“Alistair and Eleanor,” she said. “Or may I call you Mr. and Mrs. Brocket? We at the Graveling Academy have long suffered from a misunderstanding that our students are more difficult than those in other schools. Yes, it’s true that some of our pupils have been in and out of young offenders’ institutions since before they could walk. And, yes, it’s an unfortunate fact that we have security cameras in every classroom and metal detectors over every door. And, no, we don’t go in for any of that modern mumbo-jumbo that requires all our teachers to be ‘board-certified,’ whatever that means. I’ve never actually understood that term, have you?”
“Well, I think it means—”
“But despite all these things, we pride ourselves on the fact that we open our doors at eight o’clock every morning and padlock them shut again every afternoon at three. And while nothing of very much use happens in the eight hours in between—”
“I think that’s seven hours, actually,” said Alistair, who had always been good with numbers.
“While nothing of very much use happens in the eight hours in between,” insisted Mrs. Hooperman-Hall, “we do at least keep the children out of your way—which, let’s face it, is what you’re looking for. We embrace difference here,” she added in a magnanimous tone. “So your little Barnaby floats. What matter? We have a child of six who hops like a kangaroo. Another who held up a liquor store in an armed robbery and refuses to say where she stashed the loot. A third who speaks French fluently. But do we hold any of these things against them? No, we do not.”
Which was good enough for Alistair and Eleanor, and shortly after this, they left the school, trying not to notice how the wallpaper was peeling off the walls, the carpets were covered in cigarette burns, and the overflowing wastepaper baskets next to them were quite clearly a fire hazard.
Having had little contact with other children during his short life—except for Henry and Melanie, of course—Barnaby was understandably nervous during his first week at the Graveling Academy for Unwanted Children. Fortunately for him, however, he was placed next to another new boy, Liam McGonagall, whose great-great-great-grandfather had been one of the first convicts to be shipped to Australia from Britain during the 1800s, having already been exported from Ireland for taking a pee on a statue of King George IV. Like Barnaby, Liam found the idea of spending the day with a classroom full of children he’d never met before intimidating; he too had failed to make friends, having been born with an unfortunate medical abnormality: his arms came to an end at the wrists and he had two neat sets of steel hooks where his hands should have been. These terrified most of the other children in the class but didn’t bother Barnaby in the slightest. In fact, he would have made a point of shaking Liam’s right hook on the first morning they met and every morning afterward, only this was impossible, for Mrs. Hooperman-Hall always collected him at the front door and brought him directly to his seat, tying him to his chair with a strong rope and a series of complicated knots.
“Was it an accident?” he asked Liam when they became friendly enough to ask personal questions, which was only a few hours later. “The loss of your hands, I mean.”
“No, I was born like this,” said Liam. “It was just one of those things. Some people have no brain, like Denis Lickton over there.” He nodded toward a taller-than-average boy who was engaged in a conversation with his shoes. “Some have no sense of style,” he continued, glancing at a nervous-looking chap, George Raftery, who wore a Robin Hood–type hat on his head. “But me, I have no hands. I tried false ones for a while but I couldn’t get used to them. The hooks work better. I can do anything with my hooks. Except pick my nose.”
“They’re very shiny,” said Barnaby, admiring the way they sparkled.
“That’s because I polish them every morning before leaving the house,” said Liam, pleased that Barnaby had noticed. “I like to look good. Anyway, I’ve never known anything different, so they don’t bother me at all. Except I can’t play basketball, and I bet I’d be good at it.”
“I’d be brilliant at it,” said Barnaby. “All I’d have to do with the ball is float up and drop it in the basket. I’d score every time.”
“Have you always floated?”
“Since the day I was born.”
“Well, good on you!” said Liam McGonagall, and that was all it took to become friends. Simple, really.
As the weeks passed, the daily routine remained the same. Barnaby arrived at the Graveling Academy just before the starting pistol was sounded and was immediately tied into his chair and left there for the rest of the day, while he did his best not to get too upset when the other boys picked on him, all the time forging a happy friendship with Liam McGonagall.
“Do you like it at your new school?” Alistair asked him one evening over dinner, looking up at his son as they finished off a rhubarb flan that Eleanor had been working on all afternoon and was almost, but not quite, palatable.
“No, it’s horrible,” said Barnaby. “The place smells like rotten fruit, the other children are mean to me, and we’re never taught anything real. Today we spent an hour studying the kings and queens of New Zealand, learned how to plant potato trees, and were told that the capital city of Italy is Jupiter.”
“It’s Barcelona, isn’t it?” asked Alistair, who might have been very good with numbers but had a bit of a blind spot when it came to geography. (He’d never left Australia, of course, believing that normal people shouldn’t want to see the world. In fact, he’d never even left the state of New South Wales. For that matter, he’d never even left Sydney.)
“Mrs. Hooperman-Hall then said that she wanted to start a book club and asked if we had any suggestions for what we might read. I said The Man in the Iron Mask, and she told me that, no, books like that were far too complicated for her and she wouldn’t be able to sleep if her head was full of conspiracy theories. So then I suggested Bobby Brewster Bus Conductor, and she said she really only wanted to read books about vampires because they were all so stimulating and original.”
“What does stimulating mean?” asked Melanie, looking up. Henry snorted into his flan and Captain W. E. Johns allowed his ears to fall over his face.
“Melanie!” snapped Eleanor, appalled. “Do not use that word. I will not have anybody being stimulated in this house, do you hear me? It’s not normal.”
“I’ve never been stimulated in my life,” added Alistair. “And I’m in my forties.”
“I hate that school,” muttered Barnaby. “There’s only one boy there who I get along with. He has a set of hooks where his hands should be.”
“Excellent,” remarked Henry.
“It’s not excellent,” insisted Eleanor, shaking her head as if she expected nothing less from a school that would accept her son as a student. “It’s abnormal, that’s what it is. But still, I’m glad you’re happy there.”
“But I’m not happy there,” said Barnaby. “I just told you that.”
“That’s nice, dear.”
But, as things turned out, his career at the Graveling Academy would come to an abrupt end anyway. The following Wednesday afternoon the rotten smell, the greasy ceilings, the overflowing wastepaper baskets, the cigarette burns, Mrs. Hooperman-Hall’s lipstick, and the peeling wallpaper all combined to start a spontaneous flame in the corner of the long corridor that separated the newest students, still on probation, from the lifers. The fire trickled along the ancient carpets, giving birth to a number of smaller flames as it licked its way under each door, and once inside Barnaby’s classroom, it quickly climbed the walls, finding fuel to help it grow bigger and stronger at every turn. Within a few minutes, Mrs. Hooperman-Hall and the children were screaming and pulling the ancient steel bars off the windows, jumping out onto the roof, and shinnying down the drainpipe to safety.