Our Tragic Universe by Scarlett Thomas Read Free Book Online Page B

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 walkingin 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 Viwas 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