Our Tragic Universe (6 page)

‘You will receive plenty of Special Invitations in your life: those moments where you are invited to embark on an adventure, where the universe seems to be beckoning you with its finger and saying,
Come here and try this
. Will you sit on your sofa eating pizza and thinking that adventure is not for you? Then you’ll take a long time to make it out of the Second World, which, of course, is full of pizza-guzzlers and other no-hopers who have not transcended and therefore not a nice place. Decide what you most desire, and set off on a quest to get it. In my next book, I will describe the nature and possible structures of these quests, and give you some ideas about how to complete one. But in the meantime, you can learn almost everything you need to know about what it means to be a true hero from classic myths, stories and fairy tales.’

My mind was a tangle as I put the book down and picked up my knitting. I had only a small amount of my turquoise wool left, but I stayed up until about midnight making knit-stitch after knit-stitch and purl-stitch after purl-stitch, continuing my K2 P2 rib and wondering why I hated this book so much. No doubt it would give great comfort to people who’d been bereaved, or who were scared of dying. It was certainly very well argued, and the maths made sense, sort of. Perhaps a real scientist would be able to say what was materially wrong with Newman’s theory. I just wondered what the Omega Point’s motivation was in all this.

My turquoise wool had been a Christmas present from Frank and Vi. Claudia, the publishing director of Orb Books and also Vi’s twin sister, had been staying in the holiday cottage in Scotland as well. Things were slightly awkward between us because Orb Books had recently told me they wanted me to focus more on Zeb Ross projects and that they wouldn’t be renewing my contract for the Newtopia books. I’d mentioned this to Vi about a week before Christmas, when Claudia was lying down one afternoon and we were in the kitchen of the holiday cottage making beetroot soup. I explained that Orb Books didn’t feel my own work was ‘commercial’ enough any more and that I was taking too many risks with the genre. Vi had clapped me on the back and said, ‘Good for you. Fuck them. Finish your own book at last. Screw their bottles of oil.’

This was a reference to Aristophanes’ play
The Frogs
, which she was re-reading over the holiday as research for her next project. In the play Dionysus goes to the underworld to stage a competition between the dead poets Aeschylus and Euripides to see who is the better tragedian, and who, therefore, should go back to Earth to save Athens. They take it in turns to criticise one another’s work. Euripides says that Aeschylus was too dark, brooding and overwrought, but then Aeschylus proves that any of Euripides’ clever but formulaic stories could be about someone losing a bottle of oil. The point seemed to be that every formulaic story starts with a conflict that’s later resolved – like losing a bottle of oil and then finding it again.

Vi was grinding pepper for the soup, while I processed oranges into zest, juice and segments. Frank came in for a glass of sherry and then went back to watching the cricket in the sitting room. The dogs were all in front of the fire and Frank’s parrot
Sebastian was in his cage on the piano. Every so often I could hear him saying half-sense things like ‘He really middled it yesterday’, ‘See you after the break, Grandma’ and ‘One hundred and eighty!’

‘If we go along with Nietzsche’s arguments that art and writing should do something much more profound than simply have someone lose a bottle of oil and then find it again, then it is obvious how pointless most stories are,’ Vi said, looking up from the pestle and mortar. ‘They’re just dull repetitions of the same kind of idiot losing the same bottle of oil and then, of course, finding it again and living happily ever after and not being such an idiot any more. But I’m still not sure how, or if, Nietzsche comes into this. I’m not sure what he says about tragedy is quite right. I know you think tragedy is beyond all formula, but I’m not a hundred per cent sure.’

‘Why not? In tragedy if someone loses a bottle of oil, it’s a really important bottle of oil and they end up dead.’

‘It’s still a formula.’

‘But don’t you think it’s significant that the end isn’t happy?’

‘But it is happy for Nietzsche. I think that’s my point. He likes it that everyone is cast into primal oblivion.’

I thought for a second. ‘That is interesting,’ I said.

The kitchen was filling with the sweet smell of roasting beetroot. Vi kept on grinding the peppercorns, breaking them down firmly but gently.

