The Realities of Aldous U

by Michael Lawrence

  Day One / 6

  He sat on the floor of his room, cross-legged, staring at listless flakes of snow nudging one another across the black window. Down in the kitchen Liney’s singing was at its demented worst as she prepared a ‘special’ meal. He dreaded to think what ‘special’ meant, but he didn’t care that much. The only thing that really mattered was that it was over. He’d seen all he was going to of the way things might have been for him. Of course, there was still the tree. No telling what the tree could do, where it could take him if…

  No. Time to face reality. The reality in which his mother wasn’t coming back, where Kate would be instead, and things would be different. It might not be so bad. His mother had liked Kate. That is, Naia’s mother had, and that was good enough for him. It had to be. It was all there was.

  The clang of the old doorbell loped through the house, collecting echoes. His heart thumped. There it was. The signal to move on. He got up and went out to the landing, where he stood looking down. He couldn’t see all the way along the hall from there, but he heard Liney open the front door, shout a greeting, his father’s gruff response: ‘I don’t know, locked out of my own house.’

  ‘Safety precaution,’ Liney said. ‘How were the roads?’

  ‘Roads? Don’t talk to me about roads. You wouldn’t know gritting had been invented. Here we are, 21st century, and – ’

  ‘Shut up, you miserable git, and introduce us.’

  ‘Hm! Liney, this is Kate. Kate, this is the mad old bat I’ve been telling you about.’

  ‘Kate!’ Alaric imagined Liney reaching for her and hugging the breath out of her, then pulling her inside. He heard the door close, feet stomping on the mat, and Dad asking what was burning and where all the heat was coming from. Liney answered both questions. He sounded quite pleased about the second.

  ‘Turn my back for one minute, and…’ He’d noticed the Long Room through the open door to his left. ‘Stone me.’

  ‘You gave us permission, remember? Don’t you like it?’

  ‘Tell you when I get over the shock.’

  ‘I’m not taking all the blame,’ Liney said. ‘That son of yours. What a slave-driver. And talk about perfectionist.’

  ‘Where is he anyway?’

  His father stepped further into the hall, Kate and Liney trailing after him, already chatting intimately. The Kate Faraday Alaric looked down upon from the landing was a Kate he’d virtually forgotten – cheerful, enthusiastic, warm – not the cold calculating bitch he’d turned her into in his mind. She saw him before anyone else did.

  ‘Alaric!’ she cried, as though spotting a long-lost relative.

  He couldn’t find his voice immediately, but managed a small wave as he walked to the head of the stairs. Well, here goes, he thought. There was a peculiar tightness in his chest as he started down.

  TURNBACK: ALTERNATIVE

  ...rushed at one another, and were at once fighting for a space that only one could occupy.

  And they began 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. Everything in place now. Furnishings, books, pictures, favored relics of childhood.

  But the wrong ones.

  A tiny cracking sound as the dome of the Folly imploded, and within it the model house folded in upon itself, splintered beyond hope of repair, stranding them in the wrong realities.

  Wrong lives.

  DAY ONE

  Day One / 1a

  Sitting in Naia’s chair before the decimated ornament, he barely heard the knock. When the door opened he didn’t move. No point. No escape route.

  ‘Oh, you are here. I’ve been calling and calling, why didn’t you answer? Listen, you know the…?’

  Whatever she’d come in for was forgotten as she realized that the person sitting in her daughter’s chair was not Naia. She stared blankly at him, and he stared back, helplessly, and their eyes locked, and when they locked it

  was impossible for either of them to look away. But then he caught something at the corner of his eye. A shifting, a changing. Shapes and colors reorganizing themselves all around them. Only when the room became still again were they able to blink. The blink unlocked their stare. He glanced around. Naia’s things were gone. Her clothes, the dressing gown behind the door, the old toys and dolls, her makeup and jewelry, posters and magazines, the multitude of mobiles, all the strategically-placed candles and incense sticks. Everything that was particular and peculiar to Naia Underwood had either faded out of existence or turned into male equivalents. Even the wallpaper, curtains and duvet cover had become more him than her. He was marveling at this, trying to understand, when Alex spoke.

  ‘That isn’t the Folly! Oh, what happened?’

  He said nothing. He couldn’t. Why did it no longer look like Naia’s room? Why wasn’t her mother demanding to know what he was doing there?

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

  He jumped. She’d called him Alaric. How did she know his name? Had Naia told her? And what did she mean, she should never have let him –

  She whirled on him, face knotted with fury.

  ‘Well? Have you nothing to say for yourself?’

  He shrank back. He’d forgotten how formidable she could be when she lost it.

