by John Boyne
“But why not?” asked Barnaby as they went back up in the lift. “Hasn’t he seen how good your sculptures are?”
“He’s not really an art lover, that’s the problem. He’s only interested in money. And that’s what he wanted me to be interested in too. He tried to teach me the cotton-swab business; he wanted me to come to work for him, and then when he retired, I was meant to take over. But you want to know a secret? Cotton swabs—they’re not that interesting.”
“I suppose not.”
“And, anyway, I wanted to do what I wanted to do with my life. Not what someone else wanted me to do with it. So here I am, living like a rat, spending every night working on these pieces and starting to think that maybe he was right all along. No one’s ever going to take me seriously. Maybe I should pack it all in.”
They were back on the street now, and Joshua handed across a pair of iron weights that he’d taken from the underground room.
“Slip these into your shoes,” he said, not noticing that Barnaby had also taken something and hidden it in his back pocket. “It’ll be difficult to walk with them, but at least they should stop you from floating away for a little while.”
“Thanks,” said Barnaby. “And thanks for fixing my head too. Most people wouldn’t have cared.”
“Most people are a lot of hard work,” said Joshua, waving a hand in the air as he climbed into his window-washing unit, pressed the green button, and started to rise once again. “Take care of yourself, Barnaby Brocket. New York can be a pretty dangerous place, you know!”
Chapter 12
A Star Is Born
Barnaby stopped thinking about how to get home to Sydney and started thinking about how to thank Joshua Pruitt. Very few people, he decided, would have been thoughtful enough to disinfect his bruise and make sure that he wouldn’t float away. But what could he do? he wondered. He had very little money and no friends in the city.
And then he had an idea.
Walking slowly down the street—very slowly—he went in search of a post office, and when he found one, he stepped inside and sat down on a stool in front of a large telephone directory, turning the pages quickly as he searched for the address. It didn’t take him long to find what he was looking for. He scribbled the details down on a piece of paper and, because most of the streets in Manhattan are numbered instead of named, he made his way there with very little difficulty, despite the iron weights in his shoes and the fact that his ears were starting to hurt again.
From the street outside, the art gallery looked very imposing. It was painted completely white, and through the large windows Barnaby could see only a few small paintings hanging on the walls. He had never been inside such a place before and felt a little anxious, but he took a deep breath, opened the door, and stepped inside.
A woman seated behind a desk looked up; when she caught sight of him, the expression on her face suggested to Barnaby that she might be about to pass out in horror.
“Revolting,” she said in a surprisingly masculine voice.
“What is?” asked Barnaby.
“Your clothes. No feeling for color, no awareness of what’s in and what’s out. I mean—checked shorts at this time of year,” she added, looking at Barnaby’s outfit and shaking her head in disdain. “Where are we anyway, a golf course?”
She stood up, and he was amazed to see how tall she was—almost seven feet in height—with hair pulled back from her forehead so tightly that her eyebrows were raised up almost as high as her hairline. Her skin was deathly pale and her lips painted the most terrifying shade of blood-red.
“And who might you be?” she asked, dragging out each word as if their enunciation was painful to her.
“I’m Barnaby Brocket,” said Barnaby.
“Well, this is not a crèche, Benjamin Blewitt,” she declared, her tone suggesting that it would be beneath her dignity to get the boy’s name right. “Nor is it an orphanage. This is an art gallery. Get out immediately and take your peculiar smell with you.”
Barnaby gave himself a little sniff, just like Captain W. E. Johns always did when he curled up in a ball in his basket, and realized that she might have a point there. He hadn’t had a wash since leaving Ethel and Marjorie’s coffee farm, and had slept on a train from Brazil to New York in the meantime.
“That’s not a peculiar smell,” said Barnaby, trying his hardest to sound offended. “It’s my aftershave.”
“You’re too young to shave. You’re just a little boy.”
Barnaby frowned. She was right. It was best to simply get to the matter at hand. “I’ve come to see Mr. Vincente,” he said.
