‘Hold her!’
Jonno and Hag rushed forward, one each side, threw their weight onto her legs. She cried out in pain. Gus tore her belt apart, released the button of her jeans, yanked them down past her crotch. She fought insanely. Hag and Jonno clung to her legs as if their lives depended on it.
‘Captain!’
Scarry moved in, lugging Badger, who he flung to Jonno’s aid while he gripped Naia’s other leg alongside Hag. Gus unzipped his jeans, and after a slight tussle revealed an object of wonder to the young boys. Even Scarry gulped. The sight had a different effect on Naia. Her arms flew free, her released fists flailed with some success, there were shouts of pain – all of which did nothing to daunt Gus. He tore her pants, scratched her belly with long, dirty fingernails, and, holding her down with one hand, pushed himself forward. He was almost there when, following a splintering thud and a yelp, he toppled sideways. Badger and Jonno scampered out of the way just in time to avoid being crushed. Scarry and Hag also jumped back. Shocked eyes turned to Ric, standing there with a broken branch in his hand.
‘Holy shit,’ Scarry whispered.
Naia was already on her feet, hauling her jeans up. When her torn pants caught in the zip, she left it, fastened the belt while looking for the best way out of there before her assailant recovered. But Gus was already recovering. Tucking away his diminished cock, he snarled at the one who’d deprived him of his pleasure – the one whose face Naia now saw for the first time.
‘Alaric!’
This brought a gasp in return. Disadvantaged by surprise, Ric fell easily before Gus’s attack, covering his groin and as much else as he could while Gus delivered kick after kick to any part the toes and heels of his boots could reach. Believing that she knew the one who had come to her aid, Naia might have taken his side had not a strong hand gripped her arm from behind and tugged her away. She made to spin round and fight off this new enemy, but before she could complete the turn she was whisked from the scene and running through undergrowth, weaving between trees, propelled from behind. Every step and stumble of the way she demanded to know who it was that forced her onward, but received no word of reply as he swerved and twisted her along a path she could not identify but which he clearly knew very well.
In minutes, reaching a certain spot, she was brought to a halt, but before she could finally confront her silent guide, he gave her a small shove which forced her to make one more step: a step which dispatched her to a willow in a north garden, where, before she could catch her breath, she collided with one of the very last people she might have expected to find there.
21: 47
Eventually, reasoning that fear of the possible with no real knowledge of the probable is a pretty lame approach to anything, Alaric went to the willow. The leaves swished to behind him as he walked determinedly to the trunk. Not daring to pause for fear of losing his nerve, he stepped boldly round it – and crashed into Naia as she hurtled from the forest reality. The shock was mutual, though, typically, she overcame it first, breathless as she was.
‘How did you get here before me?’ she demanded.
‘Before you?’
‘And how come you look so…? Hang on.’
‘What?’ he said as she explored his face, his clothes.
‘You’re not him.’
‘Not who? And what’s the big rush all about?’
‘I was running. No choice. God, I wish I knew what he was up to.’
‘Who?’
‘Aldous U.’
‘Who?’
‘Aldous U. He leaves these notes for me.’ He continued to look blank. ‘You don’t have an Aldous U?’ she said.
‘The only Aldous I know of is the one who built the house.’
‘And Grandpa Rayner’s brother,’ she reminded him.
‘I didn’t know Grandpa had a brother.’
For a moment she thought he was having her on, but then recalled another time she’d made that assumption.
‘When did we last meet?’ she asked.
‘February.’
‘What about June?’
‘June?’
‘The Floods?’ she prompted. ‘1945?’
‘What the hell are you on about?’
‘You were flooded in June, weren’t you?’
‘Yes, but… 1945?’
She said: ‘Let’s get out of here.’
‘Is that a good idea?’
‘We’ll stick to this end of the garden. But if we’re seen,’ she added, swimming through the leaves, ‘we’d better part company without a fond farewell.’
