Alistair

A short story — original fiction from Arquivo Cósmico.

It was a damp afternoon on the outskirts of London, and the tortoise was crossing the public pavement at three metres an hour.

Nobody was watching him. That suited him.

The name had not been given to him. At the age of four, from inside his terrarium, he heard a radio presenter pronounce the name of a military strategist and decided it would do. It had weight. Nobody in the house noticed that, from then on, the animal answered to Alistair — because nobody in the house ever called him anything at all.

He was born in the basement of an antiques dealer, among crates, and was sold before his first birthday. His first owner collected Victorian relics and installed him on a shelf in the sitting room, between a brass barometer and a stuffed owl. He stayed there three years. On that shelf he learned something he would never unlearn: he was not being raised. He was being displayed. And the objects around him all had one characteristic in common.

He was traded for a porcelain pheasant.

The next couple were fond of exotic cuisine. On a Tuesday, the husband took him out of his box, turned him belly-up on the kitchen counter and measured his shell with a tape, noting the result in a notebook. Then he consulted the notebook aloud, discussing yield with his wife. Alistair remained motionless — not out of fear, but because he was counting. He counted eighteen days until he was passed along.

The last family neither measured him nor displayed him. They simply forgot him. There was a terrarium in the laundry room, and scraps fell into it. On Sundays the teenage son sometimes put him on the sitting-room floor and laughed at how slow he was.

The sitting-room floor, however, has advantages that do not occur to those who walk upright.

Five centimetres from the boards, Alistair could smell what nobody else could: a sweet, constant odour along the kitchen skirting, stronger at night, coming from the base of the cooker. Nobody in that house had ever crouched low enough to notice it. He had noticed it every day for two years.

He knew the rest as well. He knew the woman spent her afternoons on the sofa with her phone and never raised her eyes. He knew the husband slept at eleven. He knew the boy lit scented candles on the dining table — wooden table, long linen cloth, its corners hanging a hand’s width below the top — and went up to his room without putting them out.

On the night of the fourteenth of November, the boy lit a candle and went upstairs.

Alistair left the terrarium at 23:40. He crossed the laundry room in forty minutes. At 01:12 he reached the table leg and began the climb via the chair pushed against it — three attempts, the second of which left him on his back for nineteen minutes, legs in the air, with no perceptible urgency. He reached the tabletop at 02:47.

The candle stood twenty-two centimetres from the hem of the cloth.

He pushed with the front rim of his shell. The candle slid roughly half a centimetre per effort, and each effort cost a minute. He did not hurry. There was no reason to hurry: a tortoise is the one creature for whom time is not a scarce resource, and he had known that since the shelf. At 04:30 the candle touched the linen.

After that it was only a matter of watching.

The flame climbed the cloth, reached the curtains, entered the kitchen. At 04:58, it found the skirting.

The blast woke the entire street.

The family ran, screamed, called the fire brigade. Alistair did not move — he stayed exactly where he was, in the middle of the smoke, as still as an ornament. A tortoise that does not move is not suspected of anything.

He was carried out in the arms of a firefighter, who held him up for the neighbours to see. There was some applause. The woman wept and said the poor little thing had escaped by a hair.

They set him down in a cardboard box in the garden, so he would be safe while they put out what was left.

Through the air holes, Alistair studied the house next door.