The Universe versus Alex Woods

by Extence, Gavin

  ‘Woods: you’ll address your answers to me, and speak only when I ask you to, not before. Mackenzie: why did you take Mr Woods’s book?’

  Declan Mackenzie stared sullenly at the floor.

  Mr Treadstone clicked his tongue. ‘Woods: why did Mackenzie take your book?’

  ‘I think you’ll have to ask him,’ I said.

  ‘I’ve asked him. Now I’m asking you.’

  I stayed silent, but it was soon clear that Mr Treadstone was not going to let this matter lie. He was still determined to uncover motives. ‘Well?’ he asked. ‘I expect an answer, Woods. Why did Mr Mackenzie take your book?’

  In my defence, this was a very stupid question to ask; and it was certainly the wrong question to ask me. I was no psychologist. Declan Mackenzie’s motives had always been a perfect mystery to me. How was I supposed to give a reasonable answer when I doubted that such a thing even existed? Who knew what went on in Declan Mackenzie’s mind? He wasn’t exactly the most rational member of the species. My vaguest intuition was that if he’d had a motive, it had probably been something to do with humiliation – with some kind of urge to make other people feel like something the cat had dragged in. But the more I thought about that, the more incomprehensible it seemed.

  I spent what seemed like many minutes struggling with this mental block, my pent-up hysteria rising and falling in the background. Mr Treadstone raised his eyebrows and tapped the desk with his fingertips.

  ‘You want to know why he did it?’ I asked. ‘Why he took my book?’

  ‘Yes, Mr Woods. As we’ve established, some time ago. I’m not going to repeat myself. I want you to answer the question in plain English.’

  The apposite word had by now found its way to the very tip of my tongue, and once it was there, I had little notion of calling it back.

  ‘It’s because he’s a cunt,’ I said.

  The word kind of hung there in the air for a while, as if I’d somehow managed to render it in a cartoon speech bubble. No one reacted. No one had been expecting it, least of all me.

  Then the bubble burst.

  Mr Treadstone went the colour of a blood blister. Declan Mackenzie went the colour of mint ice-cream. And I think I probably managed to stay my regular colour. But on the inside – on the inside, something had shifted.

  Let me tell you: there’s this state of mind that doctors call ‘euphoria’. Some temporal lobe epileptics can experience it during a seizure, when the brain’s emotional centres are suddenly overloaded with electricity and start to malfunction. Normal people can sometimes get it too, when they feel like they’ve achieved something magnificent or are on drugs. Well, anyway: I’m fairly sure that euphoria was what I was experiencing at that moment, and for a while, I thought that convulsions were imminent. There was the same sense of unreality, the same lifting feeling – almost of weightlessness. But at the same time, my aura was absent. There were no distractions, no hallucinations. It felt more like I was rising, as if from a dense fog, into clear skies and golden sunlight. My vision was sharp, and my head was clear, and I felt a calm that went far beyond normal calm.

  ‘What?’ asked Mr Treadstone. Not ‘Pardon?’ or ‘Excuse me?’ or any of the other polite alternatives that he drummed into us daily; and I knew from his colouring that he’d heard well enough the first time. But for some reason, he was giving me the chance to reconsider.

  I did not want to reconsider.

  My words now struck me as the only meaningful words that had been uttered all morning. I would not have taken them back for all the money in Robert Asquith’s bank account. Declan Mackenzie was precisely what I’d said he was, and I felt no reservations about having pointed this out. It wasn’t as if anything bad could happen to me now – or nothing worse than what had gone before. Mr Treadstone could expel me, I supposed – but that wouldn’t be so terrible a consequence. (I would be home-schooled again, which was a more efficient way to learn.) Declan Mackenzie could beat me up again – but that would hardly make my words less true. I realized at that point that I had no fear of Declan Mackenzie any more. Sitting there with his green face and his puffy eye and his cowardly evasions, he struck me now as a pretty insignificant figure. So, presented with the chance, I decided to repeat my assertion, adding nothing but the school motto, Ex Veritas Vires, which I thought made an interesting coda.

