The Universe versus Alex Woods

by Extence, Gavin

  It turned out that Declan Mackenzie had a better conclusion in mind. He stepped back, slid open the top panel of the nearest window and flung Mr Peterson’s book from the top deck of the speeding bus. Then he spat on me and returned to his seat.

  No one moved to stop or help me as I pulled my bag across my shoulder and then half crawled, half fell down the stairs to the lower deck. My body was battered, but my mind was surprising clear. I would not experience my inevitable seizure until several hours later, in the privacy of my own bedroom, clutching my iron–nickel meteorite to my chest.

  ‘You have to stop the bus!’ I told the bus driver.

  This was the first time I had ever spoken to the bus driver, who did not present himself as the kind of man who’d appreciate the effort. Even under normal, stationary circumstances, the bus driver bubbled with barely suppressed rage. His characteristic facial expression suggested a furious impatience for retirement or death – whichever came quicker. He had what my mother would have identified as a pitch-black aura, and it was a diagnosis no sceptic would have disputed.

  Upon my addressing him, the bus driver had started grunting incomprehensibly.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I interrupted, ‘you’re not speaking clearly and I don’t have any time to waste. This is an emergency. Stop the bus.’

  ‘I don’t see a bus stop, do you?’

  ‘It’s an emergency! You have to stop the bus!’

  ‘I don’t have to do anything,’ the bus driver growled.

  I could see there was no reasoning with him. No words of mine were going to persuade him to make an unscheduled stop in the middle of the B3136. It was drizzling outside; prompt action was essential. Without thinking too much about the likely consequences, I turned to the door and pulled the emergency release lever. There were several gasps, simultaneous with the screeching hiss of airbrakes and a sudden jolt forward. My arm was wrenched from the vertical support pole. Something hit my shoulder; something bruised my buttocks. But, miraculously, I stayed on my feet.

  I was out the door the second the bus halted. I later found out that the bus driver spent the next five minutes flapping his arms at the roadside, incandescent with rage and completely at a loss as to what he should do next; there was no protocol or precedent for an incident such as this. But at the time, I was more or less oblivious to this exterior drama. I didn’t bother looking back. I ran like a maniac, my pace never slackening. My mind was fully focussed on its goal. I was determined, somehow, to turn back the clock.

  Every problem, I told myself, has its mathematical solution. My problem was that I had no idea at which point along the B3136 Mr Peterson’s book had exited the school bus. I had been on the floor at the time.

  So what did I know?

  I knew that the B3136 was a windy country road, and I knew that the school bus was old, heavy and cumbersome. It seemed unlikely, therefore, that the bus had been travelling very quickly. A mean velocity of thirty miles per hour was my estimate – and, really, this was being generous. Thirty miles per hour, I thought, was probably close to the upper limit of which the school bus was capable.

  So how much time had passed between the book exiting the window and the bus coming to a stop? Since I hadn’t had the presence of mind to check my watch, this was harder to estimate. I had to rely on woolly subjectivity. How long had it taken to regain my breath, grab my bag, fall down the stairs, argue with the driver and force the bus to a standstill? I decided that all of that must have taken at least two minutes, but no more than three.

  Thirty miles per hour equals half a mile per minute. Distance equals velocity multiplied by time. I deduced that Mr Peterson’s book was between one and one and a half miles away.

  So how fast could I run? I knew that running a mile in four minutes was considered to be an impressive athletic achievement. I was pumped full of adrenaline, but I was certainly no athlete. I allowed myself another six minutes of running time. Then I started searching.

