by John Boyne
“Help!” cried Barnaby, tapping on the glass. “Let me out of here.”
“You’re in quarantine,” said one of the scientists, stifling a yawn.
“But why? I haven’t done anything wrong.”
“You’re the space boy, aren’t you? We can’t allow space boys to just go wandering around Australia. Anything could happen. We have an environment to protect. If you’d been found smuggling peanut butter into the country, you’d be in the same predicament.”
“But I’m not carrying any contamination!” protested Barnaby. “And I don’t have any food on me! I don’t even like peanut butter. It’s all gloopy and sticks to your teeth.”
“He’s right, it does,” said one of the scientists.
“You’ll just have to wait for Mr. Macquarie to come,” said another. “He’ll know what to do with you.”
“Mr. Macquarie knows best,” cried all the other scientists in unison, turning to look at Barnaby, smiling for exactly four seconds, then turning back to their work. One put an enormous pair of headphones over his ears and placed a microphone on top of a piece of rock—one of the rocks that had been taken off Zéla IV-19—and listened. Nothing happened for a moment, then his eyes opened very wide and he seemed intrigued by whatever it was he heard.
“It’s Schubert,” he said, turning to one of his colleagues. “Listen, Celestine. It’s Schubert, I’m sure it is.”
“Rachmaninoff,” said the lady sitting next to him, taking the headphones and shaking her head.
“No, I’m sure it’s Schubert.”
“You’re wrong.”
“The fact that it’s anyone at all is the most interesting thing, surely,” said the man sitting next to her, having a listen. He threw the headphones down and shook his head in disgust. “I hate rock music,” he said, returning to his work.
Finally, the doors to the room opened and Mr. Macquarie reappeared, coming over toward Barnaby’s glass box and looking up at him with a perplexed expression.
“I want to come in there and talk to you,” he said. “If I step inside, you’re not going to hurt me, are you?”
“Of course not,” said Barnaby. “I wouldn’t even know how.”
“All right, then,” said Mr. Macquarie, reaching over to the control panel. He tapped in the six numbers again and the doors slid open. “But just so you know, if you try anything funny, you’ll only land yourself in a lot more trouble.”
He stepped inside, sat down on the chair as the doors closed behind him, and looked up, shaking his head. “What are you doing up there anyway, Space Boy?”
“I’m not a space boy,” insisted Barnaby. “How many times do I have to tell you? I’m from Kirribilli.”
“I don’t think we’ve tracked that planet yet,” replied Mr. Macquarie. “Is it in our solar system?”
“Of course it is! It’s right here in Sydney. Just down the road from the prime minister’s house. You take the train to Milsons Point, go down the hill by the shops, turn left, and our house is down there.”
“Are you quite certain?” asked Mr. Macquarie.
“Of course I am. I’ve lived there all my life.”
“I have a sister who lives in Kirribilli.”
“What’s her name?”
“Jane Macquarie-Hamid.”
“Oh, I know Mrs. Macquarie-Hamid,” said Barnaby, a great smile spreading over his face. “She lives right across the road from us. My dog, Captain W. E. Johns, plays with her dog. They’re the best of friends.”
“If you know so much about her, then what’s her dog’s name?”
Barnaby thought about it. “Rothko,” he said. “Rothko Macquarie-Hamid. Your sister puts a blue bow tie around his neck after she gives him a bath. Then Rothko comes straight across to ours so Captain W. E. Johns can pull it off with his teeth. No one should humiliate a dog like that, you know. You should mention it to your sister.”
Mr. Macquarie seemed impressed that Barnaby knew the name of his sister’s dog, and pulled a notebook out of his inside pocket, scribbled something down, then put it back. Barnaby hoped it was a note to his sister.
“Well, if you’re not a space boy,” he said finally, “then perhaps you wouldn’t mind explaining to me just how you ended up inside Zéla IV-19. You must realize that if we send up six people to middle space, then we expect a maximum of six to return.”
“Haven’t the other astronauts told you?” asked Barnaby, thinking that if Mr. Macquarie didn’t believe him, then he might at least believe them.
“They’ve told me a story, yes,” he replied. “But it’s so outlandish that I can’t believe it.”
“Everything they’ve told you is true,” said Barnaby.
“But you don’t know what they told me yet.”
“Did they tell you that I floated up to their spaceship, fell asleep due to the air pressure, and was taken inside?”
“Yes.”
“Did they tell you that I was born with a condition that means I don’t obey the law of gravity and so can’t stay on the ground for more than a few seconds at a time? When I was in the spaceship, I seemed to be able to do so, although I’m not quite sure why—it might have something to do with my ears?”
“They mentioned something about it,” admitted Mr. Macquarie.
“Did they tell you that I saved Naoki Takahashi’s life when the white cord snapped and he found himself floating around in outer space?”
“You weren’t in outer space.”
“Middle space, I mean.”
“Yes, they told me all that. But look, Space Boy—”
“Stop calling me that! My name is Barnaby Brocket!”
“All right, then, Barnaby Brocket. But that’s just the story of what you did up there. There doesn’t seem to be any dispute about that. What I need to know is how you got up there in the first place.”
