Rex Zero, King of Nothing

by Tim Wynne-Jones

  James turns back to A and goes down the list. “Okay, let’s stick to the people who live in the Central exchange. Can I go first?”

  “Sure.”

  So he drags his chair over to the phone and calls Alex Abelard. There’s no answer. We agree that you get to make calls until you reach someone. He calls Tony Adams. This time he gets through, but a secretary answers and says that Mr. Adams is out of the office. That doesn’t count, so James calls Ralph Bolsterood. He’s in a meeting.

  “This is boring,” says Buster.

  “No,” I say. “This is real detective work.”

  “Well, it’s not like in the movies,” says Buster. “This would be the most boring movie in the world.”

  “In a movie this is the part they skip over,” I explain. “You see Humphrey Bogart flip through the pages, make a face, and then start dialing. There’s some music and you see the pages flip by, then – Poof! – he’s talking to Harvey Windbag, the very guy he’s looking for!”

  Buster doesn’t look impressed.

  “Do you guys want to see my brother’s magazines instead? Mom got rid of the one she caught me reading, but he’s got others and I know where he keeps them.”

  James and I look at each other. I sort of do and sort of don’t. James looks like he feels the same way. But we both shake our heads at the same time. A mystery to solve is better than any magazine. Even one full of women in black underwear.

  Finally, James reaches somebody who is at home. His name is Bob Desjardins. James tells him why he’s calling. Bob says he’ll keep it in mind and ask around.

  Buster doesn’t want a turn. He’s making himself another sandwich.

  “The magazine is pretty good,” he says. “There are stories, too, about savage killers and spies and...other stuff.”

  But now that we’re off and running, we’re not interested. I call six people but all I get is: “Flatley and Sons,” or “Morgan, Morgan and Biggles,” or “McCruddy’s Stationery, how may I direct your call?”

  “Which proves my point,” says James. “If it were a woman’s address book it wouldn’t be full of men who were at the office.”

  Finally, I get someone on the line. And this time it is a woman.

  “Could I speak to Nate Lavender, please?” I ask politely. There is an intake of air, but no reply. “Hello?”

  “There is no Nate Lavender at this number,” says the woman, hesitantly. Her voice sounds wary. “Who is this, please?”

  I cover the mouthpiece.

  “She asked who it is,” I whisper to James, who shakes his head at me. I remove my hand from the receiver. “Uh, no one,” I say. “Just a friend.” James is slashing his hand across his neck like I should hang up, but I don’t want to. I like her voice.

  “Please,” she says. “Tell me who you are.”

  She sounds worried. I stutter a bit. “I...I must have the wrong number, sorry.”

  “No,” she says. “What do you want? Please!”

  “Uh, thanks. Sorry to bother you. Goodbye.” And I hang up as quickly as I can. But even as I place the receiver on its silver hook, I hear her voice demanding again to know who is calling.

  What did I hear? Suspicion? Fear?

  I tell the others what she said.

  “That’s weird,” says Buster. “If there wasn’t any Nate Lavender, why would she get so upset?”

  “That’s what I was thinking.”

  James has taken the address book back from me. “Twenty-nine Quigley Street,” he says.

  “Where is that?”

  “Down near the stadium.” He looks up from the address book and he doesn’t have to say what’s on his mind.

  “Come on,” I say. I push myself away from the table. “What are we waiting for?”

  But Buster doesn’t want to go.

  “It’s too cold,” he says. “I think I’ll just hang around here...maybe do a little reading.”

  * * *

  So it’s just James and I who make our way over to Quigley Street. The wind is behind us pushing us along like an impatient yard monitor. It’s dark. Luckily, it isn’t too far.

  As we wait for the lights at Fifth and Bank, I point at the telephone booth.

  “That’s where I found it.”

  James gets this calculating look in his eye.

  “Funny phoning someone who only lives two blocks away,” he says.

