Alex and the Ironic Gentleman

by Adrienne Kress

  “What are you looking at?”

  “What? Oh, nothing,” replied Mr. Underwood, turning back.

  “Gosh, you’re paranoid,” said Alex shaking her head. “It was just the school bell.”

  “Well, ah, the fact that you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they’re not after you,” Mr. Underwood pointed out and laughed nervously.

  “I guess.” The two of them stood in uncomfortable silence for another moment. Alex saw that she would have to be the one to defuse the awkwardness. “So . . . ah . . . what happened to Mrs. Swinsky?”

  “Who? Oh, Mrs. Swinsky. Yes. I believe she went to Portugal for the summer and never came back.”

  “Oh.” Alex thought for a moment. “That’s odd.”

  “Yes,” replied Mr. Underwood, “I suppose it is.”

  Alex shrugged, and started walking toward the school. “Well, let me show you the way,” she said. “Sixth grade is my class.”

  “Thank you very much, Alex.” He followed her up into the school, his bike in tow. Alex smiled to herself. Sixth grade at Wigpowder-Steele was going to be a good one. A little weird, but good.

  THE SECOND CHAPTER

  In which Alex has a most enjoyable P.E. lesson.

  What an exciting few months of school Alex had with Mr. Underwood as her teacher. He was nothing like any of her other teachers had been. First of all, he was intelligent. He could answer any question. If you asked him about Zimbabwe he would tell you all about Zimbabwe and not, “Alexandra Morningside, we are studying the feeding habits of fruit flies. Stop asking pointless questions.” Secondly, he made learning extremely entertaining. Like when they were learning all about Joan of Arc, and they staged a trial and Alex got to play juror number two, and she wore a pair of her uncle’s spectacles to make her look like an adult. (The best bit was the bonfire at the end when they got to roast marshmallows.)

  Mr. Underwood was also young, which was just plain refreshing. It was also a bit frustrating for Alex because many of the ridiculous girls in her class thought that he was “cute” and they would wear makeup (because even when you are ten or eleven, certain parents don’t mind you wearing make-up) or do their hair in a different way. And they would always laugh at his jokes, even though they didn’t really understand what they meant, unlike Alex, who picked up most of his references.

  Alex had also been correct, though, in assuming the year ahead was going to be slightly weird. Mr. Underwood did have some awfully strange ticks. For example, he was very particular about grammar, which I suppose is important for a sixth-grade teacher. However, Alex had never seen anyone react so strangely when people didn’t use the words “I” and “me” correctly.

  “The best way of knowing if you should use ‘I’ or ‘me,’ ” he had explained, “is to say the sentence just referring to yourself. So you say, ‘Could you help me with the dishes?’ in order to realize that it is ‘Could you help John and me with the dishes?’ and not ‘John and I.’ ”

  This was all well and good, and very educational, but things got a bit complicated when Douglas Gerald, who consistently flouted the rule, was finally given detention. This seemed awfully harsh even for Douglas Gerald, and there had been many letters from angry parents who wrote in to complain, and Mr. Underwood had been forced to apologize.

  “What does it really matter, anyway, whether you say ‘me’ or ‘I’?” Terri Little had asked, with a flip of her hair, of a rather disheartened Mr. Underwood once he had finished his apology.

  Mr. Underwood sighed. It was obvious he didn’t want to discuss the subject any further, but he never refused to answer a student’s question. “It matters because many people, when they are forced to choose between ‘me’ and ‘I,’ choose ‘I.’ They do this because, for some strange reason, ‘I’ sounds more intelligent than the word ‘me.’ And so they think it makes them seem intelligent, when really using the word ‘I’ when it should be ‘me’ just shows that they are not as intelligent as they think they are—and that, worst of all, they are trying to show the person they are talking to that they are someone they aren’t.”

  Alex had watched Douglas as he turned a slight shade of pink.

  Well, anyway, I digress. The point was that Mr. Underwood was a marvelous teacher despite being ever so distinctly odd. And sometimes these two attributes together could make for some surprising and wonderful lessons as well.

