Caught in a Moment (The Alex Trueman Chronicles Book 1)

by Martin Dukes

  Curled up on the bare floor in his blankets Alex drifted into sleep. For the first time in nights he dreamed. He dreamed of his father, plying his international plumbing business in Bahrain, Qatar or somewhere out there in the Middle East. Alex was so used to his going out there on business he scarcely took any notice of his exact destination. He pictured his tall, skinny father in a flannel suit, striding across the desert with a sink under his arm. He noticed Alex in his predicament and doffed his panama hat, mopping his brow with a big white handkerchief.

  “A fine pickle you’ve got yourself into this time, lad” he told Alex. “I told you daydreaming would get you into a heap of trouble one day.”

  “I’m sorry Dad,” muttered Alex into his blankets.

  And then his mum was there, got up for the gym in T-shirt and jogging bottoms. She gently pushed his father aside and knelt on the desert sand, a light breeze stirring the wisps of hair around her face.

  “There’s ineffable eye balm in solitude,” she said softly, “Mordantly dangle the dewdrops of dalliance.”

  “You should listen to your Mother,” said his father, laying down his sink. “You never listen to a word I say, but you’ll take it from her.” There was bitterness in his voice.

  “Endurance is steadfastly monitored,” she continued, laying a hand on his cheek. “Take heed of the wormwinds of Zanzibar.”

  Alex awoke with a start. His parents faded in wisps and strands of light before his mind’s eye. All that was left was darkness and slanting slivers of moonlight. He pulled his blankets more tightly around him and slept once more, but dreamlessly.

  Dawn came, and with it came Morlock, who unlocked the door and opened it just wide enough to stick his ugly head around the threshold. His sparrow’s eyes glinted blackly in the sunlight as he turned to pick up something from the ground. Blinking in the sudden shaft of bright sunlight, Alex watched incuriously as Morlock placed a jug of water and three manna rolls just inside the door. Then Morlock withdrew, securing the various locks and bolts that imprisoned Alex.

  “Not so much as a ‘Good Morning,’” grumbled Alex, surveying the food and drink bleakly. It seemed likely that three manna rolls were meant to last him all day. His stomach was making it abundantly clear this wasn’t going to be enough.

  He ate one of the manna rolls, savouring each mouthful and chewing the food until it dissolved to nothing in his mouth. Then he had a long drink from the jug, incidentally pouring a good deal of it refreshingly down his front. The day seemed to offer little prospect of entertainment and there were seven of them to be endured until his release. Alex’s spirits, raised somewhat by eating breakfast, sagged once more. He went around the shed, applying his eye to all of the cracks and knotholes for signs of activity outside. There were none. Not many people came to the park except on Gathering days. There were only the stiffs and beyond the door, Morlock, standing almost as still, maintaining what would be a patient, day long vigil. Alex tried talking to him.

  “Hey, Morlock!” he said through the knothole. “What’s the time?”

  But Morlock showed no sign of having heard. He only raised a bony digit and scratched the back of his long neck.

  “That must be a boring job for you,” Alex said, in an attempt to engage his captor’s sympathies. “I bet you get lots of rubbish jobs….. I hope Ganymede pays you well.”

  Nor did this elicit any response.

  “Oy! Morlock, you lanky, pig faced old pillock!” he called, trying another tack.

  Morlock only twitched, and shifted his weight from one foot to the other. It seemed that neither insults, nor pleading nor indeed the voice of sweet reason could persuade Ganymede’s servant to engage in conversation with his captive. Alex abandoned the attempt. He slumped against the wall and buried his head in his hands. Time passed. The rate at which it passed was impossible to discern, given that he could see no manatees(or dugongs). There were times when it seemed to Alex that he may as well kill himself. He considered the hosepipe on its hook and wondered if he could sling it from the rafters and hang himself like Mitch. Presumably his life in Reality would continue as before. For want of anything else to do he took a good wallow in the swamp of self-pity. A big lump rose up in his throat and his eyes filled with tears. He rocked to and fro on his haunches, giving himself up to black despair. After a period given over to this, anger began to take the place of self-absorption, and Alex wiped the tears roughly away with the back of his hands.

