Our Tragic Universe (8 page)

‘It’s an encore to colonialism,’ Vi said. ‘Yet another encore. Not even the final one. People just keep on clapping.’

‘You’ve even lost me, my love,’ Frank said. ‘It could have crashed anywhere, surely?’

‘Well, maybe. But don’t you think there’s something horribly poetic about a storyless nation being put to death by other people’s “heroic” stories? No one from this island ever did anything to anyone else or went out and conquered anything. But first of all some eighteenth-century explorer turns up and decides to name the island because he thinks it looks like a pillar of salt from a story he’s read, and now this. Killed by soap operas and American drama series.’

‘How can a nation be “storyless”?’ I asked.

Vi sighed. ‘OK. I don’t think in the end a nation can be storyless. Only a story can be storyless. They did have stories on Lot’s Wife. But in recent times mainly Zen stories, which are storyless stories, because they are constructed to help you break away from drama, and hope and desire. Some of them are funny. All of them are unpredictable. They’re not tragedies,
comedies or epics. They’re not even Modernist anti-hero stories, or experimental narratives or metafiction. I lost count of the times someone would say, “I’ll tell you a story,” and then recite something like an absurdist poem with no conflict and no resolution. One of these “stories” was about a Zen monk who, on the day he was going to die, sent postcards saying, “I am departing from this world. This is my last announcement.” Then he died.’

‘Isn’t this a problem of definition?’ Claudia said. ‘They obviously weren’t telling “stories” as we would understand them. If we say that a story is something with a beginning, a middle and an end, deterministically linked, with at least one main character, then someone else can’t come along and say that a story is actually defined as “anything anyone ever says”.’

‘How about if we define “story” differently again?’ Frank said. ‘What if a story is simply any representation of agents acting? What if that’s all it is, and the shape of the narrative, its determinism, its construction of “good” and “bad” characters and so on are culturally specific?’

‘Exactly,’ said Vi. ‘Thank you, my love. These structuralists who go on and on about the universality of the hero’s journey like to talk about the story of the Buddha, because he saw three fucked-up things and then set off on a journey and got enlightened at the end. But they don’t pay so much attention to the Chinese story “Monkey”, which is another Buddhist story, but with a very silly Trickster hero who doesn’t do the right things or ask the right questions, but ends up enlightened as well. They also don’t pay any attention at all to the Pacific Trickster Maui, who, according to the stories, fished up at least some of New Zealand with his grandmother’s jawbone. Maui eventually dies while
attempting to creep inside the goddess of death, Hine-nui-te-po, through her vagina, which is lined with teeth. He’s supposedly a hero entering an innermost cave – ha ha! – and hopes to secure immortality for everyone. He has taken some bird companions on his great quest. But one of these, the Piwakawaka, or fantail, laughs at Maui and wakes up the goddess, who crushes him between her legs. These are storyless stories, because they are not Aristotelian, or even
Claudian
.’ Vi smiled at her sister as if she was the one now picking out all the mistakes in Claudia’s knitted blanket. ‘If we go with Frank’s definition, then they are stories, but they’re not satisfying in the way we expect stories should be in the West. They also make us re-think what we mean by “story” in the first place.’

‘Isn’t that more or less a normal tragedy?’ I said. ‘No hero can ever succeed on a quest for immortality. There’s too much hubris.’

‘Yeah.’ Vi nodded. ‘I see what you mean. But in its very nature the story takes the piss out of tragedy, because it’s funny and absurd, which is not how tragedy is supposed to be. This, for me, is a key feature of storylessness: all structures must contain the possibility of their own non-existence – some zip that undoes them.’ She smiled. ‘The storyless story is a vagina with teeth.’

