The Universe versus Alex Woods

by Extence, Gavin

  ‘Lex, this is beyond ridiculous! It’s offensively idiotic!’

  ‘All I’m saying is that it’s a bit early to tell. But I’m sure that if you put Declan Mackenzie in charge of a country, then things would start to go downhill pretty quickly.’

  ‘Lex, listen to me: Declan Mackenzie is not evil. He may be obnoxious and immature and angry and unpleasant and all the other things you say he is, but that doesn’t mean you should demonize him. You don’t know everything about him. You certainly don’t have the right to say what you said. Otherwise, how are you any better than he is? Well?’

  ‘He deserved it! He’s not just unpleasant – he’s cruel. He takes pleasure in humiliating other people!’

  ‘Oh, really?’

  ‘Yes – really!’

  ‘And what exactly do you think you were doing when you called him what you did?’

  I stayed silent.

  ‘No, really, Lex: I’d like to know. You certainly humiliated him. How did that make you feel?’

  ‘That was different,’ I mumbled. ‘He deserved it.’

  ‘We’re not talking about whether he deserved it any more. We’re talking about how it made you feel.’

  ‘That’s not relevant,’ I said. ‘It’s completely different.’

  Somehow, despite all my resolutions, my mother had found a way to taint whatever brief victory I’d had. Any sense of triumph I’d had regarding the Declan Mackenzie incident was now on the wane.

  ‘I’m still not going to take it back,’ I said petulantly.

  My mother shrugged. ‘I can’t make you.’

  But what she really meant was that she no longer felt she had to. She’d brought at least one aspect of my rebellion into disrepute, and in so doing, she’d stripped away the purity of the whole. It was a minor victory, but a victory nonetheless. Even though I stuck to my guns and served out the rest of my sentence in surly silence, we both knew she’d won.

  I’d taken to walking two full circuits of the school field every lunchtime – a walk that filled an hour and took me as far away from other people as I could hope to get. Needless to say, this was not the most inspiring walk in Somerset, but during this period, with my evenings and weekends forfeit, it was the best that was available to me; and in some places it was not altogether dull. Since the lone groundsman employed by the school had his work cut out in maintaining the quadrangles and the central football fields and all those anterior zones that were visible to visitors and passers-by, the perimeter of the school field, bordered by tall fences and hedges, was always a neglected area, and in summer, it became particularly unkempt. In summer, the grass around the perimeter was thick and tangled and fresh-smelling, and there were patches of weeds and wildflowers that attracted bees and various types of butterfly. Occasionally, if you were lucky, you might also see a fieldmouse scampering through the undergrowth, or a squirrel darting for the nearest tree; and as a general rule the further you got away from the school buildings, the wilder the wildlife grew, and the fewer the people liable to spoil it. Towards the furthest reaches of the playing field, you were several times more likely to see a magpie or a family of finches than another human being (discounting Mrs Matthews, the music teacher, who was a keen ornithologist).

  I walked the same two circuits every day for several weeks – whatever the weather, varying nothing but the direction – and in all this time, I never had to speak a single word to anyone. Left alone with my thoughts, this was by far the most fulfilling hour of the day, and I hoped – and expected – to preserve it as such. But then, one unremarkable, overcast afternoon, everything changed. That was the afternoon I first encountered Ellie. She hunted me down quite purposefully, at a time when everybody else was happy to ignore me – but, in hindsight, that was pretty typical of Ellie. She was an extremely contrary girl.

  I already knew her vaguely – or I knew of her – even though she was fourteen months and three whole school years older than me. Her full name was Elizabeth Fitzmaurice and she was notorious for getting into trouble. More often than not, it was to do with her flagrant contempt for the school dress code. She preferred to dress herself somewhere between emo and goth. You probably know about goths already, and you might know about emos too, but just in case you don’t, I’ll elaborate a little, since both are familiar from my mother’s shop.

