“Ow,” gurgled Barnaby Brocket.
“You want to keep ahold of that lad,” remarked the taxi driver, staring at him with world-weary eyes. “He’ll get away from you if you’re not careful.”
“Thirty dollars, was it?” asked Eleanor, handing across a twenty and a ten as she realized that, yes, he might. If she wasn’t careful.
As she entered the house, the children ran to greet their mother, almost knocking her over in their excitement.
“But he’s so small,” said Henry in surprise. (In this regard at least, Barnaby was perfectly normal.)
“He smells delicious,” said Melanie, giving him a good sniff. “Like a mixture of ice cream and maple syrup. What’s his name anyway?”
“Can we call him Jim Hawkins?” asked Henry, who had taken to classic adventure stories in a big way.
“Or Peter the Goatherd?” asked Melanie, who always followed where her elder brother led.
“His name is Barnaby,” said Alistair, coming over now and placing a kiss on his wife’s cheek. “After your grandfather. And your grandfather’s grandfather.”
“Can I hold him?” asked Melanie, reaching forward, her arms outstretched.
“Not just now,” said Eleanor.
“Can I hold him?” asked Henry, whose arms reached farther than his sister’s, as he was three years older.
“No one is holding Barnaby,” snapped Eleanor. “No one except your father or me. For the time being anyway.”
“I’d rather not hold him just now, if it’s all the same to you,” said Alistair, staring at his son as if he was something that had escaped from a zoo and should be sent back there before he caused any damage to the soft furnishings.
“Well, he’s your responsibility too,” snapped Eleanor. “Don’t think I’m taking care of this … this …”
“Baby?” suggested Melanie.
“Yes, I suppose that’s as good a word as any. Don’t think I’m taking care of this baby all on my own, Alistair.”
“I’m happy to help, of course,” said Alistair, looking away. “But you are his mother.”
“And you’re his father!”
“He seems to have bonded with you, though. Look at him.”
Alistair and Eleanor looked down at Barnaby’s face and he smiled up at them, kicking his arms and legs in delight, but neither parent smiled back. Henry and Melanie looked at each other in surprise. They weren’t used to their parents speaking in such a brusque fashion. They fished out the present they’d bought the previous day by pooling their pocket money.
“It’s for Barnaby,” said Melanie, handing it across. “To welcome him into the family.” In her hands she held a small gift-wrapped box, and Eleanor felt her heart soften a little at the welcome they were showing their little brother. She reached out to take the gift, but the moment she did so, Barnaby began to float upward once again, his blanket slipping away from him and falling to the floor as he drifted toward the ceiling, which was a much farther distance to travel than the roof of the taxi cab. It was also much harder on his head.
“Ow,” grunted Barnaby Brocket, his tiny body stretched out flat as he looked down at his family, a decidedly grumpy expression on his face now.
“Oh, Alistair!” cried Eleanor, throwing up her arms in despair. Henry and Melanie said nothing; they simply stared up with their mouths wide open and expressions of wonder on their faces.
Captain W. E. Johns appeared, yawning, roused from sleep, and looked at the family that kept him fed, watered, and imprisoned before following the direction of the children’s gaze until he too saw Barnaby on the ceiling, at which point his tail began to wag fiercely and he started to bark.
“Bark!” he barked. “Bark! Bark! Bark!”
A little later—although not quite as soon as you might expect—Alistair climbed on a chair to retrieve his son, taking charge of him now, as Eleanor had retired to bed with a mug of hot milk and a headache. Reluctantly, he gave Barnaby his bottle, then changed his nappy, placing a new one under the baby’s bottom just as Barnaby decided to go again, in a perfect golden arc in the air. Finally, Alistair placed him in his basket, clipping the straps from Henry’s rucksack across the top so he couldn’t float up. At last Barnaby went to sleep and probably dreamed of something funny.
“Melanie, keep an eye on your brother,” said Alistair, positioning his daughter in the seat next to him. “Henry, come with me, please.”
Father and son crossed the garden to their neighbor’s house and knocked on the front door.
“What do you need, Brocket?” asked grumpy old Mr. Cody, picking a flake of tobacco from between his front teeth and flicking it to the ground at their feet.
“The loan of your van,” explained Alistair. “And its accompanying trailer. Just for an hour or two, that’s all. And of course I’ll compensate you for the gas.”
Permission granted, Alistair and Henry drove across the Harbour Bridge into the city and made their way to a large department store on Market Street, where they purchased three large mattresses, each of which was designed for a double bed, a box of twelve-inch nails, and a hammer. Returning home, they dragged the mattresses into the living room, where Melanie was sitting exactly where they’d left her, staring at her sleeping baby brother.
“How was he?” asked Alistair. “Any problems?”
“No,” said Melanie, shaking her head. “He’s been asleep the whole time.”
“Good. Well, take him into the kitchen, there’s a good girl. I have a job to do in here.”
He took two ladders from the garden shed and placed them at either end of the living room, then climbed one, holding the left-hand side of a mattress as he did so, while Henry climbed the other, holding the right.
“Hold it steady now,” said Alistair as he took the first long nail from his breast pocket and used the hammer to pin the corner of the mattress to the ceiling. The nail went through easily enough but met a bit of resistance in the floorboards of the upstairs room. Still, it didn’t take too long until he got it right.
“Now the other corner,” he said, moving his ladder across and nailing the next part of the mattress in place. He continued doing this for almost an hour, using twenty-four nails in total, and by the time he finished, the previously white ceiling had been covered over by the rather flowery design of a David Jones Bellissimo plush medium mattress.
“What do you think?” asked Alistair, looking down at his son for approval.
“It’s unusual,” replied Henry, considering it.
“I’ll give you that,” agreed Alistair.
By now, the sound of all that hammering had woken Barnaby and he was making a series of unintelligible gurgling sounds from his basket as Melanie tickled him under the chin and arms and generally made a nuisance of herself. Eleanor’s headache had grown worse too, and she’d come downstairs to find out what all that infernal banging was about. When she saw what her husband had done to the living-room ceiling, she stared at him, speechless, for a moment, wondering whether everyone in the house had gone quite mad.
“What on earth …?” she asked, struggling for words, but Alistair simply smiled at her and brought the basket into the center of the living room, where he unclipped the rucksack cords to allow Barnaby to float upward once again. This time, however, he didn’t bang his head against the ceiling and he didn’t say “Ow.” Instead, he had a much softer landing and seemed perfectly content to be left up there, playing with his fingers and examining his toes.