The Universe Versus Alex Woods (17 page)

‘If it’s not your book,’ said Decker, ‘then I don’t have to give it back.’ A bully’s unassailable logic. He’d opened the first page, his thumb braced forcefully against the spine, his hands grubby and clumsy.

‘Please! You’re going to damage it.’

Mackenzie’s eyes widened in evil joy. He’d found the dedication. ‘
I think you’ll enjoy this story
,’ he recited in a whining falsetto;
‘
you’ll definitely enjoy the pictures. With all my love, R.
’

Story, pictures, love – each word reverberated over the juddering engine, each word more damning than the last.

Studwin snickered. Asbo howled with delight. There were little ripples of laughter all the way to the back of the bus. This, apparently, was the type of verbal lynching that everyone could enjoy.

I found myself on my feet, my face red with public ridicule. But my humiliation was now a secondary concern. The priority, I knew, had to be the rescue of Mr Peterson’s book. I made a lunge for it; Declan Mackenzie pushed me back as easily as he might have plucked the legs from a crane fly.

‘Please!’ I implored (for what would turn out to be the final time).

Decker had opened the book somewhere in the middle, hunting for more ammunition. He wasn’t disappointed. He opened the book on the page containing a large hand-drawn picture of a stegosaurus, and read aloud the accompanying caption: ‘“A dinosaur was a reptile as big as a choo-choo train.”’

There was more laughter. It was a funny sentence, but I doubt this was the reason.

‘Fucking hell, Woods!’ squealed Decker. ‘You really
are
retarded!’ Or he squealed something similar. I was no longer listening. He now held the book aloft and was waving it around like the monkey with the bone at the beginning of
2001: A Space Odyssey.

It was at this point that I decided I didn’t want to be a pacifist any more. I decided that if ever there were a just war, this was it.

As I’ve already mentioned, I’d held for some time the untested suspicion that I wouldn’t be much to shout about in a fight. This turned out to be the case. The little I knew about fighting I’d gleaned from James Bond films and from watching the occasional altercation between Lucy and one of the neighbourhood toms – whose advances were not
always
welcomed. Neither of these sources provided a good grounding in the realities of hand-to-hand combat.

What I did have on my side was the element of surprise and a complete disregard for the rules of ‘fair’ fighting – that and a decent grasp of the physics of moving bodies. Borrowing a little kinetic energy from the accelerating bus, I sprang at Declan Mackenzie and raked my claws across his face, opening up several deep gashes, the best of which stretched all the way from the outer corner of his left eye to his downturned lower lip. There was a yowl of mingled disbelief and pain, vibrant blood, and a single arm raised defensively, and rather too late, to his mutilated cheek. That, I thought, was my opening. I abandoned my wild, unsustainable attack and made a grab for the book. Unfortunately, my plan – insofar as there had been a plan – had failed to account for the reflexive tightening of my enemy’s grip in response to sudden, unexpected pain. My fingers closed, pulled and slipped. Then my arm went dead from the shoulder. I fell forward into one of those strange boxers’ cuddles. There were lots of screams and shouts, and the general clamour of people shifting up and down the bus to make space for the fight or secure a seat closer to the ringside. I grabbed again at my opponent’s face, but instead found myself holding, then pulling, a handful of hair. There was a general tutting and groaning, even from the girls; my tactics were not endearing me to the crowd. Then all the air left my lungs. There was less pain than I’d been expecting – Declan Mackenzie hadn’t had the room to deliver a knockout blow – but I still found myself stumbling backwards into the metal frame of the nearest seat. I was quite proud that I didn’t
fall
to the floor; although the floor, inevitably, was where I ended up. Still unable to breathe correctly, I backed away to the very front of the bus and then, with a quiet dignity, lowered myself into a sitting position in the aisle. Declan Mackenzie was soon looming over me again, his foot poised curiously in midair, as if he couldn’t quite decide whether to kick me or stamp on me. I didn’t much care which option he plumped for – my defensive strategy was unaltered. I raised my knees as high as they’d go, held my legs with both arms and tucked my head in, like a turtle retreating into its shell. A half-hearted boot struck my outer thigh, but it didn’t really hurt too much. In the warm, musty darkness of my almost foetal position, I sensed that I was no longer such an appealing target for physical violence. It would take a sustained, purposeful attack to cause me any significant damage, and if this hadn’t happened yet, it wasn’t
going
to happen.

