The Terrible Thing That Happened to Barnaby Brocket

by John Boyne

  A few minutes later Barnaby was winched back down and Stanley gave him his own bag to carry, as it held enough of his traveling gear to keep him grounded. “Sorry about that, Barnaby,” he said, “but I don’t think the bungee is for you. Maybe we’ll have more luck with the parachute.”

  A private plane was waiting on a nearby runway, and they took off into the skies while a couple of instructors strapped parachutes to their backs.

  “This is the big one,” said Stanley, rubbing his hands together in glee as they ascended into the clouds. “The second last thing on my list. Once I do this, and then I do that, I’m through. You ready, Barnaby?”

  “Ready!” said Barnaby, and they jumped out within a few seconds of each other.

  Stanley sailed through the air, heading toward the ground and pulling the cord of his parachute at exactly the right moment. Barnaby, however, fell for no more than ten seconds before floating right back up again, at which point the plane circled around him with the door open until he could tumble back inside.

  “I don’t think parachuting is for me either,” he said to Stanley when they were safely on the ground.

  “Hell’s bells, son, at least you gave it a try,” said the old man.

  That night, tired after their day’s adventures, Barnaby and Stanley made their way through a forest, looking for a clearing in the trees.

  “When I was a boy,” explained Stanley as they walked along, “I always wanted to go camping and sleep out under the stars. But my dad—he was a railroad man—had to work every day and night to put food on the table, so I never got the chance. And when I had children of my own, I planned on taking them camping, but somehow work always got in the way. Big mistake on my part. So this is it, Barnaby, the last thing on my list. A night out camping under the stars. It’d be nice if my dad was here to share it with me, or my son, but one’s long gone and the other’s trying to have me locked up. So it’s just you and me. What do you say—you up for it?”

  Barnaby grinned and nodded his head happily. He was wearing a third, unopened parachute that the pilot had given him, which was so heavy that it was not only keeping him firmly on the ground but even making it a little difficult to walk.

  It didn’t take long for them to find a comfortable place to spend the night, and they threw a couple of waterproof mats on the ground and lay down, staring up at the stars. These were the same stars, Barnaby thought, that Captain W. E. Johns would be looking at now if he was outside in the back garden on private business.

  “You’re really going to go back to your family tomorrow?” asked Barnaby as they drifted off to sleep.

  “I have to,” said the old man, sounding a little sad but resigned to the inevitable. “I’ve done everything I wanted to do. And when I go, I’d rather go with the people I love by my side than in some country I don’t know, all on my own. They’ll be glad to have me back, but they won’t understand why I had to do these things. I’m happy, though, and how many people can say that at the end of their days?”

  Barnaby thought about this as he fell asleep, and he was so tired that he didn’t even feel it when a fox appeared from out of the woods and chewed so hard at the cords of his parachute that he was able to drag it away into the forest, where he could dig his way to the center on what would be an unsuccessful forage for food. And he didn’t notice when he drifted off the ground, rising up beside the trees as he floated into the night sky, which was empty now except for the stars and the moon in the distance.

  Barnaby floated like this for a long time, and when he finally opened his eyes again, he was astonished to see that he was no longer lying on the ground. In fact, he couldn’t even see the clearing anymore, or the old man, or the trees that surrounded them. When he looked down, he could make out the rivers and mountain ranges they had passed by earlier, and then he floated some more and realized that the shape he was looking down on was the outline of the African continent itself, so much bigger than he realized in comparison to the other continents—bigger than it was ever shown on maps—with the South Atlantic Ocean flowing along on the left. He looked farther north and east toward the great landmass of Asia and knew that as the world turned, he might even be able to make out the familiar shape of Australia.

  But how could he ever get back down to it? he wondered. He had never floated so far off the ground before—there had always been someone to catch him, or something to hit his head on and stop him from drifting any farther up. But not this time. Now he was just an eight-year-old boy floating away from planet Earth into the darkness of the night sky and the mysteries of what lay beyond.

