The Unluckiest Boy in the World Read online

  He stared around in some curiosity. ‘How do you cook when you can’t see?’ he asked.

  ‘Very carefully,’ said Mr Gibbon, with a chuckle. ‘And I make quite a lot of mess even then. Here, I’ll show you round.’

  The kitchen had been set up very differently to the one Nicholas had at home. The sink and the work surfaces were set at a lower height, so Mr Gibbon could reach them from his chair, and there were all sorts of gadgets he used to make up for the fact that he couldn’t see what he was doing. There were talking jugs and scales to measure ingredients. There was a device you put in saucepans to tell you when the contents were boiling, and something called a liquid-level indicator that made a beeping noise when you’d filled your cup or glass.

  While Mr Gibbon was explaining the importance of putting tins in the right place so you knew which ones to open, Fiona made a pot of tea and set out biscuits and cups on a tray. She carried it back to the sitting room, and she and Nicholas sat at the table and did their homework while Mr Gibbon played the piano.

  He was a remarkable pianist. He played without music and his short pudgy fingers darted over the keys with astonishing speed, moving gently from one tune to another. He seemed to know hundreds of songs and to be able to play any tune you mentioned. Once homework was finished, Nicholas found himself sitting beside him at the piano singing along to some of them while Fiona laid the table for supper.

  It was a very pleasant evening. At first, Nicholas found it difficult to enjoy it as freely as he would have liked. He was nervous, and a part of him was waiting anxiously for something bad to happen. But for some reason it never did, and as time went by he almost forgot about it. At six o’clock they had supper in the kitchen, washing down the spaghetti with bottles of Coke, then Mr Gibbon produced a fruit pudding he had prepared earlier, and after Fiona and Nicholas had done the washing-up, they all sat down to watch a television comedy about three nuns and a fitness instructor marooned on a desert island. Then they played poker using special cards with little bumps on the face, so that Mr Gibbon could read what they were, and matches as money to bet with. By the end of the game, Nicholas had won a hundred and forty-two matches, and was feeling rather pleased with himself.

  And still nothing had happened.

  At eight o’clock, when his mother arrived, Mr Gibbon offered to drive them all home on his motorbike, which rather alarmed Mrs Frith until she realized it was a joke. She thought it was another joke when he said how nice it had been to have Nicholas to visit and was astonished to find that it wasn’t. Mr Gibbon came to the door to wave them off, told Nicholas to be sure and call again soon, and he promised that he would.

  Walking home, Mrs Frith asked how the evening had gone and Nicholas told her about the piano-playing and Mr Gibbon’s kitchen and the poker.

  ‘And there weren’t too many… accidents?’ she asked when he had finished.

  ‘There weren’t any,’ said Nicholas.

  ‘What? None at all?’

  Mrs Frith was understandably surprised. A whole evening with other people without accidents was extremely rare. So rare she couldn’t remember the last time it had happened.

  They say a parent is only as happy as their saddest child, and life for Mrs Frith, since that day on the mountainside in Spain, had not been easy. She had lost her job, she had lost her friends, she had had to cope with innumerable accidents in her home and to the people around her – but the hardest thing had always been to watch what the curse had done to Nicholas. To see how difficult life was for him and how lonely it made him.

  And now, here he was, smiling, humming a tune under his breath, and looking as if he hadn’t a care in the world. He had been out with a friend, enjoyed himself, and come home again. It was what a lot of children did every day of their lives but she had not seen Nicholas do it in a long time.

  ‘No accidents at all, eh?’ she said. ‘Well, that is good!’

  And Nicholas agreed that it was very good indeed.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Mr Fender was in his office, filling in an insurance claim, when the phone rang. ‘Tom?’ said the voice. ‘It’s Alan Bartlett. From King Edward’s.’

  Mr Fender recognized the speaker immediately. Alan Bartlett was the head of a secondary school on the other side of town. They had met on various occasions, though not recently. In the last year, Mr Bartlett’s school had been facing a series of problems that had kept its head extremely busy.

  ‘How are you?’ asked Mr Fender. ‘And how’s the rebuilding going?’

  One of the difficulties Mr Bartlett had been dealing with was the loss of one of his classroom blocks in a freak tornado.

