The Parent Agency

by David Baddiel

  “I know,” said Barry. “Well, I know there’s quite a few children there. I don’t know how successful it is.”

  The Head raised his eyebrow; a big raise, leaving only a small amount of eyebrow hair visible below his fringe. He glanced over at The Secretary Entity, who shook their heads and looked at Barry as if he’d said something really inappropriate.

  “Hmm. Well, if you say so. We haven’t had any complaints before. Anyway, let’s move on.” He grabbed the second 24-Hourglass, the orange one, and turned it over. The sand began its slow trickle down, from top to bottom. “We have four days left before…”

  “Before what?” said Barry. The Head had stopped speaking and started to look troubled.

  “Before the end of your Five-Parent Package!” interjected Secretary One, much to – or at least it looked like this to Barry – the Head’s relief.

  “Yes! Exactly! So… Barry,” said the Head. “What sort of parents would you like for your second day?” The Secretary Entity raised their pencils above their pads. Barry took the list out of his pocket again.

  “What is that bit of paper you keep on looking at?” said Secretary One.

  “Oh, it’s just some thoughts I had written down. About the kind of parents I… don’t want, I guess. So that I can make sure I don’t choose them.”

  “Shouldn’t we keep it in our files?” said Secretary Two.

  “No thanks,” said Barry, who suddenly felt very protective of his list. He didn’t quite know why. He scanned it. He’d covered Number 9 – ‘Being poor’ – with the Rader-Wellorffs. Number 1 was ‘Being boring’. Interesting parents would be good… but then he remembered that he could kill two birds with one stone by going for Number 8: ‘Not being glamorous or famous’.

  Or, rather, the opposite of Number 8.

  “Famous. I’d like to have famous parents.”

  “Great. No problem!” said the Head. “Famous parents always want loads of children, don’t they?”

  The Secretary Entity nodded earnestly as if the Head had said something very wise.

  “Yes. But I’d like to have famous parents who don’t already have any other children, please,” said Barry. “It didn’t really work out with… me and the other kids last time.”

  “Oh,” said the Head. “Hmm. Let’s see…” He took out the gold laptop and starting flicking through profiles. “No… no… hmm… not this couple, they’ve already got one from every country in the world… Oh, there’s that famous singer and his partner, but they have two and they will insist on dressing them in gold lamé suits, so…” He looked up at Barry. “…probably not for you.”

  Secretary One raised her hand. “Head, sir?”

  “Yes, my dear?”

  “What about Vlassorina?”

  The Head slapped his forehead, and said: “I can’t believe I hadn’t thought of that!”

  “I wrote it down earlier,” said TSE One, showing the words VLASSORINA on her pad.

  “So did I,” said TSE Two. Although she was scribbling away furiously as she said it.

  CHAPTER TWO

  No one actually told Barry who Vlassorina was until he was picked up by a man in a Ferrari outside the Parent Agency five minutes later. The man was wearing a black suit and shades, and had an earpiece, with a little microphone in front of his mouth.

  “Hi,” he said as Barry got in.

  It was a red Ferrari. Like the Rader-Wellorffs’ stretch Rolls-Royce, it was a model that Barry, who knew a lot about cars, had never seen before, with pop-up headlights and millions of dials on the dashboard and a steering wheel covered in what looked like diamonds. You sat in it very low: Barry felt like his bottom was nearly on the tarmac.

  “Name’s Jonty. I work for Vlassorina.” Then to his microphone: “Ready to roll.”

  “Hello,” said Barry, who thought that Jonty reminded him of a younger and trendier Peevish.

  “Roof off?” said Jonty, starting the car, and revving the accelerator. The engine sounded amazing, like some kind of monster clearing its throat. They sped off down the road.

  “Um… OK,” said Barry, who hadn’t realised the car was a convertible.

  Jonty pressed one of the many buttons on the dashboard. The roof didn’t just go back with a slow whirr. It flew off, instantly, like a giant had flicked it off with an enormous finger.

  “Oh!” said Barry.

  “Good, isn’t it?” said Jonty, raising his voice, since the roar of the engine was now five times as loud.

