Aurelius and I (2 page)

“Oh, he does that some times. I shouldn’t worry about it Malcolm, he always comes back eventually. Now, I really must be on my way, these waffles won’t sell themselves.”

And that was it really. I’m sorry if had given the impression that something especially exciting or memorable was going to happen, but the truth is that it didn’t and, as I mentioned at the beginning, this story is wholly concerned with the truth.

No, there was nothing particularly extraordinary about my first encounter with Aurelius-Octavius Jumbleberry-Jones. It is only with hindsight that that I am able to classify the event as life changing.

Except that, somehow, on some level, I knew it at the time. I know it sounds stupid, like something out of one of those bad, straight-to-television movies the Americans so love to produce, but, somewhere deep-down inside me, I knew that things would never be the same again. Now, please don’t misunderstand me, I’m not claiming I actually contemplated such a thought directly. It was just a feeling. I can’t describe it exactly. I just
knew,
in a common-sense sort of way, that my life was now moving in a different direction.

Almost a week went by before I saw Aurelius again, but not a day passed without me thinking of him. I could not say whether it was his obscure dress sense, his charismatic charm, or his fantastic taste in frozen confectionary, but something about my strange new acquaintance had made a very deep impression upon me in a very short space of time.

I hadn’t told anybody else about Aurelius – not my parents, not my friends, not even my grandmother whom I normally told everything. I couldn’t explain this unusually secretive attitude, other than the fact that a little voice inside my head warned me that people would be suspicious of any eccentric adult who tried to befriend an eight year old child to whom he was a stranger (and rightly so, I might add). Indeed, I was not unsuspicious of Aurelius myself, but I had an inkling that my reasons for suspicion would differ heavily from those of any responsible adult to whom I recited my encounter.

My own reservations about Aurelius lay in the fact that I felt he was somehow not like other people. Of course, in one sense, this was a statement of the obvious. His dress sense, his upper-class way of speaking, his mannerisms, all differed hugely from those of anybody one was likely to spot on a stroll down the high street. There seemed to me to be something more than this though. No matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t shake the feeling that there was something more fundamentally and importantly different about Aurelius-Octavius Jumbleberry-Jones than just his outward demeanour.

I was musing over what this difference could be, or at least what had caused me to become so convinced of its existence, when I ran into Aurelius for the second time.

It was late in the evening and while the air was still warm, and the streets still more than adequately lit by the remaining sunlight, the ridiculous heat of the afternoon sun had thankfully subsided. I had been sent out to walk the family dog, Baskerville, who disliked the heat even more than I did, while my parents prepared dinner for us all.

My father had always wanted a dog. A big dog. My mother, on the other hand, had always hated dogs. All dogs. And so, after years of negotiation, a compromise had been reached; we had adopted a very small dog from a local charity and my father had named him after a very big dog from his favourite book. Baskerville though, could not have been more different from the enormous hound that terrorised the local community in the Sherlock Holmes tale. He was a small, smelly, scruffy little terrier with a coat that was a wiry patchwork of white, black and silver fur. He was also quite the friendliest dog I had ever met in my life, and in the year that had passed since he came to live with us I can honestly say that I had never heard him so much as snarl at a cat, let alone growl or bark at another dog or a human being.

This incessant friendliness, combined with an undying loyalty that meant he would never stray far from my side, had enabled my father to convince my mother that, at the tender age of eight, I was old enough and responsible enough to walk Baskerville by myself. My mother had reluctantly agreed on two conditions; that I was always sure to be back before dark, and that I promised to never let Baskerville off the lead until and unless we were in the nature reserve.

Keeping to my word, I unclipped Baskerville’s lead as we walked in through the gate. True to form he barely registered the difference and walked along at my side just as he had when he had had the lead on.

My father had insisted to my mother that it was important that I was the one who walked Baskerville each day, in order to teach me responsibility. I think it was supposed to have been a chore, a way of showing me that there were bad sides to having a dog as well as good. The truth was that, far from being a chore, walking Baskerville
was
the good side of having a dog, especially on warm summer evenings. It gave me time alone with my best friend, in the most picturesque of surroundings.

You see, we were lucky enough to live just a five minute walk from Freshfields Country Park, an enormous nature reserve that encompassed many different streams, ponds, and lakes as well as the immensely vast Hanselwood Forest. All in all it was the perfect escape for dogs and children alike.

On this particular evening I had decided it was a little late to be venturing into the woods as it would soon be dark, and was instead attempting to catch the crickets that were busy making their evening song while Baskerville sniffed around in the long grass at the forest’s edge. I had just captured a particularly large specimen and was attempting to open my hand enough to examine it without letting it escape when a noise I had never before heard in my life came from behind me, making me jump and allowing the cricket to escape. It was the sound of Baskerville growling.

“What’s the matter boy?” I said, trying to follow his gaze and find out what could have been so terrible as to have caused such an unprecedented change of mood in my ever-friendly canine. I could see nothing out of the ordinary, yet the growling continued. “What have you seen, Bas?” I asked again as if he might be able to tell me. In truth I was beginning to become quite unnerved by the animal’s unusual behaviour and was contemplating putting him back on his lead. It was then that the dog who never liked to be more than six feet away from me ran as fast as his little legs would carry him into the distance, disappearing into the forest.

“Baskerville!” I yelled, rooted to the spot by shock. “Bas!”

But it was no use, he wasn’t coming back. I began to give chase. I could feel my heart pounding in my chest as I ran at top speed through the trees in pursuit of my four-legged friend. In other circumstances I may have been more concerned, but due to the fact that the forest was still fairly well lit and I could hear exactly which way Baskerville was running, my main emotion was still surprise.

