The Remarkables (The Remarkable Owen Johnson, part 1) (2 page)

“Climb higher!”

Owen heard the voice fr
om beneath him, urging him on. He clung onto the tree, his face buried into the rough bark, his right cheek becoming sticky from the sap leaking from within.

“
Owen, please!”

His mother was pleading with him,
imploring for him to seek refuge in the treetops. Owen risked a look down below. The ground seemed dangerously far beneath him; it had to be at least the equivalent of six Owen’s stood on top of each other.

He buried
his face into the tree again. He was only four years old, and although he had climbed up a tree with his father before, but never as high up as this.

“
Owen!”

Owen looked down
again and saw his mother’s face filled with desperation, her bright blue eyes staring back at him. Then she was looking ahead, her attention focused on something that startled her but was obscured from Owen’s vision because of the lower leaves of the adjacent tree.

Without looking at hi
m she urged him upwards again with a wave of her hand. She then crouched down just as two men pounced at her, managing to leap out of their way just before they would have made contact with her.

By now Owen was terrified
, and he lost his grip on the tree and fell slightly, but just in time he managed to reach out and hold onto something that felt like a rock. Not wanting to fall again, he climbed up and his hand grabbed onto something else that was rock-like. With three more climbs he was hidden in the treetops.

He picked out a thick and sturdy branch and rested on it, using the tree tr
unk as a support for his back. Looking down, he couldn’t see any of the stones he’d used to climb, so they must have been just below the dense cover of leaves that were now between him and his mother and the men.

Owen listened for his mother’s voice calling for him, but the only noise from below was the sound of a heavy wind that strangely wasn’t present in the treetops.

There, he waited for what felt like days, even though night hadn’t yet fallen.  He wedged himself in place, listening for his mother.

He did not hear her again.

He would have climbed down, but he didn’t believe he had the strength to do so.

So he waited.
And waited.

Finally
he heard the familiar sound of a woman’s voice below. It wasn’t his mother but the old lady from next door. She had been to their house for tea a few times so Owen trusted her. Besides, he was now realising how hungry he was so began to climb down. He made it to just below the lower branches when his hand slipped. He reached out and tried to grab hold of the tree or one of those stones he had grasped before, but his hands only found thin air.

So he
fell.

~ ρ ~

Owen woke up with a jolt, as if he was falling. But he was still lying in bed, in his bedroom, in the house that he lived in with his father and younger brother.

The dream that he had just had, which was so vivid in his mind when he
had first awoken, had drifted away like smoke on a breeze. He lay there, concentrating on the blank canvas that was his ceiling and tried to reform the disparate fragments of it what he could remember. But it was no use: all traces of what had woken him up had gone. Owen took a deep breath and climbed out of bed and set about getting himself ready for school. Showered and dressed, he headed downstairs.

~ ρ ~

Owen Johnson’s final day of the school year was following a similar pattern to the first. Just as his father had all those months ago been oblivious that his eldest son was entering his final year of study, today he had forgotten that it was both Owen’s last day and the last of his exams. Even the presence of a handful of good luck cards arriving over the past few days did not seem to jog his memory. Nor did the persistent jibes from his other son Jack that were being aimed at his longsuffering older brother seem to ring any bells. So far they had ranged in subject from revolving around their father’s aforementioned neglectful memory, then moving onto Owen’s inferior sporting achievements, which segued nicely into Jack having had more girlfriends than his older brother, despite being three years younger. The latest topic of discourse was the rather subjective argument that Jack’s blonde hair was a superior hue to Owen’s brown.

Not that Owen was particularly bothe
red by any of these annoyances. He had resigned himself to his father being constantly preoccupied with his job at an energy firm, a company that appeared on the local news on a weekly basis due to the controversy over the power plant that had been built nearby. There were frequent protests, rallies and vigils at the gates of the power station, largely on account of it being built so close to Owen’s home town of Northampton, and so far away from any source of fuel as there were no coal mines or gas fields for miles.

The stresses at work were
compounded by the need to bring up two teenage sons on his own, ever since his wife and their mother, Jane, had died thirteen years ago.

And yet Christopher Johnson was still a good father, despite forgetting the occasional important date on the
calendar. He never failed to provide for his sons, and they were rarely left wanting for the clothes and gadgets that were popular amongst their peers, and his attendance record at their respective school sporting events (swimming for Owen, every other sport imaginable for Jack) was quite reasonable when compared to other parents.

Whilst
Owen’s final year was ending early on account of his exams, Jack had four weeks left at school. Ordinarily this would have been a source of frustration for the youngest member of the household, but thanks to his father’s generosity he would in a matter of hours be on a ferry bound for Denmark as part of an exchange visit with fellow students across the North Sea. Back in January the Johnsons had been host to a very peculiar Danish student called Michael, who spent the majority of his visit sitting in the spare bedroom, reading his way through the Johnson’s book collection (despite claiming he couldn’t read English, only speak it and then only when it suited him, preferring to lapse into Danish whenever anyone asked him a question).

Owen
would never admit it, but he was going to miss his brother over the next two weeks. Sure, they fought a lot, but few brothers didn’t. And yes, Owen had to concede that he was slightly jealous of Jack always returning home with a trophy or medal from whatever sport’s final he had just triumphed in (Owen always bested him in the pool though). But at least he was another presence in the house, someone with whom Owen could communicate with, even if it was typically through a series of arguments. His father’s distractions at work meant that entire days could go by without him uttering more than a sentence to his sons. The inevitable days of silence made their house feel empty and Owen very alone.