  Barry looked round. The roof was crashing down the road behind them, turning over and over. Other cars swerved to avoid it. “But—”

  “Oh, don’t worry, Barry. Vlassorina has a deal with Ferrari. They just fit a new roof every time,” said Jonty, pressing his foot down so hard on the accelerator that Barry was thrown back in his seat.

  “Uh… what kind of person is Vlassorina?” shouted Barry, the noise now so loud it was like they were actually sitting inside the engine.

  “Vlassorina, my friend, is two people!”

  “Two people? What, like some kind of two-headed mutant?”

  “Ha ha ha!” shouted Jonty. He swerved round a corner at top speed. “You’re telling me you’ve really not heard of Vlad Mitt and Morrissina Padada?”

  “Er… no…” shouted Barry.

  “Good grief. Get with it, Grandpa. They’re only the coolest celebrity couple on the planet!”

  “They are?”

  “Yes!” The car suddenly braked, throwing Barry back in his seat again. They were at some traffic lights. “Haven’t you seen any of Vlad’s movies? Black Smell? A Hundred Days Till Christmas? Froggie Goes a-Courting? Insta-Man? The Shuffling Tree? Fish and Chips: the Movie, Death in the Car? Death in the Car 2? Death in the Car…”

  “Er… 3?” said Barry.

  “No, 4,” said Jonty. “He wasn’t in 3. They got Jackie Noodle – you know, from the Wonky Monkey movies? – to play his part in that one. Vlad was furious.”

  “Oh,” said Barry.

  “He’s also the face of Stink-Bombe.” Jonty pronounced this in a very French way.

  “His face is a stink bomb?”

  “No. He’s the face of Stink-Bombe. The smelliest perfume in the world. And Morrissina – she’s a pop star! You must have heard of her!”

  Jonty was revving the accelerator pedal again as he spoke. The lights changed and they sped off. Barry had to hold on to the dashboard to control what felt like G-force on his face.

  “No. Sorry…” said Barry.

  “You’re kidding me. She used to be in Girlish! You know, who won Talent Mess two years ago? And then had a massive global hit with ‘My Dog’s Surprised by His Own Farts’?”

  “That’s a song?”

  “Yes. You must know it!” Jonty opened his mouth wide and hit a much higher note than Barry would have guessed him able to. “He sleeps by the fire/When we watch the news/Then when one pops out/He looks confused!”

  “Wow…” said Barry.

  “Yes, the record company was surprised by the choice of it as first single too. But it worked!! Number one in fifty-seven countries. And then there’s the dance…”

  “The My-Dog’s-Surprised-by-His-Own-Farts dance?”

  “Yes. You know, down in a heap pretending to be asleep, then up on all fours – surprised face! Then you move your face around, pretending to bark.”

  “Right.”

  “Morrissina’s solo now, of course. And she used to be called Sally. But then she did a big deal with a supermarket and – anyway, they can tell you more about it themselves. Cos here we are!!”

  Jonty pulled the car up to a gate. Not like the grand old gates at Bottomley Hall. It looked just like a very, very high white wall. Jonty pressed a button on the gate.

  “Can I take your order, please?” said a voice.

  “Two Big Burgers with triple fries and a choco-milk milkshake, please,” said Jonty.

  “Oh,” said Barry, “I’m not that hungry. Although if they do chi
cken nuggets I wouldn’t mind…”

  “Coming right up,” said the voice.

  “Sorry, Barry, that isn’t an order,” said Jonty, turning to him and winking again. “It’s a code.”

  There was a whirring noise. And, as Barry looked ahead, the white wall slid slowly into the ground, revealing a very, very tall skyscraper. He looked up, up, up and up and could just make out that the top of the building was shaped like an enormous letter V.

  CHAPTER THREE

  “So… who else lives here?” said Barry as the lift rose to the top floor, marked P. House on the lift button. Barry knew that P stood for Pent, although a small part of him wanted to ask Jonty if it stood for Pee. He suppressed that with a giggle.

  “No one,” said Jonty.

  “No one?” said Barry. “But it’s an enormous building!”