“Mr. Vincente?” asked the woman, laughing at the absurdity of his remark. “Firstly, no one refers to him as Mr. Vincente; he is simply ‘Vincente.’ And secondly, I’m afraid that Vincente is extremely busy. His calendar is tied up from now until the end of the decade. And regardless of this, he does not associate with smelly little boys who wander in off the streets with Band-Aids on their foreheads.”
“Please tell him that Barnaby Brocket is here,” said Barnaby, ignoring her rudeness. “I’m sure he will want to see me.”
“No. Now get out.”
“Tell him that it is a matter of some urgency.”
“If you don’t leave,” declared the woman, stepping forward now and towering over him, “I will be forced to call the police.”
“Tell him that I have arrived from a certain coffee farm in Brazil. I think he’ll want to see me then, don’t you?”
The woman hesitated; she knew enough of her employer’s history to realize that the words coffee farm and Brazil played an important part in it. She had read the biographies that had been written about him, after all, and every newspaper interview he had ever given. Perhaps this boy was somebody, she thought. Perhaps it might not be a good idea to antagonize him any further.
“Wait here a moment,” she said, allowing an exhausted sigh to escape her mouth as she turned round and disappeared into an office at the back of the gallery.
A minute or two later, a dark-haired man with a pencil-thin mustache appeared, looking at Barnaby with a half smile on his face and an expression of some curiosity. “You wanted to see me?” he asked, his accent betraying his roots in the favelas of São Paulo.
“I’m Barnaby Brocket,” explained Barnaby. “I was floating in the skies over Sydney when I bumped into a hot-air balloon piloted by your friends Ethel and Marjorie. It’s a long story, but they took me to stay with them on their coffee farm for a week. I even slept in your old room. They speak very highly of you. Palmira told me that you were their favorite person ever.”
“But they were my greatest friends!” exclaimed Vincente, clapping his hands together in delight. “My benefactors. Everything I have I owe to them. And they saved you too, yes? Like they saved me?”
“Well, sort of, I suppose,” admitted Barnaby. “I certainly don’t know what would have become of me if I hadn’t run into them when I did.” He looked over at the tall woman, who was glaring at him with a mixture of hostility and contempt. “Is this your wife?” he asked Vincente in an innocent voice. At this question her eyes opened so wide that Barnaby was afraid they might fall out and bounce across the floor.
“I am no man’s wife,” she insisted haughtily, as if she had just been accused of spending her evenings playing computer games.
“No,” muttered Barnaby, shaking his head. “No, I thought not.”
“But what can I do for you?” asked Vincente, taking the boy by the arm and leading him toward a beautifully upholstered sofa. “Ethel and Marjorie—they’re not ill, are they?”
“No,” said Barnaby, shaking his head quickly. “No, they’re very well indeed. The thing is, Mr. Vincente—”
“Just Vincente, please.”
“The thing is, Vincente, I’m right in thinking that you know all about art, aren’t I?”
The gallery owner extended his hands and looked around at the items that were on display. “I know a
little,” he said modestly.
“Could I show you something and then you can tell me if it’s any good or not?”
“No appraisals today!” insisted Vincente’s assistant, clapping her hands sharply. “You need to make an appointment. I believe we have an opening on the second Tuesday of April, eighteen years from now. Shall I put you in for ten a.m.?”
“Please, Alabaster,” said Vincente, silencing her with a stern expression. “If this boy is a friend of Ethel and Marjorie’s, then he is a friend of mine. Come, Barnaby. What is it you’d like to show me?”
Barnaby reached into his rucksack and removed one of Joshua’s sculptures—a small one that he’d taken without permission with this very plan in mind. He knew he wasn’t supposed to take things that didn’t belong to him, but he thought that, on this occasion, it might be all right.
Vincente took the piece of metalwork from Barnaby, turned it over in his hands, and stared at it for a minute or two before walking toward the window and examining it closer in the bright sunlight that was pouring through. He muttered something under his breath, then ran his fingers along the iron and wood before shaking his head in wonder.
