The Universe Versus Alex Woods (21 page)

Ellie rolled her eyes. ‘I’m not going to tell them – obviously! I’ll tell them I’m working in fucking Topshop or something.’

‘Oh,’ I said. Then I thought for a bit. ‘I’m not sure it’s fully legal for my mother to employ you,’ I continued. ‘Not without your parents agreeing to it.’

Ellie shrugged. ‘Would your mother actually care about something like that?’

‘No, maybe not,’ I confessed. I had no choice. I’m not much of a liar, especially under pressure.

‘So you can at least
ask
? Maybe put in a good word for me?’

‘Yes, I suppose I could,’ I said.

To tell you the truth, it wasn’t an idea that thrilled me. But with the summer being the tourist season, and Justine slipping to another plane of existence, I thought that my mother might well be looking for additional staff. And I suspected that Ellie was
exactly
the kind of girl she would choose to employ. I also suspected that being around Ellie for more than ten minutes at a time would prove to be a real headache. But I could see that I’d at least have to ask – there was little hope of getting out of it now.

‘Woods, this has been thrilling,’ Ellie said, crushing out her second cigarette. ‘Really – we should do it again sometime.’

This was sarcasm, or irony, or
something
. I ignored it.

‘You’ll talk to your mother for me?’ she asked again, fixing me with a stare that made me feel it would be unwise to refuse.

‘Yes, I’ll ask her,’ I promised.

‘Wonderful.’

Ellie removed some kind of body spray from her bag, closed her eyes and sprayed herself from head to toe. Then she saluted me, turned on her heels and cut a direct path back towards the school buildings.

I did not enjoy the rest of my walk.

It was a couple of days later that the parcel arrived. My mother was parking the car in the garage (which often took a while due to her poor spatial awareness) so, as usual, I was the first through the front door and the first to pick up the post. But it was some moments before I noticed that the parcel was addressed to me. I was not used to receiving post, and, in fact, only one person had ever sent me parcels. That person was Dr Weir. She, as you may recollect, had sent me Martin Beech’s meteor book and, later,
The Universe: A Beginner’s Guide
. I thought that this package was also the right size and shape to be a book, but the writing on the front was certainly
not
Dr Weir’s. Dr Weir wrote like a doctor: hers was an elegant, almost illegible scrawl – full of loops and squiggles and elaborate flourishes. The writing on the front of this parcel was angular block capitals. I put some food down for Lucy, then took the parcel up to my room and opened it.

What fell out on my desk was a new paperback edition of
Breakfast of Champions
. There was no note, but when I opened the front cover, I found this inscription:

I figured you’d want to find out how it ends. Come over and tell me what you think when you’ve finished.

After looking at this for some minutes, I put pen to paper and wrote the following reply, which I posted the next day:

Dear Mr Peterson,

Thank you for the book. It was very unexpected. I thought you’d probably be angry at me for ever, given what happened, and given that I did a pretty appalling job at explaining what happened. I’ll try to explain now, as best I can, but there might be bits that don’t make much sense to you, since I’m sure school was very different in your day and people probably acted more decently and less like chimpanzees.

[Here followed a concise account of all the events that had led up to my losing the original copy of Mr Peterson’s book.]

I’m very sorry that I didn’t tell you all this sooner, but I was very traumatized by what had happened, and also I didn’t want you to think I was making excuses or shirking my responsibility. I do feel responsible for what happened because it happened on my watch and in hindsight I think my actions were very reckless. I’ve decided to become a pacifist again, not only because I’m very poor at fighting and don’t care for it one little bit, but also because I now realize that even as a last resort fighting gets pretty lousy results.

Anyway, despite the fact that my actions may have made a bad situation worse, I hope you can see that I am not entirely to blame. I may have acted stupidly, but I acted with good intentions, and I think you’ll agree that this counts for something.

