Nikolai and Rebekka’s three sons, although still very young, now ran the family empire. Each of the sons had been troubled by drugs and shoplifting in the past, but had recovered after treatment in a Swiss resort. The eldest was only twenty-one, but was always Bachelor of the Year.
‘So,’ said Mr Bel Castro. ‘Do you think Rebekka can paint her toenails without somebody noticing? Can Nikolai buy a hamburger? Could any of the three Valerio sons take up guitar without you finding out?’
‘Yeah, that’s a true point,’ said Donna, ‘but I’d put up with being watched all the time if I had about one quarter of the money they’ve got.’
‘It’s because they’re like the royal family of the world,’ said Angela, ‘because Nikolai made his seven movies in seven different countries so it’s like he spread himself all over the world, like peanut butter, and now everybody loves him.’
‘But not everybody loves peanut butter,’ somebody pointed out, wisely.
Listen was quiet, thinking about how much work it was to hide from the eyes of the girls in her year, and the teachers. She had to hide because whenever they saw her, they saw this: a girl who had no friends. Once they had seen her in that way, they could never see her any other way. She couldn’t change it. She couldn’t make it stop.
‘I don’t think it’s worth it,’ she said, without even putting up her hand. ‘You’d forget how to be yourself.’
‘Yeah,’ said Angela. ‘But Nikolai chose to be a movie star.’
‘That’s just one choice,’ said Listen. ‘After that, the world decided he and Rebekka were perfect people, who couldn’t even get stung by bees, and they wouldn’t let them change. They were like a king and queen because that’s what everybody wanted. Then they had three sons so that’s a fairytale. So now they’re a fairy story family, and there’s nothing they can do to make it stop.’
Everyone was quiet and surprised. Listen Taylor rarely spoke in class.
‘Huh,’ said Mr Bel Castro, ‘sorry, I don’t know anybody’s name – you are . . . ?’
‘Her name’s Listen Taylor,’ said Angela.
‘Her name’s not actually Listen,’ said Donna.
‘It’s Alissa,’ Caro added. ‘She just calls herself Listen.’
Mr Bel Castro looked from Angela to Donna to Caro, and then back to Listen. ‘She just calls herself Listen?’ he said. ‘I like that.’ He smiled at Listen, and nodded as if to congratulate her.
One night, watching Law & Order: Criminal Intent, the aeronautical engineer laughed at something Marbie had just said, and murmured, ‘Maribelle, you are a riot!’
‘Who’s Maribelle?’ said Marbie from the floor, where she liked to watch TV.
He continued to watch the screen, leaning back on the couch. After a moment he said, ‘Isn’t Maribelle your name?’
‘No, Maribelle is not my name.’
‘Well, what else could Marbie be short for?’
‘What else?! And you call yourself a visionary. It’s short for Marbleweed.’
‘Marbleweed!’ He laughed so much that he had to mute the TV. ‘Why would your name be Marbleweed?’
Marbie explained about her mother – how she had wanted to give them gifts with their names. She gave Fancy the gift of imagination, and Marbie the gift of good luck.
‘Good luck!’ cried the aeronautical engineer. ‘With a name like Marbleweed?’
Marbie explained that ‘marble’ was, in fact, excellent luck, according to a book on witchcraft which her mother once owned. If marble grew like weeds, her mother thought, you’d end up with a surfeit of good luck.
‘And,’ Marbie added, ‘it worked. I’ve had excellent luck all my life.’ Then she frowned for a moment, considering this, and cleared her throat.
‘Marbleweed,’ he whispered, shaking his head at her. Then he giggled, and began singing the name, over and over, humorously.
A few days later, the aeronautical engineer fell asleep, lying flat along the couch, while Marbie watched a rerun of Survivor All-Stars from the floor. When it finished, she tried to wake him to tell him that the Convention for the Protection of Individuals with Regard to Automatic Processing of Personal Data did not apply to the Zing family. It was irrelevant.
