The 10 P.M. Question (17 page)

Frankie looked at the twins. They’d both had their heads shaved. They looked like big nubbly turnips. Thuggish turnips.

“You’ll be all alone today, Frankie,” said Seamus, in mock sorrow.

“What would you know?” said Frankie. Cassino was eyes front. He refused even to exchange glances with the Kearney twins.

“Nothing we’re telling you,” said Eugene.

“She came to the buth thtop,” said another voice. It was Evie Hewitt, a little Year Four girl with a lisp. “She wath there and then her mother came in the car and she had to go away again. I think they were having a fight —”

“Oooo yes,” said Eugene Kearney. “
Big
shit flying.”

Frankie wondered what would happen if he hit one of the Kearney twins. Probably he’d have to go into hiding.

“I think she wath crying,” said Evie Hewitt.

“Her old lady’s one wack-job,” said Seamus.

Cassino turned and raised an eyebrow at Frankie, and Frankie shrugged. He guessed there was no point in waiting.

“She’th nithe, Thydney,” said Evie Hewitt to Frankie as the bus started up again. “She leth me lithen to her Shuffle and she told me about her thithtith.”

“Yeah,” said Frankie, mentally translating.

Sisters.

“Her mother’th got a Porsche like my uncle.”

“Thanks,” said Frankie, heading to the back of the bus. A Porsche, for God’s sake. How could Sydney’s mother have a Porsche?

And what on earth was going on?

The Kearney twins yelled, “ABSENT!” with excessive glee when Mr. A called Sydney’s name at roll time. Frankie wondered if it was possible to have a heart attack from utter fury. Or worry. His heart seemed to have been beating too fast all morning. Plus, he felt unnaturally sweaty. He’d read once in the
Family Health Dictionary
that sudden heavy sweating could signal a heart attack.

He’d handed in his work experience project and crawled through Dictionary. Today’s words seemed blessedly without heavy significance. Normally
panspermia:
pan·sper·mi·a,
n, a theory of biogenetics that states that the universe is full of spores that germinate when they find a favorable environment
would have struck him as a gloriously funny word, perfect for a rude cartoon dart about the Kearney twins. But this morning’s cartoon darts had all been speculations about Sydney and what might be happening. Anything Was Possible, Frankie knew. Anything Is Possible, was Sydney’s favorite description of life with her mother. Frankie always heard the phrase in capital letters.

He hadn’t met Sydney’s mother yet, though he knew all about her. Her name was Freya. She didn’t have a surname. Not anymore. She had changed her name by deed poll. Sydney’s mother’s name had been Joanne Corcoran, but she had long ago declared it incompatible with her free spirit. Freya was perfect, she said, because Freya was the Norse goddess of beauty and fertility. Sydney had bulged her eyes lengthily on the word
fertility
and Frankie had rolled his own sympathetically.

“My mother believes in babies,” said Sydney with a sigh. “I’m sure she’s planning to have more.”

“But how?” said Frankie, and earned another eye-bulge.

As well as not believing in work or school, Freya did not believe in being tied to a man.

“She believes in their money, though,” said Sydney, but she hadn’t elaborated.

Today, his first time at Sydney’s house, Frankie had been going to meet Freya. Sydney had said, with her usual honesty, that she generally avoided inviting people to her house.

“Since sometimes it isn’t even a house,” she said. “Plus, parents never approve of my mother. Plus, she’s just way too tricky.” Frankie had already figured
that
one. He had a well-developed disapproval of Sydney’s mother, despite never having laid eyes on her. His disapproval had accumulated steadily with each of Sydney’s stories until now he imagined Freya as a lurid combination of the White Witch and Britney Spears, kind of cool and sexy, delinquent, unpredictable and malevolent all at the same time. Of course, he didn’t let on about any of this to Sydney, and he had been curious to meet Freya. In a nervous sort of way.

Loquacious:
lo·qua·cious,
n, tending to talk a great deal.

A perfect word for Sydney, thought Frankie. She was effortlessly loquacious, anywhere and everywhere and all the time. In class she managed to talk just under Mr. A’s ever-active radar, a stream of stories and forceful opinions. He was missing Sydney’s constant commentary. He was missing
her
. She hadn’t been absent once in the two months since she’d started at Notts. It was amazing, Frankie thought, how rapidly she’d become a fixture in his life. And she was a girl. He couldn’t imagine at all now what it would be like if she wasn’t there.

