The Parent Agency Read online

  “No it isn’t! I hate you!”

  “Oh, do you?”

  “Yes! And Mum!”

  And suddenly a feeling that had been welling up inside Barry for… well, since his dad had closed the door on Jake and Taj and Lukas just before tea, but in another way for much longer than that, maybe ever since he’d understood that, unfortunately, his name was Barry – a feeling that he wanted to both cry and shout and break something all at the same time – exploded out of him.

  “I hate you because you’re boring! And tired ALL THE TIME! And always TELLING ME OFF FOR NOTHING! And saying, ‘That’s a swear,’ when all I’ve done is say BUM!”

  “Barry. That’s a swear!” said his mum.

  “NO IT ISN’T! And because you’re so much nicer to THEM…” He pointed at TSE. They both grinned at the same time. “…than to ME! And because…” Barry realised by now that he was doing the list in his bedroom. He decided to miss out Numbers 8 and 9 – ‘Not being glamorous’ and ‘Being poor’ – since even in his rage he knew that they might just sound a bit too horrible out loud. Especially as loud as he was speaking now. “And… YOU NEVER, EVER MAKE MY BIRTHDAY REALLY GOOD!!”

  There was a short pause after he shouted this. Then Sisterly Entity One said:

  “Write that down, Ginny.”

  “I’m writing it down, Kay.”

  “Right,” said Barry’s dad. “Well, if that’s how you feel, we won’t have a screening of Casino Royale on your birthday!”

  “GREAT!” shouted Barry and he threw the DVD across the room. It spun round in the air as it made its way towards the sink area. Barry was secretly quite proud of the throw; his wrist had flicked sharply as he’d released the disc, like an Olympic discus champion.

  “BARRY!!” his dad shouted. So loudly that, for the first time this dinner time, Barry’s mum looked up from the dishwasher. Just in time to be hit in the eye by a copy of Casino Royale, starring David Niven.

  “OW!” she said, falling backwards and out of sight again. Barry heard a bump; then one of the egg timers, the red one, fell off the kitchen counter and smashed.

  Uh-oh, he thought.

  “RIGHT, BARRY, THAT’S IT! GO TO YOUR ROOM!” said his dad, pointing upstairs – stupidly, really, as Barry knew the way.

  “ALL RIGHT I WILL!” Barry shouted back. And because he was a little frightened by now, he ran out of the kitchen as fast as he could, swerving at the last minute to avoid the bits of glass and sand from the egg timer which were sprinkled all over the floor.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Barry lay in his bed, fuming. He’d gone straight to his room, without cleaning his teeth or anything, and slammed the door. But it had just come back at him as his door didn’t really shut properly unless you closed it carefully, jiggling the handle up as you did it. So he’d had to do that after his slam, which felt completely at odds with a show of rage.

  He lay there in his onesie – a zebra one, with ears and a tail, which was too big for him because it had been passed down from Lukas – and stared at his room. His head hurt. He wasn’t sure why that was, but he’d read in another part of the Sunday Express once that stress brought on headaches, and he knew that he was very stressed at the moment.

  It wasn’t that easy to sleep in his room at the best of times as the Bennetts lived on a main road called the A41, and Barry’s room faced it. The Sisterly Entity had, of course, been given the quieter room at the back facing the garden, which was BIGGER as well: some rubbish about them needing to have the bigger room because there were two of them. Barry did not recognise this.

  As each vehicle went past, it would light up a different section of Barry’s room, depending on which way it was going.

  A car driving down the road would light up his wardrobe, or DEJN NORDESBRUKK as it had been called in IKEA.

  A car driving up the road would illuminate the ceiling and the browny-yellow patch of damp immediately above Barry’s bed, which he sometimes pretended was a map of Russia that he had to study for a secret mission.

  A car turning into the road from the other side would throw a sweep of white light across the far wall, which had a James Bond poster on it – Daniel Craig in a tuxedo – and another poster, of FC Barcelona, which was a couple of years out of date but still had Lionel Messi sitting in the front row. Barry had always liked the way that both of his heroes stared out of the posters with intense eyes: Lionel like he was ready to go and beat eleven players single-handedly and score with a back-heel chip, and James Bond like he was ready to kill someone.