And so Barnaby told him.
Every detail of his life story from the moment he was born to the moment when he asked the head of the International Space Academy to stop calling him Space Boy and to start calling him Barnaby Brocket instead.
“Well, I’ve heard some funny things in my time,” said Mr. Macquarie when he was finished, “but that takes the biscuit. I suppose I don’t have any choice but to believe you. The question is, what do we do with you now?”
“I could go home,” suggested Barnaby.
“You could, that’s true. But first things first. Before we let you go anywhere, we need to send you over to the hospital in Randwick to have a full checkup. Make sure you haven’t come to any harm on your travels. Make sure you haven’t picked up any space bugs.”
Barnaby sighed. “All right, then,” he said.
By the evening, Barnaby was lying in a hospital bed, a tight leather belt strapped across his middle to stop him from floating to the ceiling, waiting for the doctor to examine him. They had put him in a private room on the very top floor of the hospital. It was the best room they had, as there was an enormous skylight over the bed, about half the size of the room, and when he lay back, he could look up at the night sky above as it started to grow dark. Fortunately, the nurses had pressed a button on the wall next to him and sealed it, in case his belt came loose, to stop him from floating away. It felt strange to imagine that only a couple of days before, he had been out there in middle space looking down at the outlines of Australia and New Zealand in the distance; now he was lying in a bed in Sydney Children’s Hospital staring up at the stars as they blinked in the darkness, wondering whether there were any other astronauts out there looking down at him.
A little while later, a doctor arrived, took a blood sample with a needle that simply punctured a tiny hole in the ball of Barnaby’s thumb, then wrapped a large Velcro strip around his arm and kept pumping it tighter and tighter until it felt like it was going to squeeze his arm off altogether.
“Ow,” said Barnaby Brocket.
“Oh, that doesn’t hurt,” said the doctor, whose name was Dr. Washington. She was quite
a good-looking doctor, with dark black hair that she kept pushing behind her ears.
“No, it just felt tight, that’s all,” said Barnaby.
She smiled and tapped his knees with a rubber hammer to make sure they jumped, looked down his throat and into his eyes.
“Nothing wrong with you, so far as I can see,” she said after a moment. “This whole floating business is a mystery, though, isn’t it? When did it start?”
“About two or three seconds after I was born.”
“That long? And you’ve been to see doctors about it?”
“When I was very small.”
“And it’s never gone away? You’ve always been like this?”
“Always,” said Barnaby. “Every minute of my life.” He sat back in his bed and then remembered something. “Except when I was in the spaceship,” he said, and Dr. Washington, who was just about to leave the room, turned round and looked at him.
“What’s that?” she asked.
“When I was in the spaceship, my feet stayed on the floor,” he explained. “I floated to it and I floated out of it, but inside—”
“Where the air was pressurized—”
“That’s what Dominique said! She told me to get my ears checked out when I got back to Earth.”
Dr. Washington stared at him for a moment, then took a small instrument with a bulb at the end of it out of her pocket and looked inside his ears.
“Hmm,” she said.
“What is it?” asked Barnaby.
“Just wait here a moment,” said Dr. Washington—as if there was any chance of his being able to get up and leave. A few minutes later she returned with another doctor, Dr. Chancery, who took out of his pocket a black-and-silver contraption the size of a screwdriver that also had a bulb at the end; like Dr. Washington before him, he looked inside Barnaby’s ears.
“Hmm,” said Dr. Chancery.
“That’s what I thought,” said Dr. Washington. “Hmm.”
“What is it?” asked Barnaby, starting to worry now. “What’s wrong with me?”
“There’s nothing wrong with you,” said Dr. Washington. “Nothing wrong with you at all. You’re a perfectly healthy little boy, in fact.”
“So why were you looking inside my ears and saying ‘Hmm’?”
“It’s nothing for you to worry about,” said Dr. Washington. “We’ll just run a few tests, and then we’ll have a better idea of what we’re dealing with.”
Barnaby said nothing, just stared up through the skylight and wished that sometimes, just once every century or so, a grown-up would give him a straight answer to a simple question.
A loud commotion from the corridor made him look up, and Drs. Washington and Chancery stepped outside to see what was going on. He could hear raised voices, then a scuffle, and then there was silence again. A moment later, Dr. Washington reappeared on her own, smoothing her hair down as if she’d just been in a fight.
“Sorry about that,” she said.
“What’s going on out there?”
“Reporters. From the tabloids. They’ve heard all about you, you see. How you can float. How you floated up to Zéla IV-19. They want to get your story for the weekend editions. I should probably tell you that they’re offering you a lot of money for it. You’re going to be famous if you’re not careful.”
Barnaby grimaced. That was the last thing he wanted. Famous people weren’t normal, after all, and if he arrived in Kirribilli with a crowd of reporters in tow, then his parents would surely be even less happy to see him than ever. He might not even make it to see Captain W. E. Johns before he was dragged back off to Mrs. Macquarie’s Chair.
“I don’t want to speak to them,” he said. “I just want to go home.”
