The 10 P.M. Question (4 page)

Gigs scowled, anyway. And scowled further when Mr. A assigned him to computer duty for the morning. A Gigs scowl was an arresting thing, Frankie thought. His normally cheerful, plump face creased up like a malevolent cushion; his freckles seemed to gather and darken.

Mr. A wasn’t finished, either. He confirmed what he’d been threatening since last year. Their upcoming projects would
definitely
involve new working partners. Gigs banged his
Concise Oxford
on the desk in disgust.

Frankie wasn’t wild about this development himself. He and Gigs always worked together. They did their best work that way. It was a fact. Frankie had done a French project with Fletcher last year and that had been all
right,
but not as good as working with Gigs. He and Gigs worked like a perfectly oiled machine, a machine powered by two different but complementary brains. They were pistols. Unrivaled. Everyone knew it. Not least, Mr. A.

“Mustn’t let you wallow in your comfort zones,” said Mr. A, over everyone’s protests. “You won’t be working with your mates when you’re out there in the urban jungle. It’ll be a lottery most of the time. Sometimes you’ll work with people you don’t even
like
. You have to be adaptable, you have to be ready for change and challenge, you have to be —”

The class let out a collective groan, knowing what was coming.

“Yes, yes,
yes,
you have to be . . .
counterintuitive
!”

Before he’d become a schoolteacher, Mr. A had been a probation officer and a prison psychologist. Until he’d burned out.

“Singe marks all over me,” he’d say, holding out a hairy forearm.

“Can’t you see?” He’d lift up his hair, show the weathered skin on the back of his neck.

Mr. A’s hair was dead white and shoulder length, cut like a Roundhead soldier’s. (That was how Uncle George had described it after he’d met Mr. A at the first parent-teacher meeting two years ago, then shown Frankie a picture of Oliver Cromwell and Frankie had seen his point.)

“Looks pretty battle-hardened, too,” said Uncle George, reporting to Ma. He meant Mr. A’s scar, which was the most startling thing about him. It was like stuck-on Plasticine, bleached and leathery, snaking diagonally down the left side of his face, from eye to earlobe.

There were many stories circulating at Notts School about the origin of Mr. A’s scar: he’d been in a motorcycle accident; he’d fallen through a window; his wife had thrown a broken plate at him; a deranged prisoner had gone for him with a knife. . . .

“Maybe he just had cheek cancer,” Gigs suggested once. (Frankie hadn’t even known there was such a thing, and he’d added it to his long list of terrifyingly possible diseases.)

“The simple truth,” said Mr. A. “When I was fifteen, I fell out of an apple tree and onto a nasty piece of corrugated iron, which meant thirty stitches. And a face like a recovering pirate.”

Somehow, Frankie and Gigs doubted it. They favored the deranged prisoner story, though Mr. A said deranged prisoners were generally a figment of the lurid collective imagination. He talked like this a lot.

“Offenders have nothing on the preadolescent,” he said to room 11 from time to time. “Take your average school — a cesspit of deviousness. You guys demand all my counterintuitive skills.”

Being counterintuitive was something Mr. A had brought with him from prisons and probation service. It meant going against your immediate and natural instincts, thinking cleverly before you acted.
Acting, not reacting
— that was Mr. A’s mantra. Being counterintuitive was practically his religion.

“You know, he’s not a Mormon or a Catholic or a Muslim, he’s a Counterintuitor,” Frankie said to Gigs.

“Or a Counterintuitivist,” said Gigs.

“Or a Counterintuitivationist.”

“Or a —” But here they ran out of steam.

According to Mr. A, his job was to enlarge their vocabularies and teach them how to get on with people — with the whole of the rest of the world, in fact. Even the people they didn’t like.
Especially
the people they didn’t like. If it killed him, he said, they were all going to leave his classroom knowing some words longer than two syllables
and
how to think their way through tricky relationships.

