Globetrotters - Chapter 1, The Boxer

Prologue

Michael stroked her cheek as he made to go, a vain effort to psychically transmit a final goodbye, for it would be final, there was no hope of him returning. Nor should he return. He owed his son that. But he couldn't bring himself to leave his daughter like he'd left his son. He'd take one of the girls, Alicia maybe, give her a proper Elsion name – Nanya, perhaps. Cee wouldn't mind. She'd understand his need to be with his daughter. And they had two, why not have one each, a piece of each other to keep when they could never have the real thing, ever, again. It didn't entirely make sense, not even in his eyes, never mind an outsider's, but making sense was the least of his worries.

And with a swoop he was gone: back to Turntour, back to Belchest. The dimension link hadn't been a good idea, but Michael understood why Celia had tried. It was worth the risk. He'd have done the same. And they had had a good time together. Michael loved her like he'd never loved his wife. But he loved his son – loved his son more than either of them. His son, the little man, who was destined to be great in his own little way.

He clutched Alicia close to his chest. He felt her tense and her baby muscles contract. He chuckled. He'd make a fighter out of this one. She was a born Vurakan Champion. He'd miss his other girls though, Amy and Celia, his two Earthly loves, his daughter and his … mistress. He gulped down the thought of what the word connoted, what he'd done to his family, how he'd demolished their lives. They probably thought he was dead. What would this be doing to Jonnie? And of course, what would happen to him when he left again, properly. Because soon, of course, he would be dead.. That Elsion immune system playing up again. A whole world and not a soul above thirty.

He wondered what would become of Amy, what was a normal Earth life? Hopefully it was better than an Elsion one, or at the very least longer.

Chapter 1 – The Boxer

“What's in it?” Donny Patrickson peered into the beaker at the end of the chemistry desk, taking care not to inhale any harmful fumes that may be pirouetting off of the surface.

The beaker was about three quarters full of a viscous-looking, burgundy liquid with effervescence fizzing outwards from a solitary brown clump of curious consistency. The clump did not float, indicating that either the liquid was not as viscous as it had first appeared or the clump was incredibly dense. Perhaps some sort of acid with a heavy metal like gold – but then it wouldn't be fizzing! Donny scratched his head.

Amy Oswald, Donny's first and best friend in the world, leant forward and stuck her head directly over the beaker, apparently not phased by the 'quirky' reputation of their chemistry teacher, Mr Yaxley. If she had been, she'd probably have ducked under the desk to avoid the mystery liquid. Rumour had it that when a pupil once dropped a bottle of sulphuric acid on the worktop, splattering the surface with it, Mr Yaxley had yelled that the pupils were not to stop to clean it up as this would 'disrupt their learning'. Donny had adamantly believed that nobody would let harmful acids fester for the twenty more minutes for which the pupil proceeded to work – that this particular fairly dull story would prove as true as getting his head rammed down a toilet and having it flushed as soon as he crossed the high school threshold, which so far had mercifully failed to materialise – but his resolve had begun to perceivably waver. He'd witnessed strange things about this man: he'd watched as he'd removed a skelf from his big toe with a pair of tongs used by the class the period before who'd been burning magnesium with a Bunsen burner; he'd seen him comb his floppy blonde hair with a ruler chipped along its long side like fangs; he'd even once walked on him trying to neutralise a wasp sting on his chest with very dilute hydrochloric acid. After that last experience he'd learned to wait outside the class until he saw others go in first. If he heard nothing, he followed, if he heard cries of 'Eurgh' or 'Oh my God!' he stayed put and waited for Mr Yaxley to presumably button up his shirt or sometimes to put his shoes back on.

But Amy had always been braver than Donny. She'd been the one climbing the trees; he'd been the one spotting the good trees to climb. He'd never even attempted it. He suspected he wouldn't be awful at it but it was just that Amy would undeniably be way better. Amy was nimble and agile and practically a monkey. When they used to play pirates on the way home from school, he would call up to Amy – who would be perched in the tree that preceded the forest lining their estate by a good few dozen yards, holding her empty hands to her screwed up eyes as if she were holding a spyglass, her frizzy ginger hair billowing out behind her, or flapping into her face – and she would reply with one of two codes. 'Landward Ho!' meant that the coast was clear; 'Bring 'er aboot!' meant that Melissa Frank's ferocious boxer – known as 'The Boxer' due to neither of them having ever had a full conversation with Melissa, certainly not enough to ask her about her pets – was lounging in its garden, ready to snap its jaws and hurl itself against the low garden fence as soon as they passed. If the latter was the case, they would zip around the other side of the block, crossing the burn behind Melissa's house, then getting back on course with only minimal disruption. It was a perfect system, really. Unfortunately those days were behind them, though Donny honestly couldn't fathom why that had to be the case.

