The 10 P.M. Question (5 page)

When they were much younger, Louie had taught them to cannonball, but the pool attendants had threatened Louie with a life-ban for bad role-modeling and they’d had to stop. Upham’s was the best way Frankie knew for cooling off, despite Louie’s recent assurance that riding a motorbike down Tram Road, naked except for soaking wet jeans, was better still.

But Upham’s would be unbearably crowded today, Frankie thought. And last Saturday when they’d been there, he’d had his annual unsavory collision with a Band-Aid. There was nothing more revolting in Frankie’s view than freestyling your way, innocent and blissful, into the path of a used Band-Aid. In Frankie’s private hierarchy of squeamish experiences, the casual caress of a stained Band-Aid was right up there with accidentally catching sight of writhing maggots in a forgotten rubbish bag. He’d had to get out of the pool immediately last Saturday and lie on his towel in the sun to recover.

And it was double bad luck having a Band-Aid collision, Frankie found. It always set him off obsessing about all the other unpalatable things that could be floating one’s way in the pool: scabs, boogers, pubic hair, earwax, horrible egg-whitish strings of snot . . .

Uncle George said it was just as well Frankie hadn’t been around in the old pea-soup days, before swimming pool filtration. Upham’s had been called The Lido then and it had been so full of crap, it was impossible to see the bottom. Not seeing the bottom wasn’t really a problem, though, Uncle George said breezily; he didn’t remember minding in the least. They’d all caroused quite happily, he said, no problem, until the day someone had felt that body on the bottom. . . .

Frankie shuddered. He hated that story. The body had been a child’s. That child’s body had given him bad thoughts for weeks. He’d had to creep down the hall night after night and stand by Ma’s side of the bed, mentally reciting cricket test statistics, just to calm down. Mostly now he managed not to think about the body, but Band-Aids could wreck things in a moment.

On the other hand, his school shirt was sticking to his back, and a sweat drip was winding down his hairline. That first dive into the deep end was a beautiful thing.

“Let’s do it,” he said to Gigs. “I’ll see if Ma needs anything first. It’s Aunties. And Louie’s birthday.”

“Bonga Swetso!” said Gigs, punching him on the arm.

Frankie punched him back with equal enthusiasm. Gigs had been saying “Bonga Swetso” with monotonous regularity since the Aunties’ last visit. Bonga Swetso, the Aunties had been very pleased to tell Gigs, was the four-year-old Frankie’s phrase for “goody.” He’d made up lots of words and phrases when he was that age, the Aunties said, but Bonga Swetso had been everyone’s favorite. The best by far. They couldn’t think how they’d failed to tell Gigs this before.

How indeed?
Frankie had thought, knowing instantly that Gigs would seize Bonga Swetso and run with it.

They stopped together at Ronald’s corner and crouched down, but the dachshund wasn’t there.

“Down at the river,” said Gigs. They peered through the fence slats at the trim lawn and carefully pruned shrubs in Ronald’s section. On extremely hot days, Ronald’s naturally bad personality tipped over into real malevolence and his owners took him to the river for a dip in a vain effort to improve his mood.

“Bonga Swetso!” said Gigs, standing up. “Swim. Then we’ll get an ice cream. Then I’ll do some practice and come up to your place. What’s Louie’s cake?”

“Black Forest cherry,” said Frankie. He’d put the cherries to soak in the Kirsch this morning, under Ma’s watchful eye.

“With chocolate curls?” said Gigs.

“Of course.”

“And we haven’t tested Louie,” said Gigs. “I’ll bring the sphyg. That’ll be everyone, then. We can start pasting everything onto the cardboard. Bonga Swetso!” He banged shut Mrs. Da Prini’s letter box and smacked his hands together in satisfaction.

Gigs was in one of his bossier moods, but Frankie rather enjoyed a bossy Gigs. It was certainly infinitely preferable to the sulking version. After school on Sydney’s first day, they had climbed the Zig Zag in almost complete silence. Gigs had trudged past Ronald and ignored Marmalade; Frankie had closed Mrs. Da Prini’s letter box with almost furtive care.

It was the Aunties and Bonga Swetso that had saved the day. Gigs had come up with the sphygmomanometer after dinner to do the stress test. It was as if he was swathed in an invisible black cloud. He’d eaten three brandy snaps without cracking a smile. And then Frankie had fixed the sphygmomanometer cuff to Alma’s hambone arm and everyone, including Gigs, had started laughing.

