on the door. It was opened by a girl in an
“Hello, 890 and 891. Stray, is it?”
“Yes.”
“Through you go…”
Inside was not a grand hallway, as Barry had imagined, but a very, very busy office, with lots of people working there. By people, I mean children: all the workers seemed to be about Barry’s age. He and Lukas and Taj walked through them. They were all wearing orange onesies – although some had cat ears, and some bunny ones, as well as the standard dog version that the girl who answered the door had been wearing. Some of them were carrying files; some were talking; some were at desks on computers. Others seemed to be having meetings.
Barry, Lukas and Taj carried on walking.
“Where are we going?” said Barry.
“To the Head,” said Lukas. “That’s the proper procedure when we find a stray.”
“A stray?” said Barry, remembering that the girl at the entrance had used the same word.
“Yes,” said Lukas. “A stray kid.”
By now, they had reached a big oak door. A plaque on it read: TPA HEAD. Lukas knocked.
“Come in,” said a posh, stern-sounding voice.
Lukas opened the door into another office. It was plush, with wood panels and a thick rug. At the other end of the room was a big wooden desk.
Behind this desk sat Jake. He was wearing a black onesie, with a built-in shirt and tie pattern, and no ears.
“Ah, 890 and 891. This would be the stray, I believe?” His voice sounded nothing like it normally did. He normally said “innit” a lot. Now he sounded posher than someone out of Downton Abbey.
“Yes, sir.”
“Splendid.”
“Thank you, sir.”
Taj and Lukas started to back out of the door.
“Hang on, where are you going?” said Barry.
“Done our job. And, besides, we have to be home for tea,” said Taj.
“Home for tea with who?” said Barry.
Taj looked at him like he was mad. “Our parents, of course.” He shut the door.
Barry looked over at Jake.
“Do sit down,” said Jake, gesturing to a chair on the other side of the desk. On the desk was an antique wooden box and some kind of machine with buttons and a microphone. “Your name again is…?”
“Barry. It’s Barry. You know it’s Barry!” He sat down, feeling, by now, quite frustrated and cross.
“Yes, I should know. But when they told me I didn’t quite believe it. We’ve never had one called that before, you see.”
“Right. And I suppose your name isn’t Jake?”
Jake raised one eyebrow, just like Jake always did, which only made it more infuriating when he said: “I’m just known as the Head, I’m afraid.”
“The Head of what?”
Jake gave a big sweep of his arm. “This. The Parent Agency.” He opened the antique wooden box. “Sour Haribo?”
Barry looked down. Jake – or the Head as Barry was indeed starting to think of him – had taken out of the box a pink and green sweet, the type that are circular but also have a point.
“Thanks,” Barry said, taking it and popping it into his mouth. He very much wanted to know what the Parent Agency was, but halted for a moment to savour the sourness, before it dissolved to just being an ordinary sweet.
“Do you really not know how it works here?” said the Head.
Barry shook his head.
“Oh, I see. Sometimes that happens with strays. Memory loss, etc.”
“No, I haven’t lost my memory. I come from another place – a place that you’re in.”
“I am?”
“Yes. Where you’re just my friend at school. You don’t work in an office or anything. And grown-ups have children, and they live with them. They don’t… do whatever it is they were doing when…” Barry struggled to remember their numbers. “…PCs 890 and 891 found me.”
“Well, never mind,” said the Head, in a way that suggested that Barry was, of course, deluded, but there was no point in trying to tell him that. It reminded Barry of how his dad was sometimes with his grandpa, who had an old person’s disease which meant he couldn’t remember anything. “The way things are in this place, which is the real place everybody lives in, is that grown-ups don’t…” – and here he did an inverted commas mime – “…‘have’ children, whatever that means. Here, children choose their parents.”
“Choose…?”
“Yes, of course. A childhood is far too important to just randomly let grown-ups…” – he did the mime again – “…‘have’ children. No. What we do here is work with children who have yet to choose their parents, like yourself – you’re nine, yes?”
Barry bristled at this. “Nearly ten. In five days.”
The Head’s eyebrow went up. It actually went up even further than it usually did, the top disappearing somewhere under his hairline. “Oh my God!” he said, instantly hitting a button on the machine in front of him, and bending his face down to the microphone. “Secretaries! We have a Code Yellow, Orange, Green, Blue and Red!!”
Barry sat up in his chair. He’d begun, while listening to the Head, to like the sound of this world. But he didn’t like the sound of that. And he liked even less the sight, coming through the door of the office, of The Sisterly Entity.
Barry was about to refuse to even look at TSE, and certainly not listen to them, but it very quickly became clear that, in this world, even The Sisterly Entity were not quite the same as they were in his world.
To begin with, like everyone who worked at the Parent Agency, they were wearing onesies, which they would never have done at home. Plus their hair had gone weird: it had been combed up, a bit like their granny’s hair used to be in black-and-white photos. And, crucially, they were looking at him – Barry – not like they were about to make fun of him, or tell on him to Mum or Dad, but as if he was really, really important.
One reason Barry felt this was because it was actually quite hard for them to look at him. They had come in sideways, carrying a large silver tray, but were still turning their heads as far as they could towards him, and smiling politely. On the tray were five very large egg timers. They were made of glass and each one was a different colour: yellow, orange, green, blue and red. The Sisterly Entity set the tray down on the Head’s desk, between him and Barry, and went to sit on two chairs at the side of the room.
Then they took out, from the pockets of their onesies, notepads. Real pads – they both flicked them open – followed by real pencils, sharpened and ready to write. Neither of them was getting ready to mime with their palm.
Not wanting to look at