CHAPTER 1
I’m Nobody! Who are you? Are you Nobody, too? Then there’s a pair of us - don’t tell! They’d banish us, you know.
[Emily Dickinson: I’m Nobody! Who are you?]
Lot was a Nobody. Lot was a nobody. Sometimes, life deals you a right melon.
Unwittingly, by the lunch bell, Lot Nobody’s life was to hatch the beginnings of change. For the better? Well, that was to be decided, but one thing was for sure: in the next half an hour Lot was going to find himself cold, dizzy, and worryingly naked.
It was a cold Tuesday morning in March, but this Tuesday morning had been seized by the scruff, dragged through a cow, who was standing in a pond, farting like a misfiring motorcycle.
In summary, it was bad. Very bad.
The school playing fields were an unappetizing bog of mud and drizzle, and currently the school year captains were selecting teams for the annual sports contest.
It was an event that no-one looked forward to, except the athletic sporty boys of course. They’d all had a growth spurt early in their teens, and clung on to their supremacy like the precarious hotshot on a bucking bronco, knowing that eventually everybody is swept off, out into the adult world where the bigger fish roam.
Lot huffed through his nose. Why do I have to be so blimmin’ mediocre, he scolded himself? Lot had always existed on the periphery of people’s vision, never really noticed by anyone, yet never really making himself noticed. He’d drifted through life unspectacularly - in a crowd of people you’d look right past him. Lot often thought he’d make a great Where’s Wally, cos even in red stripes he was difficult to spot.
‘I guess we’ll have, oh, that one then,’ said Phil Malloy, a human colossus possessing mean eyes and a Neanderthal forehead. He was pointing at Lot like he’d never seen him before.
The Head of Physical Education, Mr Dimmock, hastily scanned down his register trying to match the boy’s face to a name, despite having been Lot’s teacher for the past four and a half years. ‘Err, picked last for the Red team, it’s, err … Lot Nobody?’
At the sound of his name, thunder clapped ominously across the dark sky, and just for a moment Lot Nobody thought he felt a strange tugging at his clothes, like something or somebody was trying to strip him bare. Odd, he thought, but ignored it.
‘Down to the chump change now lads,’ Phil laughed, calling out to the other team captains. Lot silently wondered if that also included him, or if he was slightly better – shrapnel maybe, half a crown at best. Certainly no doubloon.
At the peril of pigeonholing him, to characterize Lot was simply to state that he was bang-on average. For his age, he was standard - standard height, standard weight, standard shape. Even his ears were of the standard variety, the horror.
Lot’s knees were the typical level of knobbly-ness, his face was adorned with enough of the basic features required, and his chest was tanned, muscular and smooth. Yeah he wished - no, it was conventionally pale, flat and slightly hairy.
‘I think I’d rather pick my eighty year old Grandma,’ Lee Partridge, Green Team Captain, complained, stretching out his hamstrings.
In all seriousness though, being a nobody was the great disaster of Lot’s life. Unlike everybody else - or so it seemed to him - he was just plain, straight-down-the-middle, ordinary. Nothing in the way of excitement ever happened to him. Of course, he was only sixteen years of age, and not yet wise to the fortunes of the world, or to the fact that most teenagers suffered this same clouded perspective upon the tragedy of youth.
‘Eeny, Meeny, Miny, Moe …’ The Blue Team Captain, Toby Cheeseman, was struggling to choose from what was left. ‘Catch a douchebag by the toe …’
In fact, Lot Nobody was sixteen years old as of today. A grand day for most, yet no-one had even said hello to him, let alone lavished him with gifts and birthday greetings. It mildly troubled him, but only deep down where he pushed most of his anxieties, together with those irritatingly catchy show tunes he could never get out of his head.
Sighing at life, Lot grabbed a red bib from the coloured pile on the grass and trailed it forlornly behind him, trudging over to join his new team. On the way, he absent-mindedly scratched at his backside – a very itchy bum was his burden to bear in life.
Phil Malloy had already forgotten about his latest acquisition, and was busily discussing tactics with the other boys, menacingly threatening them with the price of failure. ‘We lose, and it’s head flushing time,’ he snarled, towering over the nervous troop.
