The Spell Book Of Listen Taylor

by Jaclyn Moriarty

  And then, what happened? Was it a personal tragedy? Or was it just the daily grinding of the gears, the folding and unfolding of the doors, the beeping of buttons telling him to stop, tickets, inspectors, teenagers pretending to be younger than they were, people leaning forward to ask where to get off, feet on seats, and spilling Coke cans. Was it just the day-to-day that did this?

  Fancy cried the whole way home. She tried to comfort herself by recalling that this Friday she would meet Cath Murphy. For the first time ever, I am going to talk to Cath face-to-face. But this made her cry all the more.

  Thursday afternoon, Fancy was working on her prize-winning novel. Look for characters from everyday life. She remembered reading that somewhere.

  She thought of the scowling bus driver and wondered if he could be a character. It could be a sort of public-transport novel. Transport could be the language that she taught her readers! Excitedly, she began to research transport on the Internet. She scribbled down the addresses of various useful-sounding Web sites: Why not just list the URLs at the start of every chapter? Why not—and here she became even more excited—why not just refer her readers to Google? “If you are interested in any of the topics raised in this novel, please enter the following search terms in Google: bus, train…”

  “Hmm.” Fancy paused in her frantic scribbling and looked up, frowning to herself.

  A faint sound caught her attention. Cassie, she realized, had been standing at her office door knocking gently for some time.

  “Hello, Cassie!” she said.

  “Hello, Mum,” replied Cassie, nodding. “Can I paint my bedroom ceiling, please?”

  “What color would you like to paint it?” said Fancy, spinning around in her office chair.

  “A lot of colors,” Cassie explained. “It has to be like a jungle. There have to be two cheetahs. But also monkeys, elephants, zebras…” Cassie listed the animals on her fingers, but her voice drifted away.

  “Well!” said Fancy. “Why not?”

  She and Cassie drove to the hardware store and bought paint, brushes, and a small stepladder. Fancy persuaded Cassie that they should put the jungle on one of the walls, rather than the ceiling, so they would not have to strain their necks.

  She was painting stars in the jungle sky, while Cassie added ladybugs to the jungle grass, when Radcliffe arrived home.

  They heard his car in the driveway.

  Then they heard his voice at the front door: “Fancy that! My Fancy is at home!”

  Cassie held her paintbrush still for a moment, and looked up. “Mum?” she said. “How come he never says ’Fancy that, my Cassie is at home?’”

  Fancy looked down at her daughter.

  “Or else,” said Cassie, painting again, “‘Cassie that, my Cassie is at home.’ How come he doesn’t say that?”

  “That’s a good question, Cassie,” Fancy replied.

  Friday afternoon, Fancy was choosing earrings to wear to the parent-teacher interview, when Cassie appeared at her bedroom door, sneezing to herself.

  “Hello, Cassie!” said Fancy, seeing her in the mirror. “I thought you were playing outside.”

  “Hello, Mum,” said Cassie, and coughed.

  Fancy continued to hold various earrings against her ear.

  “Mum?” said Cassie, after a moment.

  “Yes, darling?”

  “Can I show you my foot?”

  “I’ve already seen your foot!” Fancy joked, and then, when there was nothing but quiet wheezing from Cassie, she turned around and looked at her daughter. “All right then, let’s see your—my God, Cassie, what have you done?”

  Cassie’s right foot was the size of a loaf of bread. Her face was swollen like home-baked banana muffins. She was scratching her arms and her stomach.

  “I got stung by a bee,” she explained. “And I’m allergic to bees, aren’t I?” Then she slid down the doorframe to the bedroom floor, whispering, “I can’t really breathe very well.”

  Radcliffe arrived home from work just as Fancy was carrying her daughter out the front door.

  “Bee sting,” she called, jogging across to her car in the driveway. “I’m taking her to the hospital.”

  Radcliffe slammed his car door. “Did you give her the injection?” he said.

  “And she’s had an antihistamine,” Fancy nodded. “She’s already feeling better, aren’t you, darling? We’ll just get the doctors to make sure.”

