The Realities of Aldous U

by Michael Lawrence

  A question came to him. If he’d visited a year that predated his birth, and that year was as current to its inhabitants as his was to him, what was the past if not just another present? Did pieces of history continue forever, repeating over and over, start to finish, as in a loop, like small enclosed eternities? There might be many such fragments, linked to others across decades by the equivalent of invisible strings, as this June seemed to be linked to June 1945. But wouldn’t that make this month, or part of it, a small eternity too? If so, why? And why would it be linked to that year, that month? Because something similar had happened in each? What? Withern Rise existed in both Junes, but there was only one other major similarity that he could think of: the flooding. Yet there’d been flooding in 1947 too, much worse flooding, so why wasn’t his present linked to that year? Maybe the flooding alone was insufficient to bind two small eternities together. All right, so what else might do it? The only other notable event that took place here in June 1945, as far as he knew, was the death of young Aldous. But there’d been no similar death this June. He must be missing something.

  He drew near the tree. He touched it. Nothing happened. He looked up. Considered.

  Friday: 10

  The transfer between the tree’s two ages was quick and effortless. Naia was standing behind the trunk – the water was lower here, too, today – hoping Alaric would come, and come soon, when she picked up the sound of sobbing from the turf-roofed hut near the kitchen: an Anderson shelter, as she now knew it to be. She hesitated, but not for long. Holding the album tightly within her cagoule, she stepped out from the tree. It wasn’t raining here, so she let her hood fall back.

  With the coarse leather draped over the shelter’s entrance, she couldn’t see who was crying inside. It was a young voice, slightly husky. She twitched a corner of the cover aside. There was no light in there, but the sobbing stopped at once. She pulled the leather further back, and light fell across the thin face of young Ray, sitting hunched up on a bench, barely clear of the water inside the hut. He stared at her with big red eyes.

  ‘Go ’way.’

  ‘It’s only me,’ she said gently.

  ‘Go away.’

  ‘What’s wrong? Why are you crying?’

  He reached out, jerked the cover from her, returning himself to darkness. She put her mouth close to the leather. ‘My name’s Naia,’ she whispered, enunciating carefully so he wouldn’t mistake the name for any other.

  ‘Don’t care. Leave me alone.’ And he started sobbing again.

  She wished she could give him a hug, dry his eyes, find out what was upsetting him, soothe him better. But she had no right to do such things here. It was probably nothing anyway. He was very young. He’d probably been scolded by his mother for some mischief and was feeling sorry for himself. Still, she would have liked to comfort him. She recalled the times that he – as a man of advancing years – had sat her on his knee when she was little. Grandpa used to go out of his way to cheer her up when she was feeling down. She remembered him as a small man with a wheezy chest that plagued him greatly during his final years; yet even then he was always chirpy when she was around, as if he considered it his duty to be so. He liked to read to her at bedtime, and sometimes he would make up a story on the spot. Or sing some comic song. Grandpa Rayner, bless him. How he loved to sing. Like his dad, she now realized: her great grandfather, Alaric Eldon.

  She left the boy in the shelter and waded past the hen house to the partial cover of a high hawthorn hedge from where, less exposed to the upper windows of the house, she gazed about her. There might never be another chance to see the garden as it was here and now. A small wooden shed stood against the cemetery wall, where she was used to seeing an apple tree, and there was a greenhouse in the kitchen garden. There wasn’t a greenhouse either in her present reality or her true one, but she was almost sure she remembered one from when she was small. What had happened to it? Could it have been this very greenhouse, due to finally collapse half a century from now? She leaned out from the hedge to survey the south garden, with its haphazard arrangement of trees, bushes, shrubs. The south garden of her experience contained just one tree, the great oak, the rest of it being flat, empty, nothing like as varied as this, as interesting, inviting. She wasn’t very knowledgeable about trees, but as well as the apple and the pear, with the rope hammock slung between them, she recognized elms and silver birches, and beyond these, way down by the southern boundary wall, evergreens, tall and dark and shapely. Many of these trees would have continued into her day if, a couple of years after the war, the property had not been sold to people who preferred the south garden ‘landscaped’, the landscaping to include a tennis court.