  I’ll never get home again, thought Barnaby, feeling the tears forming in his eyes. And I’ll never have any more adventures.

  And then, looking into the darkness, he thought he saw a small white dot in the distance, in the very direction in which he was floating. He blinked and yawned, for the atmosphere was so different up here that it was difficult to stay awake, and he wondered whether he was drifting toward a star, and if so, should he be worried. He had read somewhere that they were made of white fire; if he collided with one, then he would probably be burned to a crisp. But there was nothing he could do about it. He continued to float closer to the white dot, which then turned into two dots, one considerably larger than the other but connected by what looked like a long white rope.

  He waved his arms, his eyelids growing heavier and heavier, his body desperate for sleep, and turned toward it just as the smaller white dot appeared to turn in his direction and wave back.

  An astronaut! thought Barnaby sleepily. A spaceship!

  His eyes could stay open no longer, and the last thing he remembered before he passed out was an enormous pair of arms wrapping themselves around him and pulling him through the atmosphere toward the safety of the ship ahead.

  Chapter 21

  Twenty Thousand Leagues Above the Earth

  Barnaby woke when he fell to the floor, hitting his head on a rubber mat. He opened his eyes and looked around, his heart pounding a little faster when he realized that there were six space aliens staring at him.

  “Why do you look so scared?” asked the first one, who looked exactly like a Japanese man, except that he wasn’t a Japanese man, of course; he was a space alien.

  “Because you’ve assumed human identities to put me at my ease,” said Barnaby, scrambling backward in the spaceship’s cabin. “And you’re going to eat me.”

  “Eat him?” asked a rather elegant female space alien with a black bob, red lipstick, and a French accent. “Did he say eat him? I’m a vegetarian, for pity’s sake.”

  “Who are you?” asked a third person, this time a young male space alien with a posh English accent.

  “I’m Barnaby Brocket,” said Barnaby.

  “Well, I’m George Abercrombie,” he replied. “And none of us are aliens, I’m happy to say. May I introduce Dominique Sauvet?” he added, nodding toward the Frenchwoman.

  “Hello,” she said.

  “Naoki Takahashi,” he continued, pointing at the first man, who quickly bowed from the waist before standing upright again.

  “Over there is Matthias Kuznik,” continued George, and a tall blond man stepped forward with a friendly smile on his face.

  “Good to meet you,” said Matthias, before turning to George a little apprehensively and shaking his head. “Should we be getting involved in this?” he asked. “We don’t know who or what he is.”

  “Don’t worry, Matthias, I’m sure he’s perfectly safe. He’s just a child.”

  “I’m eight,” snapped Barnaby, wounded to the core.

  “And those two over there,” said George, ignoring this interruption, “sitting in our recreation area, are Calvin Diggler—”

  “Yo,” said Calvin, nodding his head while munching on a pretzel.

  “Calvin’s from across the pond,” said George apologetically. “You’ll have to forgive his manners. The fact that he doesn’t have any, I mean.”

  Barnaby loo
ked around. “What pond?” he asked, frowning. “I don’t see any pond.”

  “I don’t mean a literal pond,” said George. “The pond! The Atlantic Ocean. Calvin is one of our American cousins.”

  “Oh, I see,” said Barnaby. “Are you all cousins, then?”

  “No,” said George, confused. “No, none of us are cousins.”

  “But you just said—”

  “I didn’t mean my literal cousin.”

  Barnaby stared at him, then turned to Matthias Kuznik with a questioning expression. “Why does he not mean anything he says?”

  “He’s English,” explained Matthias.

  “Yes, well, if I might just finish …,” continued George. “The last member of our crew is the little filly sitting next to Calvin.”

  “George!” snapped the woman, looking up from her book. “How many times have I asked you not to refer to me in equine terms?”

  “Sorry, old girl,” he said. “Don’t get her riled, Barnaby, there’s a good chap. That cat has claws.”

  “She’s a filly and a cat?”

