The Realities of Aldous U

by Michael Lawrence

  It was crap, of course. A tree with feelings? But whether or not there was anything in it, he knew that he had to mention it to Naia. She would most likely tear the idea to pieces and deliver a more scientific explanation, but he felt a duty to warn her. If he was even half right about the tree she might touch it at some point and be transported to a Withern Rise she would never willingly visit. One plagued by Naia-hungry wolves perhaps. Now there was a thought.

  Day Two / 2

  Friends had again called and texted during the day to ask Naia if she wanted to go somewhere or do something, but she’d continued to decline. Tied to the house in case Alaric appeared, the highlight of the day was the delivery of the new dining suite for the River Room. Early evening now and she and Alex were having tea on trays and watching a DVD rented from the newsagent’s. When the phone rang and her mother said, ‘That’ll be your dad,’ she said, ‘Tell him to ring back.’ She might have forgiven him for having an affair in another reality, but how dare he interrupt a film she’d been looking forward to? Alex didn’t ask him to ring back; she paused the film. Ivan had phoned to say that he’d decided to risk the journey in spite of the dodgy roads. Alex argued, but he was adamant. He was coming home tomorrow, and that was final.

  ‘It’s very inconvenient,’ she said. ‘I’ll have to kick the lover out.’

  ‘Life,’ he replied. ‘It’s all sacrifices.’

  Later, Naia sat on her bed looking through the photo album that Alex had updated. Her entire life was documented in it. Alaric’s mother would have put together a similar album, she realized. More than similar; identical in every way, except...

  She sat bolt upright ‘My God!’

  She scurried up the bed to sit on her pillows and go through the album again from the beginning. There was a picture of her aged two and a half, in a blue summer dress. Her hair was fairer then, piled up on top of her head and bursting out of a purple scrunchie like a fountain. If there was a picture of Alaric on the same page in his album what would he be wearing? Probably not a summer dress and a scrunchie. She turned more pages, passing rapidly through the years, and photo after photo of her at various ages and phases. Where there were pictures of her with friends, she imagined pictures in Alaric’s album of him with different friends. Not girls, obviously. But who? Did she know them in her reality? Did she like them?

  And then there were the holiday snaps. Had he and his parents gone on the same holidays as she and hers, at the same time? Had they done the same things, exactly the same way? Taken the same pictures, only with him in them instead of her? She came to a photo taken five or six years ago on a Pembrokeshire beach. It showed her and Mum holding icecream cones. Just before Dad clicked the shutter they dipped their noses in the icecream. Was there a picture in Alaric’s book of him and his Alex with icecream on their noses?

  And what about that aunt? The aunt she didn’t have. He hadn’t wanted to talk about her, but he’d said her name, something like Lena, or Limey. Limey? A nickname? Maybe she’d travelled in America. She might be in some of the pictures in his album. Where? Which pages? And what pictures would be on those corresponding pages in her own album?

  Finally there were the photos from the past two years. Had Alaric and his dad continued to take pictures when there was just the two of them? Unlikely, but even if they had, had they stuck them in the album? She doubted this too. People who let a house go as badly as they had wouldn’t give much priority to the upkeep of a family album. It was the necessary differences between the two albums that determined Naia to give Alaric till ten in the morning to come to her. Her father would be home sometime in the afternoon, so it had to be the morning. If he hadn’t showed by ten she would go to him, taking her album with her. He might not want to look at it, but that was his problem. She would insist on comparing it with his. It might even be worth the risk of bumping into the unshared aunt.

  DAY ONE

  Day One / 1

  His father had phoned late last night to say that he and Kate were coming home today, snow or no snow. This had had a galvanizing effect on Liney. She was up at first light and crashing about downstairs, inflicting her misguided concept of order on the house. When he went down and found her in the utility room with a basket of clothes, he decided that this would be a good time to make himself scarce.

  ‘I’ve got to go out,’ he said.

  ‘You haven’t had any breakfast,’ she replied, shoving washing into the machine.

  ‘Cereal bar.’

  ‘Well, before you shoot off, fetch your dirty washing down, would you? And that pile of stuff in your dad’s wardrobe. I don’t see how I’ll ever get everything done before they get here. It’s my fault, allowing myself to sleep. And after the washing there’s the ironing, and then there’s the – ’

  ‘You don’t have to do these things,’ he said. ‘It’s not your job.’

  ‘Of course it’s not my job. But put yourself in Kate’s position. How would you like it if you arrived at to your new home and had to become the family skivvy five minutes after getting your coat off?’

  Alaric went upstairs, gathered all the used clothes he could find, and carried them down sideways, nose averted from his load, parts of which smelt none too sweet.

  ‘Doesn’t your father know how to use this?’ Liney asked when she saw the size of the bundle. ‘Or you, come to that?’

