Caught in a Moment (The Alex Trueman Chronicles Book 1) Read online

  Martin Dukes

  CAUGHT IN A MOMENT

  © 2012 Martin Dukes

  For Linda

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter One

  It was a Monday afternoon, the sort of sultry afternoon in early May that acts as a promise, a taster, for the anticipated pleasures of high summer. Soft scars of fading vapour trails were all that marred the perfect sky. There was hardly a breath of air to stir the leaves in the trees that broke the concrete monotony around the school sports hall. The windows of the classroom had been opened the meagre crack that was all that health and safety rules allowed.

  Alex Trueman sat hunched perspiring over his desk in one of several great trapezoid blazes of sunlight. He was nearly fifteen, a boy of unremarkable appearance except for his ears which stuck out from the sides of his head like the handles of a sports cup and had earned him the nickname “Trophy”. A desk space in front of him motes of dust danced gracefully above Jessica Elliot’s blond curled head, stirred into sudden, urgent action as she flicked her hair. Out on the playing field boys were playing cricket. From his place next to the fly specked window Alex could see the leisurely movements of the fielders on the boundary, the sudden bursts of activity as the batsmen cut or hooked, a bowler’s arms raised as he appealed half-heartedly for a wicket. It was not that Alex particularly liked cricket. It was one of the many sports that he wasn’t any good at. But if he was happy to concede to them the doubtful pleasures of cork on willow, he envied them the air and the space and the freedom from the tedium of double Geography.

  “Alex is a loser,” was the message crudely scrawled on the scrap of paper passed to him by his neighbour to the left.

  This was his friend Henry, who grinned sidelong at him to demonstrate that he expected Alex to retaliate in kind.

  Turning the paper over, he took his own pen and gave the matter some thought. He might conceivably have written, “You are fifteen years old. I would have expected you to have grown out of this kind of stuff by now.”

  Instead, with a sigh, he wrote. “Henry is a big fat loser,” and passed it back.

  Henry, frowned and chewed his pen whilst considering how to sustain this witty dialogue.

  Part of Alex was aware of Mr McTavish’s flat nasal tones describing the features of a central business district. He frowned. His fountain pen traced slow circles on the corner of his exercise book. There was a dead wasp at the base of the window, curled and desiccated, with half a wing missing. Alex imagined it suddenly huge and wicked, carrying him away like a dragon over the cricket pitch. Perched on its back, he smiled at the upturned faces of the players, pale with sudden shock, the wasp shadow passing dark over the umpire’s pristine coat. The teacher’s voice, whilst remaining audible had become no more than a series of disconnected sounds that had no meaning. A drymarker squealed faintly on a whiteboard. A lazy bluebottle buzzed feebly at the window, but gradually those sounds dwindled in his ears as the wasp bore him away, big as a racehorse, bright as a jewel. Strange. As a boy with a well-founded reputation for inattentiveness in class the experience of daydreaming was familiar enough to him in general, but this time there was something different. It was as though time slowed down around him. Slower and slower, instants trickled by. And stopped. With a shudder Alex snapped out of it, recalled not this time by his teacher’s irritated summons but by a sudden thrill of horror. The dream wasp vanished. The world stood still. Out on the field, a ball thrown from the boundary paused at the zenith of its lazy arc. Hardly daring to turn his head, Alex glanced furtively around him. The world was silent. The teacher stood immobile, pen raised, his mouth half open in mid-sentence. He had one gold tooth, that sparked light as Alex got slowly to his feet. Next to him Henry was frozen in the act of polishing his glasses. The bluebottle hung motionless in the still air above the faded globe at the front of the class. Alex surveyed the frozen world around him, the rows of statues that his classmates had become. He realised that his heart was thudding in his chest. He sat down, shook his head vigorously and the world suddenly got on with its business.

  “…economic conditions,” continued the teacher, as Henry got on with polishing his specs. “If you’d like to turn to page 42 in your books, and have a look at the diagram.”

  At break Alex mentioned the strange time lapse to Henry, as they waited their turn at the drinks machine. Henry was taller than Alex, but slighter, with unfashionably long hair. He was the easily the brightest boy in the class, but because he had a tongue like a rapier he never got picked on by the big thick lads.

  “It sounds odd alright,” said Henry now, pushing his glasses further up his considerable nose. “My cousin’s epileptic and he has these petit mal episodes when he’s totally out of it for a few seconds.”

  “It wasn’t like that,” Alex told him. “Everything just froze. I was the only one who could move. Time stood still.”

  “Sounds brilliant,” said Henry, who never really took Alex very seriously. “All sorts of possibilities there. Maybe it’ll happen in English. Then you can go and write stuff on Mr Keane’s big old bald head.”

  “Cool!” snorted Alex, with a nod, putting the idea away for later consideration.

  “It’s a thought alright,” continued Henry, keeping the theme going indulgently. He was counting out change in his palm. “It’s important always to turn every situation to your advantage, no matter how unpromising it looks. First rule of the SAS… or something like that…maybe it was the Brownies. No,” he said on reflection. “Deffo the SAS.”

