I Have a Bed Made of Buttermilk Pancakes

by Jaclyn Moriarty

  ‘Promise me something,’ said Warren, who was holding his phone to his ear. ‘Never lose that sense of humour.’

  ‘Okay,’ said Katie, dimpling. ‘I’ll try. Thanks.’

  Importantly, Cath explained to the room: ‘Warren is going to get a cab.’

  ‘He’ll never get a cab in this,’ said Lenny.

  Warren had decided to go home, and was holding his mobile phone patiently to his ear. Lenny looked up at him and repeated: ‘You’ll never get a cab in this!’

  They looked through the window at the glow of white, and Cath turned back to watch Warren. ‘Nobody’s answering,’ he mouthed at her. And she nodded, solemnly, with her face and her heart singing over and over: do not answer, do not answer, do not answer.

  Cath’s boot tap danced the icy path home. One boot, thud, one boot, tap.

  ‘I have a couch that turns into a bed,’ she told Warren, proudly. ‘It’s in the living room. I have linen too. One hundred per cent cotton. It might even be Egyptian cotton, you never know. Plus I have a spare feather quilt.’

  Snow feathered about them. Warren’s head was hunched into his shoulders. ‘I’m hungry,’ he said. ‘Let’s get some food.’

  ‘It’s midnight,’ said Cath, ‘and you’re always hungry.’

  ‘This corner store,’ suggested Warren.

  ‘It won’t be open,’ declared Cath.

  But it was. They bought chips and salsa for a midnight snack, and behind the counter, the corner-store girl with the plaits to her hips said, ‘Hello there, you!’ as usual to Cath, and ‘Hey!’ in a friendly way to Warren.

  ‘Hey,’ said Warren, friendly back – and Cath thought: I like a man who’s friendly to strangers, and friendly to corner-store girls!

  ‘Right,’ she said aloud and confused. Warren and the corner-store girl looked at her.

  At that moment, Warren’s mobile phone rang, and Cath panicked, thinking it might be the taxi company calling to try to take him home. She and the corner-store girl watched in suspense as he answered and said, ‘Bree! Hey! Do not worry yourself. Couldn’t get a taxi so I’m staying at Cath’s place tonight, okay? We’re just on our way there now. You okay? Keeping warm? It’ll all be melted by tomorrow, trust me on that.’

  ‘My wife,’ explained Warren, when the conversation finished, smiling at the corner-store girl.

  ‘Crazy, huh?’ Cath jutted her shoulder at the window while she paid.

  The corner-store girl flung her plaits over her shoulders and said: ‘You bet! But you know what? I’m out of here!’ It turned out that tomorrow she would take a week’s vacation to Byron Bay.

  ‘Lucky!’ Warren and Cath said at once, and the corner-store girl began to nod her plaits, as if to say more, but stopped, becoming distant and glassy-eyed. Warren and Cath quietly gathered their things to leave, but just as they reached the door the corner-store girl called, ‘You guys, you want to know what? While I’m away, I plan to collect some sea water and bring it back!’

  ‘Do you?’ said Warren.

  ‘For my fish tank,’ she explained.

  ‘Look!’

  Cath wanted to show him everything, suddenly, frenetically. Photos of her mother, her father and the family Alsatian. Photographs of Violin, her cat. Violin, the cat in living form. (‘Violin! Come here and meet Warren! Violin!’) A new ceramic casserole dish she bought a month ago. The rewind button on the VCR, which was jammed. The new DVD player she had won in a contest just last week! Warren moved his legs carefully, amongst her books and chairs. At each thing she showed him he said, ‘Mmm,’ with fascination and a crunch on a cornchip.

  ‘This window is all smeared,’ Warren observed, standing by her side in the dining room.

  ‘Oh,’ she agreed. ‘I threw some apple juice on it. A few weeks ago.’

  They both stood and stared at the smears.

  ‘Hang on,’ said Warren. He went into the kitchen and came out with a glass of water, splashed water at the window, and then rubbed the window with a cloth. It squealed, but soon was crisp and clear, and their reflections leapt out at them, sharply. Vaguely, beyond the reflections, was the eerie white world of snow outside.

  ‘Gosh,’ said Cath, in awe. ‘Shouldn’t we be building a snowman?’

