The Unluckiest Boy in the World

by Andrew Norriss

  It was exactly what Nicholas wanted to hear and he could not have been more pleased, although, as he pointed out to Miss Murajee, there was still one problem to overcome.

  The letter from his father had said they would like him to come to America ‘if his mother agreed’, and Nicholas was not sure his mother would agree at all. He had a feeling she might think going to America was being disloyal in some way. Or that she might say he could go if he wanted, but make it clear she would be very upset if he did.

  ‘You don’t know that she’ll be upset,’ said Miss Murajee, ‘and if she is, you can change your mind. But I think you should ask.’

  So Nicholas did ask and, to his surprise, Mrs Frith not only agreed but thought it was an excellent idea.

  ‘I was wondering what to do with you in August,’ she said. ‘I’m going to be standing in as Manager then, while Mr Ryder’s in Scotland. I’ll need to work all sorts of odd hours and I was wondering who to get to look after you.’

  The final barrier was down, and Nicholas could hardly believe it. He had had very little to look forward to in the last year and a half, but now everything seemed to be coming together. He had found a friend, he had found a school that could cope with the curse, his mother had a job, the disasters were getting fewer every day – and he was going to America to see his father and meet his brother and sisters.

  At the end of school that day, he walked back to Carlton Place with Fiona, in a mood of deep content. As they crossed the park, it began to rain, but he didn’t mind. When they ran for shelter under the nearest tree, he even found he was laughing. Who cared about getting wet in a thunderstorm when you knew you were going to America?

  At the tree, they found an elderly couple already sheltering under their umbrellas. The storm seemed to have blown up out of nowhere and taken most people by surprise. It was only four o’clock, but the sky was dark and tremendous thunderclaps rumbled through the air, following vivid flashes of lightning, while the rain came down in such torrents that it was impossible to see more than a few yards.

  As they huddled together without even a coat, Nicholas glanced up to see the old couple looking down at him.

  ‘Quite a storm, eh?’ said the old man. ‘Here.’ He held out his umbrella. ‘You take this. I’ll share with the wife.’

  ‘Thanks,’ said Nicholas, and he was reaching out to take the offered umbrella, when the lightning struck.

  Lightning travels at about 60,000 miles a second and a single bolt can deliver an electrical charge of anything up to a billion volts at a temperature of 50,000 degrees. This particular bolt hit the metal ferrule at the tip of the umbrella, travelled down its steel shaft and entered the old man. Electricity always seeks the shortest way of getting to ground, so it travelled down his arm, through his body, and into the earth beneath.

  The smile was still frozen on the old man’s face as he fell, and the deafening blast of thunder was still rolling around the park as he landed, face down on the grass, and lay there, the rain splashing on to his back. There was smoke coming from the bottom of his boots. Real smoke, rising into the air in little wisps.

  The wind caught at the umbrella he had been offering to Nicholas and blew it from his grasp. It bowled excitedly away across the park and for a moment Nicholas wondered if he should run after it and fetch it.

  ‘What happened?’ The old woman was staring down at her husband. ‘Did he trip over something? Is he all right?’

  ‘Call an ambulance,’ said Fiona as she knelt down and gently rolled the man on to his back before loosening his shirt and tie. She listened to his chest for a moment then pulled open his mouth, put his head back, pinched his nose and carefully breathed into his lungs. While Nicholas dialled 999 on his mobile, the old woman was still asking what had happened.

  ‘I don’t understand,’ she kept saying. ‘I was looking the other way. What happened to him?’

  Fiona did not answer. She concentrated instead on blowing air into the old man’s lungs. Blow… check the rise of his chest… watch it fall again… wait… blow again. That was what they had taught her to do in the St John Ambulance class and they had told her you should keep doing it until someone more qualified told you to stop. So that’s what she did.

  The ambulance arrived very quickly. It came careering towards them over the sodden grass with the paramedics jumping out before it had even come to a halt, but both Nicholas and Fiona already knew it was no good.

  The old man – neither of them even knew his name – was dead.

