The 10 P.M. Question (8 page)

It was two weeks since Sydney had first come over to Frankie’s house, and now they were walking casually down the hill to the village, as if it were a regular occurrence. It practically
was
a regular occurrence. Three times in the last week they’d taken a walk down the hill for one reason or another — to the library for Ma, to the dairy for chocolate raisins, to Upham’s to cool off.

They were taking it slowly today and playing Knob-Shine as they went, tossing the cricket ball back and forth, trying to catch each other out. Frankie was already a KNO but Sydney hadn’t dropped the ball once. She was a pistol with that ball.

Knob-Shine was a Gigs invention (it was a variation on PIG and DONKEY, which they’d learned in Year Two; now they were older, Gigs said, there was more incentive to win if you were going to end up a knob-shine). Gigs had introduced Knob-Shine to Sydney the second time she’d come over to Frankie’s, and Frankie had noted this moment for the milestone it was. Gigs’s acceptance of Sydney was complete now. Frankie thought he could probably let Sydney in on Chilun. She’d pick it up in a flash, for sure.

Gigs had band practice but would meet up with them soon. It was the final day at Upham’s before it closed for the winter. Usually the pool was open much later and Frankie and Gigs did their spear-diving amid autumn leaves falling steadily from the elms and sycamores around the pool complex. But this year, Upham’s was closing early, for refurbishment. The Council was building new changing sheds and sinking a pool for the over sixty-fives.

(The Aunties were very pleased about this development; they didn’t like the aqua-aerobics group at their local pool. Frankie had never seen the Aunties in their bathing suits and flotation belts, but he could only imagine it was an alarming sight since he
had
seen the actual bathing suits. He planned to keep on never catching that sight for the rest of his life, which would mean giving Upham’s a wide berth at least one day a week next summer.)

The early closing of Upham’s made it seem as if summer had been brought to an abrupt and premature close. Frankie experienced a twinge of pre-winter melancholy. But it was only a twinge, because the weather was still so balmy. True, the maples were on the turn, from green to red, which, according to Uncle George, marked the end of the golden weather and the beginning of winter Sturm und Drang. (Uncle George hated winter. It made him cabin-feverish and itchy and more unpredictable than usual. Frankie had looked up
Sturm und Drang
in the dictionary, which said it is
a state of violent emotional upheaval.
As usual, Uncle George was exaggerating.)

The days were shorter, too, and the mornings cooler, and the last cricket game of the season was only two weeks away. Normally Frankie would have felt great regret about it all, even as he felt a competing surge of optimism, knowing soccer was about to begin. But this year everything seemed subtly different.

It was Sydney, he was sure. It was somehow difficult to feel melancholy around Sydney — even with a vast list of worries, including the intractable problem of camp, and strangely, Frankie didn’t feel his usual excitement about soccer. He didn’t
think
he was having his Honey Johnson moment, but there was something about Sydney, nevertheless. He wasn’t sure how to describe it. She was lit up, humming, maybe — not literally humming, of course, just seeming to have a hum about her. It was as if she were wired, electrically charged. Frankie felt extra alert when he was with her, as if he were passing through some rogue force field. She certainly
alarmed
him occasionally; he never quite knew what she would say or do next.

“Question,” said Sydney. And here, in fact, was a perfect example. “Question” was a typical Sydney opening salvo, a shot over the bow, as Uncle G would say —
and
promising choppy waters ahead.

Sydney was an insatiable questioner; a steady stream issued from her mouth the entire time Frankie was with her. She had a bottomless bag of queries about everything, and everyone —Frankie, Gigs, Ma, Uncle George, the cat, the dog, the people next door . . . She was
indecently
curious. She seemed quite unrestrained in the way other people were, by delicacy or a sense of personal privacy, or the idea that it was perhaps none of her business. Apparently most things were her business.

You never knew what was coming. Frankie found it strangely exhilarating and sometimes terrifying. Any day now, any
moment
now, he just knew, Sydney was going to ask a couple of questions he really wouldn’t want to answer, but he couldn’t for the life of him think how to avoid this looming occasion.

“What?” said Frankie. He threw the ball at her, very fast, a feeble attempt at distraction. She caught it skillfully and returned it just as fast.