  ‘Miss? Hello? What’s your business please?’

  She stepped out from the hedge, guiltily. A middle-aged man in waders much like her own leaned out of the open kitchen door. He was broad and rather gruff-looking.

  ‘I was looking for Aldous.’

  She’d been ready with this. Just as well, she thought; but at her words the man gripped the doorjamb, opened his mouth as if to respond, but instead stepped back and closed the door, sealing himself into the flooded kitchen. Staring at the blank door it came to Naia that there’d been something about the man, something familiar – the thick gray hair, the high-boned nose, broad jaw – and she remembered Mr. Knight telling her that his father was gardener here once upon a time. Well, she’d met him now, and she wasn’t impressed.

  She turned about and waded as quickly as she could away from the house. Not toward the tree that had conveyed her here. Toward the side gate, and the lane that ran past the cemetery.

  Friday: 11

  Alaric barely noticed the tiny flash, like sunlight striking a window as you run past, but he couldn’t miss the change in the look and feel of the tree. It was younger, brighter, and so full that he could see nothing beyond his sitting place. He knew well enough where he was, and imagined he knew when. He looked for the photo album. It wasn’t where he’d put it yesterday. Wasn’t anywhere that he could see. Did that mean that someone had climbed up and taken it? Or that it had dropped through the branches into the –

  A movement below, beneath the mass of leaves that separated him from the water. He froze. Listened. A blackbird peeking through the foliage saw no threat in his immobility and hopped onto the bough. He ignored the bird and the bird was willing to pay him the same compliment as long as he did nothing hasty or untoward. It even tolerated his cautious parting of the leaves to try and see who was down there, but when he lost a little balance and groped for something to save himself, it leapt up and crashed away, out of the tree. When the bird’s startled flight was followed by a cry from below, Alaric created a spyhole to peer through, and saw the boy, Aldous. He wasn’t dead then. But again the polythene bag covered his head. Again he was suspended by the bag’s drawstring, flailing for his life. Why would he risk that again, the fool, after what must have been a very narrow escape yesterday?

  Well, never mind that now. Later, later. He shoved through the leaves feet first; felt around for the lower bough; dropped onto it. There, astride it, he edged along until he sat above the boy, who, as yesterday, stared up at him, the polythene stretched across his open mouth as he tried to tug the cord from his neck. Alaric reached down, unsure even as he did so whether to tear the material from the boy’s face or lift him first, to lessen the risk of strangulation. His hand was inches away when, with the slightest of lurches and a confusion of daylights, he was reaching for nothing, and Aldous Underwood had been dead for sixty years.

  Friday: 12

  Naia twisted the big iron ring, tugged the high green gate, and water from the lane and the garden merged. She recalled a splintered, elderly version of this gate which remained in situ until the mid-1990s, when it was scrapped in favor of a less sturdy one which, three or four years on, would be vandalized and itself replaced – by a gate much more like this, but blue.

  She pushed her way into the lane, pulled the ga
te to behind her, and stood, for the first time, beyond the precincts of Withern Rise 1945. The main immediate difference was the pair of 17th century cottages that had been demolished before she was born, to make way for the playground extension in which she had skipped and played hopscotch during her primary school years. They were unremarkable cottages, not in any way attractive, and there’d been few protests when they went. The tenants had been rehoused comfortably enough elsewhere. What Naia did not know was that the one on the left was the home of the Mr. Knight she’d just met, his insecure wife Clarice, and their young son, who, many years from now, would present her with a white kitten she would name after her male equivalent from another reality.

