by Matt Haig
No letter, no trouble.
Simple.
He’d just throw it in the bin. Yeah, that was what he’d do. But which bin? The one in the kitchen was too risky, and even the one in the garden wasn’t fool proof, especially with the amount of things his mum lost in a day and had to go hunting all over for. So he went back outside with his rucksack.
The cat wasn’t there now. Barney just kept walking – down the street and round the corner to the bin outside the newsagent’s.
He held the letter over the bin. He read it again. Barney knew it was bad to destroy the evidence, but the evidence was wrong.
So he ripped up the letter until it was little pieces of confetti.
On his way back home, tiny white pieces of the letter escaped in the wind, falling around Barney’s feet like snow that couldn’t melt.
He picked out certain words on the scraps of paper:
disgrace
behaviour
Barney
EXPELLED
Barney was particularly pleased to see that last piece of paper – the one with EXPELLED on it – end up in a muddy brown puddle.
But, just as he was nearing the corner of Dullard Street, he heard a quiet tinkling sound behind him. Turning, he saw the black and white cat again. It stared up at Barney.
‘What do you want, cat?’
The cat, being a cat, didn’t tell him – or not in any language Barney could have understood – so he kept on walking. So did the cat.
Then, when Barney reached his street, he saw something that caused his heart to sink and anchor in his stomach. It was his mum’s little red car, driving down the road then parking outside the house. Barney looked at his watch.
4.25.
She wasn’t due back from the library for over two and a half hours.
He stood still, literally frozen with dread.
She knows.
That’s the only explanation.
He imagined Miss Whipmire ringing her at the library and saying, ‘Your son has a letter for you. Make sure you get it!’
Then Barney felt something rub against his ankle. He looked down at the cat and remembered what Miss Whipmire had said.
That would be the life, wouldn’t it? To be a cat, lying out in the sun, without all those human worries …
Barney crouched down behind a hedge. He had no idea why he did this. To avoid his mum, yes. But he knew he’d have to go home some time.
Now, before I go on and tell you what happens next I should point out that Barney really wasn’t scared of his mum shouting at him. I mean, she would have shouted at him, and that wouldn’t have been nice, but the thing Barney dreaded was the bit after.
The bit where his mum would cry. Which was also the bit where Barney would feel so bad he’d want to turn into a piece of dust.
Or a cat.
Barney stayed crouching, the cat came close again, and now Barney found himself reaching out a hand to stroke it.
Miss Whipmire’s words kept replaying in his head. To be a cat … To be a cat …
‘Fancy swapping places?’ he asked. He was joking, of course, but a part of the joke was serious. Especially when he said the most important words he had ever spoken in his life:
‘I wish I was you.’
The cat stayed looking at him with its green eyes, and Barney suddenly felt a little strange.
Dizzy. As though the street had turned into a merry-go-round. That wasn’t the strangest thing, though. The strangest thing was the cat itself.
There was something odd about the patch of white fur around its eye. And Barney realized why – a second ago it had been around the cat’s left eye. Now it had switched.
‘Don’t be stupid,’ Barney told himself. ‘That’s impossible.’
Meanwhile – and Barney couldn’t be absolutely sure of this – it seemed as though things in the street were changing.
Everything seemed more vivid, brighter, bursting with life. The leaves on the trees became greener, the flowers in the front gardens grew taller and stood prouder, and a plant – a flowerpot on an outside windowsill containing a herb Barney didn’t recognize – seemed to visibly shake and tremble as it grew, eventually causing it to fall off and smash on the ground.
‘This is not happening,’ Barney said. ‘This is a dream.’
Barney stood up, or tried to. The street was spinning so fast he toppled back a few steps, knocking himself against a postbox.
‘Ow!’
He closed his eyes.
The world became still again.
When he opened his eyes once more, Barney could see the cat trotting quickly away.
‘Weird.’
Then he turned to look up his street and saw his mum stepping out of her car to head inside the house.
Behind him, a door opened.
‘What’s happening out here?’
Barney turned to see an old man staring at him, his face creased with anger as much as age. Barney realized it had been this guy’s plant pot that had fallen and smashed on the ground.
‘I don’t know,’ Barney said.
‘Don’t know? Don’t know?’
‘No. Honestly. I’m sorry.’
‘I know your mother. I’ll be telling her you go around knocking people’s plants over.’
‘It wasn’t me. It was no one. It just happened.’
‘Plant pots don’t fall by themselves – sorry. Not unless there’s a hurricane. And I don’t feel a hurricane, do you?’
Barney shook his head. ‘No, I don’t.’
The old man didn’t say anything after that. He just looked at Barney, and then at the smashed pot and the earth and the plant on the ground, and sighed a long sigh that seemed to contain a whole lifetime of regret, before going back inside his house.
And that was when Barney knew it was time to go home.
The Infinite Tiredness
A BRIEF WAVE of tiredness came over Barney as he opened the front door.
His mum was hoovering and didn’t look up. Guster came over to greet Barney but unusually his tail wasn’t wagging, and his eyes had a gleam of mistrust about them.
