I Have a Bed Made of Buttermilk Pancakes

by Jaclyn Moriarty

  So then, with some relief, Cath returned to her jocular ways with Warren, and he also seemed relieved to have her back. They started having takeaway lattes again, and sometimes hot chocolates with marshmallows. And they spent a lot of time kneeling in front of the staffroom radiator trying to turn it up.

  Since their sandwich-maker friendship had never included discussion of the Wife, Cath did not raise her in their conversations now. Nor did Warren.

  One Wednesday afternoon, they worked in the staffroom until the sky was heavy with darkness. Walking to the parking lot, through the empty, echoing school grounds, cold fog curled around their ankles. ‘Like my cat,’ suggested Cath. Warren gave a chuckle, and kicked a pebble towards Cath. She kicked it straight back.

  ‘Don’t our cars look lonely?’ said Warren. ‘We should park them next to each other when we work back like this.’

  ‘So they can get to know each other,’ agreed Cath.

  They were now at the edge of the parking lot – Cath’s white Mercedes Sports gleamed from the far right corner; Warren’s rusting Corolla glinted from the left.

  ‘Holy baloney, I love your car,’ breathed Warren. ‘Remind me how you scored that again? Some wealthy former lover?’

  ‘I won it in a competition.’

  ‘Lucky girl,’ whistled Warren, and then swiftly: ‘Remind me when you were planning to take me for a ride in it?’

  ‘Right this moment,’ said Cath, clapping her hands together once like Mary Poppins. ‘You don’t have any plans, do you?’

  ‘Plans,’ said Warren, sadly. ‘I’m as lonely as our cars are tonight. I was going to see a movie actually. But what kind of a fool would choose a movie over a ride in your car, Cath? What kind of a fool, what kind of a tool, what kind of a drooling mule? Eh?’

  ‘I could drive you to the movie if you like. I’ll see it with you.’

  Warren leapt into the air. He was tall enough already: Cath imagined his leap would take him right into the stars.

  Then, suddenly, Katie Toby (teacher, Kinder A) was standing beside them. Cath gave a little shriek, and Warren said, ‘Holy jacaranda, woman, where did you come from?’

  They both stared down at Katie Toby, who was little, with a dimpled round face and a reputation, among parents, teachers and children alike, as: sweet as a toffee apple.

  ‘Hi, guys,’ she giggled. ‘Sorry to scare you. I’ve just come from my classroom. Going to a movie, are you?’

  Cath nodded, uneasily.

  ‘What movie?’

  ‘Ah, the Valerio retrospective at the Chauvel,’ said Warren, after a beat. ‘It’s Pie in the Sky tonight.’

  ‘Oh yeah, great. I’d love to see that again. What time? On your way right now?’

  ‘Well,’ said Warren, ‘it starts at nine.’

  Then there was a silence as Katie dimpled at them, until Warren said, ‘You want to come along?’

  ‘Oh no!’ cried Katie. ‘I’m off! My bicycle’s just over there! Stay joyous!’ and she skittered away into the darkness.

  Cath and Warren approached Cath’s car in silence, but as soon as they had each pressed the car doors closed, Warren said, ‘Thank Christ she didn’t accept,’ and Cath felt such a gust of relief that she fell into a fit of giggles. She couldn’t get the keys in the ignition she was giggling so helplessly. Warren sat beside her, laughing happily and looking around at the upholstery.

  Then, just as Cath had calmed enough to sniff and wipe her eyes, Warren’s phone rang.

  ‘WHERE ARE YOU?’ cried a tinny voice.

  It was Breanna. Inside Cath’s car. Cath gave a little shiver.

  ‘I’m in a beautiful Mercedes Sports car, next to the lovely Cath, and we’re going to the movies,’ Warren explained promptly. ‘How about you?’

  ‘I’m here! At home! I’ve come down for a surprise visit! I’ve got candles and everything!’ Breanna’s voice rushed along in a high-pitched gabble. It was unnecessarily loud, and was filling Cath’s car. She opened her window.

  ‘You’re joking,’ said Warren, his voice deepening and softening at once. ‘You’re here? My beautiful Bree, within minutes of me? On a weeknight?’

  ‘I was starting to worry about you! What kind of a job does he have, I thought. I thought he was a teacher! A laugh of a job! I was wrong! Come home! Come on! I’ve got Indian!’

