The Boy Who Sailed the Ocean in an Armchair Read online

  Becket Rumsey is all at sea.

  His dad has run away with him and his brother Billy in the middle of the night. And they’ve left everything behind, including their almost-mum Pearl. Becket has no idea what’s going on – it’s a mystery.

  So with the help of Billy and a snail called Brian, Becket sets out on a journey of discovery. It’s not plain sailing but then what journeys ever are?

  A story of new beginnings, and learning that goodbye isn’t always the end from the bestselling author of A Boy Called Hope.

  About This Book

  Dedication

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Chapter Twenty-four

  Chapter Twenty-five

  Chapter Twenty-six

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  How to Make a Paper Crane

  Q&A with Lara

  About Lara

  Acknowledgements

  A Boy Called Hope by Lara Williamson

  More Usborne Fiction

  Copyright

  For my family, with love

  My name is Becket Rumsey and there are lots of important people in my life who I talk to every day. For starters: my seven-year-old bug-collecting brother, Billy, is one of them (although he talks nonsense ninety-nine per cent of the time – and the other one per cent? Utter nonsense). Dad, who delivers fish from The Codfather van, is another. Mainly he talks about haddock but I can live with that. Ibiza Nana, she’s my grandma and she always rings for a chat from Spain. And then there’s Pearl, Dad’s girlfriend, I talk to her a lot and Pearl’s good at listening. Plus, she gives great hugs and tells us she loves us to the moon and back, which is at least 768,800 km of love. I know this because Billy made me check. In fact, Pearl’s almost a mum to Billy and me. I say “almost” because the one important person in my life who I don’t get to talk to at all is my real mum.

  My mum died when I was four. Not being able to talk to her is the hardest thing. Harder than trying to pat your head and rub your stomach at the same time. I don’t remember a lot about when Mum died but I know she went off to hospital to have Billy and she never came back. And I never said goodbye to her. Okay, being totally truthful, at the time I didn’t think saying goodbye was all that important. I mean, you’re four and it’s just a word, like “farm” or “zoo” or “dog”. But now, at this very moment, I’m thinking “goodbye” is the most important word of all.

  You see, it is eleven thirty on the Monday night at the beginning of half-term and I’m sitting in my dad’s fish van outside a hairdressing salon called Crops and Bobbers. Dad is telling Billy and me that we’ve left our house at Honeydown Hills for good and we’re moving into the flat above this hairdresser’s, just the three of us. We’re not to worry about leaving Pearl behind and, no, we don’t need to worry about saying goodbye to her. She’ll understand. No, we’re not to ring her.

  At first, I’m confused with a capital Z (so confused I can’t even spell, that’s how confused I am).

  Not say goodbye to someone so important for the second time in my life?

  Not say goodbye to Pearl?

  Dad’s having a laugh.

  Only Dad isn’t having a laugh. His face is harder than dried-up breakfast cereal left in a bowl. If I could drive I’d go straight back to our house and Pearl. Tell her Dad has lost his marbles – in fact, that his marbles are so lost they’re probably floating around in a galaxy far, far away. Pearl would welcome us back and say it doesn’t matter that we didn’t say goodbye because this isn’t goodbye at all. It’s hello. She’d bring us straight inside and let us play with her tubes of paint (because Pearl’s an artist). She’d say she loved us all the way to the moon and back again and give us the biggest hug and we’d say we didn’t actually go to the moon, just to Eden, but we’re so glad to be back again.

  When I tell Dad we should go back to Pearl, his mouth drops into an easy O. “You,” he mutters, scratching the koi carp tattoo on his arm, “are not going back to say goodbye or anything else. You do not need to say it.”

  Well, my dad is a prawn short of a prawn cocktail.

