The Terrible Thing That Happened to Barnaby Brocket

by John Boyne

  “Even though it seemed frightening at first,” Eleanor said, coming toward Barnaby now, “in time they realized that everything that had happened had been for a reason. It is possible, you know, to drift off to an unknown world and find happiness there. Maybe even more happiness than you’ve ever known before.”

  Barnaby looked out to sea but said nothing. He felt a rumbling in his stomach and was about to ask Eleanor whether they could get some ice creams from the van at the corner of the park when he heard an unexpected ripping sound and then the start of a sssss noise, like a snake might make when it’s getting ready to attack.

  The ripping sound came from Eleanor’s scissors as they cut a hole in the base of his sandbag rucksack.

  The sssss noise came from the sand that was starting to pour slowly out and form a pyramid on the ground below.

  Barnaby looked down in confusion, then back up at his mother, who was shaking her head, unable to look him in the eye.

  “I’m sorry, Barnaby,” she said. “But it’s for the best. There’s a wonderful world out there. You can be like one of those early settlers. You’ll find happiness somewhere, I’m sure you will.”

  Barnaby gasped as the sand continued to empty—he was like a human egg timer—and Captain W. E. Johns bounded over and stuck his nose in it for a moment before looking up at his master in panic as the boy’s feet started to lift a little off the ground.

  “Mum!” he cried. “Mum! Help! I’m going up! Captain W. E. Johns, help me!”

  “I’m sorry, Barnaby,” Eleanor repeated, her voice catching a little now. “Truly I am.”

  Captain W. E. Johns barked and started to run around in circles, then leaped in the air as Barnaby continued to rise, trying to grab hold of one of his feet with his mouth, but it was too late—the sand had almost run out and Barnaby was rising higher and higher into the sky.

  “Mum!” he cried one last time as he reached the height of the trees. “Help me! I’m sorry! I’ll try not to float anymore!”

  “It’s too late, Barnaby,” she cried, waving up at him, bidding him goodbye. “Look after yourself!”

  And a minute later he had risen too high to make his voice heard anymore. His mother, his dog, and the magnificent city of Sydney were disappearing beneath him, and with no mattress to stop him from going any farther, Barnaby Brocket simply continued to rise, unsure what was going to happen to him next.

  Chapter 7

  Approaching from a Northwesterly Direction

  Barnaby closed his eyes, as he didn’t want to watch the ground disappearing beneath him any longer. He didn’t suffer from vertigo in the way that Stephen Hebden did, but still, the higher he rose, the more frightened he became.

  When he finally dared to open them again, a flock of galahs had gathered beside him and were hovering there, staring with impatient expressions on their faces, unhappy that their airspace was being invaded by an eight-year-old boy. They pecked him a little, flapping their feathers in his face, but flew on a few minutes later, leaving Barnaby to rise higher in the sky. He glanced to his left and was pleased to see something—another creature perhaps—approaching in the distance, a little higher in the sky but making its way toward him. He watched and soon realized that it wasn’t a creature at all but a basket with a large balloon hooked above it and a great flame keeping the whole thing aloft.

  “Help!” cried Barnaby, waving his arms in the air, which only made him ascend even faster. “I’m over here.”

  The hot-air balloon continued to approach from a northwesterly direction, and it soon became clear that if Barnaby timed things accurately, he could position himself underneath it at precisely the moment it reached him. He flapped his arms and kicked his feet, like a deep-sea diver making his way to the surface of the ocean, before slowing down a little, keeping both eyes fixed firmly on the balloon.

  A few minutes later it was almost directly above him and Barnaby flapped again until he ascended another few feet, banging his head against the underside of the basket.

  “Ow,” said Barnaby Brocket.

  “Who’s down there?” came a voice from within—a female voice of a certain age.

  “Help me, please,” cried Barnaby. “Can you pull me into your basket?”

  “Heavens above!” said another voice—another female voice of the same certain age. “It’s a little boy. Ethel, fetch me the fishing net.”

