The Realities of Aldous U

by Michael Lawrence

  She looked up. ‘What?’

  ‘Tea. It’s not much, but...’

  She shook her head. ‘No. Thanks.’

  She wanted nothing. The light had gone out of her life. All she had left of her son was a photo album she couldn’t bring herself to open.

  Monday: 2

  Ivan came home around mid-morning. He had something for Naia. Presenting it to her, he explained why he’d had to pretend he didn’t know where it was. ‘It was away being professionally bound. Cheap old cover before. I know how much it means to you, Nai. Wanted it to last. For you.’

  She ran her palm over the expensive green calfskin. Tooled in gold near the top were the words: Naia’s Book. It looked and felt superb, but it was all she could do not to shout at the man who thought he was her father. It wasn’t the way Alex had left it. The way it ought to remain until it crumbled to dust. That was bad enough. But even worse, he’d done the unthinkable and had it covered with the skin of a young animal. Mistaking the tightening of her mouth and the brightness of her eyes for emotion, Ivan did something rare for him: put his arms round her and kissed her on the forehead. While he was holding her, Naia glanced across at Kate. The glance told her that Kate understood how she felt, understood completely; that she too was saddened by what Ivan had done but would never let on.

  Kate. Dear Kate. These past few months they’d become close without trying. Kate had told her a great deal about her life, her interests, her past loves, and in return Naia had told her as much as she felt able to about herself. Nothing about other realities and not belonging to this one; nothing about a boy who shared a name with her cat. But there was something she did want to tell Kate about today. Some one. Over lunch, while Ivan was at the shop, she spoke of Aldous and his tragic life; that she believed him to be her great-uncle; that he was living out of doors. Kate immediately suggested they go and meet him.

  ‘Oh, he could be anywhere,’ Naia said. ‘He walks a lot.’

  ‘In these conditions?’

  ‘He doesn’t seem bothered by them. Besides, he hasn’t got a room to put his feet up in.’

  ‘So let’s go and look for him,’ said Kate.

  They set off as soon as they finished eating. About a third of the way along the drive they saw, some way ahead of them, a man looking through the bushes toward the house. But not just looking. Taking photographs.

  ‘What’s he up to?’ Kate whispered.

  ‘Dunno, but I think I saw him the other day. I’m sure it was him. That hair. He was in the same spot, looking at the house through binoculars.’

  ‘Binoculars?’

  ‘Yes. Meant to tell you.’

  ‘I wish you had.’ Kate started forward. ‘Hello there! What’s all this?’

  The red-haired man jumped at the sound of her voice, whirled round, immediately flummoxed.

  ‘S-s-sorry,’ he stammered. ‘J-just t-taking p-p-pict…’

  He turned away; fled toward the gate.

  ‘Dodgy,’ Kate said.

  ‘Think we should tell the police?’ Naia asked.

  They agreed to, to cover themselves, but a few minutes later bumped into Aldous and forgot. They talked for some time, and when they left him Kate observed that he was an odd one.

  ‘I’d be pretty odd myself if I’d had a life like his,’ Naia said.

  ‘Mm.’ Kate took a breath. ‘Nai.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘We have quite a big house. And if he’s your grandpa’s brother, and your dad’s uncle, and homeless...

  It was precisely the thought Naia had hoped she would have, but she needed clarification.

  ‘You mean invite him to stay?’

  ‘If he wants,’ Kate said.

  ‘He might not.’

  ‘No, but he might be glad of the choice. A roof over his head and all.’

  ‘Ivan – Dad – would never agree.’

  ‘Oh, I’m sure he wouldn’t turn his uncle away.’

  ‘I wouldn’t count on it. He doesn’t know him.’

  ‘We could wear him down between us,’ Kate said. ‘He’s only a man, after all.’

  Later they put it to Ivan. He resisted, emphatically, but Kate carried on as if he hadn’t spoken, and gradually, for the sake of a quiet life, he came round – to an extent.

