The Parent Agency

“Oh, speak English for crying out loud, Messi. You’ve played against John Terry. You must have at least learnt some swear words.”

“Culo.”

“That’s not a swear.”

Barry looked at Lionel, who tutted, but then looked back at him and said, in a strong accent, “Barry. Would you mind pleeze to stand in between me and the guy dressed like a waiter?”

“I am not dressed like a waiter! What waiter has a gun?!”

Barry shuffled across. “Here?”

“Yes, nearly. Just a beet to the left,” said Lionel.

Barry shuffled a bit more. Now he was precisely in between the two posters. “Yes, good. Espléndido! Now shut your eyes and say the thing again.”

“What thing?” said Barry. He dug his hands into his pockets (the onesie had quite deep ones), which was something he always did when asked a question he wasn’t sure how to answer. In the corner of his mind he noticed that, crumpled up in the corner of the left-hand pocket, was the list of things that he blamed his parents for.

“Oh, you know the thing. What is it? Is hard for me in English. Remind me, 003 and a half.”

“Seven! You know it’s seven!”

“Yes, but on that poster you are a leetle half-size version of yourself! So 003 and a half! Ha ha ha! You see, Barrito, what I did there! Ees clever, no?”

James Bond raised his eyes to heaven. “Can we please get this over with? In two hours I have to be strapped to the underside of a stealth bomber.”

“What thing?” said Barry again.

“Pardon?”

“What thing am I meant to say?”

“Oh. The thing about your mum and dad. Your wish.”

“Oh right,” said Barry. He shut his eyes.

“Loudly. Like you did last time.”

“OK,” said Barry. “Ahem.” He didn’t know why he said that. It just felt appropriate. “I wish I had better parents.” He opened his eyes. “Why? Why do I have to say tha—”

He was stopped from finishing the question by noticing that both Lionel and James Bond were waving at him. Little waves: like goodbye ones.

Barry frowned.

Then the glow behind the posters got super-strong, and the wall vanished in a huge burst of white light.

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MONDAY (#ulink_840ad5f1-999a-539e-9d7e-916d7edca8f0)

CHAPTER ONE (#ulink_c438a80e-b919-5e40-991f-b23410904c1a)

When Barry’s eyes recovered from the shock, he couldn’t see his room any more. In fact, he wasn’t in his room any more. Nor was he in his house. Nor was it night-time. The only thing that was the same was that he was still wearing his zebra-print onesie.

He was walking up some steps. He didn’t know why he was walking up them. He felt scared, but something stopped him from doing what he would normally do when frightened: crying out for his mum and dad. He simply kept on going.

Just before he got to the top, Barry felt a fluttering by his feet. Looking down, he saw a creased, coloured bit of paper, half-trodden into the step: a map. Barry bent down, peeled the pages off the concrete and unfolded it.

The map was brightly coloured and showed a city marked out with cartoon drawings of all the most important places, like the ones Barry had seen held by tourists on the odd occasions when he and his family would go to London. The city seemed to be called, as far as he could make out from the name written at the top, Youngdon.

Geographically, it looked a little like a map of London. The drawings showed all the big buildings in the same places, except instead of the Houses of Parliament there was something that looked like a cross between the Houses of Parliament and a soft-play centre, called the Playhouses of Parliament (it included a clock called Little Ben). Hyde Park was called Hide-and-Seek Park, Nelson’s Column was entitled Nelson-the-Bully-From-the-Simpsons-Column and both Oxford and Piccadilly Circuses appeared to be actual circuses.

In the middle of the map, though, there was a large, official-looking building that didn’t match anything from the real London, above which was written, in big red capitals, three letters:

Barry looked up. While examining the map, he’d moved up a couple of steps and now he could see that he’d reached the top of a subway, looking out on to a street. It was a very busy street, in what looked like the centre of a big city. There were shops, and tall buildings, and traffic, and more shops, and more tall buildings, and more traffic.

Barry was, frankly, disappointed. He knew he had come here by magic. And he reckoned that if you went somewhere by magic then it should be – well – a really different world, where people drove floating cars, or monsters spoke to you in computer code. Or maybe – and the map had led him to think this might be the case – it would be a world where everything was designed for children: where sweets grew on trees and Xboxes fell from the sky.

Here, though, all he could see were lots of grown-ups doing their boring, grown-up stuff: going to work, shopping, speaking very seriously on their mobile phones about money and offices.

Barry decided, therefore, that he had simply been transported to a big city he didn’t know, perhaps one off the A41. As such, he thought it would be best if he just went home. He didn’t know how to get home, though, so he shouted, at the top of his voice: “EXCUSE ME!”

It came out very loudly. Quite a lot of the grown-ups stopped what they were doing and looked at him.

“I’M BARRY AND I’M TEN YEARS OLD,” he said. “WELL, NEARLY TEN. IN FIVE DAYS. AND I’M HERE ON MY OWN. CAN SOMEONE PLEASE HELP ME?”

Barry expected that, by shouting this, he would make at least one of the grown-ups come over and take him to a police station, or phone his parents or something. But one of the grown-ups didn’t come over. They all came over. At once.

There were loads of them, crowding round him. Couples mainly: fat couples, thin couples, old couples, young couples, hairy couples, bald couples (even the women), well-dressed couples, couples who both wore slacks, smelly couples, couples who weren’t easy to describe one way or another. They were all saying things.

“Barry!” they were mostly saying at first. “Barry!”

“Yes?!” said Barry to some of them, before realising it would take too long to answer everybody.

“Barry!”

“We’d be great for you!”

“You’d love it at our house!”

“Come and be with us, Barry!”

And others were saying: “Here! Please! Have a look at this!”

“Take our card!”

“Here’s our CV!! Would you mind just reading it? Take your time!”

While they were saying these things, they were trying to hand him bits of paper or cards. On the bits of paper were photos of the couples, looking smart and smiling. There was also lots of information about each couple – where they lived and what kind of car they owned and how much money they earned and stuff like that – but Barry didn’t have time to read one to the end before another was thrust into his hand.