Rex Zero, King of Nothing

by Tim Wynne-Jones

  Also by Tim Wynne-Jones

  FICTION

  Rex Zero and the End of the World

  A Thief in the House of Memory

  Ned Mouse Breaks Away

  with pictures by Dusan Petricic

  The Boy in the Burning House

  Stephen Fair

  The Maestro

  The Lord of the Fries and Other Stories

  The Book of Changes

  Some of the Kinder Planets

  PICTURE BOOKS

  The Last Piece of Sky

  illustrated by Marie-Louise Gay

  Mischief City

  illustrated by Victor Gad

  The Hour of the Frog

  illustrated by Catharine O’Neill

  Architect of the Moon

  illustrated by Ian Wallace

  I’ll Make You Small

  illustrated by Maryann Kovalski

  Zoom Upstream

  illustrated by Eric Beddows

  Zoom Away

  illustrated by Eric Beddows

  Zoom at Sea

  illustrated by Eric Beddows

  REX ZERO King of Nothing

  REX ZERO King of Nothing

  TIM WYNNE-JONES

  Copyright © 2007 by Tim Wynne-Jones

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior written consent of the publisher or a license from The Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency (Access Copyright). For an Access Copyright license, visit www.accesscopyright.ca or call toll free to 1-800-893-5777.

  Groundwood Books / House of Anansi Press

  110 Spadina Avenue, Suite 801, Toronto, Ontario M5V 2K4

  We acknowledge for their financial support of our publishing program the Canada Council for the Arts, the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing

  Industry Development Program (BPIDP) and the Ontario Arts Council.

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Wynne-Jones, Tim

  Rex Zero, king of nothing / by Tim Wynne-Jones

  ISBN-13: 978-0-88899-799-9

  ISBN-10: 0-88899-799-X

  1. Family– Canada– Juvenile Fiction. 2. Canada– History– 1962– Juvenile Fiction.

  I. Title.

  PS8595.Y59R494 2007 jC813’.54 C2007-902637-0

  Cover illustration by Simon Ng

  Design by Michael Solomon

  Printed and bound in Canada

  This book is for Dad (1912-1981) and for all the other soldiers and what they carry

  1

  Our Mistress Day

  IT ALWAYS RAINS ON Our Mistress Day. That’s what I’m hoping for tomorrow – freezing November rain as sharp as vaccine needles. The kind of rain my mother would never let me go out in.

  “It’s called Remembrance Day,” says James.

  “Except in the States,” says Buster. “They call it Veterinarians Day.”

  “Veterans Day,” says Kathy, rolling her eyes.

  Buster laughs as if he was fooling. You can never tell with Buster.

  “Well, my dad calls it Our Mistress Day,” I tell them. “I don’t know why. But I hope it rains even worse than this. I hope it pours.”

  It’s Saturday, November 10, 1962, and the four of us are watching the protesters on Parliament Hill in Ottawa. The rain has made their Ban the Bomb signs bleed. They’re waiting for Prime Minister Diefenbaker to show his face.

  Canada doesn’t have any bombs, I don’t think – not like the USA and Russia. Last month they had a fight about Cuba and almost started World War III. I’m not sure Diefenbaker can do much to stop them, but the protesters seem to think he can.

  “Where’s Dief the Chief!” they shout. “Where’s Dief the Chief!”

  “Yeah, where is Dief the Chief?” says Kathy impatiently.

  “Ah, he’s not going to show,” says Buster.

  “He’d better,” says Kathy. “I’ve got a thing or two to tell him.” And she will, if she gets the chance. She’s very brave. Like her dad. He was a pilot who got killed in the Korean War.

  “Where’s Dief the Chief!” shouts Kathy. “Where’s Dief the Chief!”

  “I think Buster’s right,” says James. “The prime minister’s probably sitting in front of his fireplace listening to the game on the radio.”

  “Holy moly!”

  I totally forgot. The Ottawa Rough Riders are playing the Montreal Alouettes in the Eastern Conference quarter-finals.

  I look at James’s watch. I have to rub away the beads of rain on the crystal. Two o’clock. Kick-off time.