‘I can’t stop thinking of the stories everyone told at the nursing home,’ she said. ‘They didn’t have beginnings, or they didn’t have ends – happy or sad. People often put themselves and their lives into something like a formula, but then they would subvert it. One woman I worked with told me about her kid walking
in when she and her husband were having sex on the living-room floor. “I’ll only be a minute, love,” the father said to this kid. “I’m just slipping your mum a length.”’

I laughed. ‘How is that subversive?’

‘It should be a dramatic moment, but it isn’t.’

‘I see.’

While Vi carried on talking about nursing-home anecdotes involving blow jobs, false teeth, colostomy bags, thrush epidemics and ninety-year-olds lap-dancing, I was imagining using the bottle-of-oil idea as an exercise on an Orb Books retreat. I imagined telling the new writers about how easy plotting could be if you just imagined that your character has lost a bottle of oil and then needs to find it again by the end of the novel. This wasn’t what Vi had in mind, of course. She was still in the process of working out her theory of the ‘storyless story’, an idea which had come out of all the anthropological work she’d done. She’d got her professorship relatively late – she was now sixty-four – and was planning to talk about this storyless story in her inaugural lecture. I didn’t pay too much attention to this stuff any longer, considering that my entire existence now depended on me being able to take a good but unhappy character from bad fortune to good fortune in a credible way, and give them a bottle of oil – if that was what they wanted – as a prize at the end. I wanted to make my ‘real’ novel less formulaic and more literary, of course, but if I listened to Vi’s theories, then my only narrative strategy would be ‘shit happens’.

Being in Scotland with Frank, Vi and Claudia felt like a proper holiday. During the day we walked on the beach with the dogs, read, or wrote in our notebooks. Frank had some marking to do, Claudia was editing a Zeb Ross novel and Vi
was finishing a feature for Oscar, the same literary editor who commissioned me to review science books. In the evenings the dogs lay by the fire and Sebastian hopped around in his huge cage on top of the piano, just as he would at home, interspersing phrases he’d been taught from Shakespeare or picked up from the cricket with words and phrases he’d taught himself, like ‘Banana!’ and, regardless of whom he was addressing, ‘You’re a very hairy man, Frank.’ Frank was indeed very hairy. He was in his early fifties and had a scruffy beard, bushy hair, ragged fingernails and sharp, green eyes, like some creature living in the mountains. Vi resembled one of these mountains: tall, jagged and permanent, with the possibility of a dangerous fall if you took the wrong path.

One cold afternoon, while Frank and Claudia were out getting supplies, I asked Vi to teach me how to knit. I’d never knitted before, but I’d bought some wool and knitting needles in Dartmouth on a whim one cold, void-like day earlier that December after a big argument with Christopher. Sometimes arguing with Christopher made me feel as if I were a planet that had been tipped off its axis by some unspeakable cosmic event, so that even rotating normally would now be enough to cause radioactive storms, tectonic shifts and tsunamis. I would stand there in the kitchen scared to do anything, because the tiniest sigh or meaningless glance out of the window could start the whole thing off again. Later, when I reflected on the tiny sigh or the ‘meaningless’ glance I’d realise that there had been something in it after all, and I’d wonder whether the whole problem with Christopher was actually me.

When I got back from the shops that day the argument hadn’t finished.

‘Oh, I see,’ Christopher had said. ‘While I’ve been sitting here worried sick you’ve been out
shopping
.’

There had been a breathtakingly icy wind coming off the sea and by the time I got back I couldn’t feel my toes or my fingers. It wasn’t just that; I could barely feel myself. When we’d first moved to Dartmouth I’d spent afternoons browsing in the shops, imagining myself a millionaire and deciding on this cashmere sweater, that pair of
£
100 distressed jeans and those dark red, lace-up boots. In Dartmouth you could browse handbags, hardback books, houses, boats, holidays and even swordfish for dinner parties. Most weeks I went to look at a small, yellow, wooden breadbin that cost more than
£
50. But on this occasion I realised I didn’t want any of it, and I suddenly hated the people that did.
We all die
, I wanted to shout at everyone.
Why are we all bothering with these stupid fucking
meaningless things?
So I’d hardly had a good time at the shops. After seeing my freaked-out eyes and tired skin in too many boutique mirrors, I’d decided to find somewhere with no mirrors: thus the knitting shop. I’d never been in there before, but I liked the way it didn’t sell anything, just the patterns and possibilities and materials for things. There was a bargain bin and I’d found three balls of red wool, and needles to go with them.

