Some of the Kinder Planets

by Tim Wynne-Jones

  So it wasn’t that Fletcher had no immunities. He had amazing immunities! His immunities had taken on something pretty terrible and licked it on the battlefield of his abdominal cavity.

  As he was convalescing from the operation, Fletcher enjoyed thinking about his amazing immunities. It was nice to have a talent. In between worrying about going to a new school with kids he hadn’t seen much of in three years and who looked three years older than him, he liked thinking about those Soldiers of His Own Inner Power.

  FLETCHER DIDN’T hate school, but it was a little difficult to cope with after lying around dying for three years. But he was alive and that was so much better than the alternative. So he smiled a lot at school. He smiled at his desk, at his homework assignment, at his classmates. He even smiled at the soup in the cafeteria—even when it was green.

  Some people thought he was cuckoo. Some peo­ple thought he really was nine and that he was a genius.

  One person wanted to smash his face in with a brick.

  That’s what Ted Sawchuk said. “You wanna get your face smashed in with a brick?” He said it, Shlomo explained later, because Fletcher had smiled at Vivian Weir, who Ted considered to be his girl.

  “You’ve got to watch that, Fletch,” Shlomo said. Fletcher couldn’t quite figure out what it was he was supposed to watch. He’d missed some of this stuff while he was dying.

  The incident with Ted had been two weeks ago. Today as they walked to school with Fletcher feel­ing all those prickly places under his shirt, Shlomo tried to explain to him again about how much peo­ple like Ted hated people with winning smiles.

  That wasn’t Fletcher’s only problem this morning. He realized that maybe die exotic place names all over his body might better have been a weekend thing to do. They itched, but if he scratched, it would be an unfair advantage to a place that didn’t itch. He looked uncomfortable. The teacher noticed and asked him if he was all right. The teacher looked frightened and annoyed at the same time, like someone who didn’t want a kid dying in his classroom.

  Fletcher lost Anchorage and Reykjavik at recess, which made up for losing the hot places in bed. Shlomo hurriedly picked up any bits of paper near his friend in case anybody noticed.

  “I feel a bit like a leper,” said Fletcher.

  “Like a leopard?” Shlomo asked.

  “No,” said Fletcher. “A leper. When bits of your skin fall off. Your nose, an ear.”

  Shlomo shivered. “Here!” he said and shoved the bit of paper with Reykjavik written on it into Fletcher’s pocket.

  Just then Ted passed by and glared at Fletcher. Fletcher smiled back.

  Ted snarled but kept moving,

  “I told you not to do that,” said Shlomo.

  “I can’t help it,” said Fletcher.

  VIVIAN WEIR was in music class with Fletcher. Ted wasn’t. Fletcher tried not to smile at her. This only made things worse, because he looked like he was holding in a big joke. Vivian had never seemed to mind him smiling in her direction, but now she wasn’t sure if he was laughing at her.

  She hid her face behind her saxophone.

  IT WASN’T until the next day after school that Ted caught up with Fletcher in the hall. He jostled him heavily into the wall. The lockers groaned. As Fletcher got up, a piece of paper slipped out of his shirt and helicoptered to the floor like a maple key. Fletcher reached for it, but Ted put his fat, black boot on the slip of paper.

  “Some of your brains fell out,” he said as he bent to pick up the paper from under his shoe. It was stuck to a piece of chewing gum and he couldn’t read it. The chewing gum made him mad, as if Fletcher was responsible for where he walked.

  “He wouldn’t have been able to read it anyway,” said Shlomo later.

  “HOW GOES the battle?” said Fletcher’s father. He was standing at Fletcher’s bedroom door. Fletcher was stripped to the waist examining himself in the mirror over his dresser. Shlomo was lying on the bed reading Calvin and Hobbes.

  “Only five places left,” said Shlomo proudly, as if Fletcher was a show horse and he was its trainer.

  “So I see,” said Fletcher’s father. But Fletcher could see in the mirror that his father’s eyes were staring at the scar left from the exploratory surgery. Fletcher rubbed it gently with his finger, careful not to touch the exotic place that was closest to it.

