Rex Zero, King of Nothing

by Tim Wynne-Jones

  “Yeah,” says Donnie. “We’re real complicated. You know why?”

  I shake my head.

  “Because we know the words to the song,” he says. Then he starts singing “Speed Bonnie Boat” in a lusty voice. Zoltan joins in and gets me to sing, too. Now all three of us are singing it together.

  I glance over towards Miss Garr. She’s staring at me and looks disappointed. I’m getting good at disappointing people.

  * * *

  After school, I meet up with James and Buster and Kathy.

  “We’ve got some bad news,” says Buster. “Tell him, Kathy.”

  Kathy frowns and the clear sky blue of her eyes is suddenly full of lightning.

  “I was out Sunday for a bit and when I got home, Dr. Arnold was there.”

  “Tell him what they were doing,” says Buster.

  She makes a face as if she just bit into an oyster.

  “Were they kissing?”

  “Worse,” says James.

  I don’t want to think about what would be worse. Luckily, Kathy doesn’t make me guess.

  “They were reading Better Homes and Gardens magazine.”

  I feel as if I’ve missed something. Then James draws a rectangle in the air. A house?

  “Holy moly. They’re talking about building a house?”

  Kathy looks grumpy. “Not exactly. But they were talking about what they liked and didn’t like. ‘Oh, I like French doors.’ ‘You do? So do I.’ ‘What do you think of Formica countertops?’ ‘Oh, oh, oh, I love Formica countertops.’ It was disgusting.”

  “Things are moving fast,” I say.

  “It stinks!” says Kathy, throwing her hands up in the air. “Mom and I had everything worked out. And now there’s Mom and me and Dr. Arnold and little Missy.”

  I almost tell her that she still only has half the family I have, but she isn’t finished.

  “Why did he have to fall in love with her? Why, why, why? There must be lots of women who’d just love to marry a nice doctor.”

  We all shake our heads sympathetically.

  “Too bad he didn’t fall in love with Miss Garr,” I say.

  “Impossible,” says Kathy.

  “It would be so perfect,” I say. “It would kill two birds with one stone. They’d probably elope and you’d get your mother back and we’d get a new teacher.”

  “But who’d ever want to marry Miss Garr?” says Buster. “She’s the Bride of Frankenstein.”

  “She’s not so bad looking,” I say. The others gag. “No, I mean, really. Not all the time. And she can be nice as long as you’re only about three feet high.”

  “I know,” says Kathy. “I watched her pushing Missy in the swing. Missy was as happy as a clam.”

  Kathy is not as happy as a clam, that’s for sure. And I’d really like to make her happy. In a fairy tale it would be a cinch. Just sprinkle a little fairy dust and – Poof! – Dr. Arnold’s in love with Miss Garr.

  Hey, wait a minute! It is possible. Not that I’ve got any fairy dust, but...

  “Rex, are you all right?”

  The others are looking at me. “Maybe it’s not too late,” I say.

  “Not too late for what?” says Buster.

  “Not too late for Dr. Arnold and Miss Garr to fall in love.”

  * * *

  “This is crazy,” says James.

  “No it’s not,” I say. We’re all at Buster’s, sitting in the kitchen drinking Vernors ginger ale and eating Cheezies.

  “Here’s my plan so far. We write a love letter to Miss Garr from Dr. Arnold.”

  “Why not the other way around?” says Buster.

  “Because girls fall in love way more easily than guys,” I say. “Believe me, I know.”

  Buster looks confused. “Then why don’t we write a letter from Miss Garr to Dr. Arnold if she’s the one who’s fallen in love?”

  Kathy shakes her head.

  “Look,” she says. “No girl would write to a guy and say she’s in love with him. He would think she was a tramp. But if a guy – a doctor guy – writes to a lonely woman, she would fall in love with him right on the spot.”

  “Exactly!” I say.

  “It’s nuts,” says James, tugging on his grey patch. “As soon as she talks to him she’ll find out that he didn’t write the letter.”

  I hadn’t thought that far. Everybody takes long slow sips of their Vernors.