  Still clasping Alaric’s album inside her cagoule, she headed up the lane toward the village, curious to see how it looked now. The war in Europe had just ended. The very war that she’d had to research and write about exhaustively in a recent school project. Then, the period had been the dullest of the dull, but now that she was actually in it she wanted to see and experience every detail. She suspected that Mr. Ackley, her excitable history teacher, would have traded at least one of his four kids to be here now.

  From outside, the red-bricked, high-windowed mid-Victorian schoolhouse was well-nigh identical to the one she had attended until shortly before her twelfth birthday. It would be different inside, though. Different kinds of desk, for one thing. She reached for the latch of the school gate, intending to peer in a couple of the windows and see what a genuine 1940s classroom looked like.

  ‘Miss! This way!’

  She glanced toward the voice. A man in a brown trilby was standing by the hedge at the end of the lane.

  ‘Don’t move,’ he said before she could ask what he wanted.

  Then she saw it. A sturdy wooden tripod planted in the water, an old-fashioned camera on top, pointing her way.

  She left the gate, stepped toward the man, simultaneously raising a hand to cover her face. ‘No, wait.’

  Too late. The shutter had clicked.

  ‘Pictorial record of the floods!’ said the man. ‘You might see it in the paper on Thursday.’ He lifted his tripod clear of the water and clamped the legs together. ‘You from round here?’

  She couldn’t speak. Couldn’t think. The implications of that picture!

  ‘Shocking business up the lane there,’ the man said. ‘Poor kid. Poor family.’

  ‘Sorry, I don’t know what – ’

  ‘Dreadful. Dreadful.’

  The photographer waded off, dripping tripod against his shoulder like a rifle, along the road toward the Green, which, within five or six years, would be semicircled by pebbledashed council houses. She watched him go, thinking, It’s okay, no one will know, it’s just another photo, forget it, and turned away, into the village, intent on leaving the incident behind her.

  If the street hadn’t been under water she would have noted the absence of white lines along the middle of it, and yellow lines below each curb, but few other differences would have caught her eye, for in the years between this day and hers no building at this end of the street would be significantly altered. It wasn’t until she was some way along that more blatant disparities became evident; the shop she knew as a newsagent’s, for instance. Here it had smaller windows and bore the legend Wm. Forrest, Grocer. And almost directly opposite the grocer’s, above a very modest window beside a small blue door, she read the words J. Lee Fresh Bread & Cakes Daily. Seeing this, she felt a sudden longing to go in and find out if bread tasted different in the 1940s; but she hadn’t the right currency, or the ration book she might need to obtain even the smallest of loaves. She waded closer anyway, and found a hand-written notice pinned to the door which made it plain that she wouldn’t have been able to buy anything anyway.

  High waters has put out

  the ovens so no bread, sorry

  She’d just read this when a small jolt and a change of atmospheres compacted six decades into a couple of blinks, and she was looking not at J. Lee the Baker’s but at racks of bicycles behind a plate glass window in the Eynesford in which she had no choice but to reside these days. Just as suddenly, she was so incredibly weak that she had no idea how she would make it back to the house through all this water without someone to lean on.

  But there was no one. No one here who even knew her.

  Friday: 13

  This time Alaric was so shattered that he thought he would die if he didn’t lie down soon. He kicked his sandals off in the Long Room and left a damp footprint trail all the way upstairs. In the bathroom, drying his legs with infinite weariness, he thought: Houses half this size have two bathrooms. Not us. In a time-warp, us. He was on his way to his room, feeling his way like a shadow on the wall, when Alex saw him from below.

  ‘Alaric, what on earth…?’

  She rushed up, took his weight, helped him along the landing, questioning all the way.

  ‘Leave off,’ he managed, ‘I’m all right,’ but she wasn’t convinced.

  ‘I’m calling the doctor.’

  ‘Friday afternoon,’ he said feebly. ‘No surgery.’

  ‘No. Damn.’

  She stretched him out on his bed, leant anxiously over him.