  I searched the wet grasses and hedgerows for over an hour. I found enough drinks cans and crisp packets and chocolate-bar wrappers to fill a couple of bin liners. I found toilet roll and broken glass and fast-food packaging and a cereal box. I found all sorts of items lost or thrown from cars: a soft toy rabbit, a wing mirror, a windscreen-wiper blade. I found a few inexplicable oddities: a trowel, a pair of tartan slippers, a tennis racket, underpants. Near a lay-by, I found a prophylactic – a used prophylactic. It was laid out rather neatly on a small grey stone. At that point, I started to cry. I sat down on the verge – a safe five metres from the soiled condom – and I stared at my wet, muddy shoes and I cried. I was feeling pretty disgusted with the state of the universe. It wasn’t simply that people were having intercourse at the side of the B3136. I supposed that was okay in the grand scheme of things, since they were at least taking precautions not to bring any more babies into the world. I’d decided that the world was not a fit place for babies. But, still, these people obviously didn’t care much about anybody else. They obviously didn’t care about the countryside. No one did. The more time you spend rooting around at the roadside, the more you have to accept that fact. That condom wasn’t biodegradable – obviously. It would probably lie there for an aeon. It would probably outlive the trees and the birds, and all of the books in existence.

  As for Breakfast of Champions, that was already a lost cause. My maths had been ridiculous from the outset. There were too many guesses, and too many variables, and I knew nothing about the likely trajectory of a book thrown from the upper deck of a moving bus. It could have ended up anywhere. It could have sailed over a hedge and ended up in the field beyond, out of sight and out of reach. And even if I’d found it, the book would have been ruined. An hour of light rain had soaked all the foliage. I was soaked too. I had my cagoule in my bag, but I hadn’t bothered to put it on. I hadn’t noticed that I was getting wet until I abandoned my search.

  After a while, I stopped crying and stood up and headed back down the road. I thought it would probably take me about an hour and a half to walk home. With any luck, I might be able to get back before my mother. I didn’t want my mother to know what had happened. At that point, I still thought I could keep it from her.

  I’d walked about half an hour beyond the point where the bus had stopped (which I’d recognized from the beech trees and the tyre marks) when another car pulled over. People had been pulling over every five minutes for the last hour to check if I was okay. I guess I didn’t look okay. There was no good reason to be walking down the B3136 in the rain.

  This time, it was someone I knew. It was Mrs Griffith, who worked at the post office and spoke fluent Elvish. Mrs Griffith knew that I liked The Lord of the Rings, so whenever I went into the post office she’d greet me in Quenya, the language of the High Elves. Mrs Griffith liked languages a lot. She wasn’t so keen on working in the post office, but unfortunately, speaking fluent Elvish was not a marketable skill.

  She didn’t greet me in Elvish that day. As the electric window slid down, I could see that her lips were pursed in a concerned pout.

  ‘Hello, Alex,’ she said.

  ‘Hello,’ I replied.

  ‘Are you okay?’ she asked.

  ‘Yes, I’m okay,’ I said.

  ‘Why are you walking in the road?’

  ‘I missed the bus,’ I lied. I didn’t like lying, especially not to someone like Mrs Griffith, but I thought, in this case, it was probably for the best.

  Mrs Griffith frowned and shook her head. ‘You’re walking home?’

  ‘Yes. I thought it would be quicker than waiting for the next bus.’ (This lie was just about plausible. SARS ran a very irregular bus service.)

  ‘It’s an awfully long way,’ Mrs Griffith pointed out.

  ‘Yes, I know,’ I said.

  ‘And it’s raining,’ she added.

  ‘Yes, it is,’ I agreed.

  ‘I’m not sure your mother would want you walking so far in the rain.’

  ‘No, maybe not. I
t might be better if you don’t mention it. I don’t expect I’ll do it again. It’s too far.’

  ‘Can I give you a lift?’

  ‘Yes, that would be very helpful. Thank you.’

  ‘Hop in, then.’

  I wetted my hand on my cagoule and rubbed away the boot mark that Declan Mackenzie had left on my trouser leg. Then I hopped in.

  I got home twenty minutes before my mother, which gave me enough time to feed Lucy and change out of my wet clothes.

  THE APPOSITE WORD

  I was summoned to Mr Treadstone’s office at ten o’clock the following morning. The bus driver had reported me, of course, as had several passengers on the lower deck. When you live in a village (and have been hit by a meteor), most people know your face and name. In hindsight, I never stood a chance.

