The Unluckiest Boy in the World Read online

  ‘In a village in the mountains, there lived a hechicero, a sorcerer, called Toribio de Cobrales. He was known to have great powers and all the people came to him for healing, to settle their disputes, to bless their children…

  ‘Don Frederico did not approve of sorcerers. He did not approve of men who gave out justice and blessings and magic spells. He vowed to banish Toribio from his lands and, for many years, that was what he tried to do.

  ‘He failed. The men he sent to arrest Toribio or to kill him came back empty- handed, and Don Frederico’s anger grew. He swore by all the saints that he would drive Toribio from the land, dead or alive, and personally led an army of a thousand men against him. But he was too late. Toribio had died three weeks before. To fulfil his vow, Don Frederico said he would find the grave, remove the body and throw it into the sea, but Toribio defeated him even in this. His grave was protected by a curse and no one, not even the great grandee himself, dared touch it.’

  Nicholas felt a chilly sense of foreboding.

  ‘What… what did the curse say?’

  In answer, Señor Herez picked up a book, opened it at a page he had already marked and passed it to Nicholas. The page was covered in a writing that he recognized. The words were written in a circle that spiralled inwards towards a nine-pointed star, and the last time he had seen them was on the face of the stone on the mountain.

  ‘In your language,’ Señor Herez said, leaning across and tracing over the letters with his finger, ‘it says:

  ‘ “This is the curse of Toribio de Cobrales. If any man disturb my resting place, may all manner of misfortune and calamity befall him. May anger and envy be attracted to his person. May the animals of the field and the birds of the air be his enemy. May the plants and fruits of the earth be blighted beneath his fingers. May he fail in any test or trial And may his days be short and his existence miserable beyond hope.” ’

  There was silence for a moment when he had finished.

  ‘It is,’ he added, a little unnecessarily, ‘a very bad curse.’

  Nicholas could only agree. It sounded about as bad as it could be.

  May all manner of misfortune and calamity befall him… May anger and envy be attracted to his person…

  ‘Are you sure there hasn’t been some mistake?’ he said. ‘I mean, curses don’t really happen… do they?’

  The words that Señor Herez had read were still ringing through his brain.

  May the animals of the field and the birds of the air be his enemies. May the plants and fruits of the earth be blighted beneath his fingers…

  Señor Herez reached across to a vase of flowers in the centre of the table and took out one of the blooms.

  ‘Here.’ He held it out. ‘Take it.’

  Nicholas took the bloom and, as his fingers touched the stem, it drooped and withered in his hand.

  ‘Don’t worry.’ Mrs Frith took the blackened flower and placed it on the table. ‘It’s going to be all right. Really it is.’

  May he fail in any test or trial. And may his days be short and his existence miserable beyond hope…

  It didn’t sound like it was going to be all right.

  ‘I didn’t mean to disturb anyone’s grave.’ Nicholas turned to Señor Herez. ‘I just wanted to go to the toilet.’

  ‘I understand it was an accident but, sadly, that is of no account.’ Señor Herez closed the book and his dark eyes looked sympathetically at Nicholas. ‘We have many earth tremors in this region. Unfortunately, one of them opened the ground above the grave shortly before you arrived and you…’

  He stopped as a tiny, very old lady appeared on the terrace and walked slowly over to Nicholas. She placed a hand on his shoulder and murmured something into his ear. It was in Spanish and, although he did not understand it, for some reason it calmed him and he felt less anxious.

  ‘This is the Donna Alena, my grandmother,’ said Señor Herez as the old woman came over to Mrs Frith and took her hand. ‘She is a bruja. I know a little magic but I could not save you from a curse of such power. She is the one who saved your life.’

  “What did she do?’

  ‘My grandmother was able to weave a spell of protection round you last night.’ Señor Herez was pulling out a chair for the old lady to sit down. ‘She could not lift the curse itself – that was beyond even her strength – but she was able to weave a shield round you, a wall of magic, so that no evil may befall you.’

