Arthur Flood wasn’t always known as Arthur of Atlantis. In the beginning he was just a regular Arthur. When he was three days old someone left him outside an orphanage in a small fishing village in the north of Scotland. Mrs Horncastle, the proprietor of the orphanage, presumed Arthur had been left there because he was a bit weird looking. His nose had three nostrils instead of two.

He lived in the orphanage for ten years, all the time drawing rocket ships and dreaming of the stars. Arthur didn’t like living there; the food was totally disgusting, the other orphans made fun of his extra nostril and Mrs Horncastle maintained poor levels of personal hygiene.

Eventually Arthur became so fed up that he ran away to the docks one night and stowed away on a container ship bound for China. The journey was long and boring but it was certainly better than being a Scottish orphan with three nostrils.

One

I never really believed her until now, but my mother always said I was special. I mean, I’m mostly below average in just about every way imaginable if I had to be perfectly honest. I’m not handsome, I don’t have nice hair; my skin is questionable at best. I’m not in any way even remotely athletic. And here’s the most annoying thing. Most people like that, i.e. chubby un-sporty, friendless types, are at least good in the brains department. They might have regrettable faces, boring eyes and be completely undesirable in a physical sort of way, but at least they’ve usually got an above average brain as a consolation prize. At least their impressive grades will eventually lead to places at impressive universities (where they will hopefully meet other physically undesirable types to become lovers with). And those places at impressive universities will lead to impressive jobs with impressive salaries. And of course impressive salaries lead to impressive wives/husbands/lovers all of which will ultimately lead to the last laugh in the faces of the formerly attractive types who now work in factories making horrifyingly dull things like beige bed-pans for old people to defecate in.

        But I didn’t even get the consolation prize. I’m academically and physically below average. I’m an irrelevance. A person destined to go through life completely un-altering the course of human history. I am cold breath on a foggy morning. I am smoke from a cap-gun in a raging house fire. I am dandruff in a blizzard. I am a fart on a farm.

        If my mother and father were still alive I often wonder what they would have made of their lacklustre spawn. It’s not like I’m the one to blame for being a disappointing example of the human race. I mean, what chance did I really have to turn out above average? The odds were stacked against me right from the off when my father was blown off the side of a bloody North Sea oil rig when I was ten years old. It’s a ridiculous way to die but people die in ridiculous ways all the time. People have literally slipped to death on banana skins, choked to death on marshmallows, drowned to death in inch-deep puddles. So a middle aged Scottish man being blown off the side of an oil rig really isn’t all that ridiculous in the grand scheme of things. I mean, he could have been killed by a falling boulder while having intercourse with a chicken (which actually happened to a man in Guatemala). They never found my father’s body. Burial at sea. Fish feast. They gave my mother a box containing his personal belongings. It included a Sony Discman with a CD inside called The Best Father’s Day Album in the World Ever! (a present from me), a dog-eared pornographic magazine and a notebook containing Arthur of Atlantis, the handwritten story my father had written for me. I always found it peculiar that they didn’t consider it potentially insensitive to give a grieving widow her deceased husband’s masturbation material. Especially when the magazine in question was Big‘Uns!, a publication specialising in women with large bosoms. How this made my moderately breasted mother feel, I can only imagine.

        The Arthur of my father’s stories was an Aberdonian orphan who discovers that he is the rightful heir to the throne of Atlantis. It was a bastardised retelling of the King Arthur legend, written in biro and liberally peppered with poorly rendered illustrations. When I was a child, and too foolish to know any better, I was wholeheartedly in love with these stories of adventure, daring and mystery. However, now, after acquiring the maturity and common sense of a fifteen-year-old, it was startlingly apparent just how poorly written it actually was, really nothing more than an incoherent scattering of barely connected vignettes written with all the skill and literary panache of a dyslexic electrician (which was exactly what my father happened to be). One moment Arthur was battling genetic abominations in an underwater colosseum and the next he was flying off to Venus in an effing spaceship. When my mother told me I could take whatever I wanted from the box of my father’s possessions the first thing I reached for was Arthur of Atlantis (closely followed by my father’s Discman and his copy of Big’Uns!). I was but a child at the time and those poorly written pages meant a lot to me. In the months following his death I liked to lie in bed listening to The Best Father’s Day Album in the Word Ever! while reading Arthur of Atlantis. Then, despite feeling little to no attraction to the outrageously proportioned women within, I would fiddle my privy-digit to Big’Uns!, ejaculation forging a spiritual connection with my father in death that we had never shared in life.