  Goths like to wear dramatic black makeup and dramatic black clothes (long studded boots and corsets and chains and collars and so on). Emos have a similar fondness for black, but tend to be less theatrical and more geek-chic in appearance (which is very different to just plain geek). Their clothes are usually quite smart but also exceedingly tight – especially their trousers. Goths are into vampires, Satanism, loud music and very public displays of personality, whereas emos, in general, have a deeper, inner despair and are more into things like irony and self-harm.

  Ellie mangled the two categories together: she had a lot of despair but she was not coy about expressing it, and I think on those occasions when she harmed herself, this was largely a matter of misjudgement. She wore a lot of eyeliner and eyeshadow, and her hair was as black as a raven’s wing. Her fringe was long to the point of complete impracticality, and was typically swept across the left side of her face, where it typically rendered her a Cyclops.

  ‘Woods!’ she gasped from some ten metres away. ‘Wait!’

  Up to this point, I’d been making every effort to ignore her, but once she hailed me, I was out of appealing options. I could either run or stop. I stopped.

  ‘Jesus!’ Ellie said, and stood for a while, breathing heavily. ‘Jesus in fucking heaven, Woods! How fast do you walk?’

  This question did not require an answer.

  ‘Hello, Elizabeth,’ I said, and immediately saw her lip curl.

  It turned out that Ellie was extremely touchy about her name. She would later tell me that she had been named after ‘John the fucking Baptist’s mother’. John the fucking Baptist and his mother were characters in the Bible.

  ‘It’s Ellie or nothing!’ Ellie told me.

  ‘I didn’t want to seem over-familiar,’ I explained.

  Ellie looked at me blankly.

  ‘I was trying to be polite.’

  This provoked a short snort of laughter. ‘Polite!’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Fuck, Woods, you of all people! Since when have you bothered with polite? Everyone knows you’ve got the foulest mouth in the entire school!’

  ‘That was a one-off,’ I told her. ‘And I had extremely good reasons for saying what I did.’

  Ellie flicked her fringe back from her eyes, folded her arms beneath her small but intimidating breasts, then regarded me for some time – and I was sure that every stage of this routine was designed to make me feel uncomfortable.

  ‘Okay then, Mr Polite,’ she said. ‘So why did you say it?’

  I thought about this for a while, trying to figure out how best to phrase it, and eventually, this is what I came up with: ‘Because naming something takes away its power.’

  Ellie looked at me, then rolled her eyes. Ellie was always rolling her eyes. From the number of times she did it in the average conversation, you’d have thought that she’d invented and patented the manoeuvre. ‘God, you’re weird!’ she said.

  ‘Yes, I know,’ I conceded.

  ‘It’s not an insult,’ she added. ‘It’s just . . . well, there are certainly worse things to be.’

  ‘Thank you.’ To me, not being insulted was as good as a compliment. ‘Now can I ask you a question?’ I asked.

  ‘As long as it’s polite,’ Ellie said.

  ‘Well, no . . . not exactly. It’s about what we’ve been talking about. You know: the C-word.’

  ‘Ask away.’

  ‘Well,’ I began, clearing my throat. ‘Ever since I said it, people have basically been queuing up to tell me how terrible it is – you know: how it’s the worst word in existence, and how it’s especially offensive to women. And, well, I suppose it’s that last poi
nt that I wanted to ask you about . . .’

  ‘You want my opinion?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘As a woman?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Ellie rolled her eyes again. ‘What’s the big deal? It’s just a word.’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘Cunt, cunt, cunt, cunt, cunt, cunt, cunt!’ Ellie added, to make her point. (Ellie liked to make her points unambiguously.)

  On the whole, I felt pretty vindicated by her response. ‘Thank you,’ I said. ‘This has been very interesting.’

  I started walking again. She grabbed my arm.

  ‘Hang on!’ Ellie said. ‘Stop being weird for a second. There’s something else I need to ask you. Unless of course there’s somewhere you need to be?’ she added, quite sarcastically.

  ‘Well, I was hoping to do another lap of the field,’ I said.

  Ellie winced. ‘What for? Oh, never mind! I’ll walk with you. Just give me a second.’

  She removed a pack of cigarettes from her shoulder bag and lit one. I looked around nervously.

  ‘Oh, relax!’ Ellie admonished. ‘No one’s looking.’

