The Parent Agency

by David Baddiel

  Barry stared at them. “Lukas!” he said. “Taj! What are you doing here?”

  CHAPTER TWO

  “Sorry, but we don’t know who you’re talking about,” said Taj. “I am PC 890 and this is PC 891.”

  “PC?” Barry realised then that they were wearing uniforms. Not exactly like police uniforms – they were more, in fact, like dark blue… onesies – but similar enough for Barry to say: “Like Police Constable?”

  Taj looked at him as if he was talking gibberish. “No! Parent Controller, of course!”

  “Huh?” said Barry. “What’s that?”

  “Watch and learn,” said Lukas. Which made Barry think that he definitely was Lukas as that was exactly the sort of thing he would have said.

  Lukas and Taj turned round. Lukas raised the loudhailer to his mouth again and Taj took out of his pocket a large silver whistle. Lukas looked at the crowd, who were still all standing there, waiting. “OK, everyone! Go back to your homes!” he said.

  “But I’m on my way to work!” came a voice.

  “Well…” said Lukas, “all right. Go back… or onwards… to your place of work! Whatever! You all know the procedure!”

  “You said that before!”

  “Yes, all right! Anyway. We will be taking this boy to the Agency. You are, of course, all welcome to send your applications there, those who aren’t already on file. And now…”

  He nodded to Taj, who blew on his whistle as loudly as he could. The blast was deafening and went on for quite a long time. Barry put his fingers in his ears. The crowd began to move silently away. Well, Barry thought it was silently; as he had his fingers in his ears, it was hard to tell. So he took his fingers out. In fact, the grown-ups were all murmuring.

  “I’ll get our updated file sent in straight away…”

  “He’d be perfect for us…”

  “Stupid PCs, always turning up from nowhere…”

  When they had finally all gone, Barry turned to Taj and Lukas. “Do you really not know that your names are Taj and Lukas?” he said.

  “PC 890,” said Taj.

  “PC 891,” said Lukas. “And now, if you don’t mind…?” He paused, doing a questioning face. Barry knew what the question was, although it made no sense that Lukas – his best friend, or his best friend sometimes – was asking it.

  “Barry,” said Barry.

  “Really? It’s really Barry?”

  “Yes, of course it is! You know that!”

  “And you’re really about to be ten? In five days?”

  “Yes,” said Barry, “you know that too!”

  Lukas turned to Taj and shook his head as if they couldn’t understand what Barry was talking about. Taj frowned and looked concerned. About what, Barry had no idea.

  “OK, Barry,” said Taj. “Would you please… follow us?”

  They took the tube from a station called Green Bogey Park. Barry sat in between PC 890 and PC 891. Every so often he would notice a grown-up in the seat opposite look over at him meaningfully. One mouthed at him something that looked like, “Pocket money: we’re talking three figures.” Another, as she was getting off, tried to slip him a card, but PC 890 – Taj – flicked her away.

  They got off at another station called Ha Ha Ha This Station Is Called Watery Loo (the name took up the entire wall along the platform). When they came out, standing in front of them was a large, important-looking building, like the ones Barry had seen on a school trip to Downing Street once. (They hadn’t gone into Downing Street, just looked at it through the gates, while Mr Podmore, their form teacher, had read something out from the internet about it.) Around the building were a lot more grown-ups, some of them just standing there, others sitting by tents or lying in sleeping bags. They looked up expectantly when they saw Barry.

  Lukas got his loudhailer back out.

  “Move away, please!”

  The grown-ups looked disappointed, shuffling backwards to let them through. The three boys walked up to the door, which was large and black and on which were written, in big brass capitals:

  Barry stepped back and looked again at the building. It looked exactly like the drawing at the centre of the map of Youngdon he had found on the subway steps. Except, of course, much bigger.

  Lukas knocked on the door. It was opened by a girl in an orange onesie, with dog ears.

  “Hello, 890 and 891. Stray, is it?”

