A Box of Nothing

by Peter Dickinson

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  A Box of Nothing

  Peter Dickinson

  Chapter 1: The Nothing Shop

  There was nowhere to hide. Mum had just turned the corner of Floral Street and she didn’t see James only because she was shouting over her shoulder at Angie to hurry her up. The gold September sunlight glittered off the shafts of the buggy. Mum stood there, round as a jug because of the next baby, and the twist of her head to yell at Angie and the push of her body to hold the buggy gave her a look of fighting her way into a wind, though there wasn’t a whisper of one in the long, empty Street. In a couple of secs she’d look around and see James.

  Opposite him lay the Borough Dump. Kevin at school said there was a loose bit of the fence where you could slip through, but James didn’t know where it was, and anyway Mum would be bound to spot him dashing across the street and then it would be worse still. There were swarms of rats in the Dump, Mum said, and you could get Weil’s disease from rats, whatever that was.

  This side of the street there were only the blank brick walls of warehouses, and between them, just where James was standing, the Nothing Shop. James flattened himself into its doorway. She’d see him when she came past, of course. He’d have to think of a story.

  He couldn’t make thoughts begin. Instead he stared across the street at the sunlit mounds of rubbish above the iron fence. If he half closed his eyes so that his eyelashes blurred things, he could make the mounds into a great range of mountains, miles away, streaked with snow and glaciers where the white enamel flanks of cookers or dishwashers made part of the slopes. The scavenging gulls became enormous—huger than eagles they’d have to be for him to see them from so far off. He blurred the scene a bit more and the rusty iron fence became streaky and stretched out into a sort of iron sea between the street and the mountains …

  It was no use thinking of a story. Mum wouldn’t believe him. He could hear them now, Mum’s scolding quack at Angie and the gargle of a twin pretending it could talk and the twitter of the loose buggy wheel. Best thing was to jump out and shout “Boo!” and pretend he’d been hiding there for that.

  He leaned against the door, tensing for the ambush.

  Behind him he heard a click. The door moved. It creaked. It was open.

  He twisted, slipped through, and closed it behind him.

  It was just what he’d imagined inside. Windows so filthy that they turned the sunlight grey. A bare counter, with empty shelves behind it. Dust, cobwebs, silence.

  It wasn’t really called the Nothing Shop—that was just the name he gave it in his mind. The writing on the board over the door was so flaked you couldn’t read it. Ages ago, Dad said, there used to be streets of little slum houses where the Dump was now, too run-down to be done up the way Floral Street had been. So they’d all been pulled down and no one used the street except a few families taking the short cut to school, and the garbage trucks. There was no one for the Nothing Shop to sell things to, so it just stood there waiting for the Dump to be cleared away and made into a park, like the Borough Council kept promising.

  James was poised by the door with his ear against the crack so that he’d know when Mum had gone past when he heard, behind him, a creak. He froze. Soft footsteps slithered. A floorboard creaked again.

  “Yes?” said a quiet voice.

  He forced himself around. The man behind the counter looked old, and dusty as the shop in the grey light, but not actually doddering. He wore a dark grey smock and peered at James over the lenses of tiny half-moon spectacles.

  “And what can we do for you, sir?” he said.

  “Nothing,” said James.

  “Any special brand of nothing?”

  Mum’s dad was like that, always picking up things you’d said and giving them meanings you didn’t mean. James knew how to play.

  “Best you’ve got,” he said. “Looks as if you’ve got plenty.”

  The man raised a spidery grey hand and ran it up the bald strip above his forehead.

  “Not much call for quality these days,” he said. “People don’t seem to have the time.”

  “I want only the best. Not that ordinary stuff on those shelves.”

  “Well, now, we’ll have to see.”

  The man reached under the counter and pulled out a thing like a wooden chair, but when he tilted the top over it became a short stepladder. Gripping the shelves to steady himself, he climbed to the top step, then began to grope around on the highest shelf. He grunted and climbed back down.

  “Knew we had a bit left somewhere,” he said.

  He put on the counter a square box, only a couple of inches across, made of thick old brown cardboard. When he blew the dust off it James saw the letter O stencilled on the lid in purple ink. Probably the Nothing Shop used to sell boxes, along with stationery and other things, and size O was the smallest one.

  “How old are you, then, sir?” said the man.

  “Ten and a bit,” said James.

  “And how old is the world, would you imagine?”

  He must have been watching the same TV program as James, only last night, all about the Big Bang, and Black Holes, and quasars, and other stuff James thought especially interesting and Mum thought especially pointless and boring.

  “Four and a half billion years,” said James.

  “Near enough for practical purposes,” said the man. “What about the universe, then?”

  “They’re still arguing.”

  “Taking their time, aren’t they? Long enough to think it out, considering.”

  “Anyway, there was this big bang and it all went whoosh and started.”

  “Right. And before the bang, what?”

  “Nothing. No space. No here or there or anywhere. No time, either. It doesn’t make sense, but that’s what they say.”

