The Universe versus Alex Woods

by Extence, Gavin

  ‘Nice bag, Woods!’

  It was Decker Mackenzie. He was sitting on the wall of the churchyard, which God had built approximately buttock-high, and drinking a can of Red Bull, which is an energy drink made from caffeine and taurine and lots and lots of sugar. He was flanked, as always, by Studwin and Asbo. Studwin had his Nike baseball cap pulled so low down his forehead that most of his face was invisible. He was holding a thick branch that had probably fallen from one of the oaks or sycamores, and was poking around in the dirt like some kind of Neanderthal who’d just discovered his opposable thumbs. Asbo was rolling a cigarette. Asbo was always rolling a cigarette. No single twelve-year-old could have smoked as many cigarettes as Asbo managed to roll. There weren’t enough unsupervised hours in the day. It’s possible that Asbo spent a lot of his private time unrolling cigarettes. I don’t know. I’d walked right into their territory without noticing them. The reason I didn’t notice them was that I’d been absorbed in the front cover of my magazine, which I now dropped into my mother’s unacceptable bag. This turned out to be quite a stupid action – it drew attention to the magazine, and yet more attention to the bag.

  ‘Whatcha got there, Woods?’

  I kept my eyes down and continued walking. This was the only sensible policy. A few moments and I’d be safely past them and on my way.

  ‘What’s in the bag, Woods?’ Decker snarled.

  ‘If you can call it a bag,’ Asbo added.

  ‘More like a crap sack,’ Decker elaborated. ‘What’s in it?’

  ‘It’s nothing,’ I said, quietly and rather unconvincingly.

  What was actually in the bag was this: the latest edition of the Sky at Night magazine, which, in the days before I had my subscription, I used to have ordered in to the village shop every month; a box of cat treats for Lucy – who was again eating for several; and half a bunch of grapes, which I’d been planning to feed to the ducklings, who were only a few weeks old. There was no item in this inventory that was worth broadcasting. Especially not the grapes. Feeding the ducklings, needless to say, was one of the gayest things imaginable.

  I tried to shuffle past but Studwin had raised his ogre arm to block my path.

  ‘Come on, Woods,’ jeered Jamie Asbo. ‘Don’t be shy.’

  ‘It’s just shopping,’ I mumbled.

  ‘Hmmm,’ Decker mused. ‘Just shopping. Sounds suspicious.’ He crushed the Red Bull can in his hand and then chucked it over his shoulder into the churchyard. It bounced off a gravestone before landing on the final resting place of Ernest Shuttleworth, dedicated husband and father, startling a blackbird in the process.

  ‘My God!’ Decker said, loudly and suddenly, as if struck by the thunderbolt of inspiration. ‘It’s not porn, is it, Woods?’

  ‘Gay porn,’ Asbo clarified.

  ‘Obviously gay porn,’ Decker agreed.

  ‘Tut tut tut,’ Studwin tutted. (And let me tell you, for Studwin this was pretty articulate stuff.)

  ‘It’s porn, isn’t it?’ Decker repeated.

  Clearly, there was no correct answer to this question. It was designed to be unanswerable. If I said ‘yes’, they’d call me a pervert and then empty my bag into the street. If I said ‘no’, they’d tell me that I had no dick and then empty my bag into the street. I should have stuck to my policy of saying nothing. Instead, I went for ill-fated option three: trying to battle idiocy with logic.

  ‘It can’t be porn,’ I pointed out, ‘because they don’t sell porn in the village shop. Gay or otherwise.’

  This provoked many hoots and howls of laughter.

  ‘Yeah, you’d fucking know, wouldn’t you, Woods?’ Declan Mackenzie asked. Studwin had started to rub his stick suggestively. I assume it was supposed to be suggestive. He may have been trying to figure out how to make fire.

  ‘I’m going home now,’ I said. And I stepped out into the road, far enough to be out of range of Studwin’s stick, and started walking quickly down the lane.

  Unfortunately, the bullied don’t get to decide when enough is enough – and any effort to usurp this decision will inevitably be met with reprisals. I was immediately aware that they had left the wall and were now following me, a few metres behind.

