Our Tragic Universe

  'Do you want to tell me about it?' she said.

  I shook my head.

  'You need to tell someone. What about your parents?'

  'They'll get cross.'

  'I won't get cross. I promise.'

  Something in her eyes made me think I could trust her, so I told her everything about going to the forest and meeting Robert and Bethany and how I'd been too scared to learn any magic and how Robert had told my fortune.

  'And now I'm scared of the monster,' I said. 'I don't know when it's going to come and get me. If I'd learned magic properly maybe I would be able to overcome it, but now I can't. I can't sleep, and everything's scary. And there are noises next door all the time, and I'm sure it's the monster coming to get me.'

  'Gosh,' she said. 'Well, that does sound a bit frightening.'

  'Are you cross?' I asked.

  'Why would I be cross?' She picked up a piece of red chalk and then put it down again. 'Now, Meg. Do you know the difference between a lie and a story?'

  'I'm not lying! And it's not a story.'

  'It's all right. I'm not saying you're lying. But you are good at stories—you won a special prize for telling stories, didn't you? It's not a bad thing to be good at telling stories, and in some ways everything we tell is a story, but sometimes it's good to remember which parts of the stories we tell are true, and which parts are made up.'

  'You don't believe me,' I said. 'It is true. It did happen. I know it did.'

  'I do believe you. I just...' Miss Scott frowned. 'Oh, dear.'

  I started crying again. 'I wanted to tell my mum,' I said. 'But my dad...'

  'What about your dad?'

  'Nothing. He gets cross about things like this. He's a materialist.'

  A couple of years before, I'd sat on my father's lap and asked him what he did all day at the university. He told me that he spent most days looking at numbers and doing calculations in order to try to find out how old the universe was. He said his whole job was like being a detective where you look at clues and find out what things are made of or how old they are. I asked why he wanted to know how old the universe was, and he said that was a good question, but a difficult one. I remembered something from school assembly and suggested that perhaps he wanted to know more about God, and his smile died and he put me down on the floor and told me it was time for bed.

  Miss Scott smiled. 'Look,' she said. 'Let's assume that it happened just as you said. Robert was right when he said that not everybody should know their fortune. For one thing, your fortune isn't set in stone. It tells you more about your character than what's actually going to happen to you in the future. I think that what Robert was telling you was that you're not the kind of person to overcome monsters. That's a good thing, isn't it? Remember the story of Beauty and the Beast? The Beast looked like a monster, but all he needed was love, and then when Beauty really loved him he turned into a prince. In that story, Beauty didn't overcome the monster either; she loved him, and they lived happily ever after. Look at Herman.' I looked over to the corner of the room, where Herman was meandering through one of his cardboard tubes. 'Lots of people would think Herman was a monster. They'd say, "Urrgh! A rat!", and maybe they'd want to try to "overcome" him with rat poison. That wouldn't be very nice, would it?'

  I shook my head. 'No.'

  'Have you heard about something called the Vietnam War?' Miss Scott asked me.

  'I don't know,' I said. I had heard the words, but I didn't know what they meant.

  'America, which is a very big country, decided that it would overcome the monster of communism,' she said. Then she laughed. 'Oh, dear, I think this example is going to become too complicated. But do you understand what I've been saying so far?'

  I nodded.

  'Basically, I don't think there are any such things as monsters,' Miss Scott said.

  'All grown-ups say that.'

  'Ah—yes, I see what you mean. But what I'm saying is that if a monster, or something you call a monster, comes to see you and you become its friend, it stops being a monster, at least to you. In that sense, there don't have to be any such things as monsters. You have to decide something is a monster before it becomes one.'

  'What if the monster doesn't want to be your friend?'

  'Well, then I suppose in an ideal world you would go your separate ways and leave each other alone. The main thing is that you don't have to be violent towards something just because you don't like it. I think that's what your friend Robert meant. I think he was saying that you are naturally a kind person. That's a good thing.'

  'But he also said I'd come to nothing.'

  'Well, that is more tricky,' said Miss Scott, 'I agree. How did he say it?'

  'He had a scary face, and scary eyes.'

