The Terrible Thing That Happened to Barnaby Brocket

by John Boyne

  The following day, as Barnaby boarded the Fonseca Express, he could barely keep his eyes open. He had partied long into the night and barely slept at all. Now he found a seat in an empty compartment, put on his seat belt to prevent himself from floating to the ceiling, and kicked his shoes off, yawning loudly, and hoping that no one would come in to disturb him. He read “A Scandal in Bohemia,” the first of the Sherlock Holmes stories, and barely noticed the time passing. When he finished, he put the book away and wrote the postcard home; when the conductor came to check his ticket, he promised to put it in the station mailbox at the next stop.

  And then, without thinking to set an alarm to wake him when the train arrived in Rio de Janeiro, Barnaby closed his eyes and fell asleep.

  Chapter 10

  The Worst Jeremy Potts Ever

  Alistair opened the mailbox and glanced at the bills and junk mail he held in his hand before noticing the postcard squashed between a flyer for a home-cleaning company and a menu for a newly opened pizza delivery service. He recognized the handwriting immediately, and his heart beat a little faster as he started to read it.

  In the nine days since Barnaby had floated away, the Brocket household had become a decidedly difficult place to be. Henry and Melanie were causing all sorts of bother, insisting that the police be called to search for their missing brother, but when Alistair told them that both he and their mother might be in serious trouble if the truth came out, they became a little less eager.

  “The authorities take a very dim view of these things,” he said. “Why, before you know it, we could be up in court and you two could be living in foster homes. And, anyway, it’s not as if it’s our fault that Barnaby isn’t here anymore. After all, he was the one who took his rucksack off.”

  This was the official explanation that Alistair and Eleanor had agreed upon. Barnaby had taken the bag off his shoulders, complaining yet again about the weight of the thing, and before he knew it, he was up in the air. Eleanor tried to save him but she couldn’t jump high enough. He’d been told a thousand times, they said, how important it was to keep it on, but he was too willful to listen.

  Everything that had happened, they insisted, was Barnaby’s own fault.

  But this was not enough to satisfy Henry and Melanie, who missed their brother dreadfully and were causing scenes in front of their parents every evening, insisting that more be done to find him. Neither of them imagined for a moment that their parents weren’t telling the truth. After all, there had been only one witness to the terrible thing that had happened at Mrs. Macquarie’s Chair, and that was Captain W. E. Johns.

  And it wasn’t as if he could expose the lie.

  If only the child had been normal, Alistair thought, looking up and down the street at the rows of even hedges and perfectly manicured lawns. Was it too much to ask for a child to fit in? He remembered when he was Barnaby’s age. He’d done everything he could not to stand out from the crowd, but it wasn’t possible, not with all the attention-seeking that his own parents had insisted upon.

  He felt sick to his stomach when he remembered how desperate they had been for everyone to pay attention to their son. His father, Rupert, dreamed of being an actor; his mother, Claudia, of being an actress. They’d met in drama school in their early twenties, when they were quite convinced that they were going to become international film stars.

  “I want to work with the very best directors,” said Claudia, who had only ever had a small part in a television advertisement for artificially sweetened breakfast cereal, in which she played a spoon.

  “And with actors who really respect the craft,” added Rupert, who had won the role of “Thug in Café” in an episode of an early-evening soap opera when he was sixteen years old.

  Stardom somehow eluded them, though, and so when Alistair was born, they developed a new ambition: to turn their son into a star instead.

  From the time he learned to walk, the boy was dragged to auditions for commercials, plays, and television drama series, despite the fact that he had no interest in taking part in such things and would have preferred to stay at home, playing with his friends. A naturally shy boy, he hated standing up in front of complete strangers and having to perform a scene from Oliver! or sing a version of “With a Little Bit of Bloomin’ Luck” in a ridiculous Cockney accent.

  “You’ll do it or you won’t get any dinner,” Claudia told him when he was eleven years old and complaining about being forced to audition for the part of Jeremy Potts in an amateur dramatic production of Chitty Chitty Bang Bang.

