The Realities of Aldous U

by Michael Lawrence

  ‘And what is inside?’

  ‘Stuff that belongs here.’

  ‘What, leaves and stuff?’

  ‘Yeh.’

  ‘But I don’t see how – ’

  A yell from outside cut her short. They whirled round. Gus was gone.

  Alaric stuffed the gray pouch back in the wallet on his belt, but Naia was still holding hers as she rushed to the door. Ric lay on the path, on his back, arms folded over his head while Gus, astride him, beat him furiously with his fists. Naia dropped the pouch and threw herself onto Gus’s back, an arm around his gullet. He reared up, jerked an elbow into her ribs, shook her off. She grunted as she fell on the path, but was up again at once, snatching a spade that stood in the earth nearby. She swung the flat of the blade at Gus’s head. Still vigorously pummeling Ric, Gus moved a half a second before it struck and the blade caught his shoulder instead, but it was a powerful enough swipe to topple him into a bed of withered flowers. Discarding the spade, Naia reached to help Ric up; a foolish gesture with Gus already clawing his way out of the flowers, the light of vengeance in his eye. He wasn’t quite on his feet when Alaric, watching from the doorway, at last summoned the wit to act. He leapt forward, but, not driven by the other’s passionate need to maim, was knocked aside with little effort. On his feet again, Gus’s feral rage turned on the one who had intervened on his victim’s behalf – as he’d turned on Ric when he came to her defense two days earlier.

  ‘Right, whore! First I mash that fine face of yours to shit, then I enjoy myself!’

  Knowing that she stood no chance against him, Naia ran to the open gate, and beyond, into the forest. Gus went after her. Gaining their feet, Ric and Alaric made fleeting eye-contact – it wasn’t easy looking at your non-reflected self – and by tacit agreement plunged after them. They were already lost to sight, but identifying their general direction wasn’t a problem thanks to the oaths and murderous threats bellowed by Gus.

  This double pursuit continued until silence fell as efficiently as the blade of a guillotine. It was a short silence, broken by a fresh shout of rage – ‘You bitch, where’d you go?’ – but one which resumed an instant after they burst out of the undergrowth when Gus took a step forward and vanished. Such departures being new to him, Ric could only gape, but even Alaric was startled when, seconds later, a very different figure appeared in the space vacated by Gus O’Brien.

  46: 43

  ‘Ah, you’ve met, I see,’ Aldous

  U said, looking from one face to the other.

  ‘And you just missed them,’ said Alaric, while Ric, incredulous, remained speechless.

  ‘Missed who?’

  ‘Naia and the nutter who pissed on your garden.’

  ‘Explain.’

  ‘He was chasing her. I hope he didn’t catch her. He wasn’t in a great mood.’

  ‘It’s unlikely that he’ll have followed her,’ AU said. ‘The threads of his clothing should have taken him to his original reality.’

  ‘Oh, I bet they’ll be glad to have him back. Did you get the house?’

  ‘I put my offer in. They’ll have to discuss it. Lap of the gods now.’

  He pitched himself into the bushes. Alaric went after him, and Ric, unsure what else to do, followed.

  ‘How did you two find one another?’ AU asked over his shoulder.

  ‘He was at your house,’ Alaric said. ‘With Naia.’

  ‘With Naia?’

  ‘She arrived early, went straight there.’

  ‘Oh, why doesn’t that girl do as I ask?’ AU cried. ‘It’s not difficult. Three o’clock, there, wait. I don’t know of a simpler way to put it. So they were chatting outside, were they?’

  ‘No. Inside.’

  Aldous U stopped so suddenly that Alaric crashed into him. ‘How did you get into my house?’ he demanded of Ric, who had only just managed not to turn the halt into a farce.

  ‘There was a window off the latch.’

  ‘And you saw that as an invitation, did you?’

  ‘I didn’t do any harm. I didn’t pinch anything. Bit of food, is all.’

  ‘And Naia?’

  ‘Also the window,’ said Alaric.

  ‘Well, obviously,’ AU said, ‘the door need never have been invented.’

  They went on their way.