  ‘Aren’t we a bit . . . out in the open?’ I asked.

  ‘Trust me,’ Ellie said, ‘out in the open’s the best place to smoke. No one expects it. All those places where people usually smoke – you know, behind the pavilion and down the side of the art block –’ I didn’t know, but I let her continue – ‘well, all those places are completely retarded. Those are the places people get caught. You’d have to be a moron to smoke in any of those places. But out here – well, there’s zero chance of getting caught out here. You can see anyone approaching a mile away.’

  ‘And they can see you,’ I said.

  ‘Yes, but they’d need a fucking telescope to see what you’re doing.’

  ‘Mrs Matthews has binoculars,’ I pointed out.

  ‘Mrs Matthews is a mouse!’ said Ellie. ‘She’s the kind of woman who’d turn and wet herself before she’d risk any kind of confrontation.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘I don’t suppose I should offer you one?’

  ‘No, you shouldn’t.’

  After that, she fell into step beside me and spoke at length about her piercing. It transpired that as an early fifteenth birthday present to herself, Ellie had decided to get her eyebrow pierced. This explained the mysterious plaster above her right eye, which I’d been trying not to look at. Less well explained was her presumption that she could get away with her facial piercing in the long term.

  ‘I thought it would be like with my hair,’ she told me. ‘You know: I went out and I got my hair dyed, and it’s permanent – so, really, my parents had no choice but to accept it. What else could they do? I mean, they ranted and raved for weeks, but it was totally worth it.

  ‘Anyway, I thought this would be the same. But when I got home on Saturday, they both went completely insane. Honestly, you’d have thought I was pregnant or something.’

  I kept quiet. I didn’t think there was much I could say to this.

  ‘Well,’ Ellie continued, ‘it turns out that I’m not even allowed to come to school with my eyebrow pierced. Can you believe that?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said.

  ‘It’s against the dress code! Un-fucking-believable!’ She took an angry drag on her cigarette. ‘Anyway, so after my parents had shouted at me for about a gazillion years, eventually they forced me to take it out, and now I have to wear this stupid plaster until the hole’s healed itself.’

  ‘Oh,’ I said. ‘Yes, that’s unfortunate.’

  An uncomfortable silence passed. Ellie glanced furtively to her left and right. ‘It’s still in,’ she whispered.

  I felt something close to an involuntary shiver. ‘The eyebrow?’

  ‘Yes, that’s right. My mum confiscated the ring they put in, but I bought a little bar too. She didn’t know about that. I figured you can’t see it under the plaster anyway, so what’s the difference?’

  This scheme, I thought, had a rather obvious flaw.

  ‘Yes, I know what you’re thinking,’ Ellie said. ‘But I’ve got a plan. I figured I’d make a huge fuss about having to wear this stupid plaster for the next few days, then I’ll redo my hair so that it’s parted at the left and swept over like so.’ She gestured vaguely with her non-smoking hand. ‘That’s a bit of a pain because my right’s my better side – obviously – but it won’t seem that suspicious because I’ll have spent so much time moaning about how everyone keeps staring at my plaster. Then when it’s time for it to come off in a few weeks’ time, I’ll simply keep my new hairstyle, and hey presto! Problem solved.’

  ‘That’s your plan?’ I asked. ‘To comb your hair over your piercing and keep it there for ever?’

  ‘No, not for ever. Just for the next year or so. I’ll have to buy a lot of hairspray, I suppose. Would you like to see it? My eyebrow?’

  She didn’t wait for an answer. She stamped out her cigarette. Then she carefully removed her plaster and flicked it away into the hedge.

  ‘You know, you really shouldn’t litter,’ I pointed out.

  ‘Jesus, Woods,’ said Ellie. ‘You’re quite the comedian.’

  ‘I was being serious.’

  ‘Yes, I know. That’s what’s funny.’

  Ellie’s ‘bar’ was visible as two tiny blue spheres – like ball bearings that had been glued to her face, one above the other on either side of the fine black hairs that constituted the outer extremity of her eyebrow. The surrounding skin was red and inflamed. ‘Pretty cool, huh?’ asked Ellie. Then, again not waiting for an answer, she removed another plaster from her bag and re-patched herself.