  Take Mr. Underwood’s P.E. lessons, for instance. Alex, although she liked playing outside and walking, did not tend to enjoy P.E. Normally the class was made to do calisthenics, or run laps, or something pointless like that. But Mr. Under-wood was having none of it.

  Alex always had complete confidence in Mr. Under-wood, but even she could not imagine how it was possible to make P.E enjoyable. So in their first lesson she was, as always, the last one changed and entering the gym. What she saw was most startling. Mr. Underwood was dressed entirely in white from head to toe, and this is a literal description because covering his head was a white mask with a fine wire mesh where the face was. In fact, she only knew it was Mr. Underwood when he lifted it up and said, “No dawdling now, Alex, class has already started.” And as she sat she saw the most startling thing of all. Mr. Underwood was brandishing a sword. This seemed awfully dangerous, even—or perhaps especially—in a prestigious school like Wigpowder-Steele.

  “I’ve got the go-ahead from the board of directors to teach you my favorite form of exercise. Can anyone guess what it is?” And it seemed rather obvious it would have to be something involving swordplay, but just in case they hadn’t figured it out, he sliced the air with the sword, making a swooshing noise. “Well, it’s called fencing. Fencing looks as if it would be dangerous, but it’s actually a sport, and I can guarantee that no one gets hurt. First of all, you all wear these masks,” and he pointed to the one on his head, “and, second, you’ll see that the tip of the sword is blunted. That is called a button, because it looks like someone has stuck a small button onto the point. These swords themselves are called fencing foils. Now, I thought it would be fun to learn something a bit different, and fencing is a most excellent form of exercise. So, let’s get started.”

  What followed was fifteen minutes of stretching and a half hour of “lunging”—which is when you keep your left foot on the ground and take a giant step forward with the right so you find yourself in a lunge, which is incredibly painful, especially when you do it over and over again. And then class was finished, and they didn’t even get to touch the swords at all. Nonetheless, no one could talk of anything else, and during lunch every other student in the school wanted to ask them all about it.

  After that initial fencing class, things got a bit better, and they even got to use the swords eventually. And once they got to do that, well, then, things got very exciting indeed. They were paired off, and they each got a mask, and then they had to fight. By then they had learned how to hold their swords en garde, and they knew how to advance and retreat, and how to beat away a sword, and they constantly learned new techniques at the start of each class.

  Alex discovered that she was quite adept at it and got quite good. In fact, she got so good that she couldn’t really fight with many other people in her class, so if he wasn’t busy teaching, she got to fight Mr. Underwood personally. Sort of like this:

  MR. UNDERWOOD ALEX

  en garde in Prime refuse the blade with a dégagé ← en garde in Seconde appel, attempt change

  [Both reengage in Tierce]

  froisement, thrust → parry tierce chest

  retreat back, parry quarte ← bind into patinando

  ripost into lunge → retreat, parry seconde

  recover, parry high seconde ← punto reverso

  bind over, thrust center → demi volte, hand parry, into Angelo’s deceit

  atttempt parry tierce, rassemblement ← dégagé into spin, feint thrust center

  evade with a passata sotto threaten center ← slash head

  “Ah ha! I have you!”

  . .
. which I’m sure you’ll find pretty self-explanatory.

  Of course, Alex, despite having quite a good punto reverso, tended to lose when she fought Mr. Underwood because he was very, very good and wouldn’t pull his attacks. Yes, it was slightly odd that a sixth-grade teacher should be quite that good at fencing. But Alex reasoned that maybe he had been on the team in university or something. By fighting Mr. Underwood in this manner, she got better quite quickly, and soon she was helping him teach the class. What this meant was that she was even less popular than she had been before. But what it also meant was that she got to become better friends with Mr. Underwood than anyone else.

