The 10 P.M. Question (10 page)

Eventually Ma said that perhaps he shouldn’t go, but Uncle George had unexpectedly put his foot down. This was such a rare event that everyone had been startled. Uncle George almost never gave his children instructions; he rarely disciplined them. He said that it wasn’t in him to act the paterfamilias. He was happy for everyone to go their own way, as long as they didn’t disturb his peace or break the law. (He’d been obliged to be stern with Louie during his semi-delinquent period, but it was perfectly obvious that his heart wasn’t in it. Uncle G roared at Louie and repeated the counselor’s words, but no one was convinced.)

So, when Uncle George said that Frankie was getting on that plane or his name wasn’t George Llewellyn Parsons, it was so surprising that neither Frankie nor Ma had argued. Gordana, who had been loudly derisive of Frankie’s plane phobia but who could also be contrary at a moment’s notice, demanded to know why Frankie should have to fly if he didn’t want to.

“Because it’s important,” said Uncle George.

“Why?” said Gordana.

“Because then he’ll have proof that none of those things happened.”

But they might, they might,
said the rodent voice that colonized Frankie’s head at these times. The rodent voice was thin and whining and the perpetual bearer of unpalatable facts. When the rodent voice was in the ascendant, nothing Frankie tried would shut it up.

But none of those things
did
happen, and Frankie had a glorious time in Henry Ward’s swimming pool, where there were no errant Band-Aids nor the slightest suspicion of snot. Henry Ward had taken Frankie to visit a bird sanctuary, too. He’d taken him to the Botanic Gardens to check out an albino duck. He’d lent Frankie his binoculars to watch the shags and skuas at low tide.

Still, Frankie hadn’t been in a hurry to get on a plane since then. Of course there was the big Queensland vacation after his thirteenth birthday, when, according to family tradition, Uncle George would take him to visit his favorite cousin, Colette, who ran a bed-and-breakfast in the Glass Mountains. Gordana and Louie still talked about their thirteenth-birthday trips, and Frankie often thought about those mysterious mountains glinting in the Australian sun. All the same, he was counting on Uncle George being too busy to take the vacation.

Meanwhile, he had other more immediate concerns.

Frankie sighed heavily and stared up at the ceiling. Robert Plant stared moodily back down at him.

Robert Plant was a golden god. Or so he’d once claimed. Frankie didn’t doubt it; Robert Plant looked exactly like his idea of a Classical god, golden or otherwise. He was tall and lithe, with perfect chiseled features and a great mass of blond, corkscrewed hair. He was impossibly handsome, and he sang pretty well, too.

Louie had introduced Frankie to the music of Led Zeppelin, Robert Plant’s band, and had given him the poster. Sometimes when Louie came over for dinner and laundry, he and Frankie and Uncle George watched old Zeppelin concerts on DVD. Uncle George liked Robert Plant, too, because Robert Plant had been a golden rock god back when Uncle George was Frankie’s age, which meant — Frankie couldn’t believe how long it had taken him to realize this — that Robert Plant was now a fat, grizzled old has-been. Louie advised him not to dwell on this. It had been a bad day, Louie said, when he’d seen
sixty-year-old
Robert Plant on TV.

All the same, in his secret mental notebook of improbable dreams, Frankie wished he could somehow be magically transformed into a Robert Plant look-alike. The Robert Plant of forty years ago, that is. It was probably genetically impossible. Ma was short and dark and so were all her relatives. At least, he
supposed
the Aunties were dark. It was hard to be sure, because they dyed their hair such odd shades. They were certainly short. And extremely wide. They were practically the same sideways as up.

Uncle George was dark, too — olive-skinned and almost black-haired. The silver in his hair was nature’s makeover, he said. He wasn’t particularly tall, nor was his body godlike in its proportions. It was large and comfortable, like a friendly Kodiak bear. He’d always “locked the rugby scrum,” Uncle George said, whereas Frankie was more your nippy halfback. Or a rowing cox.

Or a jockey,
Frankie thought gloomily. He was doing his best to fill out and grow up by way of two-egg, three-scoop smoothies, but so far, so hopeless. He seemed to have stalled on four feet and his black hair stayed determinedly straight and uninteresting.

