The Realities of Aldous U

by Michael Lawrence

  The first thing she said after greeting him and stepping inside was: ‘My God, haven’t you people heard of heating?’

  ‘The boiler’s broken,’ he said.

  ‘What? You mean there’s no heat at all?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Well, can’t it be fixed?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘But it’s the middle of February!’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And snowing!’

  ‘I know.’

  The afternoon found him on the leather footstool in the Long Room, the thousand pieces of a jigsaw spread across the big coffee table before him. ‘I thought it’d be just your sort of thing,’ Liney said when she handed him The Paradoxes and Illusions of M.C. Escher. He had absolutely no interest in jigsaw puzzles, but had felt obliged to start it as it was a gift. Every now and then as he hunched over it, Liney would dart across as though inspired, pounce on a piece with a cry of triumph, and try and force it into the wrong place. To Alaric she seemed crazier than ever, which was really saying something.

  Few would have guessed, comparing their looks, that his mother and aunt were sisters. While Alex had been of medium height, compact, with short fair hair and blue eyes, Liney was tall and angular, with eyes like green gobstoppers. Her frizzy reddish hair stood up like a badly cut hedge, giving her a perennially startled look. Alaric had said more than once that she looked like a witch. Liney had an even better one. She liked to say that her sister had taken after their mother while she had taken after the dog.

  An obligation to work on the jigsaw wasn’t quite the only reason Alaric stayed with Liney in the Long Room. She had discovered a decades-old electric fire in a cupboard under the stairs. The dust on the old elements had started to sizzle seconds after the fire was plugged in, and inside of a minute outstretched hands detected a degree of warmth, which brought whoops of self-praise from Liney. A cozy scene, in principle: Liney returning to her bizarre knitting, her nephew leaning over a jigsaw beside an old-fashioned fire while snow steadily transformed the world beyond the windows. The image was wasted on Alaric, whose mind was in a stuttering loop that began and ended with his visit to the other River Room, and the girl who seemed so at home there. The paradoxes and illusions of M.C. Escher were a breeze by comparison with all that.

  Day Seven / 6

  It defied logic. Such things didn’t happen. But she’d seen it with her own eyes, and Naia had too much respect for her senses to mistrust the evidence they presented her with. Even at school she was becoming known for her imagination, her enquiring mind, her ability to absorb information. ‘A physicist in the making,’ Mrs. Petrie her Science teacher had said at the last Parents’ Evening. Typically, she’d taken the morning’s encounter at face value without much ado and moved on to wondering who the boy was, where he’d come from, returned to. She recalled his horror upon

  realizing that he wasn’t where he’d believed himself to be; the way he’d run to the Folly as if to some powerful talisman or instrument of salvation. She’d watched as he faded away, and then it was as if he’d never been there. Wonderment followed, of course – amazement, disbelief, all of that – but briefly. The facts of his presence and disappearance were undeniable, and she didn’t even try to deny them. She’d peered at the Folly as though expecting it to offer some visible explanation. The way he’d been gripping it, you’d have thought it would have gone with him, but it hadn’t. She touched the dome; felt nothing unusual. She certainly didn’t vanish, as her visitor had done. Who was he anyway? He’d given his name as Underwood, but that was impossible – as was his likeness to her. Where had he come from? Where had he gone?

  During the hours since then, she’d come up with several theories as to what had occurred and who the boy was, and one by one she’d discarded them as being unfeasible or too fanciful by half, until only a couple continued to seem worthy of consideration. She considered them.

  Day Seven / 7

  When Alaric was little and Aunt Liney visited she used to reach for him and clutch him to her and cover his face with big sloppy kisses. He would wriggle out of her arms in terror and she would howl with laughter. It was at least three years since she last covered him with those kisses. One of the few perks of being sixteen, he decided.

