Fortunately, I knew what this remark meant. It was very sarcastic. It meant that I was like Jesus – not the result of sexual intercourse, which, in the Bible, was a terrible sin.
‘That’s not what I meant,’ I said. ‘I had a father but my mother’s not exactly sure who he was. I was conceived in the normal way. Somewhere near Stonehenge,’ I added.
‘Your mother sounds like a hoot.’
‘She’s celibate now,’ I said.
‘Okay. This is all fascinating stuff, but let’s cut the crap. Tell me who your mother is, kid. I want her name. Her full name.’
‘Rowena Woods,’ I said.
This prompted a lot of blinking, followed by another short, bark-like laugh. ‘God al-fuckin’-mighty! You’re that kid?’
I should point out that, aside from the expletive, this was not an uncommon reaction when a stranger found out who I was.
The old man had tilted his head and I could see that he was peering very closely at the white line across my right temple, where my hair still refused to grow.
I waited patiently.
The old man exhaled and shook his head again.
‘Where’s your mom right now?’ he asked. ‘Is she home?’
‘She’s at work,’ I said.
‘Okay. Tell me what time she gets home.’
I looked at the shattered glass littering the ground and bit my lip.
I should explain something at this point.
There were two things that I couldn’t tell my mother about that Saturday. And unfortunately, these were the two things – the only two things – that could have saved my story from falling into senseless pieces.
First, I couldn’t tell her the names of my pursuers. This would have been suicidal. I was certain that my silence – along with the sustained possibility that I could, at some point, if pushed, break this silence – was the only thing that could guarantee my safety over the coming weeks. Having got away with criminal damage, my trio of tormentors, I thought, would not be eager to press their luck. For now, and, hopefully, for many more months, they’d have to find someone else to traumatize.
Second, I couldn’t mention my seizure. As things stood, I was already in grave danger of losing all my hard-won freedoms. If my mother even half suspected that my epilepsy was returning to its former severity, I’d be straight back into the shackles of full-time, round-the-clock supervision. I’d lose my Saturdays. I’d lose my Sundays. I’d lose my post-school afternoons. I doubted that I could persuade her that this was a one-off – that, despite evidence to the contrary, I was coping perfectly well on my stringent regime of drugs and meditation.
So my defence was in tatters from the outset. All that remained were the indisputable facts: trespass, a broken greenhouse and so little remorse – or such blithe stupidity – that I hadn’t even bothered to flee the scene of the crime.
My mother was distraught.
‘Lex, how could you?’ she said.
‘I’ve told you: I didn’t!’
‘I did not raise you to be the kind of boy who takes pleasure in acts of wanton destruction. I raised you to have principles! I raised you to be kind and polite and loving! And truthful!’
‘I do have principles!’
‘Your actions say otherwise.’
‘But they weren’t my actions!’
‘Yes. So you’ve said. And I’d love to believe that, Lex – I truly would. But you give me no reason to believe it.’
‘That’s because you’re not listening to me!’
‘Tell me who your accomplices were. Then I might start to listen.’
‘They weren’t my accomplices. I’m not responsible for what they did.’
‘If you continue to protect them, that makes you an accomplice! It makes you as guilty as they are.’
I scowled at the ground and tried to think of a way to dispute the logic of this argument.
‘Tell me who they were,’ my mother repeated.
‘I’ve told you. It was just some kids from the village.’
‘Names, Lex. I want names.’
‘Their names aren’t important. The important thing is that they were to blame, not me.’
‘Lex, this is really quite simple. If you don’t tell me which of your friends did this, then all the blame will rest with you.’
‘They’re not my friends! Which part of the story did you not understand?’
‘Don’t you get smart with me! Just tell me who they are.’
‘Why don’t you ask the cards?’ I said sullenly.
My mother stayed silent and looked at me for a very long time. I couldn’t stand the way she was looking at me. She didn’t look angry any more. She just looked hurt.
I lowered my eyes. Somehow, after a five-minute argument with my mother, I no longer felt so innocent. I felt like an accomplice.
‘Let me tell you something, Lex,’ my mother said eventually. ‘And I’m not sure right now whether or not it will mean anything to you – but I want you to listen. And I want you to think about it very carefully before you decide to say anything else.
