I want to tell you how I met Earth-Pig Fish.

About six months ago, Rich Uncle Brian took me to a fair. It wasn’t one of those fairs with craft stalls, people in cowboy hats wrestling steers and wood-choppers turning logs into matchsticks. This was a fair in Brisbane and it had joyrides and dodgems and big dippers and fairy floss stalls. I like these sorts of fairs. I never go on the rides because I am afraid of heights, but that doesn’t stop me enjoying myself. It’s the lights and the smells and the bustle of people. There is something magic about it. I’ve only been to two in my life.

So I was happy to watch Rich Uncle Brian go on all the rides. I held his coat and waved at him as he slid past me on the Pirate Ship. Then he went on the Ghost Train. Twice. I wondered if that was what it was like to be a parent, smiling and waving as a shrieking person flashed past you with a wide grin and frightened eyes. I suspect there’s a bit more to it than that.

When RUB had finished the rides we bought hot dogs and wandered along the rows of stalls. There were lucky dip stalls and a place where you had to throw a small ring around the neck of any one of dozens of bottles lined up. I had a go, but the ring kept bouncing off the bottles. It looked easy, but no one managed to do it, at least while I was there. Rich Uncle Brian was cynical.

‘They design these things so you can’t win, Pumpkin,’ he said.

I thought he was probably right, but I also thought it wasn’t worth mentioning. People were having fun. They were bathed in lights and clutching prizes or toffee apples or clouds of fairy floss on a stick. The fair was no place for cynicism.

We passed a shooting range. Metal ducks ran along three rows. They were battered and dented by experience, but kept on going. No one was shooting at them, so the man behind the counter was doing his best to get custom.

‘C’mon, sir,’ he yelled at Rich Uncle Brian. ‘Try your skill. Win a prize. Ten dollars a pop and every gun has sights.’

Rich Uncle Brian stopped.

‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘Sights set to miss.’

The man was obviously offended. He put a hand over his heart.

‘Not here, mate. Try for yourself. Five shots for free. If you miss, you walk away. If you hit, then give it a go. Whaddaya say?’

Rich Uncle Brian looked down at me. I shrugged and held out my hands for his jacket.

He hit ducks with four out of his five shots.

‘Okay,’ he said to the man behind the counter. ‘Provided I use this gun.’

‘Be my guest.’

Rich Uncle Brian spent eighty dollars trying to win a prize. Well, he won a prize every time, but the prize was a pencil with a fluffy thing stuck to its end. It was probably worth twenty cents. He had his eye on the major prize – a huge stuffed animal that might have been a gnu or a camel with severe disabilities. And Rich Uncle Brian wasn’t giving up until he had it. I might have pointed out that it was probably worth about forty dollars, but I suspected that wasn’t the point. This was about proving himself. Mum says that men are just little boys deep down. Sometimes not so deep down. Sometimes not deep at all, but right on the surface. He could’ve bought a whole Toys R Us shop, being Rich Uncle Brian, but this wasn’t about money. I held his jacket and watched the ducks fall.

‘Hah!’ said Rich Uncle Brian in triumph, one hundred dollars later. The man handed over the deformed camel/ gnu and RUB passed it on to me. I knew he would.

‘I don’t want it, Rich Uncle Brian,’ I said. ‘It’s vile.’

His face crumpled in disappointment. I felt bad, but I couldn’t lie to him. The toy was horrible.

‘But I won it for you, Pumpkin,’ he said. ‘If you don’t like this, what do you like?’

‘That,’ I said, and pointed.

A goldfish in a plastic bowl. It sat on a shelf to the right of the ducks, which were still going round cheerfully despite being targets. I say it sat, but that was the bowl. The fish was swimming. It was gold and beautiful.

‘We’ll have that instead,’ said Rich Uncle Brian, pointing.

The man shook his head.

‘No can do, mate,’ he replied. ‘That’s not a prize. That’s my pet. Time was, you could give away goldfish as prizes, but no more. Against the law. I could lose my licence.’

‘Your pet?’ asked Rich Uncle Brian. There was that cynicism in his voice again.

‘Yup. Very attached to him. Very.’ The man stroked his chin thoughtfully. ‘Then again, if the price was right … not against the law to sell your pet, is it?’

Rich Uncle Brian sighed.

‘How much?’

‘A hundred bucks.’

‘WHAT?’

‘Very attached to him, I am.’

Rich Uncle Brian looked down at me and then at the fish and then at the man. He sagged a little and got out his wallet. Again.

‘Tell you what,’ he said to the man. ‘Fifty and you can have your stuffed prize back.’

‘Deal.’

Rich Uncle Brian handed over the cash and the gnu/ deformed camel and the man handed over the fish and the bowl.

‘Tell you what, mate,’ said the man. ‘Since you’ve just bought the world’s most expensive fish – about ten thousand dollars a kilo I reckon – then I’ll throw in the bowl for free.’

Rich Uncle Brian smiled, but it didn’t come out right. It was like one of those smiles when someone has pointed a camera at you for half an hour and neglected to press the shutter.

Later, in the car as we drove home, he asked me what I was going to name it.

‘Earth-Pig,’ I said. Rich Uncle Brian sighed.

‘It’s the translation of the Afrikaans word “aardvark”,’ I continued. ‘It is an anteater and means earth pig.’

‘Is there any reason, Pumpkin, why you want to name a goldfish after an African anteater? I mean, I can’t think of too many similarities. Colour, size, presence or absence of gills, that sort of thing.’