  “Yes,” said Jonty. “Vlassorina wanted to live somewhere very high. But obviously not somewhere where they’d have to bump into ordinary people. So that’s why they built Vlassopolis.” He took out a tissue and wiped Barry’s cheek. “Sorry, Barry. It’s very hard not to spit when you say Vlassopolis. Oh dear, I’ve done it again.”

  “Really, it’s no problem…”

  “Why couldn’t they just have called it Vlassorina Towers?” said Jonty with a sigh.

  “But who lives on all these other floors?” asked Barry.

  “No one,” said Jonty. “They sometimes give the apartments to some of their famous friends to stay in, when they’re in town. You know. Finula Postalnarg. She’s stayed here. Jatt Blatt. Monty out of Monty and the Nose Hairs (obviously only Monty – none of the Nose Hairs). Imogen Le Bam-Bam, who, as I’m sure you know, designed the first ever edible smartphone. Dickie Henderson-Bear, who dances on a carousel in—”

  Ting! went the lift, much to Barry’s relief. He’d had just about enough of Jonty’s name-dropping, especially when the names were all people he hadn’t heard of.

  The lift doors opened, not into a corridor as Barry expected, but straight into the penthouse flat. It was an enormous room, bigger than any Barry had ever seen, with windows on all sides, showing an amazing view of the city.

  The room itself was really white: white walls, thick white rugs, paintings on the wall that seemed to be just blank white canvases and, on the very long white sofa, a white poodle, a white fluffy cat and a long-haired white rabbit, looking at him curiously. Music was playing, piped in from all sides. Barry had just caught the lyrics – “He sleeps by the fire/While we watch the news!” – when, from the ceiling, two white cages descended containing two figures, apparently asleep.

  The cages reached the floor and their doors opened. The man looked up with a surprised face and sang: “And when one pops out!”

  The woman looked up, danced into his arms, ballroom style, and leant back, singing, “He looks confuuuuuused!!” Then they opened their mouths and pretended to bark. Eventually, the music stopped and, from their dance position, the man and the woman – clearly Vlad Mitt and Morrissina Padada or, if not, some lunatics who had broken in – said, together: “Barry – welcome to Vlassopolis!”

  Jonty took out his tissue and wiped their combined spit off Barry’s face.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Barry had an amazing day with Vlassorina. Vlad showed him loads of clips from his films, and Morrissina showed him videos of all her hits. They took a photograph of him with the two of them putting their arms round him and posted it on something they called Birdynoise, and, because @Vlassorina had 17 million ‘feeders’, they got 20,000 people re-seeding it to all their friends!

  Morrissina wrote a song – well, she called a man up who, twenty minutes later, sent her back a song – called ‘Barry, I Will Carry You’, a really big, slow, emotional number like people do on The X Factor in the sing-off. “Barry/I will carry you/Whenever you fall/I’ll be there standing tall…” it went, when she sang it for him.

  It was a tiny bit awkward for Barry as she sort of sang it at him, with a backing track that the unnamed man who wrote it had sent via computer, and so Barry had to keep smiling for about five minutes. And then he realised that he probably shouldn’t be smiling, that maybe he should look as if he was about to cry, like the judges always did on The X Factor when people sang these songs.

  But, by the time he thought this, it was too late; she was hugging him, and Vlad, who (it turned out) had been filming it, was saying, “That’ll be great. I’ll get Jonty to put it up on MeMeMeTube.”

  Then, later, Vlad called – or possibly got Jonty to call, Barry wasn’t sure – Jamie Gherkiner, who was the most famous chef in this world, and he came round and prepared the most incredible tea. Jamie said: “OK, Barry, mate! Whatcha fancy, me old darlin’?” And after Vlad had explained what that meant, it became clear that Barry could say literally the first thing that came into his head and Jamie would be able to make it, in Vlassorina’s enormous stainless-steel kitchen.

  “Er… sausage-flavoured jelly?”

  “No worries!”

  “Doughnuts filled with cookie-dough ice cream…?”

  “Coming right up!”

  “A whole roast chicken made entirely out of skin!”

  “If you say so…”

  “Salty bananas!”

  “That’s the side dish sorted.”

  “Sherbet pie!”

  “My signature dish!”

