The Terrible Thing That Happened to Barnaby Brocket

by John Boyne

  This went on for six years until, just after her thirteenth birthday, Eleanor marched into the extension at the back of the house, which had been built especially to house her collection of trophies, and told her mother that her beauty pageant days were over.

  “They’re over when I say they’re over,” replied Mrs. Bullingham. “And that won’t be until you’ve lost your looks. You’ve got another few years in you yet.”

  “I’m sorry, but no,” said Eleanor calmly. “I won’t go anymore. I hate those pageants. I don’t like the way the people look at me.”

  “They’re admiring you!”

  “No they’re not. It feels weird. I don’t like the outfits, I don’t like the competition, and I especially don’t like the attention. Plus, they’re bringing me out in spots, and the doctor says that’s to do with all the anxiety I feel. The only thing I want is to be left alone.”

  And after a series of arguments, despite Mrs. Bullingham’s threats, Eleanor finally got her way. The makeup was thrown away, the inappropriate costumes were given to the Salvation Army, and Eleanor was left in peace at last.

  If no one ever looks at me again for as long as I live, she wrote in her diary on the day that her trophies were all boxed up and put into storage, then I think I will be able to grow old happy.

  She entered the house now, shaking her head to dismiss these thoughts, a part of her wanting to run across to little Tania Frederickson and tell her that she too could refuse to take part in the pageants if she wanted to. Nobody would think badly of her just because she wasn’t this year’s Little Miss Blue Mountains or Little Miss Woollongong.

  But she didn’t. Instead, she sat and read Barnaby’s postcard again and allowed herself a long, deep sigh. Then, putting it aside, she opened the parcel from the bookshop—it was addressed to Barnaby—and took out a copy of David Copperfield, which he must have ordered before floating away. She stared at the cover for a moment—a young boy alone on a highway, a sign pointing to London, an expression of loneliness and anxiety on his face—before flipping to the opening pages.

  Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show.

  “Bark,” barked Captain W. E. Johns, who wanted to join her on the sofa, and she nodded, tapping the cushion beside her as she kicked off her shoes and stretched out.

  To begin my life with the beginning of my life, she read, I record that I was born (as I have been informed and believe) on a Friday, at twelve o’clock at night.

  Eleanor gave a little gasp when she read that line. Then she closed the book, stood up, and went into the kitchen, throwing Barnaby’s postcard in the trash can. She opened the fridge and looked inside. Pork chops for dinner, she thought, pushing everything else to the back of her mind.

  And pavlova for afters.

  Chapter 14

  The Photograph in the Newspaper

  The following morning, Barnaby found himself back at Penn Station.

  Standing on the terminal concourse, he glanced down at his feet, where a pattern of red and white lines panned across the floor, in sharp detail where he stood but fading a little to the left and right. He craned his neck and looked up at the windows behind him, where the morning sunlight was pouring through the base of the enormous Stars and Stripes flag, sending their colors floating down like a patriotic wave.

  The station was filled with commuters, bleary-eyed and wet-haired in the morning rush hour, all carrying coffee in one hand and doughnut in the other; from their expressions you would have thought that if they failed to get where they were going immediately—or preferably sooner—then the entire universe would come to an end. They were that busy and that important.

  Barnaby took a deep breath, then exhaled loudly as he watched the tourists milling around an information booth, arguing with the exhausted-looking woman cornered inside. On his back he was carrying a brand-new rucksack filled with old pieces of heavy iron from the basement of the Chrysler Building, which stopped him from rising off the ground and finding himself trapped under the concourse roof.

  “Morning, Barnaby,” said Charles Etheridge, marching toward him purposefully, carrying two bottles of water and a couple of apples; no coffee or cakes for him. Some of the people making their way into and out of the station stared at the terrible burn marks that covered his face, and looked away. Their cruel expressions might have hurt Charles’s feelings had he not grown accustomed to being stared at. A teenage girl made a gagging sound, pointing a finger toward the center of her open mouth, and her friend burst out laughing; her screech made him look at her, and she flushed scarlet before turning away; she and her friend ran down the steps in fits of laughter.

  “I brought you some breakfast,” said Charles, his voice betraying a wounded awareness of what had just taken place. “I thought you might be hungry.”

  “Thanks,” said Barnaby.

  “And I collected our tickets on the way,” he added, waving a couple of pieces of paper in the air. “We’d better hurry if we’re going to make it in time.”

  They headed downstairs and zigzagged through a series of long corridors that led to the platforms. “You heard that young Mr. Pruitt sold all of his pieces last night, I suppose?” asked Charles. “And for a very tidy sum too. The New Yorker is running a major feature on the exhibition next week. And the New York Times is already preparing its list of reasons why it isn’t as good as everyone says it is. He’s the toast of the town and it’s all down to you.”

  “I’m just glad he’s going to be an artist after all,” said Barnaby. “And that he’s made up with his family.”

  “He was always an artist,” replied Charles. “He’s just going to be a very rich one, and in my experience the two don’t necessarily go hand in hand.”