Thanks to the tall hawthorn hedge this side of the garage, their corner of the garden was not visible from the house, so there was no chance of their being spotted from it. Naia dropped to the grass in the shade of the willow, folded her legs at the ankle, outer thighs and calves flat on the ground, forgetting that she hadn’t fixed her zip. When Alaric also sat, facing her, the combination of flaring zip and vaguely masculine posture disturbed him in ways he could not have articulated.
‘What was that about June?’ he asked.
She said: ‘Are you sure we didn’t meet then?’
‘I think I’d have remembered.’
‘Well if it wasn’t you, it was another Alaric. One who had the same memories of February.’
He already knew of one other Alaric, though he hadn’t passed this on. He didn’t pass it on now. ‘Was that who you thought I was just now?’
‘I thought you were him and the one from back there.’
‘Back there?’
‘I’m guessing,’ she said slowly, ‘that the June Alaric and that one aren’t the same.’ She leant back on her hands, reflecting on this. Her fly gaped. ‘The one I just met looked like he’d given up haircuts and washing, changing his clothes, and I think he was thinner. If I’m right, if he isn’t the June Alaric, it means there are three of you.’
Four, he thought, purposefully locking eyes with her to thwart gravity.
‘This last one,’ he said. ‘Did you meet him in your reality or his?’
She tutted. ‘How can he have been in mine? We were in a wood.’
‘A wood?’
‘Didn’t I say?’
‘If you did, I missed it.’
‘It was like no wood I ever saw. A forest really. So unhealthy-looking. Smelt horrible. I don’t envy him if he lives there. And those friends of his! I was lucky to get out of there with my – ’
‘Oh, there you are!’
They turned their heads. Kate, coming round the hedge.
Naia jumped up. ‘Time for that swift departure, methinks.’
He also got up, less hurriedly.
‘Your dad just phoned,’ Kate said. ‘I have to go to Higham Grey to look at some possible stock for him.’
‘Go on then,’ Alaric whispered – to Naia.
‘Go on yourself. Quick, or she’ll see us close up.’
He stepped forward, putting himself in front of her.
‘What are you doing?’ she hissed.
‘Keep back,’ he said. ‘And shut up.’
Kate reached them, tried to look round him. ‘Who’s this?’
‘Just a girl from school.’
Naia stumbled in shock, literally stumbled, creating a new distance which afforded Kate a good look at the state of her zip. Embarrassed, she rushed the essentials of her mission: ‘Your dad told me to ask you to be here between one and two, he’s expecting a package from a dealer, couriered, which’ll have to be signed for. He can’t get away, so could you do that?’
‘I might not be here between one and two.’
‘Oh. Well, I passed it on.’
Kate forced a smile and walked briskly away.
Naia was staring wildly about her when Alaric turned to her. ‘It isn’t mine?’ she said, and confirmed it herself. ‘It isn’t mine!’
Then she was running again, back to the willow, diving through the leaves. Only when she was inside did he think to go after her, but on plungin
g through he found himself alone. He noticed a small green pouch on the ground. He picked it up. She must have dropped it in her haste. Haste. If he was quick he might follow her. Could it work that way? He hoped so. So much to catch up on, talk about, understand. He went round the trunk. There was some disorientation as his foot came down, and then he stood on ground easily distinguishable from his own.
He was in a densely-wooded forest. Which smelt bad.
There was no sign of Naia.
22: 36
Another family to view the house already. She’d never have any time to herself at this rate. These were a Mr. and Mrs. Peterson and Mr. Peterson’s widowed mother, who it appeared was going to be living with them. They too remarked upon the size of the place, but with rather less awe, informing Alex that they had a fifteen-year-old son and a daughter in her twenties who still lived with them, and that they liked to have friends and relatives to stay, which made Withern Rise ‘perfect’. Mrs. Peterson senior, a bustling sparrow of a woman in her seventies, was obsessed with detail, needing to know the precise age of the property, the measured dimensions of the grounds, the quality of the wood used for the kitchen cupboards, the annual cost of the central heating and the rates, and much more, which after a while began to rattle Alex. Showing strangers round her home was intrusion enough without the relentless questionnaire. Her veiled displeasure finally got through to Mr. Peterson, who whispered testily to his mother, ‘Put a lid on it, eh, Ma?’
