The Unluckiest Boy in the World

by Andrew Norriss

  It was not until lunchtime that he was able to talk to the French teacher and ask if it was true that, against his explicit instructions, he had allowed Nicholas Frith to take a test. Mr Galt explained that it had only been a little vocab test and Mr Fender told him firmly that, however small, he did not want Nicholas to take any tests in the future.

  When Mr Galt asked why, Mr Fender pretended not to hear. He could not give the real reason; it sounded too absurd. But, absurd or not, he was determined not to risk another disaster.

  ‘Out of interest,’ he said as Mr Galt stood up to leave, ‘how did Nicholas do in the test?’

  ‘I’m afraid I don’t know.’ The French teacher blushed slightly. ‘His paper was destroyed.’

  ‘Destroyed?’

  ‘In the staffroom. It caught fire.’

  Mr Galt had carried the test papers to the staffroom and placed them on a window sill with his glasses on top. The sun had been shining and, as luck would have it, it had focused its beam through the lens, on to the paper beneath, and set fire to it. Only the top sheet had been destroyed before someone noticed, but that sheet had been Nicholas’s.

  ‘It’s a shame,’ Mr Galt said as he left, ‘because he and Fiona had obviously worked very hard, and if her test is anything to go by, he’d have done very well.’

  ‘Fiona?’ Mr Fender looked up. ‘Fiona did well?’

  ‘Extremely well.’ Mr Galt nodded. ‘She got a hundred per cent.’

  ‘A hundred per cent!’ Mr Gibbon peered at the paper he was holding. He could not see the numbers, but he ran his fingers admiringly over the page. ‘And top of the class, you say?’

  ‘She was the only one with full marks,’ said Nicholas. ‘The boy who came second got ninety-five.’

  ‘A hundred per cent…’ Mr Gibbon was beaming from ear to ear. ‘And what does it say at the bottom?’

  ‘It says “Brilliant work! Well done!”’ said Fiona, for the fourth time.

  ‘Brilliant work…’ murmured Mr Gibbon. ‘I’ll say it was. Well, I think this calls for a celebration.’ He turned to his daughter. ‘Why don’t you ring up the Pizza Palace and get them to send round whatever you want!’

  Fiona went out to the hall to make the call and Mr Gibbon sat in his chair, still chuckling to himself.

  ‘A hundred per cent…’ He leant forward and patted Nicholas on the knee. ‘And all thanks to you, eh!’

  ‘Me?’ said Nicholas.

  ‘Well, she wouldn’t have done it without you, would she? All that revision you did together, that’s why she did so well. I’ve been telling her for years she can do it if she puts her mind to it, but she wouldn’t believe me.’ Mr Gibbon leant back in his chair. ‘We’ve got a lot to thank you for, Fiona and me. First you cheer her up by being her friend at school and now you’re sorting out her work.’ He touched the paper in his hand again. ‘A hundred per cent! Who’d have thought it, eh?’

  Nicholas was almost too astonished to speak. He had made things bad for the people around him for so long that it was almost impossible to believe he had done something this time that helped. He hoped with all his heart it might make up for anything bad that happened and the accidents he caused.

  Not that anything bad had happened to either Fiona or her father yet, which, when he thought about it, was very odd. Nicholas had been going around with Fiona for nearly a fortnight now and, apart from being arrested for attempted murder that first day, she had not been involved in any accidents at all. Two weeks was a long time. Normally, the curse would have struck long before and a part of him wondered, nervously, how much longer the good times could last.

  CHAPTER SIX

  At registration the next morning, Miss Greco told Nicholas that the headmaster wanted to see him. He felt a slight tremor of foreboding, but Fiona assured him there was nothing to worry about. Mr Fender probably only wanted to ask how things were going, she said, and to check that he was settling in all right.

  She was wrong.

  ‘We need to talk,’ said Mr Fender, pointing Nicholas to a chair. ‘I was hoping to include your mother in this discussion, but when I tried to ring her this morning there was no reply.’

  ‘No,’ said Nicholas. ‘The telephone line’s down.’