  “Does it still itch?” his father asked, kneeling on the floor to look more closely.

  “Only sometimes,” said Fletcher.

  Shlomo crawled over to take a closer look himself. “Tashkent,” he said. “Where’s that?”

  “In the republic of Uzbek,” said Fletcher. “In the foothills of the Tien Shan Mountains.”

  “Get out!” said Shlomo, grinning. “Why couldn’t you just memorize batting averages?”

  “And if Tashkent wins,” said Fletcher’s father, “you’ll actually go there?”

  Fletcher smiled at the three faces in the mirror. “Don’t worry,” he said. “I’ll write.”

  ONLY THE city of Sofia fell that night, so Fletcher entered the school yard Thursday morning with four contenders left. Four corners of the world. Four places that were as yet only names and a few odd facts to him but would one day be strong smells and handsome faces and clanging noises that he had never heard before.

  Someone pushed by him when the bell rang and dislodged Kowloon. And in setting up the screen for a movie about teeth, he jabbed himself and lost Rangoon.

  Shlomo could hardly contain himself over lunch. “Let me see. Are they still there?”

  And Fletcher would stare down the inside of his sweater at the two finalists and say, “Yes, they’re still there.”

  Shlomo was acting like a drake honking, around the nest where two eggs were about to hatch. Fletcher was pretty excited himself. Too excited to remember not to smile at Vivian Weir when she passed by his table with her lunch tray. She smiled back. She had a pretty winning smile herself.

  Then he and Shlomo went out to the. school yard, and Ted was on them like a ton of bricks.

  “Some guys never learn,” he said, pushing Fletcher and heaving him backwards into the dirt so hard that Fletcher’s hand smashed against a rock and got badly scraped. He ended up in that hard place where the playground ends and the fence begins.

  “He’s hurt,” said one of the people who gathered around. A girl dropped Fletcher a Kleenex.

  Shlomo didn’t stop to think about it. He just started punching Ted, forgetting all about how big Ted was. “The guy almost died,” he said. “Why don’t you pick on someone who didn’t almost die.”

  Ted pushed Shlomo off. “Because,” he said, “if people almost die they should be more careful who they smile at when they start living again.”

  Fletcher dabbed at his hand. The Kleenex was soaked. He looked at Vivian through the crowd. He tried to tell her in that complicated language of facial muscles going every which way at the same time that he liked to smile, that he liked to smile at her, but that it didn’t mean anything. And if it did, what of it, because it was only a way of being nervous and happy to be alive all jumbled up into a thing the face did without having to say anything.

  Fletcher tried to tell Vivian with his face that he was going to travel to faraway places where smiling winningly might be the only form of communication left, and that he was practising on people with whom more advanced forms of communication like talking or joking around were out of the question, being that he looked like a nine-year-old among a forest of twelve-year-olds.

  He tried to say something like that. Vivian nodded. She looked pretty confused, but she seemed to understand.

  Meanwhile, the crowd around Ted and Fletcher was talking. They weren’t generally pleased with Ted. “Leave the guy alone,” somebody said. “He’s just a little cuckoo.”

  “Cuckoo? Fletcher’s a genius!” said someone else.
r />   And then Shlomo, who had recovered from being pushed and was just about to attack Ted again, turned to see how his friend was doing and saw a tiny strip of paper on the ground.

  “All right!” he said, diving for it. On his knees he cleaned it off, smoothed it out. The crowd crowded nearer. People said things like “What is it?” “Did some more of his brain fall out?” and things like that.

  Shlomo read, “Dar-something... Dar es-something...”

  “Dar es Salaam,” said Fletcher. “Founded by the sultan of Zanzibar in 1866.”

  Then, with everyone looking really confused and kind of left out and Shlomo whooping with laughter, Fletcher pulled up his sweater to reveal the last place in the world left sticking to him: the first place in the world he would journey to when he was older. It was right next to his scar.

  Of course. He was always so careful about that part of his body. There was a battlefield under there.