And even if it technically applied, she thought, exasperated as she tried to formulate this thought, even then, what did the law or legal documents have to do with her family and its meetings in the shed? The Zing Family Secret was a family matter, far too complex, emotional, private, fragile and delicate for the application of rules.
‘Hey,’ she said. ‘Hey. Wake up.’
He gasped in his sleep, and said: ‘Huh? What? Huh?’ in a mumble, and turned on his side. A cushion fell off the couch.
‘Wake up.’
He executed a gigantic turn to face the other way. She found the whole display affected.
‘Oh forget it,’ said Marbie, and went home.
One night, after dinner at Fancy’s place, Marbie asked her sister when Vernon would return. ‘You said he’d come back,’ she accused.
‘Well,’ said Fancy, cheerfully. ‘Has he had an affair with someone else yet?’
Marbie gasped.
‘Because,’ Fancy explained, ‘he’s allowed to now. And I don’t think he’ll come back until he’s had an affair of his own.’
‘But I only slept with the A.E. once!’ cried Marbie.
‘And you’re not seeing him anymore, are you?’
‘No!’ she lied.
‘Still, that’s just a technicality. As soon as you slept with your aeronautical engineer, you gave Vernon the right to sleep with someone else. It’s a rule.’
Although Marbie begged Fancy to change her mind, she refused.
‘He has to,’ Fancy explained, gently. ‘Otherwise it’s not balanced. Didn’t you realise?’
‘I would die if Vernon even touched someone else.’
‘You should have thought of that before.’
‘Stop it, Fancy, it’s not funny. I don’t want him to have an affair. Come on, please?’
‘It’s not up to me. Revenge is his right.’
Oh God! thought Marbie, breathless with panic. Vernon’s hands on another woman’s hands, Vernon’s thighs against another woman’s thighs! Vernon playing the astronaut game and moon-walking across another woman’s bed! Why had she not thought of this before?
If he had to get revenge – and Marbie supposed that he did, because Fancy was generally wise – if he had to get revenge, then couldn’t the revenge be something else?
The next day, Marbie slept with the A.E. again.
For weeks he had seemed perfectly content to ask her, now and then, if she would like to ‘give it a whirl again’. Each time he asked, she would pretend to consider it, politely, and then say, ‘No. Thanks though.’ But on this day she arrived to find him wearing nothing but boxer shorts and a bow tie. He was carrying a bottle of champagne.
‘Marbie,’ he said, as she walked in the door and raised her eyebrows at him, ‘Marbie, this can not go on.’
‘Can’t it?’ she said.
‘No, my beautiful, it cannot. You cannot sleep with me once and then not again. You cannot use those pouting lips to tell me your delicious family scandal and then keep your lips away from mine. You cannot come over, night after night, with those sexy legs and that husky voice, and not sleep with me again.’
She gazed at him for a few moments. ‘All right,’ she said. ‘But not on the living room floor.’
So they gave it a whirl in the bedroom.
On this occasion, it seemed to Marbie that the A.E. was determined to demonstrate his sexual prowess. His prowess consisted of masterful choreography – elegant traditional rhythm cut through with surprising bursts of activity. For example, he would suddenly spin her over, jump onto the floor and beckon her over to the wardrobe. Oh well, she would think, I was happy where I was. But she played along. He kept going for almost two hours, often pinning her hands at the wrists, or catching her eye so he could
gaze at her ferociously.
She understood that he needed to show off like this. That first time, on the living room carpet, with the ice storm building outside, he had not been very coordinated. To be fair, she herself had lacked her usual dexterity, since the carpet had made her sneeze.
So, she decided, doubtfully, as the A.E. danced around her, the reason I agreed to do this was to give us both a second chance.
In any case, she added crossly, what was the point of coming to the A.E.’s place every second day, and listening to his criticisms of her name, her family, and the Secret, if she was not, at least, having sex? Especially now she knew Vernon had to have an affair.