Owen’s thoughts were dragged back to the present thanks to a hefty thump on h
is right arm courtesy of Jack.

“Not that I care, but isn’t your
exam at nine?” Jack enquired. The clock on the oven showed that Owen had twenty minutes to get to school, giving him just enough time if he left immediately.

Christopher looked up from the newspaper he was staring th
rough, ignoring the headlines predicting impending doom from both a forthcoming total eclipse and (somewhat conversely) a train drivers’ strike. “Exam?” he enquired absent-mindedly.

“Last exam today, D
ad”, Owen explained.

His father
shook his head apologetically. “I’m sorry, son. Which one is it today?”

“English”, Owen called from half way down the hall, lugging hi
s schoolbag over his shoulder. “Have fun at Legoland, Jack!” he added.

“
We are
not
going to Legoland!” Jack shouted back irritatedly, characteristically sensitive at having his age poked fun at by his older brother. “Have fun being a sad loner!” Jack added after a brief pause, seemingly unable to conjure a wittier riposte.

“Good luck Owen!
Let me know how you get on!” he heard his father shout as Owen closed the front door.

Jack’s jibe hurt more than his father’s
lack of attention. Owen had a few friends but was nowhere near as popular as his brother, who was endlessly fielding telephone calls from friends, both male and more frequently (and annoyingly) female.

Owen glanced back at his house from the end of the drive, hopeful that his
father would be giving him a reassuring wave goodbye. But the front of the house was lacking any human presence. Sighing inwardly, Owen increased his walking speed so that he did not suffer the shame of turning up late for an exam. Out of the corner of his eye he spotted their next door neighbour, Mrs Argyle, fussing about her living room, wearing her trademark grey mac and purple hat despite being indoors. She looked up and gave Owen a wave which he returned along with a smile. She then returned to busying herself around her room, acting even more franticly than she normally did.

Celia Argyle
had been their neighbour for as long as Owen could recall. She was from Scotland originally, but said that she hadn’t lived there since her late teens. Owen and Jack knew her well as she was Christopher Johnson’s babysitter of choice for his sons after his wife had died, with the boys spending at least a couple of hours on most days in her company. Despite appearing to be in her late seventies, she had more stamina than either of the boys, nearly always being the person least willing to return home after one of their outdoor adventures (Owen struggled to remember spending much time actually inside Mrs Argyle’s house).

However
, now that the boys had grown up, and Owen was deemed old and responsible enough to look after his brother himself, they didn’t spend much time with their neighbour. She still came around to visit at least one evening every week, and she and their father would sit for hours in the living room talking, but on what subject Owen didn’t know as he and Jack would always be sent upstairs to their rooms.

Mrs Argyle was with Owen and Jack the night that their father brought home the news that their mother had been killed in a car accident, and from the snippets of conversation Owen had heard
since, that seemed to be a subject they discussed at length. Owen had a fuzzy memory about Mrs Argyle meeting him and his mother in the park earlier in the day that she died, and then taking him home for her, but he couldn’t remember the exact details. He did remember how angry Mrs Argyle was at the news of his mother’s death, and that she had stormed out of the house that night to try and track down the person that had caused the accident (who to this day had not been caught).

Owen’s thoughts were drifting so waywardly that he failed to notice the car
that was turning into his road, across which he had just began to walk. The car skidded to a halt, the driver shouting a stream of inaudible obscenities at him from behind the glass. Owen glanced at the black car and its two passengers sat in the rear, both of whom were wearing black tops and looked like they were on day-release from a maximum security prison.

Owen held a hand up in apology and ran across the road, his heart thumping and his hands tingling, the latter sensation happening on an increasingly frequent basis of late
, usually occurring whenever Owen was stressed or exerting himself. The last time this had happened was at the weekend when a rampaging dog had chased him across the park. Owen had taken refuge in a tree’s branches, the first time in at least a decade that Owen had climbed a tree (a particularly high one, as Owen realised when he sprained his ankle jumping down, once the negligent owner had retrieved his unruly and angry canine). The sensation of fleeing from the dog by climbing a tree had at the time given Owen a strange combination of fear and déjà vu, a sensation that still nagged at him to this day.

Owen took a few deep breaths and allowed his nerves to settle, the tingling sensation subsiding.

For the second time this morning Owen’s daydreams were brought to an abrupt halt by the taunts of a fourteen year old. Rather than a thump from his brother, this time it was Rick Farmer shouting obscenities at him, with backing cries from a selection of his usual band of cronies, of which today’s tally was a healthy six. Owen swore under his breath and increased his walking speed.

Rick was in the same year as Jack but thankfully not
part of his circle of friends. He had taken an instant dislike to Owen for no discernible reason other than his lifelong friendship with Katie Morgan. Rick had been trying to convince her to go out with him for the last year, but Katie always declined his advances, leading Rick to be convinced this was due to Owen telling her not to (rather than the fact he was three years her junior and an utter prat).

In fact Owen
had never once discussed romantic issues with Katie, for fear that his true feelings for her may be blurted out and their friendship ruined. They had known one another for as long as Owen could remember, through the friendship of their parents. Owen’s mother and father had met at work, where both of Katie’s parents also had jobs. The Johnsons and Morgans spent nearly every weekend at each other’s houses, and most holidays were taken as a group, and continued for a few years after the death of Owen’s mother.