  Thirty minutes later, all this food was miraculously sitting on the huge white dining table, looking amazing. Barry couldn’t believe it. There was a weird moment when he wasn’t allowed to eat it straight away, but had to stand smiling by the table with Jamie and Vlad and Morrissina while Jonty took photos of them all – for Goodbye! magazine, he heard Morrissina say – although not as weird, to be honest, as the actual taste of salty bananas. Jamie looked a bit upset when Barry spat them out, but then he smiled again when Barry tucked into the sherbet pie. Everyone laughed and clapped at the huge cloud of white that exploded out of it when he dug his fork in.

  “It matches the furnishings!” said Morrissina, and everybody laughed again, even Barry, who had no idea what she meant.

  Then, after tea, which, apart from the salty bananas, was absolutely delicious, Vlad said: “Right! Time to get ready!”

  “Ready for what?” said Barry.

  “Your party, of course!”

  “Oh!” said Barry. “Right!”

  “So we got a message from The Parent Agency that it’s a…” He got out his phone, which, like the steering wheel of his car, was covered in diamonds and, Vlad had told him earlier, was a special gift from the people at Peach. “…hold on… James Pond party?”

  “Bond.”

  Vlad looked up. “Definitely says Pond here. And the diamond aCommunicator – only one in the world – never lies.”

  “Um…”

  “So who is this James Pond guy?”

  “Well. He’s like a secret agent who drives fast cars and fights evil and stuff.”

  “What?! Morrissina! Are you thinking what I’m thinking?!”

  “I think I am, darling!!”

  “I know you are.”

  “I know you are too.”

  “Mmmmmmmmmm-mmmmm,” said their mouths as they kissed. Urrrgggh, thought Barry, waiting for them to finish.

  “You’re in luck, B-Man!” said Vlad when they finally stopped kissing.

  “Er… why?” said Barry.

  “Because this character James Pond sounds exactly like Dirk Large!”

  “And,” said Morrissina, hugging Barry again, “it’s the premiere of the new Dirk Large movie tonight! With a big party afterwards! At which you can be the guest of honour, Barry!!”

  “Great!!” said Barry. “Um… just one thing. Er… Who’s Dirk Large?”

  Morrissina moved away from him, incredulous. Vlad also looked like someone had slapped him with a wet fish (as Barry’s grandpa used to say, about surprised faces).

  “You really don’t know?” said Vlad. “Where have you been for the last
ten years, my friend?”

  “Er… somewhere else…” said Barry.

  Vlad stood up. He turned his head away from Barry and stared hard into the distance.

  “Secret agent. Driver of fast cars. Battler of evil,” he said. He turned back to Barry and mimed aiming a gun at him. “I… am Dirk Large. Of Death in the Car.”

  “Except in number 3, when they got Jackie Noodle to be him…”

  “Yes, thank you, Jonty. Can you go and get my suit ready, please?”

  CHAPTER FIVE

  So that was why Barry was here now, on the red carpet, with loads of screaming fans and cameras everywhere flashing at him. He thought of how the three of them must look. He was wearing a tuxedo again, but not like the one he had worn at Bottomley Hall: this one was white and his bow tie was white with sparkly silver skulls on it. Vlad’s tuxedo was also white; although he wasn’t wearing his bow tie, he had it undone around his neck. Morrissina was wearing a long white dress (not the same long white dress she’d been wearing earlier: this one showed quite a lot of her bosoms, for some reason).

  Barry thought about that photograph going all round the world (well – this world), with him in the middle of it. It felt strange. But also very exciting.

  When that picture was done, Jonty said to the cameras, “No more photos, guys, that’s it!” and the three of them began to move away. Barry could hear the cries of his name from the photographers growing fainter.

  Then, just before they passed through the doors of the cinema, he heard two more shouts of “Barry!” that sounded familiar.

  He looked round. The cameras flashed again. He squinted and shielded his eyes. Looking into the crowd of photographers, he thought he saw, above one lens and below another, two faces. A man and a woman: the same man and woman he had seen in the Head’s office, and briefly at Bottomley Hall. Looking at him with concern. And hope. Everyone there was looking at him with hope, of course, hope that he would turn to them and smile for the camera. But these two were looking at him with something else as well. Something he couldn’t quite name.