For the next few days, Marbie stayed at home. She explained to the A.E. that she had to do 147 Business Activity Statements for the various Zing Family Secret corporations. (This happened to be true: she had an excellent mind for corporate structures and formalities.) She phoned Vernon and offered to do the Banana Bar BAS, as usual, but he said he had found an accountant.
The next time she saw the aeronautical engineer, it was in the Night Owl Pub, after her work friends had gone. He did not even sit down. He whispered in her ear, ‘Have a drink on me to our second time,’ and placed a schooner of beer in front of her. Then he took out a curl of paper, tied with a pink ribbon, and added, ‘One of my new visions’, before he slipped away. Marbie opened the vision and read it. It left her somewhat cold.
The following Thursday was a difficult day for Marbie. Things such as this kept happening: she made a call to get somebody’s number, scribbled the number on a sticky note, and then lost the post-it note. She ordered a salad sandwich for lunch and when the girl behind the counter said, ‘Salt and pepper?’, she replied, ‘Just pepper, please’, and the girl gave a glazed and rueful nod, meaning, that’s what everybody says. She bit the inside of her cheek, by accident, on the first bite of her sandwich, and then kept biting the same spot. Also, her nose and her eyes were itchy, and she was always on the verge of a sneeze.
She was almost relieved when the A.E. phoned in the afternoon and asked her to slip out of work to meet him at a nearby café.
In order to change the nature of the day, she ordered a piece of chocolate cake.
‘Whoa,’ said the aeronautical engineer, when the chocolate cake arrived. The waitress smiled, as if it were a compliment. ‘You gonna eat all that by yourself?’ He himself had only ordered an espresso.
‘You can share it if you like,’ said Marbie, politely.
‘Heeeee-uge,’ whistled the aeronautical engineer between his teeth, and then shook his head: ‘No thanks.’
Marbie adjusted her chair slightly, and took up her spoon.
‘It’s not that big,’ she said after a moment, at which he chuckled slightly and said, ‘You’d better get stuck in. I mean, we don’t have all day here; sure, if you wanted to share it with a starving nation, you might just –’
She touched his thigh lightly to make him stop.
‘Ho ho!’ he said, looking at her hand on his thigh with a grin. ‘Ho ho!’
When she returned to work, the day continued exactly as before. Worse even: one of her toenails seemed to have developed a sharp edge and was cutting into the next toe along whenever she walked to the photocopier.
Later that night, she drove to the A.E.’s place, to watch TV.
‘I’m hungry,’ she said, during an ad break.
‘After that piece of chocolate cake!’
‘That was hours ago,’ Marbie pointed out.
He raised his eyebrows. ‘I’m not hungry,’ he declared.
‘I assume you realise,’ said Marbie, spitefully, ‘that your not being hungry doesn’t make you a better person than me?’
He chuckled and leaned back on the couch, stretching out an arm as if to do a reverse park. Marbie stood up. She stared at him.
He gave her a little oops grimace. ‘What’s up? Feeling fragile today?’
Formally, she announced: ‘I’m leaving. Sorry, but we have to end it now.’
‘Come on,’ he smiled wryly. ‘You’re ending it because of a piece of chocolate cake?’
‘Because of a piece of chocolate cake,’ she agreed, and she gathered up her handbag and her shoes.
FANCY ZING
When Fancy Zing was eleven years old, her father went to Ireland for a year. The day that he was due to return she sat at the kitchen table to write him a poem:
‘Today! Today! My Daddy’s Coming Home!
At last! At last! Fetch the Cheese and Honeycomb!’
The thick black lead of the HB pencil slipped when the table wobbled, and the ‘Cheese’ spilled its ‘s’ across ‘Coming’.
Fancy examined the table. It was cracked and scribbled with words such as ‘MARBIE ZING’ and ‘COW!’ She lay her hands flat and rocked the table to pinpoint the wobble, tore a corner from her poem-paper, and crouched next to the table leg. As she crouched, she stopped and swirled her skirt, making the skirt touch the floor in a parachute circle. It was a brand-new skirt, to Welcome Daddy Home.