  What right did Ganymede have to lock him up, anyway? Alex felt suddenly embittered and rebellious. He got to his feet and kicked and pummelled at the door, until his fists were raw and bruised. He shoulder charged the back wall until the shed creaked and stirred on its foundations. To no avail. Morlock remained unmoved. Alex cursed him and shouted until he was hoarse, using a vocabulary that would have scandalized his mum, had she been able to hear it. But she wasn’t. She was stuck in Wardworths, a stiff like all the others frozen in this eternal instant.

  Alex thought about school, about his first visit to 'Sticia, how much fun it had seemed then. If only he had known. His concentration during lessons would be like a laser beam if he ever got out of this lunatic world. He wondered about Henry. Where was he on this Saturday afternoon? Alex resolved to go and look for him at the end of his term of imprisonment. It felt about lunch time by now, but then it had felt about lunch time for a long time. Alex considered his remaining manna rolls. How small they were? But how wonderfully warm and succulent and tasty in the mouth. But if his stomach was already a yawning abyss of emptiness Alex’s spirit was filled with remorse for his weakness in face of the pic’n mix. If only he had been stronger. If only he had heeded Ganymede’s warning. He would not be here now. He had only himself to blame.

  And so Alex, whose body had few options available to it, occupied his mind with wandering restlessly from one mental state to another, tarrying a while with guilt and self-loathing before returning to bitterness, and so on.

  He was interrupted in this by a familiar hateful voice that caused his scalp to prickle with pent up loathing.

  “Hi Alex,” shouted Stacey, from beyond the bowling green. “How are you doing? Would you like a nice chocolate?”

  This was accompanied by sustained giggling from Sarah.

  “I bet you’d like a nice chocolate éclair now,” added Sarah, while Stacey whooped with laughter.

  Alex applied his eye to a crack in the front of the shed and glared at them impotently. His shouted response only caused them more merriment as they sauntered across the bowling green.

  “Ooh, language, language!” grinned Stacey. “Look how you’re makin’ poor Sarah here blush.”

  “What about your girlfriend?” demanded Sarah. “She hasn’t deserted you has she? Cruel, I call that.”

  Before Alex could put together an appropriately cutting reply to this, Morlock’s long back cut across his narrow field of vision.

  “Ganymede forbids this,” he heard Morlock say in a voice like the creaking of rusty coffin hinges. “Go now.”

  There was the threat of future punishment implicit in this. Stacey and Sarah took the hint. With a last few jeers and catcalls they wandered off behind the tennis courts.

  It was dark when Alex heard the next voice. Morlock had already gone. Alex assumed Ganymede saw no need to guard his prisoner during the hours of darkness when scarcely anyone ventured out. The voice belonged to Kelly, and Alex’s heart leapt within him.

  “Alex? Are you alright?” she called in a low voice, from the other side of the door.

  Alex, who had been curled up like a dog on his blankets, leapt to the door and pressed his eye to the knot hole. He could see the side of Kelly’s head, her hair catching threads of moonlight.

  “Here,” he said, calling her to the knot hole. “I’m fine.”

  Well he wasn’t, but he felt a great deal better for seeing Kelly.

  “Chin up,” she said, her face drifting into his view. “You must be bored stiff.”

&
nbsp; “A bit,” Alex admitted. “My TV’s only got terrestrial and my X-Box’s on the blink.”

  He was very pleased with himself for having said this. It was, he thought, the sort of thing that Henry would have said. Kelly laughed, and then stifled it unsuccessfully. “What have you been doing then?”

  “Not a lot. I’ve already formed an escape committee…. Let me think. I’m working on a tunnel, and I’m building a glider in the roof.” A thought occurred to Alex. “Here, look. Can you crawl under the back of the shed?”

  “I can try,” said Kelly.

  Alex rushed to pull up the loose plank, and after a few moments of grunting and cursing, Kelly’s voice issued from the stygian darkness beneath the floor.

  “Are you there, Alex? It’s pitch black down here. I can’t see a thing.”

  Alex reached down into the hole, his fingers brushing Kelly’s face.

  “Hey, steady on,” she said. “You nearly put my eye out.”

  There was a rustle and then Kelly’s warm hand found his own. For a few moments they held hands and said nothing. It was enough for Alex. He felt as happy as he had ever felt.

  “This is good,” said Kelly after a while. “I can bring you some stuff. I bet you’d appreciate a light stick. How much grub are you getting?”

  Alex told her. Kelly made a low whistle. “No way! You must be starving. I’ll see if I can wangle a few more for you. I know Will’ll be keen to help out.”

