The Universe Versus Alex Woods (4 page)

‘Wow!’ That explained the bandage on my leg. ‘Does that mean that underneath all these bandages I’m like a Frankenstein? With all those stitches holding my head together and a great big metal plate bolted to my skull?’

‘Yes, exactly so,’ said Dr Patel. Then he paused briefly. ‘Except the plate isn’t metal. It’s made from a special absorbable material that gradually breaks down over a period of months while your skull repairs itself underneath. Eventually, the whole plate will be gone, the stitches will dissolve, and you’ll be just like a normal boy again.’

‘But I’ll at least have a scar?’

‘You
might
have a scar.’

I frowned and tapped my head.

‘Lex!’ warned my mother without looking up from her book.

I stopped tapping my head. ‘Dr Patel, where do they go after they dissolve?’ I asked. ‘You know, the stitches and the special skull plate?’

‘Well,’ he replied, ‘any material that the body can use is recycled and turned into other useful things, like muscle and fat. And the rest is simply broken down and excreted.’

I thought about this for a few moments. ‘You mean it comes out in your stools?’

‘Lex!’ barked my mother.

‘That’s what they call them in the hospital,’ I pointed out. ‘It’s the proper medical term.’

‘Actually, most of it leaves the body in the urine,’ said Dr Patel.

‘Okay, I think that’s more than enough information for one day,’ said my mother.

After that, Dr Patel wouldn’t tell me anything interesting about my wounds unless my mother was out of the room, and that didn’t happen very often.

Even though my head was patched up and healing itself underneath the special absorbable bone plates, I still had to stay in hospital for another week so that they could keep an eye on me and make sure that I was getting the proper amount of rest and protein. I saw about a million different doctors, and twice as many nurses, and I had to go for X-rays so that they could check how my skull was doing, and then I had to answer questions and perform all these strange little tasks that had been designed to make sure that my brain was functioning correctly.

It seemed that it was.

My five senses were all in good working order. I could still read and write, and I still knew my times tables, one to twelve. My ability to manipulate oddly shaped blocks was unimpaired, and after a few days of solid food and increasing exercise, my movements and co-ordination were pretty much back to normal. The only thing that showed any signs of damage was my memory, and this damage was so specific that it hardly seemed to be a problem. I could still memorize lists of words or numbers, and I performed well on spot-the-difference and missing-object puzzles. I could remember what I’d had for breakfast and what happened yesterday and my first day at school and the time I sat on a wasp at Weston-super-Mare. I could still name almost every animal I’d seen at Bristol Zoo: the spider monkey, the ring-tailed lemur, the golden tamarin and so on and so forth. And based on these facts, there was no general problem with my episodic or semantic memory. There was simply a missing month, four weeks of my personal history that had fallen into a deep dark hole. Despite all Dr Patel’s reassurances, I couldn’t help wondering if that month hadn’t somehow ended up in the dust bag of the brain surgeon’s very small, very precise Hoover.

It was my mother who had found me, of course. She had heard both explosions from the kitchen, separated by at least a minute of quiet. The first, she said, sounded like a very distant gunshot, or maybe a car backfiring. The second sounded like the roof collapsing. The upstairs landing was carnage – a minefield of fallen pictures, smashed glass and displaced ornaments from the dresser that stood opposite the stairs. Pewter candelabra, a sacramental chalice – that kind of thing. The bathroom door was closed but not locked. I was lying on the floor in a pool of blood and shattered porcelain. My mother said that she screamed so loudly that it was probably this, and not the explosion itself, that brought Mr and Mrs Stapleton, our elderly neighbours, running. It was really a good job they turned up. I suspect my mother was way too hysterical to call an ambulance.

Apparently, she hardly left my side for the next two weeks. She insisted on sleeping at the hospital. The nurses had to wheel a special bed into my room once she’d made it clear that if they weren’t able to accommodate her, she’d simply sleep on the floor. From the way she described it, it sounded kind of embarrassing. Luckily, I was deep in my coma at this point. In fact, I was aware of absolutely nothing – but this was one medical reality my mother was quick to dismiss.

‘I talked to you every day,’ she told me. ‘I knew that there had to be a part of you that could still hear me.’