  ‘We manage.’

  ‘Not too well by the look of it. Clothes don’t wash themselves, y’know.’

  ‘I have to go,’ he said.

  ‘Enjoy yourself, but not too much.’

  ‘Why not too much?’

  ‘Bad for your health. I read that somewhere.’

  ‘I’m going out the back.’

  ‘The back?’

  ‘Back door.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I’m eccentric.’

  He donned his boots and parka and walked heavily down the hall, where he unbolted the back door – loudly – before heading upstairs as though trying not to crack eggshells. He was in his room, reaching for the Folly, when he remember the album. He’d brought it up last night to take with him today, wanting to compare it to Naia’s. He picked up the carrier bag containing the album and laid his free hand on the Folly, hoping more than a little fervently that if it worked at all it would send him to her reality, not one of those others.

  Day One / 2

  Ten-fifteen and still he hadn’t come. Well, he’d had his chance. Carrier bag in hand, Naia faced the Folly, which she’d returned to the bookcase. She placed a palm on the dome and, trying to put the coming agony from her mind, did her best to really want to see him. Her palm tingled, and the pain was almost instant, but too swiftly over for it to fully register before the room dissolved. She was outside, under the tree. She was still getting over the speed of the transition when a room began to assemble itself about her. Her own room. Concluding that she must have done something wrong, or not tried hard enough, she closed her eyes, focused on Alaric’s Withern Rise. The tingling again, then the pain leaped up her arm – briefly – before her feet plunged once more into snow. She opened her eyes. The tree fanning out above her was translucent, and somewhere in it a room was again forming, and then she was back, standing before the Folly.

  Her frustration, though considerable, was short-lived. Before she could make a third attempt a tug-o-war commenced between tree and room. One moment she was in the garden, the next indoors, then outside, then her room, back and forth, back and forth, unable to pause, take stock, catch breath. Then, suddenly, she was careering toward the tree as though thrown bodily, and a figure – Alaric – was hurtling toward her. She raised her arms to protect herself an instant before they crashed into one another and began jostling helplessly for position and place.

  It had been the same for Alaric, dragged from bedroom to garden, garden to room, and finally flung toward the tree, where Naia rushed at him, and was at once fighting him for a space that only one could occupy.

  And they b
egan to merge.

  ‘No! No, we’re not the same!’

  ‘The house! Think house! Inside!’

  Walls filling in, a floor, a ceiling, one room, two people joining, flesh, blood, bone.

  ‘Pull apart! Pull... apart!’

  The garden drew them, but held them for moments only before the room reclaimed them. Then back in the garden, then the room, the garden, room, garden, one garden and both, one room and both, fusing, one body, one life, one history –

  ‘No! We’re two! Concentrate!’

  In the garden, time paused, as though taking heed.

  Shivered.

  And the scene divided, slowly.

  ‘It’s working.’

  ‘Hang on, wait!’

  They each reached for a carrier bag dropped in the struggle.

  ‘Okay!’

  Two rooms formed about them, superimposed, but then separated, reluctantly, each to enclose one of them. Furnishings, books, pictures, favored relics of childhood, lost transparency. A tiny cracking sound nearby as the dome of the Folly imploded, and within it the model house folded in upon itself, splintered beyond hope of repair.

  Day One / 3

  She had fallen into her chair in dismay, and when her mother knocked she didn’t answer, just continued to sit there, staring at the small heap of shattered glass and wood. The base, cut from another tree long ago, was the only part of the Folly that remained intact.

  ‘Oh, you are here. I’ve been calling and calling, why didn’t you answer? Listen, you know the…?’ Alex broke off. ‘That isn’t the Folly? Naia, what happened?’

  She had no explanation. None that was remotely believable anyway. All she could think was that never again would she be able to receive Alaric, or visit him, and with so much still to work out and discover. It wasn’t just the knowledge, though. With time she would have worn down that deep-seated belligerence of his, and when the real Alaric emerged from his cocoon of self-pity they would have become as close as the closest brother and sister. How could they not, knowing all that they did, first-hand, of each other’s lives?

  ‘Oh, Naia! I should never have let you have it up here!’

  She could see how it looked. But what credible defense could she offer? The model house, the best thing her mother had ever made, looked as if a miniature wrecking ball had been repeatedly swung against it until there was nothing left of it.

  ‘Well?’ Alex said, whirling on her. ‘Have you nothing to say for yourself?’

  Naia shrank from her. On the few occasions that her mother lost her temper she was far more formidable than Dad in one of his impotent sputtering rages.

  ‘Sorry, I…’

  ‘Sorry? Sorry! That’s it? And what are you doing up here with your boots on? Boots with snow on them? In your room? What is wrong with you, girl?’

