Noah Barleywater Runs Away (10 page)

‘And that’s why your father carved this?’ asked Noah, holding up the puppet of Mr Wickle. ‘Since he was the man who helped the bullying come to an end?’

‘Sort of,’ said the old man. ‘But Poppa wasn’t
entirely fond of him, for he always said that if it wasn’t for Mr Wickle, then I would have stayed at home in the years that followed and not kept running off and leaving him on his own. He missed me greatly, you see, when I was gone. We had moved into the forest in order for me to stop getting into mischief, but it seemed that I just found other sorts. He made this puppet so that he could stare at it and shake it in the air whenever he got angry with me.’

‘How extraordinary,’ said Noah as he put the puppet down on the table before him.

‘You see, Mr Wickle immediately realized that my legs were unusually strong and signed me up for football and rugby, tennis and lacrosse, badminton and hurling, diving and parachuting, rafting and cycling, auto-racing and synchronized swimming, basketball and running, rock-climbing and rowing, sailing and archery, baseball and boxing, and soon I became known as the greatest athlete the village had ever seen. The polo teacher even invited me to sign up for polo classes but I shook my head at that.

‘ “No, I don’t care for polo,” I told him.’

‘I’ve never known anyone who played so many sports,’ said Noah.

‘Yes, but I liked running best,’ said the old man. ‘Every day Mr Wickle would time me as I ran out of the school gates, along the road, into the forest and out again, up the street, across the village, past my friend the donkey and back to the schoolyard again, and he said that I had the most potential of any boy
he had ever seen and he’d seen them all.

‘ “Here’s a tip though,” he told me, leaning over and pressing a hand into my shoulder. “If you want to improve your time, run faster.” ’

‘That seems like good advice,’ said Noah, considering it.

‘Oh, it was. And faster I ran. Come the school sports day, I won every race on the card, and by the end of the day the other boys gathered around and put me up on their shoulders to carry me in a victory march through the streets, but thinking that they were planning on beating me up again, I ran away as quickly as I could – which was very quick – and never received the triumph. A few months later, the village’s annual long-distance race, known as “the Long One”, was held, and I won in a time that was fifteen per cent quicker than anyone had ever run it before. I ran it even quicker than the great Dmitri Capaldi, the legendary runner whose statue stood in the centre of the village. And when news of my success started to spread, the county board came calling, and before the year was out I was crowned the fastest runner in a fifty-three-mile radius. Not long after that I was named the fastest runner in the country. And that was when all my resolutions to be a good boy and stay with Poppa started to crumble, just like I had promised they never would.’

‘I wish I had a skill like that,’ said Noah Barleywater. ‘I’m not much of a runner really. Although
I’m not bad at chess.’

‘Hmm,’ said the old man, thinking about it. ‘Not really a sport though, is it?’

‘It’s a sport of the mind,’ said Noah, sitting up straight and smiling.

‘It is,’ agreed the old man. ‘But there’ll be no one to play chess with now, I imagine. Now that you’ve run away from home, I mean.’

‘No,’ said Noah, looking down at the table again, concentrating on a knot of wood in the centre, scratching away at it with the nail of his thumb.

‘I suppose it was your family then,’ said the old man, standing up and clearing the lunch things away. ‘They’re the only people left. You must be running away from them. Now, what do you think of this?’ he asked, holding up a puppet of an orangutan, the result of all the carving he had been doing over the last hour.

‘It’s very good,’ said Noah, taking it off him and examining it carefully. ‘It’s so lifelike. The way you’ve chipped the wood to look like monkey hair.’

‘Yes, I suppose so,’ he replied, sounding a little disappointed as he looked at it. ‘It wasn’t actually an orangutan that I was trying to carve, but never mind.’

‘Really?’ asked Noah. ‘What were you trying to carve then?’

The old man shook his head and walked over to a basket that sat in the corner of the room,
overflowing with blocks of wood, selected one, examined it carefully, before nodding and sitting down again. ‘It doesn’t matter,’ he said quietly, ignoring the boy’s question as he picked up the chisel. ‘I’ll just try again. I’ll get it right one of these days. I think there’s a little dessert going if you’d like some?’