Amy chuckled and returned to upright on her stool, presumably having deduced the identity of the substance, then smirked and proclaimed, “Three guesses.”

“Does it have a pH greater or less than seven?” Donny scratched his dirty-blonde head again.

“Oh, no, no. Oh, never mind. It's not a chemical. That's a teabag,” Amy grinned at Donny.

“That's a teabag?!” Donny exclaimed, “Yuk! It looks like a chunk of a dog's flesh!”

“It is kind of hairy,” Amy agreed.

At that moment Mr Yaxley returned from the bathroom – a toilet break which had incidentally made him twenty minutes late for class! – and reclaimed his beaker. He raised his eyebrows in a … knowing? … look, then took his place behind his desk and began the lesson as if there wasn't only half an hour left of it. Donny had come to expect these 'quirks' but that didn’t mean they were any less irritating, especially when they were so close to their first prelim … ever. This was Donny and Amy's first year of real, credible, stress-worthy exams and a teacher who could technically get detention for his tardiness was not alleviating the tension at all.

Mr Yaxley launched into a flat lecture about hydrocarbons, which were ironically pyramidal and therefore with two more dimensions than his voice. Somehow, and not without Donny wondering if it ever would, the speech drew to a close and the class were left to work on some 'purple book' questions themselves.

Amy rose to collect the books from the cupboard. Donny almost made to offer to go for her then remembered the outcome of his last attempt at chivalry. He'd seen Amy at the far end of a corridor as he'd gone through the door and held it open for the thirty seconds it took her to reach it. Donny had thought a thanks would have sufficed but no, he'd had to have the twenty minute lecture on feminism, highlighting the fact that although Amy appreciated his kindness she didn't ever see him do the same for his male friends. Of course, they'd been on the way to a class at the time of the incident and so the spiel had in fact come at lunchtime, two periods later, when the whole thing had all but shuffled out of Donny's memory. Had he been more equipped, he may have been able to tell her that he would have held the door open for Declan, Oliver, Cameron etcetera if it hadn't been for the fact that none of them took computing and were in fact all over at the other side of the school, in music. As it was, he'd mumbled an apology. Evidently, he'd sounded more hurt than irritated as Amy had proceeded to smile, relax and gush out something about not to beat himself up about it.

Amy returned with the books and tossed the entire pile into the centre of the blue-green patterned, two-desk table. Donny cracked one open and got his head down, the conversation of Fraser and Peter, who occupied the other two seats of the group, swooping straight over his head. He was lost in chemical formulae, ionic formulae and electron equations. Nobody could awake him from his molecular stupor. Nobody could –

“Donny?”

Well, maybe one thing.

“Yes, Amy?” Donny replied, his head perking up involuntarily.

“Your house or mine tonight?”

“Well, given that they're attached, I'd say we could decide when we get there,” Donny grinned.

“Okay,” Amy was quiet.

Weren't jokes supposed to enliven conversation, not kill it?

“I've been thinking lately about when we played at pirates,” Donny prompted.

“Oh?” Amy still seemed unimpressed.

“Yeah, I guess I miss that. It was fun,” Donny winced inwardly; he hated monosyllabic word sentences, “Why d'you think we stopped?”

“Probably 'cause The Boxer got put down for being too aggressive.”

“Yeah.”

Jokes were not serving them well this Friday.

“Melissa was pretty sad about that,” Amy continued, “You know, I think she still slightly hates us for that.”

“How was that our fault?! The dog was insane!” Donny shouted, a tad too loudly.

Peter and Fraser abruptly paused their conversation, then resumed when they realised the banality of the actual words he'd shouted.