  She hadn’t had a chance to remove her outdoor clothes. Hadn’t even put the carrier bag down, just collapsed in the chair, shocked, defeated, exhausted.

  ‘Honest to God, Naia, I sometimes think you haven’t the sense you were born with. I am so…. disappointed in you!’

  With which Alex rushed out, in tears of loss that even she couldn’t explain.

  Day One / 4

  He couldn’t have said why he took the album out of the carrier bag and started to turn the pages. It might have been the need to distract himself, take his mind off the suddenly unreachable, the magnitude of his loss. Whatever the reason, the differences, when he began to notice them, were so marked that they took his breath away. The bib was one of the first. What should have been a blue bib covered in baby elephants was a pink one with cute little rabbits all over it. Then there were the photos of him cuddling dolls, with bows in his hair. It wasn’t until he reached a picture of a gleeful one year old standing up in a bubble bath (what a shock that had been!) that it became clear. During the clash in the garden he and Naia had snatched the wrong bags. He wondered if she’d noticed yet. She was going to have quite a problem explaining his album. The one now in his possession would be less problematic. He would just stash it away somewhere and deny all knowledge of its whereabouts if asked. But he doubted the subject would ever come up. Dad wasn’t that curious about where things got to, specially photo albums. Alex Underwoods, on the other hand, liked to know where everything was at all times. Just for once he was glad he wasn’t in Naia’s shoes.

  Up to a certain point almost every photograph in her book had a faithful counterpart in his. The only person missing was Liney. There weren’t a great many of her in his album, but of course there were none at all here. Other pictures had been substituted, mostly snaps discarded by his mother when putting her album together. The pictures of Naia were the most interesting. Wherever he appeared in the album that she now had, she appeared in this one, in the same settings, doing the same things, at the same frozen instant. In most of the early shots, wearing unisex dungarees, similar pajamas and so on, they could have been the same child; but very soon she was appearing in dresses and skirts, little girl sandals, plastic jewelry, and her hair was down to her shoulders or plaited or in bunches. But even here her expressions deviated very little from his, in the other album’s corresponding pictures.

  But it wasn’t only the photos that were similar. There was a dent in the thick green cover of this album, where, like his own, it had once been dropped. And there was a small brown stain – spilt coffee – on a photo of Naia and her mother trying to look terrified beside a life-size dinosaur at Blackgang Chine: a perfect match for the stain on the same picture in his book, in which he stood pulling faces with his mother.

  It was with trembling fingers that he approached the cut-off point. The first of the many pages that were empty in his book. He turned the page. No pictures had been taken for two or three months after the accident, but then they started, with a vengeance, as if Ivan, suddenly the family’s main photographer, had at last got it together and didn’t intend to let a single event or visit or situation go unrecorded. There were so many pictures of Alex, at first quite frail and underweight, leaning on a walking stick, gradually recovering from her ordeal, gaining strength and color as spring gave way to summer and they started to get out more. He recognized the settings for a few of the photos, but there were many he could not identify. If his mother had lived, his album – now in Naia’s possession – would have contained pictures like these; identical in every respect except that he would be in them, not her.

  Day One / 5

  The last snow had fallen by lunchtime. By early afternoon the sun was nosing through the clouds. With her father due back any time, Naia slipped out of the side gate and turned right. She climbed the cemetery steps and at the top scanned the white graveyard. No Alex Underwood was buried here, of course, but now that she was denied all access to Alaric’s version of the world she wanted to try and identify the spot where they had put her in their cemetery. The sun cast her shadow before her, blue, elongated, as she drifted this way and that seeking the place they might have chosen. No inspiration came, no clue, and after a while she came to the snow-laden wall that separated the cemetery from the house. Here her gaze fell upon a headstone she hadn’t noticed previously. It had always been there, but she’d never been one for dallying in graveyards. The stone leant against the wall, almost wearily, within an arc of ivy. She read the legend chiseled into it.

  ALDOUS UNDERWOOD

  BELOVED SON AND BROTHER

  1934 – 45

  The name surprised her. Another Aldous? Suddenly the world was full of them. First the bishop under the Family Tree, then the writer of the mysterious letter in the Message Hole, now an eleven year old of that name. The boy had died in the last year of the Second World War. As a casualty of the war, she wondered, or of some illness? Being an Underwood, in this cemetery, he must have been a relative; almost certainly living at Withern. By her estimate he had died nineteen years before her father was born, not so long ago really, and yet she’d never heard of him before.

  She turned
away, still with no more idea where they might have buried Alaric’s mother than what to do about the album she’d picked up and brought home by mistake. An album stuffed with pictures of him, not her, with two years’ worth of missing pages: pages her mother had only just completed.