  “Diefenbaker is from Saskatchewan,” says James, “so he’s probably hoping Ottawa loses.”

  “Why?” says Kathy.

  “Because of the Saskatchewan Roughriders.”

  “There are two teams called the Rough Riders?” Kathy knows lots of things but football isn’t one of them. “Isn’t that confusing?” she asks.

  “The Saskatchewan Roughriders are out west,” says Buster. “In Saskatchewan.”

  “And they’re spelled differently,” says James. “The Saskatchewan team is just one word, Roughrider.”

  “Yeah,” I say, “but what if both teams made it to the Grey Cup and you were listening to it on the radio, so you couldn’t tell who was who.”

  “The Rough Riders are passing,” I say in my best broadcaster’s voice. “Oh, no! The Roughriders have intercepted! Look, the Roughriders are trying to block the Rough Riders who are trying to tackle the Roughriders. Hooray, they’ve scored. The Roughriders have scored!”

  Everybody laughs. Then suddenly Kathy is grabbing my arm, jumping up and down and pointing at the line of protesters.

  “In the red tam with the yellow pompom. See? See? Isn’t that Miss Cinnamon?”

  It is. Our grade six teacher – the best teacher ever. Except she left about two weeks ago, because she’s expecting a baby.

  “I still don’t get how she can be Miss Cinnamon if she’s having a baby,” says Buster.

  “Because she isn’t married,” says Kathy. “You don’t have to be married to have a baby.”

  “That’s the part I don’t get,” says Buster.

  “Well, Kathy’s mom is a nurse, so she’d know,” says James.

  And Buster and I both agree.

  Just then Miss Cinnamon sees us and waves. We all wave back. She’s hanging on to the arm of a tall man with a beard. He waves, too.

  “I guess their sign says it all,” says Kathy.

  Ban the Bomb! Save the World for Our Children! reads the sign in the tall man’s hands.

  “Yeah,” says James to Kathy and me. “But who’s going to save you?” He and Buster are in Mr. Gallup’s class. Kathy and I are stuck with the replacement teacher from hell, Miss Garr.

  I look at Kathy, still waving. Then she drops her hand and her shoulders sag. Miss Garr is pretty scary, all right. My dad told me a gar is a kind of fish with a long snout and lots of teeth. Some people call them needlefish. Well, that’s Miss Garr. She likes to needle people.

  I pat Kathy on the shoulder. She shakes me off.

  “It’s cold,” she says. “Let’s go.”

  We’re all shivering. Home begins to seem like a really good idea. I leap on my trusty Raleigh three-speed, and we peel out of there so fast, the protesters’ shouts are soon just a distant murmur.

  The rain isn’t hard but it’s steady, and you have to squint when you get into high gear. Hey, maybe I’ll catch pneumonia! Then it won’t even matter if the weather is horrible tomorrow. They can’t make me go if I’m in the hospital. I swerve to hit a puddle.

  It isn’t fair. I have three older sisters, as well as a younger
sister and brother, but I’m the only one in the family who has to go with Dad to the War Memorial tomorrow for the Our Mistress Day service.

  “There’ll be real soldiers with guns,” says Buster.

  “There’ll be marching bands with three hundred thousand bagpipers,” says James.

  “You should feel proud,” says Kathy.

  “I am proud,” I say, but I don’t sound it. “It’s going to be so boring. I just know it.” They all agree.

  What I really want to say is that I’m scared – scared of letting my father down. But I can’t tell them that. And I can’t tell them why.

  I make it home in time for the second quarter of the game, but Mum won’t let me listen to the radio until I change into pyjamas. Then I sit in the living room with Dad in front of our fireplace with a blanket around me and my feet in a tub of hot water, drinking barley soup from a mug and listening to our Rough Riders lose.

  “You could have caught your death of cold,” Mum says, tucking me in.

  “Good,” I mutter. “Then I won’t have to go to the memorial service.” I say it under my breath but not far enough under my breath.

  “What was that?” says Dad. His eyebrows are all bunched together into one huge hairy eyebrow, and every hair looks angry.

  “Nothing.”

