Robert Nobel, otherwise known as Norbert No-bottle, is being bullied by Jonathan Niker. The butt of Niker's jokes in class, he despairs of his newly divorced parents at home and is hopelessly in love with Kate Barber.

Robert is also haunted by dreams that seem to tell the future as well as the past, as he discovers when a storyteller called Catherine invites some of his class to Wayfield House, the local old people's home.

Robert has never been there before, except in his dreams. Once there he meets Edith Sorrel, a spiky old lady who chooses him as her partner in the Elders' Project.