The Universe Versus Alex Woods (24 page)

I thought that if you could address these issues, you’d have the kind of community it would be nice to be a part of. And it was from this thought that the Secular Church was born.

By the time I first mentioned it to Mr Peterson, the idea had been bubbling away for a while. It seemed like the solution to a lot of problems.

Ever since I’d finished reading
A Man Without a Country
, some months earlier, I’d been thinking that I’d like to re-read all the Kurt Vonnegut books. I imagined I’d probably get more out of them a second time round, now that I was approximately ten per cent older than when I’d first picked one up. Furthermore, I realized this did not have to be a solitary pursuit.

Further enquiries in Glastonbury Library were encouraging. Fiona Fitton, the head librarian, told me that she thought setting up a reading group was a very good idea. They had a special noticeboard in the entranceway where things like that were advertised.

‘Would
you
be interested in joining?’ I asked.

‘Yes, Alex,’ she said, ‘I’m sure I would.’

‘I don’t mean hypothetically,’ I clarified. ‘I mean, when I’ve worked out all the details, shall I sign you up?’

This sentence seemed to amuse her – it made quite a lot of smile lines appear at the corners of her eyes. ‘Smile lines’ was a term Fiona Fitton had coined to refer to her many transient wrinkles. She often used it to express how much something she’d read or heard had pleased her. ‘It made all my smile lines come out!’ she’d say. She was a few years older than my mother – maybe forty or so – and her hair was strawberry blonde, getting more and more strawberry towards the roots. I’d been telling her for some time that she should
definitely
read some Kurt Vonnegut. I thought that plenty
of his sentences would bring out her smile lines.

‘Alex, you can sign me up!’ she said. ‘Non-hypothetically. Just pick a day when I’m not working.’

‘I thought Sundays would probably be convenient for most people,’ I said.

‘Yes, Sundays would be perfect,’ she agreed.

With this first foundation stone laid, I started thinking about the other readers I knew who might be interested in joining my Kurt Vonnegut book club.

There was Mrs Griffith, for a start. Ever since the funeral, when she’d said that she’d enjoyed my reading, I’d been meaning to drop a copy of
Sirens
off at the post office. (It wasn’t exactly
The Lord of the Rings
, but from personal experience, I knew it was perfectly possible to enjoy both.) Then there was Dr Enderby. He already knew a bit about Kurt Vonnegut because we’d talked about him at some of my appointments. Dr Enderby had read
Slaughterhouse-Five
at university, three decades ago, and he said that he remembered it being very funny and very sad. But he hadn’t read any more Kurt Vonnegut since then. Dr Enderby said that these days it was difficult to find the time for reading – or for reading anything other than medical journals (which were essential) or Emily Dickinson poems (which were very short).

Personally, I thought that Dr Enderby needed to
make
time for reading, which is what I told him at our next appointment. I also told him that he should view it the same way he viewed his meditation. Regular reading made you a calmer, wiser person. It was good for one’s boat.

Needless to say, this proved a compelling pitch.

‘A book club?’ Mr Peterson asked.

‘Yes, that’s right. But only with Kurt Vonnegut books. We’ll read all of them, start to finish. Nothing else.’

I couldn’t look over to see his expression, but I got the feeling that Mr Peterson was frowning. The reason I couldn’t look over was that I was driving at the time and I had to keep both eyes on the road. The only reason you should
ever
take your eyes off the road when you’re driving is to check your mirrors, which you should do briskly and often, especially when turning or pulling out at a junction. Of course, since I was not quite fifteen at the time, my driving was restricted to Mr Peterson’s lane (which was usually empty) and his private drive (which was always empty), but it was still best to be vigilant at all times. Technically, I shouldn’t have been driving at all. Not only was I two and a bit years too young, I was also too epileptic to hold a licence. You’re only allowed to drive if you’ve been seizure-free for a full year. My seizures were increasingly infrequent, but they hadn’t ceased entirely.

‘But you
know
when you’re gonna have a fit,’ Mr Peterson had pointed out (at the onset of our lessons). ‘You’ve got that weird sixth sense, right?’

‘Yes,’ I acknowledged. ‘I always know. I get a very strong aura prior to any major seizure.’

