Chapter 1
A Perfectly Normal Family
This is the story of Barnaby Brocket, and to understand Barnaby, first you have to understand his parents: two people who were so afraid of anyone who was different that they did a terrible thing that would have the most appalling consequences for everyone they loved.
We begin with Barnaby’s father, Alistair, who considered himself to be a completely normal man. He led a normal life in a normal house, lived in a normal neighborhood where he did normal things in a normal way. His wife was normal, as were his two children.
Alistair had no time for people who were unusual or who made a show of themselves in public. When he was sitting on a Metro train and a group of teenagers were talking loudly nearby, he would wait until the next stop, jump off, and move to a different carriage before the doors could close again. When he was eating in a restaurant—not one of those fancy new restaurants with difficult menus and confusing food; a normal one—he grew irritated if his evening was spoiled by waiters singing “Happy Birthday” to some attention-seeking diner.
He worked as a solicitor at the firm of Bother & Blastit in the most magnificent city in the world—Sydney, Australia—where he specialized in last wills and testaments, a rather grim employment that suited him down to the ground. It was a perfectly normal thing, after all, to prepare a will. Nothing unusual in that. When clients came to see him in his office, they often found themselves a little nervous, for drawing up a will can be a difficult or distressing matter.
“Please don’t upset yourself,” Alistair would say on such occasions. “It’s perfectly normal to die. We all have to do it one day. Imagine how awful it would be if we lived forever! The planet would collapse under all that excess weight.”
Which is not to say that Alistair cared very much about the planet’s welfare; he didn’t. Only hippies and New Age types worried about things like that.
There is a belief held by some, particularly by those who live in the Far East, that each of us—you included—comprises one half of a couple separated before birth in the vast and complex universe, and that we spend our lives searching for that detached soul who can make us feel whole again. Until that day comes, we all feel a little out of sorts. Sometimes completeness is found through meeting someone who, on first appearances, seems to be the opposite of who we are. A man who likes art and poetry, for example, might end up falling in love with a woman who spends her afternoons up to her elbows in engine grease. A healthy-eating lady with an interest in outdoor sports might find herself drawn to a fellow who enjoys nothing more than watching them from the comfort of his living-room armchair with a beer in one hand and a sandwich in the other. It takes all sorts, after all. But Alistair Brocket always knew that he could never share his life with someone who wasn’t as normal as he was, even though that in itself would have been a perfectly normal thing to do.
Which brings us to Barnaby’s mother, Eleanor.
Eleanor Bullingham grew up on Beacon Hill, in a small house overlooking the northern beaches of Sydney. She had always been the apple of her parents’ eyes, for she was indisputably the best-behaved girl in the neighborhood. She never crossed the street until the crossing guard appeared, even if there wasn’t a car anywhere in sight. She stood up to let elderly people take her seat on the bus, even if there were dozens of empty seats already available to them. In fact, she was such a well-mannered little girl that when her grandmother Elspeth died, leaving her a collection of one hundred vintage handkerchiefs with her initials, EB, carefully embroidered onto each one, she resolved one day to marry a man whose surname also began with B in order that her inheritance would not go to waste.
Like Alistair, she became a solicitor, specializing in property work, which, as she told anyone who asked her, she found frightfully interesting.
She accepted a job at Bother & Blastit almost a year after her future husband, and was a little disappointed at first when she looked around the office to discover how many of the young men and women employed there were behaving in a less-than-professional manner.
Very few of them kept their desks in any sort of tidy condition. Instead, they were covered with photographs of family members, pets, or, worse, celebrities. The men tore their used takeaway coffee cups into shreds as they talked loudly on the telephone, creating an unsightly mess for others to clean up later, while the women appeared to do nothing but eat all day, buying small snacks from a trolley that reappeared every few hours laden down with sweet treats in brightly colored packaging. Yes, this was normal behavior by the current standards of what was normal, but still, it wasn’t normal normal.
At the beginning of her second week at the firm, she found herself walking up two flights of stairs to a different department in order to deliver a hugely important document to a colleague who needed it without a moment’s delay or the whole world would grind to a halt. Opening the door, she tried not to stare at the signs of disorder and squalor that lay before her in case it made her regurgitate her breakfast. But then, to her surprise, she saw something—or someone—who made her heart give the most unexpected little leap, like an infant gazelle hurdling triumphantly across a stream for the first time.
Sitting at a corner desk, with a neat pile of paperwork before him separated into color-coded groups, was a rather dashing young man, dressed in a pinstripe suit and sporting neatly parted hair. Unlike the barely house-trained animals who were working around him, he kept his desk tidy, the pens and pencils gathered together in a simple storage container, his documents laid out efficiently before him as he worked on them. There wasn’t a picture of a child, a dog, or a celebrity anywhere in sight.
“That young man,” she asked a girl sitting at the desk closest to her, stuffing her face with a banana nut muffin, the crumbs falling across her computer keyboard and getting lost forever between the keys. “The one sitting in the corner. What’s his name?”
“You mean Alistair?” said the girl, running her teeth along the inside of the wrapper just in case there was any sticky toffee sauce left behind. “The most boring man in the universe?”
“What’s his surname?” asked Eleanor hopefully.
“Brocket. Rotten, isn’t it?”
“It’s perfect,” said Eleanor.
And so they were married. It was the normal thing to do, particularly after they had been to the theater together (three times); a local ice cream parlor (twice); a dance hall (only once; they hadn’t liked it very much—far too much jiving going on, too much of that nasty rock-and-roll music); and on a day trip to Luna Park, where they took photographs and made pleasant conversation until the sun began to descend and the lights gleaming from the clown’s giant face made him look even more terrifying than usual.
Exactly a year after their happy day, Alistair and Eleanor, now living in a normal house in Kirribilli on the Lower North Shore, welcomed their first child, Henry, into the world. He was born on a Monday morning on the stroke of nine o’clock, weighed precisely seven pounds, and appeared after only a short labor, smiling politely at the doctor who delivered him. Eleanor didn’t cry or scream when she was giving birth, unlike some of those vulgar mothers whose antics polluted the television airwaves every night; in fact, the birth was an extremely polite affair, ordered and well mannered, and nobody took any offense at all.