Beautiful World, Where Are You Read online

  Who said I want you to leave? he asked.

  A new group of people entered the room and it became noisier. No one specifically came over to speak to either Alice or Felix, and they both stood there next to the fridge in silence. Whether this experience was especially painful for either of them their features did not suggest, but after a few seconds Felix stretched his arms and said: I don’t like smoking inside. Will you come out for one? You can get to meet our dog. Alice nodded, said nothing, and followed him out the patio door into the back garden, carrying her glass of wine.

  Felix slid the door shut behind them and wandered down the grass toward a small garden shed with a makeshift tarpaulin roof. A springer spaniel immediately bounded up to meet him from the bottom of the garden, sneezed with excitement, placed its front paws on Felix’s legs and then let out a single yelp. This is Sabrina, he said. She’s not really ours, the last people who lived here just left her behind. I’m mostly the one who feeds her now, so she’s a big fan of mine. Alice said that was evident. We don’t usually keep her outside, he said. Only when we have people around. She’ll be back in tonight when everyone goes home. Alice asked if she slept in his bed and Felix laughed. She tries, he said. But she knows she’s not allowed. He ruffled the dog’s ears and said affectionately: Fool. Turning back to Alice, he added: She’s a complete idiot, by the way. Really stupid. Do you smoke? Alice was shivering and goosebumps were raised on the part of her wrist that extended out from her sleeve, but she accepted a cigarette and stood there smoking while Felix lit one himself. He took a drag, exhaled into the clean night air and looked back up at the house. Inside, it was bright and his friends were talking and gesturing. Around the warm yellow oblong of the patio doors was the darkness of the house, the grass, the clear black void of the sky.

  Dani’s a nice girl, he said.

  Yes, said Alice. She seems that way.

  Yeah. We used to go out together.

  Oh? For a long time, or?

  He shrugged and said: About a year. I don’t know—more than a year, actually. Anyway, it was ages ago, we’re good friends now.

  Do you still like her?

  He gazed back into the house as if catching a glimpse of Danielle might help him to resolve this question in his own mind. She’s with someone else anyway, he said.

  A friend of yours?

  I know him, yeah. He’s not here tonight, you might meet him again.

  He turned away from the house and flicked some ash off his cigarette, causing a few lit sparks to descend slowly through the dark air. The dog bounded away past the shed, then ran around in a circle several times.

  In fairness, if she could hear me, she’d be telling you I was the one who fucked it up, Felix added.

  What did you do?

  Ah, I was cold with her, supposedly. According to herself, anyway. You can ask her if you want.

  Alice smiled and said: Would you like me to ask her?

  Jesus no, not for me. I already heard enough of it at the time. I’m not still crying over it, don’t worry.

  Did you cry over it then?

  Well, not literally, he said. Is that what you mean? I didn’t actually cry, but like, I was pissed off, yeah.

  Do you ever actually cry?

  He gave a short laugh and said: No. Do you?

  Oh, constantly.

  Yeah? he said. What do you be crying about?

  Anything, really. I suppose I’m very unhappy.

  He looked at her. Seriously? he said. Why?

  Nothing specific. It’s just how I feel. I find my life difficult.

  After a pause he looked back at his cigarette and said: I don’t think I have the whole story on why you moved here.

  It’s not a very good story, she said. I had a nervous breakdown. I was in hospital for a few weeks, and then I moved here when I got out. But it’s not mysterious—I mean, there was no reason I had a breakdown, I just did. And it’s not a secret, everyone knows.

  Felix appeared to mull over this new information. Is it on your Wikipedia page? he asked.

  No, I mean everyone in my life knows. Not everyone in the world.

  And what did you have a breakdown about?

  Nothing.

  Okay, but what do you mean you had a breakdown? Like, what happened?

  She exhaled a stream of smoke through the side of her mouth. I felt very out of control, she said. I was just extremely angry and upset all the time. I wasn’t in control of myself, I couldn’t live normally. I can’t explain it any more than that.

  Fair enough.

  They lapsed into silence. Alice drained the last of her wine from the glass, crushed her cigarette underfoot and folded her arms against her chest. Felix looked distracted and continued smoking slowly, as if he had forgotten she was there. He cleared his throat then and said: I felt a bit like that after my mam died. Last year. I just started thinking, what’s the fucking point of life, you know? It’s not like there’s anything at the end of it. Not that I really wanted to be dead or anything, but I couldn’t be fucked being alive most the time either. I don’t know if you would call it a breakdown. I just had a few months where I was seriously not bothered about it—getting up and going to work and all that. I actually lost the job I had at the time, that’s why I’m at the warehouse now. Yeah. So I kind of get what you’re saying about the breakdown. Obviously the experiences would be different in my case, but I see where you’re coming from, yeah.

  Alice said again that she was sorry for his loss and he accepted her condolences.

  I’m going to Rome next week, she said. Because the Italian translation of my book is coming out. I wonder if you’d like to come with me.

  He showed no surprise at the invitation. He put out his cigarette by rubbing the lit end on the wall of the shed in several repeated strokes. The dog let out one more yelp, down at the end of the garden.