  “What is this garbage?” said Ted. Reaching down, he ripped the last piece of paper off Fletch­er’s body. “Tashkent,” he read. “Who’s that, Clark’s brother?”

  Some people laughed. The crowd kind of eased up.

  “It’s in Uzbek,” said Shlomo. “In the shadow of the Tien Shan Mountains.”

  “Well, in the foothills, anyway,” said Fletcher, laughing. The crowd laughed some more, too. Fletcher noticed Vivian laughing prettily. Ted was the only angry person around.

  “So what’s it doing sticking to you?” he said. “You get too close?” Some of Ted’s friends har-har-harred which seemed to loosen a few of the angry knots in his face.

  “Not yet,” said Fletcher. “Here. Give me a hand.” He said it directly to Ted, but Ted was holding Tashkent, so other hands helped Fletcher up from the ground. Somebody dusted him off.

  Ted looked around. One of his friends shrugged. Ted shook his head, shrugged himself, and shoved the paper with Tashkent written on it at Fletcher. When Fletcher took it, Ted noticed his bleeding hand.

  “You gonna die on us again?” he asked.

  “Nope,” said Fletcher. “I’m just going to travel far, far away.”

  Strangers on the Shore

  ACKER BILK. Whoever named a baby Acker Bilk?

  Harry was going through his father’s old records. He looked at the picture on the cover of the man playing the clarinet. He tried to imagine the man without a beard, as a kid named Acker.

  “Hey, Acker. Hows it goin’?”

  “Okay, Harry. You?”

  Then Harry wondered if maybe Acker Bilk came from a place where lots of kids were called Acker. Maybe there had been two or three of them in his class, like all the Justins in Harry’s class. There weren’t any other Harrys. Harry was Harry’s dad’s name and his father’s before that. Maybe Acker’s father had been an Acker, too.

  Harry imagined phoning the Bilk residence.

  “Hi. Is Acker there?

  “Well, that depends. You want Acker Junior or Acker Senior? Old man Acker’s dead, of course, so it couldn’t be him you’re after.”

  Harry slipped the record — his father called them LPs—out of its sleeve. It was old but in mint condition. When his father had first said that one of his records was in mint condition, Harry had thought maybe it would smell like toothpaste. But it just meant that Dad was careful with records. He cleaned them with a special cloth; cleaned the nee­dle with a special fluid applied with a special little brush. It was like something holy.

  On his knees Harry placed the holy LP on the holy turntable. There was only a little bit of a hiss—what Dad called surface noise.

  “Strangers on the Shore.” There were no words, just old Acker pumping on the clarinet and 400,000 violins sawing away in the background. It was really mushy. Harry lay on the rug with his hands cra­dling his head and Listened to the syrupy sweet music under the holy surface noise.

  There was a girl about Harry’s age who lived in the apartment next door to his father’s. They had met once at the mailroom in the lobby. Her name was Flower.

  Harry thought about knocking on her door. He thought about inviting Flower over to listen to Acker Bilk. He could imagine her laughing at that. She was the only Flower in her class. She had a brother named Night. He was the only Night in his class. And Harry was the only Harry.

  They could form a club, he thought, and invite Acker to be the honorary president. Harry imagined Flower listening to “Strangers on the Shore,” sitting on the rug leaning against the couch. “Not too much surface noise,” he might say to her. She might be impressed. They would need something to talk about. Harry wasn’t good at talking to people.

  EARLIER THAT day, one hundred and twenty-three kil­ometres away from Harry’s dad’s apartment in the city, Cluny Smith waited for the school bus in the miniature covered bus shelter her father had made for her at the end of the driveway.

  Cluny lived in the woods, and their driveway was as long as most people’s streets. Her father had made the shelter out of rounded slabs of cedar logs. It was only big enough for a seat and Cluny. Some­times she thought about decorating it with wall­paper and posters. She thought about putting up shelves with a book or two, a picture of her dog, a vase. She imagined having her own little TV there, a mini-fridge. She thought the same thought every school morning while she sat waiting for the bus but never remembered about it when she got home in the afternoon.

