‘Eczema, eczema, eczema.’ Cassie sang her word, eating her Vegemite sandwich before school had even started.
‘Eczema?’ Lucinda put her elbow in Cassie’s side. ‘I’ve got eczema.’
‘No you haven’t.’ Cassie rolled her eyes at an imaginary person on the bench alongside Lucinda. She looked back from her imaginary person to Lucinda and saw that Lucinda was also eating her lunch before school. Lucinda’s lunch was brown bread with soggy tomato. It was disgusting.
To change the subject, Cassie pointed to the ground and said, ‘See that? That’s a stick insect.’
‘No,’ said Lucinda. ‘It’s just a stick.’
It was a stick insect though.
Lucinda pointed to her wrist: ‘See that? That’s eczema.’
‘There is no point in our having this discussion,’ Cassie announced.
‘Yes there is.’
‘Eczema’s when you turn into a fish, actually, Lucinda.’
‘Do I look like a fish? No. I don’t think so.’ Lucinda swung her legs and ate her tomato sandwich.
The word, Cassie realised, was spoiled now.
‘Eczema, eczema, eczema,’ she said listlessly. She had her eye on the stick insect, but so far it was just asleep.
When she got back from taking Cassie to school, Fancy knew that she ought to be working on her erotic fiction. She had promised thirty thousand words to her editor by tomorrow, and she had only written eleven. Specifically:
His penis smelled like a pappadam: sweaty, salty, strange and strong.
Her editor would cut that line.
She reached for the phone and selected the button for MARBIE AT HOME.
‘Hello,’ said Marbie’s voice.
‘You’re at home! Why aren’t you at work? I was just going to leave a message. Well, if you’re home, let’s go out for a coffee!’
Marbie agreed, explaining that she and Listen were taking a day off because they had ticklish throats, which could be the start of colds.
‘Or hayfever,’ suggested Fancy. ‘I’ll call Radcliffe and let him know, in case he was thinking of coming home for lunch. And then I’ll come right in.’
Marbie looked fine when Fancy saw her, although Listen appeared to be weary. Also, she was behaving strangely: wearing sunglasses inside the shopping centre; walking backwards wherever she went.
Marbie was excited about buying a tennis racquet, and wanted to talk about something that the tennis racquet had which was called the sweet spot.
After the coffee break, Fancy did not feel ready to go home, so she shopped for Cassie’s birthday, even though it was a month away. At home again, she stood before her computer and decided she ought to do some housework.
‘Oh, Cassie,’ she said aloud to herself when she put on the washing-up gloves. Cassie was always putting soapy wet hands into the gloves, and leaving them wet, cold, clammy and unpleasant on the inside.
Luckily, by the time she had finished washing up (with a fresh pair of gloves), it was just about time to fetch Cassie from school.
Dear Ms Murphy,
This is just a note to thank you for keeping an eye on my daughter (Cassie) yesterday afternoon. I noticed that you were on ‘bus duty’, and I also noticed that you are very good at keeping all the children within your ‘radar’. As I waited for Cassie, this is something I observed, and, as a mother, I was pleased.
I do hope our Cassie is behaving herself. I know she can be a little erratic, but she has a good heart.
Kind regards,
Fancy Zing
At nights, staying up with her erotic fiction, Fancy felt afraid sometimes when she went to the bathroom. While she was washing her hands, for example, she would glance back at the shower cubicle, with its curtain tightly closed, and think: there is somebody in there!
She supposed she would see a shadow through the curtain, but it was a thick forest-green material, and she was short-sighted, not wearing her glasses in the bathroom generally (preferring to see herself, in the mirror, as somebody blurry and unmarked).
Sometimes she swung the curtain open quickly, to catch the intruder out. But so far, there had never been anybody there.
Radcliffe, she noticed at 3 am, had left the bedroom light on for her, and was lying asleep in the brightness. Making a point about how late it was. Or perhaps he just accidentally fell asleep.
When she climbed under the sheets, he opened his mouth slightly, as if to say something, but it was only a gentle snore.