  I don’t have any money, Felix said.

  Well, I can pay for everything. I’m rich and famous, remember?

  This drew a little smile. You are weird, he said. I don’t take that back. How long are you going for?

  I’m getting there on Wednesday and then coming home again Monday morning. But we can stay longer if you prefer.

  Now he laughed. Fucking hell, he said.

  Have you ever been to Rome?

  No.

  Then I think you should come, she said. I think you’d like it.

  How do you know what I would like?

  They looked at one another. It was too dark for either of them to glean much information from the other’s face, and yet they kept looking, and did not break off, as if the act of looking was more important than what they could see.

  I don’t, she said. I just think so.

  Finally he turned away from her. Alright, he said. I’ll come.

  6.

  Every day I wonder why my life has turned out this way. I can’t believe I have to tolerate these things—having articles written about me, and seeing my photograph on the internet, and reading comments about myself. When I put it like that, I think: that’s it? And so what? But the fact is, although it’s nothing, it makes me miserable, and I don’t want to live this kind of life. When I submitted the first book, I just wanted to make enough money to finish the next one. I never advertised myself as a psychologically robust person, capable of withstanding extensive public inquiries into my personality and upbringing. People who intentionally become famous—I mean people who, after a little taste of fame, want more and more of it—are, and I honestly believe this, deeply psychologically ill. The fact that we are exposed to these people everywhere in our culture, as if they are not only normal but attractive and enviable, indicates the extent of our disfiguring social disease. There is something wrong with them, and when we look at them and learn from them, something goes wrong with us.

  What is the relationship of the famous author to their famous books anyway? If I had bad manners and was personally unpleasant and spoke with an irritating accent, which in m
y opinion is probably the case, would it have anything to do with my novels? Of course not. The work would be the same, no different. And what do the books gain by being attached to me, my face, my mannerisms, in all their demoralising specificity? Nothing. So why, why, is it done this way? Whose interests does it serve? It makes me miserable, keeps me away from the one thing in my life that has any meaning, contributes nothing to the public interest, satisfies only the basest and most prurient curiosities on the part of readers, and serves to arrange literary discourse entirely around the domineering figure of ‘the author’, whose lifestyle and idiosyncrasies must be picked over in lurid detail for no reason. I keep encountering this person, who is myself, and I hate her with all my energy. I hate her ways of expressing herself, I hate her appearance, and I hate her opinions about everything. And yet when other people read about her, they believe that she is me. Confronting this fact makes me feel I am already dead.

  Of course I can’t complain, because everyone is always telling me to ‘enjoy it’. What would they know? They haven’t been here, I’ve done it all alone. Okay, it’s been a small experience in its own way, and it will all blow over in a few months or years and no one will even remember me, thank God. But still I’ve had to do it, I’ve had to get through it on my own with no one to teach me how, and it has made me loathe myself to an almost unendurable degree. Whatever I can do, whatever insignificant talent I might have, people just expect me to sell it—I mean literally, sell it for money, until I have a lot of money and no talent left. And then that’s it, I’m finished, and the next flashy twenty-five-year-old with an impending psychological collapse comes along. If I have met anyone genuine along the way, then they’ve been so well disguised in the teeming crowd of bloodthirsty egomaniacs that I haven’t recognised them. The only genuine people I think I really know are you and Simon, and by now you can only look at me with pity—not with love or friendship but just pity, like I’m something half-dead lying on the roadside and the kindest thing would be to put me out of my misery.

  After your email about the Late Bronze Age collapse, I became very intrigued by the idea that writing systems could be ‘lost’. In fact I wasn’t really sure what that even meant, so I had to look it up, and I ended up reading a lot about something called Linear B. Do you know all about this already? Basically, around the year 1900, a team of British excavators in Crete found a cache of ancient clay tablets in a terracotta bathtub. The tablets were inscribed with a syllabic script of unknown language and appeared to date from around 1400 BCE. Throughout the early part of the twentieth century, classical scholars and linguists tried to decipher the markings, known as Linear B, with no success. Although the script was organised like writing, no one could work out what language it transcribed. Most academics hypothesised it was a lost language of the Minoan culture on Crete, with no remaining descendants in the modern world. In 1936, at the age of eighty-five, the archaeologist Arthur Evans gave a lecture in London about the tablets, and in attendance at the lecture was a fourteen-year-old schoolboy named Michael Ventris. Before the Second World War broke out, a new cache of tablets was found and photographed—this time on the Greek mainland. Still, no attempts to translate the script or identify its language were successful. Michael Ventris had grown up in the meantime and trained as an architect, and during the war he was conscripted to serve in the RAF. He hadn’t received any formal qualifications in linguistics or classical languages, but he’d never forgotten Arthur Evans’s lecture that day about Linear B. After the war, Ventris returned to England and started to compare the photographs of the newly discovered tablets from the Greek mainland with the inscriptions on the old Cretan tablets. He noticed that certain symbols on the tablets from Crete were not replicated on any of the samples from Pylos. He guessed that those particular symbols might represent place names on the island. Working from there, he figured out how to decipher the script—revealing that Linear B was in fact an early written form of ancient Greek. Ventris’s work not only demonstrated that Greek was the language of the Mycenaean culture, but also provided evidence of written Greek which predated the earliest-known examples by hundreds of years. After the discovery, Ventris and the classical scholar and linguist John Chadwick wrote a book together on the translation of the script, entitled ‘Documents in Mycenaean Greek’. Weeks before the publication of the book in 1956, Ventris crashed his car into a parked truck and died. He was thirty-four.

