Read Online Our Tragic Universe by Scarlett Thomas - Free Book Online
Authors: Scarlett Thomas
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scanning the last paragraph to confirm I knew what was coming before I started at the top. After I’d played out October in Greece in my head a few different ways, I became certain that there was no need to actually go. I knew what water felt like, and sun, and I had conversations with people all the time. I drank wine. What was the point of doing all this in a slightly different way, in a slightly different time-zone? I loved flying: seeing the world below me like a doodle, and feeling like a friend of the doodler, but I’d done that before too. I had the results of the experiment already.
I also wasn’t sure I would be able to finish my novel under any circumstances, let alone somewhere strange like Greece. It had originally been due for submission in 1999, and every year since then I’d had to email my agent and ask for another extension. The editor who had commissioned the novel had left the publishing house in 2002, and her successor had left in 2004. The publishing house had been bought by another publishing house and had become an imprint. Then the second publishing house was bought by a huge media conglomerate and the imprint changed its name. Every so often I got an email from a new editor asking how the book was coming on, but I hadn’t heard anything since about 2006. The contract had probably been left behind in someone’s filing cabinet and sent to the dump. I’d almost certainly lost my copy. Even my original agent had long gone – down to Cornwall to work as a schoolteacher – so I didn’t have anyone to ask about it.
I sent the email cancelling my trip to Greece about two weeks before I was due to go. I thought this act would make me stop lying awake wheezing for hours every night after Christopherhad gone to sleep, but it made it worse. I spent the whole of October Googling the weather in Greece while yawning and almost falling asleep in the library. Since then I’d written about 2,000 words of my novel and deleted about 20,000, which was a net gain of –18,000 words. Was it possible to submit a novel with a negative number of words? I’d changed the title a few more times too, and it was currently called The Death of the Author . It was all very frustrating. I had no problem writing formulaic genre books totalling about half a million words to date, and I never deleted things from them or changed their titles. Maybe I was just a formulaic genre writer, and that was why.
‘How’s it going between you and Christopher now?’ Vi asked. ‘Really.’
‘Oh, it’s the same.’ I sighed. ‘I know I’ve got to pull myself together. I guess I can learn something from the Greece experience. Next time I get that sort of chance I will take it, I suppose, perhaps. But I guess that’s got nothing to do with Christopher.’
‘Just don’t knit socks for him.’
‘No.’
‘And I’ll make you up a flower remedy. You look exhausted.’
‘Thanks.’
The next day Vi went to the village and bought herself some black alpaca and started making a ribbed scarf. It turned out that Claudia had a half-knitted Regency dress tucked away in one of her bags, so she got that out and worked on it beside us. It was like being in a club. My knitting felt real in my hands, and all I had to do was knit stitch after stitch and the fabric got longer. It was much easier than writing my novel. At first I’d stop knitting after every row and look at how long my scarfwas, and calculate how long it might be in half an hour, or the following day, but after a while I stopped doing that. It was easier if I kept the yarn wrapped around my fingers in the way Vi had shown me, and each time I finished a row to just turn the needles and begin again on the next one. Whenever I made a mistake, Claudia would take the needles from me and fix it, saying things like ‘Yes, this stitch is twisted – look, Vi, at what she’s done – and you’ve dropped this one,’ and then she’d give it back to me and I’d tell myself not to
I also wasn’t sure I would be able to finish my novel under any circumstances, let alone somewhere strange like Greece. It had originally been due for submission in 1999, and every year since then I’d had to email my agent and ask for another extension. The editor who had commissioned the novel had left the publishing house in 2002, and her successor had left in 2004. The publishing house had been bought by another publishing house and had become an imprint. Then the second publishing house was bought by a huge media conglomerate and the imprint changed its name. Every so often I got an email from a new editor asking how the book was coming on, but I hadn’t heard anything since about 2006. The contract had probably been left behind in someone’s filing cabinet and sent to the dump. I’d almost certainly lost my copy. Even my original agent had long gone – down to Cornwall to work as a schoolteacher – so I didn’t have anyone to ask about it.
I sent the email cancelling my trip to Greece about two weeks before I was due to go. I thought this act would make me stop lying awake wheezing for hours every night after Christopherhad gone to sleep, but it made it worse. I spent the whole of October Googling the weather in Greece while yawning and almost falling asleep in the library. Since then I’d written about 2,000 words of my novel and deleted about 20,000, which was a net gain of –18,000 words. Was it possible to submit a novel with a negative number of words? I’d changed the title a few more times too, and it was currently called The Death of the Author . It was all very frustrating. I had no problem writing formulaic genre books totalling about half a million words to date, and I never deleted things from them or changed their titles. Maybe I was just a formulaic genre writer, and that was why.
‘How’s it going between you and Christopher now?’ Vi asked. ‘Really.’
‘Oh, it’s the same.’ I sighed. ‘I know I’ve got to pull myself together. I guess I can learn something from the Greece experience. Next time I get that sort of chance I will take it, I suppose, perhaps. But I guess that’s got nothing to do with Christopher.’
‘Just don’t knit socks for him.’
‘No.’
‘And I’ll make you up a flower remedy. You look exhausted.’
‘Thanks.’
The next day Vi went to the village and bought herself some black alpaca and started making a ribbed scarf. It turned out that Claudia had a half-knitted Regency dress tucked away in one of her bags, so she got that out and worked on it beside us. It was like being in a club. My knitting felt real in my hands, and all I had to do was knit stitch after stitch and the fabric got longer. It was much easier than writing my novel. At first I’d stop knitting after every row and look at how long my scarfwas, and calculate how long it might be in half an hour, or the following day, but after a while I stopped doing that. It was easier if I kept the yarn wrapped around my fingers in the way Vi had shown me, and each time I finished a row to just turn the needles and begin again on the next one. Whenever I made a mistake, Claudia would take the needles from me and fix it, saying things like ‘Yes, this stitch is twisted – look, Vi, at what she’s done – and you’ve dropped this one,’ and then she’d give it back to me and I’d tell myself not to
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