The Universe versus Alex Woods

by Extence, Gavin

  4) Having unacceptable friends or relatives. Associating with people who commit the crimes listed above and below is also a crime – even if you live in their house and have little choice in the matter. Having a parent who won’t let you do all of the things you should be allowed to do – the things everybody else is apparently doing – is also unacceptable.

  5) Being gay. This has surprisingly little to do with what you do with your private parts (or, more accurately, what you’d like to do with your private parts). Being gay is more a state of mind, or sometimes, less often, a state of body. You could almost include it as a sub-crime in 2) and 3), but really, it goes beyond both of these categories. And because of the number of times it crops up as a specific accusation, it definitely deserves its own special category. But the best way to explain what ‘being gay’ means is to tell you some of the things that are gay.

  If you’re a boy, any display of sensitivity is gay. Compassion is gay. Crying is supergay. Reading is usually gay. Certain songs and types of music are gay. ‘Enola Gay’ would certainly be thought gay. Love songs are gay. Love itself is incredibly gay, as are any other heartfelt emotions. Singing is gay, but chanting is not gay. Wanking contests are not gay. Neither is all-male cuddling during specially designated periods in football matches, or communal bathing thereafter. (I didn’t invent the rules of gay – I’m just telling you what they are.)

  Girls can be gay too, but it’s much harder for them. And girls don’t tend to call each other gay as much as boys do. When a girl is gay, she’s called a dyke. Reasons for being a dyke include having thick limbs, bad hair or flat shoes.

  Usually you have to commit quite a few of these crimes (or one very serious sub-crime) to earn yourself a permanent residence in Pariah Town. But as you’ve probably worked out, I committed crimes in every category.

  1) I was poor – despite my mother owning a successful business, a house, a flat and a car. Compared to many single parents, my mother was a tycoon; but as I’ve explained, poorness and poverty aren’t the same in secondary school. I could have taken in photocopies of my mother’s bank statements and this wouldn’t have swayed a single mind. The evidence against me was too damning. I didn’t have the right stuff, therefore I was poor.

  2) and 3) My epilepsy meant that I was both physically and mentally different in a very obvious way – I was sick in the body and in the mind. I was also quite short and a late developer, but this was just about compensated for by my being kept back a year – although, in most ways, being kept back a year was definitely not an advantage. This circumstance presented further evidence that I was probably retarded – even though I knew a lot of strange things (not the right things) and was also a swot. I may well have been unique in that I was the only person who seemed simultaneously too clever and too stupid.

  4) You know about my mother already.

  5) Most of my traits and all the things I liked were super-supergay.

  Needless to say, the early years of secondary school were not a happy time for me.

  My secondary school was called the Asquith Academy. My mother chose it for me because it had good exam results and excellent resources and promoted ‘timeless’ values. (This was how the Asquith Academy described itself in its brochure and on its website: ‘The modern school with timeless values.’) It was the kind of school she would have hated if she’d been forced to go there. But as I’ve already mentioned, there were different rules concerning what was right for her and what was right for me. The most important thing for her was that she be free to express herself and free to follow her own fantastic beliefs wherever they happened to lead her, disregarding any logical holes along the way. The most important thing for me was that I got excellent exam results so that I’d have the opportunity to do whatever I decided to do later on. This was especially important now that I had epilepsy. My mother was determined that I should not get left behind, and she was adamant that no school in the county could refuse me. It didn’t matter how limited spaces were: it would have been discrimination had they turned me away.

  The Asquith Academy was named after Robert Asquith, the man who paid to have it built and continued to pay for a significant proportion of its running costs. Robert Asquith, as we all learned in the first year, was a self-made multimillionaire, which is one of the best things you can possibly be. His company started out making roller-balls for mice (computers, not rodents), and, for a long time, these were the best roller-balls on the planet. Then when a new company started making better roller-balls, Robert Asquith used some of his millions to acquire and gut his younger rival. This was called the free market. Then he moved his operations to China, where most of the people were peasants and happy to work for much lower wages than people in the UK. This was called globalization. Eventually, because of lasers, many mice no longer needed roller-balls, so the factories in China had to close, and I guess all the Chinese peasants lost their poorly paid jobs, just like all the English workers had lost their jobs when operations moved to China. But by this time, Robert Asquith had his millions invested in software and electronics and e-solution consultancies and so on.