  He looks towards the ceiling.

  “Must be those pesky little no-see-ums. I could have sworn I heard a teensy, insect-like voice complaining about something.”

  I look for no-see-ums until I think he’s stopped glaring at me. I check. He’s looking into the fire. I don’t think he’s listening to the game. I can hardly hear it myself. All I can think about is tomorrow.

  “Our Mistress Day.”

  “What did you say?”

  I didn’t realize I’d said it out loud.

  “Our Mistress Day.”

  “It’s Armistice Day,” says Dad, spelling it out. “Good grief, Rex.”

  “Armistice? What’s that?”

  “Truce,” says my father. “The end of the war.” He puffs away at his pipe. “It comes from the old Swahili word meaning no more lumpy porridge.”

  I’ll never understand how my father can be funny when he’s in a foul mood, and he is in a foul mood, that’s for sure.

  “The Americans call it Veterans Day,” I tell him.

  “Trust the Yanks,” says my father. “They didn’t even join the bloody war until they’d finished bloody dessert. The Brits and the Canadians had been slogging through the mud since bloody breakfast.”

  It’s a three-bloody sentence, which means he is really riled.

  It’s halftime in the football game and we’re sitting there in the living room, just the two of us, silent now. I don’t know what to say. Nothing? That seems like a good idea.

  Then Mum comes in with more soup for me and another corned beef and Branston pickle sandwich for Dad. There is a furrow in his forehead you could park a Pontiac in.

  “Our Mistress Day,” he says again. “Did you hear that, Doris?”

  Mum is tucking my blanket around me. She looks as if she’s working on her own foul mood and doesn’t want to be interrupted.

  “Do you think war is some kind of blooming love affair, Rex?” says Dad.

  I’ve seen the documentaries on TV. I’ve seen the shrapnel wounds in my father’s knee. I know war isn’t any fun, which is why we should just get over it, shouldn’t we?

  “The war ended in 1945, right?” I say. “That’s seventeen years ago. Why should we keep remembering all that horrible gunky stuff?”

  Especially if you have to remember it standing in the pouring rain in scratchy flannel pants, I want to add. But from the expression on Dad’s face, I think I’d better shut up. He looks as if he is going to raise his voice, but then he snaps his mouth shut and just fills his pipe instead.

  His eyes are full of something, though.

  A storm. Bigger than the one outside.

  2

  Sunday

  ARMISTICE DAY AND THE SUN is shining! It’s cold in my room at the top of the house but not cold enough to catch your death.

  “I’m really worried about going to the service with Dad tomorrow,” I said to Mum the night before, when she came to tuck me in.

  “It’s important for your father, Rex.”

  “Then why is he so crabby?”

  “He always gets that way around now.”

  How can I explain to Dad that even though I’ve been practicing and practicing, I’m not ready?

  You see, I’m afraid I’ll faint.

  I’m sure I’ll faint.

  I climb out of bed and shiver until I’ve put on my dressing gown and slippers. I look at myself in the mirror on the wall. Then I take a deep breath and hold it.

  I watch the second hand on my bedside clock. After thirty seconds I’m dying, but I hold on. Forty seconds and I’m going to burst. Fifty-three seconds! But that’s it. The best I can do. I stagger back to bed.

  How will I ever hold my breath for two whole minutes?

  That’s what you have to do on Armistice Day if you go to the service up at the War Memorial. I saw it once on television. At exactly eleven o’clock on the eleventh day of the eleventh month, everybody at the service has to hold their breath for two minutes of silence. Even if you’re only eleven and your father suddenly decides you’ve got to be a man and you’re not ready.

  I sit on my bed and try to think of an illness I can pretend to have that I haven’t pretended to have recently.

  That’s when the caterwauling starts.

  I tiptoe down the stairs to the second floor. It’s Dad. I tiptoe along the hall to the staircase that leads to the main floor. My three older sisters are eavesdropping there.

  Annie Oakley turns and glares at me.

  “Shhhhhh,” she whispers.

  “Don’t Shhhhhh so loudly,” says Letitia.