‘Isaac Peterson is not a well man. He’s old and he’s frail. And he’s also all alone in the world. Can you imagine what that might feel like?’
I knew exactly what my mother was up to here: sending me on a guilt trip. Mr Peterson wasn’t that frail. His limp just made him incredibly slow on his feet, not infirm. And as for his age – well, he was almost twice as old as my mother, but he wasn’t nearly as old as Mr Stapleton, for example, who was approximately one hundred. The only indisputable fact in my mother’s assessment was that he was all alone in the world, and it was this that made my supposed trashing of his greenhouse so appalling.
In case you don’t happen to live in a small village, I should tell you the following information: in a small village, everyone knows at least three things about everyone else. It doesn’t matter how reclusive you try to be. The three things that everyone in the village knew about Mr Peterson were as follows:
1) He’d had one of his legs torn to ribbons in the Vietnam War, which was a war fought between America, North Vietnam and South Vietnamese guerrillas in the 1960s and 1970s.
2) His wife, Rebecca Peterson, an Englishwoman, had died three years earlier after a protracted battle with pancreatic cancer.
3) Because of facts 1) and 2) he was not of sound mind.
When my mother told me the first two facts – the third I had to infer – my last thoughts of self-preservation crumbled to dust. Because of Mr Peterson’s unfortunate situation, there was no chance of my escaping with just a slap on the wrist. Someone had to hang for the wanton destruction of his greenhouse, and that someone, evidently, was me.
All that was left to be resolved were the precise terms of my penance.
Mr Peterson’s house was a good house for a recluse. It was tucked away down a narrow, winding lane – at least two hundred yards back from the main road – and had a long private drive flanked by fifty-year-old poplars, which stood like sentinels guarding the only entrance and exit. Inside the main compound, there were more trees and hedgerows that had been allowed to grow several feet above head-height, and next to the front door there was a large bay window that revealed nothing more than a few inches of gloomy window sill. The curtains were closed. They had been closed yesterday too. They didn’t look like they were ever opened. Streaks of dirt and dust were visible in the dark folds of the fabric. I wrinkled my nose. My mother gave me a little prod in the small of my back.
‘Ouch!’ I protested.
‘Don’t drag your feet, Lex.’
‘I wasn’t!’
‘Putting this off isn’t going to make it any easier.’
‘But what if he doesn’t want to be disturbed?’
‘Don’t be a coward.’
‘I’m just saying that maybe we should ring first.’
‘We don’t need to ring. You’re doing this now.’
A few more steps and we were at the gabled porch.
I tapped on the door, with all the power of a farting flea.
A breathless moment passed.
My mother looked at me, rolled her eyes and knocked again on my behalf – thunderously.
There was an immediate outbreak of noisy barking from inside. I jumped about a foot in the air.
‘Lex, stay calm! It’s just a dog!’
This did little to reassure me. I felt uncomfortable with dogs. We’d always been a cat family. Luckily, it would turn out that Mr Peterson’s dog was even more of a coward than I was. He only ever barked when he was woken unexpectedly from a deep sleep, and this was a bark of abject panic – instinctual and frantic and completely devoid of aggression. But I didn’t know this at the time. I didn’t realize that the ten seconds of barking would inevitably be followed by a hasty retreat to the back of the closest sofa. I assumed that this was the Hound of the Baskervilles, baying for my blood.
A light came on, visible through a narrow pane of frosted glass above the door. I felt my mother’s hands clamp down on my shoulders. My moral fibre was still very much in question.
The door swung open.
Mr Peterson’s flinty eyes regarded me over his reading glasses, flicked briefly towards my mother and then returned to my face. He didn’t look surprised. He didn’t look pleased either.
I felt another poke, this one in my lower spine.
‘I’m here to apologize and to offer to make amends,’ I blurted. It sounded rehearsed. It was rehearsed, but that wasn’t the point. The point was I had to make it sound sincere. If I got the tone wrong, it wouldn’t help my case.
Mr Peterson raised his eyebrows, then kind of scrunched his face up a little.
I waited.
He drummed his fingers against the doorframe.
I waited some more.
‘Okay, kid,’ he prompted. ‘So apologize. Knock yourself out.’
