The 10 P.M. Question (19 page)

“Let me guess. Gigs is going to be a star cricketer?”

“Course. Solly wants to be an art forger.”

Ma laughed.

Frankie could hear Uncle George bashing around in the kitchen. He would be assembling a late-night snack
—
cake and chocolate sauce, or cold rice pudding and cream, or his favorite: dates stuffed with chocolate and rolled in sugar. He brought his snacks to bed and talked to Ma while he ate. Frankie liked to hear their murmuring through the wall, the clink of the spoon on the bowl.

“I wanted to be a professor when I was your age,” said Ma.

“Of what?”

“Anything. I just liked the word. And my father was a professor. The Aunties always called him Prof.”

“Professor Osborne,” said Frankie.

Professor Parsons, world famous ornithologist. Dr. Parsons, zoologist. Constable Parsons. Reverend Parsons. Nurse Parsons. Frank Parsons, chairman of the board. F. D. Parsons, opening batsman. F. D. Parsons, cartoonist. Parsons, strange hermit guy.

“Then I found out you had to talk to large groups of people.”

“So you did Russian.”

“Yes.”

Uncle George was singing “Abide With Me.” He often sang hymns at the end of the day. No one minded, not even Gordana. Maybe she found it comforting, too, Frankie thought. Kitchen sounds and an ancient hymn, signaling that everyone was home at last, everything was safe.

“But now you’re a baker,” said Frankie. “You didn’t even need to go to college.”

“But I still like languages. Different things interest you at different times. Circumstances change. You have to adapt.”

Yeah, thought Frankie. To never leaving the house.

“Tears for all wo-
oes,
a
heart
for every
plea
. . .”
sang Uncle George. Actually, “Abide With Me” was a real downer. It made you want to fall to the floor and never get up again. Frankie preferred the one with the line
“me thought the voice of angels from heaven in answer sang.”
He couldn’t remember the name of the hymn, but it was positively jolly, as Alma would say
—
though clearly the writer had no idea about grammar.

“Why do you like Russian stuff so much?” he asked.

Ma screwed the cap back on the bottle of lotion. She did it very deliberately, thinking as she stared fixedly at the label. Frankie checked out the woman in the painting. He’d begun imagining names for her. Victoria? Mabel? Sophia? Annie? Gwyneth? Angelina? Keira? Linda? Peggy-Sue?

“I honestly don’t know,” said Ma eventually. “I like the puzzle of it, I think. Or, maybe just because I’m good at it. Why do you like birds so much?”

“Maybe because I’m good at them,” said Frankie. The woman could have a Russian name; she’d fit right in. Natasha? Tatiana? Svetlana? Anastasia? How did he even know these names?

“Do you think I’m normal?” he said in a rush.

“What’s normal?” Ma sighed.

“Am I?”

“Of course you are, Frankie.”

“How do you know?”

“Because, I know what I see. I’ve known you all your life.”

“But I could go strange when I’m older.”

“Why would you?” said Ma.

He waited a beat. “People do,” he said. He couldn’t look at her.

There was silence, except for Uncle George locking the front door, closing the bathroom window, making the rounds of the rooms, and turning off all the lights.
“And, though re
bell
ious and per
verse
mean
while
. Thou has not
left
me,
oft
as I left thee . . .”
He was flicking the switches in time to the hymn. Through the open door Frankie could see the patches of light disappear one by one to the woeful beat.

He felt a moment of despair. Why had he said that? Now Ma could be crying, or trying not to cry. Again. He seemed doomed just lately to be unkind to her on a regular basis. Perhaps he was a budding sadist. The very worst personal future seemed eminently probable.

“Who did that painting?” he said, seizing on something, anything, wanting to fix things before Uncle George came to bed.

“Someone I was at the university with,” said Ma, apparently calm. She was looking at the painting, too, no tears. “She gave it to me when I turned thirty. She’s famous now. It’s worth quite a bit.”

“Don’t tell Louie,” said Frankie.

“Check,” said Ma.

“If that woman had a name, what do you think it would be?”

“I know what it is,” said Ma. “It’s on the back. It’s
—”

“Don’t tell me!” said Frankie. “I don’t want to know. I want to keep on guessing.”

Ma laughed.

“Like Rumpelstiltskin,” she said after a while.

Huh, thought Frankie, sliding off the bed. You said it. He just might stamp his foot ferociously, too, shatter the floorboards; he just might explode into a thousand goblin pieces, give them all the fright of their lives.

“Hello, old man,” said Uncle George, nudging open the door with his forehead. He held a wad of papers in one hand, his pudding bowl in the other, a book in his armpit. “All good?”

Frankie just stared at him.

“’Night,” he said.

Frankie knocked on Gordana’s bedroom door. There was no answer, but he knew she was in there. He could hear the muffled clicks of her keyboard, the mouse brushing over the desk. When she was at home, Gordana spent a lot of time in her bedroom with her computer. She had saved enough money from her job at the Cupcake Café to pay half the cost of a MacBook. Ma and Uncle George had paid the other half as a birthday and Christmas present combined — though Gordana said it was actually an essential educational expense and should
not
be counted as a treat. She took the computer to and from school to prove her point, but Frankie knew that at home she spent most of her time communicating with her forty-seven friends or playing games. Gordana could use the computer, her mobile, the landline, and sketch clothes designs, all at the same time.

He knocked again. The clicking stopped momentarily, then started up again.

He knocked a third time.

“What?”
said Gordana.

“It’s me,” said Frankie.

“What do you want?”