  “All right. Now what we have here, young sir, is a bit of that original nothing. Very best nothing there’s ever been. You’re lucky to find us still in stock. Been no call for it, not for donkey’s years, like I was saying.”

  “How much?” said James.

  The man picked up the box and peered at the bottom.

  “Must have been in here a good few years,” he said. “Zero pounds, zero pence—what’s that add up to?”

  “Zero.”

  “There you are, then.”

  James dug his hand into his jeans pocket, took out an imaginary purse, mimed it open, and counted some pinches of air into the man’s palm.

  “Thank you, sir,” said the man. “Will that be everything?”

  “Yes, thank you.”

  As James picked the box off the counter the man pressed the keys of an invisible cash register. He was good. He almost made James think he heard the ping of a bell as the imaginary drawer slid open. He counted the money into separate compartments and slapped the drawer shut.

  Although it was only cardboard, the box had a good solid feel to it. Even if there was nothing in it, it wasn’t the sort of rubbish people give away for a joke. James turned toward the door, expecting to be called back. He would have liked to keep the box. It was interesting. For one thing there didn’t seem to be any way of opening it. He turned it over and looked at the bottom. There was something written there in pencil, spidery slanting figures—£0.00. But that meant …

  He looked over his shoulder. There was nobody behind the counter.

  Chapter 2: The Fence

  Mum was right outside on the sidewalk. It
was sheer bad luck—she hadn’t spotted him trying to hide and waited, but Angie had skipped a shoe off and Mum had stopped to put it on. She’d got her glove in her mouth to tie the knot so she wasn’t quacking, and the twins had stopped gargling because they did sometimes, and the buggy wasn’t being pushed so there was no twitter from its wheel. No warning at all.

  “James!”

  “Hello, Mum.”

  “What are you doing here?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Why aren’t you at school?”

  “I don’t know.”

  That wasn’t true. He was late for school because he was frightened of Mrs. Last, having to explain to her he still hadn’t found a seed and drawn the picture of the plant it grew from. The first homework that term. Supposed to be an easy one to start with, only it wasn’t James’s sort of thing. Yesterday he’d told Mrs. Last he’d left it at home. Everyone else had brought theirs—an ear of barley and a drawing of a barley stalk, an acorn and an oak, a hip and a rosebush, a coconut and a palm, even. No problem, only James’s pictures always came out somehow messy.

  He’d actually started on a horse-chestnut-tree picture last night and he’d been going to pick up a horse chestnut on his way to school from the tree growing just inside the dump fence, only there’d been the TV program about Black Holes and things and he’d tried to draw and watch at the same time and made even more of a mess than usual and now he couldn’t even find a chestnut in the road because the garbage trucks had squashed them all, so …

  “What’s that you’ve got?” said Mum.

  “Oh, nothing.”

  “What do you mean, nothing? Only word you know, is it?”

  “It’s a box of nothing. The man gave it to me.”

  “What man?”

  (You mustn’t talk to men you didn’t know, especially not let them give you things.)

  “In there.”

  Mum frowned at the shop. Of course she’d seen it before, hundreds of times, but she wouldn’t have really looked at it, or wondered. It wasn’t her idea of an interesting place—old, filthy, silent, strange.

  “He’s the sales clerk, I suppose,” said James. “I mean he was wearing a sort of coat like they do. He gave me a box of nothing and I gave him nuppence for it. It’s only a joke, Mum. Like Granddad’s.”

  It was a mistake bringing Granddad in. Mum was fond of him, of course, but he annoyed her, like a picture she couldn’t get to hang straight.

  “Well, you’re going right back in and giving it back to him,” she snapped, “or I’ll be giving you something. Quick now. I haven’t got all morning.”

  James sighed and turned. At least it had taken her mind off him being late for school. The door wouldn’t budge. He put all his weight against it, but he could tell from the feel that it wasn’t just locked. It was shut tighter than that, bolted top and bottom, nailed through, hinges rusted fast, spiderwebs across the cracks.

  But he’d … And Mum had seen him coming out, hadn’t she? No she hadn’t because she’d been doing Angie’s shoe. A twin started to whine.

  “Thought so,” said Mum. “Nobody opened that door to my knowledge these ten years. I’m beginning to think you’ve got too much imagination for your own good, my boy. Picked it up in the street, didn’t you?”

  (That was another rule. You didn’t pick things up, especially in this street, where they’d probably fallen off one of the trucks, which meant they’d come out of someone’s garbage bin.)

  “Hand it over, then,” said Mum.

  James longed to refuse. There was something really strange about the box, and the price on the bottom, and the man in the shop, and the door, which really had been open a few minutes back. But Mum was always too strong for him, too certain what she thought and wanted. It was as if her mind, not his, made his arm reach out and open the grip of his fingers so that she could take the box. She locked the brake of the buggy and strode with her pregnant waddle into the middle of the Street. James got his own will back and scampered after her.

  “Oh, please, Mum …”

  She swung her arm back and threw the box over the fence. It seemed to float as it flew, sunlit against the pale sky, before curving down to join the rest of the rubbish. Without noticing what he was doing, James took a few paces after it. It fell out of sight just below an old broken kitchen cabinet painted a horrible yellow and mauve.