  “But I don’t want to be Jeremy Potts,” complained Alistair. “I want to be Alistair Brocket.”

  “And who is Alistair Brocket?” cried Rupert, appalled that his son would allow such a great opportunity to pass him by. “Nobody! Nobody at all! Is that how you want to spend your life? Without anyone paying you any attention? Look at your mother and me—we could have been giants of the film industry, but we gave it all up to become the parents of an ungrateful little boy. And this is the thanks we get.”

  Alistair said nothing to this. He knew very well that they hadn’t given anything up for him—that they’d been trying to be actors for years before he was born, so their lack of success was nothing to do with him.

  To his horror, and owing to the dearth of better choices, Alistair won the part. For weeks, he attended rehearsals reluctantly, having great difficulty remembering his lines and always dreading the moment when it was his turn to sing. It was bad enough with just the other cast members and director watching, but whenever he thought of a full audience sitting out there in a darkened auditorium, it was enough to make him want to throw up.

  “I don’t want to do it,” he told his parents the day the play was due to open. “Please don’t make me.”

  But nothing he could say could make them change their minds, and a few hours later he went onstage with his legs feeling like jelly. Over the course of the two hours that followed, at a conservative estimate he remembered less than five percent of his lines, fell off the stage twice, tripped over his co-star’s feet six times, and gave every impression of being about to wet his pants when Grandpa Potts declared that up from the ashes, up from the ashes, grow the roses of success.

  The local newspaper was scathing in its review, and the next day, in school, he was ridiculed by his classmates.

  “Never again,” he told his parents when he went home that evening, wishing the ground would open up and swallow him whole. “I’m not going back onstage ever, and you can’t make me. It’s humiliating. I am never, ever, going to stand out from the crowd again.”

  Walking toward his front door now, some thirty years later, Alistair couldn’t help but feel anger at his parents for putting him through this trauma at such a young age. Why, if they’d only let him be himself—a quiet, thoughtful, kind child—then maybe he would never have developed such a terrible fear of being noticed in the first place.

  And then perhaps he wouldn’t have cared so much what people thought of his own children.

  “Anything in the post?” asked Eleanor as he went into the kitchen and looked around at his family, who were eating their breakfast. Henry and Melanie said nothing; they were maintaining a silence to show their parents how much they missed Barnaby, but neither Alistair nor Eleanor was giving them the satisfaction of noticing it. He glanced up at the ceiling, from where Barnaby’s mattress had been recently removed, and crumpled up the postcard, stuffing it in his pocket, determined to throw it in the wastepaper basket at work later that morning.

  “Nothing,” he said, betraying a slight catch in his throat as he shook his head. “Nothing except bills and junk mail.”

  Chapter 11

  The Cotton-Swab Prince

  “Last stop! Last stop!”

  Barnaby opened his eyes and gave a great stretch, unsure exactly where he was at first and then remembering: the Fonseca Express.

  “It smells like coffee in here,” said the conductor, opening the window to al
low the air in.

  “It’s my rucksack,” explained Barnaby, sitting up and unfastening his seat belt before pulling it on, for the bag, filled to the brim with coffee beans, had been a parting gift from Ethel and Marjorie, something to keep him grounded when he arrived in Rio de Janeiro. He’d been so tired when he arrived at the train station in São Paulo, but the journey must have refreshed him, for he felt very alert now, as if he’d slept for days. Stepping down onto the platform, however, he was surprised to see a sign that said PENN STATION.

  “Excuse me,” he asked a passing policeman. “Which direction do I go for Rio de Janeiro Airport?”

  “About five thousand miles that way, kid,” the man replied, pointing toward the exit doors.

  “Five thousand miles?” said Barnaby, gasping in astonishment. “Where am I exactly?”

  “New York,” said the cop. “The most magnificent city in the world.”

