Noah Barleywater Runs Away (9 page)

‘Oh no,’ said Noah, shaking his head. ‘No, I
have a lot of friends at school, although I’m sorry to hear that you didn’t. There’s a boy in our class called Gregory Fish, and he gets bullied all the time on account of the fact that he says all his Rs as if they were Ws.’

‘Well, that’s not very nice, is it?’ asked the old man. ‘You’re not mean to him, I hope?’

Noah shrugged his shoulders and looked away. ‘Sometimes,’ he said, his face reddening a little. ‘I don’t mean to be.’

‘Hmm,’ said the old man, shaking his head as he chipped away at the piece of wood he held in his hands and then lifted it to the light to examine it carefully. ‘And do you think you’ll miss those friends of yours?’ he asked.

‘I don’t miss them yet,’ said Noah, thinking about the games they played together and the adventures they had. ‘But I expect I will in time. They are very good friends, after all.’

‘But still you ran away from them?’

‘Who said I’m running away?’ asked Noah.

‘YOU DID!’ roared the wooden bear in the red bow tie, who sat up for only a moment, pointed a finger at Noah and stabbed it dramatically in the air several times before collapsing down again into an inanimate state as if nothing untoward had happened. Noah stared at him, open-mouthed, before looking back at the old man in surprise.

‘Something the matter?’ asked the old man innocently.

‘The bear,’ said Noah. ‘He shouted at me.’

‘Yes, he can be terribly rude sometimes,’ said the old man, shaking his head. ‘I’ve warned him about shouting at strangers but it’s in his nature, I’m afraid. There’s nothing I can do about it. You might as well ask a squirrel not to sing along to the dawn chorus. Anyway, the point is, you are running away from home, aren’t you?’

‘Yes,’ admitted Noah.

‘And do you want to tell me why?’

Noah shook his head and reached into the box again, this time extracting a puppet of a man wearing a tracksuit. He pulled the string, and the whistle the man was holding in his left hand lifted to his lips and gave a quick, sharp
peep-peep
sound, although where he found the air to blow into it was anyone’s guess.

‘How extraordinary!’ said Noah Barleywater.

‘Ah, that’s Mr Wickle,’ said the old man with a laugh. ‘If it wasn’t for him, the things that happened to me in my life afterwards might never have happened at all. He was the one who got me interested in it, you see.’

‘Interested in what?’ asked Noah.

‘In running,’ replied the old man. ‘I was a great runner as a young man, you see. You wouldn’t think it to look at me now, making my way slowly up and down these staircases, but I was famous all around the world. And it was Mr Wickle who first realized how fast I could go.’

After a few weeks (said the old man) I began to think it might be a good idea to give up school as a bad job. I had no friends to speak of, and every day Toby Lovely made things harder and harder for me. One day he sawed off the legs of my chair, so that when I sat down I fell to the floor and hurt myself. Another day he put a bucket of varnish over the door, and when I walked in, it fell all over me and I had to have two baths in one week. He stole my homework and ate my apples, tied the laces of my boots together and mispronounced my name. He said I came from outer space and had jelly where my brain should be. He put a frog down the back of my trousers and a ferret down the front, which was actually more fun than he had imagined it would be. Oh, I could go on and on with the terrible things he did to me. He walked beside me for a whole afternoon wearing a pullover with an arrow pointing in my direction and underneath it the words: I’M WITH STUPID. He spent every
Wednesday morning speaking to me in Japanese, at which he was actually quite proficient, and I started to pick up a few words. He poured salt in my porridge and put sugar in my sandwiches. He persuaded everyone in the class to wear hats for a day so that I was the odd man out. He sent me flowers and signed them with big kisses from someone called Alice. It was terrible, terrible, terrible. I started to dread going to school and didn’t think that things could get any worse.

Until they did.

It was a Tuesday morning and Mrs Shields was going around the room discussing what jobs we all might like to have in the future, which might have been a little premature as we were only eight years old at the time, but she said we should all plan for our future, even at this early stage. She wanted to know not only what we wanted to be when we grew up but what our parents were now.

