Simon Flood wasn’t always known as Simon of Atlantis. In the beginning he was just a regular Simon. 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 Simon 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. Simon 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 Simon 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.
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 attractive types who aren’t nearly as attractive as they used to be and now work in factories making boring things like beige bed-pans for old people to poo 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 beginning 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 who worked on an oil rig being blown off the side of said oil rig really isn’t all that ridiculous in the grand scheme of things.
They never found his body. Burial at sea. Fish food. They gave my mother a box containing his personal belongings. It included an archaic Sony Discman device with a CD inside called The Best Father’s Day Album in the World Ever! (a present from me) and a notebook containing Simon of Atlantis, the handwritten story my father had written for me.