The Realities of Aldous U

by Michael Lawrence

  ‘What are you up to these days?’ she asked when he was seated in the armchair facing her on the couch.

  ‘Oh, you know. The usual. Not a lot.’

  ‘Still corresponding with Rod?’

  ‘Course.’

  ‘And Lynne, now,’ Kate said.

  ‘Lynne?’

  ‘Rod’s half-sister. Our boy’s a bit sweet on her.’

  ‘I’m not!’ Aldous said, but again colored a little.

  ‘She sent him a photo. Nice-looking girl. About his age too.’

  He stared at his hands: thin, fine-skinned, undeniably elderly.

  ‘Not this age,’ he murmured.

  This was one of his great sadnesses. No spirited lovers for Aldous Underwood. No physical love at all. No choice but to be a solitary being, these two his only truly close friends and confidantes in all the world. He could not court women, even meet young men on equal terms, and the idea of spending time with people of his body’s age revolted him. The truth about his life could never be told, or even hinted at beyond these walls. The tabloids would have a field day.

  ‘Well,

  I’m here now,’ Naia said. ‘Permanent fixture. And the three of us are going to have lots of talks and walks (whether you like it or not) and when he’s old enough – ’ she pointed to the bump ‘ – we’ll have picnics, go boating on the river, do all sorts of soppy family things together. But for the moment… Aldous?’

  ‘Hullo?’

  ‘I’ve had a long day, sod of a drive, and I have a craving for one of those toasted-cheese sandwiches of yours. How’s about it, young feller-me-lad?’

  He was up at once, all smiles – ‘Right away, madam!’ – and marching to the door: a man with a mission.

  Part Four

  THE EVITABLE CONCLUSION

  48: 43/82

  Aldous U had had a fitful night. Those damned Alarics, coming into his home and making him feel bad for minding his business in preference to theirs. Now that they’d pricked his conscience he felt – dammit, as if he didn’t have enough on his plate! – an obligation to do what he could. He knew very well where the one from the gang belonged and could easily send him home; but if he helped him, what about his pals? He had no idea where they were from. The odds were against any of them having been resident at a Withern Rise. They’d probably snuck into the grounds of their reality’s version of it for a dare or something, hidden or strayed near a crossing point, and been unfortunate enough to take the step that had brought them to R43, where they’d failed to realize that the way back was no more complicated than a step in the opposite direction. They might have ended up in any reality, of course. Pure chance they stepped into his. Other youngsters, taking that same unwitting step, could be just as adrift in very different realities. Kids went missing all the time. They weren’t all butchered, lured by pedophiles, sold into slavery. And for all he knew, crossing points weren’t exclusive to The Underwood See.

  He’d woken in the early morning after less than three hours’ sleep, knowing that he must make some attempt to locate the other boys’ home realities. He wasn’t too hopeful of success, but after breakfast he set off to glean what he could from a selection of realities he hadn’t visited for a while. He allowed himself no more than ninety minutes in each, concentrating his search on the village and nearer parts of the town. Unable to question anyone closely without arousing suspicion (‘I’m looking for boys’ – ‘Hey, call the cops!’) the best he could hope for was to overhear, in a shop or street, or see on a poster, some mention of a lad or lads who’d gone missing in recent months. It wasn’t much, but at least he would have made the effort, and thus cleared his conscience.

  AU’s assessment of the likelihood of success turned out to be accurate. By late afternoon, having visited several realities, he’d failed to turn up any information whatsoever about missing boys. He’d eaten nothing since breakfast but a small chocolate bar around eleven, drunk nothing but bottled water from a leather satchel whose main function was to shield the contents of the pouches he’d brought along. In the latest reality, he crossed the market square to the Baker’s Oven for a snack. Just one more today, he told himself, and he would call it quits. Start again in the morning with a fresh selection of pouches, and if necessary repeat the process the following day, but after that he would have to think of himself. Move the rest of his things out of R43 before it was too late.