  ‘Slowly,’ said Mr Bartlett. ‘Look, I’m ringing because I heard you’ve taken on a new student. Nicholas Frith. Is that right?’

  ‘Yes, we have. Joined us a week ago. He seems a nice enough lad.’ Mr Fender suddenly remembered something he had read in Nicholas’s file. ‘Of course! He was with you for a term, wasn’t he?’

  ‘Six weeks. That was all I could take.’

  ‘Really?’ Mr Fender leant forward at his desk. ‘You’re telling me he’s some sort of troublemaker?’

  Headmasters often tell each other, unofficially, if a student living locally is likely to cause difficulties.

  ‘Have you had any accidents recently?’ asked Mr Bartlett.

  ‘Well, nothing as bad as your tornado, or the food poisoning,’ said Mr Fender, ‘but yes, we have had a few. Little things mostly. Like this morning our head of IT slipped on a packet of aniseed balls and cracked his head on an Apple Mac. I’m giving them a talk in assembly tomorrow on how we’ve got to be more safety conscious.’

  ‘It won’t do any good,’ said Mr Bartlett.

  ‘Why not?’ Mr Fender frowned. ‘What do you mean?’

  There was a long pause before the headmaster of King Edward’s answered.

  ‘I know you won’t believe this, but I’m going to tell you anyway. It’s Nicholas. He’s the one causing the accidents. They all happen because of him. I didn’t believe it myself at first, but in the end I had no choice. I told him he had to leave and I suggest you do the same.’

  ‘But Nicholas can’t be causing the accidents here.’ Mr Fender ran his mind over some of the things that had happened in the last week. ‘He can’t be. And why would he want to anyway?’

  It sounded as if Alan was cracking up under the strain. He was a young and brilliant teacher, but the pressures of responsibility can get to the best of minds.

  ‘He doesn’t want to cause them, but he does,’ said Mr Bartlett. ‘And before you think I’m cracking up, talk to Marjorie. Marjorie Parkes. See what she says. She had him for a whole term.’ There was another pause. ‘Take my advice and get rid of him, Tom. Get rid of him before it’s too late.’

  There was a click, and the phone went dead as he hung up.

  Fiona and Nicholas arrived for their science lesson after break to hear Mr Daimon announce that he was giving the class a revision test on the work they had done so far that term. When Nicholas put up a hand to ask if he had to take the test as well, he got a very short reply.

  ‘Of course you do,’ Mr Daimon snapped. ‘Now sit down and keep quiet.’

  Fiona saw that Nicholas was looking worried and tried to reassure him. ‘He knows you weren’t here for the start of term,’ she said. ‘He won’t expect you to do very well.’

  Nicholas explained that doing well was not what he was worried about. ‘I can’t do tests,’ he told her in a low voice. ‘It’s in the curse. May he fail in any test or trial. I can’t do them!’

  ‘Why?’ Fiona looked concerned. ‘What happens if you do?’

  ‘If I don’t have complete silence,’ said Mr Daimon sharply, ‘this entire class will find itself in detention.’

  There was a slight delay when he discovered that the test papers he had prepared had somehow fallen into the sink where a leaking tap had made them all but illegible, but he was determined to carry on. He told the class he
would write the questions on the board and they could do their answers on sheets of paper, and he had got as far as copying out the second question, when a wasp flew in the window.

  The windows in Mr Daimon’s classroom were only open a fraction – so that there could be no repeat of the pigeon incident – but the gap was easily big enough for the wasp to get in. It was a noisy insect and, after it had buzzed busily around the classroom for a minute, it was joined by another. And then a third, and then a fourth…

  By the time Mr Daimon became aware that something was wrong, there were a dozen wasps buzzing around the classroom and more of them pouring in through the window every second. He opened a window to try and let them out, but all that happened was that more of them flew in. He shouted at the children to keep calm and not make a fuss, but most of them were too busy swatting at the wasps with exercise books and rolled-up pieces of paper to hear him.