  She gazed up at Warren. Then she ran back into the living room and sat down on the couch, leaving space for Warren to sit beside her. But he chose the armchair.

  She lifted her foot onto her lap and looked to see what was making her boots go thud, tap, thud. ‘Look!’

  It turned out a pebble had embedded itself deep within the rubber of her heel. Cath showed Warren and then tried to dig the pebble out with her fingernail.

  ‘Here,’ said Warren. ‘Let me try.’

  He swooped a cornchip full of salsa, ate it in one go, and then took her foot onto his lap. He scratched industriously at the pebble.

  ‘Wait,’ said Cath in a moment. She took her foot back, unlaced the boot, and took it off.

  ‘This will make it easier. I should have taken them off right away anyway. I’m walking snow all over the apartment.’

  She passed him the boot, which he took with one hand, gulping his beer with the other.

  He put the beer down, placed the boot beside it, then took her foot onto his lap.

  ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘that’s better,’ and he began to press the sole of her foot.

  ‘No,’ explained Cath. ‘That’s not what I meant.’ But she left her foot there in his lap, safe in its short black ankle sock, and had a sip of beer of her own.

  ‘Look!’ she cried suddenly, taking back her foot and leaping to her feet. ‘You want to see my Criminal Law essay, Warren?’

  ‘Not really,’ said Warren, frowning. ‘Give me back your foot.’

  Cath flicked through papers on the dining room table. ‘Warren, look at my Criminal Law essay.’

  ‘All right,’ accepted Warren. He looked:

  LEGAL STUDIES: AN INTRODUCTION (UNIT: CRIMINAL LAW)

  ‘THE LISTENING DEVICE AND THE LONG-LENS CAMERA: ADMITTING ILLEGALLY OBTAINED EVIDENCE IN CRIMINAL PROCEEDINGS’

  BY CATH MURPHY (STUDENT NO. 7893332)

  ‘Side-by-side with the major technology of the telescope, the lens and the light beam, . . . there were the minor techniques of multiple and intersecting observations, of eyes that must see without being seen; . . . secretly preparing a new knowledge of man.’1

  1. Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (Trans by Alan Sheridan, Penguin Books, Harmondsworth, 1977), p. 171

  ‘Lovely,’ said Warren. ‘Where’s the rest?’

  ‘That’s it. I’ve only done the cover page. I did it weeks ago.’

  ‘That’s it!’ Warren cast aside the page. ‘Give me back your foot.’

  Cath sat down and gave him her foot. Warren began with her instep.

  ‘But don’t you think it’s wonderful?’ she said, after a few moments. ‘I’ve got alliteration in my title. Listening and Long and Llllens.’

  Warren confessed that he was not the alliteration type, but accepted that other people were. He moved on to her toes, one toe at a time.

  ‘Massage the bit that matches my knee,’ Cath suggested. ‘You know the way you can cure yourself by massaging certain bits of your feet? Like the bit for the liver and the intestines and that? Get the bit for knees.’ She crunched on a cornchip and added: ‘Please.’

  ‘Because I’ve got a problem knee,’ she explained, when he ignored her, continuing with her toes. ‘I had two operations in high school and my knee’s got metal bits in it now, but they’ve never set off the x-ray machine at the airport.’

  ‘Hmm,’ said Warren. ‘Okay, listen. I’ll rub every part of your foot and you tell me when you feel your knee begin to heal.’

  ‘All right. But let’s talk about my essay some more.’

  ‘It’s a cover page! What is there to say?’

  ‘Foucault!’ countered Cath. ‘Didn’t you see I used a quote from Foucault? I don’t have to write
another word. Not another word. That’s a high distinction, right there. It’s all about the small things, you know. Like my little toe, just press my little toe and my knee is cured.’

  Warren ignored her, and peeled off her sock. ‘You probably have to kiss it anyway,’ he suggested, and kissed one toe.

  ‘Warren! I’ve had boots on all day. Don’t kiss my toes. Put my sock back on.’

  ‘Maybe I have to kiss the knee directly?’ said Warren. ‘Maybe the foot won’t do?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ admitted Cath.

  ‘I do,’ said Warren. He stopped for a moment and stared at her. He put her foot onto the carpet, moved to sit beside her on the couch, and kissed her.

