Plan B

Chapter Forty-six

“Wobbly,” sang Fran to the tune of Akon’s Lonely.  “I’m so wobbly!  I have nobody… to hold me up!  Ah!”

Somebody grabbed her around the waist.  Fran struggled to get free.

“Stop!  That tickles!  Dad!  Where did you come from?”

Conrad let go of her, amused, and Fran turned around to glare at him.

“Don’t cause a scene, Frankie,” he said, looking around the hospital reception.  “I’m here to take you back to school, whether or not you think you’re in a condition to stand.”

Still a bit weak on her legs, Fran followed him out into the car park.  She was a little put out Bruno hadn’t been able to come, but he was apparently baby-sitting Brookie’s siblings because Brookie’s mum had a hospital shift and his dad was away at an international conference.  Bruno’s visits to hospital had basically given her life, and she already missed him more than she thought was strictly permissible.

Conrad’s car was disappointingly normal.  When she got in and started reaching for all the buttons and dials on the dashboard, Conrad merely smiled, and none of them turned out to have a function different to the ones that they were prescribed.

“Bummer.”  Fran pouted, finally giving up on trying to produce rocket launchers from turning up the heating as Conrad pulled out onto the main road.  “Why isn’t this car as cool as your chairs and paintings?”

“It’s all finger-print sensitive,” Conrad told her.  “Can’t have any old body able to fire heat-seeking-missiles out of the exhaust, now, can I?”

“This car does that?”

“No.  I’m not particularly tempted to make it capable of doing that, either.  I have two little brothers called Eric and Bertie who come over from time to time – granted, Eric’s moving on – but I wouldn’t trust them anywhere near a car that did that even if they couldn’t use it.”

They stopped off at Conrad’s house so that Fran could put on her chest compressor and change into male clothes.

“You’re still growing,” Conrad remarked from the other side of the closed door.  “Would you like me to order you a slightly bigger chest compressor so that you don’t go fainting all over the place again?”

“The doctor said that was from the septicaemia and meningitis,” Fran called back, ruffling her hair and glancing in the mirror.  I need a haircut.  She puffed out her cheeks and blew her fringe out of her eyes.

“I’ll get you one anyway,” Conrad decided.

Figuring she couldn’t really do much else about her appearance, Fran left the room and trailed him back out to the car, taking care to avoid touching the fake flowers in the vases along the way, because Conrad wasn’t totally sure that he’d wired them correctly and she was in danger of turning the house into a biohazard zone if the fake petals came into contact with human sweat.

“I have a passport for you,” Conrad told her, “just in case people ever question your identity.  And a false birth certificate and all the other documentation you’ll need.  But here’s your passport – it’s the only one you’ll need to have yourself.”

The instant she took it off him, Fran flicked to the photo page.  She was registered as Francis James Grey, her birthday as the third of January, born in the town in which Conrad lived, and her sex as male.  She couldn’t help raising an approving eyebrow at the photo, which, although it wasn’t flattering, did at least make her look more masculine than in real life.