  This meant that although Robert Asquith’s story incorporated many trials and tribulations, it was ultimately uplifting. The moral was work hard and never give up.

  The Asquith Academy was modelled on some ancient grammar school near Shepton Mallet that Robert Asquith had attended from the ages of eleven to eighteen and which had been blown into a million pieces in the 1980s by a catastrophic explosion in the boiler room. Luckily, the explosion had happened very early in the morning, so no one was killed but the caretaker.

  There was little chance of the Asquith Academy exploding, as it had state-of-the-art under-floor central heating. It also had a Latin motto, which appeared in a little banner on all its signs and letterheads. This was the same motto that had belonged to Robert Asquith’s exploded grammar school: Ex Veritas Vires.

  In English, this means: ‘Welcome to the Monkey House.’

  I’m joking. That’s what the school motto should have been.

  Ex Veritas Vires really means: ‘From Truth, Strength!’

  These were noble sentiments, but I’m not sure how well they applied to our school’s overall ethos.

  At the Asquith Academy, learning was ‘outcome-orientated’. This meant that you learned how to do well in exams, and this was why the exam results were always so good. It all made perfect sense. If it wasn’t likely to come up in an exam, it wasn’t worth knowing – that was the Asquith policy. If we needed any additional inspiration, that’s what the legend of our super-rich founding father was all about. Education didn’t have to be its own reward. Education brought rewards in later life. If we worked hard, passed our exams and never gave up, one day we too could be as rich as Robert Asquith.

  ‘Outcome-orientated’ learning also meant that lessons were often very didactic, which meant that you had to learn lots of facts and you had to learn what you should think about those facts. Of course, I didn’t mind learning facts – I liked learning facts – but it would have been nice to have had a context too. For example, in physics, they taught us all about gravity and that f = ma and about Newton’s Laws of Motion – which we had to learn word for word – but they taught us nothing about Newton himself. When I looked him up on the internet, I discovered that Newton was a pretty weird and interesting guy. It turned out that he had come up with gravity and his Laws of Motion while he had nothing else to do because he was locked away at home, hiding from the plague – brainbound. That was pretty interesting. It also turned out that he invented a new type of telescope and spent a lot of his spare time trying to turn base metal into gold. These things were pretty interesting too. And then I found out that he had wild, staring eyes, crazy silver hair, and an arch-enemy called Robert Hooke, who may have been a hunchback. All this was really interesting. It turned out that Science had some great stories and characters, but you never got to hear about them in science lessons. I’m not saying that w
e should have spent hours and hours learning Newton’s biography, but five minutes would have been nice. Knowing a bit about Newton makes f = ma all the more inspiring. But unfortunately, knowing about Newton was not in the exams – it was irrelevant.

  As you may have guessed, the official ethos of the Asquith Academy was kind of stuffy. All the male teachers had to be addressed as ‘Sir’, and all the female teachers as ‘Miss’, and whenever an adult walked into the room, everyone had to stand up as a sign of respect. And there was a correct way of doing everything, and everything had to be done correctly. There was a correct way to stand and a correct way to sit and a correct way to shake hands and a correct way to knot your tie and a correct way to speak. Correct speaking was particularly important.