Frankie slowly moved his feet out from under the Fat Controller. He heaved himself from the bed and investigated his face in the mirror. No change since this morning. Still the same delicate girlish features and soft skin. His eyelashes were an embarrassment, thicker and curlier than a china doll’s, and his eyebrows were much too shapely. When Gordana was in a friendly mood, she said he was cute. When she was feeling savage, she said she was almost certain he had a surplus of female hormones.

No one could ever have accused Robert Plant of excessive female hormones. He had a healthy five o’clock shadow and an incipient mono brow. Once in the night, when the thought of galloping girlishness became too much for him, Frankie had thrown himself on Ma’s bed and asked her to tell him straight up if he had a secret feminizing condition and if it could be fixed by drugs.

Naturally, she’d insisted he was perfectly normal; she always did. She said it was just a matter of time before he filled out. No mention of his face. Frankie remembered distinctly that Louie had been having thrilling adventures with Uncle George’s electric shaver by the time he was thirteen. And his legs had been thick and solid as a tree trunk. Frankie’s thirteenth birthday was only six months away and his skin was as smooth as a baby’s bottom. And his legs were not at all promising. He pulled up his jeans for a hopeful check. Just as he’d expected — slender and hairless as a ballerina’s.

Since he was doing a general inspection, he decided to risk an assessment of his chest rash. He’d been very determinedly not looking at it lately. But had it spread a little more? It was hard to tell. Frankie decided he would measure it. He rifled through his desk drawer for the wooden ruler he kept precisely for the purposes of private medical checks. It was a nice old ruler. Gordana had given it to him for his tenth birthday. She’d been much kinder to him back then. She’d seen the ruler in a junk shop and knew he’d like it because it was decorated with faded pictures of native birds.

That had been during an earlier bird phase, when he’d spent whole weekends wandering up the bush, spotting kereru and gray warblers and bellbirds. Frankie would have liked a pair of South American lovebirds like Solly Napier’s, but he’d given up the idea of having any as pets. It would be cruel and unusual punishment keeping a bird while the Fat Controller was around. The Fat Controller, though mightily proportioned, was — like the Aunties — very nimble on her paws. She was one of the cat world’s great hunters. No bird was safe around her. So Frankie satisfied himself with drawing undiscovered rare birds and giving them names.

The ruler was so old it measured in imperial. His chest rash was shaped like a slightly disfigured kidney bean and was approximately two inches by three, with a small jutting part on the top left. He wrote this down in the back of his sketchbook and resolved to measure again tomorrow night. It was always better to be armed with the facts when he reported an ailment to Ma or Uncle George.

This rash is metastasizing daily,
he could say.
We should go to the doctor immediately. Metastasize
was a good word, he thought, though it made his stomach dance with fear. It had been one of his dictionary-game words last year. He’d done as usual and let his
Concise Oxford
fall open randomly, then stabbed his finger at the page.
To spread in the body from the site of the original tumor.
The sight of the word
tumor
always produced a white noise in Frankie’s head. So, maybe a rash wasn’t a tumor. But it could be. Underneath. Frankie shoved the ruler back in the drawer and slammed it shut.

He sighed even more heavily and began tidying his desktop, which was in some disarray after Sydney’s visit. Frankie had brought another chair into his bedroom, and he and Sydney sat side by side when they worked on the book project: Sydney writing in her thick sloping script, Frankie sketching ideas to accompany the story. It was very companionable.

They’d developed the story together — more or less equally, Frankie thought, though Sydney seemed to have twice as many ideas as he did. She was very good at plot. She said it was because her life had been full of plot from the moment she was born. But Frankie had come up with the title,
The Valiant Ranger,
which he considered a good joke since that car wasn’t anywhere in the story. It was all birds. The valiant ranger was a Department of Conservation worker trying to save a rare bird. Saving the rare bird meant fighting international rare-bird smugglers and falling down the occasional ravine. The best part — as far as Frankie was concerned — was that he got to invent a species of rare bird. It was small, as small as a budgie, and delicate, and a crucial cog in the ecosystem.

Sydney liked to spread out as she worked. She wrote fast, covering sheet after sheet of paper. When she was displeased with something she’d written — which was often — she scored thick lines through the sentences and shoved the paper aside or screwed it into a tight ball. If she was satisfied, she slid it Frankie’s way. They’d developed a very smooth operation in just a month, which still surprised Frankie. It was quite different from the way he and Gigs worked. For a start,
they
almost never sat down.