  “Anyway,” says James. “You can’t make someone fall in love.”

  “Of course not,” says Kathy. “But she’d probably act all sweet and friendly to him, if she thought he was in love with her. He likes to pick up Missy at school. If Miss Garr thought he liked her, she’d wear nice clothes and say how nice Missy is. He’ll notice her, at least. And maybe, by the time she finds out he didn’t write the letter, they will already be in love.”

  Kathy beams at me as if I just invented a miracle cure.

  “It could work,” I say.

  James frowns. “I don’t know. She might think he’s just weird. And how are we going to write a love letter anyway?”

  That’s when it comes to me – an even better plan.

  “We’ll send a letter from a friend. An anonymous friend. Someone who knows Dr. Arnold and knows how he is yearning for Miss Garr.”

  “But how do we make it look like an adult?”

  “I’ll type it,” I say. “I know how to type.”

  Kathy looks hopeful. I’m on a roll

  “Maybe the letter is from an expert, like Dear Abby,” I say. “Or Ann Landers.”

  Now even James looks a little less skeptical.

  Then it comes to me in a flash. “Dr. Love.”

  “Huh?”

  “Dr. Love. Like in girls’ magazines. There’s always these columns.”

  “What kind of columns?” asks Buster.

  “Advice to the lovelorn, you know. Girls write in because they’re in love with someone and he’s cheating on them or doesn’t know they exist and they don’t know what to do.”

  Kathy laughs out loud.

  “Perfect!” she says. “Then when Dr. Arnold says he doesn’t know what Miss Garr is talking about, she’ll just think he’s being shy. You could even say something like that in the letter.”

  They’re all looking at me.

  “Are you up for it?” says James.

  I’m not sure. But it would be a great trick. And if there was anyone in the world who deserved a trick played on her...

  “Oh, please,” says Kathy. “I mean, even if it doesn’t work, at least Dr. Arnold will think twice, right? He’ll think, ‘Hey, there’s this other woman who likes me. Maybe there are lots of other women who like me, so why should I marry Mary Brown?’ You see what I mean?”

  “If there is anyone who could do it, it would be you,” says James.

  I blush. I am pretty good with words.

  “Well, I could give it a try.”

  Kathy jumps out of her chair and gives me a hug. Whoa! She’s never done that before.

  “I know you can do it,” she says.

  “Of course he can do it,” says Buster. “He’s Dr. Looooove!”

  12

  Dr. Love

  WHEN I GET HOME, Mum asks me if I’ll take the Sausage out for a walk.

  “I can’t,” I tell her. “I’m Dr. Love.”

  I gather a bunch of my sisters’ magazines: Glamour, Seventeen, Mademoiselle – a big stack – and haul them up to my room. Then I look for the lovelorn columns. The letters are always signed “Please help me” or “Worried” or “Sleepless.”

  I have to scrunch up my nose to read this stuff. There are a lot of unhappy people in the world. I read six or seven to get a feel for it and I just end up feeling crazy. If dating and marriage are going to be this difficult, maybe I’ll stay a bachelor.

  Then I think about Kathy hugging me and I have to get on with it. But my brain starts playing tricks on me, because the next minute I’m thinking about Natasha Lavender and how sad she
looked. I see her all dressed in white making the cold glass of her front door fog up with her breath. I see her chest rising and falling, rising and falling under her angora sweater.

  I write the letter in pencil first. I get the dictionary from my father’s office and the thesaurus, too. This is something most kids my age don’t even know about. It’s this book with synonyms in it – words that mean the same thing as other words. My sisters use it all the time.

  “This butter is far too oleaginous.”

  “I think Pat Boone is resplendent.”

  “I’m going to eviscerate you.”

  It’s in the thesaurus that I find the words humanitarian and amorous. I was just going to say kind and loving but a doctor would use bigger words. There are lots of big words in the thesaurus: infirmity, tragically, magnetized – really good words.

  It takes a long time to get it right, but finally I’m ready.