  When it came to discipline – when it came to most things – Mr Treadstone had a meticulous attention to detail. By ten o’clock, one hour into the formal investigation, he had already amassed a wealth of information concerning the previous day’s ‘incident’. He’d spoken to the bus driver (a short, frustrating conversation, I imagine) and gathered statements from two of the civilians who’d phoned the school to register their complaints. Two of my more pliable peers had also been called in for questioning: Amy Jones, whose father was a school governor, and Paul Hart, whose mother taught art. From these interviews, Mr Treadstone knew all about the fight. He knew that I had tried to claw Declan Mackenzie’s face off, and he knew that in the ensuing struggle some property of mine had been thrown overboard. The plain facts of the conflict were easy to establish. Only the motives remained unknown, and these would be uncovered soon enough. Mr Treadstone was very big on uncovering motives. He always said that the only way to kill the weed was to kill the root.

  The weed was a metaphor for deviance.

  As with every trial that had ever taken place in Mr Treadstone’s office, ours was to be a swift, no-nonsense affair. Since the legwork had already been done, and the verdict was already known, there was little that could delay the keen sword of justice. Charges would be levelled, statements read, explanations demanded and rejected, and punishments meted out. These accelerated proceedings would be bookended by the rather lengthier pre- and post-trial lectures, which Mr Treadstone believed to be the most crucial part of any disciplinary hearing. These lectures provided the opportunity to make sure that everyone understood the nature of the weed, and was fully committed to stopping its spread.

  Strangely enough, Mr Treadstone’s views on crime and punishment were not unlike my mother’s – though in all other ways, they were as different as two people could be. Criminality, impropriety, scruffiness, poor diction – Mr Treadstone treated all these things as if they caused a kind of cosmic disorder, a general untidiness, that had to be rectified. And punishment by numbers was never enough. The books had to be balanced in the appropriate manner. Mr Treadstone, too, was a great believer in fitting punishments and public displays of remorse. When, for example, it was discovered that Scott Sizewell had been making an obscene gesture in the school photograph (this was an exceptionally dumb crime), Mr Treadstone hauled him up in assembly to make a dramatic apology before all six hundred of his fellow pupils. And this was no simple ‘sorry’. Scott Sizewell’s speech – prepared under strict supervision – lasted four minutes and was more akin to the statements made by disgraced politicians.

  When it came to fistfights, Mr Treadstone believed that there was only one satisfactory resolution to such an infringement. Each party had to apologize – first to Mr Treadstone, then to each other – with what was deemed to be an adequate degree of sincerity, and then they had to shake hands (firmly, with eye contact; this was always the correct way to shake someone’s hand). It was a solemn ritual, which was supposed to signify a definitive end to hostilities – a return to civility and the rule of law.

  Civility was also to be the major theme of our pre-trial lecture, which began promptly at 10.02.

  ‘We live in a civilized society,’ said Mr Treadstone, ‘and in a civilized society we resolve our differences in a civilized manner. We do not solve our problems with violence.’

  Mr Treadstone was speaking hypothetically, of course – about ideals rather than reality. Or I supposed he was talking hypothetically. Otherwise, this would have been, as Mr Peterson would say, Grade A Horse Shit. At that very moment, we, the civilized world, were mired in two major wars in the desert, and from what I’d seen on TV, the men fighting these wars were widely regarded as heroes. We had nuclear submarines armed with bombs that could flatten cities, and many extremely civilized people agreed that this was only prudent – given how uncivilized many other countries (and all of their inhabitants) were known to be.

  I should probably tell you that I had a lot of pent-up hysteria that morning. I had spent most of the previous night awake. By daybreak, I had suffered three seizures – two partial, one convulsive; all three kept secret from my mother – and felt physically and psychologically frazzled. Without wishing to be overly dramatic, my mind felt like a saucepan full of writhing snakes, and the only way I could keep the lid on was through unwavering, single-minded vigilance. All my well-honed meditation and distraction techniques came into play. There was no hope of cultivating my usual sense of calm, so I aimed instead for a kind of detached numbness – layer upon layer of thick insulation to protect me from further injury. And for a while, this worked reasonably well. There were only one or two moments when I felt like laughing or crying or both.