  Number twenty-nine is a large old red-brick house with a narrow front porch. The brickwork is cracked. The porch tips forward. There’s a rusty iron railing on one side of the steps that looks pretty shaky. The steps need paint. So does the front door. Through the window in the door we can see a lightbulb dangling from a wire in the ceiling of the entranceway.

  We walk by the house but there is nowhere to go. Quigley’s a dead end. Almost. There’s an alley off to the right, across the street. So we stand there, stamping our feet up and down to keep warm, watching number twenty-nine. Lights are on upstairs, but the curtains are drawn. We shiver and wait, not sure what to do next.

  Then we see someone coming up the street – a chubby man in a khaki parka and a fur hat, which he holds down with one hand because the wind is so strong. He’s holding a lunch pail in the other hand close to his chest like a tiny shield. He turns up the path to twenty-nine and hurries up the steps.

  The front door doesn’t seem to be locked. He goes in and stops to collect his mail from one of the mailboxes on the wall. I didn’t realize until now that the house is divided up into apartments.

  Once the man is gone, we sneak back across the street and up the front walk. James tries the door. It opens.

  There are four mailboxes, but only three doors opening on to the entranceway. The linoleum floor is slick with muddy footprints. A striped umbrella sits outside the door to apartment 1A. The chubby man’s galoshes sit outside 1B. On the mailboxes are printed the numbers 1A, 1B, 2A (Back) and 2B. Below each number on a slip of paper is the name of the tenant. The tenant in apartment 2B is listed as L. Lavender.

  “Bingo!” whispers James. “Should we knock?”

  I think of the woman’s voice, how nervous she sounded. I’m not sure.

  I look out the window. No one is coming. Then I notice the magazines and flyers lying on the shelf under the mailboxes. I sort through them. There is a magazine in a brown paper wrapper, still curled up with an elastic band around it. I pull off the elastic band and open it up. It’s Chatelaine. I show it to James. His eyes almost bug out of his head. It’s addressed to Natasha Lavender.

  Natasha?

  I pull the little black book out from my pocket. Nate Lavender.

  The plot thickens.

  Just then we hear footsteps on a staircase – the stairs behind the door that says 2B! We push through the front door back out on to the porch.

  “The magazine!” whispers James.

  I’m still clutching Chatelaine. I dash back and throw it on the shelf. It wobbles and falls onto the sloppy wet floor. I go to pick it up but by now the footsteps are way too close. I slip out the door but not in time to run down the porch stairs without being seen.

  I lean against the wall beside the front door. James is down hiding in the bushes. He puts his finger to his lips.

  “Shhhhhhh!” he says.

  As if I need him to tell me!

  After a moment, he nods at me. I know what he means – it’s safe to peek.

  There is a woman in the entranceway with her back to the door. She has white-blonde shoulder-length hair flipped up at the bottom. She’s looking at the mail she just took out of the box marked 2B.

  The woman’s hair gleams like a Breck shampoo ad on the back of one of my sisters’ magazines. It’s lustrous – that’s the only word for it.

  She bends over and picks up the magazine. She holds it at arm’s length. It’s dripping wet.

  Suddenly, she starts to turn towards the front door and I pull my head back.

  I hold my breath, ready to scram if she comes to the door.

>   She doesn’t.

  After a while, James nods the all clear but he mouths the word “careful.”

  She is still standing in the middle of the entranceway, facing me now, but looking down. She is frowning and there is something funny about her frown, something about her lips, but I can’t figure out what. Her hair is perfect and her face is pretty but she sure is not happy.

  “Natasha?”

  It’s a man’s voice coming from the stairway.

  She glances towards the open door to apartment 2B and wraps her arms around her chest.

  She is all in white. White high heels, white pleated skirt, white angora sweater and a wide white belt. She even wears white bangles on her wrist. The only colour is her lipstick and her nails, which are as red as blood.

  The woman in white.

  “Natasha, what the hell are you doing?”

  She sighs. Her mouth opens as if she is going to say something. But she shuts it quick. Then she turns her head towards the staircase.