After a few minutes I came out into a small clearing. I was able to hear Baskerville’s growls much more clearly than before. He was obviously close by, and, judging by the sound he was making, more annoyed than ever. I stopped and scanned the area. I realised we must have ventured further into the forest than I had thought as I knew the outskirts quite well and yet did not recognise this place at all. I was still only able to hear and not see Baskerville and was contemplating leaving the clearing when I heard a familiar voice from within the trees to my left.

“Kindly disperse vile hound! Go on, away with you, shoo!”

I negotiated a path through some particularly dense foliage to find Baskerville growling with bared teeth at a tall man who appeared to constitute the source of his upset. A tall man who was only managing to keep his ankles from becoming the little terrier’s next meal through the use of a large red and white striped cane.

“Shh Baskerville!” I exclaimed breathlessly, putting the dog back on his lead as I did so. “Its okay, you don’t have to be scared. This is my friend, Aurelius.” My reassurances did little to placate the snarling and, in truth, if anybody seemed scared, it was the tall, thin ginger fellow whom Baskerville had had pinned against a tree.

“Charlie, my boy, what a pleasure to see you,” he said, visibly calmer now that Baskerville was on a lead. “And this must be your little friend?”

“I’m really sorry about him,” I replied sheepishly. “He’s normally very friendly, I don’t know what’s gotten into him today.”

“Not to worry, dear boy. I probably have quite a funny smell about me, living out here in the woods. You know how dogs are with scent. In any case, he appears to be quieting down a little now.”

“Yes, I suppose he... sorry,” I said interrupting myself as I comprehended what had just been said. “Did you say that you live in the woods?”

“Why yes, in fact my humble abode is only a couple of minutes walk from here, would you like to see it?”

“Well, I don’t know about that,” I replied. In truth I was unsure as to whether accepting a visit to the home of a near stranger without anybody knowing where I was going was such a good idea. Not wanting to offend my new friend however, I sort to come up with a more polite excuse for evasion. “I have to get home for my tea,” I protested weakly.

“Of course you do, a strapping young man like yourself needs his nutriment,” he smiled. “Which way are you going?”

I pointed vaguely in the direction from which I had just come.

“Excellent!” he exclaimed. “My house is on the way, I shall be able to show it to you without making you late.”

“Oh, okay then,” I agreed, although I was again left with that feeling that I had just been conned without understanding how.

The three of us made our way back through the undergrowth and into the clearing from which I had just come.

“Here it is,” said Aurelius.

There, partially hidden in the trees on the far side of the clearing was a tiny little house. It was not the log cabin I had been expecting however, but a completely circular, white cottage, with a red tiled roof. It was quaintly beautiful and very out of place with its surroundings. I had no idea how I had failed to notice it before.

“Would you care to come in for a Milkshake?” asked Aurelius. “I have coconut syrup.”

This offer was very tempting – coconut milkshakes were my absolute favourite, and nobody I visited ever had them, except my grandmother of course. She was the one who had introduced me to them; they were her favourite as well. However, I didn’t really think my parents would approve of me entering Aurelius’s house, and I really was worried about getting back home for dinner.

“I really should be getting back,” I protested. “My parents will worry if I’m not home by seven.”

“Of course they will, how silly of me, clearly no time for milkshakes. Still, there are still twenty-seven minutes until seven o’clock, do you think you might spare five of them to grant me that favour you owe me?”

Unable to think of a legitimate yet polite reason for avoiding entering the cottage any longer, and buoyed by a curiosity as to what might lay inside, I found myself bending to pass through the tiny red front door of a strangely dressed man whom I barely knew with only a small dog for protection. I would advise you, dear reader, never to do anything similar. Ever. Even with a dog.

Two things struck me as strange upon entering Aurelius’s cottage; firstly; it seemed to be a lot bigger inside than it had appeared from the outside. And secondly; it wasn’t round.

Although larger than I had initially imagined, the single-roomed home in which I found myself standing was far from being of a size that one could describe as anything other than pokey. Despite this though, it contained all the clutter of a much larger house. As a result, every surface was entirely covered with various obscure paraphernalia, much of which I could not begin to identify. The tiny dining table, for instance, had its surface almost entirely obscured by, among other things, a small harp, a large vase of unpleasant-looking green liquid and an unfinished game of chess. In the kitchen area, the worktops on either side of the large, old-fashioned cooker were filled with enormous numbers of pots and pans of immensely varying size – some comfortably large enough to boil Baskerville, others no wider than a fifty-pence piece. Perhaps most strangely, there was no television. And no radio either as far as I was able to see. The only form of entertainment the cottage housed stood in its far corner in the form of an enormous, double-stacked bookshelf which had-long since been rendered inadequate in its task and was now surrounded by further piles of texts for which it no longer had any room. A brief perusal of the titles revealed nothing I recognised, indeed many appeared to be written in another language, and some even in another alphabet.

“Welcome to my home, Charlie,” said Aurelius, spreading his arms before him in an unnecessary illustration of his statement. “Are you sure I can’t get you something to drink?”

“No thank you,” I replied. “I really can’t stay long, I’m afraid.”

“Of course you can’t, a busy young fellow like yourself must have a great many things to do, how silly of me. What do you say we get straight down to business then?” he asked, with an apologetic smile which caused me to feel guilty for the constraints I had placed on out time together. “Now, Charlie, let me ask you something; do you like animals?”

“Oh yes sir, very much so,” I said. “I’d like to be a vet when I grow up, if I’m clever enough.”