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

  Day One / 2a

  Naia was alone when Alaric’s things vanished or changed into hers, his room become a less welcoming, sadder version of her own, complete with mobiles, but fewer of them, and less vibrant. Very much alarmed, she opened the door – and stifled a scream. For there stood a gawky, brightly-dressed stranger with startled hair and jewelry that might have been crafted by a bricklayer with a hangover. ‘Are you planning on finishing the jigsaw, or shall I put it way?’ the scary stranger asked. With no idea what this apparition was talking about, she mumbled something unintelligible and closed the door fast. She leant against it, understanding everything in a rush of horror. The Folly was smashed. There was no way back. She was stuck here for good and all, and Alaric’s reality had adapted to take account of this. Of her. The woman outside the door thought she’d always known her when she’d never even heard of her a minute ago. Here, now, Alaric Underwood had never existed. There had only ever been Naia.

  As soon as she felt that her legs would support her she crept downstairs. Careful to avoid Liney, she put on her coat and boots (which were waiting for her by the front door) and went out. Preoccupied as she left the porch, she was slow to hear the dry slithering sound from above. Only when it became a muffled clatter did she look up – and jump aside just in time. Not quite far enough, though. The falling slate glanced off her shoulder and thudded into the snow at her feet. She stared at the indentation in the material of her coat. If she hadn’t moved when she did the slate would have pierced her skull. She stepped away from the house, well away, unnerved by
the thought that there might now be a new reality, seconds old, in which a Naia Underwood who had not been quick enough lay on the ground, blood discoloring the snow around her head, and spreading.

  Day One / 3a

  Alaric had plodded round the garden several times by different routes. He needed unconfined thinking space and there was plenty of that here, with enough idiosyncratic cover to escape glances from the windows of the house. ‘I’m here to stay,’ he murmured as he walked. ‘To stay.’ Kate Faraday would not be moving in. There was no heartbreaking grave here, no Aunt Liney. Pity about Liney; she wasn’t so bad once you got used to her. Well, can’t have everything.

  For the most part his eyes were on the ground just ahead of him, taking little note of where he trod. When he found that his feet had delivered him to the roots of the Family Tree he stopped abruptly. Stepped back. Walked quickly away.

  Day One / 4a

  The snow was falling very half-heartedly by the time she reached the steps. At the top she paused, gathering the courage to do what she knew she must. She stepped toward the nearest headstone and brushed the snow away. The revealed name meant nothing to her. She went to the next, and the next, and so on, dashing snow from inscription after inscription. By the time she’d read eighteen her hands were like ice. But when she saw the nineteenth epitaph, in the cloister of ivy under the wall, she ceased to feel the cold.

  ALEXANDRA UNDERWOOD

  BELOVED WIFE AND MOTHER

  1966 - 2003

  It should have helped knowing that it wasn’t really her mother’s grave, but it didn’t, much. Her mother was still very much alive, but she would never see her again, never have a laugh with her or a petty squabble, fall out with her and make up. Never again would they go shopping together, or snuggle up on the couch looking through clothes catalogues or watching the rowdy game shows that drove Dad out of the room tearing at the remains of his hair. Life without Mum. How could she bear it? With this thought, finally, the tears came. Great gushing, shoulder-heaving welts of tears.

  ‘You all right there?’

  She turned. A man in a black overcoat stood in the watery blur.

  ‘Yes.’ She turned away again. ‘Thanks.’

  ‘You sure?’

  ‘Oh, shove off,’ she muttered.

  Not quietly enough. ‘Right you are,’ the man said.

  She glanced along the line of her shoulder and watched him walk away. An odd stride, awkward, unsure, like someone who was just finding his feet after a long time off them. There was something sad about him that was hard to pin down. He hadn’t been prying; just passing, heard her sobbing, offered concern. She wiped her eyes on her sleeve. Shouted after him.

  ‘Sorry! Didn’t mean that!’

  The man stopped, appeared to be considering his response, then, evidently deciding, started back. Naia groaned. Why couldn’t she keep her trap shut? Drawing near, the snow grunting beneath his feet, the man stuck a hand into one of his deep pockets.

  ‘Aniseed ball?’

  ‘Pardon?’

  He tugged out a soiled paper bag and twitched it open as he joined her. She peered in.

  ‘No thanks. Bad for your teeth.’

  He grinned at this, showing good teeth for their age, and for someone so keen on sweets. He popped two aniseed balls into his mouth and shoved the bag back in his pocket, mumbling something she didn’t catch. Wishing she didn’t feel an obligation to be so courteous, she asked him to repeat it. He shuffled the contents of his mouth.

  ‘I said it’s peaceful here.’

  It’s a graveyard, she thought, what do you expect, pole dancers? But she said, ‘Yes.’

  In spite of his obvious age there was something incongruously youthful about the man: wide eyes, the way he moved, fluttered his hands. There were very few lines on his face. He indicated the grave.

  ‘Wasn’t your mother, was she?’

  ‘No,’ she said, rather too quickly.

  The old man crunched hard on an aniseed ball. Tilted his head. ‘I’ve seen you, I have.’

  ‘Seen me?’

  He tapped his temple, but only said, ‘What’s your name?’