It turned out that Declan Mackenzie had a better conclusion in mind. He stepped back, slid open the top panel of the nearest window and flung Mr Peterson’s book from the top deck of the speeding bus. Then he spat on me and returned to his seat.

No one moved to stop or help me as I pulled my bag across my shoulder and then half crawled, half fell down the stairs to the lower deck. My body was battered, but my mind was surprising clear. I would not experience my inevitable seizure until several hours later, in the privacy of my own bedroom, clutching my iron–nickel meteorite to my chest.

‘You have to stop the bus!’ I told the bus driver.

This was the first time I had ever spoken to the bus driver, who did not present himself as the kind of man who’d appreciate the effort. Even under normal, stationary circumstances, the bus driver bubbled with barely suppressed rage. His characteristic facial expression suggested a furious impatience for retirement or death – whichever came quicker. He had what my mother would have identified as a pitch-black aura, and it was a diagnosis no sceptic would have disputed.

Upon my addressing him, the bus driver had started grunting incomprehensibly.

‘I’m sorry,’ I interrupted, ‘you’re not speaking clearly and I don’t have any time to waste. This is an emergency. Stop the bus.’

‘I don’t see a bus stop, do you?’

‘It’s an emergency! You have to stop the bus!’

‘I don’t
have
to do anything,’ the bus driver growled.

I could see there was no reasoning with him. No words of mine were going to persuade him to make an unscheduled stop in the middle of the B3136. It was drizzling outside; prompt action was essential. Without thinking too much about the likely consequences, I turned to the door and pulled the emergency release lever. There were several gasps, simultaneous with the screeching hiss of airbrakes and a sudden jolt forward. My arm was wrenched from the vertical support pole. Something hit my shoulder; something bruised my buttocks. But, miraculously, I stayed on my feet.

I was out the door the second the bus halted. I later found out that the bus driver spent the next five minutes flapping his arms at the roadside, incandescent with rage and completely at a loss as to what he should do next; there was no protocol or precedent for an incident such as this. But at the time, I was more or less oblivious to this exterior drama. I didn’t bother looking back. I ran like a maniac, my pace never slackening. My mind was fully focussed on its goal. I was determined, somehow, to turn back the clock.

Every problem, I told myself, has its mathematical solution. My problem was that I had no idea at which point along the B3136 Mr Peterson’s book had exited the school bus. I had been on the floor at the time.

So what
did
I know?

I knew that the B3136 was a windy country road, and I knew that the school bus was old, heavy and cumbersome. It seemed unlikely, therefore, that the bus had been travelling very quickly. A mean velocity of thirty miles per hour was my estimate – and, really, this was being generous. Thirty miles per hour, I thought, was probably close to the upper limit of which the school bus was capable.

So how much time had passed between the book exiting the window and the bus coming to a stop? Since I hadn’t had the presence of mind to check my watch, this was harder to estimate. I had to rely on woolly subjectivity. How long had it taken to regain my breath, grab my bag, fall down the stairs, argue with the driver and force the bus to a standstill? I decided that all of that must have taken at least two minutes, but no more than three.

Thirty miles per hour equals half a mile per minute. Distance equals velocity multiplied by time. I deduced that Mr Peterson’s book was between one and one and a half miles away.

So how fast could I run? I knew that running a mile in four minutes was considered to be an impressive athletic achievement. I was pumped full of adrenaline, but I was certainly no athlete. I allowed myself another six minutes of running time. Then I started searching.

