Free Our Tragic Universe by Scarlett Thomas Page A

silvery-green pine trees, like little cosmoses sprouting in the kind of multiverse my father sometimes talked about. On the ground I would sometimes find bright red and white toadstools that had come up suddenly, like the Yorkshire puddings my mother made on a Sunday. There were different sorts of mushrooms everywhere: some were like huge, spongy pancakes lying at the base of tree-trunks; others were tiny, with stalks like spaghetti. Late in the day, the cobwebs would become almost translucent in the low sun, and I would only notice them at all because of the spiders that hung in the middle of them like nuclei. One time I saw a spider catch a wasp. I hated wasps, and I was quite pleased when this one flew drowsily away from me and got stuck in the web. In an instant, the fat spider came and started wrapping up the wasp in its white silk. The wasp struggled at first, and I felt sorry for it. But then it stopped moving. The spider worked away, turning it around, cocooning it, its thin, jaggedlegs moving this way and that, each one as precise as a needle on a sewing machine. Then it picked up the wasp in its front legs and took it up to the centre of the web the way a human would carry a newborn baby. I watched for ages, but nothing else happened, and when I came back the next day the whole web had gone. Another day I found some string in the damp, creaky holiday house and made a shoulder-strap for my flask. In the forest I made myself a necklace out of wild flowers by piercing each stalk with my thumb-nail and threading the next flower through it, just like a daisy-chain. I ate blackberries from bushes until my hands were dyed purple with the juice. I had stopped brushing my hair. I’d gone wild, and no one seemed to notice.
    One bright, chilly afternoon I followed a stream and found a thatched stone cottage that seemed as if it had grown out of the forest. It was covered in a dense, deep-red ivy, with holes for only the windows and the door. It looked like something you might try to draw at school because you’d seen it in a picture book. There was a gate that opened easily, and I walked into a garden and past a small well. Around the side of the cottage there was a wrought-iron gazebo, also covered in climbing plants and half shaded by big, old trees, and inside it there were two wooden rocking chairs and a wooden table on which stood six cups, into which a man was arranging flowers. I’d never seen a man arranging flowers before. In fact, no one I knew arranged flowers.
    ‘Aha! A young adventuress,’ he said. ‘Well, don’t just stand there gawping. Come and help.’
    I went and stood closer. He was small, with a big, brown beard the colour of tree bark. He looked as if he had grownout of the forest along with everything else. He was wearing electric-blue suede boots and faded red trousers. He had a blue suede waistcoat too. I liked that colour blue: it was the same as the hairband I was wearing.
    ‘Hold these,’ he said, giving me some flowers. ‘And if you’re lucky I’ll show you some magic and maybe even tell your fortune.’ He winked. After I’d held several bunches of white flowers while he cut their stalks, he asked me to go and gather some foliage. I didn’t know what that was, and I must have looked baffled, because he said, ‘Just green stuff. Go on – quickly – or the spell won’t work.’
    When I’d finished helping him I said, ‘Now will you show me some magic?’
    He laughed. ‘I just did.’
    ‘Oh,’ I said, disappointed. Nothing seemed to have changed.
    ‘All right,’ he said. ‘Watch this.’
    He took a matchbox out of his pocket and put it on the little wooden table. He sat down in one of the rocking chairs and looked at it; then it started to rise up in the air. I gasped and it fell down with a little clatter.
    ‘Is it really magic?’ I asked.
    ‘Yes,’ he said, smiling. ‘I suppose so.’
    ‘Will you teach me how to do it?’
    ‘We’ll see.’
    ‘And what about my