Lot tuned him out, bored of how ludicrously hostile Phil’s competitiveness could get. At their Junior school, Phil had once filled the inside of a conker with Polyfilla, smashing poor Sammy Tucker’s legendary 89-er to smithereens. It was like Mike Tyson punching an orange.
‘Sidebottom, begrudgingly selected by Toby for the Blue team. Grab a bib from the pile, boy.’
Instead, Lot looked back to where he’d just walked from and saw the new boy, Ethan Longbow, looking slightly bedraggled in an ill-fitting and now soaking wet sports kit. Ethan was hopping from foot to foot like he needed the toilet, standing on his tiptoes in a desperate attempt to look taller. He had started at the school two weeks ago - a whirling dervish of manic enthusiasm, who annoyed and amused in equal measures.
Through the blurry rain, Ethan looked even shorter than his small figure suggested, his bright blond hair - usually resembling a yellow Lego helmet - pasted to his head like smeared lemon curd.
‘Spencer Packham, come on, you’re on Green team.’
To some, Ethan conveyed the image of a baby chimp bursting with innocent eagerness, his desperation to please clearly the chief detail getting in the way of his actual popularity. Maybe everybody didn’t love a trier?
‘Okay squirt, you’re with us.’
Lot was jolted from his reverie by the Team Captain’s voice, and Ethan jubilantly trotted towards that magnificent finger plucking him from the crowd, almost punching the air with delight.
‘You absolute plank,’ Phil Malloy hollered, bursting Ethan’s joyous bubble, as Mr Dimmock’s over-bearing voice rang out. ‘Ethan Longbow, fifteenth member of the Yellow team, and last pick overall.’
Ethan about-turned to discover that he had, in fact, emerged from a lone crowd of one - the only choice available. It didn’t seem to faze him though, and he shrugged it off with a smile, evidently thrilled to have been picked at all.
‘Right then lads, gather round and listen up,’ Mr Dimmock announced, beckoning the teenagers unsuccessfully towards him, his mammoth nose twitching with self-importance. ‘Come on boys, stop hugging yourselves, you girls.’
School rules decreed that all boys had to wear ‘shorts for sports’, no matter the weather or the season. But whilst they all froze their goolies off in the biting cold, there was Mr Dimmock, dressed in full tracksuit, bobble hat and gloves, having driven out onto the school fields in his Ford transit van.
Mr Dimmock was an arse of immense proportions.
‘First up is Cross Country,’ he continued, oblivious to the groans, ‘one full lap of the school grounds. Your individual positions will score points towards your team’s total. For some though, not that many, hey?’ he finished, winking at Ethan.
The boys collected together in their team colours at the start line, Lot hovering nearer the back despite being a pretty decent runner. He figured he’d just stick to somewhere in the middle once things got going - he didn’t want to come last, but worse, he definitely didn’t want to go on and win the stupid thing. As Mr Dimmock blew the whistle to begin, Lot realised he was dreamily humming the theme tune from Oliver Twist.
Shaking the lyrics from his dismally feeble mind, Lot jogged after the others, not slowly, but not particularly straining himself. The route they were taking was the same every year: across the grass, weave through the tree edges of the fields, avoid any gnarly roots and patches of stinging nettles, turn left at the far rugby posts, hop over the crocodile swamp, and then sprint past the tennis courts to the finish.
Okay, okay, so there were no crocodiles, but on a waterlogged day like this who knew, there might be the odd eel or piranha swimming around out there.
‘Hey, wait up, hey, hey,’ Lot heard a voice yell as he entered the trees.
‘Come on mate, you’re killing me,’ the same voice continued breathlessly, ‘making me run and shout at the same time.’
Lot wondered why whoever it was they were shouting at couldn’t seem to hear anything.
‘Lot, that’s it, hey Lot, slow down a bit man, I wanna talk to you. Slow. Down.’
Thoroughly taken aback at hearing his own name aloud, Lot came to a dead stop, and somebody careered straight into the rear of him, rebounding backwards. Hardly trusting what his most standard of ears could have heard, Lot turned slowly to see Ethan Longbow lying in a heap on his bum, grinning like a cat who’s just received his adoption papers and discovered he’s from Cheshire.