  ‘I’m not having him upstairs. You think I want to go to the bathroom in the middle of the night and meet some cracked old geezer on the landing?’

  ‘He might not be that keen on meeting you in your boxers in the middle of the night either,’ Kate said.

  ‘He won’t have to, ’cos it’s not gonna happen.’

  ‘Well what do you suggest?’

  ‘I’m not suggesting anything. I don’t want him in the house, dammit.’

  ‘We could convert the dining room into a bedsit,’ Naia said.

  ‘Oh yes? And where would we eat?’

  ‘The River Room, like we do now.’

  ‘We only eat in the River Room in summer.’

  ‘We can eat there all year round just as easily.’

  ‘The River Room’s a long way from the kitchen,’ he pointed out.

  ‘So we buy roller skates.’

  ‘He’ll still want to use the bathroom. Which means he’ll be going upstairs.’

  ‘I have an idea about that,’ Kate said.

  He frowned. She told him her idea. He wasn’t impressed. ‘Oh yeah, sure, like I’m made of money.’

  ‘Business is picking up,’ she reminded him.

  ‘Thanks to Kate,’ Naia put in brightly.

  His frown became a scowl. He had no intention of giving in gracefully.

  ‘I can’t believe I’m hearing this,’ he said. ‘You two are asking me to disrupt my life for an old codger I’ve never met? Never even heard of till now?’

  ‘Yes, odd that,’ Kate said. ‘You’d think someone in your family would have mentioned his existence, if nothing else.’

  ‘Exactly. How do we know he’s who he claims to be?’

  ‘I know,’ Naia said quietly.

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘I know.’

  And that was that. It was settled.

  ANOTHER DAY

  Naia wasn’t entirely surprised when Aldous said that he didn’t want to live in the house. He was tempted by the garden, though.

  ‘We could get you a tent, if you like,’ she said.

  ‘A tent?’ He wasn’t sure. Might still feel hemmed in by a tent. He said as much.

  ‘Well there’s always the Family Tree,’ she suggested.

  He looked puzzled. They were in the south garden at the time, so she was able to point it out to him.

  ‘Is that what you call it? The Family Tree?’

  ‘Yes. You could camp under it. Or in it. Get you a ladder.’

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘Not there. But that’s a nice big willow down by the bank there. Wouldn’t mind that.’

  ‘It’s possible,’ Naia said. ‘We could rig up some sort of waterproof covering to keep the rain out.’

  ‘That’d be nice.’

  ‘Pretty cold in winter, though.’

  ‘I’ll survive. Only thing is…’

  ‘What?’

  ‘If I get caught short.’

  She told him about Kate’s plan to convert the utility room next to the kitchen into a small bathroom. ‘There’s a side door from the garden,’ she added. ‘You’ll have your own key, and if you get hungry or thirsty the kitchen’s just another door away.’

  She saw his eyes light up in that boyish way they did sometimes, then narrow as he struggled to give the impression of pondering the proposition, in an elderly sort of way. Then he nodded slowly, as if to say that after due consideration he’d come to the conclusion that he might, perhaps, be able to stand being indoors for a few minutes at a time, in his own bathroom; that he might even manage, at a push, to pop into the kitchen for the odd bite or sip of something. So long as he didn’t have to stay there.

  ANOTHER NIGHT

&nbs
p; Alex sat on the bed in the room that had been Alaric’s, looking, for the first time, through the photo album that he’d denied knowledge of for months. The Underwood family tree that she’d spent so much time compiling wasn’t inside the back cover where she’d put it, or anywhere else, but that was a small thing. What mattered – and even this didn’t matter very much – was that he’d kept the book from her all this time. Why? And why had he left it in the tree? She sighed heavily. He must have had his reasons. For all of it.