“Well, it would appear that one night when your parents were out at a party and you were staying over at mine – I think we'd been talking about the dog during the day or maybe just before we went to sleep – either way, my mum went to the toilet in the middle of the night and stopped in to check on us. Apparently I was hanging over the edge of the bed facing your air mattress and we were both groaning about The Boxer as if the thing was possessing us or something,” Amy seemed to find the story somewhere between amusing and the kind of story you'd tell in Graham Norton's 'Red Chair'. She smiled and cocked her head to the side, “My mum says she didn't tell us at the time because she wanted to find out about the dog first and see if it needed … 'seeing to' … because if it did and we thought it was our fault we wouldn't be able to handle seeing Melissa every day. She only told me a couple of years ago, when we were getting Dillan. She was looking at those towers that cats scratch themselves on in Pets At Home and she saw a dog that looked exactly like The Boxer. It would appear she forgot all about it.”

Donny almost choked, “I was responsible for the death of a dog?”

“We both were. But inadvertently.”

“But it never actually did anything to us!” Donny spluttered, distraught.

“No, but my mum got in contact with Melissa's mum, just to check. Melissa's mum accidentally slipped something out about how The Boxer – Oscar, by the way – was actually remarkably docile for his breed and that the whole family were confident that nothing like it would ever happen again.”

“Nothing like what? Why would that be something she'd 'slip out'?”

“I'm getting there. See, that's what my mum asked. She went 'Nothing like what?', exactly like you just did. Apparently there was a woman a few years beforehand. The front gate hadn't been locked properly that day and The Boxer – I mean Oscar – had gotten out and ripped a load of her skin off.”

“Eurgh. That's gross, ten times worse than Mr Yaxley's gloopy tea!”

“I know, but more than that, it's illegal. The woman had been quite frightened of Melissa's dad and had naively assumed he was some sort of mob-leader. I mean, jeez though. The guy has a couple of tattoos, that doesn't make him a gangster. Anyway, seemingly this woman was some sort of prejudiced old maid – oh great, now I'm stereotyping her – anyway, she didn't go to the police. My mum – I love my mum – she managed to get this story out of Melissa's mum, sort of chuckling her way through as if it were an anecdote, then she got the woman's name.

“That would have been useless, however, had the same woman not come into our school the next week to warn us all off drugs. When I went home and told her all about my day, she tensed up and I remember at the time I thought she was worried we would all jump at the chance of rebellion and try to get our hands on weed or something. I guess I must have said the woman's name though because apparently the next day, my mum called up the drugs helpline number on the bottom of the leaflets they gave us. She asked to speak to 'Helen Garsheils', telling the guy who answered the phone that her little girl wanted to thank Helen for the very interesting talk she'd given at the school the day before –”

“– which I'm fairly confident was not the case given that I remember literally falling asleep for about seven minutes of that speech.”

“Oh, yeah, she was totally making it up, yeah. But I guess they don't get many compliments because the guy was so pleased that he immediately put Helen on.

“My mum told her about our sleep-talking and said she had to go to the police, that she was really worried about this dog. Helen muttered something about not thinking it was important but agreed anyway. Nobody went to jail or anything, but that's why The Boxer got put down.”

“Wow,” Donny mumbled, “I feel terrible.”

“For being scared of an aggressive dog? Man up!” she grinned and feigned a derisive sigh.

“Hey, sexism works both ways, y'know. I don't hold doors open for you and you don't give me hassle for feeling guilty for accidentally getting an animal killed,”Donny returned the grin, presumably with less elegance, then hastily returned to his work.

Amy rolled her eyes and followed suit.

Maybe the world would look less scary from above. Maybe he'd feel superior for once. Maybe he'd gain Amy's respect for once. Either way, today Donny was going to climb the tree.

“Yes,” he replied, “That's a great idea.”

Amy searched his eyes for his customary nerves and terror and fear, “You know you don't have to if you don't want to.”

“I do. I'm not sure I see the purpose in putting yourself in a situation where the probability of breaking your leg is like, quadrupled, but you did it every day for about seven years so there must be something to be gained from it. I mean, we could have checked for The Boxer from the ground.”

Something seemed to sigh with relief inside Amy, as if she had finally gotten through to him. She grabbed him by the wrist in a mechanical grip and led him brusquely along the few yards of crunchy stones to the foot of the tree, evidently not trusting him to get there himself. Donny smiled, faintly aware that this amused him, then craned his head up to the locate the top of the tree, which was now directly vertically above him. He gulped and Amy softened her grip, sliding her fingers down into his hand and squeezed, like he always did just before she went on-stage with her drama group. She let go quickly and threw her arm around his shoulder.

“You'll be fine! It's like climbing a ladder!” she called over her shoulder as she released her grip and stepped back.

“Oh, yeah, I forgot I was such an expert in that.”