Unfortunately, I won’t be able to come over and tell you what I think about Breakfast of Champions in the immediate future because I am currently under house arrest - for the fighting incident described above, and also for a later incident where I used the worst word in the English language in front of the deputy headmaster. (You probably know which word I mean, so I won’t spell it out.) However, I shall certainly stop by when (or if) my mother decides that I’ve learned my lesson and my liberty is restored to me.

Thank you again.

Yours sincerely,

Alex Woods

I should probably tell you that having written this letter, I was baffled that I’d not thought to write sooner. Explaining things in writing, when I had time and space to think, and to say what I really meant, was so much better than trying to communicate in real time.

I wished I could
always
communicate in writing. That, I thought, would make my life a whole lot easier.

Eventually, of course, my house arrest did end, and I went unannounced to Mr Peterson’s the following Saturday and met him in the driveway. He was just on his way out, taking Kurt for a ‘short’ walk – which, I should clarify, meant short in terms of distance, not time. What with Kurt’s age and Mr Peterson’s leg, all their walks were ‘short’, but none was brief. Still, it was now high summer, and the day was dry and bright, and as you know, I was now accustomed to at least an hour’s walk each day, five days a week. I was happy to tag along, no matter how long the short walk ended up taking.

Since my letter, I’d had several more weeks to work on the full, proper apology that I still felt was owed, but having written, rewritten, memorized and rehearsed this speech, I found that Mr Peterson wouldn’t let me get past the first (elaborate) sentence. For some reason I couldn’t yet grasp, he seemed to think that he was more at fault in the matter than I was, and to be honest, this was kind of awkward. I felt compelled to point out, for at least the third time, that the rare first-edition copy of
Breakfast of Champions
inscribed by Mrs Peterson had been destroyed in my care – and as a result of
my
actions.

‘Do you know what Mrs Peterson would’ve said about that?’ Mr Peterson asked me.

I thought about this for a while. ‘I suppose she might have said that you should never have lent me the book in the first place – you know, that it was asking for trouble.’ In actual fact, I thought this was more like something my mother would have said, but, really, I had no other point of comparison.

Mr Peterson screwed his face up slightly, in what I’d come to interpret as his version of a smile. ‘No, she wouldn’t have said that. That’s the last thing she would’ve said. She would’ve said that a book’s a great way of sharin’ ideas, but beyond that, it’s just pulped trees. She would’ve told me that I’ve been actin’ like a goddamn moron. Do you understand what I’m saying?’

I thought about this for a long time too. ‘I’m not sure,’ I said eventually. ‘I think you’re saying that the book’s not important, because it’s the ideas inside that are important. Except I know the book
was
important, because it was a present, and it can’t be rep—’

‘I’m not sayin’ that the book wasn’t important. I’m sayin’ there are things that are
more
important. I’m sayin’ that all the things that were important about the book . . . well, they weren’t really anything to do with the book itself. They’re more up here –’ at this point, Mr Peterson tapped his head, close to the temple – ‘and they haven’t gone anywhere.
Now
do you understand?’

‘I think so,’ I said.

‘Okay. So please – no more apologies.’

‘Okay.’

‘From what you’ve told me, it’s not so much your fault anyway. Some of those guys at your school sound like prize assholes.’

‘Yes,’ I agreed. ‘I can imagine quite a few of them winning prizes in that department.’

I then spent some time trying to explain to Mr Peterson about all the complicated rules and laws that govern appropriate behaviour in the playground – about how everyone was expected to think and act the same way and if you didn’t, you were generally treated as some kind of leper. My mother always told me that things would get easier with time, that people would get more tolerant and all these ‘problems’ would suddenly seem quite trivial, but Mr Peterson said that this was only half true.

‘Your mom’s not exactly normal,’ he told me.

‘No,’ I agreed.

‘And she might find it very easy to be that way, but for most people it isn’t. It’s always easier to go along with what everyone else thinks. But having principles means doing what’s right, not what’s easy. It means having some integrity – and that’s something that
you
control. No one else can touch it.’