  Every so often, his bed would shake as a lorry went by.

  But today he wasn’t trying to get to sleep anyway. He was too angry. And he knew that, if he went to sleep, by tomorrow the argument would all be forgotten about, and he didn’t want that. He had meant it. In his anger, he had come to a deep and important realisation: his parents just weren’t very good parents. It made him sad to have this thought – his tummy fell as the words appeared in his mind, like it sometimes did when he was scared – but another part of him felt brave: like he was facing up to something.

  “I wish I had better parents…” he whispered. He could feel, as he said it, a tiny tear squeeze out of his left eye. It blurred his vision, making the damp patch look less like a map of Russia and more like a smear of poo. This got in the way of his train of thought a little. It was very distracting, the idea of someone somehow getting their bottom on the ceiling to plop upside down, and so, to get back into the moment, he repeated, slightly more loudly: “I wish I had better parents.”

  Then, from underneath his pillow, he grabbed the list he’d secretly written down of all the things that made his mum and dad a bit rubbish at their basic job of being his mum and dad. He held it up above his face and said, a third time, the loudest so far: “I wish I had better parents!”

  And then suddenly the entire room started to shake.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  The walls were shaking like crazy; it was as if Barry’s bedroom had a really bad fever.

  The windows rattled and his little Aston Martin DB6 model car fell off the shelf behind his bed. Barry had never been in an earthquake, but he had seen them on the telly, and thought this must be what they were like. He clutched his duvet (MYSA ROSØNGLIM, white) in fear, frightened that maybe this was happening because of what he’d just said out loud.

  He was about to say, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean it!” (he didn’t quite know who this was addressed to – his parents, even though they weren’t in the room, or, he supposed, God) when he realised… Oh, of course: it’s a lorry.

  He sat up.

  It must be a very big lorry, he thought as the room continued to shake. It must have really powerful headlights as well, he thought next as the far wall, the one with the posters on it, began to glow. What was odd about this glow, though, was that – unlike what usually happened when a lorry or a big car turned on to the road, which was that its headlights would light up the whole wall as the vehicle moved past – only the area around his posters seemed to be glowing.

  And the glow wasn’t moving. Nor was it fading.

  If anything, it was getting brighter. Maybe the lorry had stopped outside the house? Barry did notice that the shaking seemed to have died down. But you weren’t allowed to stop on the A41.

  As he continued to look at the posters, a very strange thing happened. Lionel Messi’s and James Bond’s stares seemed to turn towards him. Like they were looking at him.

  And then an even stranger thing happened.

  Lionel Messi said: “Barry! Hey!”

  Lionel didn’t move from his sitting position, in between Iniesta and David Villa (see: told you it was out of date), with his hands on his knees. But his mouth did move. Definitely.

  Barry, shocked and frightened, said nothing. But, through the shock and fear, he was also very, very curious. So he didn’t look away.

  “Eh! El Barrito!” said Lionel. “Ven aquí! Rápido!”

  “He mean
s come over here. Quickly,” said another voice. A voice Barry recognised.

  Barry moved his eyes sideways. James Bond was in exactly the same position he always was, but he had, quite clearly, raised his left eyebrow.

  “He does?” said Barry hoarsely.

  “Yes. I speak Spanish,” replied James Bond. “And French, and German, and Italian, and Mandarin, and a smattering of Portuguese. Should be better, but y’know: very little action in Portugal.”

  “…Right,” said Barry, who by now was wondering if he should just start screaming.

  James Bond raised his other eyebrow. Something that Jake couldn’t do. “So?”

  “So… what?”

  “So come over here! Like he says! Otherwise I might just have to shoot you…”

  Barry gulped. He thought it best to go along with it. So he got out of bed and walked towards the glowing wall.