“I’m afraid we can’t let you go until tomorrow afternoon at the earliest. We need to keep you in overnight to observe you. Plus, there are those tests I told you about—I won’t have the results of them until lunchtime, and that might lead us in a different direction altogether. But if you like, I can call your parents and let them know that you’re here and that you’re safe.”
Barnaby felt a slight burning sensation in his stomach at the idea of his parents arriving at the hospital while the press were still gathered outside. But he nodded and wrote his phone number down on a piece of paper, and Dr. Washington left him to get some sleep.
He stared up at the night sky once again, feeling his eyelids begin to grow heavy. Tomorrow he would finally see his parents again, not to mention Henry, Melanie, and Captain W. E. Johns, and be taken home to Kirribilli. But had anything really changed? He had been sent away from home because he was different from other boys, and although he might have learned a lot on his travels, he still hadn’t learned how to keep his feet on the ground.
Chapter 24
Whatever Normal Means
The following morning Barnaby was sitting up in bed reading a copy of Around the World in Eighty Days that he’d borrowed from the hospital library. The sun was pouring through the skylight above him, shining directly down on the pages, illuminating Phileas Fogg’s journey with his faithful valet Passepartout. He was thoroughly absorbed in the story—at the point where Phileas has missed the steamer from Hong Kong to Yokohama—when the door was flung open.
“Barnaby!” said two voices in unison, and he looked up to see two figures standing there, staring at him with slightly apprehensive expressions on their faces.
“Hello, Mum,” he said, setting his book aside, surprised that he felt more anxious than happy to see them. “Hello, Dad.”
“We wondered where you’d got to, son,” said Alistair, coming over and attempting an awkward hug but changing his mind and shaking hands instead. Barnaby thought this was an extraordinary thing to say. He’d clearly been in on the plan, after all; he remembered their conversation over breakfast on his last morning at home.
“Hello, Barnaby,” said Eleanor, leaning over and kissing him on the cheek, behaving as if nothing terrible had ever happened at Mrs. Macquarie’s Chair. Barnaby breathed in her perfume; it had a familiar scent of home and made him lonely and sorrowful at the same time. “How are you feeling?”
“I’m fine,” said Barnaby. “I’m not sick.”
“Then you shouldn’t be in hospital, should you? It’s not normal to be in a place like this if there’s nothing wrong with you.”
“Try telling the doctors that,” said Barnaby. “This is where they brought me. When I came back from space, I mean.”
Eleanor sighed as she sat down on the corner of the bed, running a finger across the bedside locker and examining it for dust. “This whole space business is a lot of nonsense,” she said. “And I’m tired of hearing about it already. It’s not normal to want to go exploring worlds outside our own. We have a perfectly good planet right here, if you ask me.”
“You’re right there, Eleanor,” agreed Alistair, sitting down on the only chair in the room. “I don’t understand these explorers and what they think they’re doing.”
“But if there’d never been any explorers, then no one would ever have discovered America,” said Barnaby.
“Well, exactly,” said Alistair and Eleanor in unison, throwing each other a look.
After this they all remained silent for a few minutes as a great awkwardness descended on the room. Had they been able to see the paint on the wall grow infinitesimally fainter, then they would have seen it. Had they been able to hear the sound of their hair growing infinitesimally longer, then they would have heard it.
“How’s Henry?” asked Barnaby, breaking the silence, wishing that his elder brother had come to see him in the hospital too.
“Henry’s Henry,” said Eleanor with a shrug, as if this was any sort of answer. “He’s fine. Perfectly normal.”
“And Melanie?”
“Also fine. Also perfectly normal.”
Barnaby nodded, pleased to hear it. “What about Captain W. E. Johns?” he asked.
“Captain W. E. Johns has seemed a little sad
of late, to be honest,” said Alistair. “That tail of his has been on a bit of a go-slow.”
“Nonsense,” said Eleanor, contradicting him. “That’s just the way dogs look. It’s perfectly normal for a dog to look sad, and Captain W. E. Johns is a perfectly normal dog. On the inside he’s chasing squirrels. Anyway, your brother and sister are going to come in and visit you in a little while. They’re terribly excited about seeing you again.”
“Can’t I just come home?” asked Barnaby in a quiet voice, unsure whether they were going to say yes or no. “Can’t I just see them there?”
“Of course you can,” said Eleanor, sitting back a little, for the sun was pouring through the skylight above Barnaby’s bed. “If that’s what you want,” she added in a quieter voice.
Barnaby thought about it. He assumed it was what he wanted. After all, where else would he go if not home?
“There’s just one thing,” said Alistair, coughing a little and sitting up straight as if he had some very important news to impart. “Your mother and I … well, we’ve discussed this ever since Dr. Washington phoned us last night to say that you were here. It has to do with this whole floating business of yours. Let’s be honest, son: we’ve put up with it for as long as we can. Eight years, coming up to nine. Longer than most normal families would.”
“We are a normal family, Alistair,” insisted Eleanor, throwing him a filthy look before turning her attention back to Barnaby. “But your father’s right. You’ve spent eight years floating up to the ceiling, lying around on your David Jones Bellissimo plush medium mattress, refusing to go to normal schools—”