‘My father is an international film star,’ said Marjorie Willingham, ‘and my mother is an astronaut. I hope to be a helicopter pilot.’

‘Very good, Marjorie,’ said Mrs Shields, nodding appreciatively. ‘And you, Jasper Bennett. What do your parents do?’

‘My father is working on a cure for the runny nose. My mother is a horse whisperer. And I have ambitions towards the priesthood.’

‘And if you set your mind to it, you will achieve all your goals,’ she declared happily. ‘Matthew
Byron, how about you?’

‘My father is the head of the armed forces,’ said Matthew, ‘and my mother helps people avoid paying income tax. I plan on being a professional footballer until I am thirty-four and a half, at which point I will turn my attentions to becoming the Poet Laureate.’

‘So ambitious!’ Mrs Shields smiled. ‘Toby Lovely – I’m sure your parents are wonderful role models.’

‘They are,’ admitted Toby Lovely. ‘You know those slides that go round and round and round, and when you come out the other end of them you land in a swimming pool?’

‘I do,’ said Mrs Shields.

‘Well, my father invented them.’

‘Fascinating,’ said Mrs Shields. ‘And your mother?’

‘She invented swimming pools. That was how they met.’

‘Of course. And how about you? What would you like to be when you grow up?’

‘An athlete,’ said Toby Lovely. ‘I
am
the fastest boy in school, after all.’ He smiled rather smugly, and received warm applause from the rest of the class.

‘You are indeed,’ said Mrs Shields, looking around carefully. ‘Now, is that everyone? No one was left out?’

Every boy and girl in the class nodded except me, which I immediately regretted, for Mrs Shields
noticed this and pointed in my direction.

‘I do apologize,’ she said. ‘And what do your parents do?’

I swallowed nervously as I stood up. ‘My father is a toymaker,’ I said. ‘Mostly puppets, but a few other things as well. He’s very good with his hands.’

‘Charming,’ said Mrs Shields. ‘Everyone needs toys. Well, until their late twenties anyway. And your mother, what does she do?’ I was a little surprised that she was asking me this and bowed my head for a moment. ‘Oh, of course,’ she said. ‘I’m so sorry. I forgot. You don’t have a mother, do you?’

‘No, miss,’ I said, shaking my head.

‘Did she die?’

‘No, miss,’ I said.

‘Did she run away?’

‘No, miss,’ I said.

She seemed surprised by this and frowned. ‘Well, where is she then? She couldn’t have just vanished into thin air, surely?’

‘I never had a mother,’ I said.

‘Never had a mother?’ cried Toby Lovely, turning round to stare at me in amazement. ‘I’ve never heard anything so ridiculous in all my life.’

‘Then you haven’t heard yourself sing,’ I replied, astonished by my own bravery in standing up to him but leaving him lost for words, for he simply stared at me and began to seethe quietly.

I knew I wouldn’t have heard the end of this, and sure enough, a few hours later in the
playground, he came up to me and gave me a slap across the back of the head as a reward for my cheek.

‘How does someone never have a mother?’ he asked. ‘It’s not as if you were carved out of wood or something.’

‘It’s just one of those things,’ I said. ‘I never had a mother. You never had a brain. We all have something that makes us stand out from the crowd.’

And there it was again! Maybe it was the months of bullying that had led me to the point where I just felt I couldn’t take another moment of it. Toby Lovely stared at me and laughed for a moment in astonishment before pawing the ground with his foot like a bull preparing to charge, and then jumped on top of me, the two of us rolling around in a great bundle of raised fists and pulling hair, as everyone else crowded around and cheered us on, delighted to see the all too rare spectacle of a great fight.

I lashed out in all quarters, and when we were finally separated – by Mr Wickle, the games master – I was delighted to see that I had given Toby Lovely a bloody nose; although not so pleased to feel the bruises on my ears and the blackened eye that was starting to bulge on my face.

‘What’s all this about?’ asked Mr Wickle. ‘Boys fighting in my playground? I won’t have it! What are you fighting about anyway?’

