The Remarkable Truths of Alfie Bains Extract

Read an extract from The Remarkable Truths of Alfie Bains by Sarah Clutton.

The statistical probability of me dying in a car accident during my lifetime is a bit over one in a hundred. But because my mum, being the driver, and being in the 30–39-year-old category and being female are important variables, today my odds are better than that. Also, because she’s not speeding. Still, they are much higher odds than the chance of me dying while canoeing (one in ten thousand) or while playing a computer game (one in a million).

I just started on statistics. Kevin told me I was ready a few weeks ago, before we left Dublin. Anyway, a one in a few hundred chance of dying in a car crash (I’m estimating now, taking into account how Mum is quite old and female) seems like okay odds to me. And if I take the seatbelt off to reach across the back seat to get my iPad, it’s unlikely Mum will crash at that exact second and cause my instant death from brain eruption or whatever high-speed crashes do to a kid without his belt on.

‘Alfie! Seatbelt!’ Mum turns her head back and forth between me and the road like a bent-up cuckoo clock.

I grab the iPad and shove the buckle back in. ‘Sorry.’ But honestly, that would totally have been Mum’s fault if I got killed just then. The crazy neck-turning would have increased the crash probability by heaps. Maybe exponentially. Although I’m not really sure how exponentially works yet. Kevin had scheduled exponentially for one of our future sessions, but then Mum decided we should move back to Australia.

‘What do you think you’re doing?’ asks Mum in her furious voice.

‘Getting my iPad. Do you think my grandmother will like me?’ This is an example of my best distraction technique: bring up something Mum feels guilty about when I’m in trouble. In this case, Mum feels bad for not telling me I had a grandmother until last month, after the hospital incident when her appendix exploded like a jelly bomb. I had to stay at Aoife’s for four days, which was not a positive experience. She has way too many horrible children who fight at maximum decibels about everything.

The only thing they agree on is that I’m weird. When Mum got out of hospital, I got mad at her for nearly dying and for not having any family, and she agreed she should have told me about this actual living grandmother ages ago. I decided not to let her off the hook so easily. It was a major oversight, forgetting to tell me about a grandmother. Even if the grandmother did live on the literal other side of the world.

‘Of course she’ll like you, Alf. Who wouldn’t?’

I think about this for a minute. Brett Spangler calls me knobchops every day at school. I open Minecraft on my iPad.

‘She’ll only be angry with me, Alf. Not you. It’s my fault we’re estranged.’

‘We’re not strange,’ I say. ‘You tell me that all the time.’

‘Estranged. I mean, the reason I wasn’t talking to her. It’s my fault she doesn’t know about you.’

‘You can’t change the past, Mum.’ I say this a lot when I’m trying to make Mum feel better, even though, in this case, I’m not meant to be letting her off the hook. Kevin taught me that saying. He likes it because even though he’s now a Buddhist, he used to have a crack addiction. Aoife told Mum she was scraping the bottom of the parenting barrel, leaving me in the care of an ex-crack addict with personal hygiene issues, but Mum’s very loyal to Kevin. She says everyone deserves a second chance, and the only reason he smells is that his recipe for home-made witch-hazel deodorant doesn’t work. Still, I’m pretty sure that even though Kevin doesn’t worry about the past, Mum sometimes wishes he could change it.

Mum swipes her eye, trying to pretend she isn’t slightly crying.

‘But you can change the future,’ I say. ‘Everything changes.’

This is a universal truth of Buddhism. Kevin being a Buddhist is proof of a rare statistic happening to me. Way less than one per cent of people living in Ireland are Buddhist, so it blows my mind that our best Irish friend is one. If I was a gambler like Paddy’s dad, I would have put my money on Catholic.

‘You’re going to find it really interesting here in Tasmania. It’s so pretty,’ says Mum. ‘And I bet everyone at your new school will love you.’

‘I’d say the probability of that is low, Mum. Going on previous experience.’

‘Don’t be silly, Alfie.’

Mum calls me silly a lot when I say true things. It’s like she wishes I wouldn’t say them, even though she says telling the truth is the most important thing. Except for kindness. She’s got a bee in her bonnet about kindness. ‘It’s better to be kind than to be right,’ she always says. Personally, I’m not convinced. If that were true, it would mean I should never, ever correct any of the kids or the teachers at school when they say something ignorant. And how’s that supposed to work?

Extracted from The Remarkable Truths of Alfie Bains by Sarah Clutton. Available now where books are sold.

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The Remarkable Truths of Alfie Bains

by Sarah Clutton

For readers who love The Midnight Library and Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine, here comes your next favourite life-affirming, delightful and funny novel.

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