  “Yes.”

  “Through you go…”

  Inside was not a grand hallway, as Barry had imagined, but a very, very busy office, with lots of people working there. By people, I mean children: all the workers seemed to be about Barry’s age. He and Lukas and Taj walked through them. They were all wearing orange onesies – although some had cat ears, and some bunny ones, as well as the standard dog version that the girl who answered the door had been wearing. Some of them were carrying files; some were talking; some were at desks on computers. Others seemed to be having meetings.

  Barry, Lukas and Taj carried on walking.

  “Where are we going?” said Barry.

  “To the Head,” said Lukas. “That’s the proper procedure when we find a stray.”

  “A stray?” said Barry, remembering that the girl at the entrance had used the same word.

  “Yes,” said Lukas. “A stray kid.”

  By now, they had reached a big oak door. A plaque on it read: TPA HEAD. Lukas knocked.

  “Come in,” said a posh, stern-sounding voice.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Lukas opened the door into another office. It was plush, with wood panels and a thick rug. At the other end of the room was a big wooden desk.

  Behind this desk sat Jake. He was wearing a black onesie, with a built-in shirt and tie pattern, and no ears.

  “Ah, 890 and 891. This would be the stray, I believe?” His voice sounded nothing like it normally did. He normally said “innit” a lot. Now he sounded posher than someone out of Downton Abbey.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Splendid.”

  “Thank you, sir.”

  Taj and Lukas started to back out of the door.

  “Hang on, where are you going?” said Barry.

  “Done our job. And, besides, we have to be home for tea,” said Taj.

  “Home for tea with who?” said Barry.

  Taj looked at him like he was mad. “Our parents, of course.” He shut the door.

  Barry looked over at Jake.

  “Do sit down,” said Jake, gesturing to a chair on the other side of the desk. On the desk was an antique wooden box and some kind of machine with buttons and a microphone. “Your name again is…?”

  “Barry. It’s Barry. You know it’s Barry!” He sat down, feeling, by now, quite frustrated and cross.

  “Yes, I should know. But when they told me I didn’t quite believe it. We’ve never had one called that before, you see.”

  “Right. And I suppose your name isn’t Jake?”

  Jake raised one eyebrow, just like Jake always did, which only made it more infuriating when he said: “I’m just known as the Head, I’m afraid.”

  “The Head of what?”

  Jake gave a big sweep of his arm. “This. The Parent Agency.” He opened the antique wooden box. “Sour Haribo?”

  Barry looked down. Jake – or the Head as Barry was indeed starting to think of him – had taken out of the box a pink and green sweet, the type that are circular but also have a point.

  “Thanks,” Barry said, taking it and popping it into his mouth. He very much wanted to know what the Parent Agency was, but halted for a moment to savour the sourness, before it dissolved to just being an ordinary sweet.

  “Do you really not know how it works here?” said the Head.

  Barry shook his head.

  “Oh, I see. Sometimes that happens with strays. Memory loss, etc.”

  “No, I haven’t lost my memory. I come from another place – a place that you’re in.”

  “I am?”

  “Yes. Where you’r
e just my friend at school. You don’t work in an office or anything. And grown-ups have children, and they live with them. They don’t… do whatever it is they were doing when…” Barry struggled to remember their numbers. “…PCs 890 and 891 found me.”

  “Well, never mind,” said the Head, in a way that suggested that Barry was, of course, deluded, but there was no point in trying to tell him that. It reminded Barry of how his dad was sometimes with his grandpa, who had an old person’s disease which meant he couldn’t remember anything. “The way things are in this place, which is the real place everybody lives in, is that grown-ups don’t…” – and here he did an inverted commas mime – “…‘have’ children, whatever that means. Here, children choose their parents.”

  “Choose…?”

  “Yes, of course. A childhood is far too important to just randomly let grown-ups…” – he did the mime again – “…‘have’ children. No. What we do here is work with children who have yet to choose their parents, like yourself – you’re nine, yes?”