  “Coming,” she says. “I’ll be right up.”

  But she doesn’t move. She looks back towards the front door and again I pull my head away and hold my breath. I plaster myself against the cold bricks.

  Next thing I know she’s at the window. If she turned her head even a tiny bit to the left she would see me, but she doesn’t.

  There’s a little hitch in her upper lip; the two parts don’t meet properly. She looks helpless. I almost want her to see me now. I want to apologize for phoning and upsetting her. It seems that’s all I do these days. First I upset Dad, then my teacher, and now this beautiful woman.

  I want to give her the address book, even if it isn’t hers. I wish I’d never found it.

  Her breath fogs up the glass. Her face goes out of focus, kind of dreamy looking.

  Then a voice cries from above.

  “For God’s sake, woman!”

  And Natasha Lavender closes her eyes. Her long lashes rest on her high white cheekbones. Then she turns to go.

  I hurry to the window to see her one more time. She pulls the door to apartment 2B closed behind her and I hear her footsteps climb the stairs.

  I realize that I’m holding my breath. I reach up to touch the glass where the mist from her breath still lingers. I want to write something in the vapour. I don’t know what.

  I reach up to touch it. But the vapour is on the other side.

  9

  A Fight in the Night

  WHIPLASH IS ON at seven-thirty, but I don’t watch it. My mind is so full I don’t think there is any room up there, not even for cowboys. I go up to my room and sit at my desk. My desk is under the gable right in front of the window, but I can’t see anything except a reflection of my room and me in the glass. We’re both kind of a mess.

  I can’t see what’s happening outside but I can hear it, all right. I’m sitting tucked between sloping walls like a Plains Cree in a tepee with the winter wind prowling around outside like a pack of wolves.

  I want to write down the minutes of our class meeting. Not the official minutes. I want to write down everything that happened while it’s still clear in my memory. I don’t exactly know why but I don’t want it inside me. I want to get it out. Like when the Indian scout sucks the poison out of a rattlesnake bite.

  The thing is, I can’t write because of the Woman in White. I can’t get her out of my head. I keep seeing her face looking out of the window into the late afternoon darkness.

  Natasha Lavender.

  I can’t forget her face framed by her hair-commercial hair. She looked abandoned, like a woman in a horror movie when she realizes that her friends have all been turned into zombie pod people.

  There was something else about Natasha Lavender’s face.

  I go downstairs and find Letitia in her room. She’s looking through some sheet music, just about to start singing scales.

  “What is it, Rex?”

  I describe Natasha’s mouth, the way her upper lip kind of jogged in the middle.

  “That’s called a harelip,” she says.

  “Even if there isn’t any hair on it?”

  “Not that kind of hair,” she says. “The other hare – like a rabbit.”

  I think about the Woman in White. Her face didn’t look like a rabbit’s. Her face was beautiful, with big sad brown eyes.

  “I think harelip isn’t the polite word for it,” says Letitia. “I think it’s called a cleft lip. Do you know someone with one?” I shake my head. “It might hurt a person’s feelings if you call it a harelip,” she adds. I thank her and leave in a kind of a daze.

  I finally manage to get writing. I try to remember everything that happened in the classroom that afternoon in the order it happened. I don’t want to miss anything. It feels important. Like Perry Mason with a big court case, I want to have my facts straight.

  When I stop writing, I’ve filled seven pages. I feel a bit better.

  I look up. There I am in the window. I wave. But something has changed.

  I look closer. The wind has stopped – that’s it. The howling prowling wolves have moved off.

  I stare at the window – try to see through the reflection of my messy room and me.

  There is something going on outside.

  Can it really be true?

  I jump out of my chair and run to turn off the light and close the door. Then I race back to my desk, sit down and look out the window, which is now almost free of reflections.

  Snow!

  I feel tingly inside and at the same time I feel calm. I stand up and look down on to Clemow Avenue. The ground is already covered. The snow glitters in the street-light.