For Alex the final straw came when they entered the one room she would have given anything to pass by. The corner bedroom. It wasn’t a large room at best, but it shrank still further with four adults gathered about the bed that had been Alaric’s. The bed she’d sat upon so often since his death, moping, remembering, sobbing. And here she was, trying to be cheerful when strangers commented on it, as if nothing had happened.
‘Might do for Joe,’ the wife said.
Mr. Peterson sniffed dismissively. ‘Not enough room for his gadgets.’
‘Could be a guest room.’
‘For one small guest maybe. How about you?’ he asked his mother.
She shuddered. ‘No, thank you. It’s got an atmosphere. And I wouldn’t want to see that river every time I looked out.’
Alex sprang to the door. ‘Let me show you the box room!’
The June flooding, of which she made no mention until it could be avoided no longer, caused dismay all round.
‘The garden was flooded?’ said the wife. ‘The entire garden?’
‘Yes, but only for a week or so.’
‘Does flooding occur very often?’
‘Oh, the river rises, but rarely on that scale, never in all the time we’ve been here, and not for decades before that.’
Mr. Peterson took over. Until now he’d been content to follow the women around and merely chip in every so often.
‘If it happened once, it might happen again.’ Alex conceded that anything was possible. ‘You could raise the bank,’ he suggested.
‘We could, but I imagine it would be terribly expensive.’
‘Yes, but it’d keep the water out.’
‘It would also change the look of the garden. We might not be able to see the river from the ground any more.’
‘So you’d rather risk further flooding.’
‘Yes, actually. Care to see the garage?’
She showed them the inside of the garage, which wasn’t really worth seeing, told them that there was a fair amount of storage space at the top of the narrow staircase, then walked them round the grounds to a fresh barrage of questions from the sparrow-woman – about the plants, the fruit trees, the type of grass, the chances of getting a good gardener locally.
‘That old oak doesn’t look too fit,’ Mr. Peterson opined in the south garden.
‘It’s diseased,’ Alex said. ‘Have to come down sooner or later.’
She just wanted them to go now. She knew that the prospect of further flooding had put them off, if nothing else had. It was only as they were about to leave that Mr. Peterson let slip that he was a risk assessor for an insurance company. Alex couldn’t help a chirrup of laughter.
‘No doubt you’ve assessed the risks here then.’
He smiled tautly, and the three of them climbed into their silver-gray Citroën.
She watched their departure with relief, then looked about her, hoping to see Mr. Knight pottering somewhere. Was it one of his days? She wasn’t sure – reliable as he was, he was rarely predictable – but she could have done with his company right now.
23: 43
Alaric’s first thought was to take a backward step, which would hopefully return him to the willow. But he hesitated, tempted to explore. He spotted what might have been the beginnings of a path, but as it ran straight into prickly scrub he cast about for something more promising. He was still looking when he heard voices and the thrashing of leaves, the crunch of dry twigs. Far from ready to meet strangers in an unfamiliar reality, he stole away as quietly as he could. Not quietly enough, however.
‘Whassat?’
‘What’s what?’
‘I heard something. Must be her.’
‘Could be some animal.’
‘We could do with the meat if it is.’
‘I could do with her meat more. This way.’
‘Why don’t we spread out?’
‘You spread out, I’m going down here – if it’s okay with you, Cap?’
‘Yeah, go on. If you find her save some for me.’