  “Yeah?” Alex had his doubts about this.

  “Well, perhaps not. I can be very persuasive though.” Kelly laughed. “It’s true you can move 'Stician stuff then. Tanya was right. Why didn’t you say?”

  “Why do you think?” asked Alex, feeling uncomfortable.

  There was a pause. “I guess you didn’t feel you could trust anyone,” she said at last. “You’ve only just arrived here. I don’t blame you, I suppose. It’s got all sorts of possibilities though, hasn’t it? I wonder if Ganymede realises how special you are.”

  “What do you mean ‘special’?” asked Alex. “You don’t think I’m going to risk doing it again do you? I’d have to be mad. I don’t want to get banged up in here for the rest of my life.”

  “I don’t know,” came Kelly’s voice, sounding thoughtful. “I guess not… It isn’t half uncomfortable down here. Do you want to throw me a blanket down?”

  Kelly stayed for a long time, or so it seemed. They talked about the other folk of 'Sticia and about their lives in the real world.

  “At least you’ve got one,” she told him when he was grumbling about his absentee, globe-trotting father. “I never even met mine. He pushed off before I was even born and got himself killed in a diving accident on the rigs. The oil rigs, that is. You know. Out in the North Sea. Very careless of him.” She sighed. “So now it’s just me and Mum. And Mum’s got Parkinson’s Disease so I’m like nurse, cleaning lady, cook, shopper, companion and general dogsbody all rolled into one. Not that I’m complaining, mind. Still, that’s one bright spot about 'Sticia. I don’t have to do all that stuff. I get a lot more time to myself. And this week Ganymede has decreed that I have to spend it learning Latin. Isn’t that great? I always wanted to learn Latin.”

  “I bet,” said Alex, sensing irony.

  The knowledge that Kelly was coming back made the next day almost bearable. Almost. There was an awful lot of it, of course, and having no means of measuring the passage of time was deeply frustrating. Alex spent some of it pacing up and down his prison and some of it making sculptures, in emulation of Sylvia DiStefano, out of the hosepipe and the plastic pots. Then he set up the pots like skittles and knocked them down by throwing dried up flower bulbs at them. He must have made a tremendous din during this but Morlock showed no sign of even having heard him. The strange creature continued to maintain his lonely vigil during the course of the long day. Alex felt relatively cheerful at times. No one else in 'Sticia, he told himself, would have been able to put the meagre contents of the House of Correction to such creative use.

  He was hungry by nightfall, however, having earlier eaten all his daily rations in anticipation of Kelly’s generosity later on. Nor was he disappointed, although it seemed like the night was already halfway through by the time she came knocking softly at the door. Alex lifted the loose floorboard and within moments there she was, beaming up at him seraphically in the yellow glow of a lightstick. Alex could have kissed her. He would have tried, notwithstanding the obstacle of the floor, had he any confidence that she might have welcomed this.

  “And that’s not all,” she said, her eyes twinkling mischievously. “I got manna and….” She passed up a heavy rectangular object. “…reading material. If you can call it that.”

  Alex cast a doubtful eye over Paulo’s copy of the Complete Works of Shakespeare.

  “Well,” he said. “Shakespeare’s not really my style.”

  “It’s got to be better than Collins’s Latin Primer,” said Kelly. “Proper books are hard to come by in 'Sticia. You know what Ganymede’s like. If you’re enjoying it, it can’t be any good for you. That’s his way of looking at things.”

  “Thanks for the manna, anyway,” said Alex, looking greedily at two manna rolls nestling in a scrap of cloth. “I hope you’re not going hungry yourself for this?”

  “Not really,” she grinned. “I cadged one off Tanya and one off Will. I’m the Queen of the Scroungers.”

  Alex ate. He gave some to Kelly too. They munched contentedly.

  “How’s Major Trubshaw?” asked Alex after a while.

  “No one’s seen him,” said Kelly, brushing crumbs out of her hair. “I guess he’s keeping a low profile.”

  “He’ll have to,” laughed Alex. “Until he can learn to keep his thoughts in order.”

  “He’s a funny old stick, Ganymede,” said Kelly thoughtfully. “He’s not exactly cruel in the rip your toenails out, boil you in oil sort of way. But he can still be quite a sadist.”

  “What is he exactly?” asked Alex. “Is he, you know, human like us? Or is he some kind of super being?” He shook his head slowly. “I can’t believe I’m having this conversation.”