  A strong silver pole with a threaded hoop at the end emerged from the balloon and scooped Barnaby up, pulling him through the air and depositing him on the floor of the basket, and he started to float up toward the flames.

  “Please,” he cried. “Tie me to the side. Otherwise, I’m going to be burned alive.”

  “Heavens above!” said the two women in unison, grabbing him by both arms and doing exactly as he’d asked. Once he was safely secured, they stared down at him with a mixture of amazement and recognition.

  “I know you,” said the first woman, whose name was Marjorie, pointing a wrinkled finger at his nose. “I saw you on the news last week. You were the millionth person to climb the Sydney Harbour Bridge.”

  “The ten millionth, actually,” said Barnaby.

  “Who is he?” asked Ethel. The women both had hairstyles that resembled crow’s nests, and a collection of knitting needles and chopsticks held the entire mess together. “Who did you say he was, Marjorie?”

  “You remember, dear. We saw him on the television the evening we arrived. He climbed the bridge with his school friends and set some sort of record. Everyone got terribly excited. Then it turned out that he kept floating away. It was a very odd business.”

  “Oh, that boy,” replied Ethel, peering down at Barnaby. “Was that really you?”

  “Yes, that was me,” he admitted.

  “But what are you doing up here? It’s not often we have to pull people into our balloon, you know. In fact, it’s the first time.”

  “The second, Ethel,” said Marjorie. “You remember the human cannonball over Barcelona?”

  “Oh yes, of course. But then he rather fell into our basket, didn’t he? We didn’t have to scoop him up.”

  Barnaby opened his mouth but was reluctant to get his mother into trouble. “It’s my own fault, really,” he said. “I forgot my sandbags, and before I knew it, I was up in the air.”

  “Sandbags?” asked Ethel, frowning.

  “They keep my feet on the ground.”

  “Well, no good ever came of that.”

  “There’s not much we can do about it now anyway,” said Marjorie. “I hope you don’t think that we can take you back to Sydney? Here you are and here you have to stay.”

  “But I need to go home,” said Barnaby.

  “Can’t be done, I’m afraid, even if we wanted to. It’s the winds, you see. They don’t blow us back in that direction. We have to go east. Lucky for you the world is round, eh? If this was the fourteenth century, then the world would still be flat and we’d all fall off the edge.”

  Barnaby frowned as he tried to make sense of this. Behind him, perhaps only a few miles away, were the northern suburbs and the house where his parents, brother, sister, and dog lived. He surely wasn’t going to have to go all the way around the world to see them again, was he?

  “He’s being dishonest,” said Ethel, leaning forward and looking him directly in the eye. “Marjorie, I tell you he’s being dishonest. All little boys lie, that’s a scientific fact, but this one is easy to read. I can see it in his eyes. Tell the truth, boy. What are you really doing up here?”

  Barnaby was about to proclaim his innocence, but something about these two ladies suggested to him that they wouldn’t let him alone until he came clean, and so he decided to tell the full story, warts and all.

  “But that’s outrageous,” said Ethel when he was finished.

  “Shocking!” agreed Marjorie. “What kind of mother would do that to her child?”

  “You know very well what type of mother, Marjorie,” said Ethel sadly.


  “As do you, Ethel,” said Marjorie, in an equally sorrowful voice.

  “And by the sound of things, the father was in on it too.”

  “Absolutely disgraceful.”

  “And you want to go back to them, do you?” Ethel asked, looking at Barnaby as if she couldn’t quite believe that he would consider going home. “Even after they set you adrift like this?”

  Barnaby thought about it. Until this moment he hadn’t given any thought to the question of whether or not he wanted to go back—it just seemed like the most obvious thing to do. He was only eight years old, after all. Where would he live if he didn’t go home? What would he eat? How would he survive?

  “You don’t have to worry about any of those things,” said Ethel, reading his mind as easily as she had seen through his earlier story. “You can come with us. Ever been to South America?”

  “No,” said Barnaby, shaking his head. “I’ve never been outside Sydney.”