  Liney had cooked the tea and washed up afterwards. The meal was horrible, the washing-up inept. He could have done a better job of both, but kept this to himself. He didn’t want her there, so she could pay for inconveniencing him. Liney wasn’t easy to relax with, forever jumping up and fiddling with things that were perfectly all right as they were. This inability to sit still for long was one of the few things she had in common with his mother, but it did not endear her to him. She’d been unusually still for the better part of an hour, though, sitting on the couch with her feet up. Her feet in those wrinkly socks of hers looked enormous. The socks were but a sample of Liney’s extensive wardrobe of home-made garments, almost all of which were too big, too bright, and shapeless. She had a flat in Sheringham on the north Norfolk coast, above her own craft shop. In the shop she sold other people’s work, some of it very fine, while her flat was crammed with her own wonky lampshades, crudely-glazed pots, garish watercolors, and great clunky bits of jewelry.

  While Alaric bowed his head over the jigsaw, Liney, on the couch, knitted. The needles she used were so long that she had to sit with her head thrown back in order to keep her eyes. Precisely what she was knitting – a dazzling construction of peculiar dimensions and form – was a mystery to him, as it might have been to her. While she worked she contributed to a TV quiz show, shouting things like ‘General Theory of Relativity!’ and ‘Napoleon!’ to questions whose answers turned out to be ‘The Hanging Gardens of Babylon’ and ‘Freddie Mercury’. Television was a novelty to Liney. She didn’t possess one herself and claimed not to want one, but she seemed to be enjoying the quiz, in her way. She had no trouble wrenching her attention away from it, however, as she proved when the phone in the hall rang by simultaneously throwing her knitting in the air and trampolining off the couch in order to flee the room and snatch up the receiver before it was half way through the third ring.

  ‘Hello? Ivan! Hi, how ya doing, boy?’

  After a spot of inconsequential chat she called Alaric to the phone.

  ‘Hello.’

  ‘Al! I’m ringing from Newcastle!’ He made it sound as if he’d reached the North Pole after weeks of hardship, a diet of husky and ice, with gangrenous toes. ‘Liney says it’s snowing pretty hard there. Coming down like nobody’s business here now too.’

  ‘Really.’

  There being nothing he wanted to say to his father their conversation soon fizzled out and Alaric returned to the Long Room, where he found his aunt stabbing the TV remote in a vain attempt to avoid the news, which seemed to have come on every channel. The contents of her own head were bad enough news, Liney always said, without hearing about the rest of the world’s problems.

  ‘Anything to report?’ she asked, glaring at the screen.

  ‘Report?’

  ‘From Newcastle.’

  He returned to his puzzle. ‘Snowing.’

  ‘That all?’

  ‘Just about.’

  Liney hit the off button. Silence rattled down like the blade of a guillotine. Minutes passed. About as good at silence as at most other things, Liney, clutching at conversational straws, asked Alaric how he was doing at school. He told her he was doing okay, mainly because the truth would lead to more questions. The blade fell again. Liney tried whistling through her teeth, but finding that she couldn’t whistle badly and knit badly at the same time, gave up the whistling.

  Alaric went to bed early. Lay there listening to his aunt banging about downstairs. He had no idea what she was doing and didn’t care. Eventually she came up. He knew the house so well that he could tell which stair she was on by its individual creak. He heard her go into the bathroom. Then the water pipes were thumping, the way they did when the hot tap was run t
oo fast. Five minutes later she emerged, and after a pause closed the guest room door with a small but decisive click. Ordinary everyday sounds, every one, but how different even a door can sound when closed by someone you don’t know well. It would be like that when Kate came, he thought. Everything she did would be unfamiliar, and consequently irritating. Kate had visited them for a week in September, sleeping in the room Liney was using now. He hadn’t minded her then, had rather liked her in fact. She seemed warm and open and had a good sense of humor. But that was before she decided to move in with them.

  Even though it was late and the light was off, it wasn’t completely dark in his room. He’d pulled the curtains back to watch the snow fall while he lay in bed. By morning it would cover everything beyond the window. Ordinarily he might have looked forward to seeing the new white world the day would bring, but even after all these hours he was unable to think of anything but the girl who looked so much like him and claimed to share his name. She even had a River Room, and an old glass shade with a perfect Withern Rise inside. If nothing else was impossible this was. His mother had only made one Folly. There could be no other.