Then his mum saw him and switched off the hoover.
‘Hello,’ Barney said. But he said it like a question. ‘Hello?’
His mum just looked at him, without the faintest trace of crossness. ‘Oh, hello, sweetheart.’
Sweetheart?
‘Why are you back early?’ asked Barney, trying not to sound suspicious.
His mum sighed.
This was it! This was the moment she was going to tell him off!
But no.
‘I just felt a bit guilty about this morning,’ she said.
‘What about?’
‘Well, it’s your birthday, and I didn’t really have time for you. So I thought I’d take you somewhere.’
Barney was confused. For a moment he wished he hadn’t ripped up the letter. Maybe this was the point he should confess everything. After all, his mum was surely going to find out, and she did seem to be in a particularly good mood. And that was quite rare these days.
‘Mum, I—’
‘Pizza? Do you fancy going out for a pizza?’
Barney remembered the dream last night. Of being with his dad in a pizza restaurant. ‘I … er …’
‘Or a curry?’
‘Yeah. A curry sounds good.’
Then his mum gave him a present. It was a book called How to Improve Your Maths Skills.
‘I know it’s not the most exciting present in the world,’ said Mrs Willow. (Even though his mum and dad had got divorced, Barney’s mum had kept her married name as her maiden name was Rowbottom, and she didn’t like that very much because she’d always been called ‘Growbottom’ as a child.) ‘But I just thought it would help you get better marks.’
Barney wanted to explain that the only way he could get better marks was if he moved to a school where there was no Miss Whipmire. But he didn’t want to sound ungrateful.
‘Oh, thanks.’
And then Barney’s mum nearly cried.
‘What’s the matter?’
She took a deep, pulling-herself-together breath. ‘Nothing. You just looked like your … Anyway, come on, let’s get ready. I’ll ring up and book a table for six p.m. I’m quite hungry, aren’t you?’
So they went for a meal, and Barney ate the most delicious prawn jalfrezi he had ever tasted. But afterwards he felt weird. The tiredness came back, along with an odd feeling in his bones, as if they were being squeezed. He also felt a bit sick.
‘You do look pale,’ Mrs Willow said, staring at Barney’s empty plate. ‘I hope it’s not the prawns.’ She quickly asked for the bill and stood up.
And that was when an infinite tiredness took over Barney and he leaned forward and fell asleep on his dirty plate.
Barney’s Dream
YOU KNOW THAT expression I just used – ‘fell asleep’? Well, Barney did, but he’d never really understood exactly what it meant. Not until now, as he lay on his plate, falling through layers of treacly blackness. Down and down he fell, watching a shape float above him. A white shape, which at first he thought was a kind of cloud. But he recognized the shape of it, like a blurry number 6, and he realized this was the exact same shape as the patch of white fur around that cat’s eye.
And this shape grew and grew until eventually light had taken over the dark, and he was walking through this empty white landscape, to nowhere in particular. It was like walking through the Arctic, except without the cold. Not that it was warm, either. It was absolutely neutral. A place beyond temperature.
But then he heard a voice.
‘Barney!’
It was a voice he knew as well as any in the world.
‘Barney! I’m over here! This way!’
Barney looked around him but he couldn’t see anyone. He strained his eyes, as if to find a word on a blank sheet of paper. It was useless, but he kept trying. He was getting desperate now, because he wanted to see the person the voice belonged to.
He wanted, in short, to see his father.
‘Dad! Dad? Where are you?’
‘I’m still here, Barney. I’m alive!’
‘But where? I can’t see you.’
‘You’ll find me. Don’t worry!’
‘Dad? I can’t see you!’
And suddenly Barney felt darkness start to leak onto the white, descending in little moving lashes, like a thousand cat’s tails. Still he heard his dad’s voice, getting fainter and fainter. ‘I’ll see you soon,’ he said. ‘I’ll see you soon …’
‘What?’ asked Barney.
Then he felt something shaking his shoulders, and he looked up to see his mum.
‘Barney? Are you OK?’ his mum asked, examining his pale, jalfrezi-streaked face. ‘I think you might need the day off school tomorrow.’
And Barney nodded. ‘Yes,’ he said. Or tried to. When he opened his mouth the only sound that came out was a strange release of air.
Like a gasp.
Or a hiss.
So he tried again. ‘Yes.’ And this time his voice was there.
Then, when he got home, he was strangely wide awake and shot upstairs, feeling the need to write something down, as if he almost knew that writing things down was something he might not be able to do in the future.
SOME FACTS ABOUT DAD
by Barney Willow
He snored so loud you could hear it through TWO walls.
He thought he was very good at reading maps but he was actually NOT.
He could smile even when he was sad. He said it came from being a salesman. (He won the Employee of the Month award at Blandford Garden Centre for selling the most pottted plants.)
His dream was to own his own garden centre.
He liked going on holiday to places that were in the middle of nowhere and which were – ideally – cold and wet. (Mad!)
He liked long walks. (His favourite long walk was in Bluebell Wood.)
He loved cats but Mum never let him have one.