  “God, you children are hopeless!” says Cassiopeia, the eldest.

  We might end up having World War III right here on the stairs but my father’s voice interrupts the whispering war.

  “Two-thirty?” he shouts. “Two-bloody-thirty-bloody-o’clock?”

  “Darling,” says Mum.

  “Don’t darling me,” says Dad. Then the Sausage starts to cry. He cries all the time. I lean way over the railing and I can just see him at the end of the hall in the kitchen in his high chair. My little sister, Flora Bella, is standing beside him. It looks as if she just poured orange juice on his head.

  Dad marches out of the kitchen and down the hall. We skitter back up the stairs to the landing. He opens the door to his study, which is right at the bottom of the stairs. He doesn’t notice us. He’s dressed for the big event in a blazer with his war medals on it and a weird little soldier’s cap I’ve never seen before. He shouts back down the hallway.

  “Two-thirty,” he says. “Is nothing sacred?” Then the study door slams shut behind him.

  It’s the day of truce, but you wouldn’t know it at our house.

  Dad won’t come out of his study and Mum is fuming, and it’s all because they changed the ceremony up at the War Memorial to the afternoon.

  “It’s so people can go to church,” Mum explains to us as she swabs up orange juice and tries to stop the Sausage from crying. “It’s not usually on a Sunday.”

  “Yes it is,” says Annie Oakley. “Every seven years it’s on a Sunday.”

  “Well, I just wish Daddy would make us breakfast,” says Cassiopeia. “Sunday is his day to make breakfast – the only day he makes breakfast.”

  “Oh, for God’s sake, young lady,” says Mum. “You’re twenty years old. Make it yourself.”

  “No, it’s the principle of the thing,” says Cassiopeia. “He won’t let us off the hook when we’re in a bad mood.”

  “We could make breakfast together,” says Letitia, hopefully. “It would be fun.”

  Meanwhile Annie has gone and got her bow and arrows from the front closet. She stomps past us towards t
he kitchen door.

  “Good idea,” she says. “I’ll go kill us a cat.”

  “Don’t you dare!” says Mum.

  “Okay, a squirrel,” says Annie and slams the back door behind her.

  It’s ten o’clock on a Sunday morning and there have already been two slammed doors. This is getting interesting.

  “I thought we had some rules around here about not going out on Sundays,” says Cassiopeia to Mum, who only glares at her as she rinses out an orange-juice-soaked tea towel in the sink.

  “I know how to make cinnamon toast,” says Letitia. “We learned in home ec.”

  “I want sausages,” says Flora Bella. Then she turns her gleaming eyes on our baby brother sitting in his high chair. She grabs him by his fat knees. “I want these sausages!”

  The Sausage had just stopped crying, but now he’s off again.

  “That’s it!” cries Mum, throwing up her hands. “I quit.”

  And as we all watch in shocked silence, she heads up the hall to the stairs, throwing her apron on the floor as she goes.

  “Make your own breakfast, shoot as many squirrels as you like. I’m through with the lot of you!” She is passing the study and she raises her voice so that the ogre with the medals and the funny hat on the other side of the door hears her loud and clear.

  It’s so exciting! Like Jackie Gleason and Audrey Meadows on The Honeymooners. My mind is working overtime. I run up the stairs after my mother. “Can I go out?” I ask.

  “May I go out!” says Mum.

  “May I go out?”

  “You may go to Hartford, Hereford and Hampshire as far as I’m concerned.” She slams the master bedroom door shut.

  A three-slammed-door morning! The new world record.

  Before anyone can say another word I scoot up to my room and put on my play clothes. My blazer, grey flannel pants, white shirt and red tie are all freshly ironed and carefully draped over the chair in the corner waiting for the Armistice Day service. I salute my good clothes and put on my Saturday things lying in a heap on the floor. My jeans are still a bit damp from yesterday, but who cares? Then I dash down the stairs before my parents come to their senses.

  For some strange reason, we are never allowed to play outside on Sundays. I don’t know why. We’re not religious. We don’t go to church, anyway. We’re supposed to stay in, or maybe go for a car ride or something dull like that. So this is too good to be true.