Once the voices had died, the only sounds were the small ones he himself made as he forged a difficult path between countless trunks, and bushes so spiky and disheveled that they were virtually impassable. Yet, by chance, he found his way out of the forest quickly, if no less suddenly than Naia had before him, pulling up only just in time. One more step and he’d have dropped into water. He stood on the bank of a river that looked like a broad band of liquid rust, across which a further belt of exceedingly tousled woodland stretched as far as he could see in either direction. The water, which smelt at least as rank as the forest, was strewn with large thunder-green lily-pads with frayed, upturned rims. But it was the silence that struck him most of all. He’d thought the forest quiet, but out here, beyond its precincts, there wasn’t a hint of sound – and everything was so still. In spite of the abundance of vegetation it looked and felt as if nothing breathed here.
This observation was moderated by a factor of one when a small black shape rose from the trees across the river, wings frisking madly as it prepared to launch itself. When it was ready, the bird shot up for several hundred yards, straight as an arrow, to stop abruptly at a certain point, as though to assess its situation or position, before plunging back into the trees – a descent that ended with a single harsh cry, after which the silence and stillness returned, embellished by the interruption.
After the gloom of the forest Alaric welcomed the unshaded daylight, though it was a very inferior light, of a dirty yellow hue. But something about the sway of the river, the lie of the land, bothered him. He closed his eyes and pictured the view from his own riverbank; then, picture in place, opened them and saw how the essentials of that view corresponded with the fundamentals of this. This river was wider, and so much lower that it was hard to imagine it rising sufficiently to spill across the land, as his river had in June. Holding on to the emaciated trunk of a sickly-looking tree that sprouted from the overhang of the bank, he took in the stretch of water to his right. No distant stone bridge carrying traffic into and out of town. No town, he guessed. He peered the other way, to where, at home, a narrow pedestrian bridge arched, linking the Coneygeare to Withy Meadows. Again, no bridge. Differences indeed, but he was certain now that he stood on the bank below which, in his reality, a former soldier by the name of Eldon Charles Underwood had built a shelter for the small boat in which he wrote more than a hundred and fifty poems between the opening years of two world wars. The sprawl of the forest behind him suggested that it not only co
vered the area of ground where the garden should be, but the old cemetery, the school, the church, the village, perhaps the entire region.
Curious about this very alternative version of his world, he set off along the bank to where he estimated the landing stage should begin. There was no landing stage here, but the flora ended abruptly at a swathe of overgrown grass that sloped upward from the river, where a short flight of steps climbed at home. Approaching the slope he trod on something hard, which turned out to be a rusty sickle. He might have stooped and picked this up if not for a small imprecise sound which caused him to glance to his left, where he saw a strangely-configured house: the very house he’d glimpsed yesterday amid overlapping realities. Intrigued, he started up the slope. At the top he walked to the nearest corner of the building, and peered round it.
‘So good of you to call,’ a voice said.
A strong hand grabbed him by the shoulder, and before he could even try to wriggle free hauled him along the front of the house. A door was flung back, and he after it, headlong into an unlit room, cracking a knee on the floor before sprawling on a skidding rug. The door banged shut. Bolts were rammed home. He rolled over, staring about him, and at the large man whose hunched demeanor in the subdued light suggested that he did not plan to offer him buttered scones and Earl Grey with a slice of lemon.
24: 43
Ric had managed to shield himself from the worst of the assault, but his head throbbed, he could taste blood, and his ribs hurt like hell. Gus would have done much more damage if Scarry hadn’t ordered him to stop, repeatedly, with increasingly angry insistence. When Gus finally stood up, only the ‘Cap’ mistook the flash of resentment for deference. No one asked Ric if he was okay, though Badger and Jonno cast sympathetic looks back at him as Scarry led them away, in Gus’s twitching wake. Thus Ric was cast out, and Gus effectively promoted to second-in-command – though to an uninformed observer Gus would almost certainly have been taken for the leader, Scarry his bustling lieutenant.
The Realities of Aldous U Page 36