Cassie glanced over at Marcus – he was staring at her, pale and trembling: he had seen what she was willing to do. She was willing to take an Olympic run straight at him across the ice, and if Mr Woodford had not stopped her – He looked back down to his bat.
‘Do you understand?’ Mr Woodford said again.
Cassie nodded her agreement, and skidded away to Lucinda. She had got Marcus Ellison, she knew that from his face. So that was finished.
The unfinished thing, she realised, as Lucinda returned her lunch to her, was the run. Her legs had to finish that run.
Anything but this. Fancy jumped up from the living room floor, tripping over photo albums, and strode down the hall to the front door, throwing it open.
She stepped onto the porch and something whacked her face like a leather glove: that’s how cold it was. The mat, when she stepped on it, crunched with ice. A shudder spiralled through her and pinched her shoulderblades. The sky was low, pale and plaintive, like Cassie when she was coming down with something. The Canadian’s porch was empty.
Back inside with the door firmly closed against the cold, Fancy stared down the hall. What if she were to make gingerbread? What if she were to try a little mosaic? What if she were to do some of Cassie’s mending? What if she were to –
But no, no, she panicked, and strode back to the front door. The sky was still looking sulky, and the Canadian’s porch remained empty. She held the door open a moment as an icy breeze shifted twigs on the lawn, scattering dried leaves on the porch.
‘Oh no!’ said Fancy, her eyes glinting as a leaf or two skittered past her ankles and into the house. ‘Now I’ll have to vacuum!’ Then she remembered that her vacuum cleaner was in the repair shop.
I wonder if the Canadian has a vacuum cleaner I might borrow? she thought, suddenly and earnestly. At that moment, the Vacuum Repair Truck turned into her driveway. Fancy accepted the repaired vacuum with cold politeness, and, as soon as she had closed the door, she plugged it in.
She vacuumed: the hall, the lounge room, the TV room, Cassie’s room. And now she was in the main bedroom. Her lower back ached, the room roared with vacuum cleaner groans, she used her knees to shove the bed to the side, and she busied herself with the skirting boards. Crouching down to the floor, she fed the nozzle way under the bed, but then there was a gasping choking sound and she switched the vacuum off. There was something caught in its mouth, which she gently removed.
It was a dusty purple sock. Stitched at the back of the ankle with a simple purple daisy.
She held it up and frowned at it. This was not Fancy’s sock. Nor was it Cassie’s sock. Certainly, it was not Radcliffe’s sock. So now, whose sock would be deep under their bed like that?
In the post-vacuum quiet, Fancy rocked back on her heels, looking from the sock to the window to the ceiling to the vacuum. The vacuum had no reply, but there was something wide-eyed about the room.
This sock belongs to another woman, Fancy whispered to herself. Radcliffe is having an affair.
Immediately, crouching on the floor by the bed, she laughed to herself. Radcliffe, having an affair! It was so unlikely that the word (‘affair’) was immediately surrounded, in her mind, by a circle of witty prompt cards. Each card contained a rhetorical question, such as: When would this affair take place, Fancy, given that you work at home each day?
I know, I know! When? (She laughed along.) Although still (she noted, politely) I often do go out – on Zing Family Secret business, for instance, or for coffee with Marbie or Mum. He’s only ten minutes away and often slips home to surprise me for lunch. He could easily slip a pretty woman home.
But, FANCY, what sort of a pretty woman would have sex with Radcliffe? I mean, seriously.
Me, for a start (she thought, tartly). He’s not that bad. He has an unexpected charm. And there are plenty of women at his work. There’s Gemma, for instance, in the pay office, who spills her drinks at Christmas parties, and gets all the moles zapped from her arms.
Yes, but a purple sock? Why would she leave a purple sock behind?
Here, Fancy had to pause. She had never believed for a moment in bits of gossamer lingerie or single diamond earrings. No woman would have a dalliance with someone else’s husband and then flit off in a taxi without her underwear and earring. No woman! The wind would blow cold against her buttocks! Not to mention her diamond-less ear.