‘I’ve bought wool,’ I said to Christopher. ‘I thought I’d learn to make you socks.’ And then I started to cry while he put the kettle on. ‘I just wanted to do something nice for you, and I know you could do with some proper socks for the project and …’

He chewed on his lip the whole time he was making my tea. ‘I’m such a bastard,’ he said, when he handed it to me. ‘Please forgive me, babe.’

A couple of weeks later he asked how long I thought his socks would take. I’d completely forgotten about them.

‘A while, sweets,’ I said. ‘I haven’t even worked out how to knit a scarf yet.’

Being in Scotland meant I actually had time for knitting. Vi and I were curled up in the sitting room, with books, Biros, pencils and notebooks strewn around us, along with Claudia’s cross-stitch project and Frank’s ‘Rainy Day Cricket’. The open fire crackled away and B was lying in front of it with the other dogs, all of them snoring every so often like a very bored chorus. I got the wool out of my battered hemp bag and showed it to Vi. ‘Do you know what to do with this?’ I asked her.

‘How cool!’ she said. ‘I’ve never seen you knit. You’ll look like an old auntie.’

‘Yeah, well, maybe I’ve reached that age.’

‘Ha,’ Vi said. ‘I knitted when I was a kid. Claudia was better than me, of course. I haven’t knitted for years. I once made a lambswool blanket on a ship between Tasmania and England, while Frank read
War and Peace
in Russian. I can teach you how to cast on and get going, I reckon. Claudia will show you the rest. You know she knitted these?’ Vi bent down and pulled up the legs of her jeans. I could see the tops of two striped socks emerging from her big, battered DMs. ‘When I got back from Tassie that time she actually counted the mistakes in my blanket, the old cow. You can start by making a scarf in garter stitch, which is just knitting, no purling. After that you can make a scarf in a knit-two purl-two rib. I might make one too. I feel the urge, seeing your wool.’

‘I want to knit socks,’ I said. ‘For Christopher.’

Vi looked horrified. ‘Why?’

I shrugged. ‘I think hand-knitted socks will make him happy.’

‘Then get him to knit his own. Frank can knit. It’s not that hard.’

I laughed. ‘I think the idea of me knitting them for him makes him happy.’

‘God.’

‘Not in a sinister way. I just think he feels loved when I make an effort.’

‘But hand-knitting socks? A pair of socks takes a million billion years. Make some for yourself.’

‘Claudia made socks for you.’

‘Yeah, but all that old bat does is knit, when she’s not line-editing or cross-stitching. She has to make gifts for people. Anyway, she’s my sister.’

‘Yeah.’

‘But socks are a long way off for you. You need to begin with a scarf.’

‘OK. Is it hard?’

‘If you can write Zeb Ross novels, you can definitely knit a scarf.’

We fiddled around for a while, casting on. Vi showed me how to make a slipknot and then a strange lasso with my fingers. She cast on a few stitches while I watched, and then she just slid them off the needle and pulled the wool into a straight line again. It was like casting a spell and then undoing it. After about an hour of copying this, I’d managed to cast on twenty stitches, so that there was a long row of red on one of the needles, as if it was a sword dripping with blood.

‘Now what do I do?’ I asked her.

Vi took the needles from me. ‘You stab him,’ she said, sticking
the empty needle through the first cast-on stitch. ‘Then you hang him,’ she said, bringing the yarn around the needle. ‘Then you throw him.’ She brought the needle under, over and away, and I could then see that there was a new stitch on it. ‘That comes from Claudia, by the way. It was the only way she could remember, when we were learning.’