And it still didn’t work.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
There were times when Nicholas thought it was getting better. In those first few days and weeks, as he said the sentences to himself, there were several occasions when he was convinced that the spell had been broken and that he was no longer unlucky. But then he would pick a leaf from a tree and watch it blacken and wither in his fingers, or he would walk towards a dog on the pavement and watch it snarl and back away in fear, and realize nothing had changed at all.
On one occasion, convinced that the power of Toribio’s spell had, at the very least, weakened dramatically, he tried to take a test. It was a history test given by Miss MacMahon to see how much the class remembered about the wives of Henry VIII. There were only ten questions and, as she read out the first of them, Nicholas reached secretly for a bit of scrap paper. But the instant he started writing, Miss MacMahon began one of her nosebleeds, pints of blood spurted on to her desk and the floor, and the class had to be abandoned.
The accidents continued, much as always. The ones at school were not too serious these days, with the Safe Room and Mr Fender’s alarm system, but at home, for a while, they actually got worse.
The woman in the house next door had moved away – people who lived near Nicholas often discovered they would rather live somewhere else – and a new neighbour had arrived, called Mr Runciman. He was a short man, with short bristly hair, and an even shorter temper. In the three weeks that he lived next door, he tripped over carpets, fell down stairs, trapped his fingers in doors, burnt himself on ovens, gave himself electric shocks and got a pound coin stuck up his nose. In the end, he went to live with his sister in Scotland, and whenever Nicholas thought of him, he felt rather depressed.
He told Miss Murajee that he didn’t think her plan was working, but she said he needed to be patient. He asked how long he should be patient for, and she said she had no idea. It might be weeks. It could be years. It was not very encouraging and, as time went on, Nicholas found it more and more difficult to imagine that things would ever change. He would never be able to believe the way Miss Murajee said he had to believe and he knew, deep down, that he was always going to be the unluckiest boy in the world.
But for some reason, despite all this, he carried on saying the sentences. He said them standing in front of his desk every morning when he woke up: I am very lucky and good things happen to me all the time…
He said them again in the evening before he went to bed: I help the people around me, and good things happen to them all the time…
And he said them every hour during the day. By now, he no longer needed the watch with the vibrating alarm. Some clock in his brain would tell him the time and he would start reciting: I like all animals and birds, and they like me…
He had said the words so often that he no longer even listened while he was saying them.I love gardening and enjoy working with plants… It was like doing it in his sleep. In fact, one night, he found he was doing exactly that. It was three o’clock in the morning and he woke up to find himself reciting: I am always happy, because I know that whatever happens is all right…
If you had asked him why he was doing it, he would not have been able to tell you. He no longer believed it would work, but saying the sentences had become part of his life. Like getting dressed or cleaning his teeth, it was just something he did. Every morning, every evening, and every hour through the day.
Two weeks before the end of term, Air Daimon came back.
The science teacher had been away for nearly two months and returned a changed man. The loud voice, the brusque manner and the barely concealed irritation had gone. He was relaxed, calm and spoke in a quiet, gentle voice. He had, he told Nicholas, been on a course of intensive psychotherapy with an emphasis on anger management.
‘Something I should have done years ago,’ he said. ‘It did me a power of good, getting rid of all those feelings about my father…’ For a moment, his fists clenched spasmodically, but he took a deep breath and relaxed again.
‘I wanted to thank you. The headmaster told me about your… your problem, and how the accidents happened. It must be very difficult for you, but I want you to know it worked out well for me. Best thing that could have happened, really. Made me sort myself out. Odd, isn’t it!’
Nicholas agreed that it was.
‘And of course I’m not the only one you’ve helped, am I? We’ve all seen what you’ve done for Fiona. What a change, eh?’
Nicholas was not aware that he had done anything for Fiona, but he did know that she was a very different girl from the one with the bad haircut and the ill-fitting clothes that he had first seen that day in Mr Fender’s office.
‘Hardly recognized her when she walked into the lab,’ said Mr Daimon. ‘I thought she was someone new! And as for the schoolwork…!’
Fiona’s schoolwork had improved dramatically. She had enjoyed coming top in the French test she had worked for with Nicholas. In fact, she had liked it so much that she decided to repeat the experience. She worked hard for the next test, and came top again. The next week, she tried the same technique in maths, with a similar result, and then in science. In the last month, in all three subjects, her work had put her with the top two or three in the class.
‘She’s a lot cleverer than any of us realized, and I’m not sure she’d have found that out without you.’ Mr Daimon smiled cheerily at Nicholas. ‘It’s good to know something positive has come out of it all, isn’t it?’
Nicholas agreed that it was. And he knew he should be grateful for all the changes that had happened in his life since the start of term. He had Fiona as the best of possible friends. Miss Murajee and Mr Fender had found a way to let him live in a manner that was very close to normal. Mr Gibbon was teaching him the piano. His mother was happier than he had seen her in years and yet… and yet…
Nothing could alter the fact that he was still living under the curse. The prison might be more comfortable, it might even have brought the occasional benefit, but it was still a prison.