  'What was his voice like?'

  I tried to remember. 'It wasn't quite as scary as everything else.'

  'Do you think he was also saying that this might be a good thing?'

  'How can it be a good thing?'

  Miss Scott smiled. 'Some religions think nothing is the best thing of all.'

  'How can they say that?'

  'It sounds a bit odd, I know. But I think that the "nothing" they talk about is more of a mystery than a nothingness. It's about leaving the physical world behind and embracing something more spiritual. Have you heard of Taoism?'

  'Dow-ism?' I repeated.

  'It's more of a "way" than a religion. In Taoism, it's only nothingness that gives anything meaning. A cup is only useful because it has an empty space inside for your tea, for example. The best part of a house isn't the walls and the roof, but the space inside, where you live. There's a lovely passage from the Tao Te Ching —"The Book of the Way"—about the world being formed from a void. All the physical things you see are cut out of a big sheet of material, and this material is nothingness, or the void. The Tao says you should use the things, but remember the essence of the void. I don't know if this is what your friend meant, but again, "coming to nothing" could be coming to a place of peace or simplicity, a place where you understand the fabric of the universe, not just the patterns you can cut from it. Or perhaps it means you won't be successful in a conventional sense...'

  'You're using lots of complicated words,' I said.

  'Sorry.' She smiled. 'You're right. Look, I have a very dear friend whom I can't help but think of. Someone once told him he would come to nothing too. He was at a very strict school where they had the cane, and freezing cold showers, and the headmaster told him one day that he was a very lazy boy and would "never make anything of himself". Have you heard that expression?'

  I nodded. 'I think so.'

  'When grown-ups say that, they mean you won't become famous or successful. You won't become a prime minister, or even get a good job in a bank. You'll, in a sense, come to nothing. In a way, the headmaster was right. My friend lives in a caravan and reads books all afternoon. At night he goes to work in a factory, and then he sleeps all morning. He once went around India in a bus! In a sense you could say he hasn't made anything of himself, because he hasn't become rich and famous, and he doesn't have a family and a house, but he's very happy with his simple life. He knows lots of things from the books he's read. He learned how to make his own wine, and how to fix the engine on his car, just from books.'

  I couldn't quite visualise all the things Miss Scott was talking about, but somehow I felt better from talking to her. Just before the bell rang for the end of playtime, she went to her desk and took out a little bottle of liquid with a tiny pipette in it. She told me to open my mouth, and then she put two drops of the liquid on my tongue.

  'This will make you feel a lot better,' she said.

  The strange noises continued next door, but I wasn't so bothered by them. I was sleeping more soundly, but my parents weren't. Some nights I would wake up and overhear things. One night my mother was crying and saying, 'I can't take it any more. What are we going to do about the children?' Another night she was saying, 'You're so cold,' over and over ag
ain, in a high, breathless voice. I tried not to think about all of this. Every evening after tea I would be sent to my room to read on my own for an hour. This was in preparation for homework, which I would be getting for the first time the following year. I'd decided that this hour would be my magical training time. If Miss Scott was right, and Robert had meant to tell me kind things, then surely there was nothing wrong with trying just a little bit of magic. If I could do magic, I thought, I could make everything all right, and stop my parents from arguing and do things to make their lives easier, like make Toby sleep better and cure my father's headaches. I had a matchbox that I'd taken from downstairs, and I would put it in my desk and concentrate on it. But I'd be half-thinking all sorts of things as I willed it to rise, and of course it didn't work.