  ‘You mean…’ Nicholas wasn’t quite sure he understood. ‘You mean I can’t be hurt?’

  Señor Herez nodded. ‘Nothing resulting from the curse of Toribio can harm you,’ he said.

  Nicholas felt a wave of relief. ‘So everything’s all right, then?’

  ‘You will be safe,’ Señor Herez replied carefully, ‘but the curse will still operate. Misfortune and calamity will follow wherever you go. Anger and envy will dog your path. You will face the enmity of birds and animals and all these things will be drawn towards you as the moth is to the flame. You will not be harmed by them yourself. My grandmother’s protection will see to that, but for those around you… life will not be easy.’

  Nicholas thought about it, and the more he thought, the less he liked it. His mother was one of the people around him. So were his friends at home and at school…

  ‘You mean, wherever I go, bad things will happen to the people around me? All the time?’

  Señor Herez nodded.

  ‘But isn’t there something you can do about it?’ pleaded Nicholas. ‘Isn’t there some way you can get rid of the curse altogether?’

  Señor Herez gave a little shrug and it was Donna Alena who answered. She spoke in Spanish, and her grandson translated her words into English.

  ‘My grandmother says that she is very sorry, but no, there is nothing else she can do.’

  Later that morning, Nicholas and Mrs Frith returned to Albunol. They said goodbye to Señor Herez and his grandmother, thanked them again for all they had done, and climbed into Miguel’s taxi.

  The accidents began almost as soon as they left the farmhouse. They were not as dramatic as the terrible journey of the night before, but they were very persistent. First, Miguel had to stop to deal with a flat tyre. Soon after that, they were delayed by a herd of sheep that gathered round the car, refusing to move and butting aggressively at the doors. Outside Albunol, they, were held up for three hours in a traffic jam caused by a woman giving birth to twins in a minibus and, when they finally arrived at their apartment, they found it had no electricity because a tree had fallen on the power line.

  Next day, when Nicholas got up, he found the swimming pool had been closed because rats had been found in the filtering equipment. His mother suggested they take a trip into Malaga and the coach broke down on the motorway. The restaurant at which they tried to have lunch had to close when the chef was badly mauled by an octopus he was taking out of the fish tank. No one even suspected that any of these things were Nicholas’s fault, but there was no doubt in his mind that, somehow, he was causing them.

  Mrs Frith hoped that things would improve once they were back in England. She had the idea that being further away fromToribio’s grave might somehow weaken the curse – but it made no difference. After a nightmare flight to Gatwick, during which the pilot had to deal with seven separate mechanical failures, they got home to find the trail of disasters following in Nicholas’s path was as persistent as ever.

  When he returned to school a week later, they got worse. This was the year he was starting at secondary school and, on the first day, his classroom was burnt to the ground in a fire caused by an electrical fault. Major accidents like these did not happen every day of course, but minor ones did, and they were almost as bad. The little cuts and bruises, the slips and falls, and the angry arguments that would flare up from nowhere whenever he was around, all made life very difficult.

  Mrs Frith tried everything she knew to find some way the curse could be lifted. She spent long hours reading up the subject in b
ooks she got from the library, and writing letters to people she thought might be able to help, but to no effect.

  She and Nicholas both got very excited when they found an English witch who advertised on the Internet that she could provide protection from bad spells. Mrs Arcante drove down from the north of England to meet them, but a runaway cement lorry drove over her car two minutes after she arrived, and then a lump of ice fell out of the sky on to her head, on the way up to the front door. She phoned from the hospital to say she would not be coming back.

  They tried very hard to keep the curse a secret, at least from all the people they met and knew locally, in case it drove them away, but it made no difference. Somehow people knew. Some part of them soon recognized that being around Nicholas Frith meant bad things happened to you. That hanging around with him was when people got their fingers trapped in doors, or slipped at the top of the stairs, or dropped scalding mugs of tea down the front of their trousers.