‘If it’s not too much trouble,’ said Noah, who was still hungry. ‘And I’m not running away from my family, by the way. It’s just that … well, they’re there and I’m here, that’s all.’

‘But they must be very bad people if you don’t want to be with them,’ said the old man, snapping his fingers for the fridge, who appeared before them in a very sprightly manner considering he was so full of sugar. He opened the door and looked inside. ‘I’m afraid I don’t have much to offer you,’ he said. ‘Just a little trifle, some jelly and ice cream, a chocolate cake, a banana cream pie and some cherry cherry double cherry flan. Will that do?’

‘That will do nicely,’ said Noah, who didn’t like to think that the old man imagined his family were bad people and this was why he had left them behind. After all, they weren’t bad people at all. They were very nice people actually.

‘But if they’re so nice, then why have you run away from them?’ asked the old man, surprising Noah, for he was sure he’d only thought that in his head, not spoken it aloud.

‘It’s just better this way, that’s all,’ he said.

‘
Does your father lock you in the coal-shed?’

‘No,’ said Noah, appalled.

‘Does your mother make you eat in the kennel with the dog?’

‘Of course not,’ said Noah. ‘She’d never do anything like that. Besides, we don’t have a dog. If anything, we always have great days out together, the two of us. Or we have over the last few months anyway.’

‘Oh yes?’ asked the old man. ‘That sounds intriguing.’

‘Yes, well, there was the pinball café, for one,’ said Noah, telling him the story of how he had scored the 4,500,000 points and topped the leader board. ‘And then there was the time she saved me from the security guard who accused me of stealing the magic cards. And only a few weeks ago she built our own private beach.’

The old man raised an eyebrow in surprise. ‘A private beach?’ he asked. ‘At the edge of a forest? That sounds unlikely.’

‘You’d be amazed what my mum can do when she sets her mind to it,’ he said, smiling a little. ‘She’s full of surprises.’

Noah’s mother had never been the type of woman to do unexpected things, but this had all changed a few months earlier after their springtime holiday to Auntie Joan’s was cancelled. They had gone there every Easter for as long as Noah could remember and he always looked forward to the trip, not just because they lived by the sea and Noah could spend hours splashing about in the water and making castles on the beach, but because his cousin Mark was his best friend, even though they only saw each other a few times a year. (The coast, where Auntie Joan lived, was a long way from the forest, where the Barleywater family lived.)

Everyone said that Mark was the opposite of Noah. He was tall for his age, and his parents told him they were going to put a brick on his head to stop him growing because he wasn’t able to keep any clothes for more than a few months before he grew out of them. And he had a mop of blond hair, where Noah’s was black. And he had blue eyes to
Noah’s green. And he was a bit of a star at football and rugby, two games that Noah liked to play but wasn’t very good at. For some reason he always got confused whenever they played them at school – football on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays; rugby on Tuesdays and Thursdays – and picked up the football and threw it sideways to the other boys on his team, or took aim at the rugby ball and kicked it into the back of the net, shouting ‘
Goooooaaallll!
’ in a loud voice before running around the pitch with his shirt pulled over his head until he fell over. If it wasn’t for the fact that the other boys in his class generally
liked
Noah, then there was a good chance they would have kicked him in after it.

‘A slight change of plan,’ his mother said one evening when the family was sitting down to dinner. ‘Regarding Auntie Joan’s, I mean.’

‘We’re still going, aren’t we?’ asked Noah quickly, looking up from his plate of fish pie, which he’d been moving around with a fork in the hope of finding something edible in the squishy mess that sat before him. (His mother was many things, but a good cook was not one of them.)

‘Yes, yes, we’re still going,’ said his mum, looking around the table for salt and pepper to mask the taste rather than meeting his eye. ‘Well, when I say we’re still going, I mean we
will
be going. At some point in the future, that is. Just not next week like we planned.’

‘Why not?’ he asked, his eyes opening wide in surprise.

‘A different week,’ said his father quickly. ‘We can go in the summer, all being well.’

