The Special Wallpaper, Chapter One

It wasn’t the first time Joe’s plans had changed, and he might have known his supposedly short visit to this alien city would become more than a matter of bringing an errant iteration of himself home to Nottingham so Scientooth could commence treatment. Even so, our hero hadn’t anticipated the adventure leading him in quite this direction.

Which was himself and three girls in a one-room apartment, putting up wallpaper.

It was getting there too. Joe in fact was willing to bet the place had never looked so good, its cracked plaster all but hidden under gaudy gold of a liquid sheen which glinted back galaxies wherever light struck. Sonica was taking the latest of several well-earned rests as completion neared, while Mini-Flash Pseudangelos atop a stepladder looked helpless, as if she’d figured out how to use the contraption thus far but was at a loss as to what to do next.

Joe saw opportunity. He held out his hand to her, and she pressed her small damp palm to it. Legs shimmered in new school stockings, fresh from the fabric regenerator, as Mini-Flash Pseudangelos negotiated her way to bare floorboards again. Our hero was careful to keep his eyes averted until she was there, guessing she’d not bothered to generate the items which might have completed her Earth-schoolgirl look.

So far so good. They still weren’t talking, but progress had been made, and at least she’d stopped smelling of chocolate cake in a passive-aggressive manner around him.

In came the other Joe, wearing his cowboy hat.

“Wow!” he exclaimed. Mini-Flash Splitsville finished pasting up the piece she was working on and went over to join him, while Joe himself greeted his likeness with a smile.

“If you are sufficiently rested, my friend, we might begin,” said he.

Our hero proceeded to explain that the choice of wallpaper was not merely aesthetic. Composed of refractive crystals suspended in semisolid bio-gel, it had suggested to Joe a means of sustaining his subconscious self’s telepathic presence for longer periods than that one was capable of alone. The inner sanctum on Planet Eshcaton, to compare great things with small, functioned on similar principles.

“Then let’s give it a go,” said the cowboy with a grin.

Together they papered the last few strips, and everybody stood back. Never before had Joe’s alternate self’s mysterious power so glowed. They’d done a top-notch decorating job. Briefly the walls were like golden pulsars enveloping all in light, after which the apartment was gone.

Joe was ready to sit down on the floor when he saw what had taken its place.

It was his attic, in Boston, just the way it had always been.

Same battered couch and boxlike portable television, same bulky bookcases and overloaded shelves, same faded old rug underfoot. At the far end was a banister rail where the floor dropped to stairs leading down. A tall window above looked out on the roofs of neighbouring townhouses, and beyond these a blue early summer sky.

Both Joe and Mini-Flash Splitsville had previously heard the cowboy claim the most he could usually manage was a remembered book, or an Earth-movie supplanting whatever happened to be on the Interplanetary Broadcasting Service. True, yesterday he’d mustered something on a grander scale, but that had still conspicuously been an illusion. This by contrast was like he’d reordered time and space. No-one, however, seemed more in awe than the cowboy himself.

“I don’t even feel drained,” he whispered. “Where did you get that wallpaper?”

“A hardware store,” replied Joe, rather limply. As far as this quadrant went it was just an ordinary pattern, albeit one peculiarly well-suited to their purpose. Joe himself hadn’t imagined it held the key to spiriting him home.

He and his double snapped out of their daze when they remembered they had guests. Only two girls had ever been up here, and not at the same time, so Joe hoped his former life would hold enough diversions for three in one go. Because, although he hadn’t entered into this for his own sake, suddenly nothing was more important than that he and the other him consult at once on what it might mean.

So Joe duly waited for the cowboy to discharge his duties as host, until he realised the cowboy was duly waiting for him to do the same.

It was never going to be an easy task determining whether this was Joe’s house or his. They therefore decided to skip the whole tricky issue, and took it in turns explaining where the books and comics and board-games were, and how to tune in the digital clock-radio and load cassettes into the VCR, and which layer of the stereo midi-system played which kind of recording-device. This done, the pair of Joes exited their attic and left the girls to it.

Down through the house they went, and out into the narrow town garden hemmed in on one side by a wall and the other a hedge. Joe began to wonder even then just how far into his memories of Boston this reconstruction stretched. On the lawn a little distance from him and the cowboy, a brown and white tabby cat was walking.

“Mush,” Joe exclaimed softly.

“Well, she was always there,” the other him said back, sounding as if he too could barely believe. “You’ve brought so much into my life.”

Joe drew in a breath. Red bricks and overgrown flowerbeds seemed to reverberate under the summer sun. It was intoxicating.

He knelt to the slightly too-long grass so that Mush could trot to him, and his hand found out her soft thick fur. Nostalgically he had caressed her many times in the years since this garden ceased to be, but here was nostalgia which purred and stroked its face on him and perambulated round and round. In a voice that was not quite steady, Joe replied at last:

“And do you suppose you have brought me nothing in return? Can you conceive of what it is to behold that which I left behind, and be offered a chance to live it again?”