  One Saturday my mother took Rosa and me to a jumble sale in the church down the road. I'd always worn jumble-sale clothes, and I needed new jeans. Toby was in his pushchair sucking on a rusk, and Mum gave Rosa and me 20p each, supposedly to buy whatever we wanted, although we knew to check with her first before we handed the money over for something. In the past, kids we knew had bought all kinds of unsuitable things at jumble sales, including cap guns, sparklers, scented erasers, snuff and, apparently, from a half-blind old woman, The Joy of Sex. We went straight to the book stall and started looking for things that we weren't allowed to buy, because we knew from experience that we could read quite a lot of dirty bits before it was time to go home. Then, while Rosa was lost in something called Teach Yourself Tantric Sex, I saw it: a thin, red paperback called ESP: The Sixth Sense. It was a Macdonald Guidelines book, with a terrifying cover depicting a huge eye with a ghostly woman inside it. I picked it up and started flicking through it. There was a picture of Uri Geller bending a spoon and various images of'séances, people walking through fire, dream symbols, dowsing and faith healing. Although the picture on the front was too horrible to look at for very long, I felt something stirring in me as I looked through the rest of the book. The last section showed you how to develop your own extra-sensory skills. I had to have it. It was 15p. I picked up an Enid Blyton book I didn't already have and wandered over to my mother, who was deep in conversation with one of the neighbours.

  'Mum, can I get these?' I said.

  She hardly looked at the book underneath the Enid Blyton.

  'Yes, love,' she said.

  Later, in my bedroom, as I lay on my bed completely absorbed in my book, Rosa, who had finished her Secret Seven novel, got up from the beanbag she'd been curled up on and wandered over, yawning. She got on the bed with me and bounced a bit.

  'Stop it,' I said. 'I'm reading.'

  'What's it about?'

  'ESP,' I said. 'But it's a secret, so don't tell anyone.'

  'What's that?' she said, looking over my shoulder and pointing at a picture.

  'This bit's about poltergeists,' I said, stumbling slightly over the word.

  'Oh,' she said coolly. 'We've got one of those.'

  'I told you we often have ferry disasters,' I said to Rowan.

  It was Tuesday morning, and the Higher Ferry, also known as the Floating Bridge, had broken down. All the locals had got out of their cars and were making phone calls, lighting cigarettes or inspecting whatever piece of the ferry they thought wasn't working. The few tourists and out-of-towners were sitting in their cars watching the ferry men. Rowan, who never usually got the ferry at this time, had been leaning over the safety rail looking at one of the waterwheels, but was now looking at me. I was looking back at him, and suddenly something happened with our eyes: they touched. Somewhere in the air between us, we touched without touching. I didn't want to let go, and perhaps he didn't either, because we held each other's gaze like this for almost ten seconds. It was as if we were about to kiss again.

  'You also told me never to go on the Lower Ferry,' he said, dropping his eyes.

  'It feels worse,' I said, dropping mine and looking briefly down the river and out to sea. How would you describe a moment like that? How could you know anything had happened at all?

  Rowan took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes. Thin folds of skin puffed around his eyes like rows of underfed basking sharks, and his face was the pale grey of a moonlit sea. He looked as if he hadn't slept for a week. He was wearing his duffel coat and jeans as usual and his hair stuck out at crazy angles.

  'But this is the one that always seems to be breaking down,' he said, leaning over the safety rail again, dangling his glasses.

  'This is a magnificent piece of Victorian engineering,' I said.

  'You're right,' Rowan said. 'Year of construction?'

  'Pass,' I said. 'Some local engineer stole the idea from a Scottish student, though.'

  '1831,' Rowan said. 'At least that's when it was opened. The engineer was James Rendel, and the Scottish student was James Nasmyth. He didn't exactly "steal" the idea. Or maybe he did. Nasmyth was an engineer when Rendel met him, but he told him about this mad idea he'd had when he was a student, about boats being attached to cables, and Rendel decided to give it a try.'

  'Aha,' I said. 'This is why you're a historian and I'm a novelist. I sort of knew most of that, but I'd forgotten it. How do you know so much about the Higher Ferry?'

  'The Greenway project,' Rowan said. 'Before Agatha Christie and her husband lived there it was owned by James Marwood Elton, the High Sheriff of Devon. He didn't want a bridge, which was why people were interested in finding some other way of crossing the river. The Floating Bridge was originally powered by a couple of horses. Agatha Christie would have travelled on the ferry.'

  'When she disappeared?'

