Our Tragic Universe Read Free

one of the old ladies might see Mark touching Libby’s knee. This weekend had been different, though, because Bob had gone to see his great-aunt and -uncle in Germany. She’d been with Mark since Friday.
    ‘So you came to mine last night? And … ?’
    I frowned. We both knew there was no way Libby would ever spend a whole evening at my house. Sometimes, but not so often recently, she’d drop by with a bottle of wine from the shop. Then we’d sit at the kitchen table, while Christopher simmered on the sofa a few feet away, watching American news or documentaries about dictators on our pirated Sky system and mumbling about the corruption of the world, and the rich, and greed. He did this on purpose because Libby had money and he didn’t like it. Mostly when I saw Libby it was at the pub, although Christopher often complained about me going out and leaving him on his own. B had been sniffing the ground, but now put her paws up on the side of Libby’s car and whimpered through the window. She wanted to get in. She loved going in cars. Libby patted her head, but didn’t look at her.
    ‘No … I must have lost my keys.’ She started brainstorming. ‘We, er, me and you went out last night and I lost my keys and had to stay at yours. I was drunk, and I didn’t worry about bothering Bob because he was in Germany and I thought I’d go out and look for my keys today, and in fact that’s what I was doing when he sent the messages, but I’d left my phone at yours and …’
    ‘But you’re driving your car. Do you have separate house keys? I thought they were all on the same keyring.’
    Libby looked down. ‘Maybe I found the keys … Holy shit. Oh, Christ. Oh, Meg, what am I going to do? Why would I have driven the car to your house anyway? It’s only a five-minute walk. I’m not sure I can fit this together.’ She frowned. ‘Come on. You’re the writer; you know how to plot things.’
    I half-laughed. ‘Yeah, right. You read. I’m sure you can plot things too.’
    ‘Yeah, but you do it for a living. And teach it.’
    ‘Yeah, but …’
    ‘What’s the formula here?’
    Formula , like the stuff you feed to babies. This was my speciality; she was right. After winning a short story competition in 1997 I’d been offered a contract to write a groundbreaking, literary, serious debut novel: the kind of thing that would win more prizes and be displayed in the windows of bookshops. But I’d actually filled most of the last eleven years writing genre fiction, because it was easy money and I always needed to pay rent and bills and buy food. I’d been given a £ 1,000 advance for my literary novel, and instead of using it to clear my debts I’d bought a laptop, a nice pen and some notebooks. Just as I’d begun to write the plan for it, Claudia from Orb Books rang and offered me two grand if I could knock out a thriller for teenagers in six weeks. The official author of this book, Zeb Ross, needed to publish four novels a year but didn’t in fact exist, and Claudia was recruiting new ghostwriters. It was a no-brainer: double my money and then write the real novel. But I was only a couple of chapters into the real novel when I realised I needed to write another Zeb Ross book,and then another one. A couple of years later I branched out and wrote four SF books in a series under my own name, all set in a place called Newtopia. I kept meaning to finish my ‘proper’ novel but it seemed as if this would never happen, even if I stuck around until the end of time. If Kelsey Newman was right and all possible humans were resurrected by the Omega Point at the end of the universe, then Zeb Ross would have to be one of them and then he could write his own books. But I’d probably still have rent to pay.
    I sighed. ‘The thing is, when you plot a book you can go back and change things that don’t work and make everything add up neatly. You can delete paragraphs, pages, whole manuscripts. I can’t go back in time and put you