  ‘Is there anything you want to tell me?’

  ‘It’s nothing. Really.’

  She felt his brow with the back of her hand. ‘Can I get you anything?’

  ‘Dose of peace and quiet’d be good.’

  ‘I was thinking of a drink.’

  ‘Go ahead. Just close the door behind you.’

  More alarmed than she’d let on, Alex went downstairs feeling useless, inadequate. A good mother would surely know what was wrong with her son, and what to do about it, but she had no idea, no idea at all. What she did know was that if she pushed him, intruded too much, she might alienate him completely. She daren’t risk that. He’d been so cheerful these past few months, and more affectionate than at any time since primary school. It had been lovely. Like a real friendship. She wanted to preserve that, at all costs.

  She went to the kitchen. Put the kettle on. Then sat on a stool behind the half open door, listening for the slightest sound from upstairs.

  This time Alaric did not sleep, though sleep was all that his body craved. Something had happened which needed to be thought through. The only thing he was certain of, now that it had sunk in, was that the tree had not dispatched him to the day after Aldous had accidentally hanged himself, but to the very same instant. This presented a conundrum. If it was the same day and time, why had he not met himself there? Come to that, why, yesterday, had he not found himself sharing a bough with the Alaric of today? Only one explanation seemed likely. The boy should not have died and he’d been given a chance to put it right – in a further reality. If he had succeeded today, Aldous would have lived on there, never to suspect that he had not done so elsewhere.

  If

  he’d succeeded.

  Twice now, Alaric had failed to prevent the fatality that he himself had inadvertently caused. On both occasions he’d been returned to his present reality before he could manage it. Returned? By what? Sent there by what? It was as if two incompatible forces were competing to stabilize, each in its own way, that point in 1945; that small eternity. One wanted him to prevent Aldous’s death; the other removed him before he could do so, perhaps because he didn’t belong there – any more than the polythene bag belonged there.

  He wondered. If he had twice entered the same point in time, and twice failed to save the boy, perhaps there’d be a third chance. And suddenly, he wanted another chance. These little jaunts did him no good at all, but whatever the cost to himself he knew that he must, if the opportunity prevented itself, make a third stab at saving Aldous. He owed it to him. He really owed it to him. And next time he’d be ready. Next time he would not sit quietly among the leaves while the early stages of the death scene were played out below.

  SATURDAY

  Saturday: 1

  Aldous’s back hurt. Ruddy
hammock. Feeble old carcass. And as if that wasn’t enough, he’d woken with something nagging at him. Something that had not quite accompanied him into the waking world, yet lingered intangibly, threatening to tarnish his few treasured memories of his gran. Gran’s face came to him. Broad, fleshy, hair never quite tidy, dancing eyes, spectacles on her bobble of a nose when she was reading them bedtime stor… reading him bedtime stories. Him! Him!

  He pulled his overcoat on, though it was already a warm day and looked like getting warmer. He turned the collar up: a signal to himself, a command, not to entertain for a minute sly whispers of unthinkable things.

  Saturday: 2

  The water was so much lower today that she’d been able to dispense with the unflattering waders. Green wellies instead. She slushed her way to the edge of the Coneygeare: like a vast swamp now, with green shoots poking up here and there, in isolated bunches. She was wondering whether to cross it or turn around and go in another direction entirely when she saw the old man, sitting on a bench in the middle.

  Engrossed in a comic he’d found in the bin outside the chippy, Aldous didn’t hear her at first. When he did, he thrust the comic in his pocket – old men aren’t expected to read comics – and jumped to his feet.

  ‘No, wait!’ Naia cried.

  A command. He wanted to go, but dithered, and she approached.

  ‘Can I sit here a minute?’

  ‘Free bench,’ he grunted.

  She seated herself at one end of it; indicated the rest. ‘You too.’

  He sat, as far from her as he could get without falling off.

  ‘I want to ask you something,’ Naia said.