A paper dart crashed into Frankie’s exercise book. He unfolded it and considered Gigs’s mad punctuation figures. The Gigs and Frankie question marks sat in an airport lounge, their cricket caps hanging at despondent angles. Question mark signalmen stood on the runway waving flags at a bulbous plane. Hanging out of the plane was the Sydney question mark, her crazy mane blowing about her face. Gigs had framed the entire picture with small green question marks.

A rush of panic swept down Frankie’s arms and a tingling broke out in his wrists. It was a familiar feeling. It happened sometimes in the night if he was woken by a loud noise. It had happened once in the city when he and Gigs, mistiming a harebrained sprint across the road, had nearly been bowled by a bus. It happened whenever he got a fright.

Gigs’s scenario was entirely possible. Frankie had been suppressing the idea all morning, but he knew that Sydney’s mother could pull the plug at any time. She could
up sticks,
as the Aunties called it, take Sydney and her sisters somewhere new. She’d only done it about a kajillion times before. She’d come home, Sydney said, and announce that they were packing up, shifting out, moving on, and
now
.

“Make hay while the sun shines, ha, ha,” Sydney said. “The only reliable things in my life are my father and my
oma,
and Oma’s house in Amsterdam. And that’s only for two months a year.”

Frankie was astonished at Sydney’s apparent acceptance of this situation. He couldn’t begin to consider a life like that.
Everything
about his life was reliable. Constant. Predictable. Even — ha! — the rodent voice and its sadistic habits. He knew the patterns and predilections of everyone and everything in his day, his week, his year. The Fat Controller’s morning meow. The Zig Zag routine. Gigs’s jokes. Gordana’s grumpiness. Cassino and the code word. Mr. A’s classroom habits. Uncle George and Louie’s silly exchanges. The Aunties’ visits. The smell of the kitchen on his arrival home. Every shape and shadow in his bedroom at night. The utterly dependable presence of Ma in her bed at ten p.m.

“But she’s promised you’ll be here for a year,” he had protested. “On your grandmother’s grave!”

“Yeah,” said Sydney. “But she never keeps her promises. And guess what? That grandmother isn’t even dead. My mother just hasn’t spoken to her for twenty years. I only just found that out.”

Frankie looked over at Gigs now and gave a slow shrug. Then he opened the dictionary and stabbed the page for his last word of the morning.

Shigellosis:
shig·el·lo·sis,
n, a highly infectious form of dysentery caused by the shigella bacterium
.

Just what the doctor ordered, thought Frankie with bleak humor. Yet another vile addition to his unending mental Disease-Alert Compendium.

At lunchtime Frankie asked Mr. A if he could speak to him. If he wasn’t on playground duty at lunchtime, Mr. A usually went to the Lido for a swim. He said it kept him sane. Gigs and Frankie reckoned it revved him right up and gave him an extra injection of verbal ferocity. The swim also turned Mr. A’s scar briefly purple and his hair into ringlets. If he was particularly animated in the afternoon, droplets of pool water flew from the ends of the ringlets and landed on the kids at the Webster table, which was in the front of the classroom.

Mr. A did not have playground duty today, nor was he going for a swim. He was going to address a problem with his Campagnolo Centaur racing bike. Mr. A biked twelve miles to school every day, and twelve miles home, no matter the weather. He lived on the edge of the city, though he called it the rural-urban interface.
Interface
meant
the surface place or point where two things touch each other or meet
. Room 11 had looked it up. Most things Mr. A said required some dictionary exploration, which was just the way he liked it.

“Walk with me, Frankie,” said Mr. A. “You eat your nice ordinary lunch and I’ll eat my organic pork mince and biodynamic bean sprout seven-grain sandwich with homemade self-sown plum chutney.” Mr. A had told room 11 he was aiming to make twenty adjectives eventually in a lunch sandwich.

“Do you secretly wish you were having Subway?” said Frankie. “Or Maccas?”

“Secretly,” said Mr. A. “And if you ever tell Mrs. A that, I’ll deny we spoke.”

Mrs. A’s real name was Mitzi. She was a champion triathlete from Colorado, USA, and had dedicated her life to fighting processed food. Unknown to Mitzi, Mr. A had a bag of Party Mix sweets in his desk drawer.

“How can I help?” said Mr. A when they’d both finished eating. They were at the bike stands behind the staff room. Frankie leaned against a stand; he made a circle in the gravel with the toe of his sneaker.

“It’s about Sydney,” said Frankie. “I’m supposed to be doing our book project with her today. At her house.”

“She’s sick?”

“No,” said Frankie. “She was at the bus stop and then she had to go home with her mother.”

“And?” said Mr. A. He was detaching the front wheel of his bike from its frame.