  Radcliffe approached and opened the car door for Fancy. “But her eyes! Cassie, are your eyes are all right?”

  “They’re just a bit itchy,” said Fancy breezily, closing the door on her daughter.

  “They’re getting better,” Cassie called through the window.

  “Just relax there, Cass,” suggested Fancy, getting into the driver’s seat.

  Radcliffe hovered, anxiously, and said, “I’ll just stay here, shall I? Or shall I come along?”

  Fancy put the car into reverse and pressed the accelerator to the floor.

  When they returned it was ten o’clock, and Cassie was fast asleep. Fancy carried her into her bedroom, changed her into pajamas, and then sat on the edge of the bed and watched her daughter sleeping.

  Radcliffe hovered, whispering, “She’s all right?”

  Fancy nodded.

  They went into the kitchen for a cup of tea, and Fancy told him about the doctor’s suggestion that they get Cassie into a desensitization program.

  “I think her allergy’s getting worse,” said Fancy, “so maybe it’s time we looked into that?”

  Radcliffe nodded but he seemed distracted. “By the way,” he said, filling up the kettle for more tea. “I suppose you’re upset about missing the parent-teacher night?”

  “Oh,” said Fancy, remembering.

  “Well,” said Radcliffe, “good news! I called the school and managed to speak to Cath. I explained that you couldn’t make it, and asked if you could have another appointment. She promised to call you to arrange it.”

  “You spoke to her!”

  “Only for a moment, and only on the phone,” said Radcliffe firmly. “Don’t worry yourself, Fance. Just as we all agreed, you’ll be the first to meet Cath in person. All right? And you’ll get to do that on your own.”

  “Well!” Fancy was moved. “Thank you so much, Radcliffe.”

  Radcliffe nodded, and looked earnest for a moment. “Like your mother says,” he declared, “the restraint you’ve shown this year has been commendable. It would have been so easy for you to make an excuse to meet with her. But no. You exercised caution and waited till the proper time. All you have to do now is wait a little longer, and she’ll give you a call.”

  Fancy blinked the tears out of her eyes.

  Three

  Monday lunchtime, Listen wandered, pretending she was going somewhere, but in her mind she was climbing the outside wall of the Redwood central building. She could see hand- and footholds all over that wall—window ledges, jutting bricks, water pipes—and she was getting very fast at her rock-climbing classes.

  Imagine this: There is a first-grader trapped on a window ledge up there; Listen climbs the side of the wall and rescues the kid in an instant; most of Grade Seven watches in awe from the schoolyard below.

  Then, after lunch, in her Science class, imagine this: An intruder surprises them, planning to take the class hostage. Silently, Listen slips out of her seat. “Stay down!” she whispers, and girls hunch over their desks with startled eyes as Listen runs and leaps—a flying side kick across the entire classroom! It ends with a dramatic thump of her foot against the whiteboard, which sends the board spinning. This distracts the intruder so that, next, she overcomes him with a series of spinning hook kicks, chair splits, side kicks (straight up), flying back kicks, and double knifehand guarding blocks.

  Breathless, one foot on the chest of the astonished intruder (now lying flat on the floor), Listen glances back at the class. They are weeping with fear and relief, but also applauding.

  An
other thing: That Redwood teacher—Mr. Bel Castro—happens to be teaching the class, by chance, and he gazes at her in amazement and says, “I like that.”

  Tuesday, Nighttime

  Dear Nathaniel,

  This is just a note to tell you something, as you keep hanging up on me when I phone.

  Well, this is what I want to tell you: You are funny, kind, clever, and attractive, and when you frown there is just that one little line, like a Y between your eyes.

  I hope you like these “natural” looking envelopes. Strange, aren’t they?

  Lots of Love,

  Marbie

  Having walked out into the night to post her letter to Nathaniel, Marbie returned to her beanbag and reflected, against a backdrop of growing alarm, on just how much she missed him.