  When they broke out of the forest, AU, seeing his front door wide open, muttered something about bloody kids, then noticed, beside the path, the pouch Naia had discarded in order to join battle with Gus. He stooped for it. ‘I just don’t understand why these things are so hard to hang on to,’ he said, and went inside with it, leaving the lads on the path. He was out again in no time: livid. ‘Didn’t do any harm?’ he roared at Ric.

  ‘That wasn’t me, it was Gus.’

  ‘Gus?’

  ‘The piss-artist,’ said Alaric.

  ‘There seems to have been quite a gathering here in my absence.’

  He went back inside. This time they followed him. He was standing in the middle of the room, glumly surveying the wreckage.

  ‘My poor old Underwood. Eighty, ninety years old, and some brainless oik dispatches it on a whim.’ He noticed the sickle on the floor – ‘I was wondering what happened to that’ – then something else. ‘There was a pouch on the table. I’d just filled it but had to leave before I could number it. Where is it?’

  ‘The piss-artist put it in his pocket,’ Alaric said.

  ‘He didn’t still have it when he followed Naia, did he?’

  ‘I don’t know. Might have.’

  ‘If he did, he’ll have gone to the pouch’s reality, not his own.’

  ‘Well, at least he’s out of our hair.’

  AU sank onto one of the chairs by the table. ‘And potentially in a lot of other people’s. This is not good. A lunatic like that on the loose in any reality that isn’t his own is bad enough, but that reality...’

  ‘What’s so special about that one?’ Alaric asked.

  ‘It’s one I’ve just come across for the first time. An extraordinary one.’

  ‘Extraordinary how?’

  ‘It’s one of the very few that lives in virtual peace with itself. Its defenses are down. A disruptive individual without scruples or conscience could dominate half the world in no time.’

  ‘Holy shit,’ Alaric said.

  ‘Quite.’

  ‘Do you know where I’m from?’ Ric asked suddenly. He’d been standing apart, keeping himself to himself.

  AU glanced at him. ‘How would I?’

  ‘Well, you obviously know a lot about these things.’

  ‘There are quite a few realities out there,’ AU said dismissively.

  ‘You seemed to be able to work out which one I belonged to,’ said Alaric.

  ‘In your case I might have tried to find out anyway.’

  ‘Why my case and not his?’

  ‘Because you weren’t part of a gang that repaid my generosity by trashing my garden, stealing my chickens and murdering my cat.’

  ‘I didn’t do any of that,’ Ric said.

  ‘You were with them,’ AU said. ‘You’ll get no help from me, boy.’

  ‘So you’ll let him die here,’ Alaric said.

  Ric started. ‘What?’

  ‘According to him, this reality’s had it. All be gone soon. Nothing will survive. Except him. He’s getting out. He’ll be all right.’

  AU scowled at Alaric. ‘He didn’t need to know that.’

  ‘But now he does, so you’ve got to help him.’

  ‘There’s no “got to” about it. And even if I wanted to, I wouldn’t. I’d be interfering with the workings of a reality – something I’m careful to avoid these days.’

  ‘Not that careful. The creep who went after Naia wouldn’t have ended up where he has if you hadn’t brought stuff back from there. If he does anything bad there it’s down to you.’

  ‘You think I don’t know that?’ AU barked. ‘You think I’m not fully aware of that? By merely entering a rea
lity we don’t belong to, we risk altering things.’

  ‘Realities we don’t belong to,’ Alaric said. ‘

  If you help him get home – ’ he found it impossible to refer to Ric either by that name or the full version ‘ – you’ll be setting things straight there. That’d be good, wouldn’t it?’

  ‘Whatever’s happened in his reality has nothing to do with me,’ AU said firmly. ‘I’ll not interfere.’

  ‘You interfere when it suits you. Those notes to Naia. Bringing her here. What’s that if not interfering with her life?’

  ‘Naia’s a special case.’

  ‘And me? Am I a special case too? All the stuff you’ve told me. Stuff that would have to change the way anyone thinks about or sees the world he...’ He stopped, as though struck. Then said: ‘Unless you know something you haven’t told me.’

  ‘About?’ Aldous U said.