  Barry bristled at this. “Nearly ten. In five days.”

  The Head’s eyebrow went up. It actually went up even further than it usually did, the top disappearing somewhere under his hairline. “Oh my God!” he said, instantly hitting a button on the machine in front of him, and bending his face down to the microphone. “Secretaries! We have a Code Yellow, Orange, Green, Blue and Red!!”

  Barry sat up in his chair. He’d begun, while listening to the Head, to like the sound of this world. But he didn’t like the sound of that. And he liked even less the sight, coming through the door of the office, of The Sisterly Entity.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Barry was about to refuse to even look at TSE, and certainly not listen to them, but it very quickly became clear that, in this world, even The Sisterly Entity were not quite the same as they were in his world.

  To begin with, like everyone who worked at the Parent Agency, they were wearing onesies, which they would never have done at home. Plus their hair had gone weird: it had been combed up, a bit like their granny’s hair used to be in black-and-white photos. And, crucially, they were looking at him – Barry – not like they were about to make fun of him, or tell on him to Mum or Dad, but as if he was really, really important.

  One reason Barry felt this was because it was actually quite hard for them to look at him. They had come in sideways, carrying a large silver tray, but were still turning their heads as far as they could towards him, and smiling politely. On the tray were five very large egg timers. They were made of glass and each one was a different colour: yellow, orange, green, blue and red. The Sisterly Entity set the tray down on the Head’s desk, between him and Barry, and went to sit on two chairs at the side of the room.

  Then they took out, from the pockets of their onesies, notepads. Real pads – they both flicked them open – followed by real pencils, sharpened and ready to write. Neither of them was getting ready to mime with their palm.

  Not wanting to look at them, Barry said to the Head: “Those are very big egg timers.”

  “Egg timers? These, Barry, are Hourglasses.”

  “Oh yes, I’ve heard them called that too.”

  “These are 24-Hourglasses.

  Dayglasses,” said the Head. “So. Five day glasses. And in five days’ time…” He picked up the first glass, the yellow one, and dramatically – a bit overdramatically, Barry thought – turned it upside down so that the sand started to fall and said, “…you, Barry, will be ten!”

  “Yes,” said TSE One. “Hardly any time to make sure he doesn’t end up…” She trailed off.

  “You know…” said TSE Two, also trailing off.

  The Head did a small, quick and supposedly-but-actually-not-very-secretive headshake at them. Barry knew this was body language for “Shhh, don’t tell him about that”.

  “Hold on!” said Barry. “What happens to me if I don’t find…” He could hardly believe he was saying it. “…um, parents… by my tenth birthday?”

  “As you can see, Barry,” said the Head, ignoring the question again, “the sand in the 24-Hourglass trickles down very slowly. It will take, in fact, exactly…”

  “Twenty-four hours?” said Barry.

  “Yes,” said the Head, looking a little put out, since – Barry now realised – he had only been pausing for effect, and had wanted to say that himself.

  “So! Secretaries!” said the Head, moving on. “What would you suggest? In terms of parent-finding?”

  They frowned. One turned to the other and started whispering furiously, while the other nodded furiously, and went “hm”, “yes”, “right”. Furiously. Then they turned back to Barry and the Head.

  “We think, sir, that, given the… you know… circumstances…” said TSE One.

  “Yes, the…” said TSE Two, glancing significantly at the row of Dayglasses, “circumstances…”

  “…the best thing might be our One-a-Day Parent Package Offer, which we could run for five days,” said TSE One.

  “We don’t, as you know, sir, normally offer that for five days running, but in the circumstances…” said TSE Two.

  “Can you please stop saying circumstances in that… that… whispery, looking-around-as-you-say-it way!” said Barry, breaking the rule of a lifetime – well, of the last month – by addressing The Sisterly Entity directly. Although he’d already started to think of them as The Secretary Entity.