  CHAPTER SIX

  As he approached the wall with the posters on it, Barry kept a close eye on Bond and, more importantly, on the Walther PPK with silencer now pinned to his chest. Barry could feel the too-big feet of his onesie dragging across the carpet (BJORNO MASTERLIGN): it was the only familiar feeling about this whole thing.

  He walked towards the 007 poster, but James Bond flicked his cold, suspicious eyes to the right, so Barry moved over to where Lionel was smiling at him.

  “Eh! Barrito! Me recuerdas al niño en el avión en ese anuncio que hice!”

  “Pardon me?”

  “He says you remind him of the little boy on the aeroplane in that advert he did,” said James Bond. “You remember, the one with the basketball guy and the ice cream and stuff. God, Lionel, why did you do that? It’s not like you don’t earn a million pounds a minute as it is.”

  “Estós celoso!”

  “I am not jealous. I do my work for the love of my country. And the ladies, of course.”

  “Er… hello?” said Barry. “I think you wanted… to talk… to me…?”

  “Si!” said Lionel.

  “Oh, speak English for crying out loud, Messi. You’ve played against John Terry. You must have at least learnt some swear words.”

  “Culo.”

  “That’s not a swear.”

  Barry looked at Lionel, who tutted, but then looked back at him and said, in a strong accent, “Barry. Would you mind pleeze to stand in between me and the guy dressed like a waiter?”

  “I am not dressed like a waiter! What waiter has a gun?!”

  Barry shuffled across. “Here?”

  “Yes, nearly. Just a beet to the left,” said Lionel.

  Barry shuffled a bit more. Now he was precisely in between the two posters. “Yes, good. Espléndido! Now shut your eyes and say the thing again.”

  “What thing?” said Barry. He dug his hands into his pockets (the onesie had quite deep ones), which was something he always did when asked a question he wasn’t sure how to answer. In the corner of his mind he noticed that, crumpled up in the corner of the left-hand pocket, was the list of things that he blamed his parents for.

  “Oh, you know the thing. What is it? Is hard for me in English. Remind me, 003 and a half.”

  “Seven! You know it’s seven!”

  “Yes, but on that poster you are a leetle half-size version of yourself! So 003 and a half! Ha ha ha! You see, Barrito, what I did there! Ees clever, no?”

  James Bond raised his eyes to heaven. “Can we please get this over with? In two hours I have to be strapped to the underside of a stealth bomber.”

  “What thing?” said Barry again.

  “Pardon?”

  “What thing am I meant to say?”

  “Oh. The thing about your mum and dad. Your wish.”

  “Oh right,” said Barry. He shut his eyes.

  “Loudly. Like you did last time.”

  “OK,” said Barry. “Ahem.” He didn’t know why he said that. It just felt appropriate. “I wish I had better parents.” He opened his eyes. “Why? Why do I have to say tha—”

  He was stopped from finishing the question by noticing that both Lionel and James Bond were waving at him. Little waves: like goodbye ones.

  Barry frowned.

  Then the glow behind the posters got super-strong, and the wall vanished in a huge burst of white light.

  MONDAY

  CHAPTER ONE

  When Barry’s eyes recovered from the shock, he couldn’t see his room any more. In fact, he wasn’t in his room any more. Nor was he in his house. Nor was it night-time. The only thing that was the same was that he was still wearing his zebra-print onesie.

  He was walking up some steps. He didn’t know why he was walking up them. He felt scared, but something stopped him from doing what he would normally do when frightened: crying out for his mum and dad. He simply kept on going.

  Just before he got to the top, Barry felt a fluttering by his feet. Looking down, he saw a creased, coloured bit of paper, half-trodden into the step: a map. Barry bent down, peeled the pages off the concrete and unfolded it.

  The map was brightly coloured and showed a city marked out with cartoon drawings of all the most important places, like the ones Barry had seen held by tourists on the odd occasions when he and his family would go to London. The city seemed to be called, as far as he could make out from the name written at the top, Youngdon.

