“It works,” said Alistair in delight, turning to his wife, expecting her to be pleased by what he had done, but Eleanor, a perfectly normal woman, was aghast.
“It looks ridiculous,” she cried.
“But it won’t be for long,” said Alistair. “Just until he settles down, that’s all.”
“But what if he never settles down? We can’t leave him up there forever.”
“Trust me, he’ll get tired of all this floating business in due course,” insisted Alistair, trying to be optimistic, despite the fact that he felt anything but. “Just wait, you’ll see. But until then we can’t have him bumping his head every time he gets away from us. He’ll damage his brain.”
Eleanor said nothing, just looked miserable. She lay down on the sofa and stared up at her son, stranded eleven feet above her, and wondered what she had ever done to deserve such a terrible misfortune. She was a perfectly normal woman, after all. She wasn’t the type to have a floating baby.
In the meantime, Alistair and Henry went about their business, installing the second mattress in the kitchen, directly over the place where Barnaby’s basket would be kept, and the third in his and Eleanor’s bedroom, for when he was asleep in his cot beside them at night.
“All done,” said Alistair, coming downstairs and finding Eleanor still lying on the sofa while Melanie sat on the floor next to her, reading Heidi for the seventeenth time. “Where’s Barnaby?”
Melanie pointed her index finger upward but uttered not a word; her eyes were pinned to the page. Peter the Goatherd was speaking and she wanted to hear his every syllable. That boy had wisdom beyond his years.
“Oh yes,” said Alistair, frowning, wondering what he should do next. “Do you think it’s all right to leave him up there for the rest of the day?”
Melanie continued to read until she reached the end of a long paragraph, and then picked up her bookmark. She placed it carefully between pages 104 and 105 and set the novel on the cushion beside Eleanor before looking directly at her father. “You’re asking me whether she should leave Barnaby on the ceiling of our living room for the rest of the day,” she said coolly.
“Yes, that’s right,” said Alistair, unable to look his daughter in the eye.
“Barnaby,” she repeated, “who is only a few days old. You want to know whether I think it’s all right to just leave him stranded up there.”
There was a long pause.
“I don’t care for your tone,” said Alistair eventually, his voice quiet and filled with shame.
“The answer to your question is no. No, I don’t think it’s all right to leave him up there like that.”
“Well, then,” said Alistair, reaching for a chair in order to retrieve the boy. “Perhaps you could have just said so.”
At that moment the doorbell rang. It was Mr. Cody from next door looking for the keys to his van and, having received no immediate answer, marching in to retrieve them without so much as a by-your-leave. Alistair put Barnaby back in his basket but forgot to tie the straps, and in a moment the boy was on the ceiling once again, resting comfortably against the mattress.
Mr. Cody, who had lived a long time, fought in two world wars, shaken the hand of Roald Dahl, and seen many unusual things across seven decades, some of which he had understood and some of which he hadn’t, looked up and cocked his head to one side. He stroked his chin with one hand and ran his tongue slowly across his lips, first the upper lip, then the lower. Finally, shaking his head, he turned to Eleanor.
“That’s not normal, that,” he said, at which point Eleanor burst into tears and fled upstairs to throw herself on her bed, determined not to open her eyes lest she see the awful monstrosity of the third mattress pinned above her.
Chapter 3
Barnaby the Kite
When four years passed and nothing had changed, Barnaby’s family had to accept that this wasn’t a phase after all; it was just the way their son had been born. Alistair and Eleanor took him to a local doctor, who examined him thoroughly and suggested that they give him a couple of pills and call again in the morning, but this did nothing to improve matters. They took him to see an out-of-town specialist, who placed him on a course of antibiotics, but still he continued to float, although he became completely immune to a bad flu that was raging through Kirribilli that week. Finally, they drove him into the center of Sydney for an appointment with a famous consultant, who simply shook his head and said that the boy would grow out of it in time.
“Boys usually grow out of everything in the end,” he said, smiling as he passed across a rather large invoice for the rather short time he’d spent examining Barnaby. “Their trousers. Their good behavior. Their willingness to respect parental authority. You simply have to be patient, that’s all.”
None of which helped Alistair or Eleanor in the least and, in fact, only served to frustrate them even more.
Now Barnaby slept in the lower bunk in Henry’s room, where a couple of blankets had been stitched to the underside of his brother’s bed to prevent him from hitting his head against the springs.
“It’s nice to be able to see our ceiling again, isn’t it?” said Alistair when the mattress in their bedroom was finally taken down. Eleanor nodded but said nothing. “It needs a fresh coat of paint, though,” he added, filling the space left by her silence. “There’s a great yellow square where the mattress used to be. You can make out the flower design.”
There were a whole set of difficult circumstances associated with Barnaby’s use of the bathroom, but perhaps it would be indelicate to go into them here. Suffice it to say that taking a shower was very difficult, a bath was out of the question, and using the toilet presented such a set of challenges that even a skilled contortionist would have found himself not quite up to the task.
In the evenings, when they would occasionally light up the barbecue for their evening meal, the family would sit around the garden table, Alistair, Eleanor, Henry, and Melanie taking the four seats under the large sunshade while Barnaby hovered beneath its pointed peak, prevented from drifting off into the atmosphere by the strong green canvas that held him in place. He was banned from putting tomato ketchup on his hot dogs or burgers, as it had a terrible habit of falling down on one or all of their heads.
“But I like tomato ketchup,” Barnaby would complain, thinking this was most unfair. He could, of course, say more than “Ow” by now.
“And I prefer not to have to shampoo my hair every day,” replied his father.
At such times, Captain W. E. Johns would sit on the ground staring up at the boy, awaiting instructions; the dog had decided that this floating child was his sole master and would take direction from no other.
But the days were often rather boring. Eleanor had given up work shortly after Melanie’s birth, so she and Barnaby were left alone together for great stretches of time with only Captain W. E. Johns to act as a buffer between them. They almost never left the house during daylight hours, as Eleanor did not want to be seen in public with her son in case people pointed and stared. Alistair too refused to take Barnaby with him when he strolled across to Kirribilli market on a Saturday morning, browsing through the stalls for a bargain, as he knew that he would inevitably become the exact type of person he had always despised: somebody different.