Aurelius and I Read Free

Creamy.
    “Well, I don’t really know, Simon. I’m afraid I was busy watching Mandy chase her salmon.”
    “But, but, where can he have gone?” I asked, my eyes frantically searching the wide, empty street. “He can’t have just vanished.”
    “Oh, he does that some times. I shouldn’t worry about it Malcolm, he always comes back eventually. Now, I really must be on my way, these waffles won’t sell themselves.”
    And that was it really. I’m sorry if had given the impression that something especially exciting or memorable was going to happen, but the truth is that it didn’t and, as I mentioned at the beginning, this story is wholly concerned with the truth.
    No, there was nothing particularly extraordinary about my first encounter with Aurelius-Octavius Jumbleberry-Jones. It is only with hindsight that that I am able to classify the event as life changing.
    Except that, somehow, on some level, I knew it at the time. I know it sounds stupid, like something out of one of those bad, straight-to-television movies the Americans so love to produce, but, somewhere deep-down inside me, I knew that things would never be the same again. Now, please don’t misunderstand me, I’m not claiming I actually contemplated such a thought directly. It was just a feeling. I can’t describe it exactly. I just knew, in a common-sense sort of way, that my life was now moving in a different direction.
     
     
Chapter 2
     
    Almost a week went by before I saw Aurelius again, but not a day passed without me thinking of him. I could not say whether it was his obscure dress sense, his charismatic charm, or his fantastic taste in frozen confectionary, but something about my strange new acquaintance had made a very deep impression upon me in a very short space of time.
    I hadn’t told anybody else about Aurelius – not my parents, not my friends, not even my grandmother whom I normally told everything. I couldn’t explain this unusually secretive attitude, other than the fact that a little voice inside my head warned me that people would be suspicious of any eccentric adult who tried to befriend an eight year old child to whom he was a stranger (and rightly so, I might add). Indeed, I was not unsuspicious of Aurelius myself, but I had an inkling that my reasons for suspicion would differ heavily from those of any responsible adult to whom I recited my encounter.
    My own reservations about Aurelius lay in the fact that I felt he was somehow not like other people. Of course, in one sense, this was a statement of the obvious. His dress sense, his upper-class way of speaking, his mannerisms, all differed hugely from those of anybody one was likely to spot on a stroll down the high street. There seemed to me to be something more than this though. No matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t shake the feeling that there was something more fundamentally and importantly different about Aurelius-Octavius Jumbleberry-Jones than just his outward demeanour.
    I was musing over what this difference could be, or at least what had caused me to become so convinced of its existence, when I ran into Aurelius for the second time.
    It was late in the evening and while the air was still warm, and the streets still more than adequately lit by the remaining sunlight, the ridiculous heat of the afternoon sun had thankfully subsided. I had been sent out to walk the family dog, Baskerville, who disliked the heat even more than I did, while my parents prepared dinner for us all.
    My father had always wanted a dog. A big dog. My mother, on the other hand, had always hated dogs. All dogs. And so, after years of negotiation, a compromise had been reached; we had adopted a very small dog from a local charity and my father had named him after a very big dog from his favourite book. Baskerville though, could not have been more different from the enormous hound that terrorised the local community in the Sherlock Holmes tale. He was a small, smelly, scruffy little terrier