  They made their way to platform nine, where their train was waiting, and Barnaby looked across at the space that separated it from platform ten and narrowed his eyes.

  “Wrong station,” said Charles, noticing what the boy was doing.

  “Just checking,” said Barnaby, smiling as they boarded the train. Looking at the seats, he was pleased to see that he could stop himself from floating to the ceiling simply by buckling his seat belt around his waist, while Charles placed his rucksack on one of the overhead storage racks.

  “That must get very awkward,” said Charles. “The whole floating business, I mean. There must be so much you can’t do.”

  “I suppose so,” replied Barnaby as the whistle blew and the train began to pull out of the station. “Only I’ve never known anything different. Although there was this one time when I was climbing the Sydney Harbour Bridge with my class and we were all tied to the side in a long line, and for the first time in my life I was exactly the same as everyone else.”

  “And how did that feel?”

  “Weird,” said Barnaby, pulling a face. “I didn’t feel like myself at all. I didn’t enjoy it.”

  Charles nodded and stared at him for a moment, a half smile on his face, before laughing a little and opening his newspaper to scan the headlines. Barnaby looked out of the window and watched the scenery move past at high speed. He wished he’d brought a book with him. A little d’Artagnan would go down very well on a journey like this.

  They were a few hours into their trip when the train pulled into Albany, where a group of passengers got off and a lot more got on. Barnaby watched as a handsome young man threw an enormous green haversack onto the overhead rack and sat in the seat in front. His nose was buried in a book, and Barnaby peered over to see the title: A Nation of Politicians.

  “You don’t have any adventure stories in that bag, I suppose?” asked Barnaby, leaning forward hopefully.

  The young man turned round in surprise. “I don’t, I’m afraid,” he said. “I’m a history man. But I can give you something on land reform in early twentieth-century Ireland if you’re interested.…”

  Barnaby sighed and shook his head. He was in the mood
for something with a chase in it. Or an orphan trying to make his own way in the world. Or a bit of fighting.

  The carriage was quite busy by now, but there was a pair of free seats across the aisle, and a mother and daughter came toward them, hurrying to claim them. A relieved expression spread across the woman’s face when she realized that she was not going to be standing in the aisle for the next three hundred miles. However, as they got closer, the little girl stopped in her tracks, took one look at the burns on Charles’s face, and refused to move. Instead, her mouth dropped open, she stood stockstill, and looked as if she wasn’t sure whether to scream or simply faint away.

  “Move it, Betty-Ann,” snapped the woman, noticing Charles too and shooting him an irritated glance, as if it was inconsiderate of him to sit in a railway carriage when he looked like that. “Betty-Ann, I said move it!”

  Still, the little girl refused to take her seat.

  “Will you do as you’re told, please,” insisted the woman, and this time she pushed her daughter forward, forcing her into the window seat while she took the aisle, with nothing more than the narrow corridor separating her from Charles.

  Barnaby watched all this with great interest and then turned to look at his companion, who was busy reading an article, even though Barnaby was sure that he had seen him reading that very same page thoroughly about thirty minutes earlier.

  Of course, when Barnaby had first met Charles the night before, he had been taken aback by the dark red scars and wrinkled skin that spread across his face from just below his right eye to the left-hand side of his chin. One of his ears looked rather grisly too, and there was a patch of clear white skin above his right eyebrow that appeared completely smooth. And even though he knew it was rude, he kept staring until Charles eventually put down the newspaper and turned to look at him.

  “What?” he asked.

  “Nothing,” said Barnaby, flushing slightly and turning to stare out of the window again.

  “You were looking at my face.”

  Barnaby glanced back and bit his lip. “I just …,” he began. “Well, I wondered what happened to you, that’s all. Do you mind my asking?”

  “No, I don’t mind,” said Charles, folding the paper in half. “To be honest, I’d rather you asked me straight-out than just stared at me as if I was an animal in a zoo.” He raised his voice a little for the benefit of Betty-Ann and her mother, who ignored him completely; by now the child was locked into a computer game and the mother was reading about celebrities. “And it’s interesting that you ask now because I just noticed this.”

  He unfolded the paper and showed Barnaby a photograph in the “Style” section of a very beautiful young woman on a catwalk at a fashion show. Everyone in the audience was watching her with expressions such as mortals might have shown in ancient times when the gods descended to wander in their company; but the model simply stared down the lens of the camera with a look of bored disinterest on her face.

  “Do you see this woman?” asked Charles, and Barnaby nodded. “You recognize her, I suppose?”

  “No,” said Barnaby, shaking his head.

  “Really? You’d be about the only person in this carriage who doesn’t. You’ve heard her name, surely? Eva Etheridge?”

  Barnaby shrugged his shoulders, wondering whether he should just pretend. “Is she a model?” he asked.

  “Is she a model?” asked Charles, laughing. “She’s only one of the most famous models in the world. She’s been the face of so many campaigns that even she’s probably forgotten half of them. Not that she’d think of herself as just a model, of course. She’s a singer too. An actress. A television personality. She has an underwear line designed specifically for other malnourished women. She’s a spokesperson for any number of beauty products.” He hesitated for a moment and shook his head, smiling a little. “Oh, and she’s my sister,” he added. “I almost forgot that.”

