But he didn’t.
Derek and Emily had brought Barry some running gear, so that they could sprint all the way to their house. There wasn’t anywhere to change as they were on the street outside the Parent Agency. So, to protect his modesty, the Fwahms! ran round him very, very fast, forming a circle of speed which, from a distance, looked like a wobbly blue fence.
Back in his own world, at school, Barry had sometimes gone running, and he’d worn a pair of white shorts and a Barcelona top from 2009 that was too small for him, but the Fwahms! gave him a child’s version of their blue Lycra suits, a white headband and trainers. He thought it probably looked really embarrassing – the Lycra was very tight – but once he’d put it on he did feel like he could go faster than normal.
Then, once they started running, he was sure he was actually going faster than normal. The trainers were really bouncy and the suit felt like it just glided through the air. The only problem was, however fast he went – and Barry was a pretty fast runner: he’d come second in the school cross-country run (and would’ve come first if Taj hadn’t cheated by getting a secret lift halfway from his mum and dad) – he couldn’t go anything like as fast as the Fwahms! Most of the time, they were at least a hundred metres in front of him. Then they’d stop and say, “Come on, Barry! Nearly there!” When he got close to them, though, they’d be off again: fwahm!
Eventually, to save time, Derek Fwahm! lifted Barry up and ran with him on his shoulders all the way to their house, which Barry wasn’t sure about as he knew it might look quite babyish – but really, because Derek moved so fast, it was kind of fun. It was like riding a blue, Lycra-suited, two-legged horse.
After a while, Derek skidded to a halt – Barry actually pulled on some imaginary reins and went “Whoa!”– and put him down. In front of them was a large white building with the words Sweat Shop on its front.
“Here we are!” said Emily.
“Sorry, where are we?” said Barry.
“Our house!” said Derek who, like Emily, didn’t seem able to say anything that didn’t end in an exclamation mark. He got his keys out and approached the doors of Sweat Shop.
“That’s a gym, isn’t it?” said Barry.
“It used to be!” said Emily, taking his hand and leading him into it. “But now it’s our house!”
Barry went into the building. There was a lobby area with a wide desk at one end. “Oh, so you converted an old gym into a house?” he said, remembering that in his world the same thing had happened to an old church just off the A41.
“Nope!” said Derek. “We live in it just as it was!”
“So…” said Emily, who by now was standing behind the desk. “Would you like membership of our house?!”
“Hoor-hoor! Hoor-hoor! Hoor-hoor!” they said together.
As it turned out, though, it was fun living in a gym. Particularly a gym that no one else apart from the three of them was allowed into. Barry liked having free run of the exercise bikes and the treadmills and the endless number of enormous rubber balls. He liked being able to drink as many energy drinks as he wanted. (The ones here, which came free out of the machines, were called PowerFizz and Energyade, and were purple and green and very bubbly.) And he liked that there were loads of TVs hanging above the treadmills. Except none of them seemed to be working.
“Ah!” said Derek, when Barry pointed this out. “We don’t have normal TVs in our gym! Too easy to just stand and watch them! No! Get on and you’ll see!”
Barry stepped on a treadmill and started running. As he got his speed up, the TV came on. It was a show called Pop-Newz, just starting. It had a title sequence with lots of different people singing a theme tune which went:
“Pop-Newz! Pop-Newz! More interesting than shoes!”
“Now, Barry, slow down a bit…!”
Barry slowed down to a quick walk. As he did so, the TV slowed down too. The singers started moving in slow motion, and the sound of their voices went all low and weird and stretched out, like ghost voices in films. “Pooooppp… Newwwzzzz… Poooooppppp… Newwwwzzz… Mooooorrrreee ffffuuuunnnn tttthhhhaannnn a baddddd bruissssse…”
“Right, now speed up!” said Derek. “As fast as you can go!”
Barry moved his legs faster and the TV went back to normal. Then he went faster still and all the singers started moving as if they were speeded up, and their voices became high-pitched, like they’d sucked on helium.
“Pop-Newz!Pop-Newz!Moreexcitingthanelectrical fuse!!!” they sang.