  “I can be anything you want me to be, sugar,” said the woman, whose name was Wilhelmina White, winking at him.

  Barnaby blushed scarlet from his ears to his toes and didn’t know where to look. When he managed to get ahold of himself again, however, he realized he’d recognized something familiar in her voice.

  “You’re not Australian, are you?” he asked, looking across at her.

  “Close. I’m a Kiwi. Have you been there?”

  “No, but I’m from Sydney,” said Barnaby.

  “You’re a long way from Sydney up here,” remarked George Abercrombie. “I have to say we were a little surprised to see you floating around out there. We don’t get many visitors on Zéla IV-19.”

  “What’s Zéla IV-19?” asked Barnaby.

  “Our spaceship,” said Naoki Takahashi.

  “Perhaps you could let us know what you were doing?” asked George. “Lashings of apologies, of course, for putting you on the spot like this, but let’s be frank: it’s a rum deal when an eight-year-old boy just rolls up out of nowhere and accuses a chap of being a space alien when a chap’s clearly anything but.”

  Barnaby stared at him, blinked a few times, and looked around at the other crew members.

  “Fourteen months,” drawled Calvin Diggler from the rest area. “That’s how long we’ve had to listen to that. You’d better get used to it, kid, if you’re planning on sticking around.”

  “Steady on,” said George. “A chap’s just wondering what’s going on, that’s all.”

  “It’s a long story,” said Barnaby.

  “Well, we’re not going anywhere.”

  “All right, then,” he said, starting at the very beginning—and over the next couple of hours, as they sat down to a meal of tomato soup served cold from stainless steel canisters, followed by five square tablets of food, each one a different color (one that tasted like roast chicken, another that tasted of mashed potatoes, a third of carrots, a fourth of mushy peas, and a fifth that was a delicious crème caramel), Barnaby told them the story of his life, from his early days in Sydney to the terrible thing that had happened at Mrs. Macquarie’s Chair, and then the story of the last month and the extraordinary characters he’d met along the way.

  “That’s quite a tale,” said Calvin. “Expect us to buy it, do you?”

  “But it’s the truth,” insisted Barnaby.

  “Then how come you’re not floating in here?”

  Barnaby thought about it. It was true. He hadn’t floated since the moment he’d woken up in the spaceship. His feet were on the ground like everyone else’s, and there was nothing in particular to hold him there.

  “I don’t know,” he said, frowning. “I don’t understand it. I promise that everywhere else I go, I float.”

  He stood up and wandered around the cabin, waiting for that particular feeling to come, but it never did. It was very strange to be able to just walk around like this without floating to the ceiling. Was this what it was like to be normal? It didn’t feel normal. And it certainly didn’t feel good.

  “If anyone should be floating in here, it’s us,” said Naoki. “The air has to be depressurized and regulated; otherwise, we’d be hitting our heads on the ceiling.”

  “My parents would love to have that type of air back home,” said Barnaby. “Do you think that’s what’s keeping me on the floor?”

  “I doubt it,” said Dominique. “If what you say is true, then you should still be floating. Unless it has something to do with the air compression. You ever get sore ears?”

  “Yes, I do,” admitted Barnaby. “When I’m made to stay on the ground against my will. They’re never agonizing, but there’s always a sort of throbbing pain.”

  “Ever had a doctor look at them?”

  “My parents haven’t taken me to a doctor since I was a baby,” explained Barnaby. “They’re embarrassed to let me out of the house.”

  Dominique considered this and nodded her head. “When you get back down to Earth,” she said, “get your ears checked out.”

  “All right,” said Barnaby. “But how much longer are we all going to be up here anyway? Are you going to live here forever?”

  “No,” said Dominique. “We’re coming to the end of our mission, and then we’ll finally get to go home. We only have one more space walk to do—”

  “My turn!” insisted Naoki, slamming his fist down on the table and making the tablets of food jump. “My turn!”

  “All right, mate, we know it’s your turn,” said Wilhelmina. “Keep your wig on.”

