The Parent Agency

“OW!” she said, falling backwards and out of sight again. Barry heard a bump; then one of the egg timers, the red one, fell off the kitchen counter and smashed.

Uh-oh, he thought.

“RIGHT, BARRY, THAT’S IT! GO TO YOUR ROOM!” said his dad, pointing upstairs – stupidly, really, as Barry knew the way.

“ALL RIGHT I WILL!” Barry shouted back. And because he was a little frightened by now, he ran out of the kitchen as fast as he could, swerving at the last minute to avoid the bits of glass and sand from the egg timer which were sprinkled all over the floor.

CHAPTER FOUR (#ulink_7a6e3de0-e308-5642-a30a-844d82380b71)

Barry lay in his bed, fuming. He’d gone straight to his room, without cleaning his teeth or anything, and slammed the door. But it had just come back at him as his door didn’t really shut properly unless you closed it carefully, jiggling the handle up as you did it. So he’d had to do that after his slam, which felt completely at odds with a show of rage.

He lay there in his onesie – a zebra one, with ears and a tail, which was too big for him because it had been passed down from Lukas – and stared at his room. His head hurt. He wasn’t sure why that was, but he’d read in another part of the Sunday Express once that stress brought on headaches, and he knew that he was very stressed at the moment.

It wasn’t that easy to sleep in his room at the best of times as the Bennetts lived on a main road called the A41, and Barry’s room faced it. The Sisterly Entity had, of course, been given the quieter room at the back facing the garden, which was BIGGER as well: some rubbish about them needing to have the bigger room because there were two of them. Barry did not recognise this.

As each vehicle went past, it would light up a different section of Barry’s room, depending on which way it was going.

A car driving down the road would light up his wardrobe, or DEJN NORDESBRUKK as it had been called in IKEA.

A car driving up the road would illuminate the ceiling and the browny-yellow patch of damp immediately above Barry’s bed, which he sometimes pretended was a map of Russia that he had to study for a secret mission.

A car turning into the road from the other side would throw a sweep of white light across the far wall, which had a James Bond poster on it – Daniel Craig in a tuxedo – and another poster, of FC Barcelona, which was a couple of years out of date but still had Lionel Messi sitting in the front row. Barry had always liked the way that both of his heroes stared out of the posters with intense eyes: Lionel like he was ready to go and beat eleven players single-handedly and score with a back-heel chip, and James Bond like he was ready to kill someone.

Every so often, his bed would shake as a lorry went by.

But today he wasn’t trying to get to sleep anyway. He was too angry. And he knew that, if he went to sleep, by tomorrow the argument would all be forgotten about, and he didn’t want that. He had meant it. In his anger, he had come to a deep and important realisation: his parents just weren’t very good parents. It made him sad to have this thought – his tummy fell as the words appeared in his mind, like it sometimes did when he was scared – but another part of him felt brave: like he was facing up to something.

“I wish I had better parents…” he whispered. He could feel, as he said it, a tiny tear squeeze out of his left eye. It blurred his vision, making the damp patch look less like a map of Russia and more like a smear of poo. This got in the way of his train of thought a little. It was very distracting, the idea of someone somehow getting their bottom on the ceiling to plop upside down, and so, to get back into the moment, he repeated, slightly more loudly: “I wish I had better parents.”

Then, from underneath his pillow, he grabbed the list he’d secretly written down of all the things that made his mum and dad a bit rubbish at their basic job of being his mum and dad. He held it up above his face and said, a third time, the loudest so far: “I wish I had better parents!”

And then suddenly the entire room started to shake.

CHAPTER FIVE (#ulink_cd3fc7bc-e95d-5839-8d8e-2a5f1497dd6d)

The walls were shaking like crazy; it was as if Barry’s bedroom had a really bad fever.

The windows rattled and his little Aston Martin DB6 model car fell off the shelf behind his bed. Barry had never been in an earthquake, but he had seen them on the telly, and thought this must be what they were like. He clutched his duvet (MYSA ROSØNGLIM, white) in fear, frightened that maybe this was happening because of what he’d just said out loud.

He was about to say, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean it!” (he didn’t quite know who this was addressed to – his parents, even though they weren’t in the room, or, he supposed, God) when he realised… Oh, of course: it’s a lorry.

He sat up.

It must be a very big lorry, he thought as the room continued to shake. It must have really powerful headlights as well, he thought next as the far wall, the one with the posters on it, began to glow. What was odd about this glow, though, was that – unlike what usually happened when a lorry or a big car turned on to the road, which was that its headlights would light up the whole wall as the vehicle moved past – only the area around his posters seemed to be glowing.

And the glow wasn’t moving. Nor was it fading.

If anything, it was getting brighter. Maybe the lorry had stopped outside the house? Barry did notice that the shaking seemed to have died down. But you weren’t allowed to stop on the A41.

As he continued to look at the posters, a very strange thing happened. Lionel Messi’s and James Bond’s stares seemed to turn towards him. Like they were looking at him.

And then an even stranger thing happened.

Lionel Messi said: “Barry! Hey!”

Lionel didn’t move from his sitting position, in between Iniesta and David Villa (see: told you it was out of date), with his hands on his knees. But his mouth did move. Definitely.

Barry, shocked and frightened, said nothing. But, through the shock and fear, he was also very, very curious. So he didn’t look away.

“Eh! El Barrito!” said Lionel. “Ven aquí! Rápido!”

“He means come over here. Quickly,” said another voice. A voice Barry recognised.

Barry moved his eyes sideways. James Bond was in exactly the same position he always was, but he had, quite clearly, raised his left eyebrow.

“He does?” said Barry hoarsely.

“Yes. I speak Spanish,” replied James Bond. “And French, and German, and Italian, and Mandarin, and a smattering of Portuguese. Should be better, but y’know: very little action in Portugal.”

“…Right,” said Barry, who by now was wondering if he should just start screaming.

James Bond raised his other eyebrow. Something that Jake couldn’t do. “So?”

“So… what?”

“So come over here! Like he says! Otherwise I might just have to shoot you…”

Barry gulped. He thought it best to go along with it. So he got out of bed and walked towards the glowing wall.

CHAPTER SIX (#ulink_ed55b9b3-3833-5e9e-9454-4bfb2a960077)

As he approached the wall with the posters on it, Barry kept a close eye on Bond and, more importantly, on the Walther PPK with silencer now pinned to his chest. Barry could feel the too-big feet of his onesie dragging across the carpet (BJORNO MASTERLIGN): it was the only familiar feeling about this whole thing.

He walked towards the 007 poster, but James Bond flicked his cold, suspicious eyes to the right, so Barry moved over to where Lionel was smiling at him.

“Eh! Barrito! Me recuerdas al niño en el avión en ese anuncio que hice!”

“Pardon me?”

“He says you remind him of the little boy on the aeroplane in that advert he did,” said James Bond. “You remember, the one with the basketball guy and the ice cream and stuff. God, Lionel, why did you do that? It’s not like you don’t earn a million pounds a minute as it is.”

“Estós celoso!”

“I am not jealous. I do my work for the love of my country. And the ladies, of course.”

“Er… hello?” said Barry. “I think you wanted… to talk… to me…?”

“Si!” said Lionel.