“Your boy is floating, Mrs. Brocket,” he said, appalled, unable to bear the familiarity of her first name now. “He’s floating!”
“Is he?” asked Eleanor, looking up as if this was a tremendous surprise to her.
“You know he is. You have him on a leash! Is this where we’re headed now, Mrs. Brocket? Are these the depths to which Sydney, the most magnificent city in the world, has sunk?”
Eleanor opened her mouth to defend herself but could find no words to explain her son’s behavior, and Mr. Chappaqua, dismayed, simply growled like a roused wolf and marched straight home to Mrs. Chappaqua, who suggested that where there was one, there would surely be more, and before long Sydney would be overrun by the nasty creatures.
And although Eleanor felt humiliated by this encounter, Barnaby was too enraptured by the wonderful new sights that were on display before him to care. He looked down at Captain W. E. Johns, who, sensing his master’s excitement, wagged his tail in delight. He squinted in the bright morning as the sun reflected off the water, inspiring rainbows of color to spring from the waves. Watching one of the ferries making its way from Circular Quay round the curve toward Neutral Bay, Barnaby wished that he could be on board, that he could see what existed even farther away in those places he had never been allowed to visit.
“I knew this was a bad idea,” said Eleanor furiously, turning round and heading back in the direction from which they had come. “We’ll be the talk of the neighborhood now. The sooner I get you back indoors, Barnaby, the better.”
But as they made their way along the street toward home, they were met by another neighbor, or rather a pair of neighbors, named Joe and Alice Moffat, who were something big in computers (or so Eleanor had heard). They were chatting away quite happily as they walked along, hand in hand, but when they saw Eleanor, Barnaby, and Captain W. E. Johns coming their way, they immediately stopped and stared, their mouths falling open in surprise.
“I have to get a picture of this,” said Joe Moffat, pulling a smartphone from his pocket and aiming it at Barnaby. He was a dirty young man who always had a messy sort of half beard on his face and wore nothing but T-shirts, shorts, and thongs on his feet despite the fact that he was rumored to be worth in the region of a billion Australian dollars. “Hey, Mrs. Brocket! Stand still, will you? I’m trying to get a picture of your boy.”
“I will not stand still, you degenerate animal,” snapped Eleanor, rushing past him and almost knocking his wife over as she did so, moving at such a speed that Barnaby felt a great breeze in his face—a breeze so strong that his hair blew backward and provided a sort of windbreaker for the three of them, serving only to slow them down, which was an irony of sorts. “And please stop staring at me—it’s extremely rude.”
“Just one picture, please,” said Joe, running after her. “Everyone will want to see this.”
I wouldn’t like to tell you what Eleanor said then, but it wasn’t nice, and she sprinted all the way home, delighting Captain W. E. Johns, who loved a decent run, but leaving poor Barnaby shivering with the cold. Safely back indoors, she unclipped the lead from the dog’s collar, and he immediately ran out into the back garden on private business. Then she unclipped the other lead from around Barnaby’s neck and let him float back up toward his David Jones Bellissimo plush medium mattress.
“This is unacceptable behavior,” she shouted up at him, wagging her finger and feeling such resentment now toward the little boy that the bad ideas were returning to her mind. “I won’t have it, Barnaby Brocket, do you hear me? I am your mother and I insist that you stop floating this instant. Come down here!”
“But I can’t,” said Barnaby in a sad voice.
“Come down here!” she shouted, her face growing red with fury now.
“I don’t know how to,” said Barnaby. “It’s just who I am.”
“Then I’m sorry,” said Eleanor, shaking her head and lowering her voice at last. “But I have to say that I don’t like who you are very much.”
And with that she went into the kitchen, closed the door behind her, and didn’t speak to anyone again for the rest of the afternoon.
Chapter 4
The Best Day of Barnaby’s Life So Far
“St. Aloysius’ is the obvious choice,” said Eleanor, the evening she and Alistair were deciding what to do about Barnaby’s education. “It’s only down the road, after all.”
“I’m not sending him there,” said Alistair. “Most of our neighbors send their sons to that school. Everyone in Kirribilli will be talking about us. And what if it gets back to Bother & Blastit? People might look at me funnily.”
“Well, where do you suggest, then?” asked Eleanor.
“What’s the name of that school on Lavender Bay? It’s a little farther away but—”
“Absolutely not!” said Eleanor, looking at her husband as if he had no more sense than a rabbit. “Jane Macquarie-Hamid across the street sends her little Duncan there. What would she say?”
“Well, I don’t know what other choices we have,” replied Alistair with a sigh. “We could always keep him at home, I suppose. Does he really need an education, after all?”
“Oh, of course he does,” said Eleanor, scrolling through a list of Sydney schools on the Internet until she found one that satisfied her needs. “We can’t add ignorance and stupidity to his other failings. Now look, here we are,” she added triumphantly, spinning the laptop round to show her husband. “The Graveling Academy for Unwanted Children.”
“It’s almost as if it was built with Barnaby in mind,” said Alistair, examining the school’s website, which made a great deal of the fact that it had been set up by a former governor of Dillwynia Women’s Correctional Centre to educate those children who, for one reason or another, had been rejected by the regular school system.
“Shall I make an appointment?”
“It couldn’t do any harm to visit. Anyway, it looks rather nice, doesn’t it?” he added, clicking through the photos on the computer screen. “All that barbed wire on top of the walls is probably there as part of a project to teach the children about prisoner-of-war camps.”
“And the look of the building itself,” said Eleanor. “It’s like one of those workhouses out of Oliver Twist. The children must love it!”
“They certainly must,” agreed Alistair, and so, three days later, they found themselves sitting in front of Harriet Hooperman-Hall, the school principal.
“It’s not that he’s not an intelligent little boy,” said Alistair.
“He’s actually very bright,” said Eleanor. “He reads the most extraordinary books. He prefers authors who are dead,” she added, laughing a little, as if she had never heard of such an extraordinary thing.
“And he’s never been in any trouble,” said Alistair. “But we do feel that Barnaby would benefit from some—how shall I put this?—special attention.”
Mrs. Hooperman-Hall smiled and stroked her whiskers; she looked a little like a female goat, although her two front teeth resembled those of a dromedary. Before speaking, she ran her tongue along the thick, gloopy layer of dark red lipstick that stuck to the edges of her mouth like mortar to a brick, and snaked it in and out in a rather disgusting fashion.