  The line was down because it had been hit by an Acme Thunderbolt firework, set off the night before by a man wanting to celebrate his divorce, but Nicholas thought it best simply to say that there had been an accident.

  ‘An accident?’ Mr Fender sniffed. ‘Yes. We seem to be having a few of those recently, don’t we?’

  He reached into a drawer of his desk and took out a large exercise book.

  ‘This is the record we keep of any injuries sustained on school premises,’ he said, turning the pages, ‘and you’ll see that most weeks we have one or two, some weeks we don’t have any… until a fortnight ago. Then we had twenty-nine accidents the first week, and this week we’re already up to thirty-two.’

  He pushed the book across the desk towards Nicholas.

  ‘And you know the interesting thing? All the accidents happened to people who were somehow connected to you. We’ve got six teachers in there – all of whom teach you at one time or another – and almost all the other injuries are to children in your class. Do you have an explanation for that?’

  Nicholas wondered how Mr Fender had worked it out so quickly. In both his last schools it had taken them much longer to make the connection.

  ‘I was talking to Mr Bartlett yesterday, the headmaster of your last school,’ Mr Fender went on, ‘and it seems there were a lot of accidents while you were there, as well. Then I rang Mrs Parkes at St John’s, and it turns out she had the same trouble the term before.’ Mr Fender leant back in his chair and looked carefully at Nicholas. ‘So… what exactly is going on?’

  Inwardly, Nicholas sighed. He should have known it was too good to be true. In the last two weeks, his life was actually starting to get better, he was almost beginning to enjoy himself and now… now it was all going to be taken away. The headmaster was going to ask him to leave, just as he had been asked to leave all his other schools. He should never have expected anything else.

  ‘I asked you a question,’ Mr Fender repeated. ‘What is going on?’

  ‘I… I can’t explain,’ said Nicholas.

  ‘I think you can, and I think you’d better.’ Mr Fender’s voice was quiet but firm. ‘It’s my job to look after this school, and the people in it, and to do that I need to know about anything that might threaten them.’

  He waited, but still Nicholas said nothing.

  ‘Believe it or not, I’d like to help.’ Mr Fender was speaking again. ‘But I can’t do that unless I know what the problem is, can I?’

  ‘You couldn’t help anyway,’ said Nicholas in a low voice. ‘Nobody can.’

  ‘How about letting me decide that?’ The headmaster’s voice was stern, but his look was not unkind as he sat the other side of the desk, peering over the top of his glasses, waiting for an answer.

  Nicholas made a sudden decision. It seemed to be one of those times when telling the truth could hardly make the situation worse. He was probably going to get thrown out anyway.

  ‘All right.’ He took a deep breath. ‘If you really want to know, it began when I was on this holiday in Spain…’

  At the same time as Nicholas was having his conversation with the headmaster, Mrs Frith was calling on Mr Gibbon.

  She had been worried about him ever since the first day that she had picked up her son from the flat in Carlton Place and discovered that Mr Gibbon was disabled. It was wonderful that her son had found a friend who was prepared to take the risk of being with him, but it wasn’t fair to include her father. Accidents were bad enough when they happened to ordinary, able-bodied people, but Fiona’s father was in a wheelchair and almost completely blind. The sort of accidents he could have were too awful to think about.

  In fact, she found it hard to believe that the accidents weren’t happening already. He
r son had been round to the flat almost every evening that week and things always happened around Nicholas. They happened to anyone who was close to him and the more regularly he saw someone the more likely it was that the accidents would be bad ones. Nicholas insisted that nothing had happened yet and that Mr Gibbon was fine, but she needed to check for herself that it was true.

  She knocked at the door of the flat in Carlton Place and, after a few minutes, it was opened by Mr Gibbon.

  ‘It’s me,’ she said, ‘Nicholas’s mother. I was wondering if you had time to talk?’

  ‘Well, I was about to practise my fire-juggling but, hey, I can do that any time.’ Mr Gibbon spun his chair round and led the way through to the living room. ‘Anything in particular you wanted to talk about? Dwindling earth resources, the decline of morals in young people…’

  ‘It’s Nicholas,’ said Mrs Frith. ‘I’m worried that his coming round here every evening might be making things difficult for you.’