  There was a rumble down the street. Two garbage trucks had turned the corner of Floral Street, loaded with the discards of hundreds of houses. They churned up toward James. Mum had turned back the moment she’d slung the box and was already on the sidewalk, looking to see where he’d gone.

  “James!” she screeched. “Wait! Get back! Stay on that side! Right against the fence!”

  He trotted forward and flattened himself against the corrugated iron. Waiting for the trucks to pass, he glanced down at the strip beside him and saw that it was half loose. The nails that held the bottom and the middle had fallen out or had been pulled out and it was only hanging from the top. Slipping his hand between it and the one behind, he found he could sway it outward a few inches. Then it stuck because the one beyond overlapped it and held it firm.

  The first truck came grinding past. James hesitated. The moment the second one hid him from the far sidewalk he crouched right down, tugged the iron sheet as far as it would go, and scraped himself through the slit. The fence clashed back into place before the truck was past.

  Vanishing trick, he thought. That’ll teach her for chucking my box away like that. Now …

  He straightened to look for his landmark, the yellow and mauve cabinet halfway up the rubbish pile. What he saw was something quite different.

  When James had slipped through the fence it had been almost pure impulse. His idea, if you could call it that, was to find the box and hide it just inside the fence, and then pick it up on his way back from school. He wouldn’t tell Mum, though. He’d just pretend it was a quick tease for chucking his box away. She’d go mad, of course, and babble on about the rats and Weil’s disease, but it wouldn’t last. She was always too busy with the next thing to stay angry for long about the last one. And it ought to be easy to find the box with that horrible cabinet to go by. But it wasn’t there.

  Instead, James saw a mauve and yellow cliff. It was a long way up the slope, much farther than Mum could possibly throw, farther than from home to school, which meant more than a mile.

  Frightened, he swung back to scramble through the fence and get away.

  The fence had gone. Its colour was still there, and some of its shape, but changed and stretched out flat and enormous. James was standing on the shore of an iron-grey sea, flecked with patches of rust colour, and covered with very regular small round waves. It stretched away and away toward the skyline. From beyond that unreachable horizon his name was being called. He couldn’t hear it, but he could feel it.

  Chapter 3: The Dump

  A stream flowed down from the mountain. It was a real mountain, but there was something wrong with it, not just that there didn’t seem to be a tree or a bush or a blade of grass anywhere, but something else. There was something wrong with the stream, too. A little way up the slope it flowed over a ledge into a pool, and James could see that the water—if it was water—was a bright browny orange. Blobs of yellow foam floated on the pool, and the surface between them shimmered with rainbow colours.

  All along the shore of the iron sea, like a sort of high-tide mark, was a line of ordinary garbage. James picked his way through it and started to climb the slope. The ground was a jumble of rocks, with soft places between, but the rocks were funny shapes. James stared at one, puzzling over what was wrong with it, and suddenly saw that although it looked and felt like an ordinary seaside rock it had once been something else, some kind of machine, part of a stereo system perhaps, which had turned into rock somehow and then got worn at the corners. T
he whole slope was like that, made of people’s discards that had turned into rocks. Gone fossil. The soft places between crunched like breakfast cereal when he trod there. The whole mountain had once been garbage. It was high enough for its peak to be streaked with snow. Three enormous white birds were circling around the peak with the slow, drifting flight of gulls.

  When he’d climbed far enough to see over the fence, supposing the fence had still been there, James turned again. He knew it wouldn’t work, but he couldn’t help hoping that from up here he would be able to see that it really was only a fence, and Mum would be there on the sidewalk in front of the Nothing Shop, yelling at him to come back. But all he saw was the sky, and the vague horizon, and the iron ridges of the sea. He shut his eyes and counted slowly to twenty before he opened them, but he still couldn’t make the fence come back. What’s more, it wasn’t going to, not until he found his box of nothing. All this had something to do with that. It was obvious. And he would never get home without it.

  So he turned his back on the sea and climbed on, scrambling up the fossil rubbish. It wasn’t difficult or dangerous, but it was hard work. Whenever he stopped for a rest he checked on the birds. They really were gulls, he decided, even though they were far too big. But then everything was too big. Down on the shore the rubbish had seemed sort of normal, but up here things, where he could recognize them, were enormous. The cupboard he was aiming for had become a great cliff. A fossil shoe was a yard across.

  Or had he become small? He didn’t think so. If you shrank that much, all your veins and things would shrink too. They’d become much too thin for the blood to get through. Dad had explained about that when they’d been watching a science-fiction movie about doctors being made tiny to go and fix something inside somebody’s body. Anyway, James felt perfectly ordinary, apart from being frightened.

  There were two kinds of fright—fright at the strangeness and the lostness, and fear of the gulls. The gulls were bigger than eagles, as big as aeroplanes. He thought of gulls at the seaside. They have a mean look and they snap things up. These were big enough to snap up a boy if they glided this way and spotted him scrambling over the rocks. There was nowhere to hide on the bleak slope. He’d better be quick and find that box.