  “Then you have a real treat in store for you. We’re heading home to Brazil. We have a coffee farm there, you see. We’ve been on holiday for a few months, but it’s time to get back. That’s where we were going when you bumped into us. It won’t take long. She’s a wonderful balloon, isn’t she, Marjorie?”

  “Wonderful, Ethel. The best we’ve ever had.”

  “Bar none.”

  “Bar absolutely none.”

  Barnaby struggled to his feet, making sure to keep his arms within the ropes, and looked over the side of the balloon. The land had vanished now and he found himself staring at a group of wispy white clouds as they floated past.

  “What do you think?” asked Ethel. “Are you ready for an adventure?”

  “I don’t really have much choice, do I?” he asked.

  “Splendid! Then full steam ahead.”

  “Full flame, Marjorie, dear.”

  “Of course, Ethel, dear.”

  A little later, once their coordinates were fully established and their navigation charts folded correctly, they opened a picnic basket and offered Barnaby a sandwich, an apple, and a flask of orange juice.

  “So what’s in South America?” he asked as he ate. “Do your husbands live there?”

  “Husbands?” cried Ethel, looking at Marjorie in horror.

  “Husbands?” roared Marjorie, staring at Ethel as if someone had just threatened to sit on her head.

  “We don’t have husbands, young man,” explained Ethel. “Nasty, smelly creatures. Always lazing around like the good-for-nothings they are. Drinking, gambling on horses, finding excuses not to fix the crooked shelf in the kitchen. Making the most foul noises and disgusting stenches from unspeakable parts of their horrible bodies while they’re sitting watching sport on the television.”

  “Sport!” repeated Marjorie with a shudder.

  “No, we gave up on the idea of husbands many years ago. Never had any interest in them, did we, Marjorie?”

  “Not even the faintest inclination, Ethel.”

  “Have you been friends for a long time, then?” asked Barnaby.

  “Oh yes,” said Marjorie. “Since we were in our early twenties, which is more than forty years ago now, if you can believe it. We met when we both joined an amateur dramatic society in Shropshire, took one look at each other, and decided that we were destined to be—”

  “Friends,” interrupted Ethel, patting Marjorie gently on the hand and smiling at her. “The very best of friends.”

  “The very closest of friends,” agreed Marjorie.

  “Exactly,” said Ethel, nodding her head with a sigh of deep satisfaction. “Nothing wrong with that, is there?”

  “No, of course not,” said Barnaby. “I had a very good friend once called Liam McGonagall. He saved my life when the school we were in burned to the ground. Well, I say school, but it was more like a prison.”

  “Did you burn it down?” asked Marjorie, leaning forward again and poking him with one of her chopsticks.

  “No,” said Barnaby. “I wouldn’t do something like that.”

  “You won’t be getting any ideas with that flame up there, will you?”

  “I didn’t burn it down!” insisted Barnaby. “The place was a firetrap.”

  “I thought maybe that was why your mother sent you away.”

  “She sent me away because she said I wasn’t normal.”

  For the first time, both ladies were silent; they stared at Barnaby, then at each other, before looking back at the boy.

  “Do you know,” said Ethel, more quietly now, “forty years ago my mother told me that I wasn’t normal either and threw me out of the house. I never saw her again. She wouldn’t take my calls, refused to reply to any of my letters. It was a terrible thing.”

  “My father said much the same thing to me,” added Marjorie. “Closed the door in my face forever.”

  “But I don’t understand,” said Barnaby. “You seem perfectly normal to me. You don’t look any different from the old ladies who live on our street.”

  “Less of the old, you little brat, or we’ll toss you overboard,” said Marjorie, glaring at him but then bursting into an extraordinary laugh, her whole body shaking, as if someone was tickling her all over.

  “Don’t, Marjorie,” said Ethel, giggling too. “The poor boy will think you’re serious.”

  “Oh, nonsense!” insisted Marjorie. “I haven’t been serious since nineteen eighty-two. I wouldn’t throw you overboard, young man. Don’t worry.”

  “Thank you,” said Barnaby, relieved.