  Even the best of friends can become nervous if such experiences are repeated often enough and, around Nicholas, they were repeated all the time. Without a word being spoken, he found he was increasingly left on his own. Few people wanted to be with him and those who did usually came to regret it.

  At Christmas, his mother moved him to another school, hoping that a new start with different friends might make things easier – but the same thing happened all over again. After six weeks, the headmaster of the new school asked him to leave. He said he was very sorry, and that he had nothing against Nicholas personally but, for the sake of the other pupils, he had no choice. He and his staff were adamant. Either Nicholas left, or they would all resign.

  Mrs Frith gave up her job so that she could teach Nicholas at home. She found that if he stayed indoors and went out as little as possible, the accidents were reduced in number to something that was almost manageable. So Nicholas’s life was limited to the house and his garden. Occasionally, he might go out to the park or the corner shop, but whole weeks could go by without his speaking a word to anyone apart from his mother, and for a boy who had enjoyed his life and his friends, it was very hard. He read a lot of books, he watched a lot of television, he kicked a ball up and down the garden till he had worn a groove in the lawn, and sometimes he found himself thinking it might have been better if the Donna Alena had not woven her protective spell and some accident had finished the whole business at the start.

  It went on like this for eighteen months, and both Nicholas and his mother had almost come to believe that it would go on like this forever.

  CHAPTER THREE

  The headmaster of Dent Valley School was a small, wiry man with receding hair and a bristly, ginger moustache. Despite his height – he was a good deal shorter than most of his pupils – Mr Fender was a man of some authority who had been known to reduce men twice his size to tears merely by staring at them through the lenses of his steel-rimmed spectacles.

  At the moment, however, the eyes beamed benignly across his desk at Nicholas, sitting the other side.

  ‘I see from your file,’ he said, ‘that you spent a term at St John’s.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Nicholas.

  ‘Then half a term at King Edward’s and, for the last eleven months, you’ve been taught at home by your mother…’

  ‘Yes,’ said Nicholas.

  ‘I think it might be a good idea to make a decision about how you want to be educated,’ Mr Fender said, looking down his nose, ‘and then stick to it. How long are you planning to stay here?’

  ‘As long as possible,’ said Nicholas, and he meant it. It had taken many hours of argument to persuade his mother to let him try going back to school and she had told him that if it didn’t work this time, they would be moving to the Outer Hebrides. They would live out the rest of their lives as far away as possible from any other human life form.

  ‘Hmm.’ Mr Fender sniffed. ‘Well, you won’t find it easy, joining a new school two weeks into the term. Most of the other children have already made friends and settled into their groups…’ He stood up. ‘Though I’ve got someone who might help you with that.’

  He walked to the door and pulled it open.

  ‘Come in, Fiona.’

  The girl who came in had a slightly odd appearance. She was about the same age as Nicholas, but none of her clothes seemed to fit properly. Her blazer was too small, her skirt was too long, and her blouse too tight round the collar. There was something odd about her hair as well. As a small boy, Nicholas had once tried to give himself a haircut with a pair of nail scissors and it looked as if Fiona had recently made a similar experiment.

  ‘Fiona, this is Nicholas,’ said Mr Fender. ‘He’s going to be in your class and I want you to look after him, make sure he knows his way around, has the things he needs and gets to wherever he’s supposed to be going. Can you do that for me?’

  Fiona nodded.

  ‘Good. OK. On your way, both of you.’

  Mr Fender watched as the two children headed off down the corridor and hoped he had done the right thing. He would not normally have asked a girl to look after a boy – he knew it could make both of them uncomfortable – but he thought it might be good for Fiona. He had been worried about her recently. She spent too much time alone, and she needed a friend.

  He sighed as he went back into his office. He hoped Nicholas wouldn’t be unkind or hurt her in any way. Fiona’s life was quite difficult enough already.