  ‘I’ll be there in five.’

  He returned his phone to his pocket. ‘Sorry, Cath. Another time?’

  As he walked toward his own car, he blew a passionate kiss her way, which she almost took for herself. Then she realised it was for her car.

  Driving home, Cath passed the ice-cream van that was always parked across the street from her apartment block, and thought: That van is NEVER open. What if she wanted an ice cream right now? Even if it was after eight, and a cold, foggy, blustery night. She would, in fact, like an ice cream.

  She walked into her apartment and the silence seemed to catch her like a hangnail.

  I like the way he walks, thought Cath, one late afternoon, watching Warren cross the playground. I like the way he kind of lopes along, scuffing at the fallen leaves. See how his head sits way up on top of his body there? I like that. He looks good in that linen suit, too, with the open collar. I wonder when I’ll get to kiss his collarbone?

  Of course, I didn’t mean that. I know nothing is ever going to happen. He is married to the beautiful Bree.

  She watched as he approached their building. He had stopped to lean over and pick up a toy car.

  Still, I don’t think it’s wrong just to THINK about kissing him. That’s probably quite healthy, actually. You have to have sexual fantasies about SOMEONE, don’t you? It could be Brad Pitt, let’s say, and you know you’re never going to kiss HIS collarbone. So why not dream about Warren’s?

  Warren was now running up the steps to the 2nd grade balcony, and Cath thought fiercely: Turn right, turn right towards my classroom.

  He did. He leaned in to her open classroom door and said, ‘There you are! I’ve been looking for you everywhere!’

  ‘How come?’ She busied herself away from the window. ‘I’m just taking down these pictures of polar bears.’

  ‘Because I want to take you out to dinner tonight,’ explained Warren. ‘I’ve got a reservation at Tetsuya’s, and Breanna was coming down especially, but she just cancelled, if you can believe it, so you’re not allowed to say “no”, okay?’

  Cath regarded him.

  ‘And also,’ said Warren. ‘It’s my birthday today.’

  ‘Okay,’ said Cath. ‘I’ll come.’

  After Tetsuya’s, they took a taxi to the Shangri-La for cocktails. The taxi nudged through traffic and gathering rain clouds, and Warren Wishful Woodford unfurled his long thin body, and unfurled his words (‘How much?’ to the driver), and his body and his words were like a banner, or a long royal carpet, thought Cath, gazing through the steamy taxi window. He was standing on the footpath waiting for her, and she was inside the taxi thinking that his words were like a pathway through the woods.

  As she gathered up her handbag, he opened her door, taking the steamy taxi window with him, and letting in the traffic and the cold. She walked beside him silently, her legs moving smoothly like the wheels of a cart through the furling ferny fronds of a forest. (At Tetsuya’s there had been a nine-course degustation menu, with a wine to match each course.)

  At the cocktail bar, it was so crowded they had to lean in close to hear one another. They talked for a while about how wicked it was of Breanna to cancel on Warren’s birthday, even if a pair of clients had phoned her to say they had made a joint suicide pact and were having trouble with the catch on the gun. ‘Birthdays come but once a year,’ said Cath, sternly, ‘but suicide pacts?’ She gave a dismissive shrug. ‘A dime a dozen,’ agreed Warren.

  ‘Hey,’ said Cath, changing the subject, and looking up at Warren from her frothy strawberry cocktail (she reflected that her eyes would be shining in this light). ‘I need your teaching advice. Y
ou know Cassie Zing?’

  ‘How could anybody not know Cassie Zing?’

  ‘Well, today she said the c-word five hundred times.’

  ‘The what?’

  ‘The c-word.’

  Warren leaned in to her ear and whispered, ‘Cunt?’

  ‘Warren! You’re not allowed to whisper that word into a woman’s ear!’

  ‘Well, you don’t want me to say it out loud, do you? So . . . ?’

  ‘Well,’ agreed Cath, doubtfully. ‘What should I do about Cassie? She does this all the time, you know, she chooses a word to say five hundred times, and sometimes I think the best thing is to ignore it, and she’ll get over it, but she doesn’t. And today, it turned into a kind of crisis, which I didn’t really handle very well.’

  ‘What other words?’