I searched the wet grasses and hedgerows for over an hour. I found enough drinks cans and crisp packets and chocolate-bar wrappers to fill a couple of bin liners. I found toilet roll and broken glass and fast-food packaging and a cereal box. I found all sorts of items lost or thrown from cars: a soft toy rabbit, a wing mirror, a windscreen-wiper blade. I found a few inexplicable oddities: a trowel, a pair of tartan slippers, a tennis racket, underpants. Near a lay-by, I found a prophylactic – a
used
prophylactic. It was laid out rather neatly on a small grey stone. At that point, I started to cry. I sat down on the verge – a safe five metres from the soiled condom – and I stared at my wet, muddy shoes and I cried. I was feeling pretty disgusted with the state of the universe. It wasn’t simply that people were having intercourse at the side of the B3136. I supposed that was okay in the grand scheme of things, since they were at least taking precautions not to bring any more babies into the world. I’d decided that the world was not a fit place for babies. But, still, these people obviously didn’t care much about anybody else. They obviously didn’t care about the countryside. No one did. The more time you spend rooting around at the roadside, the more you have to accept that fact. That condom wasn’t biodegradable – obviously. It would probably lie there for an aeon. It would probably outlive the trees and the birds, and all of the books in existence.

As for
Breakfast of Champions
, that was already a lost cause. My maths had been ridiculous from the outset. There were too many guesses, and too many variables, and I knew nothing about the likely trajectory of a book thrown from the upper deck of a moving bus. It could have ended up anywhere. It could have sailed over a hedge and ended up in the field beyond, out of sight and out of reach. And even if I’d found it, the book would have been ruined. An hour of light rain had soaked all the foliage. I was soaked too. I had my cagoule in my bag, but I hadn’t bothered to put it on. I hadn’t noticed that I was getting wet until I abandoned my search.

After a while, I stopped crying and stood up and headed back down the road. I thought it would probably take me about an hour and a half to walk home. With any luck, I might be able to get back before my mother. I didn’t want my mother to know what had happened. At that point, I still thought I could keep it from her.

I’d walked about half an hour beyond the point where the bus had stopped (which I’d recognized from the beech trees and the tyre marks) when another car pulled over. People had been pulling over every five minutes for the last hour to check if I was okay. I guess I didn’t
look
okay. There was no good reason to be walking down the B3136 in the rain.

This time, it was someone I knew. It was Mrs Griffith, who worked at the post office and spoke fluent Elvish. Mrs Griffith knew that I liked
The Lord of the Rings
, so whenever I went into the post office she’d greet me in Quenya, the language of the High Elves. Mrs Griffith liked languages a lot. She wasn’t so keen on working in the post office, but unfortunately, speaking fluent Elvish was not a marketable skill.

She didn’t greet me in Elvish that day. As the electric window slid down, I could see that her lips were pursed in a concerned pout.

‘Hello, Alex,’ she said.

‘Hello,’ I replied.

‘Are you okay?’ she asked.

‘Yes, I’m okay,’ I said.

‘Why are you walking in the road?’

‘I missed the bus,’ I lied. I didn’t like lying, especially not to someone like Mrs Griffith, but I thought, in this case, it was probably for the best.

Mrs Griffith frowned and shook her head. ‘You’re
walking
home?’

‘Yes. I thought it would be quicker than waiting for the next bus.’ (This lie was just about plausible. SARS ran a very irregular bus service.)

‘It’s an awfully long way,’ Mrs Griffith pointed out.

‘Yes, I know,’ I said.

‘And it’s raining,’ she added.

‘Yes, it is,’ I agreed.

‘I’m not sure your mother would want you walking so far in the rain.’

‘No, maybe not. It might be better if you don’t mention it. I don’t expect I’ll do it again. It’s too far.’

‘Can I give you a lift?’

‘Yes, that would be very helpful. Thank you.’

‘Hop in, then.’

I wetted my hand on my cagoule and rubbed away the boot mark that Declan Mackenzie had left on my trouser leg. Then I hopped in.