“Oh, just get on with it. This is only interesting until I get hungry!” Then came that grin again. If Donny had one wish, it would be to be able to grin that charmingly. When he attempted it, he looked like a cross between a duck and a chipmunk.

He rested his hands on a branch at shoulder-height and thumped a trainer-clad foot onto a branch that jutted out about a foot off of the ground. He transferred his weight onto the raised foot and lifted his other foot up to meet it. So far he was in control. So long as he was transferring his weight and his weight was not being transferred, he would be okay.

For a time, the branches led him upwards to the right like a sort of hands-on spiral staircase – then the branches stopped. Donny thrust a questioning glance down what he considered a dizzying height to Amy, who only giggled for roughly a whole twenty seconds.

“You've been watching me do this for years! You've told me to be careful about what you're about to do!”

And that clicked, oh boy that clicked. Donny swivelled his head around to look behind him, his knuckles turning white from gripping the branches. Sure enough, there was the next branch, behind his head. Donny slipped out a melancholy chuckle, certain that he must be insane to be even attempting this. He wrapped his right arm all the way around its branch, suddenly aware that he was still wearing his blazer and that if he fell he'd not only break his bones but rip his uniform and then he'd be in trouble as well as pain.

Partially because of this realisation but mostly to stall his imminent pain, Donny leant his chest shakingly against the branch and shrugged one trembling arm at a time out of the blazer. He called over a befuddled Amy and dropped it down, offering only a nervous half-smile in explanation. Puzzled, Amy returned to her vantage point on the pavement, a few steps away from the tree, seeming even more amused at what he was beginning to feel certain was the road to his death.

As he restarted his hellish twist to the other branch, he screwed up his eyes.

Amy exploded with peals of joyous laughter, “Donny! Just 'cause you can't see the heights doesn't mean they don't exist. Open your eyes, you idiot!”

Donny snapped up his eyelids, his chest pounding. The sky seemed to be lower than normal – oh right, he was higher up. He almost face-palmed but then realised that while Amy had called him adorable, she had also called him an idiot, twice, and had been dead on both times.

“Oh, uh, right,” he mumbled, then grabbed the branch with his left arm and levered himself onto his left side by pushing off with his right hand.

Now back on the staircase structure, although winding upwards in the opposite direction through the bare branches of early December, Donny felt far more confident, even gaining a little speed as he neared the notch dug into the trunk by his dad, Iain, who'd constructed it as an extra Christmas present to her when she was around eight. Apparently the branches were too thin to hold by that high-up point in the tree. They'd waited for a quiet day – eventually choosing boxing day – and Iain had taken a Stanley knife to the tree and hacked out a crescent moon shaped hole in the trunk. This burrowed inward about two inches. After about half an inch inwards, Iain had tunnelled downwards for a further inch, creating a handle for Amy to cling to. After he'd finished, Amy had proclaimed that this was the best Christmas present she'd gotten, 'apart from the snow cone machine yous gave me yesterday', awarding Iain with a still developing version of her witty grin.

At the time, Donny had not seen how the handle could have been necessary. Now he saw that it was crucial. He wrapped his fingers around it and hugged the trunk. He turned his eyes to the town centre. He could spot figures doing their Christmas shopping – they were the ones with the least Christmas cheer, their heads tipped towards the ground as the studiously jogged through their check-list of relatives they hadn't yet bought for – and he could see some kids from his school down amidst the outdoor corridors of shops. Some smoked, some pretended to be knights and have a sword fight, some just laughed and talked. Donny thought the ones with the imaginary swords looked happiest, but maybe it was just because he liked to think of himself as a dragon rider, maybe the kids laughing had a budding 'Night At The Apollo' comedian in their midst, maybe the kids smoking didn't show enjoyment by smiling, or maybe they were just cold because they were standing still –

“Hi.”

Donny nearly tumbled out of the tree. Somehow without his having any idea, Amy had trotted up the branches to sit on the branch his feet were on – luckily a rather sturdy branch, the tree now flexing its biceps. Donny painstakingly lowered himself down, rather beginning to wish he was wearing a scarf – but that could end up strangling him so maybe not. He plopped into a space on Amy's left, clutching the handle for as much of the procedure that he could, eventually relying on a juddering grip on Amy's irritatingly steady shoulder. Somehow she had found the precise centre of gravity necessary to sit on the branch as if it were solid ground.