  ‘That’s my mouth,’ said Cath, blinking at his face, ‘not my knee,’ but she kissed him back in a fury of relief.

  FANCY ZING

  Fancy closed her secret notebook and leaned back in her desk chair. She would now spend twenty minutes working on her prize-winning novel. It was 10.23 am.

  Having read several prize-winning novels, Fancy was confident that she now knew the recipe:

  1. Write a simple narrative.

  2. Make a long list.

  3. Scatter the contents of your list throughout your narrative.

  So, for example, in the prize-winning novel that Fancy had just read, the author had done the following:

  1. He wrote a simple narrative in which two people fell in love, then the man left the woman, and the woman cried.

  2. He made a long list of leaves.

  3. He scattered the story with his leaves.

  So, ‘Tears fell from her eyes’ had become:

  ‘Tears the shape of sugar maple leaves fell (like so many blackjack oak leaves falling on an autumn day) from her eyes.’

  Voila! A richly-textured (prize-winning) novel all about love and leaves.

  There was no harm in mixing the recipe around a little, Fancy believed. (She had flair in the kitchen.) She would begin with the list, and then write the narrative around it. Although she was not yet at the stage of making her list, she was well underway with her list of things to list.

  This was on the back of an old phone bill which she carried in her handbag wherever she went. It was stained with splats of cranberry juice.

  LIST OF POTENTIAL LISTS

  • sounds

  • things that are very hot

  • delicious things to drink

  • foreign currencies

  • fish

  ‘Hmm,’ she said, running her fingernail down the list. ‘Fish?’ She had a slight zing of excitement then, and picked up her pen, quickly scribbling:

  ‘Tears the shape of trout fell (like a school of those darting glassy fish that you see in tropical waters) from her eyes.’

  Pleased, she turned to her computer and typed the word ‘fish’ into the word processor’s thesaurus. ‘Angle’, it suggested promptly. And ‘trawl’.

  ‘No, no,’ she chided gently. ‘I meant it as a noun.’

  She sat back frowning, murmured ‘of course!’ and typed the word ‘Fish’ into Google. For a few minutes, she excitedly scribbled down fish names – dottybacks, pufferfish, clownfish and tangs – but then she discovered an extremely comprehensive website. It broke fish down into categories (such as marine fish and fresh fish) but then it expanded each category into several more. Sub-category collapsed into sub-subcategories, and these slid on into sub-sub-subs. There was a veritable flood of fish. No single fish would sit still: even goldfish became black-moor, fantail, lionhead and red cap oranda. For heaven’s sakes. Not to mention the latin names. Carassius auratus, she transcribed carefully, and then she said pfft! and put her pen down. Really, there were too many fish to fit on the back of a phone bill.

  There were also too many references to streams, wetlands, bays and aquariums, which reminded her of something. She reached for the phone and dialled the Castle Hill Gym. A man with a husky voice answered.

  Clear your throat, thought Fancy. But aloud she said, ‘Hello. I’m just ringing to enquire about the hours of your swimming pool there. I’m hoping you might tell me when the pool is quietest.’

  ‘The quietest time,’ said the man with the voice, ‘would be Friday mornings from nine-thirty to eleven-thirty, but then . . .’

  As he talked, Fancy circled the first word on the list (‘sounds’), and tapped it with her pen, frowning. That category, like fish, was much too broad.

  The man on the phone was laughing in a rasping, unpleasant way.

  ‘All right,’ she said briskly, ‘thank you.’

  Then she hung up, crossed out ‘sounds’ and replaced it with ‘UNPLEASANT SOUNDS!!!’ She looked at the clock on her computer, which said 10.42 am. After she had watched for a while, it said 10.43 am.

  ‘So, that’s that,’ she declared, pleased.

  In the back seat of the car, Cassie wore the middle belt so she could lean forward between the two front seats and talk to her dad or mum.

  Her mum was driving and her dad was changing the radio stations. Dad tipped his head sideways to listen carefully to the news. Mum was behind her glasses, and you couldn’t tell if she was listening to the news or not.

  Cassie looked through the groceries in the box beside her, which they had just picked up from Coles. They were extremely boring. Celery sticks and milk, cauliflower and toilet paper.

  ‘Mum?’ said Cassie.

  ‘Shh,’ said Dad, listening to the news with his head on his shoulder.