The days passed, and the weeks, and the months. Term ended, the Easter holidays came, the summer term began… and Nicholas discovered a new hobby. He took up gardening.
It started in the Easter holidays when Fiona and Mr Gibbon went to Yorkshire for a week to stay with Mr Gibbon’s sister. His mother was at work, Nicholas was spending large parts of the day on his own, and it left him with a lot of time on his hands and nothing really to do.
Miss Murajee had been supplying all the herbs she used for the Safe Room and for Nicholas to keep on his desk from her own tiny backyard, and was finding it difficult to provide a sufficient quantity. Nicholas, on the other hand, had a large garden at the back of his house. It was big enough for him and Fiona to kick a football around at weekends and Miss Murajee suggested that he use part of it to grow some of the herbs he needed for himself.
She gave him cuttings and showed him how to make them root in pots and then how to clear a patch of ground where he could plant them out. It was a peaceful occupation, safely away from other people, and Nicholas found he enjoyed it. During the week that Fiona was on holiday, he not only planted the herbs, but set about clearing a fruit cage containing some very healthy raspberry canes, and then planted a flower bed.
He worked wearing gloves and found being out in the open air, tending the plants, and watching them grow, deeply satisfying. When Fiona came back, he continued to find time at weekends and in the evenings to keep his garden going. He had, his mother said, a real knack for it.
And he was out in the garden one day early in June, planting out some hollyhocks that he had grown from seed, when a voice said, ‘Who are you?’
Looking up, Nicholas saw a boy, about four years old, leaning over the fence from the next-door garden. Small children always made him nervous. They could have accidents before you could blink.
‘I’m Nicholas,’ he said. ‘Be careful you don’t fall down.’
‘I live here now.�
� The boy pointed to the house which had, until recently, belonged to the short-tempered Mr Runciman. Nicholas vaguely remembered hearing that it had been sold.
‘I’m Brian.’ The boy looked around the garden with an admiring gaze. ‘Is all this yours?’
‘Yes,’ said Nicholas.
The boy took in the fruit cage with the raspberries, the brightly coloured flowers and the lawn with the football goal.
‘You’re lucky,’ he said.
Three months before, if someone had told Nicholas he was lucky, he would instantly have rejected the idea. After all, he was not lucky. He was the unluckiest boy in the world. But our thoughts are governed, as much as anything, by habit. Most of them are simple repetitions of ideas we have had a thousand times before and they flash along well-worn paths in our brains so fast that we barely notice them.
Three months before, the most familiar path for Nicholas’s thoughts would have been the belief that he was unlucky, but this time, they found a different route. There was an easier and wider track for them to follow. It was one that had been built into his brain over the days and weeks of endless repetition. Those thousands of times he had said the same thing over and over again had created a path as wide and inviting as an empty motorway, and his thoughts followed this new route as inevitably as the river finds its bed.
The boy said, ‘You’re lucky,’ and the thought that instantly sprang into Nicholas’s head was that he was right. He was lucky. And good things happened to him all the time. Just for one instant, before he was even aware that he was thinking it, the thought was in his mind, unquestioned and accepted. Just for one instant, he believed it.
And in that instant of belief, the world changed.
For a moment, it changed quite literally. With his eyes still open, Nicholas found he was no longer standing in the garden, but in a large room with stone walls supporting a great beamed roof, and a nagged floor beneath his feet. The room was completely empty except for a man at the far end, sitting at a table in front of an enormous fire.
He was dressed in a black tunic over baggy trousers that stopped just below the knee. On his head he wore a wide-brimmed hat, round his neck hung a green stone on a silver chain, and from his chin flowed a long grey beard. He seemed quite unaware of Nicholas as he busily scratched at a piece of a parchment with a pen made from a goose feather.
As he wrote, little flashes of light appeared from his body, and danced and floated in the air around him. After a moment, one of the lights started moving towards Nicholas.
It moved with gathering speed and, as it flew through the air, became an arrow, pointing straight at his head. There was another light following it, and that one became an axe, and the one after it became a knife. They raced towards him, but before they reached him, they stopped as if they had bumped into some invisible barrier, turned back into a shower of lights, and disappeared.
Other lights were still leaving the old man and became more weapons. They turned into stones that fell from the ceiling, flaming torches and evil-looking demons that danced across the floor, but Nicholas always knew that he was perfectly safe. None of them could reach him through the shield that protected him.
Then, watching the display, it occurred to him that he would be safe even without the shield. After all, though the rocks and arrows that flew towards him might look dangerous, they were not real. They were only made of light. Even if he were to step out from behind the shield, he would come to no harm.
And so he did. He stepped carefully to one side, and watched as an iron hammer hurled itself at his chest. It passed straight through him, with no more power to hurt or harm than a gun fired on the screen in the cinema. It was the same with all the other weapons that hurled themselves at his body. As long as you knew they weren’t real, they couldn’t hurt you.
On the other side of the room, the old man still seemed quite unaware of his presence, and Nicholas felt a surge of anger. The stones and arrows might not be real but they had been frightening enough before he knew that. What gave this man the right to go about scaring other people? On the wall beside him hung a collection of spears. He took down one of them, and held it for a moment before reaching back his arm and flinging it with all his strength towards the old man.