  Declan Mackenzie’s jaw hit the floor. Mr Treadstone leapt from his chair like a firework.

  ‘Mackenzie: out! NOW! Woods: not another word! Not another BREATH!’

  The lecture that followed was extremely animated, but also far too long and repetitious to report here. Once it was over, Mr Treadstone phoned my mother at work, and my mother pleaded for clemency based on the mitigating circumstances of my illness and previous good record. They eventually agreed that a week of detention – in conjunction with the additional discipline I’d be facing at home – would be the minimum punishment for the terrible thing I’d said. Declan Mackenzie, in contrast, received a single day’s detention. My crime in using that word was deemed to be five times worse than anything he could possibly have done to me.

  By the evening, any sense of euphoria was nothing more than a memory. I felt exhausted and miserable, and once more at a loss for words.

  I hadn’t had enough time to rehearse what I was going to say to Mr Peterson. I had only a two-hour window before my mother got home – at which point, I was sure to be grounded for the next month (two months, as it turned out). And, anyway, the more I thought about it, the more I realized that there was little I could say. I could lay out all the facts, make my excuses, give a detailed, eloquent account of all the torment I’d suffered since – and none of this would change a damn thing. The final result was just as hideous.

  By the time I was passing the poplar sentinels, my heart was in my mouth. And by the time the door swung open, any dream of eloquence had gone the way of the dodo.

  ‘I’m afraid I lost your book,’ I blurted. And it was such an awful, inadequate sentence. But what else could I say? I didn’t have my mother’s knack for delivering bad news. I just wanted to get the words out before my courage left me entirely.

  Mr Peterson looked stricken. ‘You lost it?’

  I nodded. My voice was paralysed.

  ‘You lost it?’

  ‘Yes, I’m—’

  ‘You knew what that book meant to me!’ Mr Peterson was holding his head like he had a migraine.

  ‘It wasn’t my fault!’ I pleaded. ‘I was on the school bus and—’

  ‘The school bus! You took it on the school bus?’

  I could see straight away how irresponsible this was. I gave up trying to pretend that this was anyone’s fault but my own.

  ‘I’m extremely sorry,’ I said. ‘And I know that’s not good enough. I know I can’t replace it—’

  ‘No, you can’t! Jesus! I must be an idiot!’

  I didn’t know what to say.

  ‘Go home, kid,’ Mr Peterson said eventually. ‘I don’t want to look at you right now.’

  I had no thought of staying – of trying to explain things properly. I turned and I ran. And I didn’t stop running until I was home.

  PIERCING

  For the next eight weeks, right up to the summer holidays, I found myself once more under the worst kind of house arrest – the kind masterminded by my mother. Having received three strikes in quick succession (vandalism, fighting, swearing), I was no longer trusted to take responsibility for my own punishment. I was barely allowed out of my mother’s sight. Every morning she drove me to the school gates, and every afternoon I was collected from the same spot. Usually it was my mother who did the collecting too, but sometimes Justine was sent in her place, and, once or twice, even Sam was roped in to cover the school run. It was very inconvenient for all concerned. Not that Justine or Sam ever complained – they were always very patient with me – but I could tell that they were keen to see me back ‘on the rails’ as quickly as possible. And when it came to the subje
ct of my various crimes and misdemeanours, I faced a united front.

  ‘You know that fighting rarely solves anything,’ Justine said. ‘It usually makes matters worse.’

  ‘Yes, I know,’ I said.

  ‘And that word you used,’ Justine added, wrinkling her nose, ‘that word really is extremely offensive. Especially to women.’ (And from the vehemence in her voice, I knew that what was true of women in general was doubly true of lesbians – although the logic of this was light-years beyond my grasp.)

  My mother, of course, had already lectured me at length on the appallingness of that word. So had Sam, who was usually more moderate when it came to such things.

  ‘It’s a vulgar, obnoxious, male word,’ Sam said, which confused me for quite some time.

  ‘Why’s it a male word?’ I asked.

  Sam looked at me for a few moments to gauge whether or not I was being deliberately stupid, then said: ‘You do know what that word means, don’t you?’

