Our Tragic Universe

  'Why did she do it?' he asked.

  'Who?'

  'Libby Miller. Why did she push her car in the river?'

  'She's the one I told you about ages ago. She's having a tragic love affair. Didn't you hear what we were saying?'

  'No. I only got here just as she pushed it in.'

  'Oh. Well.'

  'I won't say anything.'

  'Thanks.'

  'Funny how things just go, isn't it?' he said.

  'Sorry?'

  'The car in the river. It's just gone.'

  'It's for the best, I'm sure,' I said.

  Rowan got up to leave, and I felt like a melting iceberg as I said goodbye and walked away from him. I didn't know what was wrong with me. I could have emailed him any time I'd wanted to. I could have got in touch to tell him I'd read the book he'd lent me, but I hadn't. I could have emailed him to write off the kiss as a mistake and tell him how much I missed our friendship. As I walked away, I imagined going back and asking him if he had come out tonight because of me, and then him looking puzzled and saying it was all just a coincidence.

  Was it a coincidence that we'd ended up at the library together? It must have been. I didn't usually tell people that I worked in the library every weekday. It was such a weird thing to do when I had a perfectly good house to work in, and if I ever mentioned my asthma and the damp people didn't understand why I just didn't simply move. I recognised Rowan the first day he came to work at the library. He seemed to recognise me, too. After we'd spent a day or so just nodding and smiling at one another I showed him how to get his emails on his laptop rather than the library computers and then he took me to Lucky's for lunch to say thanks. Over lunch we realised we had friends—Frank and Vi—in common. Frank had been my lecturer almost twenty years before, and he and Vi had been something like a second set of parents for me since then. Rowan had been at Goldsmiths before he got his chair in history at Greenwich, and had met Frank there. Vi was an anthropologist, and she and Rowan had really hit it off and ended up working together on re-enactment projects. They'd wanted to reconstruct the voyage of the Beagle, but could never secure any funding. But they did once spend a successful couple of weeks in Norfolk re-enacting Captain Cook's death on Hawai'i with their postgraduate students.

  Cook had been killed by his previously generous hosts when he came back to the island to fix his broken boat. ('It would be like having your parents come to stay,' Vi explained to me once, 'and just after you've settled down to eat with your put-upon partner and vowed never to have them back again, their car breaks down and they return to stay for another week while your local garage sources the part to mend their car.') Was he killed because he demanded too much generosity? Or was it because he'd inadvertently become a character in a ritual, and this character wasn't supposed to return? Vi, Rowan and the students decided to act out a situation as close as possible to the one in which Cook and the islanders had found themselves. They'd hired an old beachfront hotel to function as 'Hawai'i'—a closed community into which Cook came, went and came again. Rowan played Cook, and Vi played the Hawai'ian King and chiefs. The students played islanders, and after the project had to write up how they'd felt about having to bow and scrape to Cook, and wait on him hand and foot. Could this have led one of them to want to kill him, or was there more to it? How much did they believe in the ritual? Rowan wrote about how interesting it was to find yourself allowing and accepting huge amounts of deference and generosity, and, after a while, becoming upset if people don't give you everything you want. An edited version of the experiment was published in Granta magazine.

  When I'd asked Vi about Rowan, not long after I'd met him, she had told me how fastidious he was about always taking a good map and a pair of walking boots anywhere he went. I couldn't bear to admit to myself that I was interested in him, but I lapped up everything Vi said. I would have found out his shoe size if I could have done. When I discovered that he and Vi shared a birthday I even looked up his astrological chart, despite not believing in astrological charts. From Rowan I heard things about Vi that I mostly knew already. Vi's projects always involved what she provocatively called 'going native'. Over the years she had picked up several colloquial languages, five complicated tattoos, three 'lost' herbarium specimen collections, a drum kit, a dress made from leaves, and malaria. After her long period of Pacific studies, she took more study leave from the university, got a job as a care assistant and embarked on an ethnography of a nursing home in Brighton, which became her bestselling book I Want to Die, Please. Now she was working on a project about subculture and style in late-middle-aged people in the UK. Rowan made lots of jokes about that, mainly at his own expense.