  Day Seven / 8

  Naia dreamed. In the dream she was an observer, watching a boy climb the great oak in the south garden. There was something about the boy that reminded her of the morning’s visitor, though the boy in the dream was younger: ten, eleven, twelve at a pinch. Having already climbed higher than was sensible, he crawled out along one of the sturdier boughs. It was summer, the tree was in full leaf, so she could only catch glimpses of him now, but suddenly there was a crack, and the boy fell, hit the ground hard, didn’t get up. Then a great slow tide of water rolled across the garden and covered everything, including the body, and Naia woke abruptly to find her sheets soaking wet. She was horrified. She couldn’t remember the last time this had happened. She cleared up after herself, quietly so as not to wake anyone, changed her pajamas, climbed back into bed. After a little tossing and turning she again slept, and again dreamed – the same dream with one small difference. As before, it was summer. As before the boy climbed the tree, and after going out too far fell to his death. Again, a short pause, then an identical form rose from the dead body and walked away. The garden remained unflooded, the bed dry.

  DAY SIX

  Day Six / 1

  It was freezing when he woke. His breath hovered above him like small blue pockets of fate. His clock told him it was almost ten. Well, no school, stay here all day if I want. But he didn’t want. Too cold for one thing. Not that it would be much warmer out of bed. Probably less warm. Still, he crawled out, shrugged on his dressing gown, went downstairs. He knew where Liney was well before he got to the kitchen by her screechy duet with Bryan Adams. ‘Mor-ning,’ she sang as he entered.

  ‘Yeah,’ he said, and turned the radio down.

  ‘I haven’t made any breakfast. Wasn’t sure what you have.’ He drew back the larder door and rattled a cereal packet at her. ‘I’ve arranged for someone to come and look at the heating,’ she said.

  ‘Just look at it?’

  ‘Hopefully fix it. Tomorrow morning, early.’

  He tipped the cereal into a bowl. ‘Dad know?’

  ‘No. Be a surprise for him.’

  ‘Like the bill when it arrives.’

  ‘By then he’ll be too warm to care.’

  He shoveled his cereal down without much pause and went back upstairs. Got dressed to music. He left the music on to give the impression that he was still there when he crept down a second time. Liney was still in the kitchen, air-miking Better Be Good To Me with Tina Turner. From the stairs he crossed to the River Room, closed the door quietly. It felt even colder in there than yesterday. He went to the French doors and stood looking out, hands in armpits. Snow had fallen steadily through the night, was falling still. The grounds were white and flawless, the trees and bushes across the river clearly delineated works of art.

  But he wasn’t there to admire the view. He turned to the ornament on the sideboard. The night had given him time to think. But thoughts prove nothing. He wiped the dust off the dome and the snow at the room’s windows immediately found a purer reflection. He gazed at the little house within, a precise copy of the Withern Rise his mother had known, cared for, made so homely; not the one he and his father had let go so carelessly. Yearning once again to be at the Withern of better days, he put his hands on the dome, and almost at once felt a tingling in his palms. It wasn’t an unpleasant sensation, but it was all he could do not to cry out at what came next, a very sharp, intense pain that shot up his arms and rampaged through every part of him. He only just managed to keep his hands on the glass, knowing – his conclusions of the night had walked him through it – that he must maintain contact for the event to reach completion. What he glimpsed through the veil of agony was the room becoming translucent, and the old oak in the south garden rearing up, its great boughs and numberless branches unfurling like cables and strings above him. Then the garden was slotting itself into place all around him, piece by piece, like an automated Escher jigsaw. Only when the setting was complete did the last of the room fade, and the pain with it. His hands were empty.