  Geographically, it looked a little like a map of London. The drawings showed all the big buildings in the same places, except instead of the Houses of Parliament there was something that looked like a cross between the Houses of Parliament and a soft-play centre, called the Playhouses of Parliament (it included a clock called Little Ben). Hyde Park was called Hide-and-Seek Park, Nelson’s Column was entitled Nelson-the-Bully-From-the-Simpsons-Column and both Oxford and Piccadilly Circuses appeared to be actual circuses.

  In the middle of the map, though, there was a large, official-looking building that didn’t match anything from the real London, above which was written, in big red capitals, three letters:

  Barry looked up. While examining the map, he’d moved up a couple of steps and now he could see that he’d reached the top of a subway, looking out on to a street. It was a very busy street, in what looked like the centre of a big city. There were shops, and tall buildings, and traffic, and more shops, and more tall buildings, and more traffic.

  Barry was, frankly, disappointed. He knew he had come here by magic. And he reckoned that if you went somewhere by magic then it should be – well – a really different world, where people drove floating cars, or monsters spoke to you in computer code. Or maybe – and the map had led him to think this might be the case – it would be a world where everything was designed for children: where sweets grew on trees and Xboxes fell from the sky.

  Here, though, all he could see were lots of grown-ups doing their boring, grown-up stuff: going to work, shopping, speaking very seriously on their mobile phones about money and offices.

  Barry decided, therefore, that he had simply been transported to a big city he didn’t know, perhaps one off the A41. As such, he thought it would be best if he just went home. He didn’t know how to get home, though, so he shouted, at the top of his voice: “EXCUSE ME!”

  It came out very loudly. Quite a lot of the grown-ups stopped what they were doing and looked at him.

  “I’M BARRY AND I’M TEN YEARS OLD,” he said. “WELL, NEARLY TEN. IN FIVE DAYS. AND I’M HERE ON MY OWN. CAN SOMEONE PLEASE HELP ME?”

  Barry expected that, by shouting this, he would make at least one of the grown-ups come over and take him to a police station, or phone his parents or something. But one of the grown-ups didn’t come over. They all came over. At once.

  There were loads of them, crowding round him. Couples mainly: fat couples, thin couples, old couples, young couples, hairy couples, bald couples (even the women), well-dressed couples, couples who both wore slacks, smelly couples, couples who weren’t easy to describe one way or another. They were all saying things.

  “Barry!” they we
re mostly saying at first. “Barry!”

  “Yes?!” said Barry to some of them, before realising it would take too long to answer everybody.

  “Barry!”

  “We’d be great for you!”

  “You’d love it at our house!”

  “Come and be with us, Barry!”

  And others were saying: “Here! Please! Have a look at this!”

  “Take our card!”

  “Here’s our CV!! Would you mind just reading it? Take your time!”

  While they were saying these things, they were trying to hand him bits of paper or cards. On the bits of paper were photos of the couples, looking smart and smiling. There was also lots of information about each couple – where they lived and what kind of car they owned and how much money they earned and stuff like that – but Barry didn’t have time to read one to the end before another was thrust into his hand.

  “Hey! OK! Thank you, but I just need to get back to my house!”

  “No, Barry! Come and live with us at our house!”

  “No, our house is much nicer!”

  “We live next door to a theme park!”

  “Our house is made of candyfloss!”

  “That’s not true!”

  “OK, it isn’t, but we’ve got a lot of candyfloss under the stairs!!”

  “What?” Barry said. “Why are you saying all this?”

  They were all around him, bumping him and knocking him in their desperation to get him to look at their bits of paper. He was starting to feel afraid. Then, suddenly, he heard a voice, a kid’s voice. Which made him realise, for the first time, that he hadn’t seen any other children on this street, or in this crowd. The voice was tinny and amplified.

  “OK, get back,” said the voice. “Come on! All of you! Back we go!” It sounded strangely familiar. “You know the procedure!”

  The adults all fell silent, moving away from Barry, who squinted and saw, coming across the crowd, two figures he immediately recognised. One of them was talking through a loudhailer.