Of course, how to sing a lot of songs from start to finish was important too, he added. Also how to write a coherent sentence, how to research history, speak another language, and throw a ball well. These things undoubtedly made for the completely rounded person, said Mr. A, but vocabulary and counterintuitiveness were the first two commandments in his classroom.

Frankie thought a spot of counterintuitiveness might come in handy just now with Gigs. What he
felt
like doing was fashioning a paper dart with “What’s wrong with you, knob-shine?” written on it, and aiming it at Gigs’s chest. But it would probably aggravate his mood.

Instead, he sketched a comic strip of Seamus Kearney trying unsuccessfully to spell
knob-shine
and Bronwyn Baxter trying to strangle him. A magpie dive-bombed the two of them. Underneath, he wrote
B and S: a marriage made in hell.
He folded the strip into a dart and sent it gently across the table to Gigs.

Gigs opened the dart and gave a glimmer of a smile.

Sydney giggled. “Good drawing,” she said. “Do you take art as an elective?”

“Yeah,” said Frankie, pleased. “What’re you taking?” He watched Gigs drawing something to send back.

“Writing,” said Sydney. “I’m pretty good at writing.”

“Love yourself, why don’t you?” said Solly, from across the table.

“Just stating the facts,” said Sydney. “I’m hopeless at everything else — changed schools too often.”

“How come?” said Frankie. “Your dad get transferred?”

“He lives in Holland,” said Sydney. “Nah, my mother’s a nomad. She gets a rash if she stays in the same place too long. But, she’s promised to stay here at least a year. She’s promised on my grandmother’s grave. My sisters can start school and I can finish at least one project.”

“Enough, Pepys!” Mr. A called from the front of the classroom. “Concentrated work for fifteen minutes, please. Usual drill — definition and sentence. Then we’ll talk book projects.”

Gigs’s dart came wafting over to Frankie. It had FYEO in black marker on the wing. FYEO meant “for your eyes only.” He opened it slowly, turning it away from Sydney.

“Hey,” hissed Sydney, “you want to do this book project with me? He told me about it before class.” She gestured toward Mr. A. “Sounds good. I’ll write and you can do the artwork.”

She beamed at him. Her eyes nearly disappeared when she smiled, Frankie noticed.

“Um,” he said, scanning Gigs’s message. It was a cartoon in Gigs’s primitive but distinctive style — stick figures and exclamation marks with legs harassing everyone. Everyone in his cartoons had an identifying feature. For instance, the Frankie character always wore a cricket cap, the Mr. A character had a scar jutting horizontally from his face, and the Seamus Kearney character had a head shaped like a pumpkin.

There was a new character in this cartoon. A stick figure with preposterously pointy breasts and a head of writhing snake hair. A torrent of letters was tumbling from her large, open mouth, and helmeted exclamation marks were dragging her away to a police van. The Frankie stick figure was wiping sweat from his brow and muttering, “Lucky escape, lucky escape.”

“Um,” said Frankie, quickly crumpling the paper. Out of the corner of his eye he could see Gigs smiling.

“Um . . .” He was finding it hard to think straight.

“Spit it out,” whispered Sydney loudly. “You want to or not? Be good.”

What
was
good, Frankie thought, suddenly clear about something, was the way she said exactly what she wanted. It was unusual. It was refreshing. She wasn’t like any girl he’d ever met before. Or any boy, come to that. She didn’t seem to care what people would think. She spoke her mind, as they said in books.

“Um,” he said for the fourth time.

She bulged her eyes at him as she had on the bus.

“Okay,” he said, putting the balled paper in his pocket and not looking at Gigs. “Okay, but can it be about birds? I’m best at them.”

“No problem,” said Sydney, opening her dictionary and getting down to work.

Very busily not looking at Gigs, Frankie opened his
Concise Oxford
and stabbed the open page with his finger.

Perplexed:
per·plekst,
ppl,
involved in doubt and anxiety about a matter on account of its intricate character; bewildered, puzzled
.