‘You look tired,’ remarked the Canadian from his porch next door. He was eating sliced mango and kiwifruit this morning.
‘It’s funny you should say that,’ said Fancy, ‘about me looking tired. Because I just saw myself in the hallway mirror without my glasses on and I thought, “I look awful”, and then I thought, “isn’t it lucky I wear glasses so that nobody can see my eyes?” I put my glasses on and felt safe. And now I come out here and you notice right away.’
The Canadian took a pensive sip of coffee.
‘Cassie, honey!’ Fancy called, as usual, through the screen door.
‘Mum, I can’t find my shoes, where are my shoes? What did you do with my shoes?’ came a panicky little call from upstairs.
‘I didn’t do anything with your shoes. They’re right here by the front door where you left them.’
‘To be honest,’ said the Canadian from his porch, ‘I didn’t notice that you look awful. If you look awful,’ he continued, and peeled the foil lid from a boysenberry yoghurt, ‘your glasses are hiding that well.’
Fancy looked at his wide white breakfast plate, with its elegant butterflies of fruit, and tried to think of something to say besides isn’t it hot?
‘Kiwifruit is very good for you,’ she declared. ‘Vitamin C and zinc.’
‘You don’t say?’
Cassie clattered down onto the front-door mat to put on her shoes.
‘I’ll do one lace and you do the other,’ offered Fancy.
‘No, Mum. I’ll do them both.’
‘Bye now,’ called Fancy to the neighbour as she tightened the straps on Cassie’s satchel, her keys at the ready to open the car door.
‘It is possible,’ called the Canadian, his voice melting distantly against their car windows, ‘to be both beautiful and tired. A sleeping beauty. You see?’
Fancy adjusted the rear-view mirror and reversed with the regular bump of the fender on the steeply graded drive. Cassie, meanwhile, wound down the window slightly, and gave the Canadian a stare.
Dear Ms Murphy,
Please excuse Cassie for being late today.
It was all my fault! I was up late last night, working, and then overslept this morning.
Best regards,
Fancy Zing
Dear Ms Zing,
Thank you very much for your note!
I’m sure that Cassie was not more than a few minutes late – some of the children are much later than that, and we seem to get along all right. It is very kind of you to write notes of explanation, but please do not trouble yourself.
I look forward to meeting you at the Parent-Teacher Night later this year, when we can discuss Cassie properly. She certainly does seem to have a good heart, and is quite popular (I often see other children gathered around her while she entertains them with funny little stories – I wonder what she tells them!).
Best wishes,
Cath Murphy
Turning into her driveway one day, Fancy looked across at her neighbour’s verandah and saw that there were two of them. Her neighbour had become two.
She got out of her car, and glanced over quickly. Yes, there were now two men sitting at the breakfast table, slicing up kiwifruits, sipping from their coffee mugs. She kept her back straight, and hurried across the burning driveway to the soft, cool grass. She never wore shoes to drive.
‘– coyote fuck,’ she heard from the porch next door, just as she reached her front door. And then a chuckle.
She couldn’t help it. She turned and
stared.
‘Fancy,’ said her neighbour, ‘hello there. This is a friend from Canada, visiting for a couple of days. Bill. Meet Fancy.’
‘Did I offend you?’ said Bill with a friendly nod. ‘You heard what I just said? Coyote fuck?’
How direct the Canadians were. ‘Well . . .’ she began.
‘It’s an expression – coyote fuck,’ he explained. Meanwhile, her neighbour looked down, slicing up another kiwifruit. ‘You know when you pick a girl up at a bar – or, I guess, in your case, when you pick up a guy – anyhow, you pick someone up at a bar, right, at the end of the night, so you’re blind drunk and you don’t know what you’re doing. You take them home, you sleep with them, the next morning, there they are in your bed, fast asleep, lying on your arm, you’re thinking what the fuck? You’re thinking: how do I get OUT of here without waking up this chick? What are you going to do?’