        His untimely demise really knocked my mother for six. She eventually became an alcoholic - if she hadn’t been one already - and killed herself two years later via the means of carbon monoxide poisoning in the car that once belonged to my father, a topaz Volvo with a wonky back wiper. She was considered a strange woman, drinking strong tea in thin china and talking to her dead husband on a dusty old HAM radio set.

        Now that I was an official DDO (Double Death Orphan) it was clear that no-one else in the family really wanted to take responsibility for me. I can’t blame them really. Who would want to take charge of a twelve-year-old afflicted with military grade dandruff that wets the bed and suffers from night terrors? My mother’s mother, Nonny Scanlan, eventually drew the short straw and ended up as the unlucky recipient of a full-time grandson in the clutches of grief-stricken puberty. Aunty Dorothea, my father’s sister, drove me to Nonny Scanlan’s house the day after my mother’s death. She didn’t live far from my mother and father so it wasn’t a long drive, but it was a memorable one, mostly because Aunty Dorothea chose to drive me there in the same topaz Volvo with the wonky back wiper that my mother had offed herself in the day before. After dropping me off, she said she was taking the car to the car-wash in preparation for selling it on. But for whatever reason the car never sold, instead becoming a secondary vehicle for my dim-witted Uncle Frank, a supermarket manager with a speech impediment. She probably never even tried to sell it in the first place. Carbon monoxide is supposed to be odourless but there was a smell in there that day, of that I am certain. How nice of my mother to leave me with a parting olfactory memory to haunt my nostrils for the rest of time.

        So at a young age I think it’s fair to say that I was already right up against it. And as if being a tragic DDO wasn’t enough for a twelve-year-old I also had to deal with the perils of being raised by Nonny Scanlan. I don’t doubt that the nature part of my upbringing was mostly responsible for my below average genetic makeup, but nurture wasn’t exactly helping much either. Nonny Scanlan probably did her best, but protestant pensioners in tweed skirts and bras the size of buses are not meant to raise modern forward-thinking boys in 21st century Scotland. She still called coloured people darkies, for crying out loud. She was a powerful woman, six foot tall and built like a Victorian wardrobe. She was permanently disgruntled, drove a red Lada, and looked like the bride of a cave man.

        Not having much money, she dressed me in ill-fitting, dreadfully unstylish attire, mostly obtained from local charity shops; my one pair of denims sporting a patch from Legoland Windsor, a place I have never visited nor intended to. She cut my hair in the kitchen with the same scissors she used for heavy duty tasks like slicing entire newspapers in half to put in the recycling bin. She didn’t have the internet, a DVD player, satellite TV, a computer game machine or anything else that children growing up in the modern era require in order to develop normally. Nonny Scanlan liked Songs of Praise and Countryfile. Hardly a balanced televisual diet for a growing boy taking his first tentative strokes into the world of inexplicable hair growth, spontaneous erections and uncontrollable masturbation. She used to let me watch The Antiques Roadshow as a ‘Sunday treat’ before adding it to her inexhaustible list of forbidden media thanks to Fiona Bruce’s ‘whorishly tight’ cardigans.