  “I know. It’s weird isn’t it. It’s like a dream but it isn’t. It’s all too real. For days when I first got here I kept on pinching myself to see if I could wake myself up. I can’t even remember how I got here. Not really. The last thing I remember is meeting my friend Jess by the town clock. After that it’s all a blank. And then I’m here, wandering about like a lost soul until Tanya came upon me, up by the Hospital School.”

  “And what about Paulo?” asked Alex, after a while. “Has he come back?”

  Kelly shook her head. “I don’t think he is coming back,” she said.

  Kelly visited Alex every night after this, and made Alex’s term of imprisonment bearable for him. During the day he played with his good friends the hose and the flower pots. Sometimes he read Shakespeare, straining his eyes in the uneven light, and working his way gradually through Macbeth, Julius Caesar and A Midsummer Night’s Dream. At other times he merely sat and thought; which would certainly have pleased Ganymede. Alex doubted, however that the nature of his thoughts would always have recommended themselves to his jailor. They were not self-critical thoughts. They were fierce and resentful thoughts of escape into the rough, high country beyond Micklebury. Let Ganymede catch him there. All the other 'Sticians were dependent on Ganymede for food, but not Alex. Oh no. Alex could look after himself. Alex entertained grim fantasies of survival in the wilds as the slow hours passed into days and his time in the House of Correction drew to an end.

  Chapter Nine

  Morlock released Alex on Sunday, the day before the Gathering, which was a welcome surprise. Time off for good behaviour, he supposed. So it was a good job Ganymede didn’t know about the loose board, and the collected works of Shakespeare, and the extra rations he had enjoyed, thanks to Kelly. Alex emerged blinking into bright ‘Stician daylight.

  “Ganymede,” creaked Morlock,
pointing an arm as long as Alex’s leg in the direction of the tyrant tramp’s dwelling place.

  Morlock was not one for idle chatter. He counted out words like a miser counts out coins. Perhaps he was worried he would deplete his stock. It was as though each word Morlock spoke was a word lost forever, spinning into the void. Alex mused on this as he made his way across a park more familiar to him now than it had ever been in Reality.

  “I hope I have made my point,” Ganymede told him, when he was ushered into the tramp’s presence. “You do understand now, that interference with 'Sticia will not be tolerated.”

  Alex nodded, fighting back the urge to ask Ganymede what right he had to boss everybody about and strut about like some kind of mad dictator. But it really wasn’t worth it. Despite his wild fantasies of living a lonely existence in the hills he had ultimately decided that he would keep on the right side of Ganymede from now on. This resolve had begun to weaken by the time Alex left. He had had to endure a lengthy lecture about morals, behaviour and the wickedness of youth. He had also been allocated his work task for the coming week. This involved an empty skip outside a factory unit on the Birmingham road. His task was to fill it with water from the nearby River Rimble. Ganymede had given him a bucket to do this with. This in itself would have been conventional enough, had the bucket not had a big hole in the bottom of it. Ganymede had only laughed in a sardonic sort of way when Alex had pointed this out. Neither had he made it clear how far the skip was from the river. Alex soon found out. It was a good fifty metres from the river bank, beyond a sagging barbed wire fence and a patch of scrubby bush. By the time he had filled the bucket, scrambled up the bank and hurried across the yard to the skip, the bucket was almost empty. Two manatees and a dugong later and there was a meagre puddle of water around the child’s broken bicycle that was all that the skip contained. Alex was already exhausted, his knees grazed from clambering up and down to the river and pushing past the bushes. The temptation to bung up the hole with a bit of Statical chewing gum was almost unbearable. Alex might have given in to it had it not been for the presence of Morlock, who stood by watching him all day with glum concentration. It seemed that Ganymede still didn’t trust him. Ganymede had told him that for every centimetre of water in the skip at the end of the week he would receive a manna roll at the next Gathering. This had seemed straightforward enough at the time, but by the time three days of the new week had passed a future of starvation seemed to lie ahead for Alex. There was barely a hand’s breadth of water in the skip and a broad damp trail led back across to the river. As he surveyed this bleakly at the end of what he thought of as Wednesday, Alex made the decision to cheat. He was not by nature a deceitful boy. So he assured himself. But Ganymede had forced him into it. By the time he was almost asleep in his bedroom that night he had summoned up the determination to take positive action.