“And she was crying. Evie Hewitt said there was a fight and she was crying.”

“I think,” Mr. A said, “that this is what we in education service delivery euphemistically describe as ‘a family matter.’”

“It’s her birthday, too,” said Frankie. He really didn’t know what he expected Mr. A to do. Reassure him? Ring up Sydney’s house? Make it all go away? “We’ve got a present for her.”

“Can’t you give it to her tomorrow?”

“She might not be
here
tomorrow,” Frankie burst out. “I don’t think you know about her! Her mother’s a wack-job! She could take them off somewhere. Anywhere. Saudi Arabia! Cambodia! Guadalajara! She wants more babies!” He stopped and felt his heart pumping, race speed.

Mr. A placed his bike wheel gently on the gravel and looked up at Frankie. He was squatting, the gravel grinding under his weight.

“Wack-job,” he said speculatively. “I like it. Is it in the dictionary?”

“It’s in the online slang dictionary,” said Frankie. The conversation was veering in the way it could with Mr. A.

“Listen, Frankie.” Mr. A stood up, and Frankie heard his knees creak. “There’s not a lot I can do —”

“You could ring up,” said Frankie. “You could make up some reason, something about the book project, or about camp, anything, you could just check that they haven’t”— He stopped, seeing the look on Mr. A’s face, hearing his own voice, all high and wobbly —“You know,” he finished lamely, dropping his voice. “You know. You could check they haven’t . . . gone.”

Mr. A was silent for a while. Frankie pushed more gravel with his shoe. He pushed it into a circle of little hillocks, an empty sphere in the middle.

“Real shame you’re not coming to camp,” said Mr. A from nowhere.

Frankie looked blankly at him, a low-grade fright snaking down his arms. He had written “family matters” on the camp sheet but maybe he should have been more specific. Ma? Uncle George? Grandparents’ ashes? The Aunties?

“It’s this big eightieth,” he said with desperate inspiration. “My great-aunt. She’s turning eighty. She —”

“No problem, no problem,” said Mr. A, waving a hand. He gave Frankie a long look.

“How’s your book project going? Is it working out with Sydney?”

“Fantastic,” said Frankie, a little too heartily. “She’s fantastic, I mean her writing’s fantastic, she’s really, you know, smart, and funny, and she has great ideas —” He stopped abruptly, hearing what he was saying. And as he heard the words, he was seized with the terrible urge to cry. An ache pulsed in his throat.

Frankie was horrified. What was
wrong
with him? Perhaps he was actually going insane. Could such a thing just happen? Suddenly? In the middle of a school playground at lunchtime? He clenched his jaw and did the tooth jarring. He squeezed his fingernails into his palms. He stared ahead at a spot past Mr. A’s right arm.

“Well,
good
!” Mr. A was saying. “Good to branch out, isn’t it? Opens out the synapses, gets ideas flowing differently.”

Frankie nodded vigorously. The throat ache ebbed a fraction. He looked at the ground and smoothed out the hillocks of gravel with his shoe. He covered the gap tidily and gave it a drawn-out tamping.

“I’m going to have to take this to the cussed bike shop,” said Mr. A, picking up the bicycle wheel again. “Notice how I avoided swearing there by ingeniously using a word that actually means bad language.”

Mr. A was giving him time to recover, Frankie knew. He breathed slowly, measuring the in and out.

“You guys started lunchtime soccer?” said Mr. A. “Herr Angelo marshaling all the troops?”

Frankie gave Mr. A a half smile. “He was born to be a captain.”

“Damn right!” said Mr. A. “I really don’t see
damn
as a swear word,” he added.

Frankie turned to walk back to the soccer field. “Anyway —” he started.

“I’ll give Sydney’s house a call,” said Mr. A. He patted Frankie on the shoulder. “Take it easy, Frankie.”

“Hot damn,” Frankie muttered.

Frankie and Gigs got off Cassino’s bus at the midtown terminal. Gigs was meeting Dr. Pete at the Music Arcade; they were checking out trombones to buy — Gigs was graduating from rental to ownership.

Frankie was going to Sydney’s. He was going anyway. Not for long, because he had to buy the meat for Ma and get back home, but he was going. He’d decided suddenly in the middle of the afternoon that this was what he would do. Why not? It was obvious. There was no law against it. Sitting on the benches in the hall, in the middle of the afternoon, in the middle of the Science Fair results, he’d decided this. It was at the exact moment of the Year Eight first-prize announcement, when a wave of pure happiness broke over him, and Gigs punched him extremely hard on the arm to demonstrate his own violent joy.