There was no sign of Libby’s car in the river on Monday morning. I had plenty of time to look, since I got stuck in the ferry queue for half an hour. I was on my way to the library as usual, where I planned to finish my review of
The Science of
Living Forever
and then try to work on my novel. I was sleepy but warm, wrapped up in my new turquoise ribbed scarf. I’d
woken when Christopher had, at five, and only dozed between then and him leaving. I realised I’d been dreaming Kelsey Newman’s words over and over again –
You are already dead
– and of being chased around by the Omega Point, which had become a blueish, cartoonish antagonist that said things like ‘Ha, ha, ha,’ and twiddled its moustache. I also dreamed some other words, words that I remembered, and which seemed to be connected somehow:
You will never finish what you start. You
will not overcome the monster. And in the end, you will come to nothing
. After a quick shower, I’d taken B to the beach. I did this every morning in the winter, and some days it woke me up, but most days it didn’t. Today I’d been looking at all the little barnacles clinging to the rocks, and remembering Darwin writing about their evolution, and the female barnacles that at one stage had a ‘husband in each pocket’ – like Libby, I’d thought with a smile. If we were living in some sort of Second World, what was the point of evolution? I supposed Newman would say that the whole point of evolution in the First World would be the ultimate creation of the right scientists, and then their Omega Point. I wondered what the creationists would make of that idea: that the ultimate purpose of evolution is to create God.

While I’d been looking at barnacles, B had been fishing for a big rock that I kept throwing in the sea for her. She strutted around with it between times as if carrying the rock was her important job. Animals hadn’t seemed to figure much in Newman’s afterlife. They had in Plato’s, I remembered. If you were sick of being a human, you could ask the Spindle of Destiny if you could come back as a dog or a horse or a sparrow and have a less troublesome life. According to Plato, even
Odysseus chose to come back as a normal citizen in his next life because he couldn’t be bothered to have adventures any more. But it didn’t sound as if Newman was a fan of the quiet life. What was wrong with sitting around eating pizza if it made you happy and you didn’t hurt anyone? Why was this worse than, say, slaying a dragon or rescuing a maiden? The idea of a thousand years of adventure just made me feel tired.

After a while longer in the ferry queue I thought I was going to drop off, so I started doing the Waterwheel, a breathing exercise I’d learned a long time ago. To breathe like a waterwheel, you breathe through your nose but imagine your breath entering your body at the base of your spine, continuing up your spine, stopping for a second at the bottom of your throat and then tumbling down the front of your body, exiting somewhere around your navel. The Waterwheel eventually creates the sensation that you are breathing in and out at the same time, and that the air is like water constantly flowing around you. It is both relaxing and energising at the same time.

I learned the Waterwheel when I was eight. It was the beginning of October in 1978, and my school was closed because of the strikes. We hadn’t had a holiday that year because of my brother Toby being born, but suddenly one day my father said, half to me, and half to my mother, ‘Meg would like a holiday, wouldn’t you?’ and the next day we got in our old car and drove to Suffolk. It wasn’t much of a holiday at first. My mother was busy with Toby, and my father was working on an important paper and worrying about his promotion application. We’d rented, or perhaps borrowed, a house on the edge of a forest, and for the first few days I simply sat on my bed and read books about children who go on holiday and find criminals in caves,
or enchanted castles or dungeons with treasure in them. My parents occasionally said I should go out and get some fresh air, but I got the impression they didn’t much care whether I did or not. Still, when the books ran out I went off to explore the forest. Perhaps I wanted an adventure, like the ones I’d been reading about. Perhaps I did just need some fresh air.