  She remembered a time when she had arranged to meet Nathaniel and Listen in Castle Hill but, half an hour before the meeting time, she had seen them in the distance, by chance. Nathaniel had also seen her, and had stopped still, dropping his shopping bags to the floor, opening up his face and his arms in an enormous, wondrous smile, shaking his head, as if to say, “Look who’s here!” while Listen giggled beside him.

  Also, she remembered how patient he was with her nightmares and sleepwalking. How she would wake in a panic from a nightmare and, from the darkness beside her, Nathaniel would speak calmly, in his daytime voice, and say, “Marbie? Are you okay?”

  She remembered that when she touched him on a knee or a forearm, he would continue with the conversation, but casually, as he talked, he would cover her touch with a touch of his own, the tiniest pressure from his thumb.

  She remembered also the bursts of love she had experienced when she saw him hunched over papers, working on ideas for the Banana Bar. Or when she saw how kind he was with his daughter—how seriously he took her education, and how he knew all the names and hobbies of her friends.

  Now Marbie knew it was time to confront herself. Why had she started an affair with an aeronautical engineer? She sank deeper into the beanbag and closed her eyes. (Somebody once told her that ideas and answers emerged as you fell asleep.) Certainly, there had been a strange low buzz between them that she supposed was chemistry. He had seemed like an adventure parachuting into her otherwise dull work life. It was just as if a waiter had unexpectedly brought a hot bread roll. Wow, a special treat! she might have thought, before she realized that they had heated the roll for a reason. The A.E.’s purples and paisleys, his visions and surprising invitations—they were all just hiding the fact that he was stale.

  She made herself consider the theory of Toni from work. “It’s because you had just moved in with Nathaniel and his kid,” Toni had informed her. “You were running for your life!” Could it have been about Nathaniel? Had she been reacting, subconsciously, to all the indications that here was the rest of her life? After all, she had bought an apartment with him and she had told him the Zing Family Secret. The level of commitment was impressive, and perhaps overwhelming.

  That’s just nonsense. I was ecstatic about life with Nathaniel. I considered him perfect. I was terrified of losing him! I thought I had to concentrate on keeping the luck—I was obsessed with ladders and black cats! I was afraid of making the simplest decisions—what to wear to work; whether to leave paper clips under my desk—just in case one tiny thing would end it. I saw catastrophe at every corner, and the suspense was killing me.

  And there it was.

  Marbie’s eyelids fluttered as she shifted slightly in her beanbag. It was clear to her just for a moment. If she was going to lose Nathaniel at some unknown moment in her future, she had better make it happen at once. If a catastrophe was flying at high speed toward her, she would move to be directly in its path.

  She found she was drifting toward sleep. Already, her revelation was splintering into confusion. She fumbled for its words, but found there was nothing in her mind anymore except small, sharp images, the pinpoints of tiny paper clips skimming through the air.

  Wednesday, Listen was summoned out of morning roll call by a woman in a cardigan and wooden earrings. “Might I borrow Listen Taylor?” said the woman from the door, and the roll-call teacher said, “Why not?”

  The woman introduced herself to Listen as they walked across the schoolyard. Her name was Ms. Woodford, and she was the Redwood counselor. Her office was very small—the size of a broom closet—but every surface was covered with paper lanterns, paper swans, paper bears, and paperweights. There was also a picture of a fox on the wall.

  Although Ms. Woodford seemed like a nice person, Listen was confused about what she herself was doing sitting in her office.

  After chatting about how warm it was getting, and how difficult it was to remember the snow, Ms. Woodford asked what Listen’s parents did for a living. Listen explained that her mother was in Paris, or maybe Peru, and had been on vacation since Listen was a baby. Also, she added, since the counselor seemed keen to hear more, also, she and her dad used to live in a campervan outside her dad’s Banana Bar, then they lived with her dad’s girlfriend, Marbie, but now they lived in the campervan again.

  “Oh!” Ms. Woodford was upset about everything. “You know, it’s not your fault that your mum ran away when you were a baby, don’t you?”

