‘I don’t know,’ Barney said.
‘Don’t know? Don’t know?’
‘No. Honestly. I’m sorry.’
‘I know your mother. I’ll be telling her you go around knocking people’s plants over.’
‘It wasn’t me. It was no one. It just happened.’
‘Plant pots don’t fall by themselves – sorry. Not unless there’s a hurricane. And I don’t feel a hurricane, do you?’
Barney shook his head. ‘No, I don’t.’
The old man didn’t say anything after that. He just looked at Barney, and then at the smashed pot and the earth and the plant on the ground, and sighed a long sigh that seemed to contain a whole lifetime of regret, before going back inside his house.
And that was when Barney knew it was time to go home.
The Infinite Tiredness
A BRIEF WAVE of tiredness came over Barney as he opened the front door.
His mum was hoovering and didn’t look up. Guster came over to greet Barney but unusually his tail wasn’t wagging, and his eyes had a gleam of mistrust about them.
Then his mum saw him and switched off the hoover.
‘Hello,’ Barney said. But he said it like a question. ‘Hello?’
His mum just looked at him, without the faintest trace of crossness. ‘Oh, hello, sweetheart.’
Sweetheart?
‘Why are you back early?’ asked Barney, trying not to sound suspicious.
His mum sighed.
This was it! This was the moment she was going to tell him off!
But no.
‘I just felt a bit guilty about this morning,’ she said.
‘What about?’
‘Well, it’s your birthday, and I didn’t really have time for you. So I thought I’d take you somewhere.’
Barney was confused. For a moment he wished he hadn’t ripped up the letter. Maybe this was the point he should confess everything. After all, his mum was surely going to find out, and she did seem to be in a particularly good mood. And that was quite rare these days.
‘Mum, I—’
‘Pizza? Do you fancy going out for a pizza?’
Barney remembered the dream last night. Of being with his dad in a pizza restaurant. ‘I … er …’
‘Or a curry?’
‘Yeah. A curry sounds good.’
Then his mum gave him a present. It was a book called How to Improve Your Maths Skills.
‘I know it’s not the most exciting present in the world,’ said Mrs Willow. (Even though his mum and dad had got divorced, Barney’s mum had kept her married name as her maiden name was Rowbottom, and she didn’t like that very much because she’d always been called ‘Growbottom’ as a child.) ‘But I just thought it would help you get better marks.’
Barney wanted to explain that the only way he could get better marks was if he moved to a school where there was no Miss Whipmire. But he didn’t want to sound ungrateful.
‘Oh, thanks.’
And then Barney’s mum nearly cried.
‘What’s the matter?’
She took a deep, pulling-herself-together breath. ‘Nothing. You just looked like your … Anyway, come on, let’s get ready. I’ll ring up and book a table for six p.m. I’m quite hungry, aren’t you?’
So they went for a meal, and Barney ate the most delicious prawn jalfrezi he had ever tasted. But afterwards he felt weird. The tiredness came back, along with an odd feeling in his bones, as if they were being squeezed. He also felt a bit sick.
‘You do look pale,’ Mrs Willow said, staring at Barney’s empty plate. ‘I hope it’s not the prawns.’ She quickly asked for the bill and stood up.
And that was when an infinite tiredness took over Barney and he leaned forward and fell asleep on his dirty plate.
Barney’s Dream
YOU KNOW THAT expression I just used – ‘fell asleep’? Well, Barney did, but he’d never really understood exactly what it meant. Not until now, as he lay on his plate, falling through layers of treacly blackness. Down and down he fell, watching a shape float above him. A white shape, which at first he thought was a kind of cloud. But he recognized the shape of it, like a blurry number 6, and he realized this was the exact same shape as the patch of white fur around that cat’s eye.
And this shape grew and grew until eventually light had taken over the dark, and he was walking through this empty white landscape, to nowhere in particular. It was like walking through the Arctic, except without the cold. Not that it was warm, either. It was absolutely neutral. A place beyond temperature.
But then he heard a voice.
‘Barney!’
It was a voice he knew as well as any in the world.
‘Barney! I’m over here! This way!’
Barney looked around him but he couldn’t see anyone. He strained his eyes, as if to find a word on a blank sheet of paper. It was useless, but he kept trying. He was getting desperate now, because he wanted to see the person the voice belonged to.
He wanted, in short, to see his father.
‘Dad! Dad? Where are you?’
‘I’m still here, Barney. I’m alive!’
‘But where? I can’t see you.’
‘You’ll find me. Don’t worry!’
‘Dad? I can’t see you!’
And suddenly Barney felt darkness start to leak onto the white, descending in little moving lashes, like a thousand cat’s tails. Still he heard his dad’s voice, getting fainter and fainter. ‘I’ll see you soon,’ he said. ‘I’ll see you soon …’
‘What?’ asked Barney.
Then he felt something shaking his shoulders, and he looked up to see his mum.
‘Barney? Are you OK?’ his mum asked, examining his pale, jalfrezi-streaked face. ‘I think you might need the day off school tomorrow.’
And Barney nodded. ‘Yes,’ he said. Or tried to. When he opened his mouth the only sound that came out was a strange release of air.
Like a gasp.
Or a hiss.
So he tried again. ‘Yes.’ And this time his voice was there.
Then, when he got home, he was strangely wide awake and shot upstairs, feeling the need to write something down, as if he almost knew that writing things down was something he might not be able to do in the future.
Some Facts about Dad by Barney Willow
He snored so loud you could hear it through TWO walls.
He thought he was very good at reading maps but he was actually NOT.
He could smile even when he was sad. He said it came from being a salesman. (He won the Employee of the Month award at Blandford Garden Centre for selling the most potted plants.)
His dream was to own his own garden centre.
He liked going on holiday to places that were in the middle of nowhere and which were – ideally – cold and wet. (Mad!)
He liked long walks. (His favourite long walk was in Bluebell Wood.)
He loved cats but Mum never let him have one.
He knew a million facts about plants, and told me quite a lot of them. For instance, he told me that there is a rare plant that grows in the Andes in South America called Puya raimondii which doesn’t grow a flower until it is 150 years old. Then it dies.
His favourite flowers were simple ones, like daffodils and bluebells. (‘Nature’s at her best when she’s not showing off,’ he said.)
He was a good swimmer. Except in backstroke, where he always crashed into the side of the pool.
He had RUBBISH taste in music. He only liked stuff with loud guitars and not much singing, which Mum always said sounded like someone was strangling a cat. (She was right.)
He had big bushy eyebrows that looked like caterpillars.
His favourite food was Mum’s apple and blackberry crumble (with custard).
He used to take me to the cinema even though it gave him a headache.