It was much better when she had a boyfriend herself, so she could respond with my boyfriend, to redress the imbalance and get on with it. Or even better, say my boyfriend first.
“White, no sugar, yes?”
Warren Woodford’s voice was behind her, and when she turned around, it was not just his voice, it was him. His left arm was pinning a bundle of folders awkwardly to his side, and his right hand stretched to hold two mugs of coffee, long fingers looped around the handles. He was staring ferociously at the coffee mugs, as if that would keep them from spilling.
He has noticed how I take my coffee! Or maybe that’s how people take their coffee, as a rule.
She helped him to sort out the papers and mugs, then he straddled the bench, and now it was strange, because she was facing forward, while he was looking at her shoulder. Like a setup for a photo shoot. Or like he was riding a horse the regular way, and she was riding it sidesaddle. His nose was quite long, and his mouth was a bit big for his chin.
“I hear you’re studying law?” he said, as if he didn’t care that his mouth was too big for his chin.
He has heard things about me!
“Not yet,” Cath explained. “I only just enrolled. The classes start next week.”
“Huh.” He nodded to himself, as if this was just as he’d imagined. “Why would you do that? Study law, I mean?”
“Something to do.” Cath shrugged.
“Something to do,” he repeated slowly. And then, in a chant: “Something to do; someone to sue; somewhere to queue. Hmm. Queue. Forgive me.”
He put down the mug and said, “This is terrible coffee. And another thing, I don’t know if I’m going to be able to work with the principal here. What’s his name? Billson. He seems a bit, I don’t know, slow?”
“I think,” said Cath, “that he is brilliant.”
“Well, brilliant, yes, of course. Frank Billson, eh? A remarkable man.” He took a thoughtful sip from his coffee. “And this is excellent coffee.”
So far, in five days of school, and three brief chats on the second grade balcony, Warren had not said my girlfriend once. Cath appreciated that. Either Warren did not have a girlfriend, or he did not see the need to mention her. Either way, it was respectful of him.
Cath liked being single, but she wanted to make friends with this man, this Warren Wishful Woodford. (His eyes had a wistful, wishful look.) She wanted to make friends and to do that, she might have to flirt.
Three
Tuesday morning, Fancy Zing dropped Cassie at school and came back to the smug, empty house. She sighed as she wandered its hallways. Its hallway, she corrected herself. There was only the one.
She changed back into her pajamas and sat at her desk with tea and honey-on-a-crumpet.
Irritating Things About My Husband # 2
During sex, he talks in this low, husky voice, which is nothing like his own. More like somebody hiding in the pantry and phoning the police while a robbery takes place.
He uses the voice to say things like “Do it to me, baby,” which is acceptable, though not to my taste. But he also uses it for ordinary things, such as “Just move your leg slightly, honey? That’s pinching me?”
I am always clearing my throat during sex to indicate that he should clear his.
At fourteen, Fancy had worked part-time in a hardware store, and she still remembered fondly the counting down of change.
“Twenty dollars? Thanks. So, that’s eleven, that’s thirteen, that’s fifteen, and that’s twenty. Would you like a bag with that?”
“No thanks,” the men always said. But sometimes she gave them no choice, putting their screwdrivers straight into plastic bags. They never used the handles when she did that, but grabbed the bag around the neck as if it were a hen.
Now she was a romance writer (although, of course, she was planning a prize-winning novel: Romance was her bread-and-butter knife; the novel would be her tomahawk). Specifically, Fancy wrote wilderness romances: stories set in remote locations such as the Guinean forests of Sierra Leone, or the shopping malls of South Dakota. The challenge was getting enough characters out there in the wilds to participate in the romance.
Wednesday night, Cassie found her parents in the TV room. She had just had a bath and was wearing her summer pajamas.
“Here’s trouble!” This is what her dad said whenever Cassie walked into the room. Or even if she’d just gone to the bathroom at a restaurant and was coming back to the table. “Here’s trouble!”
Where? Where was trouble?