I looked at my mother dubiously.
‘It’s a figure of speech,’ my mother said. ‘It means you should get on with it.’
‘Oh.’
I cleared my throat. Mr Peterson shifted his weight. He looked as eager to get this over with as I was. That gave me a glimmer of hope.
‘I’m very sorry about your greenhouse and for trespassing on your property,’ I said. I felt another prod in the back. ‘And,’ I added, ‘I’d like to make it up to you in any way I can. For example, I’d be very happy to volunteer for any odd jobs you might need doing.’
‘Odd jobs?’
I could tell this wasn’t a welcome proposition. Mr Peterson looked like he had toothache. I ploughed on regardless, delivering the rest of my speech to the doormat.
‘I could clean your windows,’ I said, ‘or weed your garden or run any errands you might have.’
‘Can you re-glaze my glasshouse?’
I thought this was probably sarcasm. I decided not to answer.
‘Also,’ I said instead, ‘I noticed that your car hasn’t been washed for a while, so mayb— Ow!’
I took this latest poke as a sign that I should stick to the script and not try to improvise.
‘Anyway,’ I concluded, ‘because I can’t repair your greenhouse, I’m offering to place myself in your service until such a time as you deem the damage to be repaid in full. It’s penance,’ I added, glancing up from the doormat.
Mr Peterson frowned, cleared his throat, then frowned again.
‘Look, kid,’ he said. ‘I’m not sure that’s such a great idea. What I mean is, I think maybe it’s better if I just accept your apology and we call it quits.’
‘Yes, that’s also—’
At this point, my mother stepped in. ‘Excuse me, Mr Peterson. If I may?’ She didn’t pause to hear if she might. ‘That’s very gracious of you – extremely gracious – but I hardly think a simple apology can suffice in this instance, not given the severity of the crime.’
I saw my glimmer of hope sputter and die.
Mr Peterson’s face was still fixed in an uncomfortable grimace.
‘You do agree that this is a serious matter?’ my mother prompted. ‘Because I got the impression yesterday that you were very keen to see Alex suitably punished.’
‘Well, yeah, that’s a given, but—’
‘Can you suggest a more suitable punishment?’
‘Maybe not. But this isn’t exactly what I had in mind. I mean, to be frank, Mrs Woods, I really don’t think it’s my place—’
‘Mr Peterson, this is a matter of principle,’ my mother insisted. ‘Alex has to learn a lesson here. He needs to understand that his actions have consequences.’
‘Okay, agreed. And look, the last thing I want to do is screw up any lesson you’re trying to teach your son, but—’
‘Excellent! I’m glad that we’re of the same opinion. Because I assure you: Alex and I have discussed this matter at length, and we both agree that if he’s to make amends in any meaningful way, he has to repay his debt to you – not to me. It’s the only way we can move on from this.’
Mr Peterson threw me a look that said: ‘Help!’ I threw him a look back that told him that none of this was my doing and that against my mother I had no help to offer.
He flapped and flailed his arms for a bit, then swore under his breath. My mother pretended she hadn’t heard. I knew that the battle was already lost. It was lost the moment he’d opened the door.
‘Ah, hell!’ Mr Peterson rubbed his temples.
My mother waited expectantly.
‘Sure, great. Why not? I’ll find him some chores to do, he’ll learn his lesson, and we’ll all move on with our lives. Terrific.’
Sarcasm was wasted on my mother. ‘Wonderful,’ she said. ‘So let’s set a time. I thought perhaps next Saturday would be fitting?’
‘Very fitting.’
‘Excellent! Then it’s settled.’
Mr Peterson looked at me, his eyes vaguely bemused. I gave a very small shrug – too small for my mother to notice.
‘Come along, Alex,’ my mother said, delivering a final poke in the ribs. ‘I think you’ve taken up quite enough of Mr Peterson’s time for one weekend.’
I suppose this last sentence must have made sense in my mother’s head, but, given the arrangement she’d just brokered, its logic was lost on me.
METHANE
It was raining as I made my way down the lane and past the poplars the following Saturday. A dull, misty drizzle that felt like pins and needles. I hoped very much that I wouldn’t have to weed the garden or cut the grass or clean the outside windows; and the more I looked up into the leaden sky, the more I felt sure that this, or something similarly miserable, was likely to be my fate. But, as it turned out, Mr Peterson had different plans for me.
