Читать книгу The Parent Agency - David Baddiel - Страница 11

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a James Bond poster on it – Daniel Craig in a tuxedo – and another poster, of FC Barcelona, which was a couple of years out of date but still had Lionel Messi sitting in the front row.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.