“K-N-O-
B,
” said Sydney. “How come Gigs doesn’t like his brothers and sister?”

An easy one.

“They’re noisy. They’re messy. They get in his way. They take his things. And they take all Chris’s attention. It was much better before they came. He says.”

“But he likes his stepmother?” said Sydney.

“Of course,” said Frankie. He threw the ball trickily from behind his back.

“Not of course,” said Sydney, fluffing the catch.

“A
ha
!
K
!
” Frankie permitted himself a small hop of triumph. He retrieved the ball from the gutter.

“I didn’t like my stepfather,” said Sydney. “I
despised
him. He was a big fat weasel. It was Christmas in Paris when we left him. But I like my sisters. Why do you call your father Uncle George?”

See. That was her style. She lobbed tougher questions hard on the heels of a dolly. It was exactly like her bowling.

“He’s always been called that,” said Frankie. “When he was born, he was already an uncle, so they called him Uncle George. The rest of his family is much older. Half of his nieces and nephews are older than him. One of them is
retired
.”

“I thought he mustn’t be your father,” said Sydney.

That was perfectly understandable, Frankie conceded privately, since, once upon a time, he had thought precisely the same thing.

It was after he’d been at school awhile, a time when his family began to appear unsettlingly different from other kids’ families. The food they ate, for instance. Normal people, Solly Napier instructed him, had quite different things in their lunch boxes; normal people ate dinner earlier; normal people didn’t have carpet in their dining rooms; normal people
always
drank milk with their dinner.

It had taken Frankie some time to figure out that by “normal people” Solly merely meant the Napiers, but for a while, he asked Ma for packets of chips and muesli bars and earlier dinners; for a while he ostentatiously poured himself large glasses of milk to have with dinner. He didn’t even like plain milk.

But it did seem that most people, not just the Napiers, called their fathers Dad or Pop or Pa or Papa or — in the case of the Aunties, who often talked about the long-dead head of their family — Pater. Lily Bunz called her father Vati, but that was German for Daddy. True, Uncle George mostly called his deceased father the HOD, which meant Head of Department, but even he occasionally referred to him as “my old dad.”

Ma had assured Frankie that Uncle George was indeed his dad, and Uncle George had proved it by demonstrating that the hammerhead second toe on Frankie’s left foot was identical to the hammerhead second toe on
Uncle George’s
left foot. It was a small but very fetching genetic malformation, Uncle George said. It was a family heirloom, and possibly the only kind Frankie would inherit (not counting the HOD’s frying pan from the Western Desert, which Uncle George was thinking of leaving to Frankie since Louie would probably sell it to the highest bidder on Trade Me).

“He’s definitely my father.” Frankie threw a high leisurely ball and Sydney caught it with exaggerated grace. “And Louie’s, and Gordana’s. No doubt about it. We’ve all tried to call him Dad, but it doesn’t work.
Everyone
calls him Uncle George, even Ma.”

They came to a stop at the bottom of the hill road, outside the Boys’ and Girls’ Gymnasium, where Gigs was meeting them. Frankie had gone to the B&GG for trampoline classes when he was younger. Louie had walked him down the hill every Friday, talking, talking, all the way. Louie had done tramp in his time, too; he’d reached intermediate level and had even won a trophy at the trampoline regionals. Then he’d fallen out of a first-story window at school and broken his leg in three places, and that was the end of his tramp career. (Though it seemed to mark the beginning of his semi-delinquent career.)

Frankie had been good at tramp, too, when he wasn’t worrying that his neck would accidentally snap during backdrops and half twists. He’d heard once about a man who’d become paraplegic after a freak trampoline accident and it preyed constantly on his mind, though Ma assured him over and over that safety measures were very carefully observed at the B&GG.

The best part about tramp had been Gino, the young instructor with curly black hair like a King Charles spaniel’s. Gino was poetry in motion, Louie said, and Frankie believed it. Gino could cody and rudy and barani and execute a Miller Plus that made your stomach plunge to your knees as you watched. But Gino had gone to Italy to join a circus and Frankie had given up tramp soon after. It just hadn’t been the same.