  The thick pages turned automatically in her hands. It broke her heart to look through the album, Alaric’s life, but it was all there was now. She saw the pictures, yet saw none of them – until she came to the last few pages. There she found that every photo that had featured him since the middle of 2003 had been replaced by a little yellow note, with writing on it. His writing. Same ten words on every one.

  I love you.

  I miss you.

  Think of me sometimes.

  She didn’t understand. Why had he removed the pictures of himself and stuck these notes in? Written these words? He couldn’t have known it was going to happen, couldn’t have intended it… could he? She read the three short sentences over and over, until, finally, the breath rushed out of her, her head fell forward, and she was sobbing into her hands.

  ‘Alaric. Oh, Alaric.

  ’

  So vast was her grief, so immeasurable, that it could not be contained within a single reality, or even the bounds of time. Of such intensity was her misery that it would always exist as part of this moment, and occasionally, on certain nights at this hour, be heard or even witnessed by those of her blood who shared a particular disposition and sensibility. In one reality a young man who’d gone to bed early because he could find no reason to stay up, awoke, opened his eyes expecting to find someone sitting on his bed, crying. There was no one, so he imagined that he’d been dreaming, but all next day he carried within him a very deep sorrow which he could attribute to nothing. That was the day he resolved to try and find a way to reach again the reality in which his mother still lived. But not yet. He wasn’t ready yet. Soon perhaps.

  Soon.

  THE YEARS BETWEEN

  Aldous Underwood: A Life

  The normal human brain contains thousands of cells that manufacture the chemical Arexin, which wakes us and keeps us awake for hours each day by periodically stimulating the brain. Without Arexin we might sleep our lives away. Aldous’s near-death ordeal at the age of eleven, followed by the unconscious scramble through three conjoined realities in which he actually did die, nullified all but five percent of the Arexin cells in his brain. Arexin-deficient to an unnatural degree, he was unable to stay awake. In the decades following the accident that almost killed him, the sleeping Aldous dreamed a great deal. Often, the dreams concerned Withern Rise, family, friends, and two strangers in a tree; but on waking – briefly, always briefly –he remembered as little of his dreams as of his life.

  He was nearly seventy by the time medical science had advanced sufficiently for his disorder to be identified and drugs be developed to simulate the waking action of the dead brain cells. Before long he was able to remain conscious for hours each day, falling gently asleep around dusk and waking with the light. As a regular sleep-wake pattern established itself, a program of exercise and physiotherapy was introduced to restore his body’s flexibility and strength. He was required to sit up in order to regain his sense of balance, stand in a support frame, walk in splints between parallel bars to fortify his lower limbs and spine. Muscle-building hydrotherapy was an unexpected pleasure, though he hated the neck support he was forced to wear until his neck strengthened.

  After almost six decades in bed he was surprisingly fit after just eighteen months’ treatment – a recovery undoubtedly aided by a mind that had not aged with his body. An educationalist who specialized in helping slow and reluctant learners was brought in to help him ‘grow up’ and learn something of society and the world that had developed while he slept. He was a willing student, if a naïve and frequently confused one, frustrated by his memory’s reluctance to return other than in disconnected fragments. One very powerful image did come back, however. The house he knew as a boy. But he had no knowledge of its whereabouts, and contact with surviving relatives had been lost since Marie died. The name and location of his childhood home were discovered by Lucy Fry, his amiable tutor. The information thrilled him. The only life of which he had any memory, slight as it was, had occurred there, and he was eager to see it again. There, he was sure, the rest of his memories would reveal themselves to him.

  Aldous returned to Eynesford in February 2005. There, as his memories grudgingly came back, he discovered an ability to enter (whether he wanted to or not) realities other than his own, his ‘other lives’. There were three in all. Three in which, in each cemetery behind the house, there was a headstone bearing the name that he’d learnt was his. There were other small differences in the four realities, but there was one thing that did not change: there was no place for him at his childhood home. The best he could do was live nearby.