  I’ve condensed the story here into a suitably dramatic form. There were plenty of other classicists involved, including an American professor named Alice Kober, who made significant contributions to the interpretation of Linear B and died of cancer at the age of forty-three. The Wikipedia entries on Ventris, Linear B, Arthur Evans, Alice Kober, John Chadwick and Mycenaean Greece are somewhat disorganised, and some even offer variant versions of the same event. Was Evans eighty-four or eighty-five years old when Ventris attended his lecture? And did Ventris really find out about Linear B for the first time that day, or had he heard of it already? His death is described only in the briefest and most mysterious way—Wikipedia says he died ‘instantly’ following ‘a late-night collision with a parked truck’ and that the coroner gave a verdict of accidental death. I have been thinking lately about the ancient world coming back to us, emerging through strange ruptures in time, through the colossal speed and waste and godlessness of the twentieth century, through the hands and eyes of Alice Kober, a chain-smoker dead at forty-three, and Michael Ventris, dead in a car crash at the age of thirty-four.

  Anyway, all this means that during the Bronze Age, a sophisticated syllabic script was developed to represent the Greek language in writing, and then during the collapse you told me about, all that knowledge was completely destroyed. Later writing systems devised to represent Greek bear no relation to Linear B. The people who developed and used them had no idea that Linear B had ever even existed. The unbearable thing is that when first inscribed, those markings meant something, to the people who wrote and read them, and then for thousands of years they meant nothing, nothing, nothing—because the link was broken, history had stopped. And then the twentieth century shook the watch and made history happen again. But can’t we do that too, in another way?

  I’m sorry that you felt so terrible after running into Aidan the other day. These feelings are no doubt completely normal. But as your best friend, who loves you very much and wishes the best for you in every part of your life, would it be aggravating of me to point out that you weren’t really happy together? I know that he was the one who decided to end things, and I know that must be painful and frustrating. I’m not trying to talk you out of feeling bad. All I’m saying is, I think you know in your heart that it wasn’t a very good relationship. You talked to me several times about wanting to break up and not knowing how. I’m only saying this because I don’t want you to start retroactively believing that Aidan was your soulmate or that you could never be happy without him. You got into a long relationship in your twenties that didn’t work out. That doesn’t mean God has marked you out for a life of failure and misery. I was in a long relationship in my twenties and that didn’t work out, remember? And Simon and Natalie were together for nearly five years before they broke up. Do you think he’s a failure, or I am? Hm. Well, now that I think of it, maybe all three of us are. But if so, I’d rather be a failure than a success.

  No, I never really think about my biological clock. I feel like my fertility will probably continue to haunt me for another decade or so anyway—my mother was forty-two when she had Keith. But I don’t particularly want to have children. I didn’t know you did either. Even in this world? Finding someone to get you pregnant will not be a problem if so. Like Simon says, you have a fertile look about you. Men love that. Finally: are you still planning to come and see me? I’m forewarning you that I’ll be in Rome next week but likely home again the week after. I have made a friend here whose name is (genuinely) Felix. And if you can believe that, you will also have to believe that he’s
coming with me to Rome. No, I cannot explain why, so don’t ask me. It just occurred to me, wouldn’t it be fun to invite him? And it seems to have occurred to him that it would be fun to say yes. I’m sure he thinks I’m a total eccentric, but he also knows he’s on to a good thing because I’m paying for his flights. I want you to meet him! Yet another reason for you to come and visit when I’m home. Will you, please? All my love, always.

  7.

  The same Thursday evening, Eileen attended a poetry reading hosted by the magazine where she worked. The venue was an arts centre in the north city centre. Before the event, Eileen sat behind a little table selling copies of the most recent issue of the magazine, while people milled around in front of her, holding glasses of wine and avoiding eye contact. Occasionally, someone asked her where the bathrooms were, and she gave the directions in the same tone of voice with the same hand gestures each time. Just before the reading began, an elderly man leaned over the table to tell her she had the ‘eyes of a poet’. Eileen smiled self-effacingly and, perhaps pretending she had not heard him, said she thought the event was about to start inside. Once the reading did begin, she locked her cash box, took a glass of wine from the table at the back and entered the main hall. Twenty or twenty-five people were seated inside, leaving the first two rows entirely empty. The magazine editor was standing at the lectern introducing the first reader. A woman about Eileen’s age, who worked at the venue and whose name was Paula, moved in from the aisle to allow Eileen to sit beside her. Sell many copies? she whispered. Two, said Eileen. I thought we might snag a third when I saw a little old man approaching, but it turned out he just wanted to compliment my eyes. Paula sniggered. Weekday evening well spent, she said. At least now I know I have nice eyes, said Eileen.