The Universe Versus Alex Woods (14 page)

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.

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.

A few feet away from Kurt was the thing that surprised me the most, which was a very new, very shiny computer sitting on a desk next to a large, flatscreen monitor. For some reason, I’d assumed that I’d be using one of those ancient typewriting machines that they used to have years ago. But sometimes people have homes and possessions you don’t expect, and hobbies you can’t even imagine.

It turned out that Mr Peterson’s hobby was writing letters to politicians and, occasionally, prisoners. He was in a special letter-writing club. You had to pay a monthly membership fee and then you got sent the club magazine, which was full of the names and addresses of people all over the world whom you might like to write to, even though most of them would never write back. The politicians were generally too busy or didn’t care for personal correspondence, and the prisoners weren’t often allowed to answer their mail. They were quite lucky that they were allowed to
receive
mail. Mr Peterson’s letter-writing club was called ‘Amnesty International’.

At first, I was dubious that my mother would agree that writing letters to prisoners was morally instructive, but Mr Peterson, who was extremely crazy, insisted that it was. He told me that most of the prisoners we’d be writing to shouldn’t have been put in prison in the first place. They were good people who’d been locked away and denied their most basic human rights. They weren’t allowed to act according to their consciences or even to express their opinions without fear of persecution and physical reprisals – although Mr Peterson doubted very much that I could imagine what that was like. I told Mr Peterson that since I went to secondary school, I thought that I could imagine it fairly well. And as for the fact that most of the prisoners had been wrongly imprisoned – on spurious charges, without fair trial, or for crimes they probably didn’t commit – well, this was another thing I could sympathize with.

I typed while Mr Peterson dictated, spelling out the names and places that were causing me trouble. But after a while, he told me that my typing sounded like a horse clattering over cobblestones, so he put on some music, which he said was a sherbet quintet. I didn’t know what this meant, and I didn’t ask. But the music was quite pleasant, and it didn’t have any singing, so it didn’t affect my concentration.

We must have written five or six letters that afternoon. It turned out that there were a lot of people in the world who were being denied their basic human rights. We wrote to our local MP asking if he could raise in parliament the issue of British prisoners who were being held without trial in an American prison in Cuba, which was a large island in the Caribbean run by communists. We wrote to a judge in China asking for the immediate release of five men and women who’d been put in jail for protesting about their homes being destroyed to clear space for an Olympic stadium. And we wrote to the Governor of Nebraska to ask if he’d consider not executing one of the state’s prisoners, who’d been convicted of killing a police officer when he was eighteen years old. He was now thirty-two and there was no physical evidence linking him to the crime, just the testimony of two witnesses who’d later changed their stories. The state was planning to kill him by passing electricity through his body until his heart stopped beating. This was a very dramatic, if slightly messy, way of ending someone’s life. Most other states – even Texas – had now stopped using the electric chair as the default method of execution, but Nebraska still held on to its quaint, old-time values.