“Exquisite,” he said, returning to the boy. “Simply exquisite. Did you create this?”
“No,” said Barnaby. “A friend of mine did. He’s a window cleaner on the Chrysler Building, but he wants to be an artist. Only no one will look at his work. He disinfected my bruise and put Band-Aids on my forehead. I thought I owed him a favor in return.”
“He does not want to be an artist,” roared Vincente in a dramatic tone. “He is an artist! An extraordinary artist. But you must take me to him, you foul-smelling little fellow. Take me to him now!”
A week later, having taken advantage of Vincente’s generosity in the shape of one of the guest rooms in his enormous apartment on Fifth Avenue, which looked down over Central Park, Barnaby—clean now, fully washed, scrubbed, and deodorized—arrived at the gallery wearing a pair of very expensive shoes with weights in the heels to keep him grounded, and made his way through the lines of photographers and newspaper reporters attending Joshua Pruitt’s first show, an event that was being heralded by the art world as one of the most important of the year.
“I hear you’re responsible for all this,” said a man with a press badge, approaching Barnaby, who nodded and tried not to stare too much at the terrible burn marks that covered most of the man’s face. He knew it would be rude to gawp at them but couldn’t help wondering how they had come to be there.
“Sort of,” said Barnaby.
“The name’s Charles Etheridge,” said the man, shaking Barnaby’s hand. “Chief art critic with the Toronto Star. I heard all about this remarkable new work from Vincente and had to come see for myself. And it wasn’t a wasted trip. I’ve got to take the train back to Canada tomorrow morning, but I’m glad I came. Speaking on behalf of my readers, I want to thank you for bringing young Mr. Pruitt’s work to the attention of the world. We owe you a debt of gratitude. If there’s ever anything I can do for you, just let me know, all right?”
Barnaby nodded, unable to think of anything that Mr. Etheridge really could do for him, and wandered off to find the artist.
“I can’t thank you enough, kid,” said Joshua, delighted by all the praise he was receiving. “And look over there—even my old man showed up. Seems like he’s proud of me now that I’ve made it into the New York Times and says it’s okay for me not to work in the cotton-swab business after all.”
“So you’re friends again?” asked Barnaby.
“Well, we’ve still got a lot of things to sort out. After all, he kicked me out onto the streets without a penny to my name. And why? Just ’cause I was a little different than he wanted me to be. I’ll get over it in time, I guess, but it’s not easy to forget. What kind of parent just tosses their son out of the house like that?”
Barnaby frowned and bit his lip. In all the excitement of the last week, he had not given as much thought to Alistair and Eleanor as he should have, but hearing Joshua say this made him think of home, although not in a good way. He glanced around at the extraordinary display that Vincente had set up, and at the wealthy art lovers examining each of the pieces as Alabaster stuck little red circles beside them to indicate that they were sold.
“We’ll figure it out,” continued Joshua. “As long as he realizes that I’m an artist, not a businessman. But what about you, Barnaby? What are you gonna do now?”
“I’m trying to get home to Sydney,” said Barnaby. “I just have to figure out how.”
And then an idea struck him. He walked back over to Charles Etheridge, the journalist from the Toronto Star, the one who had said that the world owed Barnaby a favor.
“Excuse me, Mr. Etheridge,” he said. “You said you’re going back to Toronto tomorrow morning?”
“That’s right, young man. Why do you ask?”
Barnaby thought about it and tried to picture a map of the world in his head. “Is Toronto anywhere near Sydney?” he asked.
Chapter 13
Little Miss Kirribilli
Eleanor was coming back from her walk with Captain W. E. Johns when she ran into the postman on the street. He handed her a parcel from a bookshop, a letter from Henry’s school, and Barnaby’s latest postcard. She read the letter first—apparently, Henry had been getting into fights over the last few weeks—and then hesitantly began to read the postcard. She could feel the blood draining from her face as she recognized her younger son’s tone and felt an ache inside her unlike any she had ever felt before.