Each morning I would make cheese and pickle sandwiches and a flask of tea and go out for the whole day, wondering what I’d do if I met a fairy, or came across a monster in a lair. I knew I wouldn’t tell my father. It was a bright, crisp autumn, and early in the morning cobwebs glowed white with dew between the low branches of trees, and robins and thrushes sang high-pitched songs that echoed through the forest. Cones were beginning to grow on the branches of silvery-green pine trees, like little cosmoses sprouting in the kind of multiverse my father sometimes talked about. On the ground I would sometimes find bright red and white toadstools that had come up suddenly, like the Yorkshire puddings my mother made on a Sunday. There were different sorts of mushrooms everywhere: some were like huge, spongy pancakes lying at the base of tree-trunks; others were tiny, with stalks like spaghetti. Late in the day, the cobwebs would become almost translucent in the low sun, and I would only notice them at all because of the spiders that hung in the middle of them like nuclei. One time I saw a spider catch a wasp. I hated wasps, and I was quite pleased when this one flew drowsily away from me and got stuck in the web. In an instant, the fat spider came and started wrapping up the wasp in its white silk. The wasp struggled at first, and I felt sorry for it. But then it stopped moving. The spider worked away, turning it around, cocooning it, its thin, jagged
legs moving this way and that, each one as precise as a needle on a sewing machine. Then it picked up the wasp in its front legs and took it up to the centre of the web the way a human would carry a newborn baby. I watched for ages, but nothing else happened, and when I came back the next day the whole web had gone. Another day I found some string in the damp, creaky holiday house and made a shoulder-strap for my flask. In the forest I made myself a necklace out of wild flowers by piercing each stalk with my thumb-nail and threading the next flower through it, just like a daisy-chain. I ate blackberries from bushes until my hands were dyed purple with the juice. I had stopped brushing my hair. I’d gone wild, and no one seemed to notice.

One bright, chilly afternoon I followed a stream and found a thatched stone cottage that seemed as if it had grown out of the forest. It was covered in a dense, deep-red ivy, with holes for only the windows and the door. It looked like something you might try to draw at school because you’d seen it in a picture book. There was a gate that opened easily, and I walked into a garden and past a small well. Around the side of the cottage there was a wrought-iron gazebo, also covered in climbing plants and half shaded by big, old trees, and inside it there were two wooden rocking chairs and a wooden table on which stood six cups, into which a man was arranging flowers. I’d never seen a man arranging flowers before. In fact, no one I knew arranged flowers.

‘Aha! A young adventuress,’ he said. ‘Well, don’t just stand there gawping. Come and help.’

I went and stood closer. He was small, with a big, brown beard the colour of tree bark. He looked as if he had grown
out of the forest along with everything else. He was wearing electric-blue suede boots and faded red trousers. He had a blue suede waistcoat too. I liked that colour blue: it was the same as the hairband I was wearing.

‘Hold these,’ he said, giving me some flowers. ‘And if you’re lucky I’ll show you some magic and maybe even tell your fortune.’ He winked. After I’d held several bunches of white flowers while he cut their stalks, he asked me to go and gather some foliage. I didn’t know what that was, and I must have looked baffled, because he said, ‘Just green stuff. Go on – quickly – or the spell won’t work.’

When I’d finished helping him I said, ‘Now will you show me some magic?’

He laughed. ‘I just did.’

‘Oh,’ I said, disappointed. Nothing seemed to have changed.

‘All right,’ he said. ‘Watch this.’

He took a matchbox out of his pocket and put it on the little wooden table. He sat down in one of the rocking chairs and looked at it; then it started to rise up in the air. I gasped and it fell down with a little clatter.

‘Is it really magic?’ I asked.

‘Yes,’ he said, smiling. ‘I suppose so.’

‘Will you teach me how to do it?’

‘We’ll see.’

‘And what about my fortune?’

He looked at me seriously. ‘I’m not sure it’s always good for people to know their fortunes.’

‘But you promised,’ I said.

He sighed. ‘Come back tomorrow if you like. Make sure your parents know where you are, though.’ The man said his name
was Robert, ‘like the herb’, and that before I could learn magic, or indeed understand my own fortune, I’d have to learn some other things. He had a friend called Bethany, who would be there tomorrow, but who was very shy and wouldn’t want to be disturbed too much. He said she was so shy that I might not even see her at all, but that she would definitely be there.