Charming,
thought Frankie. Though, really, he expected nothing less. When she was six years old, Gordana had pinned the first in a long series of signs to her door. It was handwritten and colored and said,
G
RILLS ONLEE
. B
OYEES KIP ART
. Frankie had been too young to remember this, but Ma kept the note in her treasure box these days and Louie still liked to refer to grills and boyees to annoy Gordana. The first sign Frankie could remember was the one that said,
N
O ENTRY IF YOUR NAME BEGINS WITH
L
OR
F
. He had learned the alphabet by then and could still recall his shock on realizing that this No Entry included him. Him? Frankie?
Why
? Later the sign had been amended to
N
O ENTRY IF YOUR NAME BEGINS WITH
L
OR
F,
AND YOU HAVE TESTICLES
,
because of course Ma’s name began with F, too. There were no such signs these days since Ben had free entry to Gordana’s room, but the family was about as welcome as a dose of flu.

Lately, Gordana had taken to pinning up her art class sketches. The current door attachment was a black-and-white drawing of a naked woman with only one breast. Her eyes were lifted to the heavens, her long hair fell about her like a garment. Saint Agatha, Frankie supposed. It was a pretty good drawing.

“I just wanted to ask you something,” said Frankie.

“What? Ask me.” The keyboard clicks alternated with a ringing trill.
Tring!

“Can I come in?”

Click,
tring!
Click,
tring!

“Please?”

And now he heard an exasperated
huh
and Gordana pushing back on her wheeled office chair, sliding along the floorboards to the door. Gordana propelled her chair like some hostile snowboarder.

The door opened gustily.
“What?”
said Gordana.

Frankie gave her his most beguiling little-brother smile and proffered the box of Spaceman Candies he’d bought especially to sweeten his entry. He had a marshmallow Easter egg in his pocket, too.

“Oh, good
God,
” said Gordana. She took the box and nodded him into the room. Gordana had a fatal weakness for Spaceman Candies. Her bedroom was the largest in the house, a fact Louie had never ceased to complain about when he lived at home. There was enough room for a double bed and several bookcases and a sofa. There was a balcony, too, overlooking the back garden.

Frankie liked Gordana’s room very much. Occasionally, when she wasn’t at home, he opened the door to the room just to survey the girly splendor, take in its distinct fragrance.

Every room in the house smelled different, Frankie had found, and he was fond of each aroma. Uncle George’s office, for instance, was pretty much stationery smells — manila boxes, cardboard, postage packaging, fresh paper — and the hot electrical smells of the computer and printer. Louie’s room, now technically the guest room, still housed the paraphernalia of his childhood — trampoline and soccer trophies; papier-mâché masks; film posters; misshapen pottery experiments from school; the old cage he’d built for his mice, Beezus and Henry; and his vast collection of Kinder Surprise toys. It was two years since Louie had occupied the room, but it was somehow redolent of him still, a mix of old sneakers and toast, damp towels, mouse pee, a lingering note of Tommy aftershave.

Ma and Uncle George’s bedroom was mostly Ma — hand lotion and laundered sheets and the heavy perfume of the oriental lilies that Uncle G bought Ma sometimes for the windowsill. But the closet was all Uncle George. Ma’s clothes hung there too, of course, but their fragrances were somehow delicate and domestic and completely overwhelmed by the hearty, outdoor,
manly
smells that Uncle George’s jackets and shirts carried with them.

Gordana’s room smelled like a beauty parlor — a mix of hair product chemicals and the faintly acrid odor of singed hair (the curling iron was in constant use), of mango body lotion and cosmetics, and the sharp acetate smell of nail polish.

Gordana was nearly as tidy as Frankie. She made her bed and kept her bookshelves orderly, but she was a hoarder. Every corner of her room was filled with old toys, old projects, all the flotsam and jetsam from the past. The history of her dressmaking and craft development could be traced around the room. A sampler hung over her chest of drawers, stitched with an original Gordana poem from Year Three:
My cat is fat. Beat that.
There were pottery models from Year Four of Snow White and the Wicked Queen on the chest with various representatives from Gordana’s book-character modeling phase. A series of graffitied dress patterns from Year Seven were wall hangings now. Gordana’s old rag doll, Infinity (Gordana had liked the word), sat slumped in a chair with several soft toys in her lap. In the corner by the window was a model of
Apollo 9
made entirely from Spaceman Candy packets.
Apollo 9
was nearly three feet tall and had been Gordana’s entry for the Old Girls’ Association art prize in Year Eleven; it had placed third. No one else in the family could eat a Spaceman Candy stick for months after this, but Gordana had been unbowed.

The walls of the bedroom were a riot of snapshots — Gordana and her friends at school, Gordana and her friends at parties, Gordana and her friends as
babies,
for heaven’s sake — and artwork demonstrating Gordana’s particular brand of surreal portraiture. Frankie’s favorites were the series of drawings Gordana had done one summer of Uncle George: Uncle G as a Saint Bernard; Uncle G as a portly dolphin, Uncle G as a baby-size Winston Churchill with a homburg and a cigar. The Winston Churchill portrait was really quite repellent but somehow arresting, too. Frankie always found his eyes wandering toward it.

“I’m busy,” said Gordana. She ate three Spaceman candies at once, in her usual way, then, almost as an afterthought, tossed one at Frankie.

“Homework?” he said.

“Yes,” said Gordana. “Who said, ‘Fashion is architecture’?”

“Don’t know,” said Frankie.

“Coco Chanel, of course.”

“I don’t even know who Coco Chanel is,” said Frankie.

“Was,” said Gordana. “Who’s the main designer at Chanel? Karl Lagerfeld!” Click,
tring!

“What subject is this?” asked Frankie.

“Careers,” said Gordana. “Who invented the LBD?”

Frankie just looked at her.

“Coco Chanel!” Click,
tring.
“What is the LBD?”

“A drug?” said Frankie.

“Little Black Dress, idiot.”