Occasionally he felt a little disloyal to Gigs — especially when Gigs regaled him bitterly with stories of Bronwyn Baxter’s uncooperativeness — but mostly he just enjoyed the project. And Sydney. She was funny. She had good ideas. He liked her eye-bulging and her funny gruff voice and the sound of her bangles rattling. He liked that she was interested in his life — mostly. He liked
telling
her about his life — mostly. Sometimes, it was as if he was seeing and hearing it all for the first time himself.

Frankie shuffled the papers into a tidy stack and weighted them with his block of hacked-out kauri gum. He liked to keep his desk, his entire room (his whole life really) very neat. Sydney had immediately remarked on this.

“If my mother saw this, she’d bet you were a Virgo.”

“I
am
a Virgo,” said Frankie.

“That’s what’s so annoying about my mother,” said Sydney.

“What do Virgos do?” asked Frankie.

“They’re obsessively neat and tidy. Everything has to be in its place. They’re nuts.”

Frankie blushed, feeling as if he’d been caught naked. It was the truth.

Take his desk — it was ridiculously symmetrical. The South Park Club Cricket cup sat in the top left corner, holding all his sharpened pencils. Top right was the soapstone box with his collection of birds’ feathers. His one- and two- and five-cent coin towers were lined up along the top center.

Ma’s old music box with the one-armed ballerina was positioned just near his left hand so he could lift the lid and play it when he was drawing. Louie had fiddled with the mechanism so the box played “Lara’s Theme” backward. The new tune was very peculiar, yet familiar, and it always made Frankie smile.

His old bear, Kidder, grubby with age, the stuffing sprouting from his neck, sat on the right of the desk, leaning against the windowsill, and between Kidder’s stumpy legs stood Maxwell Smart and Agent 99, the Fimo figures Gigs had made him for Christmas. The trio was a static audience regarding him blankly as he did his homework.

In front of them was the framed photo of Ma and Uncle George on their wedding day, posing outside the stone church with Gran and Grandad Parsons and the three Aunties — Uncle George, dashing in a straw boater and Ma, doubled up, helpless with laughter at something Uncle George had said.

Finally, dead center, in pride of place, was Morrie, the plastic skull Louie had found at a garage sale. Frankie had decorated Morrie to soften his hideous aspect, draping his silver cricket bat chain across Morrie’s cranium. A kereru-bird feather sprouted from his empty brain, and dried rosebuds filled his eye sockets.

Sydney had picked up and inspected everything on Frankie’s desk.

“Are you sure he’s imitation?” she said, cradling Morrie in her hands. She rotated him gently, counted his teeth.

“He couldn’t be real, could he? It’d be illegal,” said Frankie. He didn’t know this for sure, but he felt it should be the case.

“Why is he called Morrie?”

“Louie. He gave him to me when he moved out.”

A skull was a very Louie kind of present, and Morrie was spooky, no doubt about it, especially on nights with a full moon. On those nights, Morrie’s creamy head seemed to glow in the moonlight. Frankie had to turn over in bed, away from his rosebud gaze. Sometimes he buried his ears in his pillow, afraid that Morrie might suddenly begin speaking, like some cartoon skull.

On the other hand, occasionally Frankie spoke to Morrie — and Robert Plant. Of course, he would rather be devoured by a colony of bull ants than ever confess this, but the truth was, sometimes — almost without noticing it — he blurted things out to both of them. He figured it wasn’t a problem unless either of them ever answered back.

“So, you two,” said Frankie now, picking up the sheaf of colored papers that had been persecuting him silently for days. He waved the papers under Morrie’s bony nose. “
What
am I supposed to do about camp? Eh?
Eh
?”

Camp.
Camp
.
Campcampcampcampcampcampcampcamp . . .
It wasn’t so much an odious word now as a chant, haunting his head morning and night. The chant had been gaining in force and volume since Mr. A had distributed the camp papers two weeks ago. On Friday the forms were due back at school.

The papers were color-coded in Mr. A’s usual way. Orange, yellow, green, blue — what Mr. A called “the bureaucratic rainbow.” The bureaucratic rainbow was, he said, a hangover from his probation days, when he had nearly drowned in color-coded forms. Gigs had raised his hand and said that this meant Mr. A had been burned-out
and
wet back in his probation days, and could those two things actually happen at the same time?