‘You, you, you can see me?’ Lot stammered, confused, pushing his exasperatingly brown hair out of his depressingly brown eyes. Ethan, meanwhile, brushed some wet leaves off his short legs and bounced back up.
‘This is really fun,’ Ethan began animatedly as they resumed their jogging, ‘we never used to do any of this at my old school. I really like it here, everyone is so friendly and welcoming. Our team captain even told me earlier that he specifically chose me for the squad with the high jump in mind, which is really great. Not that I’ve ever done high jump before, but hey, if he has the confidence in me, then it must be something I’m gonna be awesome at, right?’
Lot Nobody silently mused upon how Ethan Longbow could have such a positive outlook on everything - I doubt he’s ever going to stop being so optimistic, Lot gloomily thought.
Ethan wiped the rain off his face with a wet hand, and it appeared to Lot momentarily like he’d smudged all of the freckles that lined his cheeks into sharp, brown lines. Lot dismissed it as an illusion created by the water, but then again, it had been a very weird day.
For instance: he’d woken up this morning lying on his pyjamas rather than them being on his body; a seagull had followed him to school as if he smelt of putrid fish; and in conjunction with regular dizzy spells, he’d been hearing the constant sounds of waves crashing upon a shore, even though he’d never been near a beach in his life.
‘Did you know that it can sometimes rain animals?’ Ethan rattled on, gazing at the sky in anticipation. ‘Wouldn’t that be great? I’d personally want it to rain me down a unicorn. Imagine galloping over the finishing line riding one of those beauties. Do they come in different colours, or can you only get white ones?’
‘Err, I think it’s more like frogs and fish in the rain,’ Lot responded, so surprised at hearing his own voice again that he barely thought to correct the validity of unicorns.
‘Well that’d be okay too, I guess. Ideally the frogs would have wheels though. I saw a classic video on YouTube last night where a frog was on a roller-skate with a firework attached to it, and it fired straight up a ramp and into a pond. It was amazing how they got the frog to sit so still, but he definitely seemed to enjoy it.’
Lot didn’t have the heart to tell Ethan that all was probably not well in that film clip. Or that the type of person recording such a cruel thing would be of the same mould sniggering at him later on in the high jump.
‘Oh my gosh, I’m Ethan by the way, Ethan Longbow. And you’re Lot, yes, Lot Nobody, what a funny name. Did you choose it yourself?’ he asked, without a hint of malice.
‘No, my Grandad picked it apparently,’ Lot said, smiling in spite of himself. ‘It means secret, or hidden, or something along those lines.’
Low in the sky, the grey clouds appeared to pull themselves tighter together, the already gloomy conditions becoming further overcast. The mist swirled around the trees like tendrils of smoke, coiling and merging and looping to form a deeper layer of fog.
Without warning, a loud clap of thunder rolled out across the fields, knocking everybody slightly off balance - enough that they had to check their stride. Feeling giddy again as a result, Lot could only just make out the curve through the trees up ahead, leading them out of cover and onto the rugby pitch.
But through the settling - and rather unsettling - haze, it now seemed like the trees were collectively bending towards each other, creaking and cracking on the wind, narrowing the path and entwining their canopies to intensify the darkness.
As the path constricted, Lot slowed a fraction, allowing Ethan to run ahead. They were making good time, even with Ethan’s incessant chatter, and although no-one was near them that he could tell, they certainly weren’t last. With any luck, they’d get to the finish line soon, the rest of the day would be cancelled, and everybody would be back inside for a nice cup of tea.
That thought of a warm brew spurred Lot onwards, but as he attempted to pick up speed, his trailing foot caught on a stray root, sending him tumbling into the shadows of fog in front of him.
Had he had time to deliberate it, Lot may have alleged in whispered tones that the root itself had stretched out on purpose, wrapping a crooked finger around his trainer and tugging him off his feet. But with the snaking murkiness beneath giving the impression that his body had gone fully into orbit, Lot’s brain was currently using all of its deductive powers to establish at what point in time his averagely fleshy face was about to connect sickeningly with the hard, unyielding ground.
Another rumble of thunder fractured the air, roaring through like a low flying 747. Ethan yelped, the trees groaned, the world spun, and before Lot’s chin struck the dirt, he completely, totally and utterly disappeared.