‘Can you drive?’ he asked. This was the first thing he said to me after he’d unbolted the front door.
‘I’m only thirteen,’ I pointed out.
Mr Peterson looked at me critically, as if this were exactly the kind of can’t-do attitude he’d been expecting. ‘So you can’t drive at all?’
‘No.’
‘I’m not talkin’ a hundred-mile road trip here, kid. I just need a couple of things from the store.’ He glared at the sky. ‘My leg’s not so great in this rain.’
‘I’m only thirteen,’ I repeated apologetically. For some reason, I couldn’t help feeling partly responsible for the pain in Mr Peterson’s leg.
‘Y’know, I’m pretty sure I was drivin’ my daddy’s truck by the time I was your age.’
‘I don’t have a daddy,’ I reminded him. ‘Immaculately conceived,’ I added.
This was a joke. He didn’t smile.
‘I could wash your car,’ I suggested.
This was met with a humourless bark. ‘In this? I reckon my car’s gonna get all the washing it needs today, don’t you?’
‘Yes, I suppose so,’ I acknowledged. I felt the formidable weight of my uselessness pushing down
on my shoulders.
‘Anyway,’ Mr Peterson continued, ‘physical labour in the rain’s all well and good, but I’m not sure how your mother’d feel if I returned you to her with pneumonia.’
‘I’m sure she’d blame me, not you,’ I said.
Mr Peterson cleared his throat the way people do when they’re trying to buy some time to negotiate a tricky situation. ‘Well, anyhow,’ he said, ‘I had something a little more instructive in mind. Your mom seemed pretty keen for you to learn something here, don’t you think?’
I nodded blankly. My mother and Mr Peterson wanted me to learn that wanton destruction of a greenhouse was wrong. I knew this already. My penance was a regrettable but necessary charade, designed to make all concerned feel better about what had happened. And I told myself that, really, I had no right to be resentful about this state of affairs. But I certainly didn’t expect to learn anything.
As it transpired, I was underestimating Mr Peterson’s notion of moral instruction.
‘Can you type?’ he asked.
‘Yes,’ I replied.
‘How’s your spellin’?’
‘It’s okay.’
‘’Cos if you can’t spell, then, frankly, this is gonna be a royal pain in the ass.’
‘My spelling’s generally adequate,’ I assured him. ‘And Mr Treadstone, my English teacher, says that I have a reasonable vocabulary for my age. Although there’s always room for improvement. What do you want me to type?’
‘We’re gonna write some letters,’ Mr Peterson said.
The first thing I learned that day was this: what you think you know about a person is only a fraction of the story.
As I’ve said, in Lower Godley, everyone thought that they knew all the things (usually no more than three) that were worth knowing about everyone else. Everyone knew that Mr Peterson was a reclusive Vietnam veteran whose wife had died of pancreatic cancer. Everyone knew that my mother was a clairvoyant and a single mother with funny opinions and funny hair. And everyone knew that I had been hit by a meteor and wasn’t quite right in the head and was subject to convulsions.
These things were all true. But they were not the only truths.
Mr Peterson’s house wasn’t dingy and dusty as I’d expected. In the back, everything was neat and tidy, and although it was a very grey day, the living room was still filled with daylight from the window that overlooked the garden. There were also two standard lamps and tall bookcases and art prints on the wall. And there was a large floor cushion where Mr Peterson’s dog was dozing. He looked up and sniffed curiously when I walked in, then closed his eyes and went back to sleep. He was very old, so he spent a lot of his time sleeping. I would later discover that he had been rescued from an animal shelter a couple of years earlier – which was why he had part of his right ear missing – and he was called Kurt, which was short for Kurt Vonnegut Jnr, which was the name of Mr Peterson’s favourite author, who had died ten days previously. Mr Peterson didn’t mind rescuing a very old dog, because old dogs don’t need much exercise and are happy just to have a warm place to sleep. When I asked what kind of dog Kurt was, Mr Peterson told me that he was some kind of mongrel.
The Universe versus Alex Woods Page 10