  “Anyway, the point is, just because your version of normal isn’t the same as someone else’s version doesn’t mean that there’s anything wrong with you.”

  “Quite right, Marjorie,” said Ethel, nodding fiercely. “If I’d listened to my mother when she said there was something wrong with me, I’d have lived a very lonely life.”

  “And if I’d listened to my father, I’d have been miserable.”

  “Who wants to be normal anyway?” cried Ethel, throwing her arms in the air. “I know I don’t.”

  “But if I had been normal, then my parents wouldn’t have sent me away,” said Barnaby. “I’d still be at home with Henry, Melanie, and Captain W. E. Johns.”

  “What are they—cats?”

  “Henry’s my elder brother,” explained Barnaby.

  “And Melanie’s my elder sister.”

  “And Captain W. E. Johns?”

  “My dog.”

  “Breed?”

  “Indeterminate.”

  “Parentage?”

  “Unknown.”

  Neither Ethel nor Marjorie had any answer to this so they said nothing, simply shook their heads and continued to steer the hot-air balloon in the general direction of South America.

  “You should get some rest,” said Ethel after a few minutes. “It’s a long way to Brazil. Do you want to steer, Marjorie, or shall I?”

  And anxious to prove himself agreeable, Barnaby Brocket curled up in a corner of the basket, closed his eyes, and within a minute or two was sound asleep.

  Chapter 8

  The Coffee Farm

  When Barnaby woke, he was surprised to find himself lying in a comfortable bed with a warm blanket spread across his body, two fluffy pillows under his head, and a garden hose wrapped around the entire thing to keep him from rising to the ceiling, where a fan with four rotary blades was threatening to turn him into mincemeat. He sat up carefully, held on to the sheets, and looked out of the window.

  A vast farm stretched before him, rows and rows of tall green plants and a dozen or more people walking between the stalks, each wearing a pair of pale blue dungarees and a wide-brimmed hat to ward off the sun. As they examined the stems, they shouted at each other and made extravagant hand gestures, sniffing a few of the leaves, pleased by some, uncertain about others. Clumps of small red berries sprouted from each vine, and from time to time one of the workers would twist one off before tossing it into his mouth and chewing thoughtfully, forehead creased in concent
ration as he considered the taste, before spitting the mess into the dirt at his feet.

  Barnaby couldn’t believe that he had slept through the balloon landing and the journey to the farm, and was beginning to feel a little uncertain of where exactly he was when the door was flung open and the two ladies charged into the room.

  “He’s awake, Ethel,” said Marjorie.

  “About time too. How long has it been anyway?”

  “Almost thirty-six hours.”

  “I’ve been asleep for thirty-six hours?” asked Barnaby, opening his eyes wide in surprise. “Are you sure?”

  “Oh, quite sure,” said Ethel. “There was no waking you, despite the fact that we came down with an almighty thud. Which, by the way, accounts for that bump on your forehead, in case you’re wondering.”

  Barnaby reached up and felt a tenderness just above his right eye. “Ow,” he said.

  “Well, floating up into the sky will take it out of you, so it’s no wonder you were tired,” said Marjorie. “When we landed, we thought we’d better bring you here until you decide what you want to do next. We put you in Vincente’s old room. He wasn’t much older than you when he first came to live with us, and he was always so happy in here. He said it was the most comfortable bed he’d ever slept in.”

  “Well, it was the only bed he’d ever slept in,” said Ethel. “So there wasn’t much competition.”

  “Who’s Vincente?” asked Barnaby.

  “He’s a boy we looked after for a while, but he lives in America now,” replied Marjorie. “A wonderful young man. Such a delight to have around. We miss him terribly. Anyway, what would you like to do today?”

  “I want to go home,” said Barnaby.

  “Yes, of course. But Australia is very far away, that’s the problem. It’s not easy to get there from Brazil.”

  “But we did a little research,” said Marjorie, a triumphant smile spreading across her face. “And it turns out you can fly to Sydney direct from Rio de Janeiro. Well, there’s a stopover in Hong Kong, but it’s only for a few hours.”