Fancy tilted her head to the side. ‘What are you going to do?’ she asked.
‘You’re going to chew through your arm.’
The visitor nodded to himself and picked up a slice of kiwifruit.
Fancy waited.
‘It’s what coyotes do when they get caught in a trap,’ he explained as he slurped at the fruit. ‘They chew through their leg to free themselves. See?’
Her neighbour offered her a cup of coffee.
‘No thank you. And thank you for the story, Bill. Nice to meet you.’
She opened the screen door to her house, and it let out a long, thin squeal.
Dear Ms Murphy,
How kind of you to write! I, also, look forward to meeting you at the Parent-Teacher Night.
I’m so pleased to hear that Cassie is popular! I hope she does not give you any trouble.
You know, I just thought I would let you know that I was talking to Barbara Coulton the other day – she is Lucinda’s mother – and she told me that Lucinda is happier than she’s ever been at school! Barbara is delighted with the standard and variety of work that Lucinda brings home, and is especially pleased that you correct Lucinda’s spelling mistakes – such a rare thing in modern teaching.
Take care, and
Best wishes!
Fancy Zing
‘Write this down,’ Fancy said to Radcliffe on Sunday afternoon: ‘Toilet paper.’ Radcliffe wrote it down. ‘Follow me down the hall,’ she instructed, taking out the vacuum cleaner from the hall closet. Obediently, Radcliffe followed, writing the list.
‘The vacuum cleaner’s broken, you know.’
‘I don’t want the vacuum cleaner,’ said Fancy, patiently. ‘I just want the bucket from behind it. Paper towels. I’ve decided to wash the glass doors. Or will Cassie just run through them? Okay: butter, self-raising flour, Kangaroo Cookies, Valerio Pies.’
‘I think she’ll run through them,’ agreed Radcliffe, writing carefully. ‘Don’t wash them. Let’s go for a walk instead. Anything else?’ His pen at the ready.
‘Yes. Spaghetti. Okay. Good. Let’s go for a walk. Radcliffe, what do you mean it’s broken?’
‘What’s broken?’
‘The vacuum, you just said it was broken. Since when?’
‘Oh,’ he said vaguely, ‘since the other week. I came home to surprise you at lunchtime and you weren’t here, so I smashed a glass, then I tried to vacuum it up, and the vacuum cleaner jammed, and now it seems to be broken.’
‘So you smashed a glass? Because I wasn’t here? Where was I?’
‘That came out wrong. I think you were having coffee with your sister in Castle Hill. Remember that day? And Marbie brought Alissa along, you told me. They both had colds. Or at least Alissa did. That’s how you put it.’
‘She prefers to be called Listen, you know.’
‘Anyhow, let’s go for a walk and, tell you what, I’ll take the vacuum into that new repair shop by the hardware store.’
On Saturday, it would be Cassie’s birthday. It was a secret, almost scary, wonderful fact which she carried around each day, like a big smile about to happen on her face.
But what Cassie was actually realising today (Thursday) was that it used to be better than this, back when she was a kid. Maybe when she turned five or six, it was more than just a smile: it was like everything was whispering and just about to skip. Now, turning seven, her excitement felt a bit wrong.
It’s because I know you can get disappointed, she realised to herself. One time she got too excited on her birthday and jumped on the table where the grown-ups were sitting and at first they laughed but then she knocked over their champagne bottle and champagne spilled onto her dad’s lap and she got into trouble. She cried, and you should never cry on your birthday.
It was Thursday already, and tomorrow she had work to do for the Friday night Zing Family Secret Meeting, and then Saturday it would be Cassie’s birthday, so that really only left today and Sunday to finish another thirty chapters of her erotic fiction. Fancy stared at her computer in wonder.
She decided to write to Cassie’s teacher.
Dear Ms Murphy,
Just wanted to let you know that Cassie has a loose tooth
But then there was a knock at the front door.
She opened the door and, in the sun-shadow, there stood a handsome stranger. Tears sprang at once into Fancy’s eyes. She blinked them away.