  Barnaby lifted the newspaper off Charles’s lap and took another look, trying to see whether she bore any resemblance to the man seated beside him, but it was impossible to make out what he truly looked like beneath all those terrible scars.

  “And these two people here …,” continued Charles, turning the page to a gallery of smaller photographs from the same fashion show. “These are my parents, Edward and Edwardine Etheridge. He’s an extremely famous designer, and she’s an equally successful photographer.”

  “But this show was on last night,” said Barnaby, pointing at the date at the top of the page.

  “That’s right.”

  “And yet you went to Joshua’s exhibition rather than that?”

  “Of course I did.”

  “Didn’t they invite you?”

  “Oh, they invited me, all right,” said Charles, his laugh a rather bitter one. “They always invite me to things now—ever since I became a famous art critic. But I never go.”

  “Why not?” asked Barnaby, frowning.

  “There was a time when I needed them very badly and they weren’t there for me,” Charles replied, his tone filled with sorrow now. “They weren’t interested in me at all until I was somebody. Now it just seems like too little, too late.”

  “But they’re your family,” said Barnaby.

  “And look what your family did to you,” said Charles, who had heard the story of the terrible thing that had happened at Mrs. Macquarie’s Chair from both Vincente and Joshua Pruitt the night before. “You asked how I got my scars,” he added, rubbing his eyes and sighing. “Are you sure you want to know?”

  “If you don’t mind telling me,” said Barnaby, who did want to know.

  “I don’t mind telling you,” said Charles. “But it’s not a happy story and it doesn’t have a happy ending.”

  “Most stories don’t,” said Barnaby. “I don’t know how mine is going to turn out yet, but I’d like to hear yours.”

  Chapter 15

  The Fire in the Studio

  Darkness began to fall on the landscape outside, and some of the people in the carriage turned on the tiny spotlights above their heads in order to continue reading or turned them off in an attempt to get some sleep.

  “I was only a boy when the terrible thing that happened to me took place,” said Charles, speaking quietly now as he thought about the past. “Only eight years old.”

  “I’m eight years old now,” said Barnaby.

  “Well, then, perhaps you’ll understand how I felt. My mother, who you saw in the newspaper, ran a photography studio from our home in Brooklyn. She had the top floor of the house; the middle floor was where my parents, Eva, and I lived; and the ground floor was where my father designed his collections. Both my parents were very busy people. It often felt like they were at the heart of everything that went on in the city. They only associated with the most beautiful people—people like them, models with perfect faces, movie stars, and cultural icons. Their version of normal, no one else’s. Famous actors, musicians, novelists, artists—they all came through our home on a daily basis, and only occasionally did either of my parents even notice that Eva and I lived there too.”

  “Is your sister older than you?” asked Barnaby.

  “No, a couple of years younger. She’s almost thirty now. Hence the look of dread on her face in that photograph. Anyway, a few weeks before my ninth birthday, I found myself alone in the house. This almost never happened, as it was more the center of a very particular universe than a family home, and I thought I’d do a little exploring. So I went upstairs to my mother’s studio and started looking through the contact sheets because I knew she had lots of photographs of models with their clothes off. And I was starting to get very interested in photographs of models with their clothes off.”

  Barnaby sniggered to himself, and as he did so, one of the attendants came through the carriage carrying a large basket of treats and crying “Pretzels! Pretzels!” very loudly in a singsong voice, waking half the passengers. When she reached Charles, she did a double take and moved quickly past him,
even though Barnaby would have quite liked some pretzels. He was starting to realize just how rude some people could be when they were confronted with someone who looked a little different.

  “Anyway, there’s a lot of equipment in a photography studio,” continued Charles, who gave the impression that he hadn’t noticed the snub even though Barnaby was certain that he had. “An extraordinary number of liquids and potions, toners, developing fluids, stuff like that. I was doing things I shouldn’t have been doing, of course, and disaster was bound to strike. I knocked over a lamp, which fell onto a pile of film stock, and before I knew what was happening, the whole room was ablaze.”

  Barnaby gave a gasp and put a hand over his mouth. He remembered how terrifying it had been when the classroom at the Graveling Academy for Unwanted Children had caught fire; he had thought he was going to die—and he would have too if it hadn’t been for the bravery of Liam McGonagall and his pincer hooks. For weeks afterward he’d had nightmares about being trapped by fire and not being able to float above it.

  “Everything that follows is a little hard to remember,” said Charles after a few moments, looking down at his lap rather than directly at Barnaby as he thought about that afternoon twenty-five years before. “The whole house went up quite quickly, I was told. But somehow one of the firefighters managed to get me out. When I woke up, I found myself in hospital, in the burn unit, and this awful gel was spread all over my face. My skin was burning intensely beneath the ointment, and I was covered with a thick layer of bandages. It was the most excruciating agony. Weeks later, when I could finally sit up and see myself in the mirror, I looked like a mummy from ancient Egypt. It was awful. For a boy my age, it felt like the end of the world.”