It was the next day, when Sydney had joined lunchtime cricket, that really sealed the deal, though. Frankie had been thinking about that with great pleasure every day for the last two weeks.

“Bonga Swetso!” he said with a laugh, as they turned the corner for the top.

Frankie opened the back door to the smell of warm honey and toasted walnuts.
Baklava
. He was expert at figuring the different cakes under construction, usually just from the smell (for which he awarded himself an A+) or sometimes from the bowls and ingredients on the bench (B+).

Ma was brushing the filo pastry sheets with melted butter, a steady painting motion. Frankie stood for a moment watching the white pastry become transparent. It looked like wet, brown paper, brittle and eminently breakable, but Ma could wield the ghostly sheets with no difficulty at all.

Frankie liked to watch Ma while she baked. She was like a practiced conjuror, her movements sure and splendid. Ma did everything in the kitchen with great calm. No matter how many cakes were in process, no matter how many different tasks needed to be completed in short order — creaming butter, toasting nuts, melting chocolate, greasing pans — she never rushed or panicked. And, as if in response to her unruffled presence, the ingredients seemed always to play their part; they almost never burned or curdled or spilled.

When Gordana baked, it was another story. Frankie believed the utensils and ingredients became instantly anxious when Gordana entered the kitchen. The beater stalled and coughed and sprayed the walls; bowls shattered inexplicably; eggs imploded; a burning odor prevailed. Gordana banged and crashed a great deal while she was baking. She slammed pans and cupboard doors. She stomped about in a cloud of flour and sugar and baking soda. She swore at biscuit mix when it stuck to her fingers. It was no wonder, Frankie thought, that her afghans and peanut cookies had a shrunken look about them. They were born frightened, and they never recovered.

He figured his own baking style was somewhere between Ma’s and Gordana’s. The kitchen wasn’t a train wreck or anything, but he did seem to walk an agitated tightrope, darting between bowls, checking and rechecking the recipe nervously, remembering things at the last minute. These days, he could do a decent carrot cake and Anzac biscuits, but only if all the planets were in alignment.

Frankie pinched a spoonful of chopped walnuts from one of the china bowls lined up in front of Ma.

She moved the bowl away from him. “School okay?” She kissed his cheek.

“Not bad,” said Frankie. “Started new book project. New partners. New girl and me. New cricket practice time.” He usually gave Ma the day in shorthand. It was simpler.

“Sydney, the new girl?”

“And her sisters are called Galway and Calcutta. Can you believe that? What’s for dinner?” There was a competing savory smell in the kitchen but he couldn’t pin it down.

“Chicken pie,” said Ma. She sprinkled walnuts on the filo. “Galway and Calcutta!”

“They were born there,” said Frankie. “Like Sydney was born in Sydney. Can we have mashed potatoes? Louie’s favorite. And he prefers canned peas.” Conveniently, this was also what Frankie preferred with his chicken pie.

He began assembling the ingredients for a massive banana smoothie and thought back yet again to Wednesday a fortnight ago. Just now, it was his favorite default memory.

“Your mate’s in a pet,” Sydney had said at lunchtime. She was following Frankie to the canteen, though he hadn’t asked her.

“A pet?” said Frankie.

“A big fat sulk,” said Sydney. She bought a bagel with cream cheese and jam and waited while Frankie got an apple juice. “He doesn’t like me,” she said. Since this was obviously true, Frankie said nothing. The puzzle was
why.
Sydney was certainly different, but that was a good thing, surely? Apart from Vienna, who Frankie had known forever because her father was a friend of Uncle George’s, and maybe Renee, the other newish girl who seemed passable, the rest of the girls in the class, if not the entire school, were exceptionally silly.

They were always feuding or having hysterics about project deadlines. Or they were trying to match each other up with different boys in Year Eight. Frankie had spent weeks last year worrying about what to do every time a girl rang him up. He hadn’t wanted to be rude, but he also strenuously had not wanted to go to the movies or The Mall with them. That was the other thing: all the girls in his class ever did was go to The Mall. He and Gigs had had many a conversation about the crucifying boringness of The Mall and the complete tedium of having to go there with any of the girls from their class. They’d rather score an own goal, they decided, than go to The Mall.

Frankie poured milk into the blender and broke two eggs into the liquid from a great height. He enjoyed the wet sucking sound that it produced. He peeled two bananas, sliced them carefully down the middle, and chopped them into thirds.