She shuffled him closer to the trunk then shot her arm round behind him to reach the broken branch of the trunk, providing a guarding bar behind him.

“I could do that and then hold you up,” Donny suggested, “You must be pretty precarious like that.”

“Patience, grasshopper, one day you shall elevate to person-supporting responsibility.”

“Wouldn't this make more sense with one leg on either side of the branch?”

“Perhaps, but that hurts like hell for me so I don't even want to think of what it'd mean for you,” she laughed.

“And now I see why I'm not yet qualified to be responsible for your life.”

Suddenly the smooth front was gone as Amy anxiously assured him, “No, don't get me wrong, I trust you more than I trust my own mum, okay?”

“Em, okay. I was just kidding,” Donny smiled warmly.

“Alright,” Amy seemed to visibly sink gratefully into the tree with relief, then, the spark of mischief returning to her eyes, she motioned to the other side of the tree with her head, “Hey, you can see Melissa Frank's garden if you lean forward a bit.”

Donny nearly bit off his tongue as he carefully hugged the trunk and allowed himself to fall forward slightly, Amy with a handful of the back of his shirt holding him in place. His eyes focussed blurringly on the street that fled up the hill to the farms at the top of the town. At its base were a few tenement blocks with small walled gardens at the back and fenced in front gardens. It took Donny a matter of seconds to recognise the slanted fence from where The Boxer had rammed its entire body weight against its restraints, as if howling 'lemme at 'em, lemme at 'em!'.

Sorry, Oscar.

“Did you just apologise to the dog?!” Amy snorted, “Oh, Donny, do you ever stop?”

Presumably he'd said his goodbyes to The Boxer out loud, though what Amy meant by 'stop' was beyond him. Stop being an idiot? Stop worrying about the dog? He whirled around to face her, perhaps to ask her to explain, then once again came horrifyingly close to toppling to his death.

“Amy,” he breathed.

“What?” she raised a quizzical eyebrow, “Are you okay?”

“Are you?”

Her face was golden. Not in a sort of beautiful-glow golden kind of way – literally sparkling with gold flecks. They danced around like fireflies in against a sky that was already darkening, highlighting the amber tones of her hair. Then they began to spark out of her hands, which was when she noticed. She in turn lost her balance, then looked up shocked at Donny as he caught her and propelled her back up.

This was no time for Sensei jokes, though. The flecks started to swoop in swirls out from her flesh and wrap around her in a cocoon. The swirls whipped about her as if affected by the wind, suggesting substance but when Donny reached out to grab an urgent hold of Amy, his hand spliced the streams in two. The gratitude on Amy's face was immense, almost immense enough to make Donny forget the searing pain that was whooshing up his arm through his body as the streams started to attack him instead. But then her expression morphed into an aghast caricature of horror as the realisation of what she'd just silently thanked him for set in. He couldn't let go of her, though. The swirling streams would return to her and he couldn't let her return to this pain. No.

“STOP!” Amy cried, her voice ripping up in the single syllable, as Donny's sight began to waver, the blackness holding position on the edges of his vision.

“You're c-razy,” he grated, “N-no!”

“It doesn't hurt me, Donny, please, please just STOP, JUST GIVE IT BACK!”

“You d...on't havvve to be ssso tough,” Donny's eyes were watering now, whether through his fear that if he blinked he wouldn't open his eyes, or simply just tears, he couldn't tell.

“No, literally! There's no pain!” Amy wrenched his arm off of her shoulder and the pain began to seep out of him.

Donny reached to just pinch Amy, anything, but she swung down the branch and landed softly on her feet, like a shimmering panther – the swirls had returned to her by now. Donny picked his way down the tree, his head still heavier than the entire rest of his body.

When he reached the base of the tree, he spotted his blazer hung on a branch as if it were on a coat peg. Then he turned to see Amy, the swirls completely obscuring her from view, having formed a cylindrical container around her.

“What do you mean it doesn't hurt? How can it not hurt?! AMY!”

“DONNY! It hurts, Oh God, it hurts now! And its – It's like parts of me are missing and I – I – AAAAAAAAOOOOOWWWWWWW MY LEG!”

“AMY!” Donny could do nothing but shout – Amy would never forgive him for dying for her, even once he was dead – so by God he would shout, “HEEEEELLLLLLLLLLP! SOMEBODY! HELP US!”

“DO –”

“AMY!” his voice was haggard and breathless and useless and … pointless … she was gone, “AAAAAAAAAAMY!”