  “Interesting,” said the Head. “I like it.”

  Barry looked at him. It was as if he hadn’t spoken at all. He took a deep breath and decided, for the moment, to forget about his circumstances. “This… package,” he said resignedly. “How does it work?”

  “We’ll match you with five different sets of parents,” said Secretary One.

  “And you can then try them out. A daily trial. Each set of parents for a day,” said Secretary Two.

  “And then…” said the Head, “you can tell us which set you like best. And Bob’s your uncle! Or rather your parents! Sorry, I shouldn’t have said Bob’s your uncle; that’s confusing. Unless one of those parents did indeed have a brother called Bob, in which case Bob would indeed… be your uncle.”

  “Right…” said Barry, confused.

  “Also,” said Secretary One, “if you let us know of anything you might want to do with each set of parents… go to the zoo, visit a theme park, a trip to the cinema… we can take a note of that now and let them know in advance!”

  This, Barry had to admit, was starting to sound interesting.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  The Head took out, from under his desk, a gold laptop. “So…” he said. “Let’s begin by having a quick look at the profiles…”

  He opened the lid, pressed a button and then turned the laptop round so Barry could see the screen. On it, a series of pages, a little like Facebook ones, were flicking past in a slide show.

  “These are the Parent Profiles,” said the Head. “Every prospective parent has to create one of these and send it in…”

  Barry could see, as the pages went by, photographs of grown-ups smiling, mostly posing outside their houses. Some of them stood in front of trampolines, or swimming pools, or big collections of toys. Others in front of tables laden with delicious-looking food.

  “Each one includes a short filmed message too…”

  The Head clicked on a box on one of the pages. A couple in their front garden suddenly started moving. “Hello, I’m Sheila,” said the woman.

  “And I’m Michael!” said the man, who was holding a guitar. “And this is our song about us!”

  “And hopefully…” said the woman, pointing at camera, “you…”

  Strum strum strum went Michael’s guitar. “We are the Radcliffes,” they sang cheerfully. “And we never have any bad tiffs! We like to go to parks and zoos. And our house…” At this point, they turned and gestured towards their front door. “…has seven loos!”

  The Head clicked pause. “I don’t like them much,” said Bar
ry.

  “No,” said the Head, doing, by his standards, quite a small eyebrow-raise. “They seem a bit weird. But you get the general idea.”

  The slide show carried on, each new page showing a new set of parents with their photos. Then a page came up on which the photo of the parents was really blurry. Barry couldn’t make out what these two looked like at all, although there was something familiar about them. But he didn’t have much time to think about it as the Head turned the laptop away from him.

  “So,” said the Head. “That’s just a few of the couples on our books. There’s many more…”

  “And,” said Secretary One, “as we said, if you let us know what you might want to do with each set of parents, we can inform them of your preferences.”

  “Oh… right,” said Barry. This being a question that he didn’t quite know the answer to, he dug his hands in the pockets of his onesie. And felt, in the left-hand one, a piece of crumpled paper.

  He took it out and unfolded it. It was the list of things that he blamed his parents for.

  For a second, just seeing this familiar object made him feel homesick. But he put that feeling out of his mind quickly and looked at the list. It had suddenly become really useful.

  The last item, Number 10 – the one about his parents never making his birthday any good – gave him an idea. “Well, it’s my birthday in five days’ time,” he said. “I was going to have a party. Maybe… maybe each set of parents could organise a… party?”

  The Secretary Entity looked at each other, then at the Head.

  “You want to have… five parties?” he said.

  Barry nodded. The Head thought for a second, then shrugged and nodded back at The Secretary Entity. On their pads the Secretary Entity started writing down a word. It seemed to be the same word, beginning with G. Barry frowned. G, he saw, R, E, E, D and what looked like the start of a Y, when the Head spoke again.

  “So, Barry. Perhaps if you could tell us what kind of parents you’d like to have…? Then we can begin.”