  There were still a couple of untried pouches in the satchel, but as he entered the café he decided that when he stole back into the garden of this reality’s Withern Rise he would not use a pouch at all. Even without one, the crossing point could take him to a reality he knew – impossible to predict where he’d end up that way – but there was always a possibility that he would find himself in a reality from which one or more of the boys had come. Occasionally, just occasionally, chance worked in your favor.

  49: 39

  Naia was buying chocolate éclairs at the counter of the Baker’s Oven when she saw the man she knew beyond any shadow of a doubt to be Aldous U. He was sitting in the poorly-lit café section at the back, frowning over something he was writing. She turned away so if he looked up he’d think she hadn’t seen him, and, suddenly nervous, fumbled her change and flew outside with the bag of éclairs. She crossed the road at the lights and entered the market square car park, around which were a number of ornate iron benches. She seated herself on one of the benches to watch the shop, hardly daring to blink for fear of missing him. When he finally appeared in the doorway she raised the bag to her face, even though it was unlikely that he would notice her from there, with a busy road, a car park, and pavements full of shoppers between them.

  ‘Some funny people about,’ said a voice.

  Naia peeked round the bag: Lauren Hayle from her class, with some pasty-faced youth. They exchanged a laugh – no explanation needed for hiding behind a paper bag – and the couple went on their way. As they went, she thought she heard the boy whisper, ‘In’t that that loony Underwood chick?’ When she returned her gaze to the Baker’s Oven, there was no sign of the man she’d intended to follow.

  She jumped up, rushed to the edge of the car park, waited impatiently for a break in the traffic, and hurried across to the other side, where she looked up and down the street, leaning round pedestrians, standing on tiptoe, desperate for a glimpse of the tall red-haired figure. There was no sign of him. Frustrated, she headed along the High Street. Recrossing the road at the lights by Flyaway Holidays, she cut through the cobbled lane between an estate agent’s and a craft shop to Parable Road, on the far side of which lay the old woodyard bridge into Eynesford.

  About two thirds of the way along the village street, she dipped into the paper bag for an éclair. She’d bought four, two for her, two for Kate, who she expected to throw histrionic hands in the air, then say ‘Oh, what diet?’, before burying her face in the first of hers. She was about to pass Mr. and Mrs. Paine’s shop when she bit into the éclair. As her teeth closed, her toe caught a slight lift in the pavement. She tripped, ramming her nose into the chocolate icing. At the same instant someone came out of the shop and collided with her. The man caught her arm, but the bag left her hand and opened out, scattering its contents.

  She looked up, a brown blob on the end of her nose, into the eyes of the man she’d failed to follow from the Baker’s Oven.

  Simultaneously recognizing her, the man became shifty, stammered incomprehensibly, started away. Naia’s imperious ‘Wait!’ brought him to a halt. She gathered up the street-soiled éclairs, dropped them in a wastebin, and, scrubbing her nose and sticky fingers with her hanky, walked him, like an apprehended felon, to the railings of the old primary school on the corner. ‘All these months,’ she said, pinning him there, ‘the mysterious letters, the instructions, the pouches, the missed meetings, and we bump into one another here, literally bump into one another! We could have met openly any time, any day, why all the…?’

  He was staring at her, patently bemused. She lo
st it.

  ‘Oh, cut it out! I know who you are! Why go on with it?’

  But when his mystification merely intensified…

  ‘You are Aldous U…?’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘You’re not?’

  ‘I-I’m j-just me.’

  ‘But if you’re not him…’

  She considered the possibility that he wasn’t who she’d believed him to be, accepted the twist with admirable aplomb, and started again, from a rather different standpoint. If he wasn’t Aldous U, he was still the man she’d seen watching the house through binoculars, taking pictures of it. The man who’d run off when approached. So who was he? What had he been after? He wasn’t going anywhere until he’d satisfied her on these counts, and others.