  We continued to walk and Ellie lit another cigarette and eventually got to the main point that had brought her to me.

  ‘I want you to ask your mother if she’ll give me a job,’ Ellie told me.

  I didn’t know what I’d been expecting, but this was not it. ‘A job?’ I repeated dumbly.

  ‘Yes, a job. Weekends, evenings, summer holidays – whatever. I need the money. My allowance has been stopped, and I don’t think it’ll be coming back for a while.’

  I didn’t think so either.

  ‘I think if I have to get a job, then working for your mother might be fun,’ Ellie said.

  I frowned. I couldn’t imagine anyone thinking that working for my mother would be fun. Also, I couldn’t imagine Ellie’s parents consenting to this arrangement, and I felt obliged to point this out.

  Ellie rolled her eyes. ‘I’m not going to tell them – obviously! I’ll tell them I’m working in fucking Topshop or something.’

  ‘Oh,’ I said. Then I thought for a bit. ‘I’m not sure it’s fully legal for my mother to employ you,’ I continued. ‘Not without your parents agreeing to it.’

  Ellie shrugged. ‘Would your mother actually care about something like that?’

  ‘No, maybe not,’ I confessed. I had no choice. I’m not much of a liar, especially under pressure.

  ‘So you can at least ask? Maybe put in a good word for me?’

  ‘Yes, I suppose I could,’ I said.

  To tell you the truth, it wasn’t an idea that thrilled me. But with the summer being the tourist season, and Justine slipping to another plane of existence, I thought that my mother might well be looking for additional staff. And I suspected that Ellie was exactly the kind of girl she would choose to employ. I also suspected that being around Ellie for more than ten minutes at a time would prove to be a real headache. But I could see that I’d at least have to ask – there was little hope of getting out of it now.

  ‘Woods, this has been thrilling,’ Ellie said, crushing out her second cigarette. ‘Really – we should do it again sometime.’

  This was sarcasm, or irony, or something. I ignored it.

  ‘You’ll talk to your mother for me?’ she asked again, fixing me with a stare that made me feel it would be unwise to refuse.

  ‘Yes, I’ll ask her,’ I promised.

 
‘Wonderful.’

  Ellie removed some kind of body spray from her bag, closed her eyes and sprayed herself from head to toe. Then she saluted me, turned on her heels and cut a direct path back towards the school buildings.

  I did not enjoy the rest of my walk.

  It was a couple of days later that the parcel arrived. My mother was parking the car in the garage (which often took a while due to her poor spatial awareness) so, as usual, I was the first through the front door and the first to pick up the post. But it was some moments before I noticed that the parcel was addressed to me. I was not used to receiving post, and, in fact, only one person had ever sent me parcels. That person was Dr Weir. She, as you may recollect, had sent me Martin Beech’s meteor book and, later, The Universe: A Beginner’s Guide. I thought that this package was also the right size and shape to be a book, but the writing on the front was certainly not Dr Weir’s. Dr Weir wrote like a doctor: hers was an elegant, almost illegible scrawl – full of loops and squiggles and elaborate flourishes. The writing on the front of this parcel was angular block capitals. I put some food down for Lucy, then took the parcel up to my room and opened it.

  What fell out on my desk was a new paperback edition of Breakfast of Champions. There was no note, but when I opened the front cover, I found this inscription:

  I figured you’d want to find out how it ends. Come over and tell me what you think when you’ve finished.

  After looking at this for some minutes, I put pen to paper and wrote the following reply, which I posted the next day:

  Dear Mr Peterson,

  Thank you for the book. It was very unexpected. I thought you’d probably be angry at me for ever, given what happened, and given that I did a pretty appalling job at explaining what happened. I’ll try to explain now, as best I can, but there might be bits that don’t make much sense to you, since I’m sure school was very different in your day and people probably acted more decently and less like chimpanzees.

  [Here followed a concise account of all the events that had led up to my losing the original copy of Mr Peterson’s book.]