  “Plus there is the little matter of us being at our new flat already and it being the middle of the night. I can’t be travelling all over the place at this time with two children,” Dad says, forgetting that he’s just done exactly that. Because about an hour ago he woke us up, threw all our stuff into boxes and strapped Mum’s favourite armchair onto the top of the van beside the plastic one-eyed cod. When we asked Dad where Pearl was he said she’d gone out and then he shooed us into the van and we zoomed away as if we were in the Grand Prix. Although I don’t think a van with a giant cod on the roof could enter. “Anyway, this is our new life now. We’re going to be living by the seaside and this is our home.” Dad points up at the flat as if he’s the Wise Man from the East pointing at a star.

  Living by the seaside? Our new life? I blink back my confusion. What was wrong with the old life? You can’t just throw away old things like that. Otherwise we’d have slung out Ibiza Nana a long time ago. Okay, so saying goodbye doesn’t seem all that important to Dad, but he’s nuts if he thinks it’s not important to me. Well, I’m going to do something about this. In fact, I’m not going to say goodbye to Pearl at all. What I’m going to do is contact her and bring her here to live with us. Yes, that’s what I’ll do.

  But now I’m thinking about goodbyes, it reminds me of Mum and suddenly saying goodbye to her is what I want more than anything. So the other thing I’m going to do is say goodbye to Mum, because I can’t bring her here to live with us. No matter how much I wish I could.

  “Okay, Dad, you’re the boss,” I say, saluting. This is what I call “the bluff”. Pretend to Dad that I agree with whatever he says when really I don’t agree with any of it and I’m going to do something about it.

  By the way, Dad isn’t the boss in our house at all. That was Pearl. Not that I’m saying she went about being all bossy-boots to everyone, but she liked things done her way. Like, even though it was our house that she moved into, she wanted to decorate it in her style. Pearl was very stylish though, so it was okay. She wore her hair in a bun secured with a paintbrush and these long floaty velvet coats that swished the floor, and when she wanted you to do something she’d smile and you’d want to do it for her because she was so lovely. In the end everyone wanted to do what Pearl asked. So, you see, Dad isn’t the boss at all and that’s why I’m going to be the boss on this – take control of the situation and bring Pearl back to us.

  “Yes, Becket Rumsey,” says Dad, running his hand over his bald head. You know Dad means business when he starts using my full name. “You’re quite correct. On this, I am the boss. What I say goes.”

  “Yes, Stephen Rumsey,” I reply, thinking that Dad has had a funny turn.

  To be honest, Dad has had a few funny turns recently so I shouldn’t really be surprised. For the past two weeks he has been extra quiet, plus he’d leave for work early and get home late. Pe
arl said she didn’t believe he had to work so hard. She got angry about it. Dad would laugh and say she was giving him a haddock. That was him joking about. But Pearl didn’t like it. She’d say fish aren’t funny. Obviously she doesn’t know the joke about the fight at the seafood restaurant where four fish got battered. Fish are a bit funny. In the end, Dad didn’t bring fish home for our tea any more and he didn’t talk about them so much.

  Anyway, what I’m trying to say is, looking back on it…Dad hasn’t been Dad for the last few weeks.

  In fact, looking at him now, standing in front of our new flat, I’m not sure who Dad really is.

  Okay, so we’re here, a few minutes away from the ocean, and standing in front of a blue blistered door to the right-hand side of Crops and Bobbers hairdressing salon. Dad says, “This is it,” and checks out my watermelon-slice-wide super smile. I think he’s impressed that I’m so happy with all these changes. What he doesn’t realize is this: it is the smile of a boy who is going to sort out everything. It is the smile of a boy who thinks his dad has gone completely bananas and the only thing left to do is pretend to be as bananas as him.

  Billy pipes up that this flat isn’t really our new home so it must be my birthday present. He lifts his finger and makes a home for it inside his nose, before jiggling it around like beads in a kaleidoscope.

  Sweet Baby Cheeses! My entire family is bananas now. As if! Dad is not going to buy me a flat. I mean, I was just hoping for a life-size skeleton on my birthday, like any eleven-year-old boy. Though imagine if the flat was my new den, like Billy says: a place where I could store all my medical encyclopaedias. Imagine if Dad was investing in the future, knowing I’ll need a special place where I can work in peace to find a medical cure for the heebie-jeebies…

  Okay, this is ridiculous. I’m going as bananas as them.