  But this morning Cluny’s mind was on other things. Her mind was on the first issue of her very own magazine. It was called Cluny: The Magazine for People with Weird Names. The lead article started like this:

  Hi! I know you’re out there. And now, here’s a magazine just for you!

  There followed a-recipe for Scheherezade Casserole which she had got from the Moosewood Cook Book; a little bit of a story about Scheherezade and the One Thousand and One Tales of the Arabian Nights; and then a contest: how many words can you make out of the name Scheherezade? Her dad had suggested that a contest was a good idea for the first issue of a magazine because it invited peo­ple to write in, get involved. Her dad ought to know. He produced his own magazine right out of the house. It was an ecology magazine called Turnip. Actually, he called Turnip a zeen, a short form for magazine. A zeen didn’t have advertising in it and it didn’t appear on newsstands, but every month her dad wrote and printed up about one thousand copies and mailed them out himself all over the place.

  People heard about Turnip by word of mouth. They sent in donations if they felt like it. Mostly they sent in articles which Dad put in the next issue. Cluny’s dad didn’t make any money produc­ing Turnip but, as Cluny’s mother put it, “In the Smith household, John raises the consciences and I raise the cash.” Her mom worked at an ordinary job that she liked. Mom also liked the fact that when John was finished raising consciences for the day, he cleaned house and raised a little supper.

  John had let Cluny print her own zeen on the laser printer. It looked pretty professional. She had printed ten copies. She had them with her in a shopping bag. She was going to give two each to her friends: Percy, Bryony and Darwin. The idea was that they would hand out a magazine each to someone else with a weird name.

  Cluny took a copy out of the shopping bag and looked it over for the umpteenth time. After the

  Scheherezade stuff there was a poem, “archy and mehitabel,” written by Don Marquis. The poem was supposed to have been written by archy, a very literary cockroach, in Marquis’ office at the news­paper where he worked, archy was obliged to write without capital letters because he couldn’t operate the shift key on the typewriter, mehitabel was archy’s friend, a cat. It was because of mehitabel that Cluny had included the poem in her first issue, mehitabel was a very weird name.

  Because the first issue of the magazine was com­ing out on November 19th, there was also a birth­day greeting to Saint Mechtilde of Hackeborn. Mechtilde had been born in 1241, and November 19th w
as her saint day, if it wasn’t exactly her birth­day. Nobody really knew her birthday. Cluny had found out about her in a dictionary of saints. She’d written a little story about Saint Mechtilde and what great things she had done. And after it, Cluny had added in italics: “So you see, even if you have a weird name like Mechtilde, you can still accomplish big things!”

  Cluny stood up as she heard the bus coming. She was nervous. She really hoped Cluny would go over well.

  The bus stopped and she climbed on board.

  “How’d it come out?” asked the bus driver.

  “Okay,” said Cluny. “Here’s your copies, Percy.” She handed the bus driver the very first two copies of the very first issue of her very own zeen.

  “Hey, Clueless!” yelled someone from the back of the bus. “Got one for me?”

  Percy rolled his eyes and started looking at the magazine. “Very nice,” he said.

  “Don’t start reading it now,” said Cluny. Old Percy’s driving was bad enough without a new distraction!

  EVERY SECOND Friday, Harry took a train from his mother’s city to his father’s. He got to miss school all of Friday and Monday morning, too. There had been a lot of wrangling about this arrangement, because Harry was only twelve, for God’s sake. But he was a reliable kind of kid and a good student, and there were all sorts of safety precautions to make sure he didn’t get lost and end up in Bolivia, for God’s sake, and it had all worked out. He had a thousand phone numbers on him and emergency money, just in case, but he had never had to use either.

  Harry liked to think about having an emergency. He liked the idea of having to use the emergency money. The train trip lasted just over an hour. Mostly it took him through rocky land and muskeg and cedar forests with little pastures cut out of them for a few sheep or cows. You couldn’t see many towns from the train. It would be hard to spend emergency money out there.