  “Hmm,” grunted Naoki, popping another carrot tablet in his mouth.

  “My brother, Henry, wants to be an astronaut,” said Barnaby. “He’s obsessed with outer space.”

  “Well, this isn’t outer space, I’m afraid,” said George. “It’s middle space. We’re several hundred million light-years away from outer space. It’s that way …,” he added, pointing a finger toward the left-hand side of the spaceship’s rear before adjusting it ever so slightly. “No, actually, it’s more like that way,” he said, correcting himself.

  “Have your parents sent him to Space Academy?” asked Calvin, and Barnaby shook his head.

  “No, they want him to be a solicitor like them. They say normal people don’t want to go to outer space.”

  “Middle space.”

  “Any part of space. They’ve told him that when he’s eighteen, he should go to university to study law.”

  “I know how your brother feels,” said Calvin, sniffing one of the crème caramel tablets, then deciding against it and throwing it back in the pile in the center of the table.

  “Oh, but you’ve handled it!” cried George, looking aghast.

  “Zip it, Prince Charles,” snapped Calvin. “Trying to tell a story here. You should tell your brother that if he wants to be an astronaut, he needs to go to Space Academy. My parents refused to send me when I was a kid. Said I was too stupid.”

  “Too stupid?” asked George, still smarting from the way Calvin had spoken to him. “Oh, God forbid that anyone should think you’re stupid. I bet you don’t know the capital of Mozambique.”

  “Maputo,” said Calvin without a moment’s hesitation.

  “Or what the square of the hypotenuse is equal to.”

  “The sum of the squares of the other two sides.”

  “Or where the Duke of Devonshire stands in succession to the throne.”

  “Fourteenth,” said Calvin. “About a million and a half places ahead of you.”

  “Well,” said George, sitting back irritably. “All right, so you’re good on general knowledge. If I’m ever involved in a pub quiz, I’ll drop you a telegram.”

  “If you ever drop me a telegram, I’ll drop you on your head.”

  “All right, boys, that’s enough,” said Dominique in an exhausted tone. “Barnaby was telling us about his brother. And he’s our guest. And, Calvin, we’ve heard
how your parents didn’t encourage you a hundred times before.”

  “I showed them, though.” He pointed out through the porthole into the blackness beyond. “Space,” he said, then pointed all around him. “Spaceship.” Then he pointed at himself. “Astronaut.”

  “My parents wished for me to become professor of mathematics at Tokyo University,” said Naoki Takahashi. “Like my mother and grandfather before me.”

  “You are a bloody good mathematician, Naoki,” said Wilhelmina. “He knows all the numbers,” she added, turning to Barnaby and nodding her head enthusiastically. “Even the really big ones.”

  “My parents thought there was something a little embarrassing about my desire to become an astronaut,” said Dominique. “They wanted me to work in an art gallery and marry a writer who thinks the world doesn’t appreciate him enough.”

  “Like there’s any other sort,” muttered Calvin Diggler.

  “My parents don’t talk to me anymore,” said Matthias Kuznik, bowing his head in shame. “Back home in Germany I am a national disgrace.”

  “But you’re an astronaut!” said Barnaby. “They should be proud of you.”

  “They were proud of me. Once,” he said. “I was the greatest striker in the history of the German Football Federation. Better than Oliver Bierhoff. Better than Jürgen Klinsmann. Even better than the great Gerd Müller. By the time I turned twenty, I had already played for my country thirty times and scored sixty goals.”

  “Two in every match,” said Naoki.

  “I told you he was good with numbers,” said Wilhelmina.

  “Well, no,” said Matthias. “Sometimes it was more, sometimes it was less, but on average, yes, it was two. Children looked up to me; they had my posters on their walls. But all the time I was playing football, I was training to be an astronaut too, and nobody knew.”

  “But then they should be twice as proud of you,” said Barnaby. “You’re a great athlete and an astronaut.”

  “You haven’t heard the rest of it yet,” said George.