What did her father mean?
Cassie sat on the carpet by the couch and crossed her legs so they’d forget that she was there.
Her mum had the remote control and was zipping through some recorded ads. Now she was zipping through the actual show. Did she mean to do that? She missed the end credits and zipped through a whole new program. Cassie sat quietly, pretending that nothing strange was happening.
“Well!” said her mum, finally noticing Cassie, and pressing STOP on the remote.
“No!” cried Cassie. “Don’t say ‘Well!’ like that! I don’t like it when you say it that way!”
“How would you like me to say it?” asked Mum. “Well? Well? Well!!” She tried out different pronunciations. “You choose, Cass.”
“I don’t want you to say it at all. It means you want me to go to bed.”
“Oh ho!” Her dad leaned forward on the couch. “Casso has clinophobia, has she?”
“What?”
He grinned at her. She stared back. Then she turned to her mum and explained: “Just say ‘well’ in a way that doesn’t sound so happy, okay?”
“All right, darling, say good night to your father.”
“My little clinophobic!” Her dad held out his arms for a hug.
“It’s a fear of going to bed,” Radcliffe confided later, leaning into Fancy’s study. “Clinophobia? A fear of going to bed.”
“I’m trying to work, Radcliffe,” Fancy said coldly.
Irritating Things About My Husband # 3
His family once owned a dog, a Rhodesian ridgeback, which they named Fancy, which is my name, and he cannot leave that coincidence alone.
Thursday morning, Fancy felt that there could be nothing wrong with driving your daughter to school in your pajamas. Also, nothing wrong with jumping out of the car on the way home to dump two garbage bags of secondhand clothes into the St. Vincent de Paul blue bin. Nothing wrong with that at all!
Except that the man next door was having breakfast on his porch as she emerged in her pajamas, shouting, “CASSIE! GET A MOVE ON! WE ARE VERY, VERY LATE,” spilling worn-out clothes from two garbage bags that were hopelessly clutched under her arms.
He was one of those dull Canadians, the man next door, the kind who speak slowly and with a mild, polite amusement about everything.
“Got your hands full there,” he declared from his porch, with his knife and fork poised over his bacon, and that little smirk of his. Their houses were very close.
“Yes!” Fancy agreed, and then she had to pause, for the sake of politeness, before shouting at Cassie again.
The neighbor returned to his bacon and pancakes, and Cassie emerged from the hallway with a comb and scrunchie hanging from her mouth, the car keys looped around her finger, her hair falling into her face, dragging an enormous garbage bag behind her.
“What on earth are you—Cassie, darling, that’s the bag of books! We’re not bringing that one.”
Cassie took the comb and scrunchie from her mouth. “Why not?”
“Darling, we’re giving that one to the school fete, not to St. Vincent de Paul. But thank you, that must have been very heavy on the stairs.”
Cassie raised her eyebrows and turned to drag the bag back inside.
“No!” Fancy panicked. “Just leave it by the door there. No need to take it back upstairs.”
“Okay.”
“Have you got your lunch?”
“What is it?”
&n
bsp; “It’s peanut butter. On the second shelf of the fridge; run back in and get it, quick.”
“Peanut butter!” shouted Cassie, and stamped her foot. She had loved peanut butter yesterday, but sometimes her taste took an unexpected swerve.
“In Newfoundland,” said the Canadian from his porch, “the kids swap lobster sandwiches for peanut butter.”
Cassie stared at him.
“Gosh!” Fancy said.
“That’s how common lobster is,” confirmed the Canadian, “in Newfoundland.”
“Cassie,” Fancy said after an agonizing pause for politeness, “quick, honey, go and get your lunch.”
The news was starting its triumphant drumbeat as they pulled into the bus zone at Cassie’s school. “Toilet brush, toilet brush, toilet brush,” said Cassie, counting on her fingers. She pointed at the radio. “The news is on.”
“Here.” Fancy craned into the rearview mirror, and brushed Cassie’s hair behind her ears. “Pass me the pen from the glove box. I think I’d better write you a note.”