  ‘You know, bad words. Like eczema or scrotum or the c-word – you get away from my ear – and now I think about it, maybe she’s casting a kind of spell over the classroom, I mean a good spell, where she’s taking all the evil out of the world by chanting it away, so there’s nothing left for us but good, so maybe I should just, you know, let her cast her spell. Or, do you think maybe I’m drunk?’

  ‘Well, she’s either casting a spell or she’s obsessive compulsive, and you are gorgeous when you’re drunk. Do you want me to ask Bree about Cassie? She used to work with kids before she got into relationship counselling.’

  Bree was in the conversation a bit too much tonight, Cath thought, disgruntled.

  ‘Oh no,’ she said, ‘I’ll ask Lenny. Good idea! Professional help! I always forget that Lenny’s the school counsellor as well as the 6th grade teacher. I’ll ask her advice.’

  ‘She’ll be distracted,’ said Warren, signalling for the bill. ‘Screwing Frank Billson must be very – distracting.’

  ‘You can’t pay for this too, Warren. This will be me paying. This will be your birthday present from me. Watch me pay, okay? And HEY, HOW DO YOU KNOW ABOUT LENNY AND BILLSON? IT’S A SECRET!’

  Warren slid the bill from underneath her hand and said, ‘You coming out with me tonight? That is my birthday present from you. And I know about Lenny and Billson because Lenny and Billson are blindingly obvious. Everybody knows about them, Cath Murphy.’

  ‘Do they?’ Cath said, wonderingly, enjoying the way he just said her full name, and scraping at the sides of her cocktail glass with the straw.

  ‘Maybe not Heather Waratah,’ conceded Warren. ‘Heather Waratah probably doesn’t know about Lenny and Billson. She’s too busy baking muffins. Don’t forget your jacket there, eh? Here, let me take your arm.’

  Later that night, Cath lay awake replaying Warren’s sentence: ‘You coming out with me tonight? That is my birthday present from you.’ Sometimes she rewrote it to say, ‘You getting a room with me tonight? That is my birthday present from you.’

  Even later, she sleepily, drunkenly, wickedly, replayed him whispering the c-word in her ear.

  The next day Warren passed on Bree’s ‘eternal gratitude’ to Cath, for taking care of Warren on his birthday.

  Zooming from school to her law lecture, and then from the lecture to Feminist Discussion, Cath felt she had a full life. Her windscreen wipers dashed back and forth, trying to keep up with her full life.

  She ran through the rain to the café and sat in the comfortable plum-purple chair. ‘Hi,’ she whispered, and, ‘Sorry to be late’, and Leonie mouthed back a quick, ‘No worries!’

  Leonie Marple-Hedgington was an old friend of Cath’s from university. She had purple hair, polar-white skin and the settled, mistaken belief that Cath was the kind of person who would want to go to Feminist Discussion. Cath did not like to correct her, and so attended every session.

  Leonie leaned forward, bonily, cardigan pushed up to her elbows, to say, ‘I thought today,’ (a little shy to start), ‘I thought today we might find a way to deconstruct the rational/irrational duality?’

  Everybody nodded, including Cath, but as she nodded she thought of Warren Woodford and his own special nods. His own sideways thinking nod, his own hearty, rapid nod, his own slow perhaps nod, his nodding nod-nod.

  ‘As you know, there’s a crit group who call themselves the irrationalists so as to reclaim the word irrational, and invest it with something powerful and good,’ continued Leonie.

  Irrational, thought Cath, and she thought, immediately, of the word: affair.

  How irrational an affair would be! Even, let’s say, if Warren planned such a thing. I would NEVER let it happen! It would be wrong, but more to the point: IRRATIONAL. I’ve read the books, I’ve seen the movies, I’ve read the magazine problem pages! Don’t even worry about it. He’ll keep promising to leave his wife, but he NEVER EVER will.

  ‘Doing no more than exploring the boundaries of the admittedly nebulous notion of sense, of course.’

  And of course, I wouldn’t WANT him to leave his wife! That makes no SENSE. Because, see, if he’s the kind of guy who leaves his wife, he’s not a nice guy, and why would I want a not-nice guy? Plus, I would never want to hurt another woman like that. I’m at Feminist Discussion! If I had an affair with Warren, I would betray my own KIND!

  ‘What we still have to do, you know, is to pin down the power/knowledge paradigm, and colonise Foucault, make him our own. Keeping in mind the Balkanisation of the issue, of course,’ finished Leonie.