But a purple sock. This she could believe.
Let’s say Gemma (it might as well be Gemma) – let’s say Gemma only works afternoons. (Gemma does only work afternoons – Radcliffe mentioned that.) All right, so let’s say one morning Fancy calls Radcliffe to tell him, ‘I’m going to have coffee with Marbie today, so I won’t be home!’
Radcliffe makes a furtive call to Gemma: ‘Are you still at home, my darling? Haven’t left for work? The wife’s gone out. Meet me at my place in ten.’
Gemma, dressed in jaunty morning attire of shorts, sneakers and purple socks, arrives breathless. Her work clothes are in a gym bag over her arm. They hurry up the stairs for a few moments of passion; Gemma showers steamily; then she throws her work clothes on (stockings, skirt, lipstick); and off they rush to work. So easy to forget a purple sock!
Well, but really, why would you imagine that Radcliffe is having an affair? You’ve never thought a thing like that before.
The question (frostily) is why have I not considered it before. Recollect that Radcliffe cheated on me when we were fifteen years old and had only just begun going out. If he could not last a single month, why do I imagine he can last a lifetime?
And now she found the word ‘affair’ gleaming and proud, surrounded by fallen cards. It waited patiently for her to fill in the details.
It was with Gemma! Of course it was! Remember how Radcliffe spoke of her? So tenderly, so fondly. ‘You must remember Gemma,’ he had said. ‘No,’ she had replied. And then he had explained how Gemma had the moles zapped from her arms. Why should he know that? Why would Gemma from the pay office tell Radcliffe about her moles? Didn’t people in the pay office stay behind closed doors, filling up envelopes with pay?
He must have brought her home on the day Fancy met Marbie and Listen for coffee in Castle Hill. On that day, Radcliffe had come home from work to ‘surprise’ her for lunch. But, she realised now, she had phoned to let him know she was not there. He came home BECAUSE she was not there. He came home with Gemma in purple socks! And on that day, she recalled in a rush, he had broken a glass. He had broken the vacuum cleaner trying to clean it up. Trying to clean away the evidence of his affair!
No! It was Gemma who had broken the glass. Gemma was clumsy. She spilled drinks at Christmas parties. He only mentioned his sojourn home, and the breakage of the vacuum cleaner, weeks after the event. It was a slip! How strange and awkward he had been when he told her. And then how kind and loving as they carried the vacuum in to be repaired.
All this time, her vacuum cleaner had been trying to let her know about the affair. First, it choked on the broken glass; then it caused Radcliffe to slip up and reveal he had been home that day; and now, today, it had come home to her from the repair shop. On purpose, to swallow the purple sock.
Fancy lay flat on her back on the bed, and thought with clarity: Radcliffe is having an affair.
Oh stop that, she cried, sitting up with a final burst of scorn. It’s just a sock! She looked at it on the palm of her hand, so flimsy and frail. How could this mean something so immense as an affair?
But then she thought of her recipes: an accidental touch of egg yolk in her meringue; one-eighth of a teaspoon of cayenne pepper in her mango dressing – these tiny things had such an impact! Small things, she realised, can mean something immense.
Suddenly the sock felt moist in her hand, a scaly, alien thing, and she flung it back onto the floor. It lay there seeming to wriggle, like a fish too small to eat.
MARBIE ZING
The Monday after Cassie’s party, the neighbour’s black cat crossed Marbie’s path and
tripped her up in such a way that she stumbled underneath a ladder. The ladder was leaning quite deliberately against the neighbour’s house. She stood under it for a moment, trembling. As far as she could recall, it was the first ladder she had ever walked beneath. There was now no point going to work.
‘Are you up yet?’ she called, knocking on Listen’s bedroom window. Listen was going to school later and later these days. She appeared in her frayed pyjamas, rubbing her eyes.
‘You look tired,’ said Marbie.
‘I just woke up,’ explained Listen.