  ‘You are ambassadors for the school,’ Mr Treadstone intoned. ‘When you are out in the local community, when you are travelling to and from the school grounds, you are still carrying the school flag – and you will behave accordingly.’

  I stared solemnly at the floor and counted to fifty in Roman numerals. This was an acceptable posture given the circumstances. Mr Treadstone only expected eye contact when he was addressing you directly, by name or through a non-rhetorical question; and by the time Mr Treadstone addressed us that day, my mind was somewhere else entirely. (I was thinking about Kurt Vonnegut in his meat locker while Dresden burned above him.) His demand for a response seemed to come from nowhere.

  ‘Well?’ he prompted. ‘What do you have to say for yourselves?’

  My numbed mind fumbled for thought. Declan Mackenzie reacted with the pin-sharp reflexes of a cornered weasel. ‘Sir,’ he said, ‘I know that fighting’s wrong. And usually no one dislikes violence more than me—’

  ‘More than I,’ Mr Treadstone corrected.

  ‘No one dislikes violence more than I,’ Declan Mackenzie agreed, ‘but this was self-defence. Ask anyone. He attacked me.’

  He touched his hand to his left cheek at this point. Exhibit A: three or four angry-looking wounds. The scratches were now a reddish-yellow colour, and his left eye was puffy and purple. The wounds did look reasonably impressive, but I suspected they were actually quite superficial. In contrast, though much of my bruising was severe, it was all on places like my hips and buttocks – places I didn’t care to make public. And I suppose under questioning I would have been forced to admit that most of these injuries were technically self-inflicted, having been accumulated while I was falling down the stairs or rattling around in the doorway as the bus performed its emergency stop. Visually, Declan Mackenzie held a major advantage. He also had going for him the fact that his phoney-baloney ungrammatical speech at least sounded sincere. When I tried to riposte, mine was the hollow monotone of the clinically depressed.

  ‘Yes,’ I admitted, ‘I attacked first. But that’s pretty irrelevant.’ Mr Treadstone’s lip curled, perhaps because of my choice of modifier, perhaps because of my presumption in telling him what was or wasn’t relevant. I wasn’t sure which. ‘It’s not relevant,’ I continued drearily, ‘because he started it. He provoked me. This was his doing, not mine.’

  ‘It takes two to create a conflict,’ Mr Treadstone noted.

  It was one of those statements that sounds true b
ut doesn’t feel true. I was surprised to discover a small flicker of dissent somewhere in my gut. But my gut, sadly, was no public speaker. Whatever I wanted to express slipped from my grasp. I only managed to repeat myself, an atom less robotically. ‘This is his fault. He started it.’

  ‘I did not!’ Declan Mackenzie wheedled. ‘I was only messing around. It’s not my fault he can’t take a joke!’

  ‘Theft is no joke,’ I said.

  I felt sure Mr Treadstone would support me in this sentiment. He did not. By then, he’d lost his patience. ‘That’s quite enough,’ he said, raising his hands. ‘This is disappointing, very disappointing . . . I can see that neither of you is willing to accept your share of the responsibility for yesterday’s disgraceful display. But I am going to get to the root of this matter.’

  Mr Treadstone took a seat in his high-backed chair to show that he was prepared to wait for as long as it took.

  ‘I’m not interested in excuses,’ he said. ‘I want answers. Straightforward answers. Woods!’ His index finger swung dramatically in my direction. ‘Why did you assault Mr Mackenzie?’

  ‘He stole my book. He threw it out of the window.’

  ‘Mackenzie?’

  ‘I was upset. He attacked me!’ He touched his cheek again, close to his puffy eye socket. ‘He could have blinded me!’

  ‘It’s actually pretty difficult to blind someone,’ I pointed out.

  ‘He came at me with his nails!’

  Mr Treadstone frowned, which was the only possible response to a disclosure such as this.

  ‘That was after you’d stolen my book,’ I pointed out.