It really was
uncanny,
Frankie thought, keeping his eyes resolutely on the tip of his pen as he copied the definition. It was downright odd how often the Word of the Day seemed to actually be about his life. He speculated about a sentence.

He was extremely perplexed by the unusual behavior of his best friend.

He tried another stab just to see what would happen.

Vexed:
vekst,
ppl, distressed, grieved, annoyed, irritated . . .

Frankie banged the dictionary shut. It was too weird.

He knew his friend was very vexed because his normally cheerful face was creased and cross-looking.

He opened the dictionary and tried a third time.

Portal
: por·tal,
n, an entrance to a place, or any means of access to something
.

That was better, Frankie thought. He glanced across the table. Gigs, with head down, was scribbling.

The portal to the Tower was as high as a house and decorated with ferocious gargoyles. Ravens circled overhead. . . .

Frankie sighed. But why was life always so complicated?

“So,” said Frankie, “how was
your day?” He lay down beside Ma, on top of her duvet.

Ma put down her book. She was reading
Crime and Punishment
by Fyodor Dostoyevsky, which Frankie happened to know was her second favorite Russian novel. Her absolute favorite was
Anna Karenina
by Leo Tolstoy. Ma had wanted to call Frankie Leo, but there was already an L in the family.

“Pretty good,” said Ma. “Eight cakes, three slices, and a new
biscuit
.
Albanesi. White wine, olive oil, flour, and castor sugar. Strange but nice.”

Frankie stared as usual at the painting hanging beside Ma’s bed. It was dark and a little menacing and not at all the kind of picture Frankie would want to look at as he went to sleep, but Ma was devoted to it. A ghostly woman with long yellow hair stood, waiting, beside a four-poster bed hung with transparent draperies. The brushwork was so fine you could make out each strand of the woman’s hair and the strain in her whitened knuckles.

“So,” said Frankie, still looking at the painting. “We got this bird flu handout at school.”

“That’s good,” said Ma. “Good they’re distributing information in schools.”

“And this house hasn’t got any of the stuff we need,” said Frankie. “Except what’s in the earthquake kit.”

“What do we need?” said Ma.

“Heaps,” said Frankie. “Practically everything. Flour, tea, tinned fruit. Surgical masks. Rice. Panadol, plastic gloves, more baked beans, medications —”

“We’ll talk to Uncle G,” said Ma.

Not for the first time Frankie wondered what the ghostly woman was waiting for. Or whom.

“Do you think it will happen soon?” said Frankie. “Bird flu?”

“Probably not,” said Ma. “Good to be prepared, though.”

The bedroom door in the painting was slightly ajar; a soft light showed in the adjoining room. Sometimes Frankie thought he could detect a shadow in the light. Maybe it was the woman’s husband, or her child. Or her maid. Or a highwayman. But probably highwaymen didn’t come into houses; probably they stuck to the highways.

“ ’
Night, then,” said Frankie. “You really think it won’t happen soon?” he said from the doorway.

“I really think it won’t happen soon,” said Ma. She glanced at the clock on the bedside table. “Ten-oh-two p.m. You’re so
punctual,
Frankie.”

“Ha, ha,” said Frankie.

He closed the door quietly.

Frankie and Gigs were climbing the Zig Zag, the eternal afternoon slog. It was hot. Crushingly hot, said Gigs. Punishingly hot, said Frankie. Mercilessly hot, said Gigs. Barbarously hot, said Frankie. Gigs matched him step for slow step around the fourth corner — thinking feverishly, Frankie could tell.

Even the ferns looked hot, Frankie thought. Kind of limp and exhausted. His feet were damp and gritty, his pack impossibly heavy.

“
Malignantly
hot,” said Gigs, punching the air.

“You win,” said Frankie, glad to give up. It was far too hot for adverbs.

“Shall we do Upham’s?” said Gigs. Upham’s was the local swimming pool — the Charles Upham Memorial Baths, to be exact. Frankie and Gigs went there as often as possible in the summer. They didn’t actually swim much; they just spear-dived off the deep end for white stones, and ducked each other a lot.