  Vi never used maps, but relied on a strange kind of 'luck' to find her way around. If she found a tree that had been cut down she apologised to it on behalf of humans. She talked to inanimate objects as if they too were alive, although since working at the nursing home her conversations with these objects often began with 'How the fuck are you, then?' She used tea tree oil as an antiseptic, and ginger to settle a bad stomach. For everything else she used 25+ manuka honey. One time in Scotland I'd gone on a hike with Frank and Vi and she had fixed his sprained ankle with a bottle of vinegar and some daisies. I told Rowan about this in some detail and then felt I'd betrayed Vi by laughing at her. Then again, we laughed at a lot of things.

  We found all sorts of excuses to have coffee or lunch at Lucky's and continue the long, rambling conversations we'd started. These included our thoughts on playing guitar, whether it was immoral to use a dictionary when doing cryptic crosswords, why neither of us could sit at a messy table, why we hated shopping and how many ferry disasters there'd ever been on the River Dart. We discovered that we both disliked email: me because I had a psychological problem with replying to them, and Rowan because he got too many of them and preferred pen and paper. We joked about reading each other's minds, and tried to guess each other's lunch order every day. Bizarrely, we'd bumped into each other in a one-off flea market in the hall next to the library, both looking for an antique fountain pen to give to the other as a thank-you present. He was—still—thanking me for helping with his email. I can't remember what I was thanking him for. And we kept parking our cars next to each other in the library car park. Once when there wasn't a space free next to his car I drove round the car park until one did become free, because I didn't want to break the symmetry. A few days later I arrived first, and when I left the library that afternoon and saw his car several rows away from mine I felt like crying.

  When Rowan's office in the Maritime Centre was completed we went for our last lunch. On the way there we'd been talking about the Titanic, and I'd recited Thomas Hardy's 'The Convergence of the Twain' and told Rowan my theory that it is a tragic love story as well as a disaster poem. After that he looked at me, and his eyes held mine for a second longer than they should have. Over lunch he told me that he was planning to write a completely different book after the one on shipwrecks, something that would involve going back to the Galápagos Islands for at least a year, but not as Darwin or anyone else: just as himself. I could tell he wouldn't hang around in Devon for long. Once Lise's mother was dead and Rowan's book was finished they were bound to sell the converted boathouse and move on. If I was the iceberg and he was the ship, we'd never converge, because he would change course before it was too late. I wouldn't sink him, and he wouldn't destroy me either. There would be no jarring of 'two hemispheres'.

  We stayed in Lucky's until gone four, talking about Rowan's plans for exhibitions and conferences, and ways in which I could get involved. We laughed a lot as these collaborations became more and more absurd. We never explicitly said we wanted to see one another again, but we planned thousands of ways it could happen. Our eyes touched again, for longer. I breathed out as he breathed in and the molecules of air between us danced back and forth in a frenzied tango that no one else could see or feel. But we didn't physically touch: we never had. We walked back to our cars toget
her as if we were walking through a force-field. Rowan said quietly, 'I often go for a walk in Dartmouth on a Sunday evening. Maybe we'll bump into one another sometime.' Then, even though I'm sure we meant to just say goodbye by shaking hands or kissing on the cheek, we ended up taking each other's hands and then kissing properly, deeply, gently stroking each other's hair. Afterwards, as I drove home panicking and sweating and moaning his name, I realised that I hadn't kissed anyone like that for almost seven years. We didn't have each other's phone numbers, but we had exchanged email addresses. I felt that an affair was inevitable, even though I didn't want to have one. I'd had plenty of complicated break-ups but never an affair. Who would email the other first, I'd wondered? Who would fashion the iceberg?

  Neither of us did.

  'Where have you been?'

  I looked at the clock on the oven. It was half past seven. It was dark outside, and there was a cold smell in the house. Christopher had turned off the central heating as usual. Nothing was cooking, no washing was drying, my peace lily was slowly dying on the sunless windowsill; if it wasn't for the sawdust and Christopher it would be as if no one had lived here for ages: as if whoever had lived here had died.