It landed, point first, on the table, right in the middle of the piece of parchment. The old man looked up in surprise, peered at it for a moment and then turned to look at Nicholas.
His eyes were very dark and, under his gaze, Nicholas was aware of a great power. For a long minute, the two of them stared at each other and then… and then the old man smiled. It was the barest flicker of a smile and it touched only the corner of his lips, but it was there and Nicholas saw it. At the same time, he gave the faintest nod of his head, as if Nicholas had made a request and he had agreed to it. Then he calmly turned back to his desk, picked up his goose-feather quill and continued writing.
An instant later both he and the room had gone.
Back in the garden, everything looked just the same. Nicholas was standing by the flower bed with his tray of hollyhocks and Brian, the little boy next door, was peering at him from over the fence… but nothing was the same really. Everything had changed. Nicholas could feel it in every cell of his body.
A cat strolled calmly across the lawn towards him, briefly brushing past his leg before moving on. He took off a glove, reached down and picked one of the hollyhock seedlings. It lay in his hand, bright and clear and green.
There was no doubt.
The spell had been broken, and he was free.
CHAPTER TWELVE
When Fiona came back from her St John Ambulance class, she found Nicholas waiting for her outside the flat in Carlton Place. He was looking a little dazed and she thought at first that something bad must have happened to him.
‘Are you all right?’ she asked.
‘I think so.’ Nicholas held out a bunch of flowers. ‘I came to give you these.’
They were snapdragons he had grown in his garden, and it was only as Fiona reached out to take them that she noticed he wasn’t wearing any gloves.
She gave a little gasp. ‘What… what’s happened?’
‘Well.’ Nicholas took a deep breath. ‘I think it’s worked.’
As he told her what had happened earlier that morning, Fiona, normally so calm, let out so many shrieks and screams of excitement that Mr Gibbon opened the window to ask what all the noise was about.
‘It’s Nicholas,’ Fiona told him. ‘He’s not unlucky any more!’
Mr Gibbon had always found it difficult to believe that Nicholas lived under a curse. As far as he was concerned Nicholas had been nothing but good news from the first day Fiona brought him home, but he didn’t want to appear rude. If Nicholas was happy, then good luck to the lad.
‘I think that calls for a celebration,’ he said. ‘Let’s all have a chocolate biscuit. No, hang the expense. It’s a big day, let’s have two.’
Mrs Frith, on the desk in the Royal Hotel, took a little more convincing. Nicholas and Fiona walked round there from Carlton Place and, even when she had seen Nicholas take a flower from one of the displays, and happily stroke a dog that was crossing the reception hall, she still found it difficult to believe.
She was worried that he might have imagined it all, and she was even more worried when a man rang from the sixth floor saying he was going to jump out of the window if someone didn’t bring him a decent-sized bar of soap. But Nicholas never doubted the truth of what had happened.
‘It’s no good looking like that,’ he said firmly. ‘It’s nothing to do with me.’
On Monday morning, Mr Fender was waiting at the school gates to ask if the rumours he had heard were true and, when Nicholas said that they were, the headmaster swept him straight off to his office to hear the full story.
‘Extraordinary,’ he murmured to himself as Nicholas repeated the details of what had happened in the garden on Saturday morning. ‘And you’re quite sure, are you? The curse has defi
nitely gone?’
‘Definitely,’ said Nicholas. ‘I’ve been doing all the things it said I couldn’t, and there haven’t been any accidents. The only thing I haven’t done yet is take a test.’
‘Well…’ Mr Fender picked up his pen. ‘That should be easy enough to arrange.’ He would have liked to call Miss Murajee first to check that there was no risk, but she was away in Ireland doing a course on Seeing into the Future.
‘I’ll tell the staff, and one of them can give you a test some time this morning. Then we’ll know for certain, eh?’
In the staffroom at break that morning, when Mr Fender asked if any of his teachers would like to give Nicholas a test as a final demonstration that all was well, his request was met with a distinct lack of enthusiasm. Everyone remembered all too clearly what had happened before.
In the end, it was Mr Daimon who stepped forward and offered to give his class a short test on thermodynamics. He said Nicholas had done more than anyone to help turn his life around and that, in the circumstances, it was the least he could do.
While the test was going on, Mr Fender hovered outside in the corridor, occasionally peering in through the window of the science room to check that everything was all right. He rather admired the way that Mr Daimon constantly reassured the class that it was perfectly safe and there was nothing to worry about, and only someone very close would have seen the slight beads of perspiration on his forehead.
Nicholas did the test, and nothing happened. It might be hard to believe that doing a test in school could make you happy, but Nicholas could not have been more pleased. It was the last sign that his life was completely back to normal, and the delight shone in his face.
Mr Fender came in at the end of the lesson and Nicholas showed him the finished paper. The headmaster looked down the answers, nodding with satisfaction.
‘Excellent,’ he said. ‘All we need to do now is teach you to get some of them right.’
The Unluckiest Boy in the World Page 9