  Dear Miss Garr;

  You don’t know me but over the last few weeks I herd a lot about you. Why just the other day my good friend Dr. Arnold Schwartz mentioned your name. He was picking up his daughter Missie and he saw you their helping out and smiling at all the little children. Dr. Schwarts thinks you are a very humanitarian and amorous person. I ought to know. I am also a doctor. When I hear a pasient talk the way Dr. Arnold talks I know what the infirmity is! Tragically Missies mother left Dr. Arnold many years ago. Missie so misses having a mother. There is nothing like a woman’s touch to make for a happy home. I hope you will not think it uncouth of me to interfere like this, but for my good friend Dr. Arnold’s sake I hop you will consider having a chat with him. He is quiet shy. He may pretend to not know what you are talking about but beleive me he is very magnetized to you and he is a very nice and plesant and sucessful man. Maybe you to could go out for a drink or to the movies? I notice that Mutany on the Bounty is still playing at the Regent. What do you think? Remember, he may be bashful but as his doctor I can tell you there is only one cure. You know what I mean.

  Yours very truly,

  Dr. Love

  I’m pretty proud of it. But by the time I’m done reading it over, it’s dinnertime. After dinner, Letitia gets dibs on the typewriter for an essay for school. The final version of Dr. Love’s letter will have to wait.

  The next day Kathy arrives at school with an address for Miss Garr. There were only two Garrs in the phone book, Thomas and P.

  “Bet it stands for Prune-Face,” says Buster.

  Everyone is impressed with my letter. James notices I spelled patient wrong and left the e off the word hope, but otherwise everybody agrees it’s perfect.

  “Just what the doctor ordered,” says Kathy. And we all laugh.

  As soon as I get home, I go to type out the letter in Dad’s office. I push through the door without knocking and there’s Annie Oakley.

  “What are you doing here?” she demands.

  I’m backing out the door apologizing when I stop.

  “What are you doing here?” I ask. “And why are you going through Dad’s filing cabinet?”

  “It’s none of your business,” she says. “Close the door.”

  I close the door.

  “Okay,” I say. “So you won’t mind if I tell him?”

  She glares at me but I stand my ground. Our eyes lock. There we are, Godzilla and King Kong fighting over who gets to destroy Tokyo.

  Finally, she slams the drawer shut. I’ve won!

  “What’s up?” I ask.

  She scowls, but I can see that flicker of excitement in her eye. She’s on to something.

  “Remember that time I snuck up on Dad and he started talking in his sleep?”

  “In German.”

  “Right. Well, one day last week, I came in without knocking and he was reading something at his desk. He covered it up the second he saw me.”

  She is speaking so quietly, I have to cross the room to hear her.

  “Did you see it?”

  She nods. “Just a corner of it. It was a letter written on that thin blue paper.”

  “Like the letters Mum and Dad get from England?”

  “Like that,” she says, “But this letter wasn’t from England. It was from Germany.”

  I can’t believe it. “How did you find out?”

  “I pretended I was sad and needed a hug.”

  “Wasn’t he suspicious?”

  “Ha ha ha. Anyway, while he was giving me a hug, I managed to free one of my arms and shift the paper on his desk. The date at the top of the letter was...” She stops mid sentence and goes to the desk, takes a pen and writes on a scrap of paper.

  8 . 11 . 46

  Numbers. “Is it a code?”

  “No, you nincompoop. The eighth of November, nineteen forty-six.”

  Whoa. “That was just after the war.”

  “Right. But there was more...”

  Dramatically, she picks up the pen again and writes,

  Mein Liebchen

  She writes it funny but I get what she’s trying to do. She’s making it look like old-fashioned German script.

  “What does it mean?”

  She puts the pen carefully back in the old mug, which is full of mechanical pencils and pens and a letter opener shaped like a dagger.

  She looks solemnly at me. “I think it means ‘My darling.’”

  I have to sit down.

  My darling.

  Finally, I look up at Annie. She has this expression on her face as if I’m going to call her a liar. Her fists are clenched. She’s waiting to beat me up.

  “I know someone at school who takes German,” she says. “She said she would translate the letter for me if I could find it.”