  Interestingly, at the same time, while Alex was becoming friends with Mr. Underwood, Mr. Underwood was becoming friends with her uncle, who had grown to be his most avid supporter on the board since the “I/me” detention scandal. And so Alex’s uncle had begun to invite her teacher over after school for dinner occasionally. Now it may seem odd to have your teacher around all the time, but Alex thought Mr. Underwood was just as interesting as her uncle, and really enjoyed listening to the two of them talk. Besides, she had no friends anyway, so she didn’t care that her peers thought it was strange that Mr. Underwood hung out with her family. And even though they also thought this gave her an advantage in school with grades and stuff, Alex knew that, in fact, the opposite was true, that she was graded all the more carefully. Besides, it wasn’t as if Clarissa Fairfield’s mom wasn’t bridge partners with the Headmistress and Brent Snoutford wasn’t best friends with the son of the academic examiner.

  So Mr. Underwood would come over after school and help her uncle with fixing doorknobs and even invented a Special Technique for gluing together shattered glass ones. Other times he and her uncle would have quiet grown-up conversations about the Current State of Government or Literature over a bottle of wine. But then he would spend time with Alex as well, for example showing her new and interesting photography techniques.

  And this was how Mr. Underwood became a Family Friend, because he could get along with both Alex and her uncle, and the three of them would sit up until Alex’s bedtime listening to her stories. Then Alex would go to bed, and shortly afterward she would hear the sound of Mr. Underwood’s bicycle clanking away into the distance, along the bridge and down the street, until the sound disappeared altogether.

  THE THIRD CHAPTER

  In which we meet some Very Dangerous Men and witness an act of arson.

  So let’s say many weeks have passed since the family friendship between Alex and her uncle and Mr. Under-wood had been solidified, so that we can get the story moving and tell you of a Very Important Night.

  Strange things can happen in the middle of the night. The reason for this is that, typically, this time of night tends to be very dark. This means that there is lots of blackness to hide in or escape to after having done something sinister. And this is why most movies have their scariest moments late at night. Also the streetlights can cast ominous shadows so you can fool yourself into thinking things are more dangerous than they are.

  However, I should point out that the two men walking down that alley over there were exactly as dangerous as, if you could see them properly in the day and not in the middle of the night, they looked. Which was rather dangerous.

  And if you could have seen them in the daylight you would have noticed how one man was very tall and looked very strong, and one man was short and looked very weak. You would have also noticed that the small man had a very pointy nose, greasy, red hair that fell lank to his shoulders, and no eyebrows. Although you might not have noticed he didn’t have any eyebrows because that isn’t the sort of thing one notices. You might have noticed that he looked Odd, or Unsettling, without quite knowing why, as often we cannot place exactly the reason we don’t like a person. And we think it is because of who they are or how they behave, when really it is all down to a lack of facial hair. The short man with the pointy nose, greasy, red hair that fell lank to his shoulders, and no eyebrows was also wearing a black trench coat and black leather gloves. And black leather shoes with buckles. And he carried a hammer close to him like a security blanket. He called his hammer “Hammer.” He called himself Jack.

  The bigger man had more than enough facial hair for the both of them. But, if he hadn’t been wearing a bowler hat, you would have noticed he had none on his head. Interestingly, he wore a monocle. This is interesting because it is very annoying to wear a monocle as you have to hold it in place with the muscles around your eye. So it is a very definite Choice to wear a monocle instead of glasses, which are much easier to deal with, but what that Choice meant for that man, I haven’t the foggiest.

  The bigger man with the hairy face and bowler hat and monocle was wearing a three-piece suit. He liked to look professional because he was very proud that he was a doctor. People called him Dr. Brunswick. Because that was his name. Dr. Brunswick was also wearing rubber boots.

  The two men had one map between them, which had caused them to argue over who got to carry it. Of course, the doctor had won, because he was bigger, and bigger men usually win things. He had also won because he was much smarter than Jack and much more adept at reading maps. And he had drawn the map in the first place.