  A lot of the wasps seemed to be gathering round Mr Daimon’s head as he stood at the window. Several landed on his face and one of them stung him on the forehead. He opened his mouth in a cry of pain and another one flew inside and stung him on the tongue. He had wasps climbing up his trouser legs, more crawling inside the buttons of his shirt and, in a sudden blind panic, he ran for the door, abandoning his classroom, and went racing off down the corridor with a stream of wasps in his wake.

  Moments later, the insects disappeared as rapidly as they had arrived, but not before they had done a good deal of damage. Most of the children had received at least one sting – one boy had six just on his arm – and Fiona was extremely busy looking after them, removing the stings by scraping them off sideways with a fingernail and applying cold compresses.

  She suggested that Nicholas go and make sure Mr Daimon was all right.

  ‘I think I saw him stung in the mouth,’ she said, ‘which can be quite serious. The swelling might close up his windpipe, and there’s the possibility of anaphylactic shock.’

  Mr Fender sat in his office, staring thoughtfully at the phone on his desk. He had just had the most extraordinary conversation with the head teacher of St John’s. Marjorie Parkes was a tough, no-nonsense teacher of the old school, now nearing retirement. Somehow, hearing a woman like Marjorie say what she had about Nicholas had made the whole thing seem even more bizarre.

  ‘Alan’s right,’ she had barked. ‘The boy’s a Jonah. You have to get rid of him, and the sooner the better.’

  ‘But I don’t understand!’ Mr Fender was still trying to come to terms with what he was being told. ‘How can he be causing these accidents?’

  ‘Does it matter?’ Marjorie Parkes answered briskly. ‘There was a rumour, when he was here, that he was under some sort of curse, but I never cared if it were true or not. I just didn’t want the ambulance turning up at the main gates twice a day. Has anyone tried to give him a test yet?’

  ‘I… I don’t know…’

  ‘Well, don’t let them. That’s one way of guaranteeing that the dirt hits the fan. I’m telling you, Tom, you need to get him out of there. Bad things happen when that boy’s around.’

  ‘But I can’t just throw him out,’ Mr Fender protested. ‘Not without a reason.’

  ‘You don’t need a reason. You call in his mother and tell her to take him away. I told her if she didn’t, I’d plant the drugs in his pocket myself. One way or another, I said, he has to go.’

  ‘You… you threatened to plant drugs on him?’

  ‘I’d have done it too.’ Miss Parkes’s voice dropped to a quieter level for a moment. ‘You can’t have him in your school, Tom. Believe me, too many people get hurt.’

  For some time after the call, Mr Fender sat in his chair, wondering what on earth he should do. He was still wondering, when Mrs Lear, the deputy head, brought him the news about Mr Daimon and the wasps.

  ‘Wasps?’ The headmaster could hardly believe his ears. ‘In January?’

  ‘Perhaps it was waking too early that made them so aggressive,’ suggested Mrs Lear. ‘Thankfully the children are OK, but we’ve had to send Michael to hospital again, I’m afraid. Forty-three separate stings, poor fellow. He’s not having a lot of luck at the moment, is he?’

  ‘No,’ Mr Fender agreed, and then, as his deputy turned to leave, he asked, ‘You don’t happen to know what he was teaching them, do you?’

  ‘In science?’ Mrs Lear thought for a moment. ‘I think one of the children said they were doing a test.’

  ‘Were they,’ murmured Mr Fender. ‘Were they really…’

  It was too cold to go outside and Fiona and Nicholas spent their lunch break in the library.

  ‘So,’ said Fiona, ‘is that what happens every time you try and take a test?’

  ‘More or less.’ Nicholas was feeling rather gloomy. ‘I’ve never had the wasps before, but there’s always something that stops me.’

  ‘Well, you shouldn’t let it upset you.’ Fiona had never done very well in school tests and the thought of not being able to take one seemed, if anything, rather attractive. ‘I mean, who wants to do tests anyway?’

  ‘It might sound OK,’ said Nicholas, ‘but what’s going to happen when I get older? What’s going to happen if I can’t pass any exams, or get any qualifications, or get a licence to drive a car?’

  He had a point, Fiona realized. Not being able to pass any test or exam at all could have serious disadvantages as you grew up. She thought about it, on and off, for the rest of the day, and it was as they were walking home together after school that she wondered if there might not be a way out.