  CHAPTER TEN

  ‘Thank you so much for coming.’ Mrs Frith ushered Miss Murajee into the hall. ‘We didn’t know who else to call, and I’ve been so worried.’

  ‘Where is he?’ asked Miss Murajee.

  ‘He’s upstairs. He came in after… after it happened, went up to bed and he’s been there ever since.’

  Fiona was standing at the bottom of the stairs, looking rather solemn. ‘He won’t talk to us or anything,’ she said.

  ‘He won’t talk, he won’t eat…’ Mrs Frith was clearly worried. ‘All he does is lie there.’

  ‘Right…’ Miss Murajee nodded. ‘I’ll see what I can do.’

  She went upstairs to Nicholas’s room. The curtains were drawn, but in the dim light she could see him lying on the bed, his face to the wall. He did not move or speak as she came in.

  ‘Nicholas?’ Miss Murajee walked over to the bed. ‘What is this? What’s going on?’

  There was no answer.

  ‘Nicholas!’ Her voice was firm and commanding. ‘You have to talk to me.’

  ‘There’s nothing to talk about,’ said Nicholas eventually. ‘I killed him, didn’t I?’

  ‘The old man in the park? Is that what this is about?’

  ‘It’s bad enough when people around me get injured, but when they start dying…’

  ‘The way I heard it,’ said Miss Murajee, ‘is that a man in the park was struck by lightning, and that you and Fiona did everything you could to help. You called for an ambulance, she did first aid, and his wife was very grateful.’

  ‘She doesn’t know, though, does she?’ said Nicholas. ‘She doesn’t know it was my fault.’

  ‘And you do?’ Miss Murajee sat on the edge of the bed. ‘How do you know it wasn’t a coincidence? That it wouldn’t have happened anyway?’

  ‘I’m a lightning conductor,’ said Nicholas. ‘You told me that yourself.’

  ‘Oh, come on! I didn’t mean it literally! Plenty of people get hit by lightning. Are you the cause of it every time? Of course you’re not.’

  Nicholas refused to be consoled. He had thought that his life was getting back to normal, and he had been wrong. His life could never be normal. He had been a fool ever to think it could. A fool to think he could live like other children. A fool to think he could go to America and meet his father…

  His face still turned to the wall, a tear trickled down his cheek.

  ‘Bad things happen to people,’ said Miss Murajee softly. ‘They happen to all of us. It doesn’t mean it’s your fault.’

  ‘So whose fault is it?’ asked Nicholas. ‘People around me get hurt. Yesterday it was an old man in the park – who’s next? Fiona? My mum? You?’ He took a deep breath. ‘It has to stop. It can’t go on like this. It has to stop.’

  ‘Ah…’ Miss Murajee nodded. ‘So that’s the plan. You’re going to lie here in the dark until you die, is that it? You think that’s going to help?’

  ‘It has to stop,’ Nicholas repeated doggedly. ‘If I go anywhere it means someone gets hurt.’

  There was a pause before Miss Murajee spoke again.

  ‘You asked me once if I could do anything to lift the curse. Well, I can’t, but I’ve been doing some reading, talking to a few Mends and… it seems there might be a way.’

  Nicholas rolled on to his back and looked at her for the first time.

  ‘A way to lift the curse?’

  ‘Possibly.’

  ‘You can get rid of it? Comple
tely?’

  ‘I can’t,’ said Miss Murajee. ‘I told you. It’s beyond my strength to remove. But it seems there is one person who might be able to resist it, despite its power.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘You,’ said Miss Murajee. ‘It’s you.’ She stood up. ‘Come and see me when you’re feeling better and we’ll talk about it.’

  The doctor had said that Nicholas should take as much time as he needed to recover from the shock of the events in the park, so the next morning, instead of going to school, he went round to Miss Murajee’s house and knocked on the door.