It had been weeks now since she had walked across the Harbour Bridge with Barnaby, and the events of that day were rarely far from her mind. There were moments when she thought she had done the right thing, because, after all, he was the most willful little boy who absolutely refused to change, but then, just occasionally, she wondered why it was that she had been unable to love him exactly the way he was. After all, she had always taken pride in the fact that she was a normal mother with an entirely normal family, but was it normal to do what she had done?
Across the street she saw Esther Frederick-son getting out of her car with her seven-year-old daughter Tania in tow.
“Oh, hello, Eleanor,” cried Mrs. Frederickson, turning round and waving an enormous trophy in the air. “First place!” she declared triumphantly. “Little Miss Kirribilli, just like her three elder sisters before her. And her mother!”
Eleanor smiled but couldn’t bring herself to go over to congratulate Tania or Esther. The Little Miss Kirribilli contest brought up nothing but bad memories for her. When Eleanor was a girl, she had won the title of Little Miss Beacon Hill, and she’d hated all the fuss and attention that had gone with the crown. Her mother had been Little Miss Beacon Hill too, and from the day Eleanor was born, she’d used her daughter as if she was a dummy in a training school for makeup artists and hair stylists, covering her face with lipstick and rouge, piling her hair up in ever more extravagant bundles on her head, forcing her to walk up and down with her hands on her hips until she had perfected what Mrs. Bullingham, Eleanor’s mother, described as her “signature walk.”
“Now remember,” she instructed her daughter when she was only five years old and entering her first beauty pageant. “If the judges ask you what you want most in all the world, what do you say?”
“That I want to work in a kennel,” said Eleanor. “And I want to rescue as many unwanted dogs as possible and find them good homes to live in.”
“World peace!” cried Mrs. Bullingham, throwing her arms in the air. “Heavens above, child, how many times have I told you? The thing you want most in the world is world peace!”
“Oh,” said Eleanor. “Of course. Sorry. I’ll try to remember.”
“And if they ask you who your best friend is, what do you say?”
Eleanor thought about it; this was an answer that changed quite regularly. “I think I’ll say Aggie Trenton,” she replied. “Last week it would have bee
n Holly Montgomery, but she pulled my hair and stole my lunch on Tuesday.”
“Your best friend is your mother,” insisted Mrs. Bullingham through gritted teeth. “Repeat after me, Eleanor: My best friend is my mother.”
“My best friend is my mother,” said Eleanor dutifully.
“Your favorite music?”
“The Beatles,” said Eleanor.
“Chopin!”
“Oh yes. Chopin.”
“Your favorite book?”
“Anne of Avonlea.”
“Hmm,” said Mrs. Bullingham, who never read any books at all. “All right, that answer sounds fine to me. Now, is there anything I’ve forgotten?”
Beauty pageants were never Eleanor’s idea of fun. In fact, she hated having her makeup done and her hair styled; she much preferred going out into the neighborhood with the other boys and girls and getting messy and coming home with cuts on her elbows and mud on her face. But Mrs. Bullingham wouldn’t allow that.
“You’re a young lady,” she told her daughter. “And you must behave like one. There are over forty different beauty pageants for girls your age in the state of New South Wales. If we put our minds to it, we can work the entire circuit and win every single one. Wouldn’t that be wonderful? The most that’s ever been won in a single season is thirty-six. And do you know who that was?”
“Who?”
“Me!”
Eleanor sighed. It wasn’t just the pageants that she found boring, it was the other contestants too. Not one of the girls seemed to have a mind of her own. They repeated the things their mothers said and wore such wide smiles on their faces that it was a mystery how their cheeks didn’t crack open.
But her mother offered her no choice. Weekend after weekend, they got in the car and traveled from Broken Hill in the west to Newcastle in the east, from Coffs Harbour in the north to Mornington Peninsula in the south, singing songs, marching up and down catwalks, winning trophies. Not once did Eleanor get to attend a friend’s birthday party, because these always took place on a Saturday and that was the day she was in front of an audience, strutting her stuff.