  “Have you got any homework?” asked his mum that afternoon, when he was dumping his school bag in the garage. As ever this was amongst the first things she said to him upon his return from his day’s labours.

  “Is there any chocolate?” he countered, coming into the kitchen and draping his blazer over the back of a chair in a manner that he knew to be highly provocative.

  “There is if you left any yesterday,” retorted mum, setting down a bowl of food in front of their aged spaniel Rufus. Rufus glanced at Alex apologetically and wagged his tail as if to say “I’d be glad to greet you with my usual enthusiasm but as you can see I’m otherwise engaged at present“

  “What have you got on your hands?” asked mum, wiping her own on a tea towel.

  “It’s nothin’” said Alex, glancing at the dense pattern of writhing forms he had earlier drawn on them in felt tipped pen. “Just a neural network of tiny metal threads so that when you touch a computer you interface with it directly and tap into the global mind.”

  “Really,” said mum, turning to the dishwasher, “Well get it washed off before tea please. The global mind will have to manage without you.” A thought struck her suddenly, and she turned to Alex, her brow creased. “It’d better not feature on the school photo you had taken this morning. You know what your grandparents would think of that.”

  A tiny part of Alex’s mind, one on the whole he was able to ignore, briefly considered this and told him they would be displeased. His mum was a small, slender woman with anxious, bird like movements and a way of biting her lower lip when distracted. She did this now, regarding her son’s hands and then his blazer disapprovingly. By mo
st standards she was rather too old to be the mother of anyone of Alex’s age. Kate, his sister, was seven years older than him and in her third year at university. Rob, his twenty four year old brother, was working in North London. But then Alex had apparently come along as a bit of an afterthought, or possibly a mistake, as Alex occasionally conjectured but no one would ever admit to him.

  “I did it after the photo,” Alex explained. “In Physics.”

  “Whoa!” said mum. “Things have moved on in Physics since I was at school. Neural networks eh?” She grinned to demonstrate she was joking with him and tousled his hair playfully. “Go on now. Tea’s in ten minutes so no chocolate and biscuits for you. And go and get this blazer hung up. Do you want it to look like a piece of rag?”

  Alex had no particularly strong feelings on this issue but he took it from mum’s outstretched hand and went up to his bedroom, chalking up for himself a minor point in having managed to avoid responding to mum’s question about homework. In fact there was French and Chemistry to be done. Unfortunately the worksheet that he needed in order to do the Chemistry was where he had left it in his locker at school. This would require a period of urgent attention in the ten minutes or so before lessons tomorrow. On the other hand the French revision he had been set could safely be ignored, which left the evening nicely open.

  “Hmm”, he said to himself, switching on his laptop and loosening his tie before slipping it over his head (an expedient that saved having to tie the knot again the following day). “What’s the point in Chemistry anyway? I’m never going to be a chemist. I’m never going to be a physicist a biologist or a geographer either.”

  His laptop, which had once belonged to his sister and was showing its age, took an eternity to boot up. Alex occupied this time by launching himself onto his bed in a manner that drew a squeal of complaint from the bedsprings. He rolled over to regard the ceiling thoughtfully. Above him, various models of aircraft stirred gently at the end of the dusty cotton threads from which they were suspended. Visions of his future passed before his eyes. He closed them. Now History… he could see the point in that, given that he envisaged himself as an archaeologist. There he was, in the parched desert of Morocco, leading a team excavating the remains of an ancient civilisation. He wiped the dust and grime from his brow as his trowel encountered something hard amongst the compacted sand in the bottom of the trench. He glanced around. One of his colleagues trundled a wheelbarrow along a plank that bridged a whole network of trenches excavated during the previous month. It was hot. The sun beat down on his sweating back. Sweat trickled cold down his rib. Someone in the neighbouring trench chuckled at some private joke as Alex scraped away at the sand. There it was – a tiny metallic glint. In his dream Alex closed his eyes too and opened them once more, taking a deep breath. He was conscious that his heart was suddenly hammering within his chest. Was this the moment? Abandoning the trowel, forgetting all his training, Alex clawed at the sand with his bare hands revealing beautiful glistening gold, more and more of it, the features of what could only be a royal death mask emerging from the earth like a swimmer from the ocean of ages. “Oh my god!” he murmured under his breath. “Is this it? Am I gazing upon the face of the king of Atlantis?”

  That question hung in the air, unanswered as a text came in from Henry.

  “Wnt 2 ply footy at mine?” was the query.

  “Tea’s on the table”, called his mum from downstairs.

  “After t,” Alex texted back. Then he threw his phone into the laundry basket and rolled off the bed like a soldier lurching into a slit trench, a sudden artillery bombardment unleashing the fury of hell all around him.

  “Coming!” he shouted above the cacophony of exploding shells.