  She led him through the hallway of the little terraced house into a tiny walled garden at the back. The ground was covered with flowers and strangely scented herbs in dozens of pots and baskets and stone troughs. There were more plants growing in boxes on the brick walls all round, and Miss Murajee picked her way through the greenery to a table with two chairs before motioning Nicholas to sit down.

  ‘I’ll warn you now,’ she said, ‘it’s not going to be easy. What I’m going to ask you to do will seem strange and you’ll need to be very determined to do it. You’ll wonder soon why you started it, but you’ll have to promise to go on with it anyway and stick with it till it’s finished. Can you do that?’

  Nicholas said that he could. He was a little unnerved by the serious look on Miss Murajee’s face but, if there was any chance of getting rid of Toribio’s curse, he was determined to take it, whatever the cost.

  ‘What do I have to do?’ he asked.

  Miss Murajee did not answer directly. Instead, she said, ‘Do you know what magic is?’

  It was not something Nicholas had ever really thought about, but he presumed it was about learning spells, waving wands and making potions from strange ingredients.

  ‘No, no.’ Miss Murajee waved a hand dismissively. ‘Those things help, of course, but they are not the magic. What magic is…’ She stopped and looked carefully at Nicholas. ‘What magic really is, is believing. That’s what the old wizards and sorcerers used to do, they believed things. They used spells and magic signs and all the other tricks to help them believe things, but the power came from the believing.’

  ‘What Toribio de Cobrales did was set up a belief that anyone who disturbed his grave would be cursed, and it was such a strong belief that even three hundred years later it was still there. When you came along, it was strong enough to make you believe it. And once you believed it, you made it come true.’

  ‘I made it come true?’

  ‘That’s how the magic works. What we believe becomes the truth, and what you have to do now is believe that you’re not unlucky.’

  ‘But I am unlucky,’ said Nicholas.

  ‘You’ve been made to believe that you are,’ Miss Murajee corrected him patiently. ‘And, as I said, we have to change that belief.’

  ‘So what did she tell you to do?’ asked Fiona.

  Sitting with his friend in the classroom the following morning, Nicholas hesitated before answering. What Miss Murajee had told him to do was not what he had expected at all.

  When she had warned him that the work of lifting the spell would be difficult and require every ounce of his determination, he had imagined that it might involve eating weird potions, performing strange rituals or battling unknown demons in a different dimension. But Miss Murajee had not asked him to do anything like that.

  What she had done, was give him five sentences to repeat. He had to say them ten times in the morning when he woke up, ten times in the evening before he went to bed, and once every hour, on the hour, in between.

  ‘Sentences?’ asked Fiona. ‘You mean some sort of spell?’

  Nicholas didn’t think they were a spell. They were just… sentences. The first one was: I am very lucky and good things happen to me all the time.

  ‘But you’re not lucky,’ said Fiona. ‘That’s the whole problem, isn’t it?’

  ‘I know,’ said Nicholas. ‘But she says that saying it will make me think I am.’

  ‘Ah…’ Fiona nodded doubtfully. ‘What are the others?’

  The other sentences were:

  I help the people around me, and good things happen to them all the time.

  I like all animals and birds, and they like me.

  I love gardening and enjoy working with plants.

  I am happy, because I know that whatever happens is all right.

  ‘And Miss Murajee thinks,’ said Fiona, ‘that if you say them often enough, you’ll start to believe them?’

  Nicholas nodded.

  ‘And will that make any difference?’ Fiona hesitated. ‘I mean, even if you believe them, they still won’t actually be true… will they?’

  Nicholas was not sure. He had not entirely followed Miss Murajee’s argument on this, though he did remember that, while she was talking, she had been very convincing.

  Whether he understood or not, however, he was definitely decided on one thing. He was going to give it a try. After the incident in the park, something had to change, and this looked like his only chance. If there were even the remotest possibility of its working, he would do it. For as long as it took.

  He had the sentences written out on a large card and, first thing every morning, he would get out of bed and sit at his desk and read them out loud, ten times. He had a smaller card with the sentences written on that he carried around with him during the day and every hour, on the hour, he would take it out and read them quietly to himself. In the evening, last thing before he went to bed, he would stand in front of his desk again. This time, before he read the sentences, he would take a sprig of dried herbs that Miss Murajee had given him, light the end with a match and, as the smoke rose to the ceiling, read the sentences aloud.