  He didn’t mind not living at the house. In any house. On leaving the clinic a complex new world had opened out before him; four versions of it as it turned out. Free of his narrow, iron-framed bed, of medical staff and exercise regimes, the thought of being cooped up again made him nervous. After all those years of waking to the same walls, an unchanging ceiling, living indoors would be like having his head shoved into a bag of some sort, gasping for breath.

  The Recovery of Withern Rise

  When Rayner Underwood was a young boy he could stand on the landing stage, gaze across the water at the far bank, and see, to left and right, nothing but a tangled, impenetrable mass of foliage and leaning trunks. The river was decked with water lilies then, crowned with yellow and white flowers, through which small boats had a hard time progressing. He loved that view with a quiet childish passion and was devastated when, following the great tragedy when he was seven, they moved away to be near Aldous’s nursing home. Ray hated the place they moved to, the ugly little prefab with its treeless back yard, no river within an hour’s walk. He missed Withern Rise terribly. He’d been born there; taken his first steps there, had his first falls and upsets there, first Christmases, Easters, birthdays. He’d even heard his first songs there, from his father’s lips. Until he started school Withern was his whole world. At the age of fourteen, two hundred miles from ‘home’, he vowed to bring that world back into Underwood hands as soon as could be managed.

  Shortly after his sixteenth birthday he left home to become assistant to an antiquarian bookseller in Trinity Street, Cambridge. His employer, Garrod Nesbit, who had no children, died in 1959, leaving Rayner the gloomy little premises he called his shop. Garrod’s Antiquariana (Books) was not a very profitable concern, and Rayner would never have made his fortune there in the normal course of business; but in 1961 he made the acquaintance of two ladies seeking a purchaser for a centuries’ old volume that had come into their hands. This little book, hand-written in an unfamiliar language, copiously illustrated, was known by the name of the dealer who had owned it since 1912. Rayner immediately saw the potential of the Voynich Manuscript and sold it, through contacts, to rare book dealer Hans P. Kraus of New York for $24,500. The deal not only brought him a useful handling fee but a paragraph or two of minor fame, which he turned to his advantage when seeking finance for the purchase of Withern Rise. These paragraphs also brought him raven-haired twenty-one year old Betty Joyce Arnott of St. Paul, Minnesota, who had recently discovered the poetry of his grandfather, E.C. Underwood. The couple moved into Withern Rise in September 1963 and married the following spring.

  The only blight on this new phase of Rayner’s life and Withern’s history was threatened the year after the move when Stone Parish Council announced that the osier beds were to be drained, cleared and landscaped for public use and recreation. Horrified by the prospect of losing his gloriously unruly view, Rayner ma
naged to acquire sufficient additional funds to lease, for a period of thirty years, the two hundred yard stretch of marshy bank directly across from the house.

  The view secured, the next item on his agenda was the oak tree in the south garden. He remembered all too well the dreadful day twenty years earlier when his big brother had come to such grief beneath it. It still made him shudder to think of it. Rayner contemplated his choices. Should he cut the tree down? Would its removal dilute the memory of that appalling episode? Eventually deciding that the tree should go, he made the arrangements, but the morning the work was to have begun he had second thoughts. The tree had been there for six full decades, growing tall, filling out, reaching maturity. It was part of Withern Rise. Besides, it was all that was left of the trees of the south garden, cleared away by the family that had owned it since the Forties.

  No, it must stay. But there was something he could do. One little thing that might ease the pain when people commented on its grandeur, its majesty. He could rename it. And so he did. From that day forth it was no longer referred to as Aldous’s Oak, but as the Family Tree.

  OCTOBER

  Flash 1

  Part One

  PERIPHERAL VISIONS

  Flash 2

  Part Two

  THE WILD

  Flash 3

  Part Three

  A POLICY OF INDIFFERENCE

  Flash 4

  Part Four

  THE EVITABLE CONCLUSION

  Flash 5

  Epilogue

  Who belongs to which reality