  'Walking Bess,' I said. 'You knew that.'

  'For an hour?' He shook his head. 'And after storming off in such a mood. I don't know why you can't just stay and talk if there's a problem. I'm not a monster. There's nothing for dinner, by the way. I've looked in all the cupboards. And your mother phoned.'

  'I really don't know what you're talking about. I didn't storm off.'

  'Don't use that tone of voice with me. It's not helpful.'

  'What tone of voice?'

  'That one.'

  'Oh, for God's sake.'

  I started going through the cupboards and found some whole-wheat penne and a jar of murky-looking tomato sauce. Our few kitchen cupboards were always full of things that couldn't be thrown away but couldn't be eaten either. I didn't mean to slam all the doors, and thump the jar of sauce down on the table, but I did.

  'So you are in a mood. I always know...'

  'If that's what you want to call being angry, then yes, I am now. I wasn't before. I walked out of the house completely normally, came back after a normal amount of time, and found you shouting at me.' As I said this, I was filling the kettle with my back to Christopher. He didn't say anything until I turned to face him again.

  'I'm not shouting,' he said.

  'No. But you know what I mean.'

  He looked at the floor. 'You always say I'm shouting.'

  I looked at the floor too, but a different spot.

  'I'm sorry. You're right. I do.'

  My mind was like a fishing net with too many thoughts wriggling around in it. My stupid suggestion. Splash. The tears in Rowan's eyes. Splash. Libby's shawl. Splash. Immortality in an artificial heaven. My eyes were filling with tears again, and I was developing a headache. I imagined an eternity with Christopher. I'd been waiting for the last seven years for him to make sense to me, to fall into place; perhaps in an eternity it would happen. Perhaps in an eternity everything would fall into place, but then it wouldn't stay like that, because that's not the point of eternity. Even in a finite universe, a rock doesn't keep being a rock. Things are always disintegrating and becoming other things. In fact, I was quite looking forward to becoming a rock, or perhaps some sand, once I was long dead and decomposed. It would be a lot simpler than being resurrected and having to go through all this again. In an eternity, though, I'd get one night with Rowan, something I'd never get in this life. But like everything else in eternity it would be meaningless.

  The kettle had boiled, and I put the penne on.

  'I'm sorry,' I said again. 'You're right, I do feel a bit unsettled this evening. I think I'm coming down with a headache.'

  The pieces of pasta bobbed about in the pan like little tubes of brown cardboard, the empties from a doll's-house toilet, perhaps, although not even doll's-house people would put little tubes of cardboard in a pan and cook them. I blinked and looked at Christopher. He was looking at the pasta too.

  'What's wrong?' he said. 'Has something happened?'

  'No. I don't think so. It'll be OK. I'll take some painkillers. What did my mum say?'

  'She said she'd ring back tomorrow. Then, as usual, she put the phone down.'

  'Oh.'

  Without catching his eye I picked up the newspaper from the table and opened it to the cryptic crossword that I did every Sunday. I'd done all of it the previous week except for one answer, which I'd written in the margin but not entered because although I thought it was right I didn't know why. Now I could see the correct answers for last week, and I had been right. I still didn't know why. Rowan and I once finished the crossword together on a rainy Monday morning in the library, after using a big, musty atlas to look up a lake in Australia and the capital of Corsica. That morning had ended oddly, I remembered. We'd planned to go for lunch as usual, but Lise had texted Rowan to say she had a migraine, and he'd gone home instead. His hands had been shaking as he'd packed up his decrepit, cotton knapsack, and he'd rushed off without really saying goodbye. Now I picked up a mechanical pencil from the kitchen work surface and sat down on the sofa. It was hard to concentrate, and I realised Christopher hadn't moved.

  'Any news from Josh? Was he OK after yesterday?'

  Christopher rolled his eyes. 'Who knows?'

  'Any news from your dad? Is Becca any better?'

  'No,' Christopher said. 'I don't know. I was going to ring him after dinner.'