Dear Ms. Murphy,
Please excuse my daughter, Cassie Zing-Mereweather (better known as Cassie Zing—her choice!), for being late today.
I had to take some secondhand clothes to St. Vincent de Paul.
Yours sincerely and VERY best wishes,
Fancy Zing
Friday night, Radcliffe and Fancy drove to Fancy’s parents’ place for a Zing Family Secret Meeting. Cassie was in the backseat with the first week of Grade Two work piled around her.
“They are going to be amazed about this, aren’t they, Mum?”
She leaned forward in her middle seat belt and waved a butterfly painting around in front of them, blocking Radcliffe’s view of the road for a moment.
“They sure are!” agreed Fancy.
“For Christ’s sakes!” snapped Radcliffe, at the same time.
This threw Cassie back into her seat belt for a moment. Then she recovered. “First I’m going to show my math workbook with the gold star, then my painting and—no, wait—”
“We must be just about due to have the Samsons and Bellamys for dinner, eh?” Radcliffe said to Fancy, tapping on the steering wheel. He had the habit of talking over Cassie when he found her boring.
“Yes,” she agreed. “But Cassie’s birthday’s coming up in a few weeks.”
“Well, then, sixth I’m going to sing and—did you say something about my birthday, Mum?”
“Hey, Cass-kid.” Radcliffe glanced in the rearview mirror at Cassie. “Let’s hope you don’t suffer from alektorophobia, eh?”
There was silence from the backseat for a moment. “Pardon?”
“Alektorophobia.”
“Is it something for my birthday?”
Radcliffe chuckled. He pulled up at a red light, and Cassie sat quietly, waiting.
“It’s a fear of chickens,” Radcliffe explained to Fancy, in a low voice. “Alektorophobia. A fear of chickens. We’ll probably have roast chicken for dinner tonight, eh?”
“Well, tell Cassie then! Cassie, don’t worry about Dad, okay? He’s being silly.”
“Leave it,” said Radcliffe, accelerating as the light turned green. “This is how she learns.”
“Learns what!”
Fancy had the strangest sensation. As if an antelope were nibbling her chin.
“Electra,” murmured Cassie from the backseat. “Alektro? Electro.”
Radcliffe turned on the radio.
Four
Tuesday, running late for work, Marbie Zing chose her long floral skirt (It was a decision she would regret for the rest of her life), and then with a shiver replaced it and picked the blue dress.
“Nathaniel,” she said, waking him with a kiss on his bare shoulder, “what would you think of a woman who didn’t know the difference between daffodils and tulips?”
Nathaniel opened his eyes and said, “There is no such woman.”
Marbie worked in insurance, third-party recoveries, and along with her colleagues, played car crash on the edge of her desk. Second-party car enters roundabout here, third-party car is reversing here, family of elephants distracts attention here (these doughnuts are the family of elephants), our car heads straight through the middle, and boom! Little plastic people went zipping through the air.
She read their explanations for their sorry little smashes.
“I sneezed and lost control and hit a fence.”
“I sneezed, hit a pothole, and ran into a tree.”
“I sneezed and collided with the rear end of an elephant.”
She hushed angry customers and redirected their hostility: “Don’t speak to me like that, please…I’m hanging up now. I’m just about to hang up the phone.”
Wednesday, running late for work, Marbie tripped out of her high heel. A bicycle courier held the elevator door open while she reached a stockinged foot back to collect it.
Marbie had always been a slippery kind of person. In restaurants, napkins slid from her lap to the floor. Hair clips never stayed in her hair; they slipped to her shoulders, where they perched like silver butterflies. And her shoes were always falling from her feet. (It was because of this that she was first—aged six and a quarter—stung, on her toe, by a bee. “You ran right out of your sandals,” scolded her mother, who was always cranky when they hurt themselves.)