        So of course it wasn’t long before Nonny Scanlan told me in no uncertain terms that my mucky thoughts and wandering mitts would send me straight to Hell in a screaming horror of sticky fingers and tangled toilet-roll. It’s not like I was a particularly prolific masturbator anyway. Whereas most boys at that age were fiddling their privy-digits thrice daily, I was more of a four a week man. Perhaps that would have changed if I had had access to hardcore pornography, like normal twelve-year-olds. Constantly being forced to use my imagination was nothing if not mentally exhausting. I was a modern boy on the cusp of adulthood for goodness sake, I shouldn’t have been expected to manufacture my own mental eroticana or rely on wholesome brasserie advertisements in The People’s Friend. I should have had it everywhere, all kinds, at the touch of a button like everybody else. My brain was disgracefully uncorrupted. The only pornography I had ever been exposed to was my father’s copy of Big’Uns!, by now dog-eared and held together by reams of crumbling brown sticky tape. The large-breasted woman within were now more like family members than sources of arousal. I still fiddled to them now and again but it was like masturbating to a collection of long-lost aunts, gazing encouragingly from the faded pages as if I was performing a rehearsed routine at a family reunion. I hid Big‘Uns! under my bed at the bottom of a secret shoebox alongside Arthur of Atlantis, £40 in hard cash (two 10s and a 20), and Nonny Scanlan’s discarded copies of The People’s Friend. She gave them to me when she was finished with them, believing that I too enjoyed the wholesomely moronic stories within, not realising the sordid reality of their fresh purpose. I took what I could get but I knew there was absolutely no effing way a modern boy such as myself should be fiddling himself to senior models in one-piece swimsuits advertising bath seats in such an embarrassingly uncorrupted publication as The People’s Friend.

        “God, Jesus and all the angels are watching you dirty chickens fiddling with your privy-digits,” Nonny Scanlan used to say. I always thought it must have been very awkward for Jesus to have to watch so much masturbation with his father and a bunch of embarrassed angels. And Jesus, of course, was all over Nonny Scanlan’s house, gazing out with disappointment from every available wall space, like a bearded limpet. I even had to face him in my own effing bedroom, hanging on the wall at the end of my bed cradling a lamb in each arm. “Look at me,” he would whisper in the night when my hand inched closer to the elasticated waist band of my jammie bottoms and towards the raging jackie within. “Look at me standing here with lambs while you disgrace yourself, you perverted little heathen.” Merely getting a jackie was seen as an abominable sin in Nonny Scanlan’s eyes, a grossly unfair scenario given the uncontrollable nature of a teenage boy’s privy-digit. I tried to take Jesus down but Nonny Scanlan had nailed him to the wall (just like the Jews did). It didn’t stop me from fiddling though. An imminent H-Bomb couldn’t stop twelve-year-old me from fiddling my privy-digit. I just had to adapt my technique. In a position ironically akin to praying, I would kneel by the bow of the bed, facing away from the wall and fiddle away happily, free from the accusing eyes of Jesus and the lambs.

        Being a DDO with a terrible haircut that lived with a God-thumping pensioner, it was inevitable that by the time I started high school I quickly became the focus of the better boys’ laughter. I don’t blame them, really I don’t. It didn’t help that because Nonny Scanlan lived on the other side of Oakburn I was now technically living in a different catchment area and was thus sent to a different secondary school when I finished my primary education, Oakburn High, instead of my original designation of Keystone Academy. I mean, I didn’t have any friends in primary school in the first place, but at least I was used to the people there that didn’t like me. Their ridicule was familiar and that in itself was a comfort in some way. But attending a different secondary school meant an entirely new scrum of children and teachers, an overwhelming number of fresh faces to dislike and, in turn, be disliked by.

        And it didn’t take long. Within my first week of secondary education, the nickname of Skidder Scanlan had been bestowed upon me by a popular boy called Kevin Dawson when someone noticed a thin arrow of beige excrement in the inner-rump of my underpants when I was getting changed after a swimming lesson. The name spread like… well, excrement and there was absolutely eff all I could do to stop it. That’s how it goes in a place like Oakburn. Someone farts and the whole town smells it.