  ‘Do you know how long it is,’ she asked, ‘before the curse takes effect? I mean, how long is there between sitting down to take a test and something bad happening?’

  Nicholas said it varied but was usually very quick. In Mr Daimon’s science lesson, he pointed out, the wasps had started coming in the window before he had written up even the first two questions.

  ‘Yes, but they were quite long questions, weren’t they?’ said Fiona. ‘And some people had written the answer to the first one by then.’

  Nicholas said he thought it didn’t make a great deal of difference if the disaster happened at once or five minutes later, it was still a disaster.

  ‘But supposing it was a really short test,’ Fiona suggested, ‘and supposing you could answer all the questions really quickly and finished them before anything could happen? Wouldn’t that mean you’d broken the curse? And if you’d broken it once, wouldn’t that mean it was losing its power over you?’

  Nicholas thought about it and found the idea very appealing. He did not know if finishing a test would weaken the curse but, whether it did or not, it would be very good to know that he had beaten it, even once.

  ‘It would have to be a very short test,’ he said.

  Fiona had already thought of that. In the first lesson on a Thursday, Mr Galt gave the class a French vocab test. He showed them twenty words that he had already written on the whiteboard and gave everyone two minutes to write down what they meant in English.

  ‘If you knew it really well,’ said Fiona, ‘you could probably do it in half the time.’

  He probably could, Nicholas thought, and it was very tempting. The prospect of winning even a tiny victory against the curse that had blighted his life for more than a year and a half was hard to resist.

  Nicholas knew that the faster he could write down the answers, the more chance there was of success, so he prepared for the test very carefully. That evening, he and Fiona went over all the words they were supposed to know several times. It took them over an hour, and they did the same thing the following evening and again the evening after that.

  ‘You want to be careful,’ Mr Gibbon warned them cheerfully. ‘A boy at my school tried to work that hard and his brains overheated and came dribbling out of his nose.’

  By the time Thursday arrived, Nicholas knew the vocab so completely that he could have passed the test in his sleep. At the start of the lesson, however, he ran into an immedi
ate snag, when Mr Galt told him he was not allowed to take it.

  ‘The headmaster,’ he explained, ‘has told the staff you’re not to do any tests or exams. Why don’t you read a book till we’ve finished?’

  ‘I don’t want to read a book!’ protested Nicholas. ‘I want to take the test!’

  ‘Well, I’m sorry.’ Mr Galt was already walking away. ‘Mr Fender was very definite.’

  ‘But that’s not fair!’ Fiona stepped in to give Nicholas support. ‘He’s been working for this test for days. Why can’t he take it?’

  Mr Galt hesitated. He was not entirely sure why the headmaster had said Nicholas should not take any exams or tests. Mr Fender had said something about the boy being sensitive, and reacting badly to pressure, but you only had to look at him to see how keen he was. Maybe, as it was only a little vocabulary test…

  ‘All right,’ he agreed, ‘you can do it. But if you find it too difficult, or it upsets you for any reason, promise me you’ll stop.’

  Nicholas said that he would and triumphantly picked up his pen.

  As Mr Galt revealed the words on the board and the test began, he scribbled down the answers as fast he could, keeping one eye open for anything strange that might be happening in the class around him.

  There was a scratching sound from the book cupboard that made him a little uneasy. Then there was a thud as a large bird ran into the window (which he and Fiona had been careful to close before the lesson started) and a moment later there was a power cut, but Mr Galt ignored it, and the test was allowed to continue.

  As Nicholas was writing the answer to question twenty, there was a loud bang, the cap flew off one of the radiators that ran along the wall under the window and a gush of scalding steam filled the room. The classroom had to be evacuated, of course, but he and Fiona managed to dash round first and collect up the answer papers, and it was with real pleasure that Nicholas watched Mr Galt carry them off to the staffroom to mark.

  Mr Fender spent most of that morning talking to heating engineers and reorganizing the school timetable. The exploding radiator meant there was no heating in six classrooms and he had been told it would be several days before the fault could be repaired. In the meantime he had to find alternative places for Mr Galt and five other teachers to have their lessons.