‘Great. So if you’re gonna have a fit, just tell me and stop the car. Hell, you’re not gonna be travellin’ at more than twenty, twenty-five miles per hour anyway. I don’t think we’ll be in any imminent danger.’

Mr Peterson thought it would be better for me to learn to drive sooner rather than later, not only because it would be useful, but also because he thought it would be good for my confidence; and, in hindsight, I suppose he was right. I was surprised to discover that driving came quite naturally to me. I was a cautious driver, but never a nervous one, and I never felt in danger of a seizure while at the wheel. In fact, I found the quiet concentration that driving required kept me extremely calm and composed.

After a few half-hour lessons, I knew how to stop and start the car, how to check my blind spot, and mirror-signal-manoeuvre. Soon after that I mastered the clutch: I could pull away without stalling, and change between first, second and third. (There was never any call for fourth.) And after only a few more lessons, I felt that my reverse- and parallel-parking were really rather elegant. Mr Peterson didn’t have a garage, but we used two lines of plant pots to construct a standard-sized parking bay. None of these plant pots ever got damaged.

Anyway, since I was having another driving lesson at the time of our conversation, I couldn’t look over to verify that Mr Peterson was frowning, but there was certainly a lot of scepticism evident in his voice.

‘A book club that
only
reads Kurt Vonnegut?’ he asked.

‘Yes, that’s right.’

‘I’m not sure you’re gonna get an overwhelming response to that idea,’ Mr Peterson predicted.

I was prepared for this, of course. ‘Actually,’ I said, ‘I’ve already found a few people who’ve said they might be interested: Mrs Griffith, Dr Enderby – my neurologist – and Fiona Fitton, who works at Glastonbury Library. She even said we might be able to order in multiple copies of the books we need, just in case there are people who’d like to join but can’t afford it. The council will pay because the council thinks reading’s good for the soul.’

‘I see.’

‘So, anyway, I’m happy to organize it all. But we’ll need somewhere to host it, obviously.’

‘Right. And where did you have in mind?’

‘Well, your house seems the obvious choice. I guess we can probably squeeze a fair few people in the front room before things get too tight. And then there’s all this space for parking.’ I gestured with my left hand. We were just pulling up to the house at that point.

‘Keep both hands on the wheel, kid,’ Mr Peterson warned.

I returned my hands to ten to two and brought the car to a gentle halt in front of the bay window. ‘I’ve already thought of a snappy name,’ I said. ‘I think a reading group should have a snappy name to attract members, don’t you?’

Mr Peterson didn’t ask about my snappy name, but I could tell his curiosity was piqued.

‘“The Secular Church of Kurt Vonnegut,”’ I said.

‘Jesus F Christ,’ said Mr Peterson.

‘It’d be like a regular church but with no singing or praying, and better stories. We can meet every Sunday.’

‘
Every
Sunday?’

‘Right. A book a week.’

‘Kid, most people don’t read that quick.’

‘It’s only twenty to forty pages per day. They’re not long books.’

‘Trust me. A book a month is more realistic. Most people have busy lives.’

‘Oh.’ I frowned. ‘Well, I suppose one Sunday a month would be okay. That means it’ll take a bit more than a year if we just stick to the fourteen novels, or about eighteen months if we include the short stories and essays and journalism as well.’

Mr Peterson was definitely scowling at this point. ‘Kid, you’ve lost the plot. What exactly are we gonna do in this
church
?’

‘I figured we’d discuss morality and so on.’

‘Morality?’

‘Well, yeah. After all, it
is
quite a large theme of the books. But there are lots of other things too. You know: satire, time travel, war, genocide, jokes, extraterrestrials. What do you think?’

‘I think I’m gonna end up with a bunch of nuts in my house.’

‘Does that mean you’re willing to host it?’ I asked.

Mr Peterson chewed his lip for a bit. ‘Okay, kid,’ he said eventually. ‘Find enough people and I’ll let you hold it here.’

‘How many people’s “enough” people?’ I asked.

‘A half-dozen, excluding us. Of course, there’s no chance in hell you
will
find that many people. Not in a month of Sundays. That’s the only reason I’m agreeing.’