  He peered through the snow falling at the tree’s rim like a white bead curtain. Everything looked as it should at first glance, but then he noticed the doors. The garage doors and the front door of the house should be green, but these had been stripped back to the wood. And the front porch. The porch was clear of the boxes and bags of rubbish his dad had been piling there for weeks. Then the ivy caught his eye. The ivy that should be scrambling unchecked across every wall, all the way to the roof, so thick in places that its own weight threatened to pull it away. The ivy he was looking at was neat, controlled, carefully trimmed.

  Day Six / 2

  Naia had spent much of the morning in her room, partly to avoid the tasks her mother would have inflicted on her at sight, partly in case yesterday’s visitor returned. She tried closing her eyes with one of Mum’s ‘relaxing’ tapes on in the background, but it just made her drowsy. She didn’t want to be drowsy, she wanted to be alert for when he came. If he came.

  Day Six / 3

  He cursed his stupidity. He’d willfully engineered this return, known that if he succeeded, and there was a pattern to this, he would find himself outside in the first instance; but he hadn’t had the wit to dress for the weather. He was even wearing slippers again. He looked at the house. It might not be his, but he had to get inside if he didn’t want to freeze. He’d gotten in easily enough yesterday. How had he done that? He stood under the tree, shivering, thinking of the warmth to be had inside, at such a loss as to how to get to it that he felt little surprise, only relief, when four walls rose about him, a ceiling formed above him, a carpeted floor rolled out beneath him. ‘Took you long enough,’ Naia said. ‘But did you have to bring all that snow in?’

  Day Six / 4

  She sat on the floor, leaning against the bed, her knees a book-rest. To look at her, you’d think he’d walked in the door, by arrangement, instead of out of nowhere in a whirl of snow. He stared about him, skin burning with the rush of warmth.

  ‘My room,’ he said.

  Naia tossed her book aside, and said: ‘My room.’

  ‘Why am I up here?’

  ‘I brought the Folly up.’ She indicated it on the bookcase. ‘I wasn’t sure, but just before you appeared it sort of shivered, like it was getting ready to receive you or whatever. I’m betting you have a Folly too?’

  ‘Yes...’

  ‘Well, yours sends you off, mine pulls you in. You’re ruining my carpet. Get those slippers off. Why are you wearing slippers anyway if you’ve been outside? Don’t move.’

  She dove under the bed as if that was what everyone did immediately after greeting someone. While she was down there Alaric took in his surroundings. It was his room all right, and he knew a number of the things in it intimately: the old easy chair, the chest of drawers, the corner cupboard, wardrobe, bookcase
(though there were more books on this one). The things that he did not recognize were new or newish furnishings, ornaments, pictures that wouldn’t have been his choice.

  ‘Put them on this.’

  He stepped out of his slippers on the sheet of paper she’d laid out.

  ‘Your mother in?’ he asked.

  ‘Downstairs.’

  ‘Likely to come up?’

  ‘We’ll listen out for her. Keep your voice down anyway.’

  He flung himself into the chair and leant back. It was his chair in every respect. There was even a loose spring that dug into your backside. He felt something under his palm on one of the arm-rests. He tilted his hand: a rip in the material exactly like the one he’d made when he dropped a pair of scissors there when he was ten or eleven.

  From deep in the old chair, he sought differences between this room and his own. Most were very obvious. These walls, for instance, were papered: a delicate purple and green pattern; his walls weren’t papered but painted, black and red, his chosen combination when he was thirteen. His curtains were pale blue, in need of a wash; hers matched her wallpaper and looked fresh. On her window ledge there were dolls, soft toys, ornaments she’d outgrown but didn’t want to part with. Mostly there was just litter and dust on his ledge. He’d dumped most of his old stuff ages ago. Here, everywhere you looked above head height were wind chimes, slowly revolving mobiles – butterflies, stars, little parasols – and dream catchers. Nothing dangled from Alaric’s ceiling apart from the odd spider or cobweb.

  Naia was watching him. ‘Is it very like yours,’ she said, ‘or just fairly?’

  ‘I’m a bit short of dolls.’

  He stood up suddenly; headed for the door.