  She twigged. He was an old perve who hung around places like this hoping some ripe specimen would come along so he could chat her up and God knew what else.

  ‘What’s yours?’ she said.

  Instead of answering he turned away and started back the way he’d been going when she made the mistake of apologizing.

  ‘What is it, a secret?’ she shouted after him.

  He continued on until, reaching the steps, he half turned and looked back across the graveyard. His next words, carried on such still air, were as clear as could be.

  ‘It’s Aldous,’ he said. ‘Aldous Underwood. The one and only.’

  Then he descended the steps, and was

  gone.

  Day One / 5a

  Alaric sat in the very familiar chair in the room that had been Naia’s, the family album spread across his knees. This time the album was his own, not hers, and as he’d brought it with him from the garden it had not changed, unlike his surroundings. Everything in it fitted perfectly here, except the empty pages that should contain pictures from the past two years. He imagined that Naia’s mother, once she’d gotten over the accident, had found or taken photos to fill those pages. How could he hope to explain their absence? Should he hide the book, claim to know nothing of it, so that its disappearance would eventually become another of life’s unsolved mysteries? Naia was lucky, in this if nothing else. He’d never known his father to open the family album; doubted that he even knew where it was kept.

  The missing two years were going to give him other headaches too. Naia’s mind contained all the memories her former parents would now expect to be in his. There would be times when things they’d done together as a family would be mentioned, require comment, or at least some recollection. He gulped at the thought of all the making it up as he went along that he would have to do.

  But this was a small price to pay, and nothing compared to what Naia would have to contend with. When his ex-father returned from Newcastle his memory would tell him that he was her father, that he had never had a son, only a daughter: a daughter with whom he’d shared a terrible loss and grief. No one there would know that her grief was just beginning. There was nothing Alaric could do about that, but he hoped she didn’t think he was sitting here in her house, her room, thrilled by the upturn in his fortunes at the expense of hers.

  And yet…

  An exquisite glow washed through him. Down in the kitchen, in the farthest reaches of the house, an Alex Underwood was preparing a special meal for her husband’s return – and for her son. The house radiated a warmth and color it had never lost here, and all was very right with the world. They were going to be a real family again. The three of them. Just like the old days.

  Day One / 6a

  The old days were coming back – gradually, at their own pace, but coming. As yet he could recall little of the village or the town, but there was more each day of the house, and life there when his body was young. In one of these new memories he raced from room to room, hiding from his little sisters and brother. His sisters had high excited voices.

  There was one room in particular: the corner room up there on the right. There’d been wooden shutters at the windows back then. Maroon shutters with slats. He had first remembered the room a week ago, standing on this very spot across the river. There’d been someone at the window, a young man, who must have reminded him of himself, for his former occupancy of the room had returned in an instant, with some force. Aldous longed to enter that room again and gaze down at the slow river, as he once had, a lifetime ago. The river had been thick with lily-pads when the view was his. Lilies and shutters: such incidental things. How many more incidentals were due to come home to roost?

  A few days ago he’d remembered his grandmother and been filled with a rich and wonderful warmth. A small fleshy woman full of kindness and laughter.
He recalled sitting on her knee while she read to him, and on the kitchen table in his vest and pants while she washed him with the softest of flannels from a white tin bowl. The washing water had come from the rain barrel outside the kitchen door, heated in a copper pan on the range. The seven o’clock news always seemed to be on the wireless when Gran was washing him. Much talk of the War Effort.

  Night had as good as fallen and the snow had stopped, but it was as light beside the river as any winter night in his limited memory. Gazing across at the house where he was sure he’d been happy once, Aldous felt a sudden need to be nearer to it. He could go round the long way, of course, across that bridge, but there was nothing between him and the house but the river’s width. He stepped down onto the snow-covered ice; tested it with one foot. It held. He lowered his other foot. The ice barely moved. He started across, step by cautious step. If it cracked and opened up he would either drown or freeze to death. He would not be missed. There was no one now. This, if nothing else, he was sure of.

  He reached the half way point, and stopped. Standing on the frozen river in the glowing darkness was like standing between two worlds. He remained there for some time trying to decide which way to go: back to the bank, where he was a rootless stranger, or forward, across the ice, to his childhood home. The scene of his death sixty years earlier.

  Day One / 7a

  Naia sat in the room that had been Alaric’s, in the chair that was the same in both realities. The family album was spread across her knees. Soon she would have to remove those last seven or eight pages, put them where no one would think of looking. She couldn’t destroy them. She could never destroy them. They were all she had left of...

  It had to be faced. She no longer had a mother. Again. I no longer have a mother. Whatever she did from now on, wherever she went, she would always know that her mother was going about her life elsewhere, without her; that the woman who gave birth to her no longer knew she’d ever had a daughter. She wouldn’t be missed for a minute, remembered for a second. She struggled not to blub again. What a day of secret tears. What a fine conclusion. To be stuck for life in a world that she hadn’t known existed till a week ago.