Free Noah Barleywater Runs Away by John Boyne Page B

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.’

Chapter Nine

The Race
    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 everyWednesday 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