  “Why do you think I’d buy Becket a flat?” asks Dad, his eyes ping-ponging from Billy to me. “Anyway, it’s not your birthday until next Monday.” Dad says it like I don’t have a clue when my own birthday is. “What parent would buy their child a flat as a gift anyway?” continues Dad, ushering us closer to the blistered door.

  “A rich one?” I reply.

  “Pffttt…” says Dad. “There’s no money in fish.” He points at a name on the buzzer. “Come here, Becket. Look at this. I haven’t got my glasses on. What does that say? Is it Cat Wom…” Dad runs his finger over the illuminated button.

  Holy smokes! “It is!” I exclaim. “Are we going to be living next door to Cat Woman? I can’t believe it.” At that point Dad pushes the button and even though he takes his finger off sharpish it keeps buzzing.

  The lady who opens the door looks nothing like Cat Woman. For starters, she isn’t wearing cat’s ears or a funny mask. Although, to be fair, I might have actually wet my pants if she had been. Cat looks us up and down and then up again, as if she’s watching some vertical tennis match. Billy tries to hide behind my leg as Cat gives Dad the key to our new flat and then asks us to follow her inside. Once up the staircase, Cat points to Flat A. “That’s me.” And then Flat B. “That’s you. I own the hairdressing salon below. Come in for a cut at any time.” She looks at Dad’s bald head. “Maybe not.”

  Meanwhile, Billy is muttering over and over, “I think we should go home now.” Wise words from young Billy; quickly ignored by old Daddy. I feel Billy’s cold little hand slip into mine and he gives me a squeeze. Okay, so it feels like he’s milking a cow, but I know it’s his secret way of asking me if everything will be okay. Call it a sort of code if you will; like the Enigma Code I learned about at school, only a billion times less complicated. This way we can “speak” to each other without actually moving our lips. It started a long time ago, when Billy came home from the hospital and he would grip my hand and I would squeeze his.

  This time, even though I squeeze Billy’s hand back, I don’t actually believe everything is okay.

  Billy whispers, “Why have we run away from home? Why isn’t Pearl here? This is very much a mystery and we have to solve it.”

  “I know,” I mumble back, “exactly what I was thinking.”

  Billy squeezes my hand again, but more urgently this time.

  I squeeze his hand back.

  Then I remember that he picked his nose.

  I thought it would be me taking control of getting back in contact with Pearl. That it would be me who was the boss. I mean, I’m the eldest and it goes without saying that I am the most intelligent person in the family. But only the very next morning after we’d arrived at the flat, it was Billy who said we must text Pearl because that is how we would get her back. Annoyed that I hadn’t thought of it, I reminded Billy that Dad had said we weren’t allowed to ring Pearl. Feeling smug, I waited to hear what bright idea Billy had next. Bright ideas are not Billy’s thing, you see.

  Okay, so a minute later I realized bright ideas are Billy’s thing. “I’m not ringing Pearl,” scoffed Billy. “I’m texting her. It is very different.” Sometimes Billy is so daft he actually goes full circle and becomes a complete mastermind.

  I hand Billy my mobile phone and he begins punching in his message. His eyes glittering, Billy says, “She’ll text us straight back. Just you wait and see.” No word of a lie, we wait and we wait. I look at Billy’s message to make sure it has been sent and it has.

  It’s BiLly AND BECKET. We miS u. wee r here in Eden. COMe BaK 2 us. Pleese ANnswer. :)

  We wait a bit longer for a text back. I grow tired of waiting and start picking the fluff from my belly button. It is something to do and it’s a lot better than staring at our new bedroom. Last night, Dad said he hoped we wouldn’t mind sharing. He said it would be cosy. He smiled. I didn’t. Dad brought Mum’s armchair up from the van and put it in the corner of our new room. He said it belonged with me. When he’d gone to get the rest of our stuff from the van I sat in the armchair for ages and closed my eyes, wishing I was back at home. Then I wished Mum could come back to me even if it was only for a minute. Truth is, closing your eyes and wishing does nothing because when I opened them again I was still in a strange bedroom that smelled of mushrooms and Mum was still gone.