  We ate in front of the TV, with me still looking at my crossword, and Christopher occasionally looking at my crossword too as if it was my lover and he'd become resigned to discovering us together. But mostly he was watching a programme about haunted houses. I hated programmes about haunted houses and Christopher knew this. I ate so fast I half-choked on a piece of penne. Once I'd finished coughing I put my plate in the sink and headed for the stairs, still carrying my crossword.

  'What are you doing now?' Christopher said.

  'I'm going to have a bath. Give you some space to talk to your dad.'

  'I don't need space,' he said. I went anyway.

  'It'll help clear my chest,' I said, coughing again.

  I lay there for an hour, until long after Christopher had put the phone back in its cradle and started sawing again. There was always something in the crossword that made me think it could have been written just for me, and I always wanted to tell Rowan about it. Today the clue was 'Cosmos in a single poem (8 letters). After a while I put down the crossword on the damp bathroom floor, made myself stop thinking about Rowan and wondered what on earth I could do about my relationship with Christopher. Was there something I could say to him? I still dreamed about Becca sometimes, even after all these years: her freckled, laughing face freezing at the sight of me.

  Becca was Christopher's sister. She lived in Brighton with her husband Ant. They'd just had a third daughter and there'd been some complications that meant Becca had temporarily closed the shop where she sold her hand-made jewellery. Ant's brother Drew was an actor, and had been my fiancé in the late nineties when I first met Christopher. For a couple of years we'd all hung around together having silly tea parties and 'happenings' in Becca and Ant's huge house. Just after my first Zeb Ross book had been published Drew had shot his first major drama series, in which he was the young parochial sidekick of a literature-loving detective. A couple of years later there was a Millennium party, where everyone except Christopher and me dressed as bugs. But Brighton soon became very complicated, which was why I had run away to Devon with Christopher, home for him and exotic for me, at least at the beginning. Becca had hardly spoken to either of us since we'd left Brighton, although Christopher had gone there at Christmas to try to patch things up. Drew had blamed Becca somehow, and left the area too. She and Ant 'almost split up' because of it.

  I vaguely remembered the first synopsis I'd written for my literary novel, which was at that tim
e called Sandworld. It was going to be all about a bunch of youngish, long-haired, thin people living in Brighton. They would take cool drugs and listen to cool music and fuck each other for about 80,000 words and then the novel would end. It fitted with what my agent called the 'Zeitgeist', but seemed to lack substance, so I'd added a dangerous love-interest for the main character. I also added a philosophy course about hedonism, and made the characters students rather than townies. I wrote lots of pointless sections about nihilism and then deleted them. Then I decided to end the novel with the end of the world, but that didn't work, so I made it so that the end of the world could just be a fireworks display on Sark, or one of the other Channel Islands—but the reader doesn't know for sure. Then I put it aside and wrote another Zeb Ross novel and then another Newtopia novel, because I needed the money.

  When I came back to Sandworld I deleted most of it, changed the title to Footprints, decided to relocate the characters to Devon and started researching some themes about the environment. I made the main character a scientist, and then, perhaps more authentically, a writer who wanted to be a scientist. Recently I'd been trying to make the novel into a great tragedy, but that wasn't working either. I had realised a while ago that I was always trying to make the novel catch up with my life, and then deleting the bits that got too close, wiping them out like videogame aliens in a space-station corridor. I still didn't know what to do about it. I'd invented a writer character from New York who deletes a whole book until it's a haiku and then deletes that, but then I deleted him too. Blammo. Lock and load. In the past few years I'd invented a couple of sisters, called Io and Xanthe, who have lost everything in their lives, a building site with yellow cranes, a run-down B&B owned by a chewed-up old woman called Sylvia, an inconsiderate boyfriend, a married lover, a girl in a coma telling her life story from the beginning in real-time, a life-support machine wired up to the Internet, a charismatic A-level physics teacher called Dylan, a psychic game-show, an extended game of 'Dare' that goes wrong, some people trapped in a sauna, a car accident, a meaningful tattoo, dreams of a post-oil world full of flickering candles, a plane crash, an imposter, a character with OCD who follows any written instructions she sees, some creepy junk mail, a sweet teenage boy on a skateboard and various other things, all of which had now been deleted as well. Ducks in a row, then bang, bang, bang.