Free The 10 P.M. Question by Kate de Goldi

Daddy. True, Uncle George mostly called his deceased father the HOD, which meant Head of Department, but even he occasionally referred to him as “my old dad.”
    Ma had assured Frankie that Uncle George was indeed his dad, and Uncle George had proved it by demonstrating that the hammerhead second toe on Frankie’s left foot was identical to the hammerhead second toe on
Uncle George’s
left foot. It was a small but very fetching genetic malformation, Uncle George said. It was a family heirloom, and possibly the only kind Frankie would inherit (not counting the HOD’s frying pan from the Western Desert, which Uncle George was thinking of leaving to Frankie since Louie would probably sell it to the highest bidder on Trade Me).
    “He’s definitely my father.” Frankie threw a high leisurely ball and Sydney caught it with exaggerated grace. “And Louie’s, and Gordana’s. No doubt about it. We’ve all tried to call him Dad, but it doesn’t work.
Everyone
calls him Uncle George, even Ma.”
    They came to a stop at the bottom of the hill road, outside the Boys’ and Girls’ Gymnasium, where Gigs was meeting them. Frankie had gone to the B&GG for trampoline classes when he was younger. Louie had walked him down the hill every Friday, talking, talking, all the way. Louie had done tramp in his time, too; he’d reached intermediate level and had even won a trophy at the trampoline regionals. Then he’d fallen out of a first-story window at school and broken his leg in three places, and that was the end of his tramp career. (Though it seemed to mark the beginning of his semi-delinquent career.)
    Frankie had been good at tramp, too, when he wasn’t worrying that his neck would accidentally snap during backdrops and half twists. He’d heard once about a man who’d become paraplegic after a freak trampoline accident and it preyed constantly on his mind, though Ma assured him over and over that safety measures were very carefully observed at the B&GG.
    The best part about tramp had been Gino, the young instructor with curly black hair like a King Charles spaniel’s. Gino was poetry in motion, Louie said, and Frankie believed it. Gino could cody and rudy and barani and execute a Miller Plus that made your stomach plunge to your knees as you watched. But Gino had gone to Italy to join a circus and Frankie had given up tramp soon after. It just hadn’t been the same.
    Frankie stared up at the high windows of the B&GG. Probably there were kids in there now, practicing their tucks and pikes. He could almost hear the springs of the trampolines, straining and singing. He could almost smell the cold of the concrete walls.
    “So,” said Sydney. “You have to tell me more about the Aunties. When can we go there?” She rubbed the cricket ball vigorously on the side of her skirt.
    It was a nifty skirt, Frankie thought, wide and circular and bright orange, and decorated with ragged black triangles. Sydney made her own clothes. She had told him this on her first day at school, and now he noticed whatever she was wearing. He had never noticed girls’ clothes in his life before now — apart from a dress Gordana had worn last year to the St. Agatha’s Ball.
    Uncle George had said it was a virtual dress because it was hardly there. The dress was pink and silky and apparently designed to reveal as much of Gordana’s skin as possible. Frankie was used to seeing wide expanses of Gordana’s flesh because all her clothes were skimpy, but he’d never seen as much of her breasts before. They were so abundant and startling that Frankie and Gigs had been forced to repair to the hallway and goggle wordlessly at each other for minutes at a time.
    Sydney’s clothes weren’t revealing, but they were conspicuous, nevertheless — loudly colored, painted with crazed brush strokes, or adorned with geometric patches. She seemed to have a thing for triangles, Frankie noticed. Also, for T-shirts with lettering. Today she was wearing a white