‘Still,’ said Marbie, ‘you need a break. Let me take you to the seaside and buy you a sarong. This week autumn will begin and the sun will start to fall from the trees and become little shadows at your feet. We should wear sarongs until that happens.’
‘Okay,’ said Listen, ‘good idea.’
‘I’ll write a note and say you’ve got rabies.’
While Listen found her beach towel, Marbie phoned work and explained about the cat and the ladder. Tabitha was very understanding. ‘You stay right where you are,’ she said. ‘Don’t take a step toward the office.’
Then Marbie phoned the aeronautical engineer and said she could not meet him after work that night.
‘Can’t meet me?’ said the A.E., with a slurping sound. ‘I’m sick anyway. Hear this? I’m sucking a lozenge. So, better off not meeting me, but aren’t you the one who arranged this?’
It was true she had arranged the meeting. It was so she could formally explain: no more tennis. Anyway, either that or invite him over for a cocktail, so she could alter the tone of the thing: ‘Here, Mr Aeronautical Engineer, meet Vernon and Listen! The A.E. is a sort of colleague of mine. Listen! Show the A.E. some Tae Kwon Do! Look at her, A.E., she’s a natural! I think it’s because she can dance.’
Afterwards, A.E. would drive away, and she would hold Vernon’s hand on the doorstep, already talking about something else, such as dinner.
Marbie was silent on the phone, thinking about this, so after a moment the A.E. made a crunching sound and said, ‘Ouch. Bit through the lozenge and it’s got sharp edges. What say you to Wednesday instead?’
‘I say okay to Wednesday instead,’ agreed Marbie, and put down the phone. She had a habit of simply hanging up rather than making some conclusive remark such as ‘Great! See you then. Keep smiling!’
On Wednesday, A.E. arrived at the pub in an unusually chatty mood, declaring that his cold had been cured by Butter Menthols.
He sat down and chuckled to himself, picked up his beer and made a brmmm sound as he flew the glass towards his mouth. Foam spilled over the edges. ‘Here comes the aeroplane!’ he said. Then he told Marbie that his father used to be a pilot.
‘Huh,’ said Marbie.
‘So this is how he always fed me,’ he explained, ‘when I was a baby. And that’s why I studied aeronautical engineering!’
‘Hmm,’ said Marbie, wondering if she should mention that babies all over the world were fed by aeroplane spoons.
Instead, for the sake of politeness, she told him she had been to several festivals of hot air balloons. She picked up her beer and floated it towards her mouth like a hot air balloon. He chuckled, then remarked that hot air balloons were ‘terrifically significant’ in the development of the principles of aeronautics. She said she once heard that Leonardo Da Vinci figured them all out, all the principles of aeronautics, in sketchbooks five hundred years ago. He said that this was a common myth, such as the myth that William Shakespeare wrote his own plays.
So then Marbie said she thought that myth was actually true, that William Shakespeare did write his own plays. And even if somebody else had written the plays, did it matter? Who really knew William Shakespeare these days? He could be a compilation of people, couldn’t he, and it would still be William Shakespeare?
‘Whoa!’ said the aeronautical engineer, making his eyes sparkle to show his fascination and confusion at her point.
Also, she continued, talking about William Shakespeare, she herself came from a family of writers. For example, her father once travelled to Ireland for a year to write a novel (although he then threw the manuscript, one page at a time, into the ocean); and her sister, Fancy, was a writer.
Aeronautical Engineer looked almost shifty at the news of her family of writers. He did not express environmental concerns when he heard that her father threw his novel to the sea. (That was the usual reaction.) And he did not ask what kind of writing Fancy did, which was also a common reaction. Instead, he shifted (shiftily), looked into his beer (sadly), then looked up at Marbie (sharply), and said: ‘I don’t know if I should tell you this or not.’
‘Of course you should,’ said Marbie, emphatically.
‘I don’t know,’ he said, ‘I don’t know’, shaking his head and trying to get something out of his eye for a moment.
‘Just count to ten and then tell me,’ suggested Marbie.
He looked embarrassed, and gazed at her with unexpectedly vulnerable baby eyes.