  When we’ve waited fifteen minutes and I have enough fluff to make a home for a baby dormouse, Billy insists on sending another text. Well, I don’t see what harm it could do, because maybe Pearl hasn’t seen the first one. It’s still quite early in the morning and Pearl doesn’t usually get up much before nine. And I think about Ibiza Nana, who always says “The more the merrier” (particularly when she’s talking about sherry). So I think the more texts we send, the more Pearl is likely to reply and the merrier we’ll be, so I let Billy send a second one.

  No answer.

  Billy sends a third text.

  No answer.

  Billy sends a fourth text.

  No answer.

  Billy sends a fifth text.

  At this point I have to stop Billy because once you’ve done the poop emoji there’s nowhere else to go. Pearl is clearly not going to send us an emoji in return. Reluctantly, I tell Billy we’ve got to knock it on the head, because Pearl’s as silent as a burp in space. There will be another way to get her attention, I tell him. We just have to give it some thought. While we are giving it some thought at the breakfast table Dad tries to tell us how much we’re going to love living here.

  “If you cross the road you’re straight into the park and there’s a pathway that leads down to the harbour. Sometimes you can see seals there,” says Dad. “And there are a lot of little fishing boats that take you out on expeditions to the ocean. Plus, we can spruce up this flat and make it really homely. We just have to pull together to make it work.”

  “The old house worked,” I reply. I pause. “Why are we here, Dad? Why have we run away? Why didn’t we bring Pearl with us?”

  Dad doesn’t answer.

  Later that day, Billy has obviously given the matter of getting Pearl’s attention some thought, because he hands me a rectangle of paper and says, “
This is my business card.”

  I stare at it with a mixture of shock and admiration.

  “It’s interesting.” I raise my eyebrows so high they’re doing the eyebrow trapeze. “There are a few spelling mistakes.” Giving Billy back the scrap of paper, I return to my book on parasites.

  “No one is hiring me for my spelling,” huffs Billy.

  “No one is hiring you at all, Billy,” I retort, reading about how pinworms can be detected by sticking tape to your bottom. “You’re not a spy, Billy Rumsey.” I turn the page to ectoparasites: bedbugs, head lice, fleas, ticks.

  “Oh, yes I am.” Billy sniffs dramatically. “And I’ve been thinking that Pearl must be dead.”

  Exasperated, I set the book straight down. Seeing he has my full attention, Billy continues, “Because when Dad brought the boxes up from the van there was a box of my stuff, your stuff, Daddy’s stuff and Mummy’s stuff. There was no box of Pearl’s stuff. And…” Billy inhales and his chest puffs up. “Daddy doesn’t talk about Mummy much and she’s dead and when I wanted to talk about Pearl Daddy didn’t, so I thought she might be dead too.”

  What kind of logic is this? Billy says he thought that maybe Pearl had e-clam-say-what. “Because Mummy had that and she went away and never came back and that was because of e-clam-say-what. And then Daddy was sad and didn’t talk about it and Mummy was completely dead like that spider you whacked with your medical book called Pop My Pimple. And so I got to thinking Pearl must be dead too because Daddy seems sad and doesn’t want to talk about it.”

  Eventually, when I find my tongue (despite it being in my mouth all along), I repeat that Pearl isn’t dead. Mum had eclampsia and you only get that when you’re pregnant, and it’s very rare indeed that you will die from it. I tell Billy to trust me because I know all the medical facts about everything, which I do.

  You see, I’ve wanted to be a doctor since I saw a man on telly pressing his lips on a plastic dummy. Dad said he was doing mouth-to-mouth resuscitation and heart massage and it would save lives. To be fair, it wasn’t like any massage I’d ever seen. Once, Ibiza Nana asked me to massage the bunions on her feet and I didn’t put my lips anywhere near those. Anyway, after that TV show I wanted to save lives more than anything.