Frankie stared up at the high windows of the B&GG. Probably there were kids in there now, practicing their tucks and pikes. He could almost hear the springs of the trampolines, straining and singing. He could almost smell the cold of the concrete walls.

“So,” said Sydney. “You have to tell me more about the Aunties. When can we go there?” She rubbed the cricket ball vigorously on the side of her skirt.

It was a nifty skirt, Frankie thought, wide and circular and bright orange, and decorated with ragged black triangles. Sydney made her own clothes. She had told him this on her first day at school, and now he noticed whatever she was wearing. He had never noticed girls’ clothes in his life before now — apart from a dress Gordana had worn last year to the St. Agatha’s Ball.

Uncle George had said it was a virtual dress because it was hardly there. The dress was pink and silky and apparently designed to reveal as much of Gordana’s skin as possible. Frankie was used to seeing wide expanses of Gordana’s flesh because all her clothes were skimpy, but he’d never seen as much of her breasts before. They were so abundant and startling that Frankie and Gigs had been forced to repair to the hallway and goggle wordlessly at each other for minutes at a time.

Sydney’s clothes weren’t revealing, but they were conspicuous, nevertheless — loudly colored, painted with crazed brush strokes, or adorned with geometric patches. She seemed to have a thing for triangles, Frankie noticed. Also, for T-shirts with lettering. Today she was wearing a white shirt printed with a joke Frankie had been puzzling over for some hours: . . .
why, wye, wai, Delilah
. . .

“Why do you want to know more about the Aunties? Why would you want to go there?” Frankie said, backing away to receive the ball.

“Because I don’t have any aunties,” said Sydney.

“They’re
great
-aunts, anyway,” said Frankie.

“I know,” said Sydney. “But they’re so funny. And so
fat
. It must be so satisfying
looking
at them.”

Well,
no,
thought Frankie,
satisfying
was not the word that sprang to mind. But Sydney was right, the Aunties were certainly fat — they were enormous; they were
obese
— but he was used to it. It was somehow typical of Sydney to think that their size was interesting. He knew she wasn’t being rude.

Sydney had met the Aunties on her third visit. She and Frankie and Gigs had been walking up the hill from the pool, practicing Knob-Shine. There was a loud horn blast behind them and the Aunties pulled over in Alma’s black Morris Oxford.

It was a Thursday, so Frankie knew the Aunties were returning from a movie and shopping. Their weekly timetable was set in concrete. Frankie knew it as well as his own routines because he’d stayed with the Aunties for long periods when he was younger. He knew their peculiar habits like the back of his hand. He knew that the trunk of the Morris Oxford would be stuffed with groceries and wine bottles. There would be sweet treats and library books and a new gadget for Nellie from the Hardware SuperStore.

Frankie knew exactly the contents of the grocery cartons and the types of sweets (chocolate ginger, Liquorice Allsorts, Curiously Strong Peppermints). He knew that the library books would divide pretty much into three categories — romance novels for Nellie, biographies for Teen, thrillers for Alma — and that there would be a pile of magazines, including
Majesty
because all the Aunties followed the doings of the British Royal Family.

On Thursday they usually dropped off groceries at Frankie’s house, but they didn’t stop for tea or cake because Thursday was the night they had their old friend Maurice Pugh for curry and cards. Maurice Pugh was a curry addict and a recovering gambler. He could still eat as much curry as he liked, but he could only play cards as long as he didn’t bet on the result. Maurice had told Frankie once that this had robbed card playing — and life — of much of its excitement, but the upside was that now he had enough money to buy food. Maurice Pugh had, apparently, once lived for an entire year on donated fruitcakes.

The Aunties had been to a film at the black-and-white festival. They leaned out the windows of the Morris Oxford, telling Frankie and Gigs and Sydney all about it. An oldie but a goodie, they said. A classic. Nellie had gotten hiccups from crying. (Nellie nearly always cried, especially when the music swelled. Film music was better back then, they all said — something Frankie had heard them assert about a million times.)

Of course, once the Morris Oxford roared away, Sydney poured forth a torrent of questions. What were their
names
again? How come they all lived together? Hadn’t they ever had husbands? What was their house like? Did they dye their hair? Where did they get their clothes? How come they were so
fat
?