  “Actually, that’s Sydney,” said Barnaby, who might have been surprised to find himself in North America rather than South, but wasn’t going to allow a mistake like that to go unchallenged. The policeman didn’t seem to mind, however, simply shrugging his shoulders and moving on while Barnaby made his way out of the station, wondering what on earth he should do next. He had obviously slept for the entire journey, and his flight to Sydney had departed without him.

  Barnaby was now alone on the streets of the huge city and simply wandered around for an hour, down one avenue, across a side street, up another, through a plaza, and out into a busy shopping area, a little taken aback by the height of the buildings and the crowds that were making their way along the pavements. After a while he saw a long queue forming to get into one of the skyscrapers and looked at the marble sign pinned to the wall: THE CHRYSLER BUILDING. Just then a man pushed into him from behind, pulled the rucksack off his back, and ran off down the street with it.

  “Hey!” Barnaby shouted. “Stop, thief!”

  But there was nothing he could do. Before he could even think of giving chase, his feet were lifting off the ground and he was rising up into the sky. And as he approached the top of the building, his head banged sharply against a hard metal object, and everything went black around him as the city twisted like a kaleidoscope beneath his feet.

  “Ow,” said Barnaby Brocket.

  “Hey, kid! You all right?”

  Barnaby opened his eyes and looked up. He was hovering underneath a wire cage that was hanging off the side of the building, just where the upright walls gave way to the terraced crown. Through the gaps in the grilled floor, he could see a pair of sturdy black boots.

  “Say something, kid! Are you hurt?”

  “Urgh,” groaned Barnaby, looking up into the cage itself, where a young man in a pair of blue denim overalls was standing surrounded by buckets and cloths. “What happened to me?”

  “You came sailing up here like a balloon with the air let out,” replied the young man. “Then crashed into me and hit your head. How’d you do that anyway?”

  “I float,” said Barnaby, making eye contact with a passing hawk that was winging its way down toward the Hudson; he couldn’t help but envy its ability to soar and land at will.

  “No kidding!”

  Barnaby tried to shrug, but his shoulders were pressed against the latticed floor, which made moving a little difficult. “Will you help me inside your cage?” he asked.

  “Of course,” said the young man, reaching over the side and taking hold of Barnaby’s ears to pull him in and then keeping his hands pressed firmly on the boy’s shoulders to stop him from floating away again. “This is a first,” he said, shaking his head in disbelief. “I don’t normally get visitors up here.”

  “You’re a window cleaner?” asked Barnaby, looking around at the various scrubbers, squeegees, scrapers, and sponges that littered the floor of the cage.

  “That’s the day job anyway. Stops me from going hungry.”

  Barnaby craned his neck and stared up toward the top of the building, tilting his head to get a better view of the triangular windows and the ribbed steel arches that surrounded them.

  “Impressive, isn’t it? It takes me a whole week to clean them all, you know. The name’s Joshua, by the way,” the young man added, extending his hand. “Joshua Pruitt.”

  “Barnaby Brocket,” said Barnaby.

  “That’s some nasty bump you’ve got on your head,” said Joshua, parting Barnaby’s hair a little with his fingers. “We need to clean that up a little. You want to come back down with me?”

  Barnaby looked around. He didn’t have much choice, really; it was either go back down to street level or float away into the sky. “All right, then,” he said.

  Joshua nodded and lifted a metal brick that was hanging from the side of the cage walls, slapped his hand down on a large green button, and they began to descend. He kept a tight hold of Barnaby’s hand as they went round the corner and entered the building through the service entrance, crossing the floor toward a single gray lift. Once inside, he pressed the button marked –3 and they began to descend into the depths of the building.

  Leaving the lift, they made their way along a twisty corridor with gray stone walls covered in ancient-looking pipes that made strange gurgling sounds as they passed by before descending a short flight of uneven steps and opening a large metal door that led into a dark and gloomy room. Joshua pulled a cord, and a single lightbulb illuminated what appeared to be someone’s makeshift home. In the corner was a sleeping bag, and next to it some empty cups, a couple of books, and a half-eaten sandwich.