  ‘Of course I know what it means!’ I searched my mental thesaurus, ruled out every alternative, then said: ‘It refers to the part of the woman where babies come out.’

  ‘Exactly! And you can see why that’s demeaning, can’t you? You can see why it’s so offensive?’

  I thought about this for a while. ‘No, not really,’ I concluded. ‘I mean, I wasn’t actually using it in that context. Also, surely what’s so offensive is that the word’s so offensive, rather than the word itself?’

  Sam made me repeat this sentence, then told me I was being pedantic and perpetuating a sexist mindset. I felt quite aggrieved by this.

  ‘I didn’t make it the worst word in the world,’ I said.

  After I was picked up from school I was not allowed home unsupervised. Instead, I had to spend two hours every afternoon (and another nine on Saturdays) at the shop, which was a further inconvenience for all concerned. This was at the time when Justine and Sam were first having their ‘problems’, the nature of which was none of my business. All my mother would tell me was that they were going through a ‘rocky patch’, and this was why Justine often appeared so out of sorts – a fact that had not escaped my notice. A lot of the time, Justine seemed so far away that I was sure she had passed over to one of my mother’s other planes of existence; and often, when she came back from a break, her eyes would be all raw and bloodshot. Really, it was the worst possible time for me to be underfoot – a truth that I was quick to point out to my mother.

  ‘Yes, it is,’ she agreed. And then she said no more on the matter.

  So Justine was in a bad mood, my mother was in a bad mood, Sam was in a bad mood, and of course, I, too, was in a bad mood. For the first several days I was extremely sullen, and after that, merely bored. My mother tried to find small jobs to occupy me – stock checks and the like – but more often than not, there was little I could do to pass the time. Mostly, I sat in the far corner behind the counter – as far into the far corner as I could skulk – and spied on the comings and goings of the customers.

  I probably don’t need to tell you that my mother’s shop was frequented by a lot of odd people. I’d estimate that less than a third of her clientele could be classified in any other way – just the tourists, really, and the occasional group of school girls, my age or a little older. Some of them I recognized from Asquith, but if any of them ever recognized me, none went so far as to acknowledge my existence. This was not particularly awkward; I was used to not having my existence acknowledged by girls. What was awkward, however, was that my mother had decided that groups of school girls were the only demographic that posed a serious shoplifting risk, and as such required ‘special monitoring’ from the moment they entered to the moment they left.

  ‘Keep an eye on those girls,’ she’d tell me.

  ‘Why me?’ I’d plead. ‘You keep an eye on them!’

  ‘Don’t be silly!’ she’d say in an infuriating whisper. ‘I’m sure it’s not that much of an ordeal for you.’

  ‘They’ll think I’m staring!’

  ‘So what? That doesn’t seem to bother you most of the time.’

  ‘This is different. It’s embarrassing! What if they catch me? What if they look up and find me watching them?’

  This would provoke a delighted tinkle of muted laughter. ‘Well, you could try smiling, Lex. You’ll probably find they’re not quite so scary as you imagine!’

  This annoyed me a lot. For a start, I didn’t think that my mother was ideally placed to set herself up as a relationship coach. Furthermore, the truth of the matter was that on a one-to-one basis I was actually much more comfortable with girls than I was with boys – I always had been. It was only groups of girls I struggled with. Because in groups girls were scary. They were always whispering and giggling and exchanging coded glances. It was unfair to expect me to try to deal with that. But, as always, there was no arguing with my mother. It fell to me to watch and squirm and blush, and later to report any activities that could be construed as ‘suspicious’.