  How long have I been writing – a month? I look at the luminous hands of my bedside clock. It’s nine-thirty.

  “Rex?”

  I turn in my chair. It’s my mother. She’s standing at the door silhouetted by the landing light.

  “What are you doing sitting in the dark?” she asks. She doesn’t sound angry. “May I turn on the light?”

  “Sure. I was just watching the snow.”

  “Indeed,” she says.

  She flips on the light. I blink, look at her and blink again.

  She’s wearing a dress. My mother is wearing a dress! Well, actually, she always wears dresses, but this is a party kind of dress. It’s made of some shimmery material with sparkles in it and the skirt is full as if she’s wearing crino-lines. My sisters wear crinolines to make their skirts look like hot air balloons. But I’ve never seen my mum in one. And her hair is done up and she’s wearing pearls and high heels.

  “What’s going on?”

  “Your father and I are going out.”

  “Just you two?”

  She chuckles. “Yes, silly. Come on now, get into your pyjamas.”

  I get up and take my pjs from the end of the bed. I start to undress, then stop myself.

  “Mum, I’m eleven, you know.”

  She covers her eyes. I change in a big hurry and hop under the covers.

  “Where are you going?” I ask.

  “Oh, a movie, I suspect.”

  “Mutiny on the Bounty?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Rio Bravo is still on.”

  She laughs again. “We might end up just going for a drink.”

  I lay my head down. My pillow is frosty cold and the shock wakes me up. This is getting stranger and stranger. There’s a liquor cabinet in the dining room with all kinds of drinks in it. Why do they need to go out?

  “Aren’t you worried about the snow? It might be slippery.” My parents don’t go out. Something must be wrong.

  “Come on now,” she says, tucking me in. “Enough questions.”

  She bends down to give me a kiss and a hug. She doesn’t even make me go and brush my teeth. And, as if that weren’t enough, she’s wearing perfume.

  This is serious.

  She sits on the edge of my bed and strokes my hair.

  “Yesterday,” she says, “when you missed goin
g with your father to the Armistice Day ceremony, did he talk to you about anything in particular?”

  “He told me a story.”

  “What kind of a story?”

  I scratch my head. Even though it was only yesterday, it seems like a million years ago. So much has happened. Trying to remember it is like looking for something in the closet. I have to throw out all these boots and tennis shoes and galoshes.

  Ah! There it is.

  “It was about cheese,” I say. “And this...” But I don’t want to talk about the German sniper.

  “And this what?” she asks.

  “About this soldier getting blown up by a hand grenade.”

  Her hand rests on my arm.

  “Nothing else?” she says.

  “No. Why?”

  She sits another moment and then sighs and gets to her feet. “Sleep tight, darling,” she says. I’m usually allowed to read for a while, but I don’t bother mentioning it. She leaves the door a little bit open. I listen to her high heels click, click, click slowly down the stairs.

  What was that about?

  I jump out of bed and go to my window. Eventually, I see them below, Mum and Dad, walking carefully down the front steps to the path. Mum is hanging on to his arm really tightly.

  Then they stop. Dad is looking up at the snow. Mum does, too, but then she shudders. Even in her mink coat she’s cold. She lets go of his arm and heads towards the car, walking carefully through the snow in her high heels. Dad just stands there looking up at the sky or the trees or something. I hear the car door open and close. Dad doesn’t move. After about a million heartbeats, the car door opens again. Mum says something, I guess, because Dad looks towards the car. Then her door closes again, harder this time.

  Finally, Dad heads towards the car, his head bent low, his hands deep in his pockets.

  Another mystery.

  There are too many of them to think about. I jump back into bed shivering and lie there listening to the snow. You can’t hear it but it’s there, and it’s comforting, somehow.

  All these mysteries to solve, like a bunch of toys left out in the garden all getting covered up so you can’t see them anymore.

  * * *

  I’m not sure what wakes me up. I look at my clock. It’s after eleven. I listen again.