He knew a million facts about plants, and told me quite a lot of them. For instance, he told me that there is a rare plant that grows in the Andes in South America called Puya raimondii which doesn’t grow a flower until it is 150 years old. Then it dies.
His favourite flowers were simple ones, like daffodils and bluebells. (‘Nature’s at her best when she’s not showing off,’ he said.)
He was a good swimmer. Except in backstroke, where he always crashed into the side of the pool.
He had RUBBISH taste in music. He only liked stuff with loud guitars and not much singing, which Mum always said sounded like someone was strangling a cat. (She was right.)
He had big bushy eyebrows that looked like caterpillars.
His favourite food was Mum’s apple and blackberry crumble (with custard).
He used to take me to the cinema even though it gave him a headache.
He is not out there. I will not find him. It was just another dream. IT WAS JUST ANOTHER DREAM.
The Hairs
BARNEY STILL FELT wide awake from his deep nap at the restaurant, and was allowed to stay up late as it was his birthday.
‘That was very odd, you falling asleep like that,’ his mum commented. ‘I think we might need to take you to hospital to get you checked out.’
‘I’m all right now. I think I’m feeling better.’
But then, while he sat on the sofa watching TV with his mum, his arms started itching and he began to rub them.
‘Barney, don’t do that. You’ll make them sore,’ Mum said, switching from polar bears to a quiz show.
‘I can’t help it.’ He unbuttoned one of his cuffs, rolled up the sleeve and started to scratch the skin directly. ‘They’re so itchy.’
As he scratched he saw one, then two, then three thick black hairs on his right arm. They were pure jet-black, way darker than his normal mousy mid-brown hair colour, and were arranged like points in a neat line just below his wrist.
‘Mum, look – these hairs.’
‘Oh yes, you’re turning into a man. Well, now that you’re nearly a teenager you’ll be starting to get hairy all over the place.’
‘But they’re weird. They’re black. I don’t have black hair. And they weren’t there yesterday. They weren’t even there this afternoon. I don’t want to turn into a man that quickly.’
She wasn’t listening. She was too busy looking at his forehead.
‘What is it?’ Barney asked her.
‘Oh dear, I’ll just get the tweezers,’ she said, before disappearing up to her bedroom.
Meanwhile, Barney went to look in the hallway mirror to see what the matter was.
There, right in the middle of his forehead, was another thick black hair.
‘Right,’ his mum said, running back down the stairs. ‘I’ve got the tweezers. Let’s pluck it out. Stand under the light so I can get a good look at it.’
Barney did as she instructed, staring up at the bulb, which shone little white whiskers of light. A part of him quite enjoyed his mum giving him so much attention. But another part of him was worried.
‘Mum, what’s happening to me?’
‘Nothing’s happening,’ she reassured him. ‘Bodies are strange things. You can get hairs anywhere.’
‘But I feel itchy as well. My arms, and my legs.’
‘Well, don’t scratch right now,’ she said. ‘Stay still and we’ll get this out.’
Barney stayed still even though his skin felt like it was covered with a hundred invisible mosquito bites.
‘Right,’ his mum said. ‘This might hurt just a little bit.’
She pressed the tweezers together, jamming the hair between the ends. Then she started to pull. And pull.
And pull.
She had one hand pressed onto his head and the other was trying to tug out the hair. Barney winced, his eyes watering from the pain as the hair was pulled and tugged and yanked.
‘How weird,’ she mused. ‘It j
ust won’t come out.’
A horrible image flashed into Barney’s mind. He imagined walking into school and Gavin making even more jokes about him than normal. Hey, look at the werewolf! Or something equally hilarious.
Then his mum went and got the cream she used on her upper lip to stop her getting a moustache, but that didn’t do anything except add a red circle around the black hair – just in case it wasn’t noticeable enough already.
Barney wanted to tell her that this needed to be sorted out, but he felt another wave of overwhelming tiredness. This time, though, he managed not to fall asleep right there. He just yawned a ‘Goodnight’ and a ‘Better go up’ to his mum, and had a vague thought that he should confess about the letter, but he couldn’t. He didn’t have the courage. Or the energy.
Instead he promised to wash his face and brush his teeth, and climbed upstairs in a sleepy trance. Then he went to bed (without washing his face or brushing his teeth – or even closing his curtains), collapsing on his mattress and pulling the duvet over him before falling into the deepest, darkest sleep of his life.
Waking Up
BEFORE HE EVEN opened his eyes for the day to begin, Barney knew something was wrong.
His mouth felt like a desert. His heart was racing fast but gently, like a drum roll at low volume. But that wasn’t all. His whole body felt different. Warmer, for one thing, but also more hunched in, like a closed fist that couldn’t open.
He could feel a softness on top of him. A big, heavy softness. When he opened his eyes it made no difference, because it was still totally dark. Quickly, though, he could see patterns in front and around him, as if he had suddenly developed night vision.
Long, black, teardrop-shaped shadows stood out against grey.
I’m in a cave.
A very soft, low – and particularly warm – cave.
As he became more alert he realized this was ridiculous. He decided he must be under his own duvet. But how could it have grown so big?