  The map was of the town, the same town that Alex lived in with her uncle and her sixth-grade teacher, Mr. Underwood. And it was leading the two men down a small alley that opened onto a pleasant cobblestone mews.

  This mews was lit by streetlights, and the two men were very cautious in approaching number 18, which was where the map had been leading them. They stood in the shadow of the doorway, and Jack, after a quick look around, opened his trench coat. Being so skinny, he was able to hide all manner of things under there and still not make a bulge. In this instance, he had a can of kerosene with the name “Dude Hector” etched into the side, a book of matches, a bundle of material, and the complete works of Dickens. Dr. Brunswick silently watched (and by “silently” I mean accidentally knocking over a garbage can and then kicking it in rage) as Jack drenched the cloth in kerosene and then set it on fire. Then the doctor smashed number 18’s front room window and Jack threw the ball of fire into the house. And then they ran away into the shadows.

  They ran far from the house, now entirely swallowed by flames. They ran till they were very far away and then stopped. They stopped because this is where they were supposed to meet the third man. I’m sorry, I just realized I forgot to tell you that there was a third man, and the third man was the most frightening and dangerous one of the lot. If you looked at him you could be forgiven for assuming he had no eyebrows because you would definitely not have liked the sight of him. But he had eyebrows. He just didn’t have eyes.

  Now you shouldn’t feel sorry for him because he had never had eyes and had been born that way. And if you have never had something you can’t really miss it. Once upon a time, he had had his nose, however, and he missed that terribly. Even more than he missed his ears, and definitely more than he missed his hands. Again, though, you shouldn’t feel bad for him because though this all sounds unpleasant, and it really is, he could still hear things through the holes in the sides of his head, and he could still grab things with the elegant wooden hands designed to replace the originals.

  But the reason he missed his nose most of all was that in losing his nose he had lost his sense of smell, and while his sense of smell was no great loss to him, there was one thing that was. I don’t know if you knew this, but when you lose your sense of smell, you lose most of your sense of taste. And that was, if you insist on feeling sorry for this most dangerous man, what made him the saddest. Because what he liked more than anything in the world was a good whiskey. And since he had lost his nose, he had not been able to taste the flavor of a good whiskey at all.

  Now if you had seen this man in this way, you might have fainted from fright. And you may wonder exactly how he would go about in the daytime with everyone fainting around him. “How,” for example, “would he be able to buy a
hot chocolate?” you may ask. Well, he had solved that problem by wrapping a long, black silk cloth around his head just above his mouth (which was entirely intact, by the way) and tying it neatly at the back of his head. The silk meant he could still hear through the material, and it also felt very nice against the skin. He wore a matching black silk shirt tied with strings at the front and soft, dark-red leather trousers with black boots. And when he walked down the street, instead of everyone fainting, they would whisper, “What a dashing young man that dashing young man is. I wonder why he wears a scarf around his face?” (There was, in fact, a small town that he had passed through once that so admired his appearance that he had started a trend of people wrapping silk scarves around their faces—which caused no end of accidents but greatly benefited the silk scarf industry in that region.)

  So . . .

  This third man arrived from behind the other two, which made them jump. What made them jump was not so much his arrival but the bark that the third man’s dog made. It was a very loud bark, and when you are not expecting it, a very loud bark can easily make you jump. Oh yes, I meant to tell you that the third man had a large, scraggly, gray guide dog who drooled constantly. And the dog’s name was Walter. And he could probably bite you in half with one snap.

  “So where is he?” asked the third man quietly.

  There was a silence broken by the sound of fire engines roaring somewhere off in the far distance.

  Then the doctor said, “I knew we forgot something.”

  So number 18 was on fire, but this was not very dangerous to Alex or her uncle because they lived on the other side of town from number 18. And it wasn’t dangerous to Mr. Underwood either because he hadn’t been home at the time. He had been out for one of the midnight strolls he sometimes took when he couldn’t sleep. Of course, when he got back and found his home burned to the ground, he thanked his lucky stars that he had had one too many coffees before going to bed.