  I already knew from Rowan that Agatha Christie had become so pissed off with her husband's affair that she'd staged a disappearance. She'd left her car in a ditch and gone to a spa in Harrogate, where she checked in under a false name, perhaps even, I remembered, the name of her husband's mistress. When the newspapers found out, they went so wild that Agatha Christie had to pretend to have had a nervous breakdown. A year or so later she filed for divorce, went on an archaeological dig and met the man who would become her second husband. He was fourteen years younger than her and was apparently pushing her in her wheelchair when she died of natural causes at the age of eighty-five. I remembered the way Rowan had told me that detail, with a pessimistic smile.

  'No,' he said. 'She only moved to Greenway after she had married Max Mallowan, the archaeologist.' He put his glasses back on and leaned against the safety rail, facing me. 'Apparently on sat-nav the Higher Ferry shows up as a B-road.'

  'I heard that some sat-navs really freak out when you cross the river. I don't know if it's an urban myth or not. One of Libby's out-of-town friends claims that when she drove onto the Lower Ferry the sat-nav started saying, "Turn back now! You are in danger! You have driven into a river." Or something like that.' I looked at his car. 'You've got sat-nav in there, presumably?'

  'Yeah, Lise had it installed,' he said. 'But I keep it switched off. I think I know where I'm going, most of the time.' He looked over the side of the ferry again. 'Where are these cables, do you think?'

  I went and stood next to him, and we both hung over the rail. Our arms were separated by at least four layers of clothing and about two inches of air.

  'Underneath, I guess. They must run across the river bed.'

  'Apparently one time when it sank a herd of cows were on board, and they had to swim to safety.' He paused. 'Didn't you tell me that?'

  'Yeah. And there was that time in the eighties when the cables snapped and the ferry was swept downriver. It was like what happened last year, but worse. It mowed down something like twelve yachts. It also had an ambulance on it, carrying a woman to hospital, and she died. Some people say that on stormy nights you can see the faint outline of an ambulance on the ferry, and hear her weakening cries.'

  Rowan went pale. 'God,' he said. 'That's awful.'

  'Yeah. Well, I'm sure most of it isn't true.'

  He turned and faced upriver, but I wa
sn't sure what he was looking at.

  'How's the chapter going?' I asked.

  'Oh. Probably too much research, not enough writing.'

  'You mentioned cultural premonitions before,' I said. 'I meant to look up some examples, because I was intrigued. But I forgot.'

  'Well, the most famous one is from 1898, fourteen years before the Titanic sank, when a writer called Morgan Robertson wrote a novel called The Wreck of the Titan, all about a supposedly unsinkable ship that is sunk by an iceberg on its maiden voyage. The two and a half thousand passengers drown because there aren't enough lifeboats, just like on the actual Titanic. They don't bother to have them because the ship is apparently indestructible.'

  'But you don't think this was a real premonition?'

  'No, of course not. In the chapter, I'm arguing that if you were a novelist writing about an unsinkable ship, and you wanted to name it, you'd presumably be in the same mind-set as someone naming a real ship. Titan, Titanic: it's plausible that both the novelist and the person naming the real ship would think along the same lines. It's not as if the word "Titanic" wasn't used frequently before the boat came along, and it's always used to describe some great thing that is eventually overthrown. Byron used it to describe Rome before it fell. "In the same dust and blackness, and we pass / The skeleton of her Titanic form, / Wrecks of another world, whose ashes still are warm." And when it comes down to it, if a boat like that sinks, people will usually drown because the authorities, believing the ship is unsinkable, don't take sufficient precautions, and don't install enough lifeboats. None of it's that far-fetched. So it's not so much a supernatural premonition of the future, but a different kind of premonition, or prediction, based on cultural factors and things people would reasonably know, or guess.'

  I started peeling a tangerine from my anorak pocket. 'It's interesting that whoever named the real Titanic called it that. I'd never thought about it before. It's almost as if they wanted it to sink, or they knew it would. I mean, the Titans were defeated by the Olympians, weren't they, and the word "Titanic" has a sense of tragedy and doom before you even start. It goes with the vaingloriousness that Hardy writes about: "Dim moon-eyed fishes near / Gaze at the gilded gear / And query: 'What does this vaingloriousness down here?'"'