Barnaby

Barnaby came over from Australia with my grandparents when I was around eight. I wondered if he understood me when I said hello as he didn’t say anything back. It was the same when my cousins had visited the year before. My mum said that we’d have to talk really slowly so they could understand us. It had snowed that year and they acted all weird running out into the back garden screeching and screaming because they’d never even seen snow before.  Meagan the older one never seemed to stop talking, constantly asking squeaky high-pitched questions about Scotland and the Loch Ness monster.

Barnaby was the complete opposite it would seem. We had to do one of those awkward hug things that parents make you do when you first meet each other. I remember then that he had smelled weird. Like when you go into one of your friend’s house and their house smells different to yours. Like stinky cabbage or digestive biscuits.  

   ‘How was the flight?’ Mum had asked.

   ‘Almost had to smuggle him in our suitcase,’ my Grandpa had laughed.

All the family laughed along with him, but I didn’t know what they meant. Barnaby looked at me with his dark brown eyes as if he was embarrassed and like he knew what I was feeling; what I was thinking. It felt like there would be no hiding place when he was around.

After he had been over here for a while I grew to like him. For one he looked me in the eye when I spoke to him, which I knew meant that he liked me. Many of the grown-ups like Auntie Paula and Uncle Henry wouldn’t look at me at all which made me think there was something wrong with me because they always looked at my sister’s.  

Barnaby grew to be one of my best friends. He understood the times when I got scared when mum and dad fought. He understood when I just needed someone to talk to. He understood when I had to see him again after all these years.

I can’t quite believe that he came back. I look at him stretched out on his back on my green footstool. He’s still as quiet; still a good listener.

I noticed out the corner of my eye that I’m not the only one who has aged, yet his deep dark eyes remain the same, gently probing. His head I notice tilts to one side as if he is listening empathically and full of kindness when I tell him of the one thing after another that’s happened since I last saw him. I never asked him a thing about his life, where he's been.

I took him to bed on the first night but it didn’t feel right. I’m obviously much older now and it’s not the same. When we hugged I felt I was being needy, clinging on and looking for him to give me something; save me from what my life is now.  

He looks depleted now, lying in yoga nidra. Perhaps I’ve exhausted him. Yet at the same time I feel I can’t look at him like he is the one wanting something from me.

I remember the night when he first came on holiday with us to Pitlochry, we’d gone out, all of us for a walk and my Dad had shouted;

   ‘Look up there a shooting star, quick make a wish.’

I’d clenched my eyes tight and wished and wished and wished that Barnaby my stipey long-legged friend would be able to talk to me out of that little stitched up Australian mouth of his.