‘I’m a writer myself,’ he breathed eventually. And looked back down.
‘What?’ she said, although she had heard him.
So that’s when he told her. He said he had invented a new form of poetic self-expression which he called the ‘vision’. He said he had written exactly 1449 of these ‘visions’ and that he intended to publish them, as a collection, once he had reached 2000. He had never told anybody this before. Also, he had a selection of his favourites in his pocket right at that moment.
Politely, Marbie said, ‘Can I take them home and read them?’
And he said, ‘Okay, but promise you won’t lose them?’
‘I can’t promise that,’ explained Marbie, ‘because it’s in my nature to lose things.’ She suggested he make photocopies before he loaned them to her.
‘These are copies,’ he admitted. ‘It’s just I’m scared they’ll get lost and someone’ll steal the ideas, and, you know, publish them.’
Marbie said, don’t worry, ideas can’t be stolen, that’s illegal.
So he let her borrow them to take them home.
‘By the way,’ she said as she pressed the visions into her handbag, ‘there was something I wanted to say –’
At that, her handbag miaowed and her hand jumped out in surprise.
‘UP FOR SOME MAINTENANCE?’ said the message from her mother. ‘CONFIRMED 3 HR MARGIN AS OF NOW.’
‘Got to go, sorry.’ She looked up at the aeronautical engineer. ‘Got to phone my sister and then leave!’ She slid out of her seat and floated away from the table.
Left behind, the aeronautical engineer watched as she approached the pay phones, and idly turned back to his beer.
Marbie read the first of the A.E.’s visions later that night, while sitting in the tree above the ice-cream van. She had watched Fancy safely enter the building and had surveyed the empty street for a few minutes. There were never any problems on Intrusions these days, and being Look-out was boring. Also, they were well within the ‘3 hr margin’ and her mother never sent them in without confirmation.
So Marbie opened her handbag for a Mini Mars Bar, and her hand found the A.E.’s scroll of visions. The first, curling at top and bottom, was vision # 263.
Marbie felt curious. She shook her head, trying to shake herself back into herself. She read the vision again, and felt even more curious. For she had never told the aeronautical engineer about her lifelong fear that long sharp items (such as umbrellas or fence posts) would somehow end up in her eye. She had never even told him about the event with the flying beach umbrella.
And yet here, curling in her hand, was a vision containing not only her fear, but also the solution to her fear. He was going to break the arrow tops off the fence! Like the ends of fresh asparagus.
Her hand, which was holding the travel torch, trembled violently, and the torch slipped and rustled through the branches to the ground. She looked down. And there was the car in the street beneath her, turning in to th
e apartment garage.
GET OUT NOW Marbie typed into her pager, fingers shaking. She sent the message thirteen times before Fancy finally acknowledged it. A few moments later, she saw Fancy leaping smartly from the window to a tree, and elegantly stepping down its branches.
Marbie phoned the A.E. from work the next day and expressed wonder at his vision. He did not seem surprised at her wonder. In fact, he seemed despondent because, it turned out, he hated writing his visions. He said that, as a writer, one felt a compulsion to write, much like the compulsion that some people have to tear out their own hair. He would give anything, he said, not to be a writer, for writers have expression in their soul, which is tearing and scratching to get out! Worse, he said, far worse, to tear something out of your soul than simply to tear it from your head.
It was his secret anguish, his writing of visions, and it surprised him, too, this anguish, given that he was generally: practical, objective, logical; just as an engineer, a scientist! should be. But the artist, sadly, was in him.
Also, the A.E. said that he found his visions were at their best just before he fell asleep. So each night when he hopped into bed, he set his alarm for ten minutes hence. Then he let the visions scratch their way out (the agony!) as he fell asleep, and the alarm ensured that the latest visions were not lost in his dreams forever.
He said he got this idea, of setting the alarm, from a particular genius of the past, whose name he could not recall, who used to tie bells to his fingers and sit down for a sleep. The bells would wake the genius just as he began to doze and he would quickly scribble out the ideas he had had while falling.
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