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    A Box of Nothing
    A Box of Nothing
    A Box of Nothing
    Ebook144 pages3 hours

    A Box of Nothing

    By Peter Dickinson

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    About this ebook

    For one young boy, a box full of nothing is a ticket to adventure

    While skipping school, James sees his mother on the street. He ducks inside an abandoned store, where an aged shopkeeper asks what he wants to buy. When James says “nothing,” the old man sells it to him: a heavy cardboard box stuffed full of top-quality nothing. James tries to explain this to his mother, but she doesn’t believe him and throws the box over the fence and into the dump. He sneaks in to retrieve his new possession—and finds himself trapped in another world.

    The dump is an eerie place populated by hyperintelligent rats, monstrous seagulls, and a very clever pile of garbage called the Burra. Once it was a thriving community, but something strange has happened, and the dump has become stuck in time. To get back home, James must help the Burra save the dump—using all the nothing he can find.

    This ebook features an illustrated personal history of Peter Dickinson including rare images from the author’s collection.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherOpen Road Media
    Release dateFeb 24, 2015
    ISBN9781504003001
    A Box of Nothing
    Author

    Peter Dickinson

    Peter Dickinson is one of the most acclaimed and respected writers of our time and has won nearly every major literary award for his children's novels. THE KIN, his first book for Macmillan, was shortlisted for the Carnegie Medal in 1999, as was THE ROPEMAKER in 2001. Peter is currently writing the sequel to THE ROPEMAKER, due October 2006. His most recent book for Macmillan, THE GIFT BOAT, was described by Books for Keeps as 'a masterpiece, gripping, the work of a major writer at his very best.' Peter was one of the three shortlisted candidates for the first Children's Laureate. He lives in Hampshire.

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    • 5/5
      Marvellous. Opens your heart and mind to the universe that is above, beyond and inside of you. Like a great music, tells so much without explaining. One of the things that alone can make a change in the life. It doesn't matter how old you are. And you'd certainly be blessed to read it at the age of James, the main character. Thank you Mr. Dickinson.

    Book preview

    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

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