I couldn’t take it any more and roared at the top
of my voice: ‘HE THINKS HE’S BETTER THAN ME! AND HE’S NOT!’

‘Am too,’ said Toby Lovely.

‘Are not,’ I countered.

‘Am too,’ said Toby Lovely.

‘Are not.’

‘Am too.’

‘Are not.’

‘All right, all right,’ said Mr Wickle, silencing us both. ‘That’s enough, the pair of you. Look,’ he said, turning to me. ‘Toby Lovely is one of the brightest stars the school has ever produced. He won four gold medals on our last sports day, after all. He runs faster than anyone I know. If he says he’s better than you at that, surely you can let him get away with it? Though as for you,’ he added, turning to Toby Lovely, ‘you should have more humility.’

‘You’re right,’ said Toby Lovely, reaching across to shake my hand. ‘I should simply accept my superiority and not look down my nose at others.’

‘I could beat you in a race,’ I said, shrugging my shoulders, not even thinking about the words before I said them.

Every voice in the schoolyard went silent when I said this, and remained silent for the best part of an hour. Finally, Mr Wickle’s stomach started to rumble and we all shook ourselves out of it.

‘For shame,’ he said, shaking his head and looking at me with great pity in his eyes. ‘That’s an
outrageous thing to say.’

‘But it’s true,’ I said.

‘It’s not,’ said Toby Lovely.

‘Is too,’ I replied.

‘Enough!’ cried Mr Wickle. ‘If you think you are a faster runner than the most brilliant athlete the school has produced since the great Dmitri Capaldi, then there’s only one way to prove it. We shall have a race!’

The school sent up a great cheer and, with extraordinary speed, separated down the centre into two ranks. The boys all stood on one side, the girls on the other, and they stared across at each other with their usual mixed expressions of fear and interest. Between them both, at the top of the lines, stood Toby Lovely and I, with Mr Wickle in between us. From the school itself ran Mrs Shields, carrying a pair of trainers.

‘Toby’s trainers,’ she said, gasping for breath. ‘He can’t run without his lucky trainers.’

‘Do you have your trainers with you?’ Mr Wickle asked me, looking down at my hobnailed boots.

‘No, sir,’ I said. ‘But it doesn’t matter. He can wear them if he likes. I’ll still beat him.’

‘Fine, I will then,’ said Toby Lovely, slipping them on, and we knelt down in our starting positions.

‘Look ahead, boys,’ said Mr Wickle. ‘You see that apple tree in the distance? It’s half a mile away. The first boy to bring me back an apple will be declared the winner. Are you ready?’

‘Ready, sir,’ we cried, and I wondered what I had got myself into, for I had never run a race in my life, let alone against someone like Toby Lovely, who was indeed a very fast runner.

‘Set?’

‘Set, sir,’ we said, and I swallowed nervously, peering ahead towards the tree, deciding that whatever happened, I would try to give a good account of myself and not fall too far behind.

‘Go!’

I raced forward, looking neither left nor right, completely unaware of how far my opponent might have been ahead of me, and when I reached the tree I grabbed an apple, spun round and raced back, popping it into Mr Wickle’s outstretched hand, suddenly aware of how quiet the two rows of spectators had become. Turning round, I saw Toby Lovely only a few metres away, stopping, looking back at me in astonishment. He’d hardly even left his starting position and I’d been there and was back already.

‘Good Lord,’ said Mr Wickle, shaking his head. ‘Now there’s a surprise.’

‘You won then?’ asked Noah. ‘You beat him?’

‘I did,’ said the old man, smiling. ‘And believe me, I was just as astonished as everyone else. I never imagined I would win, but it turned out that I was a natural athlete, the fastest runner the village had ever known. And to be fair to Toby Lovely, he recognized this and congratulated me afterwards.’

‘I suppose you became great friends after that?’ asked Noah.

‘Oh no,’ said the old man, shaking his head. ‘No, we couldn’t stand each other. The bullying stopped, it’s true, but we never spoke again. His story ends there, I’m afraid. But mine was only just beginning. The world was about to become my oyster.’