‘Understood,’ I said.

That evening, buoyed by our conversation, I designed and printed my poster for Glastonbury Library, which looked like this:

EVER WONDERED WHY WE’RE HERE?

WHERE WE’RE GOING?

WHAT THE POINT IS?

CONCERNED ABOUT THE STATE OF THE UNIVERSE IN GENERAL??

THE SECULAR CHURCH OF KURT VONNEGUT

A book club for people interested in all or some of the following:

morality, ecology, time travel, extraterrestrial life, twentieth-century history, humanism, humour, et cetera

Phone Alex Woods: ***** *** ***

The stars, as you’ve probably worked out, were the digits of my home phone number, which I’m not going to reveal in case of nuisance calls.

A week later, I got my first response – or pair of responses – from John and Barbara Blessed. Their surname was pronounced Bless-ed, in two syllables, as in ‘Blessed are the meek . . .’ Considering the name of my reading group, this was a curiously apt surname, as Barbara Blessed, whom I spoke to on the phone, was quick to point out.

John and Barbara Blessed were both teachers, but not at Asquith. John Blessed turned out to be a compact, soft-spoken man who taught physics at a sixth-form college in Wells. Barbara Blessed was two inches taller than her husband, taught maths, suffered from chronic insomnia and to π knew one hundred decimal places. As you probably know, π is the number equal to a circle’s circumference divided by its diameter, which is approximately 3.14159. It’s a number that you can’t write in full because it goes on literally for ever. Most people count sheep when they can’t sleep, but Barbara Blessed recited π.

John and Barbara Blessed were both interested in time travel. John Blessed collected research papers on the subject and would later explain to me that on a sub-atomic scale, time travel was in fact a rather common phenomenon. But when it came to macroscopic objects, such as human beings and spaceships, most physicists agreed that the laws of nature probably conspired to make time travel a practical, if not physical, impossibility. Personally, John Blessed was of the opinion that ‘whatever time is, it’s not what we think it is.’ It was an opinion he shared with not only Kurt Vonnegut but also Stephen Hawking. John Blessed said that when physicists worked out a Theory of Everything (ToE), concepts such as space and time might no longer be tenable on a fundamental level, though they’d still be useful for day-to-day purposes such as arranging appointments and going to the supermarket.

Of course, most of this did not come up during that first phone conversation, in which I spoke to John Blessed only indirectly, via his wife. This is what she said: ‘Forgive me, Mr Woods, but my husband’s been on about this ever since we first saw your advert, and I really think I need to put him out of his misery. He wants to know if you’re
the
Alex Woods.’

This foxed me for only a few seconds.

‘I think there’s a good chance I might be
the
Alex Woods,’ I admitted, cautiously. ‘But obviously it depends on which Alex Woods your husband has in mind.’

Barbara Blessed cleared her throat. ‘It’s preposterous, really, but my husband has it in his head that Alex Woods was the name of the young boy who was hit by a fragment of the Wells meteor. You probably remember the story: it was in the papers for weeks. Anyway, I told him that even if he
has
remembered the name correctly—’

‘Yes, that was me,’ I confirmed.

The phone was quiet for a bit. I could hear the Blesseds conferring in the background. Then Mrs Blessed came back on the line. ‘I hope you don’t think it’s rude of me to ask, but how old are you, Alex?’

‘I’m almost fifteen,’ I said, ‘but my reading age is higher.’

This was not a joke, but it made Barbara Blessed laugh like a drain nonetheless.

After that, I took down Barbara Blessed’s email address and told her that I’d contact her once I’d finalized the date for our inaugural meeting. I also promised to bring along my iron–nickel meteor fragment.

In Glastonbury Library, a few days later, I recruited my second librarian. This was Sophie Haynes. She was fifty-five years old and the serenest of all the Glastonbury librarians. Her hair was the colour of graphite, and she always wore floaty ankle-length skirts or dresses rather than trousers, which rendered her walk more of a glide. She liked cryptic crosswords and William Blake, which I had discovered one afternoon while she was on a tea break and I was sitting in one of the soft chairs in the reading area, researching Emily Dickinson. William Blake was also a deceased poet, and artist, who had written a very famous poem about tigers: