Some of the Kinder Planets

by Tim Wynne-Jones

  “Ooh, that’s pretty creepy,” said Quin.

  “Getting a gorgeous daughter is creepy?”

  “No. It just says he got her hand!”

  The simpleton was smart enough to appreciate marrying the beautiful princess, but he still wished he knew what the creeps were. The princess’s chambermaid knew just what to do. That night while he was sleeping, she went to the brook that ran through the castle garden and fetched a bucket full of minnows. Making her way up to the newlyweds’ bed chamber, she .pulled back the sheets and poured the icy water and minnows over the simpleton. The little fish flapped all over him, causing him to wake up and exclaim, “Oh, I’ve got the creeps! I’ve got the creeps! Now I know, dear wife, just what the creeps are.”

  The end.

  Nanny Vi thumped the book shut and glared at her granddaughter like a sorceress. “Scared, my pretty?” she asked. There was some of her gravelly dream voice in the wicked-witch imitation.

  Quin glared back. “Don’t get any ideas,” she said.

  Nanny Vi re-opened the book just a crack and, reaching into it, came out with an imaginary minnow wriggling in her fingers, flap, flap, flap. She dangled it in front of Quin’s face and then tried to plop it down Quin’s shirt. They laughed their heads off.

  THAT NIGHT Quin lay in bed in the close darkness of the closet dollhouse, her head cradled in her arms. She tried to think of scary things. She tried to imagine her parents dying. She couldn’t But the trying made her sad. The director didn’t want sad.

  Then she recalled one night when there was a storm and her parents weren’t home. There was a power failure and Quin went to get a flashlight from the kitchen. She and Mark had been watching TV and Mark waited in the TV room. Suddenly she heard him yelling. “There’s people outside!” he shouted. His voice was panicky. “They’re sur­rounding the house!” Quin hurried back to him. And sure enough, there were lights in the woods, flashing here and then there, on and off. Fireflies.

  “They’re fireflies,” she said. After that Mark just sat in the dark and let it sink in: fireflies. He was two years older than Quin but he was nervous, imaginative. He also liked to watch scary movies. Quin had no interest in them.

  Now, lying in her windowless room seventeen floors above the busy night streets of Toronto, Quin tried to feel Mark’s fear of that moment. Hunters in the woods. No creeps came to her.

  “Maybe I just don’t have any imagination,” she thought. She rolled over to face the wall.

  She thought of Thea, sickly and living in a troubled, war-torn land. She thought of Thea’s last scene, in an abandoned mansion with her Aunt Constance.

  Constance is waiting for the phone to ring, not knowing if the rebels have cut the telephone lines. Thea is standing by a shattered window when suddenly the light breaks through the overcast and pours into the grey room. In the bright wedge of sunlight, she seems to see every particle of dust.

  THEA: Is it true that there are creatures who liveon dust?

  CONSTANCE: Dustmites. Yes. Why?

  THEA: Is there one dustmite per dust particle?

  CONSTANCE: What? I don’t know. Yes. Howcould there be room for more than one. Liedown; Thea. Stop fretting so.

  THEA: It makes me think of the Little Prince. On his planet, you know. He has a flower.

  (There is gunfire. Constance ducks. Thea doesn’tmove. Constance crawls to her.)

  CONSTANCE: Get down, girl! They’ll see you in the light! (She drags Thea down to the floor. Cradles her. Watches the phone.) Oh, why don’t they phone! It’s riot so far.

  THEA: Oh, it’s very far ... I forget ... the flower. What is it, Aunt Constance?

  (Constance has discovered blood on her dress. Thea’s blood; she has been shot.)

  CONSTANCE: Blood?

  THEA: No ... a rose ... that’s it...

  CONSTANCE: Thea!

  THEA: And the baobobs ... the bad seeds ... they get so big ... Constance, their roots will shatter the little planet ... Constance? As soon as they are big enough to distinguish from the roses, the Little Prince has to ... dig ... them ... up...

  (Thea dies. There is more gunfire. Constance carries her out of the room.)

  THE PLAY GOES on and on, and Quin, off stage, enjoyed watching the adults wrecking things and sorting things out and wrecking things all over again. When she first read the scene, Quin thought that dying in a play would be great. But Keith wanted her to “see” something fearful in her last moment. He wanted her to have an Image, he said — an Image she could look at in her mind’s eye that terrified her from deep inside.

  Quin rolled over in her bed to face the door. It was open; the night-light in the hall made the broadloom glow. Keith had brought in a magazine with an article about dustmites. The pictures, enlarged eight hundred times, made the mite look like a monster — an overweight crab. Quin had scrinched up her face. “Its legs look like asparagus,” she had said.

  “And to. think they’re everywhere.” Keith had looked hopeful. “Frightening, eh?”

  Quin had only nodded, disgustedly. “Yes,” she had said. “I hate asparagus.”

  Now she tried to imagine monstrous dustmites with asparagus legs traipsing across the glowing landscape of the apartment broadloom. She closed her eyes and she could see a dustmite there, but it didn’t look terrifying. Hardly. She could even imagine it as a pet: “Here, Fluffball. Roll over. Play dead.”

  Suddenly she heard Nanny Vi start to groan. She cocked her head to listen. Nanny Vi’s troll voice rumbled down the hall.

  “Nasty bushwhacking piece of work,” she growled. “Lord, if my hair was on fire, I’d show you a thing or two!”

  Weird.

  But not scary.

  The next day was Friday, the end of the second week of rehearsals. There was only one more week before Some of the Kinder Planets opened. Already Quin knew of four radio, newspaper and television interviews she would be doing next week, apart from the heavy rehearsal schedule. At the end of the first week of rehearsals, she had been sad at the prospect of the weekend. But today she looked for­ward to some time off.

  Nanny Vi had a rummage sale that day. Her women’s group was raising money for the Somalian refugees. “Now that’s pretty scary stuff,” she said, pointing to a picture in one of the Relief Fund’s brochures. “Machine-gun-carrying soldiers killing innocent women and children and stealing food from them.” As the taxi stalled in an early morning traffic jam, Quin read the brochure.

  Was this scary? It seemed so far away. It made her heart hurt inside; it made her angry. Was this what Keith wanted?

  Quin was just about’ to hand the brochure back when she read the part about sending donations. She shuddered with excitement.

  “This is fabulous!” she said.

  “It is?” said Nanny Vi.

  “I’ve never sent any money to a charity in my life,” said Quin. “Now I could. I could send a hun­dred dollars, even.”

  Nanny Vi looked thoughtful. “Yes,” she said. “You could.”

  Quin settled back in her seat with a smile on her face, as the cab shot through a gap in the traffic and sped her towards the heart of downtown. It was only as Nanny Vi walked her into the Royal Alex towards the rehearsal studio that Quin felt a sink­ing feeling down in her stomach.

  In all this wonderfulness, where was she to find scared?

  “Well?”

  Nanny Vi was there again. The rummage sale had been a massive success. She and Quin were sitting in a booth at a bar near the theatre having a TGIF—Thank God It’s Friday—hot fudge sun­dae. It was Quin’s turn to talk about her day.

  “We stayed away from my death scene,” said Quin, pressing the peanuts down into the ice cream.

  “Is that good?” asked Nanny Vi.

  Quin shrugged. “Keith said we’d give it a rest.”

  A klatch of noisy offic
e people pushed through the double doors of the bar, laughing and clapping each other on the back. They sounded to Quin like the happy-go-lucky crew on the radio station Nanny Vi listened to in the morning.

  “The famous actress talked to me,” said Quin. “Behind Keith’s back.”

  “Oh?” Nanny Vi’s spoon paused halfway to her mouth. Chocolate in a thin stream dripped back into the sundae bowl.

  “She said it was every child’s right to live with­out fear: to live fearlessly. That’s how she put it.”

  “Bravo!” said Nanny Vi.

  “She did Some of the Kinder Planets when it ran in London. For two years. Can you imagine? And she said she’d been watching me and I was perfect for Thea.”

  Quin took a deep breath, an ice-cream-cold breath. “She said that instead of Fear, I should play the scene with Wonder. She said Keith will think it is Fear and he’ll love it.”

  Nanny Vi put down her spoon and smiled a very satisfied smile. Quin smiled back.

  “She said most adults don’t know the difference anyway.”

  Her grandmother looked as if she was going to crack up. “I like this woman,” she said.

  Quin agreed. “There’s only one problem,” she said. “How do I play Wonder?”

  LATER THAT evening Quin and Nanny Vi curled up with a bowl of popcorn and watched The Wizard of Oz on TV. It was one of Quin’s favourite movies, but she couldn’t concentrate. Her mind kept wandering.

  Fear. Wonder. How did a person pretend these things? How had she ever got this part? She was no actor. An actor had to have an imagination, be able to see things that weren’t there — see something that transformed her so that she looked different. Keith had said, “No face-pulling, dear.” But what was an expression but face-pulling?

  “Here’s my favourite part,” said Nanny Vi.

  On the screen, Dorothy was sure pulling face. She was trapped on the ramparts of the wicked witch’s castle. The soldiers were closing in. Nanny Vi grabbed Quin’s hand and held it tightly. Then Dorothy got mad and threw water at the witch, and the witch began to melt.

  “See!” said Nanny Vi. “Water again. Fearful stuff, with or without the minnows.”

  Quin laughed, but not very convincingly. Her grandmother squeezed her hand. “You’re thinking too hard,” she said.

  “I know,” snapped Quin. “So how do I stop thinking?”

  She had never spoken to Nanny Vi like that before. Her chest felt all tight. She felt as if she had a popcorn kernel caught in her throat. She wanted to run to her little windowless dollhouse room and close the door. But she didn’t budge.

  They watched the end of the movie in silence. Then Nanny Vi pushed the Off button on the remote control, and the movie fizzled.

  “How about some hot chocolate?” she said.

  “I’m sorry,” said Quin.

  Nanny Vi patted her on the leg, but didn’t say any more. She got up and left the. room. Quin listened to her pottering in the kitchen. She picked up the remote control and turned the TV back on. “Tune in next Friday for another classic oldie,” said a TV voice. And now on the screen Sinbad the Sailor held up his hands in major face-pulling fright as a towering lizard pounded down the beach towards him.

  Quin punched the Off button. She would never find out what happened to Sinbad, she thought. Next Friday was opening night.

  And then, somehow, it was Friday. For Quin it was a frantic week filled with interviews and extra rehearsals. It was a week of encouraging winks from the leading lady and patient smiles from Keith. He didn’t bug Quin about her death scene anymore. Instead, he brought her a lovely illus­trated leather-bound copy of The Little Prince. Quin had read the book before—it made her fall asleep—but she appreciated the thought.

  It was also a week filled with Nanny Vi talking in her sleep. She was so nervous. Not Quin.

  Friday came, and with it, Quin’s parents and Mark and Sarah, too. Sarah gave Quin an opening-night present of a pair of earrings. The tiny silver masks of comedy and tragedy. Her family gave her a huge box of flowers.

  But the best thing of all came from Nanny Vi. Somewhere, she had found an old coloured print of a magnificent frigate-bird, which she had framed. The bird was flying on huge black wings with a jellyfish in its beak. And, although it might not have been her grandmother’s idea, it was that picture that came suddenly swimming into Quin’s mind in Act Two’s tragic conclusion. She didn’t actually see the magnificent frigate-bird in her mind’s eye. She became it

  Fearlessly, she sailed out of her Aunt Con­stance’s arms, over the packed electric darkness of the Royal Alex Theatre, through the doors and out into the night until she was soaring at last over the grey-green waters of the Gulf of Mexico.

  Star-Taker

  IT WAS August, 1867. Upper Canada had only been Ontario for a little over a month, a prov­ince in a new country. Edward George Lee had heard something about the talks in Charlottetown and wondered what it would mean being a Cana­dian, if it would be any different. It certainly wasn’t going to stop Father from giving him chores.

  On that day they were going to be clearing some forest up by Green Lake. Mixed hardwood and pine. And mosquitoes. Still, work was work and as his mama said with the old country purring in her voice, “Don’t look a gift-horse in the mouth, Edward George.”

  So he was up at the whip-crack of dawn harnessing Buck and Brin and glad to be near their dusty oxen warmth, for the mornings were already as cool as the bite of a McIntosh apple. He had no idea that at fourteen years old he was going to become famous—famous and forgotten—all on that same August day.

  They walked in silence. In this new country called Canada, would his father talk more than he

  was accustomed to? Eddie doubted it. He knew what the man was thinking anyway: that this job would finally afford him a new addition to the barn. It was all his father thought about these days.

  A white-throated sparrow whistled its quavering three-note song. Eddie puckered up and joined in; the bird always answered back. More conversation than he’d hear all morning.

  CAPTAIN OVERMAN of the Ottawa Forwarding Company had hired Eddie’s father to.clear some land. The captain operated the steamboat Jason Gould up on Muskrat Lake. Papa was making three dollars a day, good money. And at the end of it, there would be something for Eddie. Father would present him with a crisp new three-dollar bill issued by the Colonial Bank of Canada.

  The sun came up hard that morning. His papa did the axe work. Eddie’s job was to hitch up the oxen team to the felled trees and draw them to the burn site. It was good timber they were burning, but there was good timber everywhere in this corner of the country.

  “More timber than you could shake a stick at,” Mama liked to say. All that forest—it gave her the willies. Eddie couldn’t have imagined a time when there would not be endless forest everywhere. It was all he knew.

  The smoke from the fire kept the mosquitoes and black flies at bay. But Eddie’s eyes smarted, and the sweat boiled on the back of his neck. He

  took off his shirt, spread it out over the alder brush by the stream that meandered down to the lake.

  Noon rolled around, as it will even on days when a person is about to become famous and for­gotten. Father brought down a giant red pine. How it thundered as it hit the ground. It was around then that he sent Eddie home for his dinner. He left his father hacking that pine into sections. It was too big for the oxen to drag away as it was. Eddie was told not to dawdle. Father would be waiting for his own meal, which Eddie would carry back to him in the old biscuit tin.

  It was good to escape the smoke and fire and walk down the concession trail out to the road. Stretch his legs, feel his spine unwind a bit. Let the sun turn his bare back as red hot as a cast iron pan. Mama kidded him about that when he arrived home, poking him with her finger and drawing it back as if it were sizzling.

  �
�Lie down on the table, Eddie. I’ll just mix up a batter of griddle cakes,” said Mama. “Shame not to use a good iron nicely heated.” Little Isabel laughed. She climbed up on Eddie’s knee and rode to Banbury Cross while Mama cooked up a half dozen sausages.

  When Eddie got back to Lot 12, Father was grateful for the break. He took the tin over to a stump where he could look out over the lake. Eddie stood by him for just a moment, watching a blue heron stalk the shore with her improbable long legs. She caught herself a fat bullfrog. Father wiped the grease off his cheek with a hunk of fresh bread, slapped another fat sausage in it, took a big bite.

  Eddie drew away two of the logs, the lower portions of the huge red pine. But the third section just below the branches was not chopped clean. He had to pull it around sideways to break it off.

  He dug away the moss and marl that the old tree lay-in so he could get the chain around the log.

  “Hiaiye!” he called out, slapping Buck on his sooty side. “Hiaiye!”

  Smack. The oxen heaved their mighty shoulders and swung the log around. Eddie jumped back out of their path, ducking as branches swung past his head. And the log rolled back the moss like a blanket to reveal a bed of dark soil, which is where it lay, as if sleeping.

  A round yellow thing no more than six inches in diameter.

  FIFTY-TWO YEARS later, Edward George Lee would visit the site with an historian fellow and show him just where it all happened. Not so limber anymore at sixty-six, he would duck and dance out of the oxen’s way, acting out the whole little drama. He would tell the historian that the thing was ten inches across. Funny, how things grow in the memory...

  FOURTEEN-YEAR-OLD Eddie picked the round thing up, flicked off the dirt, a curling brown centipede or two. With a grimy thumbnail he cleaned the groove that ran around the edge. There were all kinds of markings, figures cut into the metal, and there was an arm across it, pointed at one end and blunt at the other. With an effort he could move that arm a notch or two. It made him think of a compass.