That day, however, she was slippery because she was distracted: It was Listen’s first day at Clareville Academy. “She’s too small for that school,” Marbie had said to Nathaniel last year. “Send her somewhere nice and little, like Bellbird Junior High.”
Nathaniel had pointed out that Listen was an average size. Also, that her friends from elementary, Donna Turnbull and the others, would take care of her at Clareville; also, that the only thing Listen’s mother ever did for her, besides sending a postcard or two, was set up an education trust fund. It was important that he spend every cent.
But Nathaniel was older than Marbie, and seemed to have forgotten school. She herself remembered junior high as a cacophony of shrieking bells and thudding teachers’ voices. All day she was distracted by images of Listen quietly dissolving in the noise. Papers drifted out of Marbie’s hands, and ink slipped from pens and stained her fingers.
She phoned Listen at home as soon as she could, to ask about her first day, and was strangely relieved to hear that the girl still had a voice.
Thursday morning, running late for work, Marbie almost stepped into the path of a semitrailer. A pencil seller shouted a warning just in time.
She phoned Nathaniel at the Banana Bar to tell him about it. She liked to phone Nathaniel at work, especially when he was busy, surrounded by customers. It was then that his voice took on the edge that it had when she first met him.
Actually, when she first met him, his voice had been jocular, like someone playing tennis. They had met in a hotel elevator in Melbourne, and had spent the next few days drinking coffee together, while Listen danced around their table.
It was not until they were all back home in Sydney that he began to telephone.
He carved off an edge of his voice for the phone calls, making it cool and restrained, which caused her to press her forehead to the wall, hushing even her breath so she could hear.
“Are you there?” he would say, in his nonchalant voice.
“Uh-huh.” And then she would fall silent at once so that his voice would go on in that way.
Friday, Marbie was not late for work, and she met the aeronautical engineer.
Tabitha (Marbie’s supervisor) had arranged for an aeronautical engineer to visit the small boardroom, the one with bowls of mints on the sideboard and views of Darling Harbour. He was there to demonstrate the tendencies of airborne cars.
They were always dealing with airborne cars in their work. Cars seemed to leave the ground at the slightest suggestion: a tap from a semitrailer; the bark of a dog on the side of the road. One claimant even said that her car took flight when she changed the radio station.
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sp; Marbie and her colleagues tended to be dubious about these claims, but Perhaps, they often said, we are wrong.
Fridays at work, everyone was cocky and buoyant, saying cheerful things with their heads tilted sideways. The aeronautical engineer arrived with his swinging paisley tie and purple shirt, and right away he recognized their Friday mood. He put both hands to his closely shaved head and said, “To begin. The airplane!” Then he asked for a page from Marbie’s notepad and showed them how to make a paper plane.
They spent the afternoon making paper planes, paper fans, or paper swans, and drinking all the wine from the small boardroom fridge, while the aeronautical engineer wandered around with his hands behind his back. He praised Marbie’s fan exuberantly.
Toni got the key to the big boardroom, and came back with seven half-bottles of white wine, and the aeronautical engineer praised her, which made Marbie slightly jealous, so she showed him the paper turtle she’d been working on. He didn’t understand what it was but praised it anyway. Then Rhamie interrupted with a handful of toy cars, and the aeronautical engineer remembered why he was there and made them throw the toys at one another to demonstrate the tendencies of airborne cars.
It was wonderful.
At four o’clock, everyone decided they had done enough work for the day, and they invited the aeronautical engineer to join them at the Night Owl Pub for their Friday drinks. He said he had to run and move his car because he had just that moment remembered it was in a one-hour parking spot! Oh no, they cried, you could have parked in our building! They wanted him to park in the building now, but he had a meeting in Chatswood and maybe didn’t even have time to have a drink? He’d try to join them for five minutes or so, once he had moved his car.
Marbie ran to phone Nathaniel at the Banana Bar and tell him she was having a drink but would be back in time for the Zing Family Secret Meeting.
“Don’t get hit by a semitrailer on your way,” instructed Nathaniel.
The Spell Book Of Listen Taylor Page 3