  He continued to stammer badly during the early part of the question and answer session that followed, but as he got used to it, and to her, the stammer receded. When she heard his reason for spying on the house, she invited him back to meet Kate. He glanced about as though estimating his chances of making a break for it, but she took him by the arm and led him along the lane, doing most of the talking to calm him. He preceded her apprehensively through the side gate, but once on the path became calmer, as though resigned to what had to be done. By the time they reached the front step he seemed almost sanguine about the whole thing. Naia opened the door and called twice before Kate shouted ‘On the phone!’ from the Long Room.

  She took him to the kitchen. ‘What I don’t understand,’ she said, seating him across from her at the table, ‘is why you didn’t just ring the bell.’

  ‘Oh, I couldn’t, I – ’

  ‘But all that sneaking around! So… unnecessary.’

  He started to stammer an apology, but she again cut him short; asked him to fill in the details. In his own time.

  50: ?/43

  The last reality of the day, the ‘chance’ reality, turned out, as AU had hoped, to be one that he hadn’t visited previously, but there too he found no mention of missing boys. He returned to R43 at the end of what felt like a wasted day and proceeded through the forest by his usual route. As he opened his gate, he heard a shiver of leaves nearby, and, turning, saw Ric watching him from some trees a little way along. The boy had been waiting for him and did not dodge back, but said, rather plaintively: ‘Please? Help me?’

  ‘Help you what?’ AU answered coldly.

  ‘Don’t leave me here,’ Ric said. ‘Not if it’s all going to – ’

  He was cut short by an almighty roar that flipped both their gazes skyward, where, as the sound expanded, mellowing into something akin to a long-suffering groan, they saw the heavens quiver, darken, then turn a swift purple, like a vast spreading bruise.

  Aldous U shook himself, gave an anguished cry, and lurched up the path. Vaulting the wall, Ric bounded after him, demanding answers. He received none as AU fumbled with the padlock, threw the door back, and charged inside, where he dithered, attempting instant decisions he’d expected to have days to formulate. Another celestial groan of even greater magnitude activated him. He ran into the bedroom for the two framed photographs, which he put in a canvas bag as he returned to the main room, where he added papers, documents and keepsakes from various drawers and cupboards, all the while chastising himself for removing so few things while he had the chance. What distressed him most was the books he would now have to leave behind, many of them irreplaceable volumes from realities that no longer existed. Hastily selecting a handful from the stacks, allowing the rest to tumble, he shoved them in another bag, zipped it up, slid it across the floor to Ric – ‘Take this!’ – and set about levering up floorboards. Beneath them lay a multitude of small pouches of various materials and colors. Darting about, picking and plucking from the array, muttering ‘Which, which? Goddam memory! No time!’, he crammed pouch after pouch into the satchel that had accompanied him to seven realities that day.

  The bag was no more than two-thirds full when the world fell silent, as though a switch had been flipped. He raced to the door, where Ric waited, wide-eyed, very scared. High up in the sky, which had a dead look now, a confusion of long-tailed turquoise-and-green birds cawed and squawked as they converged on an orb of smeared darkness that had not been there before, whirling around it and each other with terror. ‘Now where have those beauties been hiding?’ AU said, before dashing back for one last item: the ledger in which he’d listed the thousands of realities he’d visited over the years.

  With the book under his arm, the strap of the satchel across his chest, the canvas bag in his hand, he closed the door of the house: habit, though he left the padlock hanging. Ric was waiting anxiously at the gate. Behind him, boughs groaned under their own weight; thinner branches snapped; some trunks shattered and crumbled.

  ‘Best be off,’ AU said. ‘Rather quickly, I think.’

  ‘We?’

  ‘Unless you want to stay here.’

  ‘I don’t.’

  ‘Where are your pals?’

  ‘They’re… lost.’

  ‘Too bad. Missed their chance.’

  Half-way along the path, AU stooped to touch a rectangle of flat gray stone, into which he’d scratched the name of his murdered cat. ‘Farewell, old friend.’ Rising, he continued on to the gate, but again stopped abruptly. ‘My pipes!’ He glanced back, tempted to return for them. The sound of a tree crashing down not so very far away caused wisdom to prevail. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘I couldn’t get the hang of the damn things anyway,’ and entered the forest, Ric hard on his heels.