Integrity
. I tried the word out in my head and made a special note of it for future reference. Because as soon as Mr Peterson said it, I thought that that really
was
the apposite word. It occurred to me that this was an idea I’d been thinking about, or trying to think about, for the past several weeks.

‘Mr Peterson,’ I said, ‘I think in a way, I was trying to say something with integrity when I used that word I used. You know which word I mean?’

‘Yeah, I know which word you mean,’ Mr Peterson confirmed.

‘Well, I’ve not really been able to explain this to anyone, because everyone agrees that that word’s forbidden, and can’t be used in any circumstances – but really, I think that it needed saying. And when I said it, I didn’t feel like I was doing anything wrong. I felt like I was doing something, you know,
principled
. That’s when I felt like I had the most integrity. Does that sound stupid to you?’

‘No, it doesn’t. I think that integrity can show itself in all sorts of ways, and sometimes you can break the rules and still act with integrity. Sometimes you have to. Just don’t expect too many people to accept that.’

‘I won’t,’ I said. ‘Although, under normal circumstances, I’m not really one for breaking the rules – or for discourtesy. I’ve always been very good at school. Actually, that’s one of the reasons my peers don’t like me much. You’re not supposed to be enthusiastic about learning. It’s the wrong thing to be interested in. People get very suspicious if you’re too into things like reading and maths and so on. But I expect that seems a little strange to you. I’m sure it was very different when you were at school.’

Mr Peterson snorted. ‘Kid, I’m American. We’ve been suspicious of intellectuals for hundreds of years. When I was your age, it was the early 1950s – thinking too much was seen as unpatriotic, and things haven’t changed a whole lot since. Just look at some of the morons we’ve made president. Bush! Fuckin’ Ray Gun!’

I knew who Bush was, of course. He was on television a lot because of Iraq and so forth. He was having a special relationship with Tony Blair, the Prime Minister, and looked a bit like a monkey. From what I’d gathered, most people didn’t much care for him; Mr Peterson said he was barely bipedal. But as for ‘Ray Gun’, I had no idea what that meant. I suspected it was probably some kind of nickname, but I thought I’d better check.

‘Rea-gan!’ Mr Peterson enunciated. ‘He was the fortieth American president. Before that he was Governor of California, and before that he was a B-movie actor – a pretty lousy B-movie actor. Honestly, if you’d seen him in those godawful movies in the fifties, you’d have sworn there wasn’t a job on the planet he’d be worse at. Not until he became president. He was president for most of the eighties.’

‘I wasn’t alive in the eighties,’ I pointed out.

‘Count yourself lucky. It was pretty much Satan’s decade whichever side of the Pond you found yourself on.’

‘Oh.’ I made a mental note to verify these facts on Wikipedia later, and also to Google ‘B-movie’ and ‘the Pond’.

Sometimes our conversations demanded a lot of further research, but I was very glad that Mr Peterson and I were friends again.

A year passed. It was a time of strengthening and consolidation. At school, I had no further trouble – or little worth speaking of. There was still the odd insult thrown my way by Declan Mackenzie and his brotherhood of baboons, but on the whole, their powers were much depleted, and no match for my newfound integrity, which swaddled me like a protective cloak. In lessons, I reverted to my natural behaviour. I worked unashamedly hard. I raised my hand and answered questions. I spent a lot of time researching and polishing my homework – more time, I imagine, than any other fourteen-year-old on the planet. I got into the habit of spending two hours every weekday evening in Glastonbury Library, and often several more at the weekend, and I got to know all of the librarians very well. I liked the librarians because they were extremely calm and orderly and quiet – and helpful too. I soon discovered that if you wanted a book they didn’t have, they’d gladly order in a copy – free of charge. The council paid because the council thought that reading was good for the soul, and wanted to encourage it in any way they could. I thought it must be very satisfying to work for an institution with such lofty ideals, and decided that after being a neurologist or an astronomer, being a librarian would probably be my third choice of job.