  Tuesday’s French test brought with it the realisation that there were a surprisingly large number of French words whose meanings remained mysterious to him. There were others that seemed vaguely familiar but hovered frustratingly just beyond the reach of his comprehension. Having set forth all his knowledge in the best part of five minutes Alex found himself with a further fifteen to kill. Henry, he noted, was scribbling away industriously, brow furrowed in concentration. Erica, the fat girl with B.O. at the desk next to him, sat hunched over her paper in such a manner as to make it impossible for him to make out anything she had written. Nevertheless, she turned to eye him suspiciously from time to time and once, noticing that he had already set down his pen, gave a little sniff of disapproval. Alex sighed. In the corner of the test paper he began to draw out the outline of the continent he would create were he to be given god like powers. A knowledge of Geography, he had to concede, proved useful in this context. His teacher would undoubtedly have approved of the elaborate delta he had placed at the mouth of the continent’s chief river. Soon great forests of tiny trees marched along the flanks of high mountains and a Lilliputian city sprang up in a deep valley between two rocky spurs. He was putting the finishing touches to a series of lakes when he became conscious that a shadow had fallen across his world. Madame Aitken, his French teacher was standing at his shoulder. Alex’s pen paused in the act of creation. A moment passed. The shadow remained. Without turning his head or otherwise indicating that he was aware of her presence Alex carefully wrote “le foret” next to one of the trees. There was a muffled snort from behind him and then Madame Aitken had moved on.” I wish, I wish I could just walk into this page,” thought Alex, regarding his little kingdom with satisfaction. There’d be no French tests in Miroplagia – no French people either for that matter, with their selfish insistence on speaking a completely incomprehensible language. Alex glanced up at the clock and saw that there were seven minutes until morning break. The red second hand moved evenly between the numerals on its perimeter. Did it falter for a moment? Did it stop for a fraction of a second and then lurch forward once more? Alex rubbed his eyes. Time moved on. Had he imagined it?

  At break he was somewhat pre-occupied by the behaviour of the clock. Had he been fully in possession of his wits he would not have walked past Gary Payne carrying an open packet of sweets in plain view. Gary Payne was a large, crop haired lad for whom Alex harboured feelings of deep loathing and resentment. Gary was a school bully in the traditional mould and had made Alex’s first weeks in this school misery. Only teaming up with Henry had spared him from a regime of continual persecution. Gary had a worrying tendency to violence and a dislike for intellectuals that stemmed from his inability to tell them apart from homosexuals. Because Alex knew more words than him (hardly a rare distinction) and was known to read a lot of books Gary had him down as an intellectual.

  “Oi, poof!” Gary greeted him, moving smoothly into his path. “Got some suck ‘ave yer Trophy?”

  Since the beginning of time school bullies have been accompanied by a couple of brutish sidekicks and Gary was no exception. In this case smirking Mason Tennyson and wall-eyed Macaulay Pitt. Alex had a suspicion of people who had been given surnames for first names but he kept this to himself as Mason and Macaulay invaded his personal space on either side of him.

  “Who are you calling a poof, you horrible knuckle dragging moron?” he imagined himself saying.

  “Yeah,” was what he actually said, glancing warily around for possible sources of support. The space outside the tuck shop was busy with people queuing or standing about talking but there was no one who seemed likely to intervene on Alex’s behalf in what he foresaw with grim certainty was going to be a tuck mugging. Henry had gone to sign up for cricket practice after school. Nathan, another friend was down in the lockers at the other end of the corridor.

  “It’s good to share isn’t it,” stated Gary, indicating Alex’s packet of sweets meaningfully. Alex recognised that he lacked physical courage and didn’t quite know what to do with them. It was too late to slip the colourful tube into his blazer pocket so he found himself gripping it tightly to his solar plexus region whilst a variety of emotions wrestled for control of him. There was indignation in large measure, fear in roughly equ
al proportion and regret that he hadn’t already been to the toilet. Where was a teacher when you needed one?

  “I bet you’d like to let me have the rest, wouldn’t you, poof?”

  Alex found himself unable to speak for a moment. His mouth was suddenly dry and his tongue afflicted by a strange paralysis.

  “Give!” said Gary suddenly, grasping for the sweets.

  “Hey!” gasped Alex, instinctively snatching them away so that a brief tussle ensued from which there could be only one outcome. Alex was spared this by the sudden intervention of Jessica Murphy, an impressively large and assertive Year 11 girl with a face resembling a potato. For this reason she was generally referred to as “Spud”, although rarely within her earshot.

  “Hey! Leave him alone you big bully!” said Spud, shouldering her way past Macaulay and glaring into Gary’s face. She was at least as intimidating as Gary and with a cohort of her own pals there to back her up Gary was suddenly outgunned.

  “Come to stick up for your boyfriend have you?” jeered Gary, going on to mention a number of things he thought Spud could go and do with herself. Alex listened to this with interest now that the Gary threat was certainly quelled. As Mr Jones, the enormous Head of PE hove in sight along the corridor, Gary moved off uttering a stream of imprecations that many people might have thought unkind or even hurtful. Spud merely shrugged and laughed uproariously with her friends, winking at Alex and giving his bum a sharp tweak before moving off towards the girls’ toilet in regal splendour.

  “What’s going on?” asked Henry, turning up at Alex’s side with masterly timing. “Do I detect romance in the air?”

  “No you bloody well do not,” said Alex, with feeling, conscious that his face was flushing a deep crimson. The humiliation of being rescued from his plight by a girl was almost too much to bear. “Come on. We’d better not be late for Chemistry. My homework’s not going to win any awards.”