‘I don’t think I could hear you,’ I said – for the thousandth time.

‘There was a
part
of you that could hear me,’ my mother insisted.

‘I don’t
remember
hearing you,’ I said.

My mother chortled carelessly. ‘Well, of course you don’t remember it! You were fast asleep. And we don’t remember things when we’re fast asleep, do we? That doesn’t mean you couldn’t hear
at the time
.’

I frowned. I wasn’t sure that this made sense, but then, there was a lot from the past month that didn’t make sense.

Highest on the list was the accident itself. Of course, I knew the basic facts about what had happened to me – from my mother, and from Mr and Mrs Stapleton and the ambulance men who had been up to visit me after I woke up – but this actually didn’t amount to very much. They’d found the Rock straight away – apparently you couldn’t miss it – but no one could be sure that it had actually hit me. One of the ambulance men told me that it seemed more likely that I’d been struck by a piece of shrapnel or falling masonry from the ceiling. ‘If you’d been hit by the Rock itself,’ he said, ‘I don’t think we’d be having this conversation right now.’

To my disappointment, Mr Stapleton, who’d been the first to pick up the Rock, supported this theory. He said that it was only the size of an orange but, in his estimation, it must have weighed at least four or five pounds, which is as much as a two-litre bottle of Diet Coke. ‘IT FELT LIKE A LEAD WEIGHT,’ he shouted. (Mr Stapleton always shouted because he was extremely deaf.) When I asked him what it looked like, he told me that it was ‘BLACK AND PECULIAR-LOOKING, LIKE IT HAD BEEN CAST IN A MOULD’. But I didn’t find this description even close to adequate.

‘What do you mean?’ I asked. ‘What kind of mould?’

‘FREEZING!’ Mr Stapleton assured me.

‘WHAT KIND OF MOULD?’ I repeated.

‘A PECULIAR ONE. LIKE IT WAS MADE BY ALIENS!’

I was desperate to see it, of course, but when I asked my mother, she said that someone had taken it away weeks ago.

‘Who?’ I demanded.

My mother shrugged. ‘Actually, I’m not sure who she was. She said she was a scientist. Dr Monica Somethingorother. I was much too upset to take it all in. She caught me while I was right in the middle of packing a suitcase to bring back to the hospital.’

‘But who was she? Where did she come from? Where did she take my Rock?’

‘Lex, I’ve told you – I don’t know! She said that she needed to take it away to do some important tests. At the time, I couldn’t have cared less.’

‘Is she coming back?’

‘She didn’t say.’

‘You didn’t ask?’

‘Lex! I’m not going to repeat myself.’

I felt dismal. I was sure that because of my mother’s short-sightedness I’d never get to see my Rock and no one would ever be able to tell me the things I wanted to know about it. For the time being, I could only console myself by reading and re-reading the articles that the Stapletons and various doctors and nurses had collected. It was from these sources that I started to patch over the hole in my memory, which would have otherwise remained obstinately unfilled.

The fireball, it transpired, was first seen over the northeast tip of Northern Ireland at around 3.27 in the afternoon on Sunday, 20 June 2004. Anyone who was outside at the time, or looking out of a window facing in the right direction, would have seen it. Apparently it was three times brighter than the full moon and shot across the sky like a bullet. After being witnessed by about a hundred thousand people in the Belfast region, it took just a few seconds to cross the Irish Sea, rocketed over Anglesey and then disappeared behind thick cloud cover over North Wales. It re-emerged just north of the Severn estuary, startled half of Bristol and then ended its journey somewhere over Somerset. At the time, no one knew exactly where that somewhere was, but there was a lot of speculation. Several hundred people swore blind that they saw it explode directly over Wells Cathedral, and for a while, this was reported as fact in the local and national papers. Then, after a couple of days, a scientist from the University of Oxford appeared on the news saying that, in actual fact, because the impactor struck the Earth at an extremely acute angle and exploded high in the atmosphere, ‘it would have been very difficult for any single eyewitness to identify accurately the precise point of detonation.’ In response, Graham Alcock, a writer for the
Wells Herald
, pointed out that this wasn’t the testimony of a ‘single eyewitness’, but rather ‘two policemen, three busloads of tourists and an entire pilgrimage of nuns’. This prompted (two days later) a letter from Professor Miriam Hanson, a psychologist from Bristol, who wanted ‘to clarify that the issue of reliability is not, in this case, bound up with the number of people who witnessed the phenomenon, much less their good character. The fact is that the
apparent
explosion of the meteor over Wells Cathedral was in all probability an optical illusion created by the height and expanse of the building relative to the position of the observers. In a scenario like this, eyewitness testimony has to be taken with a large pinch of salt.’ Her letter, published under the title ‘28 Nuns
Can
Be Wrong’, did nothing to quell the debate, which went on in the same vein for most of the next week, drawing in such luminaries as the Archbishop of Canterbury and
The
Sky at Night
’s Chris Lintott.

