CHAPTER TWELVE

RAISED BY . . .

Jonny gazed at Hari for a while, thinking.

‘OK, I’ll admit it, I’m not sure I do get it,’ he said. ‘I mean, sorry to mention this and please don’t take this the wrong way, but you’re not actually a meerkat, are you?’

Hari blinked.

‘You act like a meerkat, sure, but I don’t see any fur, and you are kind of big for one,’ Jonny went on.

Hari pointed at the picture of a family of meerkats. Then he ran over to the bookshelf where some photos were lined up. Hari pointed at a photo of Jonny’s mum and then at the adult meerkat in the book.

‘That’s your mum?’ said Jonny, trying not to make a ‘you’re frying my brains right now’ face.

‘Squeak!’

‘Were you somehow, maybe, possibly, kind of raised by meerkats?’ Jonny asked.

Another single squeak from Hari, who then rolled on his back happily before hopping up on to the chair and staring out of the window.

Jonny tried to take all this in. He had wanted a new brother, it’s true. Someone quite different to Ted, yes. But there was ‘quite different’ and then there was ‘a boy who thinks he is a meerkat different.’ Yes, it would be pretty mad and exciting to have a boy who was raised by meerkats for a brother, but Jonny couldn’t help thinking that this wasn’t really what he’d signed up for. And before he realised he was speaking aloud, he was speaking aloud.

‘This wasn’t really what I signed up for,’ he said.

Hari didn’t reply. Something had caught his eye outside. The sandpit!

Leaping off the chair, he opened the back door and zoomed out into the garden. Jonny hadn’t played in the sandpit for about a year, and it was full of leaves and, quite possibly, fox poops, but Hari didn’t seem to care. He started excavating with his two hands, spraying sand out through his legs. He was trying to build a tunnel, but every time he climbed down it, it collapsed. He was too big! Jonny guessed that this must have happened back home, wherever Hari came from – meerkat world. He’d got too big for the underground meerkat houses and so here he was, attempting to live in a regular human home.

Jonny joined Hari in the garden and, with a spade, tried to make the tunnel bigger, but there just wasn’t enough sand and they both gave up after a while.

‘Are you hungry after all that digging?’ Jonny asked him. He ran back into the kitchen and brought Hari some bread, but Hari wasn’t interested.

‘You have to eat,’ said Jonny, feeling concerned. ‘All right, I know, let’s go on a bug hunt.’

The two boys poked about in the bushes for a bit. Hari nibbled a worm and Jonny caught another daddy-long-legs and passed it to him. He looked away as Hari gobbled it down.

Quietly, Jonny sat back in the sandpit and built a little castle. Though Hari would probably never do something like that, he definitely needed sand – and lots more than Jonny had – so he could build the tunnel of his dreams. Perhaps it wouldn’t be right for Hari living here. He needed a brother in the desert perhaps. Or one who lived right next to a beach … Jonny went back inside and opened his laptop.

He emailed Sibling Swap, explaining the situation. He liked Hari, he said, but wasn’t sure how they could really be brothers who rode their bikes around and scoffed doughnuts together. Hari seemed to prefer bugs. A Swap operative emailed back.

‘Greetings, Swapper! We’re sorry your latest brother was not massively suitable. We will hop on to arranging a new Swap! A replacement will be with you in the morning.’

Oh well, Jonny thought. He felt a weensy bit guilty about swapping Hari so quickly, but he was impatient to find his perfect brother match. He had to be out there, didn’t he? Of course! Jonny knew it!

Hari didn’t want to come in for dinner (he was snacking on a beetle instead), and Jonny couldn’t persuade him to sleep indoors, so he took him a blanket then went upstairs to bed.

When Jonny woke the next morning, he looked out of his bedroom window. The blanket was lying on the grass. The sandpit was empty. Hari had gone.