  “Sorry about the mess,” said Joshua, looking a little embarrassed. “I don’t tidy up as much as I should.”

  “Do you live down here?” asked Barnaby.

  “Sure do. I can’t afford my own place, so I thought I’d stay here for a while.” He scratched his head and looked a little unhappy that this was the best that life was offering him. “It’s better than paying rent for some tiny box on the opposite side of the city.”

  Barnaby wondered what might lead to someone living underneath a building like this—and where the young man’s parents were. Will I end up in a place like this? he asked himself as Joshua rummaged in a box in the corner of the room and pulled out a bottle of something green and gloopy-looking and a couple of Band-Aids. What if I never make it home at all?

  “Good as new,” said Joshua, dabbing the disinfectant on Barnaby’s head with a cotton ball and crossing the Band-Aids in an X shape over the bruise. “You feel better now?”

  “Much better,” said Barnaby. He sat down on one of the large round pipes that ran along the base of the walls and held on to it tightly, as the ceiling was made almost entirely of steel. It was at moments like this that he longed for his David Jones Bellissimo plush medium mattress.

  “Okay, Barnaby,” said Joshua. “Let me just put these things away and we’ll get you back upstairs.”

  As he disappeared round a corner, Barnaby’s attention was taken by an open door on the opposite side of the room. He stood up and made his way carefully toward it, holding on to the steel girders like a monkey swinging from vine to vine. Scattered around the floor of the next room was a most unusual collection of sculptures, all made out of iron and twisted into strange but interesting shapes, some with strips of wood buried in the center, their wooden hearts flecked with an icy blue paint. There didn’t seem to be any particular sense to the designs, and each one was different from the next, but when he picked one up, he was intrigued by the object he was holding; they looked like pieces you might find in an art gallery or a museum.

  A moment later, his attention was taken by something equally unexpected that sat in the corner of the room: a simple cardboard box filled to the brim with cotton swabs—the type you soften in water to clean your ears. There must have been thousands of them in there. Tens of thousands.

  “I thought you’d floated away,” said a voice from behind him, and he spun round to see Joshua, who’d followed him inside.


  “Did you do these?” asked Barnaby, looking around at the sculptures.

  “Sure did. You like them?”

  “They’re really good. What do they mean?”

  “You have to decide that for yourself. Each one means something different to me. I told you that being a window cleaner was only my day job. I’m an artist, really. Or I want to be anyway. Not that I can get anyone to look at my work or buy it. You have no idea how snooty all the gallery owners in this city are. Maybe I’m wasting my time, I don’t know.”

  “And what about the box of cotton swabs?” asked Barnaby. “Are they art too?”

  “No,” said Joshua, smiling. “No, that’s just a box of cotton swabs.”

  “You must have very dirty ears.”

  “They’re not for me,” he replied, picking one up and staring at it. “I just keep them to remember my family by. It can get pretty lonely this far underground, you know.”

  “Most people keep photographs,” said Barnaby.

  “Well, I’ve got one or two of those in my wallet too. But the family business is cotton swabs, so they remind me of home. My father’s the cotton-swab king of America. Which makes me the prince, I guess. You ever heard of Samuel Pruitt?”

  Barnaby shook his head.

  “Well, I suppose he isn’t very famous. But he’s very, very rich. He invented the cotton swab. And anytime anyone in the world buys a pack of swabs to clean out their ears, my father makes a quarter. That’s a lot of quarters. Put them all together and they make a lot of dollars.”

  “So why do you live down here?” asked Barnaby. “You must be able to afford to live in a palace.”

  “That’s my father’s money,” said Joshua, steering Barnaby back toward the corridor. “It’s not mine. The only money I have is whatever I make out of washing those windows. It’s enough, though. It keeps me from starving while I’m working on my art. He cut me off without a dime. Won’t let me in the house. Won’t have anything to do with me.”