  ‘My reality.’

  AU looked him in the eye for a long time, silently. Time enough to provide all the answer Alaric needed. The answer he least wanted. ‘I’d like to be alone now,’ AU said when he knew it had sunk in.

  ‘Oh, I bet you would,’ Alaric said. ‘So you can put us out of your mind, move to your “proper” Withern Rise, forget we ever existed.’

  ‘Close the door on your way out, would you?’

  Alaric tore the wallet from his belt and slapped it on the table. ‘Returned!’ he said, and stormed out.

  Ric also headed for the door, but not with anger. Just before stepping outside he glanced back at the man who might have been able to help him get home, but had instead condemned him to death. Aldous U looked away.

  47: 43

  Alone and very frightened in a world he now knew to be doomed, Ric wandered in the forest hoping to come across the others. With Gus out of the picture he had no qualms about calling to them, and this he did repeatedly; but the only reply was the odd flap of wings, or a frantic scuffle from some small creature he’d disturbed.

  After a time he came to a particular tree that leant out over the water from the river bank. This tree, with its coarse cocoa-colored bark, bore a yellow-skinned fruit the shape and size of a ripe aubergine, at the heart of which lay a pellet of firm pink flesh that tasted not quite of apple, not quite of pear, but an approximation of both. Fruit had been the great sustainer for all of them, and it was Scarry who’d introduced him to this one, having previously sampled it and remained on his feet. Scarry liked first dibs at anything new. Maybe it was bravado, maybe his way of consolidating his position, but whenever they found an unfamiliar fruit he insisted on trying it before anyone else. Some varieties, which might not have been fruit at all, were so spiky, dubiously-colored or unpleasantly sticky that even Scarry hadn’t touched them, but he’d tried most of the more innocuous-seeming ones, almost all of which had turned out to be either very bland or rather bitter, though not inedible. Only once had they found a fruit that looked worth trying but had proved to be very much worth avoiding. It looked like a greengage and Scarry had rapidly consumed two, pulling a face at their tartness while trying to kid everyone that they were tasty in a good way. But just as the others were about to sample one each for themselves he had gone deathly pale, clutched his stomach, and spent the next five minutes heaving into the bushes.

  Plucking one of the aubergine-like fruits, Ric wondered where Scarry was – where any of them were – and why they were so quiet. He cracked the thick skin, eased it apart with his thumbs, and was about to bite into the fleshy nucleus when he glimpsed something between the reeds along the bank. He parted them with one hand and saw Scarry, sprawling just below the surface of the water, face up, staring at the dull yellow sky. He staggered at the sight, dropped the fruit; his foot slipped, he sat down sharply, clutched wildly for something to hold onto. His hand closed on what he at first took for a tree root. Only when he felt more secure did he look at it and see that it wasn’t the exposed root of a tree but a human ankle, a young one, sticking out of the grass. He leapt up as though yanked by the hair. Stared down at Jonno’s twisted corpse.

  From there, he went on to discover, amid the bent grass and ailing weeds, two further reasons for the lack of response to his calls.

  Flash 4

  It was rare these days for Naia to reflect that the village she drove through was not the one she’d known as a child. Somewhere along the way, over the years, its provenance had ceased to be relevant. Never very picturesque, central Eynesford was little more than a two-way street between narrow, nondescript eighteenth and nineteenth century houses, a few of which had been remodeled to accommodate small shops and businesses. The twelfth century Norman church was much as it had always been, but the old primary school across the road had been a private house for years. A little way past the church, where the housing estates began, a slightly-raised platform of grass – littered with wrappers and drink cans from the Chinese chippy, bottles from The Cock and Bull – was a poor relic of a village green which would have been the communal hub for many a bygone generation. One of the cars parked haphazardly on the grass had skewed the sign that insisted that it was still The Green, whatever the year. This part of the village seemed coarser and uglier to Naia each time she returned. How different it must have been here in her grandfather’s day. And Bishop Aldous, exchanging the nineteenth century for the twentieth, wouldn’t have recognized it in the twenty-first.