Sydney, he thought, was very much
not
a Mall girl. For a start, she wore very un-Mall-like clothes. Plus, her hair was dreaded and this had already caused a minor sensation in room 11. Most of the girls in room 11 stuck to a narrow range of hairstyles, strictly no dreads. Apparently there was a rule somewhere — probably in Bronwyn Baxter’s head — which decreed a girl couldn’t get dreads till she was in high school.

Sydney seemed oblivious to rules of the Bronwyn Baxter sort. She marched to a different drum, as Uncle George liked to say about people. She was an independent operator (another Uncle George-ism). Independent operations, Sydney-style, apparently meant making friends with a boy in the class rather than all the other girls. This really was very interesting, Frankie thought. He’d never seen it before. When a new girl arrived, she was usually swallowed up by the phalanx of room 11 girls, just as a new boy was somehow magnetically pulled toward the cricket game at lunchtime, or the clusters of other boys wandering around the grounds, chucking balls or wrestling one another to the ground.

Not Sydney. She’d ignored most of the girls and they’d ignored her right back. At lunchtime on her second day she’d followed Frankie over to the cricket pitch. He really didn’t know how to tell her that no
girl
ever played cricket at lunchtime; it was strictly boy territory. But, no problem. Gigs did that for him, anyway.

“I can bowl, you know,” said Sydney.

“Yeah,” said Gigs derisively. He was tossing the ball high, over and over, and catching it with increasingly wristy flourish. Frankie felt small prickles of tension starting on his arms.

“I was strike bowler for my school team in Australia,” said Sydney.

“You lived in Australia?” said Frankie, blushing at the question as soon as he’d uttered it, since she’d just said so. But diversionary tactics seemed necessary.

“Girls can’t bowl,” said Gigs. “They’ve got stupid elbows.” Frankie and Gigs had privately concluded this some time ago, but Frankie wished now it wasn’t so.

“My sister can bowl,” said David Robinson. “And she’s fast.” Frankie and Gigs had also privately admitted that David Robinson’s sister, Julie, was the exception to the otherwise iron-clad girls-can’t-bowl law. But Gigs rightly said this was because Julie Robinson was practically a man; she was big and fierce and had a six-pack where other girls had breasts.

“I’m fast, too,” said Sydney, at which moment she darted sideways and upward and expertly intercepted Gigs’s ball on its downward trajectory. She ran to the other end of the pitch and proceeded to send down a ball of excellent line and length. Seventy ks, Frankie reckoned, giving it a practiced assessment.

“Boy!” he said, stealing a look at Gigs.

Frankie particularly enjoyed reliving that ball of Sydney’s. He dug deep now into the vanilla ice cream and added two scoops to the blender. He considered the height of the mixture for a moment, then added a third scoop.

“Hey!” said Ma.

“It’s a three-scoop kind of day,” said Frankie. He stabbed the blender button and watched the banana, milk, eggs, and ice cream bump and bounce and transform themselves into his smoothie.

Gigs certainly had his blind spots, Frankie thought — his little brothers and sister being three of them. But the good thing about him was his basically fair-minded nature. He always gave skill its due. And cricket skill was particularly high on Gigs’s priority list for a perfect human being.

After Sydney had bowled that ball and David Robinson had fielded it and the guys had gathered around, all grinning, Sydney had stood, hands on hips, bulging her eyes at Gigs, and Gigs had stared back and Frankie had held his breath for what seemed an entire historic era.

“Not bad,” said Gigs, finally. “Can you bat, too?”

Frankie had felt like bursting into song.

Right now, he decided to drink straight from the blender. No point in making extra dishes. He took two straws from the cupboard and headed for the stairs.

“We’re going to Upham’s. I can get anything you need,” he called to Ma.

“More honey. And lemons. I need to do the mint and honey cake later tonight.” Ma often baked late. It was an occupational hazard, she said. If there were early-morning orders, late-night baking was unavoidable. She put the cakes in the oven and went to bed with the timer. She said it was like getting up to feed a new baby.

“And cream for Louie’s cake!” she called.

“Make a list!” Frankie shouted. After-school shopping always fell to him. Gordana was never around to do errands. She was either at work or the gym. Apparently, earning money or getting fit relieved you of all household tasks. Frankie wondered if he should get a paper route. Or take up boxing.