  ‘Difficult?’ Mr Gibbon frowned. ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘Well…’ Mrs Frith phrased her answer carefully. ‘Sometimes things happen when a young boy comes into a house… you know… accidents.’

  ‘You mean like all the accidents they’ve been having at school?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Mrs Frith. ‘I wondered if anything like that was happening here as well.’

  ‘Ah.’ Mr Gibbon stroked thoughtfully at his chin. ‘Well, we are a bit worried whether the baby wolf that bit Fiona yesterday had rabies…’

  ‘Oh, goodness.’ Mrs Frith paled. ‘Nicholas never said anything about a wolf…’

  ‘Of course he didn’t!’ Mr Gibbon chuckled. ‘I was joking. No, we haven’t had any accidents here. None at all.’

  ‘You’re sure?

  ‘Positive.’

  Mrs Frith was finding it hard to believe. ‘You mean that, when Nicholas comes round here, everything’s normal?’

  ‘Not normal, no.’ Mr Gibbon smiled. ‘Better than normal. He’s been really good for Fiona.’

  ‘He has?’

  ‘He’s been a good friend. Really perked things up for her. Even made her do some work.’

  ‘So you… don’t mind him coming round every day?’

  ‘It’s a pleasure to have him,’ said Mr Gibbon happily.

  ‘Well, I’m glad to hear it.’ Mrs Frith was relieved, though still puzzled at the lack of accidents. ‘I only wish there were something I could do in return.’ She had a sudden thought. ‘Perhaps there is. Perhaps I could offer to help with Fiona?’

  ‘How d’you mean?’

  ‘Well, I could take her to a hairdresser’s for a start.’ Mrs Frith smiled. ‘I don’t know who’s cutting her hair at the moment but…’

  ‘It’s me,’ said Mr Gibbon. ‘I cut her hair. I’ve been doing it ever since she was little.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Mrs Frith. There was a slight pause before she asked, ‘You don’t buy her clothes as well, do you?’

  ‘I certainly do. She tells me what she needs and I order it from the catalogue. I get Mrs Barnet from across the way to help fill out the form. You’re not going to tell me there’s something wrong with them as well, are you?’

  Mrs Frith did not answer.

  ‘Oh dear.’ Mr Gibbon’s normally cheery face had become a little downcast. ‘That bad, is it?’

  That evening, Mr Fender sat in his office staring out of the window until long after the children and staff had gone home. He was thinking, as he had been on and off all day, about the story Nicholas had told him. It wasn’t easy to believe in a curse from a man who had been dead for three hundred years, not in this day and age, and yet…

  And yet there had to be some explanation for the extraordinary things that had happened in his school during the last two weeks. Only that afternoon, Mrs Baker, Nicholas’s history teacher, had had a seizure after inadvertently eating some laburnum seeds that had been blown by the wind into her yoghurt. And two girls in his class had superglued their shoulders together and been taken to casualty like a pair of Siamese twins. There was obviously something going on.

  If a curse was causing the trouble, he wondered, what was he supposed to do about it? The simplest solution would be, as Alan Bartlett suggested, to ask Nicholas to leave, but something in Mr Fender rebelled against that idea. He was a head teacher, and a head teacher is responsible for all the children in his care. It was his job to look after the pupils at his school whatever their handicaps or disabilities. It might be a lot easier if he only had to deal with the children who didn’t have problems, but he hadn’t taken the job because it was easy.

  But how did you help someone like Nicholas? If a child was dyslexic, or had rickets, or was deaf, there were experts he could call in to advise him. He had great lists of them in the filing cabinets round his office. But where did you go to find an expert on being cursed? Who could he possibly talk to?

  Head teachers know a wide range of people. They teach the sons of dukes and the daughters of dustmen and, as part of their job, they meet people from almost every walk of life. Offhand, Mr Fender couldn’t actually remember anyone who was an expert in curses, but there were one or two parents of past pupils who might be able to point him in the right direction. He remembered one mother who charmed warts and had offered to feng shui the classrooms. She might be a good place to start.