  I glance at her. She’s chewing her lip. Our eyes meet. She looks anxious. And then she says something I’ve never ever heard her say before.

  “Maybe I was wrong.”

  I still don’t speak and neither does she. Then before I know it, she marches out of the office and closes the door behind her.

  I don’t know what to think. Maybe she is wrong. Maybe Mein Liebchen means Mister Engineer?

  After a while, I decide that if I’m going to type the letter I came in here to type, I’d better get to it. I find some of my father’s best creamy coloured stationery and roll it into the typewriter.

  Mum used to be a typist for a steamship company in Liverpool. She showed me how to type a letter properly so that I could thank my grandparents back in England for sending me Christmas presents, and impress them with how successful we are now that we live in Canada. I even know how to type an envelope.

  I like typing. I’m really slow but it doesn’t matter. It still looks impressive when you’re finished. Nobody will ever guess that Dr. Love is only eleven years old.

  I concentrate. Try to block all the funny thoughts that are circling around in my brain. It’s kind of like a football game up there and these ferocious thoughts are blitzing the quarterback. You can block some of them but you can’t get them all, and then – Bam! You get blind-sided.

  Mein Liebchen – Bam! – Natasha Lavender – Bam! Bam! Once I start thinking of her, I can’t stop. She sounded scared on the phone and yet hopeful, too.

  Who are you? What do you want?

  Then when I saw her, she looked so sad. I can still see her face. Her beautiful face, her big brown eyes, even her cleft lip.

  Somehow, with all this on my mind, I get the letter typed. I look at the time on the mantel clock. Dad won’t be home for another fifteen minutes. I seal up the letter to Miss Garr.

  Then, just as I’m about to leave, I stare at the telephone as if it’s a loaded gun.

  Why not? I pull the little black book from my pocket. I take a deep breath and dial the number.

  I hope she’s home. I hope she’s home.

  “Yeah, who is it?”

  It’s a man.

  “Hey, who is this?”

  Any bets it’s the guy who called down the stairs when Natasha was getting the mail.

&nbs
p; “It’s you, isn’t it?” he says, his voice low and mean. I freeze. “You think I don’t know about you?”

  I couldn’t speak now if I wanted to.

  “What do you take me for, a chump?”

  I should hang up but it’s as if the receiver is glued to my ear.

  “You are going to be sorry, buddy,” he snarls. “You are going to wish you were never born. You hear me?”

  With superhuman strength I wrestle the phone away from my ear and slam it down.

  He knows me even though I didn’t say a word. How could he?

  I stare at the phone in terror, as if the cord is this long thin tunnel and right now Mr. Nasty L. Lavender is crawling along it all the way from Quigley Street, with a knife clenched between his teeth.

  Then the office door swings open. I gasp, half expecting it to be him. But it’s only Letitia, smiling.

  “Din-din,” she says cheerily. “And Cassiopeia has brought home Mr. Odsburg.”

  13

  Mr. Odsburg

  CASSIOPEIA THINKS MR. ODSBURG‘S eyes are “scrummy,” but I don’t think she found that word in a thesaurus. Up close they just look bulgy to me. It’s as if someone squeezed his neck too tight. They’re a nice colour, though, kind of greeny-blue like the ocean. His hair is the colour of corn silk – almost white – and very soft looking. Mr. Odsburg is very soft looking all over.

  “Are you the one who works in China?” asks Flora Bella, as soon as we’re all seated.

  “Well, yes,” he says.

  “That’s a long way to go to work.”

  We all laugh except for Cassie, who closes her eyes.

  “Pardon me?” says our guest, looking around. “Oh, yes. I see. Very funny.”

  “I know lots of jokes,” says Flora Bella.

  “Not now, dear,” says Mum. “Gravy, Mr. Odsburg?”

  “Uh, no, thank you very much.”

  “Actually Brian isn’t in china any longer,” says Cassie. “He has just been promoted, haven’t you, Brian.” He nods and she touches his hand.

  “Good for you,” says Dad. “And where exactly does a young man go when he’s moving up from china?”

  “Precious jewels.”