  It might sound simple enough, but Miss Murajee was right when she had warned him it would not be easy. Nicholas found it very difficult to remember to read the sentences at the right time during the day. A lot of times he forgot, and Miss Murajee told him not to worry but to say them when he remembered and try not to forget in future. But he still did. In the end, he bought himself a watch with an alarm that vibrated on his wrist so that he knew it was time – and would take out his card and read it.

  I am very lucky, and good things happen to me all the time…

  Very soon, he knew all the sentences by heart, but he still carried around the card and took it out and read them.

  I help the people around me, and good things happen to them all the time…

  The only trouble was that good things didn’t happen to the people around him all the time. Sometimes, the things that happened to them were very bad. Like the time Miss Bingley got zapped by a robot in her textiles lesson.

  The robot had been built by a talented Year 11 student as his GCSE design tech project, and was programmed to herd sheep. Miss Bingley was a quiet, gentle woman, who was trying to teach 7E how to knit a scarf when, activated by the sound of her voice, the robot unexpectedly came to life and began herding everyone to the far end of the room. It had been fitted, as Miss Bingley sadly discovered, with a cattle prod capable of delivering several hundred volts to any animal that tried to resist it, and in no time the entire class was huddled in a corner of the room with the robot in front of them, wagging its electronic tail.

  They might have been there most of the day if Miss Bingley had not managed to press the panic button on her desk before the robot took her down. In a matter of minutes, Mr Fender had arrived. He took in the situation at a glance, picked up a crow bar from one of the work benches and swiftly disabled the machine.

  Although no one had been seriously hurt, Miss Bingley was visibly shaken – she was still twitching a week later – and several of the children were badly upset. How could he keep saying to himself that good things happened all the time, Nicholas thought, when the opposite was so obviously true? How was he ever going to make himself believe he was helping the people around him when anyone could see that what he was actually doing was making life very difficult for the
m?

  He tried to explain his feelings to Miss Murajee, on her visit to the school the next Wednesday, but she didn’t seem to think there was anything to worry about.

  ‘Sounds to me like some very good things happened,’ she said, placing a fresh sprig of herbs in the vase on the table in the Safe Room. ‘The headmaster’s alarm system worked brilliantly, the problem was sorted before anyone was hurt…’ She looked at Nicholas. ‘What’s wrong with any of that?’

  ‘You know what’s wrong. It wouldn’t have happened if I hadn’t been there, and people do get hurt. They get hurt all the time.’

  Only that morning, a boy in Nicholas’s class had been attacked by a woodpecker trying to drill a hole in his knee. It was not easy to say ‘good things happen to the people around me’ with any conviction, with that sort of thing going on.

  ‘I’ve told you,’ said Miss Murajee, ‘you don’t have to believe it. You just have to say it.’

  ‘But I don’t see how it’s going to help,’ protested Nicholas. ‘I mean, even if I did believe it, it’s still not going to be true, is it? What’s the point of believing something that’s not true?’

  ‘If you believe it,’ said Miss Murajee, ‘then it will be true. That’s how the magic works. When you believe something, you make it happen.’

  ‘Are you sure?’ Nicholas looked at her doubtfully. ‘Most people think it’s the other way round.’

  ‘And most people are wrong,’ said Miss Murajee firmly. She took his head between her hands and her eyes bored down at his. ‘What you are doing has more power than you can possibly imagine. The change is already happening and I promise you, I promise you that this will work. And you will be free.’

  As she spoke, Nicholas could feel determination and confidence flooding through his body. He believed her. If he did what Miss Murajee said, if he followed her advice, if he repeated the sentences every hour as she had instructed, the curse would be lifted and all would be well. He knew it was true!

  So he went home and he did it.

  He did it every morning, every evening and every hour, day after day and week after week.