‘You’re right, Rich Uncle Brian,’ I said. ‘But it’s the first proper word in the dictionary.’

The dictionary is my favourite book. I often read it at bedtime. It has thousands of different words and it doesn’t try to tell a story, and fail. It just deals in words for their own sake. It is pure. The only other thing I read is books by Charles Dickens. He has taken many of the trickiest words from the dictionary and put them in an interesting order. This is clever and admirable.

‘Won’t it be confused by being called a pig?’

‘Maybe,’ I said. ‘It could suffer an identity crisis.’ I thought for a few minutes. ‘I will call it Earth-Pig Fish. That is a good name.’

We drove in silence for about twenty minutes.

‘Do you know what the best thing about you is, Pumpkin?’ said Rich Uncle Brian finally.

‘No.’

‘You sing your own song, Pumpkin, and you dance your own dance. You see the world differently from the rest of us. And you know? Sometimes I think I wish everyone saw it the same way you do. I know the world would be a better place.’

I didn’t say anything. But I must admit I was very surprised. He didn’t use one maritime metaphor.

Douglas Benson told me his secret ten minutes into lunch. The librarians lent him a chair, though they didn’t encourage him to eat. They didn’t forbid it either, mind.

‘I am from another dimension,’ he said.

‘That’s nice,’ I replied.

‘Well, not really,’ he said. ‘You see I like the dimension I came from whereas this one sucks big-time.’

I considered that for a while, but it didn’t do any good. I still had no idea what he was talking about.

‘I have no idea what you are talking about,’ I said.

Douglas Benson has an interesting face. His eyes crowd towards the middle as if they are trying to merge together but are prevented from doing so by the barrier of his nose, which is larger than you’d wish if you were designing it from scratch. He has eyebrows like hairy caterpillars, and a mouth that is very wide. His fingers are thin and long, though they are not part of his face, obviously. He would make a good pianist. Anyway, Douglas’s interesting face was screwed up in concentration.

‘You know about M-theory, I imagine,’ he said.

That wasn’t a question so I said nothing.

‘It’s a multi-dimensional extension of string theory in which all universes – the multiverse, if you like – are created by collisions between p-branes …’

‘Pea brains?’

‘Yes.’ He spelled it. He said some other things, but I missed some of the detail because I was thinking about colliding pea brains creating universes. We have a lot of pea brains at my school. Remember pencil-sharpener-sucker Darren Mitford? He and other pea brains often collide in the playground, particularly when they play ball games. I enjoyed the image of their collisions spawning universes inhabited by pea-brained sports enthusiasts. I shook my head and tried to focus on what Douglas was saying. ‘… operating with either eleven or twenty-six dimensions. As a result of these collisions a universe is created within its own D-brane, and there are, clearly, an infinite number of such D-branes, and therefore an infinite number of universes, of which this is just one. Now the point is …’

I was glad he was getting to the point because my brain was hurting. Or was it my brane?

‘… each universe is locked from the other universes because each object, including forces and quantum physics itself, is restricted to its own D-brane. Except gravity. You see? Except gravity. The only force not restricted to its own D-brane. Thus it is through gravity that transference between universes is possible. It is how I came to be here. Consequently, gravity is the key to me returning.’

He gazed at me triumphantly. I gazed back at him blankly. He sighed.

‘You haven’t understood a word I’ve said, have you?’

I ripped a sheet of paper from my pad and extracted a black pen from my pencil case. If ever there was a time for such a manoeuvre, it was now.

On the contrary (I wrote). I understood

nearly all the words you said. ‘Brane’ was,

I think, the only exception, unless it is a

contraction of ‘membrane’, in which case

I understood ALL the words you said. Words

are not a problem. It is their order which can

be. For example, here are some simple words:

jumped; desks; happy; will; aardvarks; in;

back. All can easily be understood in isolation

(maybe not aardvark – it is an anteater

indigenous to South Africa). But if I put

them together thus – back desks in aardvarks

happy will jumped – then you would have

difficulty understanding my meaning and

might interpret it as a particularly bizarre

pronouncement from Yoda, of Star Wars

fame. So it is with your expressions, Douglas.

I understood the words. I missed the meaning

entirely. Explain in simple terms, please.

Douglas read this and frowned again. I think he might be a huge fan of frowning.

‘Okay,’ he said. ‘This universe you know. All the stars, all the space. Everything that exists. It is not the only one. There are an infinite number of such universes. Millions upon millions, billions upon billions. And then more …’

‘I know what infinity means.’

‘Okay. That means there are an infinite number of Earths. And each will be slightly different. There will be an infinite number of Candices, for example. In one you might have brown hair. In another … well, the combinations are … infinite.’

So somewhere, I thought, there is a world where penpal Denille replies to my letters. Just my luck to be in one where she doesn’t.

‘The other universes are separated from this one,’ he continued, ‘not by space and time, but by a different dimension. I came through that dimension. Another universe.’

‘How?’ I asked. It seemed a reasonable question. And it was short.

‘You wouldn’t understand. It involves manipulating dimensions and invoking gravity, of course.’

‘How?’ I asked. I was on a roll.

‘I jumped out of a tree.’

I could understand that bit.

‘And found yourself here?’ I asked.

‘Yes.’

‘So jump out of another tree and go back.’

He sighed and frowned, confirming my earlier suspicions.

‘It’s not as easy as that,’ he said.

Nothing is, I thought.