He hesitated, then left off Mush, and stood.

“Such, however, is not our errand,” Joe told himself firmly. “We must not lose sight of the danger Mini-Flash Pseudangelos poses, nor stint in our endeavours to ameliorate it. She has attacked me once, my friend. It is imperative we determine her agenda, and the nature of her alliance with 4-H-N. That much is of paramount importance to affairs beyond this realm, which, for all that it may appear a haven or even Paradise…”

He was not trying to be unkind.

“Which, for all that, is but a monument to running from responsibility. You know that, my friend. Better, I should say, than any of us.”

The other listened patiently until he was done. Then, our hero’s subconscious spoke up:

“Running from responsibility? Don’t you mean, denying yourself?”

Joe was fast becoming familiar with that unaccustomed look upon his own features, that of one straining after tact, that of one who longed to leave the words unspoken.

“What happened was terrible,” continued the cowboy. “But how would you describe everything you did since then, if not as another kind of running away? I told you. This is where you didn’t have to create Nottingham. The world needed it, but there was no need for it to be your doing. You’re talking about responsibility, and this realm? It’s the place you can stop shouldering ownership of evil robots and bizarrely powerful girls and the fate of the entire universe, and start taking responsibility for the one person who matters above all.”

Joe didn’t like to think he’d reached the stage of arguing with himself, if indeed there was any arguing with contentions such as these.

“I shall take it under advisement,” he promised at last.

Sonica and Mini-Flash Splitsville were coming out of the conservatory to join them. “Mini-Flash Pseudangelos wants to know if you’ve got any coloured pencils,” said Sonica.

“Top drawer of the writing-desk,” harmonized both Joes.

One of them added he would accompany Sonica to the attic and show her. Three was a crowd, always assuming he and the cowboy counted as two. It wasn’t that Joe was uncomfortable exactly around the pair of them, for he knew it was Mini-Flash Splitsville who’d taken the initiative, and she seemed incapable of perceiving any correlation between himself and his doppelganger. Nevertheless, another interpretation might be that Joe was subconsciously having a full adult relationship with his most promising pupil, and there he didn’t care to dwell.

So, thanking the cowboy again for his counsel, our hero parted from him and Splitsville and followed Sonica upstairs.

Having kept Joe informed it was Wednesday all the way from the kitchen, Sonica on reaching their terminus threw herself comfortably down again on the dilapidated red leather couch and with her pants still pointing at the rest of the room resumed her recreational reading. She and Mini-Flash Pseudangelos had dug out a veritable heap of magazines dating to Joe’s distant boyhood, though the latter at the desk was absorbed by just one.

Our hero stepped to her and slid open the drawer, disclosing coloured pencils and plain paper. Mini-Flash Pseudangelos looked staggered.

“I should inform you I have made friends with three of your Special Program peers,” Joe said confidentially to the gawping girl. “Nor is it in my nature to easily abandon hope.”

So saying he glanced down at the relic she’d unearthed. It was an art competition, and no surprise to our hero such things should be here. The presentation was so unrelentingly pink that any self-respecting boy would have consigned it straight to his subconsciousness. It had been a rare point at issue between Joe and his Mother that she was wont to buy him unisex magazines instead of unequivocally masculine ones. His objections to this practice came back to him now, and the much-aired counterargument that any little girls he invited home would thereby have something to read. So much for Joe’s scoffing assurances that this should never be.

“What is it you seek here, Mini-Flash Pseudangelos?” he asked her gently.

Joe didn’t like to push his luck. He had a feeling however that the crayons might just have promoted him to speaking terms, and sure enough:

“I wish to be sweet to a girl who has served out to me,” came back the reply. “Beautiful, with a figure to match.”

“She sounds nice,” commented Sonica, turning a page.

Joe already knew who the girl was. With a smile of encouragement to Pseudangelos he moved away, that she might be able to begin her work in peace.

Good. More progress.

When they’d defeated The Foretold One and saved the galaxy, he’d look back on opening his old desk drawer and it wouldn’t seem such an unlikely means of securing that end.

For some seconds afterwards Joe stayed standing where he was, the long low shady room about him resonating memory. The past suffused all, furniture and fittings and the visible tiled skyline, yet there twinkled on either side of him a shard of sweetness which did not belong. Chocolate bunches and quivering nylons on the one hand, languid cerise leafing through celebrities on the other, each mingling sight and smell with an ancient ambience which never knew them. Small wonder Joe was unsettled. He could not relax here as he once had, when words spoken in the garden below ran though his thoughts still yet.

Our hero decided himself. It was time to discover the truth.

He walked back over to Sonica, who was tabulating the pin-up hunks in order of personal preference. Jason Priestley and Philip Schofield seemed to be neck-and-neck.

“Are you equally busy for the next hour?” Joe asked her.

END OF CHAPTER ONE