  Listen nodded, intrigued. Of course it wasn’t her fault.

  “And you live in a campervan!” She seemed so upset by this that Listen had to reassure her: “It’s okay. I don’t really mind. I mean, I miss Marbie and that. But it’s fine.”

  Ms. Woodford played with a square of construction paper, and turned it into a rose.

  “Cool,” said Listen. “How did you do that?”

  “So,” said Ms. Woodford, not answering. “How’s school for you?”

  Listen looked at the rose and said, “Fine.”

  “Uh-huh. Plenty of friends to muck around with then?”

  Muck around with, thought Listen. What did that mean? “Yep,” she said, staring at the paper rose, which she now thought was maybe just a cabbage.

  “I go to Tae Kwon Do and also rock climbing after school. I’ve got some friends there.”

  “And friends at this school?”

  “Well, this is not really our school, so it’s all kind of different,” she tried.

  “No, but I mean in your grade? Your own grade?”

  “Yep,” said Listen, “plenty.”

  After that, Ms. Woodford chatted about how happy she was to be a school counselor at Redwood Elementary, and how Listen could come and see her any time she liked, and then she was allowed back to class.

  It was true that she had friends outside of school. Anyway, she was kind of friends with Carl at Tae Kwon Do. He sometimes spoke to her after class, and there had been that thumb-war incident. Also, the other day she had noticed a Bellbird Junior High emblem on his bag, and she had actually walked up to him and said, “I know the people who live in the house next door to your school.” Carl seemed surprisingly happy to hear it. “Really?” he said, grinning like she’d told him she knew where he could get a year’s supply of Gatorade for free (he was always tipping back an empty bottle of Gatorade when she saw him after class, trying to get the last drops). He seemed to want more information, so she added, “I used to go to their place every Friday night.”

  He said she should look out for him because he stayed late on Fridays for violin. She didn’t get a chance to explain that she had actually stopped going to the Zings’ on Friday nights, because the others at Tae Kwon Do were laughing at Carl for being a black belt who played violin.

  Furthermore, at rock climbing, there was a girl named Samalia Janz with a ponytail, who always said “Hi” and “See you,” as if Listen were a regular person. Listen was pretty sure that they would soon have a real conversation. It had occurred to her that Samalia might be even more shy than she was. She herself was going to have to start the conversation.

  After school that day, Listen collected the mail from their post-office box, but there were jus
t two letters for her dad.

  She walked the letters back to the Banana Bar, and did not press the button at the traffic lights. Instead, she ran to the middle of the road, waited as a truck skimmed past her, and then ran again.

  Her dad was eating a chocolate-coated banana in the empty shop. He was sitting on the counter and swinging his legs. “Whatcha got?” he said, trying to see the envelopes.

  “Nothing.” Listen sat up beside him on the counter.

  He leaned back and got her a chocolate banana of her own.

  “Hey,” he said, when he had opened the first envelope. “This is from your school. Did you know they were going to do this?”

  “Do what?”

  “A camp,” said her dad. “They’ve fixed your classrooms so you’ll be able to go back in a couple of weeks. And they’re taking you all to the mountains the weekend after next, because you’ve been good sports. Good sports. It says it right here. See that?”

  “How about that,” said Listen.

  “I always knew you were a good sport, Listen. And now here it is in print. Wait a second. Now it says they’re going to do some extra lessons at the camp, to make up for the classes you’ve missed. So, the camp’s also compulsory.”

  “Compulsory?” said Listen. “It can’t be.”

  “Which is it? Is it a special treat because you’re such good sports, or is it compulsory because you’re behind in schoolwork?” Her dad was holding up the letter and shaking it: “Make up your mind!”

  “Who’s the other letter from?”

  He picked up the second envelope—it was brown with strange pieces of bark and string embedded in the paper.

  “Nobody,” he said, and put it in his pocket.

  On the doormat there was a large pink envelope, addressed with the single word MARBIE in swirling purple ink. “More poetry,” she frowned, recognizing the A.E.’s style.