  Her appearance may have been a little strange, but Fiona looked after Nicholas very efficiently. She took him to the English lesson with their form tutor, Miss Greco, made sure he got a copy of the textbook they were using, showed him what page they were on and lent him some file paper to take notes. At the end of the lesson, she took him along to French with Miss Barrie, and at break, she showed him where the toilets were before taking him to the library so that he could register, and take out the books he would need for Miss Greco’s project. She was the sort of girl that teachers call solid and sensible, and there was something about the quiet, careful way she did all this that Nicholas rather appreciated.

  He also appreciated the fact that, so far at least, there had been no accidents. In the English lesson, Miss Greco had tripped over a carpet tile and twisted her knee, but if that was the worst that happened, Nicholas thought, he could probably cope. As the librarian took his details and tapped them into the computer, he found himself fervently praying that the quiet would continue and that he would have a chance to settle in at Dent Valley.

  When he rejoined Fiona, he found she was reading a book on first aid.

  ‘It’s for a test on Saturday,’ she explained, when he asked. ‘I was going over the four things to do when you discover someone unconscious.’

  ‘There are four?’ said Nicholas.

  Fiona ticked them off on her fingers. ‘Assess casualty’s response. Open airways. Examine casualty for injuries and bleeding. Place in recovery position.’

  ‘I wish I’d known,’ said Nicholas. ‘Last time it happened to me all I could think of to do was shout “Help!”’

  ‘You found someone unconscious?’ Fiona sounded a little envious.

  ‘I didn’t exactly find him unconscious.’ Nicholas still had vivid memories of the time the man collecting for Oxfam had called at their house. ‘He sort of collapsed while I was talking to him, clutching his chest.’

  ‘Ah, that sounds more like a heart attack,’ said Fiona. ‘You have to deal with them a bit differently.’ She was ticking off her fingers again. ‘Make the casually comfortable. Dial 999. Monitor breathing. Then give them an aspirin to chew.’

  ‘An aspirin…’ Nicholas picked up the book on first aid. ‘Really?’

  ‘You’re welcome to read up about it.’ Fiona glanced at the clock on the wall. ‘But we’d better get moving. It’s science with Mr Daimon next, and he can get very upset if people are late.’

  The first of the accidents happened in Mr Daimon’s class. It wasn’t one of the bad ones – at least, not as bad
as some of the things that had happened around Nicholas in the last eighteen months – but it was bad enough. And it dashed any hopes he might have had that life at Dent Valley was going to be different.

  Mr Daimon was an energetic, quick-tempered man. His lesson that morning was on chemical reactions and the children were supposed to be measuring the different rates of reaction using various promoters and catalysts. He expected his students to take the work seriously and became very irritated if his teaching was interrupted.

  Ten minutes into the lesson, he was getting particularly cross with a girl called Amanda, who had dropped a contact lens into the tube of ammonium chloride she was heating, when a pigeon flew in through the open window.

  It did a quick circle round the classroom, causing a certain amount of noise and excitement as it did, and tried to fly out again only to run smack into a pane of glass. A twitter of concern ran around the class.

  ‘All right,’ said Mr Daimon, ‘it’s only a bird, calm down!’

  But, as the pigeon continued to fly round the room, the class was anything but calm. Children screamed whenever the bird flew near them, and the more noise they made, the more frightened the pigeon became. Being frightened, it made messes and, as it flew, it dropped them everywhere. They landed in people’s hair, on their clothes and on their work, which of course led to more screaming.

  ‘Stop this!’ Mr Daimon bellowed. ‘Stop this noise at once! If I do not have silence this instant, I will…’

  But the class never heard what Mr Daimon planned to do if he did not have instant silence, because at that moment the pigeon swooped low over his head and one of its feet caught in his hair. Mr Daimon gave a cry of surprise. He shook his head and his whole body in all directions in his efforts to shake it off, scattering papers and knocking over bottles as he did so.