        Kevin Dawson was the kind of teenager confident enough in his genitalia to walk around the changing room completely skuddered, making a point of laughing at the less confident boys with towels wrapped round their waists tighter than their own foreskins. Dawson’s privy-digit was an impressive size (in both length and girth) and endowed with a proud foundation of pubic hair. The only smear on his anatomy was a large brown mole on his scrotum, stuck there like a penny on a hot day. It was the kind of thing Dawson himself would have ridiculed were it on someone else’s scrotum, no doubt bestowing upon them a nickname like Mole-Balls or Ball-Teaser (to rhyme with Malteser). But due to his lofty social standing Dawson and his scrotal irregularity were completely untouchable. Thanks to having a mother from Barbados his exotic mixed parentage bestowed him with outrageous good looks and a caramelised skin tone that radiated health in a sea of Scottish pink. He had it all- impressive privy-digit, beautiful girlfriend, athletic prowess, he was even a singer-songwriter, penning and performing a slew of vomit-inducing ballads with an acoustic guitar. The girls of Oakburn High wept from every orifice when he performed at school talent shows and busked like a homeless person in Oakburn town centre on Saturday afternoons. He would wear ridiculous baggy-necked T-shirts and jeans so fashionably torn it looked as if he had been mauled by a werewolf or lacerated by an IED. Most of his songs were about love, broken hearts and Zoe Cockburn. His most popular song, Sapphire, a shatteringly awful ballad about the colour of Zoe’s eyes featured embarrassingly woeful lyrics like “Sapphire eyes and alabaster skin, won’t you take my love and let me in…” Unbearable drivel. As he had been kept back a year he was an entire year older than everyone else in sixth year. This was apparently because his older brother had died of leukaemia and Dawson had been too grief stricken to attend school. The reality was he was probably just an idiot.

        A small middle-class suburb in the north-western edge of the greater Glasgow area, the population of Oakburn was around 13,000 souls, a great number of them elderly and desperately clinging to life, mobility and continence. Four hundred years ago the surrounding land had been nothing but dense forest. Legend had it that the snapping neck of an executed witch spontaneously set fire to the oak tree she had been hanged from and burned the forest to the ground. Like a blasphemous phoenix the town of Oakburn was built upon its ashes. There isn’t much to say about the place really: a small pedestrianised shopping precinct, a quaint railway station with regular half-hourly departures to Glasgow city centre (a twenty-six minute journey), leafy streets, pretty houses, two primary schools, one secondary, two doctors’ surgeries, and a smattering of parks surrounded by green hills and woods. A nice place to raise children if you don’t mind raising them in what must surely rank as one of the top ten most boring places on the planet.

        Frankly, I blamed Nonny Scanlan for the skid-mark in my underpants that led to my unfortunate nickname. The stain in question was historical; it had been there for weeks and clearly wasn’t shifting despite a number of 40 degree washes. If Nonny Scanlan used modern liquitabs in her archaic top-loading washing machine like a sane person instead of cheap powdered mystery-brand garbage from Lidl, then the stain would no doubt have been successfully eradicated after a single cycle.

        But now that I was the last man on Earth, none of this mattered anymore; I’m sure most people would once have argued that a chubby fifteen-year-old virgin has no right to call himself a man, but there was no-one left to argue. I know I should feel sad that all the people are dead but in all honesty I’ve never been happier. I’ll miss Nonny Scanlan, of course; I was at least partially fond of her, but as she was already rapidly approaching her natural demise, it’s not like her early departure could be considered as anything close to a tragedy. And as I never really liked anyone else it’s not like there’s anything to miss. I’m not exaggerating; I really didn’t have much time for any other human being on the planet. Their very existence made me feel bad about myself. In their sudden absence I felt reborn, lighter, clearer, cleaner. The things that worried me before- my questionable skin, my chubby belly, my little boy-boobs, the underwhelming size of my privy-digit … all of those things were because of other people. Now that they were gone, so too were my woes. I now had the biggest privy-digit on the planet. Or at least the biggest privy-digit on the planet that wasn’t about to be eaten by worms. I officially had the best privy-digit on the planet.

        The end of the world was not sad and grey and tragic. It was an explosion of colour, hope and infinite possibility. It was the greatest thing that ever happened. If Adam was the first, then Arthur Scanlan (that’s me) is the last.

        My mother always said I was special.