  Mr Treadstone, my years seven-through-eleven English teacher, who was also the deputy head, was the main policeman in charge of ensuring that the English language was never violated – not in writing and not in casual conversation. Mr Treadstone wanted you to pronounce everything correctly, and preferably with no accent – no ‘West Country twang’. He also insisted that you use the full and correct term rather than second-class derivations: ‘hello’ instead of ‘hi’; ‘yes’ instead of ‘yeah’, ‘yep’, ‘yup’ or ‘(y)uh huh’. In my case, Mr Treadstone quickly identified a specific problem area, which was my tendency to use vague and redundant colloquialisms, especially when I was trying to explain something. I said ‘like’ too much, and seldom in the appropriate context. I said ‘pretty’ when I meant ‘rather’. I said ‘y’know’ as a kind of pointless, mid-sentence percussion. (He didn’t know – that was why I was telling him.) And worst of all was my apparent inability to utter a three-sentence paragraph without using ‘kind of’ as a modifier. This phrase had no place in the English language. If I needed a modifier, he referred me back to rather – or slightly, or quite, or largely, or mostly. Any one of these would be preferable to my unfortunate verbal tic.

  Although I don’t use it nearly so much any more, I’ve decided, five years down the line, that Mr Treadstone’s verdict on ‘kind of’ was kind of unjust. Obviously, this phrase can be redundant or reductive, or just plain stupid in some sentences, but not in all sentences. I wouldn’t, for example, use a sentence like ‘Antarctica is kind of cold’, or ‘Hitler was kind of evil’. But sometimes things aren’t black and white. And sometimes ‘kind of’ expresses this better than any other phrase. For example, when I tell you that my mother was kind of peculiar, I can think of no better way of putting this.

  However, for Mr Treadstone, ‘kind of’ – the undesirability of the phrase itself – was simply the most annoying part of a broader problem. Ideally, he said, I should try to address my reliance on modifiers at a more fundamental level. Mr Treadstone believed that there was always an apposite word. The English language, after all, was the richest in the world. If you couldn’t find the apposite word, if you found your language slipping into the mire of vagueness and obscurity, this meant that you needed to work on your vocabulary. Because the apposite word certainly existed – and it was very eager to make your acquaintance.

  In the early years at Asquith, I was constantly working on improving my vocabulary, and since I read so much – especially in the way of obscure medical and scientific tracts – I was often encountering words that no one else knew. But I still found that when I spoke – when I tried to explain things in real time – I struggled to find the apposite word. Later, whenever I was struggling to find the apposite word or phrase, I developed the habit of trying to imagine what Mr Peterson might say in that situation. Mr Peterson had a way of getting right to the point. He would have called this ‘cutting through the crap’.

  As for Mr Treadstone, this is what I think Mr Peterson would have said about him: Mr Treadstone had a Serious Bug up his Ass.

  The Asquith Academy was really a school full of weird contradictions. It was an ultramodern building – only five or six years old when I started there – but it had an ancient Latin motto. It had quadrangles built out of steel and glass. In lessons, you learned how to pass exams, and outside of lessons, you learned about correct language, behaviour and posture. The Asquith Academy was constantly trying to elevate its pupils in terms of their morals and values, but in many cases, it was fighting an unwinnable war. As I’ve already implied, many of the pupils who went to Asquith weren’t exactly enlightened. Some of them were barely evolved. They were just extremely two-faced. They learned how to behave correctly in supervised society, and behaved like gorillas everywhere else.

  In my year, most of the gorillas had telling nicknames. There was Jamie Ascot, whom everybody – friends and enemies alike – called ‘Jamie Asbo’, because of what he’d been caught doing in his next-door neighbour’s pond. Then there was Ryan Goodwin, known to all as ‘Studwin’ or ‘Studdo’ – not because of his success with the ladies, or the quality of his genome (which was questionable), but after a late sliding tackle that had hospitalized Peter Dove. And then there was Declan Mackenzie, whom most people called ‘Decker’. This was a simple abbreviation. The fact that he liked to beat people up was a happy coincidence. Asbo, Studwin and Decker formed a formidable bullying alliance. There were also various other bullies within the school, but I mention these three in particular because they all happened to live near me. We caught the same school bus, they were my most frequent tormentors, and they play a pivotal role in my story.