  He reached for the phone.

  That weekend, Mrs Frith took Fiona into town on something of a shopping spree. Mr Gibbon had drawn two hundred pounds from his bank account and told her to buy a complete new set of school clothes and anything else that might catch Fiona’s eye.

  It was something they very much enjoyed, at least they did once Mrs Frith had persuaded Nicholas to go for a walk and meet up with them later. Shopping with Nicholas was always difficult. Either the till wouldn’t work, or the fire sprinkler system suddenly malfunctioned, or the assistant who was serving you ran off to chase a shoplifter. So they agreed to meet at McDonald’s in two hours’ time and, until then, Mrs Frith and Fiona were left to do their shopping in peace.

  The trip was a new and exciting experience for Fiona. They bought two school skirts and blouses, some socks, a pair of shoes with the chunky square toes and big heels that everyone else was wearing and then, because there was still some money left, they went on to buy some jeans and a couple of vests from Topshop.

  Finally, they went to the hairdresser’s, where Fiona was given a haircut by a young man called Marco, who was dressed in a sort of romper suit covered in sequins but was very good at his job. When he had finished, Fiona was left staring into the mirror, not quite sure if the pretty girl staring back was really her. She wondered what Nicholas would say when he saw it but unfortunately, when they got to McDonald’s, Nicholas had other things on his mind.

  He had only been waiting by the door for a couple of minutes, but in that time two accidents had happened. First, a small fire had broken out in one of the waste bins, and then the manager, running out of his office to see why the smoke alarms had gone off, slipped on a patch of wet floor and somehow swallowed the button battery he had been trying to fit into his hearing aid.

  Fiona instantly swung into action. She got Mrs Frith to use her mobile to phone the emergency services, told Nicholas to use the extinguisher on the wall to put out the fire in the bin, while she herself gave abdominal thrusts to the man who had swallowed the battery, making him cough it back out on to the floor. At the same time, she was giving instructions on looking after an old lady who had fainted at the sight of the fire, by telling her husband to lay her on the ground with her legs raised to improve the blood flow to her brain.

  Mrs Frith watched it all with a deepening admiration. Nicholas had told her how calm Fiona was, even when the most extraordinary things were happening, but until now she had never quite believed it.

  ‘She’s done all these first-aid courses with the St John Ambulance.’ The fire was out and Nicholas had come to stand beside his mother. ‘She started doing them when
her dad was going blind, so she’d know how to look after him if anything happened. Then she got sort of interested.’ He looked down at his friend with a quiet pride. ‘It’s been really useful at school. Whatever happens, she always seems to know what to do. She’s amazing.’

  Mrs Frith was inclined to agree, and she was beginning to think she might have been wrong to presume that Nicholas’s friendship with Fiona could not last. The more she saw of her, the more it seemed that Fiona was exactly what he needed.

  Mr Fender also had an errand in town that Saturday, though it was one he was hoping to keep secret if possible. He parked his car in the road outside a row of terraced houses and checked carefully that no one was watching before getting out and walking up to the door of number 47.

  A part of him wondered what the local newspaper might make of a headmaster getting advice from a ‘psychic consultant’ on how best to treat one of the pupils at his school. They would probably demand that he lost his job, and who could blame them?

  Even now, he wasn’t at all sure he was doing the right thing. But he knew he had to do something. If things went on the way they were he might not have a school left by the end of term. He had spent most of the previous evening on the phone, following up leads and suggestions from a number of people, and several fingers had pointed him in the direction of the front step on which he was now standing.

  If this was the only way to solve the problem, then this was what he would have to do. He rang the bell and, a moment later, found himself facing a tall woman, dressed in a sari, with astonishingly bright green eyes.

  ‘Mr Fender?’

  The headmaster nodded and smiled a little nervously. He had been told that Miss Murajee possessed some extraordinary powers and wondered if these included being able to read his mind.