  The putrid flora was already a wasted tangle of brittle stalks and withering leaves. Trees creaked and splintered about them as they hurried past and through. The tight web of branches that had so reduced the overhead light pulled apart and came down in spinning clumps that had to be dodged. Cats appeared, more cats than AU had known were there, beseeching him for assurance that everything would be all right. He could not meet their eyes.

  By the time they reached the crossing point, the ground was as dry as ash, threatening to give way beneath them. AU fumbled with the clasp of the satchel, took out the first pouch he touched, and, gripping Ric by the arm, pulled him forward.

  Within seconds of their going, Reality 43 and all that it contained was no more.

  51: 39

  His name was Rod Bishop. His mother had spent the first decade of her childhood at Withern Rise, and for the past twenty-one years had been running a motel and guest house with her second husband, Phil Gurney, in Dunedin, New Zealand. When Rod (her son from her earlier marriage to Maurice Bishop, a trombonist and tuba player from York) had announced that he was going to spend a few months in this part of England researching a book – he was an historian – she had prevailed upon him to go to Withern and take some photos for her. He had obliged, within days of landing at Heathrow in June, and at first his mother had been pleased merely to have the pictures, but then she developed further curiosity about the place it had become since she last saw it, and demanded written descriptions of it and its surroundings. The latest thing she’d asked him to do was go to the house and talk to the people who now owned it, find out how long they’d lived there, maybe get some photos of the interior. Being of a nervous disposition, this latest request gave Rod the twitches. But about three days ago he had finally managed to gear himself up to approaching the house and introducing himself. He’d not even made it to the end of the drive, however, before Naia spotted him and called out, whereupon he lost his bottle and once again made a run for it.

  ‘Your mother lived here in the nineteen-forties then,’ Naia said when she was up to date with all this. She’d heard this twice now, so it wasn’t a question so much as a preamble to one.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You haven’t told me her name.’

  ‘Mrs. Gurney.’

  ‘Her first name. And her maiden name.’

  ‘Her first name’s Mimi. She was Mimi Underwood then.’

  Naia beamed. She sprang from her seat. ‘Don’t move!’ />
  He hardly dared to until she returned, breathless from a run upstairs, with an old photo album she placed on the table between them but did not open at once. There was one more thing she wanted to know first.

  ‘You dropped a pair of binoculars the other day.’

  Reminded of his most recent flight from her, he again became agitated. ‘Y-yes, I d-did, s-sorry, I – ’

  ‘It’s all right, don’t get in a state, I’m only asking.’

  He took one of the deep, slow breaths that seemed to help his delivery. ‘The binoculars are of no p-personal value.’

  ‘Just as well. Someone else has them now. But I’m curious to know where you got them.’ He told her. ‘Oh,’ she said. ‘Ivan’s shop.’

  ‘Whose?’

  ‘My… dad’s.’

  ‘Your dad’s? Well that explains the name.’

  ‘Name?’

  ‘Underwood. Over the door. That’s why I went in.’

  ‘You could have asked him if he was a relative.’

  ‘Oh, no. It was all I could do to buy the binoculars.’

  ‘He never should have sold them. They belonged here. Still, they’re back now. You know, I’m amazed your mum didn’t know the family had returned to Withern. All these years and she had no idea.’

  ‘Oh, she knew they’d returned,’ Rod said.

  ‘She knew? But…’

  His mother, he explained, had told him about his Uncle Ray buying Withern back in the 1960s, but her memories of their childhood home had not been as fond as Ray’s and she’d never visited. In any case, any closeness that had existed between them as kids had faded during their teens, and once they left home for jobs in different parts of the country correspondence had never been better than sporadic. By the mid-seventies even birthday and Christmas cards had ceased to be exchanged, since when, over time, Mimi had come to assume that Rayner had either died or resold the property.