  ‘Hmm,’ agreed Cath, nodding along with the others.

  In the last week of the school term, Cath sat on her living room floor, wrapped in her quilt, and played with the hole in her tooth with her tongue. It was so cold that the windows had fogged over, and her small electric heater did not know what to do. It made hysterical hissing noises.

  Cath had to make a dentist appointment. She leaned out of her quilt to write in her Filofax, choosing the second Tuesday of the holidays to: Make dentist appointment. Then, efficiently, she closed the Filofax. So, that was done.

  ‘Now, I’m sure you will all have noticed that Sydney is experiencing record-breaking lows this winter,’ the weather man interrupted her. She looked at the TV and nodded, ‘Uh-huh.’

  ‘And you might also have heard some buzz around that snow might come to Sydney. You know what? I’m going to put my eggs in that basket too.’

  ‘Snow!’ said Cath, scornfully. ‘It doesn’t snow in Sydney!’

  But still, imagine if it did! The weather man was waving an arm over his map, and talking about ground temperatures, a cold front and moisture on its way. ‘Or,’ he was saying, ‘let me go out on a limb here – I would not be at all surprised if this turned out to be freezing rain!’

  ‘Freezing rain,’ wondered Cath, imagining a sky filled with long thin streaks of ice. Dangerous. But what was ‘freezing rain’?

  ‘If you don’t know what that is,’ the TV was saying, obligingly, ‘take a look at these shots from the film The Ice Storm – see the ice and the icicles everywhere? Turns out they used hair gel for those shots. But if it happens here in Sydney, it won’t be a result of film tricks – no, it will be the result of these zero-degree temperatures we’ve been having. See, rain falls from the warmer sky, hits the colder surface of the earth, and instantly freezes. That’s any surface – cars, letterboxes, rooftops, trees, you name it.’

  ‘Zero degrees!’ said Cath. ‘No wonder I’m so cold!’

  ‘Brrrr,’ agreed the weather man.

  She changed the channel to MTV, and waited for a song that would make her cry. Crying would warm her up. She had an apple, but eating made her feel unbalanced, her left cheek aching from all its chewing, and the right side begging for some apple. But if she relented, let the right side of her mouth have some apple, she was sure to hit the tooth with the hole and make it shriek.

  She set the apple on the carpet.

  There were Things-To-Do clumped all around her, and her cat, Violin, trod from Thing to Thing; disrespectful, indiscriminate, like the weather. She took Violin beneath her arm, the bell on his collar jangling, and surveyed her T
hings-To-Do.

  1. A toppling pile of egg cartons for art and craft at school. (Cut out the egg cups so that the kids can colour them and glue them to paddle-pop stick rafts. Think up a reason why.)

  2. Cases and Materials on Torts. (Read Chapter 7: Trespass and Assault.)

  3. Letters from her Staffroom Pigeonhole. (Open.)

  She decided to begin with the Letters from the Staffroom. The first envelope was addressed in swirling pink:

  Cath Murphy, Teacher, Class 2B,

  Redwood Primary, Hillside Street,

  Mount Montmart

  Dear Ms Murphy,

  Thank you for your note enquiring about my daughter (Cassie’s) loose tooth. She has lost it now! And the tooth fairy has come and gone.

  I hope you will forgive me for writing again so soon, but I have a small favour to ask. I have just learned that Cassie’s ‘cousin’ will be ‘attending’ Redwood next term – she is one of the Year 7 students from St Carmel Catholic Girls, where, as you may have heard, there has been a flood! So, after the holidays, she and her classmates are being ‘shipped out’ to your school for a month or two.

  I say ‘cousin’, by the way, rather than cousin, for this reason: I have a sister, Marbie, who lives with a man named Vernon, and they take care of Vernon’s little sister. Do you see? And it is this little sister (Alissa Taylor, better known as ‘Listen’ Taylor) – she is the ‘cousin’ of whom I speak.

  In any case, I am wondering if you might keep an eye on Listen for us? She is a quiet little thing, and good-natured. If you could just look in on her, once or twice – make sure she is not lost in the system – I would be so grateful.

  Again, thank you for being such a delightful teacher to our Cassie, and again, I am longing to meet you at Parent-Teacher Night!