  At The Green she turned right, onto a stretch of pitted tarmac that twitched between a plot of nineteen-fifties bungalows and a row of terraced houses (one of which bore a cement plaque dated 1899) before swinging left and becoming Withybank Lane. Two or three hundred yards further on she came to the ever-open five-bar gate of Withern Rise. She experienced a glow of pleasure on turning into the drive – the comforting crunch of gravel beneath her wheels, the tunnel of reaching trees fanned by her headlights – and then she was sweeping round to draw up in front of the house. The light had been left on in the porch to welcome her. She switched the engine off, released the seat belt, and was barely out of the car when Kate flung the front door back and rushed forward, arms outstretched – ‘My darling!’ – and then they were embracing as though they would never let go.

  ‘Hugs aren’t so easy these days,’ Kate said, pulling back to eye the mound between them.

  ‘A lot of things aren’t so easy now.’

  Kate went round to the back of the car and hauled the suitcase out of the boot. ‘Is this it? Your entire wardrobe?’

  ‘I’ve bribed my friend Michael to bring the rest down in his van next week.’

  ‘Friend?’ Kate said with interest.

  ‘Just that.’

  They went inside, where she helped Naia out of her coat. ‘You two must be hungry.’

  ‘All we want right now is to put our feet up and wallow in being stationary.’

  ‘Drink, then.’

  ‘Sworn off it till I’m free of the alien presence.’

  ‘Even tea?’

  ‘In a minute. Where’s Aldous?’

  ‘In his room, tarting himself up. He likes to look his best when you come. Don’t let on that I told you.’

  They went into the Long Room. Sat down on the couch. Naia sighed noisily. ‘I can’t tell you how good it is to be home!’

  ‘Good to have you.’

  ‘Don’t give me that, my ears have been burning.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘You must have pictured it.’

  ‘Pictured what?’

  ‘That as well as me, very soon there’ll be a squalling brat keeping you awake night after night, and soon after that he’ll be scampering all over the place, breaking things, going where he shouldn’t, ruining the viewing, conversations, everything. No more peace and quiet.’

  ‘Peace and quiet’s overrated,’ Kate said.

  ‘You say that now, but it’s your home, you’re used to not tripping over a disruptive supporting cast at every turn.’

  ‘It’s only my home because certain people allow it.’<
br />
  Naia growled irritably. ‘You know there’s never been any question of “allowing it”. Without you the place would’ve gone to seed after Dad died. Would have gone to seed

  before he died, if you hadn’t been here.’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know.’

  ‘I do. So no more talk like that please, unless you want a slap.’

  She leant back, into the soft cushions of the big couch, the soothing atmosphere of the old house. There was nowhere, nowhere she’d ever been or known, where she felt so at ease, so absolutely right.

  ‘I ought to tell you,’ Kate said, ‘that we’ll have visitors at the weekend.’

  ‘Visitors? Not…?’

  ‘Who else would I invite to commemorate your homecoming?’

  ‘But that’s brilliant! That’s perfect!’

  ‘Actually it was his idea. He was over the moon when he heard you were moving back. Said it’s where you belong.’

  ‘You said visit-

  ors

  …’

  ‘Well, Chris is coming too, of course.’

  ‘Oh. Yes. Of course.’

  ‘I thought you liked Chris.’

  ‘I love Chris,’ Naia said. ‘I really do. But sometimes…’

  ‘I know. Just like to be alone. In-depth chats and all.’

  ‘Yeah. Our stuff.’

  ‘Already plotted for. I want to reorganize the shop and Chris has a fantastic eye for such things. I wouldn’t be surprised if we weren’t there all weekend. Fair bit of chin-wag time for you.’

  ‘And some for me, I hope,’ a voice said from the doorway.

  Naia laughed with delight. ‘Hello, my boy!’

  A physical eighty-six, Aldous Underwood had the look of a rather preoccupied youth trying, not very successfully, to play the part of an old man. He was very neat tonight, in a dark blue shirt and lightweight linen trousers. His hair, as thick as ever, with just a touch of gray, was carefully combed. Naia hauled herself to her feet and Aldous’s cheeks warmed as she gathered him to her as well as she was able.