  ‘Radcliffe,’ said Mum, ‘it’s just the weather.’

  ‘I want to find out if there’ll be good sailing weather this weekend, actually,’ said Dad, with his calm voice.

  ‘We can’t possibly go sailing this weekend!’ said Mum. ‘There’s the Bellamys and the Samsons coming for dinner on Saturday. Not to mention your parents on Sunday!’

  ‘We don’t need to see the Bellamys and the Samsons,’ said her dad. ‘We can cancel.’

  ‘I think you’ll find that we do, actually,’ declared her mum.

  ‘You know I don’t like routine, Fancy.’

  ‘It’s not a question of routine, Radcliffe. It’s a question of manners. You can’t invite people and then uninvite them because you feel like going sailing. And, besides, what do you mean when you say routine? It’s been ages since we had the Bellamys and the Samsons!’

  ‘That rhymed, Mum,’ said Cassie from the back seat. ‘What do you mean when you say routine?’

  ‘I also don’t like being told what I can and cannot do,’ said her dad, coldly.

  ‘Radcliffe, would you not be ridiculous? Please?’

  ‘There is no point in our having this discussion,’ said her dad, shrugging. ‘I just do and don’t do exactly as I please. Thank you very much.’ He switched off the radio, so he could be angry in peace.

  ‘No point in having what discussion?’ muttered her mum.

  Cassie thought she should be quiet, but first she had to murmur, softly: ‘What do you mean when you say routine? What do you mean when you say routine? What do you mean when you say routine?’

  ‘The light’s green, Mum,’ Cassie interrupted herself.

  ‘Thank you, Cassie,’ and her mother made the car jump forward.

  Fancy flipped open a notebook, took the lid from a thin black marker, and instructed: ‘Radcliffe, tell me some sounds that are unpleasant.’

  ‘Right then.’ Radcliffe leaned back in his television chair to think. The TV commercials blazed away.

  ‘The sound of a fingernail on a blackboard,’ he declared after two commercials had gone by.

  Fancy replaced the lid on her marker. ‘I’m not writing that down.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘It’s very common, Radcliffe. I think I need something original.’

  ‘Too common? Well then.’ He thought again, but had to pause to watch a humorous commercial for margarine.

  ‘Heavy footsteps,’ he suggested eventually, ‘walking around upstairs.’

  From the
floor by the couch, Cassie said, ‘That’s a good noise.’ She crawled around toward them. ‘I think that’s a good noise if you hear footsteps upstairs, because you wonder to yourself: who’s upstairs? You wonder if maybe it’s a ghost, or maybe Santa Claus, or maybe Grandma, or anyone.’

  ‘What’s Grandma doing upstairs?’ wondered Radcliffe.

  ‘I agree with Cassie,’ Fancy said. ‘Sorry, Radcliffe, I need you to think again.’

  ‘Ah!’ sighed Radcliffe, exasperated. ‘The sound of your voice!’

  Fancy and Cassie both cried, ‘HUH!’ and Cassie said, ‘Mum’s got a beautiful voice!’

  Radcliffe shrugged: ‘Show’s back on.’

  ‘You have no imagination,’ Fancy declared, closing her notebook.

  ‘No need for one,’ Radcliffe replied, amiable, tilting his wineglass towards his mouth. ‘That’ll be the telephone,’ he announced next, as it had just begun to ring.

  As soon as she picked up the telephone, a voice said, ‘His penis smelled like a pappadam?’ So she knew it was her editor, Tanya.

  ‘I knew you wouldn’t like that line,’ Fancy said jauntily. ‘Go ahead and cut it.’

  ‘Seriously, Fancy, shouldn’t he take a shower? If his penis smells? He’s dirty. I’ll write in a shower scene if you like.’ Tanya always worked at night, while watching Japanese kung-fu movies, so the sounds of rapid breathing and occasional yelps filled the background of her calls.

  ‘I said you could cut it,’ said Fancy, sinking down to the hall floor, where she sat, cross-legged, leaning against the wall.

  ‘Okay. Great. Let’s cut that, but Fancy, honey, what’s this about a special private place between your legs?’

  ‘Mummy,’ whispered Cassie, tiptoeing down the hall towards her, ‘do you want me to bring you a jumper?’ The heater was on in the TV room but the hallway was icy cold.