I found all these arguments extremely interesting when I was finally able to read about them – which is one of the reasons I mention them now – but I should point out that, for most, the ‘Wells Controversy’ was nothing more than a sideline. Most people weren’t interested in knowing about the precise point of detonation or the attempt to reconstruct the meteoroid’s original orbit round the Sun. They were only interested in the ‘human cost’ of recent events, and on that topic, the consensus was absolute. The archbishop, the scientists, the journalists, the letter-writers – they all said the same thing: that given the mass and composition of
my
meteorite fragment, which was quickly established, and given the speed at which it must have burst through our bathroom roof, which was considerable, it was really nothing short of a miracle that I had survived.

It was five days later, the day before I was discharged from Yeovil District Hospital, that I finally got the answers I’d been looking for. This was the day that Dr Monica Somethingorother rematerialized, appearing like an out-of-breath vision at my bedside. She’d arrived unannounced and brought with her a scruffy sports bag and enough data about meteors, meteorites and meteoroids to make my head spin for the next week.

Her real name turned out to be Dr Monica Weir, although I misheard it at first, naturally. She wasn’t a medical doctor, but a doctor of astrophysics, specializing in planetary science, at the Imperial College in London. And she wasn’t much like any other adult I’d ever met. For a start, it seemed to me that she could answer any question you put to her – and, more surprisingly, she
would
answer any question you put to her. With most adults (with my mother, in particular) there came a point, after the third or fourth question in a row, when they stopped answering; or, more often, the answer they gave would be no answer at all – ‘because it just is!’ or some equally frustrating variant. But with Dr Weir, there was no cut-off point. She seemed quite capable of explaining everything, right down to the smallest detail. And the more questions you asked, the more willing she seemed to bombard you with information; she couldn’t utter a ten-word sentence without making it sound like an excerpt from a Royal Institution Christmas Lecture. She also dressed kind of funny. Not funny like my mother, who dressed ‘alternatively’, but more old-fashioned and mismatched, as if she’d selected all her clothes at random from a 1950s jumble sale. I suppose, really, she dressed like her mind was on Higher Things, which was fine by me – although I’ll admit that I wasn’t sure of her at first, mainly because I still felt like she’d stolen my Rock. And I was not alone in this sentiment.

It turned out that quite a few people – quite a few other astrophysicists – felt this way too. Once they learned that she’d swooped across to Somerset to claim possession of the meteorite, mere hours after the news had broken, there was quite a backlash. The words ‘insensitive’ and ‘unethical’ came up quite a lot. Then there were several stroppy emails written by various scientists at the universities of Bristol and Bath, who were furious that such an important local fall had been whisked away to London before the dust had even settled. But Dr Weir didn’t seem particularly bothered by any of this. She would later tell
New Scientist
magazine that ‘the most important thing was that the fall was recovered promptly, undamaged and uncontaminated. If I’d left it any longer, there was a real chance that it could have been taken by a private collector. After all, this wasn’t a normal situation. Everyone in the country knew precisely where this fragment had landed. And you have to remember that within twenty-four hours the whole county was swarming with meteorite hounds. I felt it my duty to claim it at once in the name of Science!’

Once she’d explained her actions to me, I was very pleased that Dr Weir had arrived so promptly to claim my meteorite in the name of Science. In the two weeks she’d had it, she’d managed to find out an incredible amount about my Rock. And the first thing she was eager to point out was that it was
not
a rock in any ordinary sense of the word.