  ‘Don’t go home yet, Woods. It won’t be dark for hours. I’m sure your mummy won’t mind.’

  ‘His mummy’s probably out on her broomstick.’

  I gritted my teeth and picked up my pace. My mother’s broomstick was purely ornamental.

  ‘Woods, why don’t you like us? Why won’t you be our friend?’

  I probably don’t need to tell you that this was sarcasm, which Oscar Wilde called the lowest form of wit. But Oscar Wilde had clearly not heard of setting fire to your own farts, which was also a popular form of humour at my school.

  I stayed calm and continued to walk. I watched my breath rising and falling in my chest. Something hit me on the shoulder. I felt with my fingers. Mud. (At least, I hoped it was mud.) I stayed calm. I started counting to ten, visualizing each number in golden italics. One, two, three, four . . . Another projectile sailed past my right ear. Where the hell were all the people? The dog-walkers? The joggers? The postman? It was a mild, sunny day. Why were all the driveways empty? I was experiencing the helplessness of nightmares, and I had no idea what I was going to do. What could I do? (Leap the church wall, sprint across the graves, hammer on the closed oak door and scream, ‘SANCTUARY!’?)

  I picked up my pace as I rounded the corner. I could see the stile ahead, but still no people. I tried to calculate if I could outrun my pursuers. It seemed unlikely. Although things had improved, I was still, to a certain extent, battling the ‘puppy fat’ that had resulted from the year spent in my pyjamas. In contrast, my pursuers were all on the football team. But then, they were all smokers too. Hopefully Mr Banks, our biology teacher, hadn’t been lying to us and smoking really did diminish your lung capacity. It seemed plausible. Although that stuff about it stunting your growth was clearly a fabrication.

  Another piece of something hit me in the back to a chorus of cheers.

  It was at this point that calmness jumped ship. My mind skipped in a couple of frantic, useless circles; then my legs and spinal cord decided to stage a coup d’état. No time for the executive decision: we were running.

  Like many decisions that bypass the neocortex, this turned out to be a poor one. There’s a good chance that my tormentors would have grown bored soon enough – as long as I remained unresponsive. This is why hunted animals play dead. But as soon as I started to run, the predator’s instinct kicked in. I was running, they were chasing, and we were, all four of us, locked into a shared fate. Furthermore, the stakes had been raised. Now, when they caught me, they’d be obliged to take action. They couldn’t let me go. They couldn’t back-pedal and let me off with just another verbal battering. I would be captured, spat on, possibly stripped and then thrown into the nearest patch of stinging nettles. The humiliation was over and now the pain was about to begin.

  I ignored the turn-off to the duck pond (for now, the ducklings would have to fend for themselves; I’d be no use to the ducklings dead) and continued straight ahead, running full tilt. I had enough of a surprise head start to make it over the stile unimpeded – an obstacle that was a greater problem for my pursuers, who had to co-ordinate and proceed one at a time. But my advantage couldn’t last for long. Like all prey, I had the greater incentive in the chase, but the predators, I was beginning to suspect, had more stamina. And I was also encumbered by a bag of shopping. It wasn’t heavy, but it was still a hindrance. Lucy’s cat treats were bouncing around with the regular rattle of a military drum. And my heart was pounding too, and the blood was surging in my ears, and my breath was coming in thick, ragged pants. And still there was not a soul to be seen.

  A risky, time-consuming glance over my shoulder revealed that the gap had neither narrowed nor widened. They were still a good lorry-length behind me, but they showed no signs of slowing. This was just sport to them – no
different to football practice. There was no question in my mind that some part of me – my legs, my lungs – would give out long before they got tired enough to end the pursuit. I had no chance of outrunning them in the open. I veered off the bridle path, across a muddy, barren field and towards a distant hedgerow that marked, I hoped, the boundary back to civilization.

  The ground was uneven and difficult. My feet hurt, my legs hurt, my chest hurt, my head hurt. There was a drainage ditch ahead, a narrow channel of green-brown water separating me from my goal. I hardly slowed. I slid down the near bank, jumped, scrambled up the far bank and reached the hedge in a few shaky bounds. I looked round. All three of my pursuers had reached the opposite bank of the ditch, and I’d reached the point where I could no longer run. The hedge was my only option – unpromising as it now appeared. It was comprised of mature, prickly conifers, planted close together to form a darkly tangled wall – dense enough to make any sane, moderately sized creature think twice before attempting an incursion. But this moderately sized creature had left his sanity in the lane behind the churchyard. I held my mother’s bag to my chest and launched myself at the midpoint between two burly firs. I was swallowed in musty darkness. Something tore. Branches splintered and swiped my face. Needles pricked my hands. I closed my eyes, lowered my head and pushed forward like a charging bull. And then I was free. I fell forward into dazzling sunlight. Something broke underfoot – a small plant or shrub. I could hear shouting through the conifers, and then a hail of sticks and stones and mud started raining all around me.

  I quickly took in my surroundings – someone’s long, narrow garden. The house was completely obscured by trees and trellises. There was a shed to my left and a greenhouse to my right, and high fences marking the perimeter beyond. I heard a rustling behind me, but my legs were beaten. Now that I’d stopped, I couldn’t start running again. It was all I could do to hobble to the shed. The door wasn’t locked – my first and only lucky break. Inside, my eyes darted for something I could use. Old plant pots, a length of hose, some bamboo poles, a pair of gardening gloves, a rusty rake. Then, with the last of my pitiful quota of strength, I managed to drag a heavy bag of compost behind the closed door. Then I sat on the compost bag, my back against the door and my legs braced and my whole body locked as rigid as the atoms in a carbon nanotube.

  A second later, someone was trying the door. The pressure increased. A few dull thuds clattered through the wood. But it was clear that the door wasn’t going to budge. There was too much force shoring up its base.

  There was a lot of swearing and yelling from outside. Then I heard the sound of breaking glass, and more shouting. Then everything was quiet.

  I counted to a hundred.

  When I peered outside, there was no one to be seen. But from the amount of glass that glittered in the sunlight, it seemed as if half the greenhouse had been demolished. I’d later discover that only seven panes of glass had actually shattered. But at the time, I was in too much of a daze to take in details. Now that the chase was over and I was no longer focussed on the necessities of self-preservation, my mind had started to spin in a familiar, juddering dance. I knew that I had to calm myself again. I had to sit still and concentrate and wait for this to pass.

  I got back in the gloomy shed, my refuge from the destruction outside, and I sat on the floor against the far wall with my head in my hands. I was, by then, extremely disorientated. I tried to focus but the whole place smelled of marzipan and creosote, and this was preventing my mind from settling. It was too late to move, though. At this point, movement would make things worse. I had to sit motionless and work through my exercises. I could see chariots and unruly horses. I tried to breathe. I started listing prime numbers. I could see blackbirds circling. I felt extremely exhausted.

  I’ve no idea how much time passed, but when I came round from my dream, the atmosphere had changed. Something had awoken me. There was a current of air cutting through the creosote; the shed door had been pushed fully open, and in the doorway was a figure – a silhouette framed in sinking sunlight.

  It was a man. There was a man looming in the doorway, and he was pointing at me with a stick – a long, cylindrical stick. It gleamed dully in the darkness. My heart jumped into my mouth.

  The man was pointing a gun at me.

  PENANCE

  ‘Don’t shoot!’ I yelped, raising both my hands above my head. ‘I’m an epileptic!’ I added. I don’t know why I added this second part. It may have been some delirious attempt at explanation; it may have been an appeal for leniency.

  The single-cylinder gun barrel remained poised.

  I felt ice crystallizing in my bowel. My eyes were watering, blurring out the details so that I could only see the dim outlines of my impending doom. Then a bright orange circle suddenly flared against the background darkness. I expected a bang and a bullet, the powdery smell of fireworks. Instead there was a faint crackle and a smell like very strong parsley. I thought another fit was coming.

  ‘So,’ my executioner asked, ‘you wanna tell me what in the name of Jesus F. Christ you’re doing in my shed?’

  I wasn’t surprised to discover that he spoke with a slow American drawl. In the fever dream my mind was spinning – which owed as much to Hollywood as it did to blind panic – it seemed reasonable enough that I was to be murdered by a cowboy. And there certainly wasn’t time to clear up the mystery of Jesus’s middle initial.

  ‘Well?’ the voice prompted. ‘What’s the matter? Cat got your tongue?’

  ‘Resting!’ I squeaked. ‘I was just resting!’

  This provoked a short, sharp snort, like the warning bark of an angry dog. ‘Well, I guess trashin’ someone’s glasshouse must really take it out of you, huh?’

  I didn’t say anything. My brain is not to be relied on in a crisis.

  ‘So, you done restin’ now, kid? You ready to step outside so we can talk, or shall I come back later?’

  I weighed my options, and decided that I’d rather die on my feet in the sunlight than curled up in the dark. But then, when I tried to rise, my legs buckled beneath me. I gave up and buried my head in my arms.

  ‘If you’re going to kill me,’ I pleaded, ‘I’d prefer it if you made it quick.’

  ‘What the hell’re you talkin’ about, kid?’ The cowboy took another drag on his parsley cigarette. ‘What’s the story here? You funny in the head or something?’

  I nodded vigorously.

  ‘Come on – on your feet!’

  The cowboy stepped back into the sunlight to clear the doorway for my exit, and at the same moment, he lowered his gun – which resolved itself into what it had been all along. Three feet of lightweight aluminium. Grey plastic handle. A crutch.

  The ice melted. Sensation rushed back to my limbs, and with a breath that brought relief to every cell of my body, I rose and stumbled out into the light, reborn and ready to face whatever punishment awaited me.

  Fear distorts the world. Fear sees demons where only shadows dwell. This was the lesson I’d eventually learn.

  My captor was not the dark menace imagination had made of him. He leaned heavily on his crutch, walking with a pronounced limp in his right leg. He was thin and wiry. His face was pale and drawn and grizzled with silvery stubble. He had some sparse patches of hair at his temples, but little left on top. He was old. The only things about him that retained the kind of brisk authority I’d projected into the darkness were his eyes, which were a sharp, flinty grey, and his voice, which was hard and cutting.

  ‘You’re not gonna bolt on me, are you, kid?’ he asked.

  I shook my head.

  ‘You promise?’

  I nodded, still tongue-tied.

  He pointed at me with his crutch. ‘You got anything that doesn’t belong to you in there?’

  I gawked blankly.

  ‘The bag, kid. What’s in the bag?’

  I dropped my eyes. I was still holding my mother’s bag. I was clutching it protectively to my chest. My tongue u
ntied itself. ‘Cat biscuits!’ I blurted. ‘Cat biscuits and a magazine and half a bunch of grapes. It’s all mine. You can check. I’m not a thief!’

  ‘Just a vandal, huh?’

  The old man looked at me very keenly, and then shook his head and dropped his cigarette to the ground. He crushed it out with his left foot.

  ‘Y’know, I’ve seen some pretty dumb crimes in my time, but this is possibly the dumbest. I know that an appetite for destruction and intellect don’t always walk hand in hand, but by any standard, this here’s pretty goddamn mystifying.’ He gestured again with his crutch, first at the greenhouse, then at the shed. ‘I’m probably wastin’ my time askin’, but I don’t suppose you’ve got an explanation for all this?’

  ‘It wasn’t me,’ I explained.

  ‘I see. Who was it, then?’

  ‘Some other kids.’

  ‘Which other kids?’

  I gulped. ‘Just some other kids, that’s all. They were chasing me.’

  ‘Right. And where are they now?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘I guess they just vanished, huh?’

  ‘I think they must have gone back through the hedge.’

  We both looked in the direction of the hedge. It was an impenetrable grey-green wall.

  ‘Your friends must be regular Houdinis,’ the old man said.

  ‘They’re not my friends!’ I replied.

  He looked at me for a very long time, then shook his head again.

  ‘You got a name, kid?’

  ‘Alex,’ I said, very quietly.

  ‘Just Alex?’

  ‘It’s short for Alexander,’ I elaborated.

  My captor clicked his tongue and scowled. ‘Who’s your father, kid?’

  ‘I don’t have a father.’

  ‘Gotcha: immaculately conceived!’