

‘I made Drew say it was me,’ she said. ‘And now I’m with Caleb at last.’

I bumped into Andrew Glass when I was on my way to buy the papers the next morning. I’d had scrambled eggs on toast and a large cup of coffee for breakfast, but I didn’t feel very awake. My strange dream the afternoon before had unsettled me, and I’d spent most of the night being afraid to go back to sleep, and playing Iris Glass’s folk songs on my guitar instead. It was a little misty, but the bearded man was already setting up his tripod by the cliff-face. There was no sign of the woman and her daughter, or the couple I’d mistaken for Vi and Frank.

‘How are you getting on in there?’ Andrew said, nodding at the cottage.

‘Oh, it’s lovely. So peaceful.’

‘No weird dreams, then?’

‘Huh?’

‘Funny dreams.’ He laughed. ‘No?’

‘Why would you say that?’

‘God – I could never sleep in there because of the dreams. It’s because of all the witchcraft. It hangs around, you know, like cooking smells. Freaks you out.’ He laughed again. ‘Hey, I’m just kidding. That’s not why I can’t sleep in there. I mean, I can sleep in there. Obviously not now, but you know what I mean. Oh, dear. Sorry: I shouldn’t mess around with you. Don’t want to lose my tenant. I thought you were only using the place to work in. But Gill in the shop says you’ve been buying dog food and plants and all sorts.’