‘But it’s all arranged,’ said Noah, looking from one to the other in dismay. ‘I wrote to Mark last week and we decided that on the first afternoon we’d go in search of crabs and—’

‘The last time you went looking for crabs with Mark, you filled a bucket with them, and when one of them jumped out onto your arm, you dropped the lot on the stone floor of Auntie Joan’s kitchen and they all ran away.’ said his mother. ‘Except for one unfortunate crab whose shell broke as it hit the floor. If anything, I imagine the crab population will be pleased to hear that you won’t be visiting this Easter.’

‘Yes, but I was only
seven
then,’ explained Noah. ‘Nobody knows how to behave when they’re seven. But I’m eight now. I would treat the crabs with a lot more respect.’

‘You mean you’d keep their shells intact before you dropped them, still breathing, in a pot of boiling water?’ asked his father, who described himself as a bleeding-heart liberal and proud of it.

‘I
would
,’ agreed Noah. ‘So can we go?’

‘No,’ said his mother.

‘But why not?’

‘Because we can’t.’

‘Why can’t we?’

‘
Because I said so.’

‘But why are you saying so?’

‘Because it’s not possible right now.’

‘But why isn’t it possible right now?’

‘Because it isn’t!’

‘That’s not an answer!’

‘Well, it’s the only answer you’re getting, Noah Barleywater,’ she snapped, and he knew that was the end of the matter, because his mother only used his full name when she had made up her mind on something and there was no turning back. ‘Now eat your fish pie before it gets cold.’

‘I hate fish pie,’ grumbled Noah, who rather liked it actually when it was cooked right. (As in, by someone who knew how to cook.)

‘No you don’t,’ said his mother. ‘You always order fish pie when we go out for dinner.’

‘I don’t hate
real
fish pie,’ agreed Noah, moving the pale pink and white slop around on his plate, some of the fish pieces looking so raw and inedible that a skilled veterinarian might have brought them back to life. ‘But this, Mother … this – I mean, really.’

Noah’s mum sighed. She knew that Noah only called her ‘Mother’ when he was absolutely certain of something and there was no convincing him otherwise. ‘What’s wrong with it?’ she asked after a moment.

‘It tastes like sick,’ he said with a shrug.

‘Noah!’ snapped his father, stopping his own
fork from pushing the food around the plate for a moment to stare at his son. ‘That’s a terrible thing to say.’

‘No, he’s right,’ said his mother with a sigh, pushing her plate away. ‘I can’t cook for toffee, can I?’

‘You make quite good tomato soup,’ said Noah, willing to give her that.

‘That’s true,’ she said. ‘I can open a can with the best of them. But my fish pie isn’t up to scratch.’

‘To be fair,’ said Noah’s father, ‘it does look like something the dog would turn up his nose at. If we had a dog, that is.’

‘Let’s go out for dinner then,’ said his mother, standing up and clearing the plates away. ‘And you can order whatever you want.’

Noah smiled, the disappointment of the non-holiday forgotten for a moment, and jumped down from his seat, but just as he did so, his mother dropped the handful of plates she was holding, and all three fell to the ground, sending potatoes, prawns, cod, peas and all manner of squishy ingredients all over the floor. Noah jumped, expecting her to say that she was a terrible butterfingers, always dropping things, but instead she was leaning against the sideboard, one hand pressed to the small of her back, and was groaning quietly, a strange and disturbing sound, a heartbreaking cry that he had never heard her make before. Noah’s father immediately jumped up and ran to her, and Noah stepped forward too, but there
was no way over the fallen fish pie except to take a giant leap and he wasn’t sure he could make it without taking a step back first.

‘Go up to your room, Noah,’ said his father before he could do this though.

‘What’s the matter with Mum?’ he asked nervously.

‘Go up to your room!’ his father repeated, raising his voice now, and he sounded so serious that Noah immediately did as he was told, trying not to think about what was really going on downstairs.

And that, for the time being, was the end of that.

But then, two weeks later, on the day they should have been going to Auntie Joan’s if the plan hadn’t been changed, he was standing in front of his bedroom mirror measuring his muscles when his mother came marching in. She’d been sick in bed for a few days before that, but seemed to be better now and had been away all the previous day on what she described as a secret mission that he would learn about soon. ‘There you are!’ she said, smiling at him. ‘How do you fancy a day out?’

‘Love to!’ replied Noah, putting down the measuring tape and making a note in his book of his current measurements. ‘Where to this time? Back to the pinball café?’