  This task was close to impossible for two main reasons. First, groups of girls always look suspicious. Second, most of my mother’s other customers looked just as suspicious. In my mother’s shop, suspiciousness was such a relative concept that the term was basically meaningless. I remember, for example, one man dressed in a leather trench coat and a broad-brimmed leather hat who spent an awfully long time looking at the pickled animals – maybe as long as forty-five minutes. Then he turned and left without saying a word. And behaviour like this was not uncommon. The only reason I remember that man in particular was that I always paid extra attention to men of his type – loners of a certain age who lurked with an apparent lack of purpose. This harked back to a recurrent fantasy from my earlier childhood, in which one of these anonymous men would suddenly announce himself as my phantom father. In some versions of the fantasy, the man in question had come purposefully to observe me in secret before choosing to unveil himself. In other versions, he would be there by pure coincidence; it was only when he looked up from his contemplated purchase that he would notice me, or sometimes my mother – or she would notice him, all of a sudden, always with a dramatic intake of breath.

  It was only when I got a little older that I became aware of the various problems and improbabilities bound up with this daydream. For a start, it seemed extremely unlikely that my father knew of my existence, or even suspected it. I also had reason to doubt that after so many years, my parents would be capable of recognizing one another. When I asked my mother for information regarding their relationship, she tended to respond with words like ‘brief’ and ‘functional’. More specifically, I’d managed to ascertain that their affair had not outlasted the daylight hours of the winter solstice, and from my mother’s perspective, it had been about procreation and nothing more. All she could tell me about my father was that he was healthy (or so he appeared) and sexually competent (evidently) – and, once she had established these facts, anything else seemed rather extraneous. She hadn’t paid a great deal of attention to anything so abstract as his appearance and general character, and nothing had stuck in her memory. Without wishing to sound overly critical of my mother, by the time I was born, I don’t think she would have been able to pick my father out of a three-man line-up.

  Nevertheless, even after my childhood fantasies had lost much of their lustre, the idea of my father still retained some grip on my imagination. I still had an image, based on next to nothing, of how my father might look and act. I imagined him as some kind of Tom Bombadil type – all boots and beard, with a deep love of the woodlands and no employment history. Most of the vaguely suspicious lone men who came into my mother’s shop seemed to fit this profile, but, even so, the arrival of such specimens was a relative rarity. I’d be lucky to observe more than two a week, and after they’d left, boredom was quick to return.

  Unfortunately, there was no chance of my negotiating a reduction in the length of my jail term – not without an admission of guilt followed by a suitably c
onvincing, and elaborate, display of remorse. My mother wanted me to write letters of apology to Mr Treadstone and Declan Mackenzie (and probably to the cantankerous bus driver too) – even after I’d given her a (nearly) full account of the circumstances that led to me acting and speaking as I did. We had the same circular argument again and again. I told my mother that I didn’t feel guilty because my words and actions (however unpleasant) were justified by circumstance – and for this reason I was not prepared to apologize to anyone. I’d rather die. My mother maintained that if I was able to comprehend the appalling gravity of what I’d done, then I’d apologize in a heartbeat. I’d have to. In the meantime, I was just being obstinate, and wilfully ignorant.

  ‘I don’t think you can possibly understand how offensive that word is,’ my mother told me one afternoon, elaborating on a familiar theme. ‘If you did, you never would have used it.’

  ‘I know how offensive it is,’ I assured her.

  ‘No, you don’t! You obviously don’t. Honestly, Lex, I don’t know what’s worse: that you said it in the first place or that you refuse to realize how horrible it is!’

  ‘I know how horrible it is! It’s the worst word in the English language – everyone knows that. That’s why I chose it. I didn’t just pick it at random!’

  ‘You shouldn’t call anyone that – ever. I don’t care how much you think you were provoked.’

  ‘He deserved it!’

  ‘No, he didn’t – no one deserves that kind of abuse.’

  ‘No one?’

  ‘Yes – no one!’

  I waited for a few moments. ‘What about Hitler?’ I asked. I’d been thinking of playing the Hitler card for a while, even though I knew it was unlikely to strengthen my argument – my mother’s counter-attack was too obvious.

  ‘Oh, Lex, really.’ She planted her hands on her hips. ‘I can’t believe what I’m hearing! Are you seriously comparing the Mackenzie child to Hitler?’

  ‘Well . . . I don’t know. I suppose not. But then, Declan Mackenzie hasn’t had as much time to develop his evil. He hasn’t had access to the same resources. I’m sure when Hitler was a child no one realized how bad he was either.’