  Decker Mackenzie was the leader. It wasn’t that he was the strongest – Studwin, whose shoulders were half as wide again as anybody else’s, could have annihilated him in a fight. And he wasn’t exactly the wittiest guy on the planet – Jamie Asbo had a much sharper, crueller wit. Decker Mackenzie was simply the loudest and most aggressive of the three. I’m not sure how things work in the wild, but in the playground hierarchy, Decker Mackenzie was alpha male through sheer force of will – through his unshakeable belief in his own right to dominate. Studwin and Asbo were his underlings, his loyal henchmen.

  At the other end of the social ladder, the bullied also tended to acquire telling nicknames (most of them dreamed up by Jamie Asbo): Ian Stainpants (formerly Ian Stainfield), Gyppo Johnson, Brian Bin-Bag Beresford (whose mother insisted on repairing his clothes rather than buying new ones), Snotty George Friedman and so on and so forth. As for me, I found myself at the receiving end of many different nicknames. For a while, I was ‘Ally Twatter’ (a feeble reworking of Harry Potter, based on the fact that I had a visible scar, a witch for a mother, was prone to seizures and, presumably, was a twat). Later, I was Weirdo Woods, and then Wanker Woods – with a handful of obvious variants (Wankshaft, Wankstain, Wankface). But fortunately none of these nicknames gained popularity. Most of the time I was just Woods, and wished for nothing more than to be as plain as my surname – widespread, forgettable, ordinary.

  CREOSOTE

  There are two ideas I want you to think about at this point.

  1) In life, there are no true beginnings or endings.

  Events flow into each other, and the more you try to isolate them in a container, the more they spill over the sides, like canal-water breaching its artificial banks. A related point is that the things we label ‘beginnings’ and ‘endings’ are often, in reality, indistinguishable. They are one and the same thing. This is one of the things the Death card symbolizes in tarot – an end that is also a new beginning.

  It’s only in stories that we find clearly marked beginnings and endings, and these have been selected from a very deep well of possibilities. I could have started my story by telling you about my conception, or my mother’s adolescence, or the formation of the solar system – the birth of the Sun and the planets and the Asteroid Belt four and a half billion years ago – and any one of these would have been a reasonable place to begin, as was the place I finally settled on.

  2) The universe is at once very orderly and very disorderly.

  There is large-scale mechanical determinism – Newton’s Laws of Motion, gravity, snooker balls, ballistics, t
he orbits of heavenly bodies. There is Chaos Theory, which is still a form of determinism, just impossibly complex – systems that are very difficult to understand or predict because of their extreme sensitivity to small variations and chance occurrences (the Butterfly Effect). Then there is quantum randomness at the sub-atomic scale – uncertainty, unknowability, games of chance, probability in place of classical predictability. And there might also be free will to throw into the mix.

  It’s possible to find order in chaos, and it’s equally possible to find chaos underlying apparent order. Order and chaos are slippery concepts. They’re like a set of twins who like to swap clothing from time to time. Order and chaos frequently intermingle and overlap, the same as beginnings and endings. Things are often more complicated, or more simple, than they seem. Often it depends on your angle.

  I think that telling a story is a way of trying to make life’s complexity more comprehensible. It’s a way of trying to separate order from chaos, patterns from pandemonium. Other ways include tarot and science.

  The moment I’m about to describe is the culmination of one set of chaotic circumstances and the starting point for another. It’s a moment that makes me think about how life can seem highly ordered and highly chaotic all at the same time. It’s an ending and a new beginning.

  It was 14 April 2007, a Saturday. It was three days after the day Kurt Vonnegut died, but I didn’t know that at the time. I found out later on. I hadn’t heard of Kurt Vonnegut at that point.

  I’d been to the village shop to collect a couple of essential items, and was now taking the scenic route home – round the back of the churchyard, past the duck pond, over the stile, on to the bridle path, past the allotments and houses, off the bridle path at Horton Lane, through the kissing gate, up to the junction and then a short road-walk home. I was carrying my mother’s hessian bag, on which was printed in green ink the phrase Reduce, reuse, recycle. This was not an acceptable brand of bag to be associated with, and I knew this very well; but since I was only going to the village shop and back, and since Lower Godley wasn’t exactly Milan, I thought I’d probably be okay. As it turned out, I was wrong.