The stranger was carrying a plate, covered in a tea-towel. He was wearing a loose T-shirt and jeans, and worn sneakers without socks. His shoulders were broad, his face was darkly tanned, and his eyes, behind small, wire-rimmed spectacles, were glinting.
‘Hello there,’ he said.
At that, he transformed into the Canadian-next-door.
She was so disconcerted, she did not open the screen door. She stood and simply stared.
‘Not in any way intending to bother you,’ he continued, in a slightly formal voice. ‘But I’ve baked you an apology cake. My buddy from Canada. Bill. The other day. I just wanted to apologise for him. He’s a good guy but not exactly the most tactful, and I just about died when he told you that story of his. I just about died, and now I am here to apologise.’
‘Oh!’ cried Fancy, in a flutter. ‘The coyote fuck story! I wasn’t offended at all! I liked it even! I write erotic fiction. That’s my occupation. So, see, nothing like that bothers me at all! It’s my career! I know it must sound strange to you, me, a mother in the suburbs, writing erotic fiction, and the only person I ever slept with my whole life is my husband!’
There was silence for a moment.
Fancy opened the screen door, and it let out its usual squeal.
‘I could fix that for you.’ He was looking at the door.
‘No! No! I can do that! All it needs is a bit of WD40!’
‘I agree,’ he said, with that odd little smile. ‘I still think my friend was inexcusable, so please take this maple cake. Okay?’
He used one foot to hold open the screen door as he passed the cake towards her. She took the cake, and he withdrew his hands, palms upwards. She saw that his palms were calloused. Then he saluted, with that same glint in his eye, and ran down the steps of her porch.
Rather than crossing directly to his own porch, he took the driveway, walked along the street, and then walked back up his own driveway. She found this extremely moving.
Driving to the Zing Family Secret Meeting the next night, Fancy felt very happy. She felt excited about dinner that night – it would be roast chicken, as usual – and about the meeting afterwards (there was lots to discuss, and she had prepared a slide show). She also felt excited about Cassie’s birthday tomorrow. How wonderful that Marbie and Vernon were hosting it! She might go to the gym before the party. How thin she was these days, now that she was going to the gym regularly. She leaned back into her seat, humming along with the tune that Cassie was singing in the back seat.
And then Radcliffe said what he said. ‘You remember Gemma in the pay office?’ he said, changing lanes.
‘No,’ said Fancy.
‘Come on! You must r
emember Gemma. She’s the one who spilled her drink everywhere at the office Christmas party? Remember?’
‘No,’ repeated Fancy.
‘Well.’ He shrugged. ‘Well, trust me, there’s a Gemma who works in my pay office. She works afternoons only, lucky duck. Anyhow, turns out she had some kind of laser treatment done on her moles. You know, you’d call them freckles, but they’re really moles. Anyhow. Extraordinary. She got about ten of them zapped.’
Fancy could not believe it. She lowered her chin to check the freckles on her bare shoulders: nicely spaced, attractive freckles. Beauty spots, really.
‘What exactly do you mean by that?’ she said coldly, after a moment.
Radcliffe turned swiftly towards her with a hurt, confused expression on his face. Then he looked back to the road.
MARBIE ZING
In the hot noon light of a summer day once, Marbie, nine years old at the time, was almost killed by an umbrella.
She was distracted at the time.
The day before, her sister Fancy had walked in to the beach house at sunset and announced that she had done something incredible.
Marbie was supposed to be washing the sand off her feet, but hearing this, she ran inside. She made herself invisible by placing herself, side-on, in the narrow open space between the bubble-glass sliding doors. She had to turn her head to see what was happening.
Fancy was standing in the centre of the main room, her hands on her hips, waiting for her parents. Mummy leaned in from the kitchen, where she was making a beetroot salad. Daddy leaned in from the bathroom, where he had just had a shower.
‘What incredible thing did you do, sweetheart?’ called Mummy.
‘What’s up, Fance?’ said Daddy.
‘I told Radcliffe the Secret.’
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