“It’s designed to make sure you run at exactly the right speed!” said Derek. “Brilliant, isn’t it?!”
“Yes,” said Barry, which was all he could say, since he was completely out of breath. He noticed that the first item on Pop-Newz was a piece about Vlassorina. They were being filmed smiling at home with their new child, Patarina. Barry slowed down.
“Weeeeeveeee alllllwwaaayys waaaannnnttteeed a girrrrrlllll…” Vlad was saying, while bouncing Patarina on his knee.
“Maybe I’ll do a bit more of that later,” said Barry, getting off the treadmill.
“OK!” said Derek, who was in the middle of doing some star jumps.
“So…!” said Emily, who came skipping into the room – not skipping as in doing a hoppy, jumpy walk, but skipping, properly, with a big yellow skipping rope – “we’ve got it all sorted for your party!!”
“The football party?”
“Yes!”
Barry had felt that, party-wise, it was perhaps time for a change, the James Bond idea not having gone so well in the previous parental try-outs. So he had suggested to the Head that a football party would be equally to his liking. The Head had said he thought that would be right up the Fwahms!’ street.
“Great!” said Barry.
“There’s a place where we can have a football party right up our street!” said Emily, still skipping.
“Right! Yes, that’s what the Head said. Although I thought, when he said that it was right up your street, he meant… it was something you’d be good at doing.”
“It is!” said Derek. “But it also happens to actually be right up our street! At the end of this street is Wobbly Stadium!”
“Wobbly Stadium?”
“Yes!”
“Does it… um… wobble?”
“Only when there’s a lot of people in it…!” said Emily. “Anyway,” she continued, dropping the skipping rope, but joining in with Derek’s star jumps, “there’s a game on tonight, a big international…!”
“Oh! Right! Who between?”
Derek smiled, stopped star-jumping and leapt on to a treadmill. The TV immediately started up. It was a different show from Pop-Newz, although with quite a similar theme tune. “Sports-Newz! Sports-Newz! Including stuff about teams nicknamed The Blues!” it went.
“So…” said a voice-over when the theme tune had finished, “all eyes tonight are on Wobbly Stadium where, of course, everyone is gearing up for the big game between the United Kid-Dom and Boysnia-Herzogeweeny.”
The TV showed a film of a group of kids of about Barry’s age playing in front of enormous crowds. One team was in white and one in yellow.
“Oh!” said Barry. “They have kids’ football on the TV here?”
Derek and Emily looked at him, amazed. “Of course!” said Emily. “I mean there’s grown-up football as well! But that’s not on TV! It’s only kids’ football that’s everyone’s really interested in!”
“The last time these teams played,” the voice-over continued, “United Kid-Dom won 3–0, mainly down to a fabulous hat-trick scored by this boy among boys…”
The film cut to a boy on the United Kid-Dom side, beating four defenders, flicking the ball up with the backs of his heels, then jumping up and overhead – kicking it into the goal. The crowd went wild.
Barry squinted at the boy as he punched the air and ran towards the camera. “He looks like a younger version of Lionel Messi…” he said.
“Lee-oh-nel Messi?!” said Derek, still running, but not at all out of breath. “No, that’s Lionel Tidy! The best kid player in the country!”
“What’s Lee-oh-nel Messi like?!” said Emily.
“Well, a bit like that,” said Barry. “Only from a place called Argentina. And grown-up. Although actually about the same size.”
“But, despite that result, the United Kid-Dom still need a win tonight to qualify for the Planet Birth Cup!” said the commentator.
The TV switched back to the studio.
“So…” said Barry, “…is that where we’re going for my party? To watch the game?”
Derek got off the treadmill, stopping the TV. He winked at Emily, who winked back. Emily suddenly ran out of the room, with a particularly quick fwahm! “Going to watch it?!” said Derek.
Emily came back, again with a fwahm! She was holding in front of her a United Kid-Dom football kit. She turned it round. On the back was printed the word ‘Barry’.
“You’re playing!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!” said Derek and Emily together, with more exclamation marks than Barry had ever heard.