Her mother had said, ‘New jeans?’
And Fancy had said, ‘I think I’d like a skirt.’
‘A skirt!’ cried Mummy. ‘Aren’t we growing up!’
Then she took most of the money from the St Vincent de Paul box on top of the fridge, took Fancy’s little sister, Marbie, by the hand, and all three caught the bus to Castle Hill.
Fancy’s mother bought herself a pale green scarf, which floated in the air when she tossed it about, making up her mind whether to buy it or not (and she leaned toward Fancy and explained, ‘A little pink lipstick and a pale green scarf, and you’ll find you win any man’s heart!’ ‘Will you?’ said Fancy, surprised.) They bought a purple T-shirt for Marbie, and for Fancy, they bought a skirt in the colours of a rainbow lorikeet.
Now Fancy stood up from the floor, graceful, a flamingo, and felt the skirt rest against her legs.
The wobble was gone when she sat back down, and she took up her pencil again. But here was the problem. She could not write the poem too fast because she had to be there, writing it, when her father arrived. She had to be sitting at the kitchen table, her pencil chatting poetry, frowning as she worked on the last few words.
He would walk through the door and say, ‘Fancy! Hi! Doing your homework?’
And she would say, ‘Writing a poem to welcome you home.’
She would stand up, and her lorikeet skirt would fall against her legs in a great spray of colour, and he would say, ‘You’re all grown up!’
And she would say, gracefully, ‘Welcome home, Daddy.’ And present him with the poem.
So she sat at the table and drew tiny flowers in the space between the lines of her poem. Then she wrote the heading: ‘WELCOME DADDY’ in bubble letters, and made a 3D effect by shading around the edges.
The telephone rang and Mummy shouted from the laundry, ‘Get that would you, Fancy?’ But Marbie came skidding through the back door, and grabbed it from just beneath her fingers. ‘Hello?’ she said.
Fancy whispered at her sternly: ‘Good afternoon, Marbie Zing speaking.’
Marbie shivered her muddy face and turned towards the wall. ‘Yes,’ she said to the receiver. Then, ‘Ye-e-e-e-s! Of course!’ Then, ‘Uh-huh, Uh-huh. Okay. Bye.’
Fancy said, ‘You’re all muddy, Marbie. Who was that?’
‘Nobody,’ said Marbie, squirming past and running down the hallway.
‘It can’t have been nobody,’ Fancy murmured to herself. She followed Marbie at a more stately pace.
‘Who was it?’ Mummy asked.
‘Guess.’
Mummy stood up slowly from the laundry basket, carrying a pair of Marbie’s shorts. She put her hands in both shorts pockets, one at a time, and took out crumpled tissues and dirty handkerchiefs. ‘Look at you, Marbie,’ she said, shaking her head. ‘Look at your lovely new T-shirt.’
Marbie looked down and said ‘Oops!’ to see the purple T-shirt splattered with mud specks.
> ‘Oops is right, young lady.’ Mummy took an apple core from Marbie’s shorts pockets.
‘Who was it?’ Fancy demanded. ‘On the phone?’
Marbie licked her fingers and began scraping at the drops of mud.
‘Stop that,’ said Mummy. ‘You’ll only make it worse. Here, take it off right away and I’ll put it in with this lot. Marbie, who was on the phone, darling?’
Marbie lifted her T-shirt up over her face and from behind the purple she said, ‘Daddy.’
‘Daddy?’ Fancy cried.
‘Hang on,’ said Mummy. She had noticed something deep in the washing machine, and leaned way into the machine. Marbie and Fancy waited. ‘Huh,’ she said, coming back out and holding up a sock. Then she tossed it into the basket and turned around to reach for Marbie’s T-shirt.
‘Yeah,’ said Marbie, ‘Daddy. And he says he’s still at the airport now because the plane was late, and he said he’ll come home soon, okay?’
‘Right,’ said Mummy, bending to the basket once again. ‘We may as well get dinner started. No sense in us starving, is there?’
‘I’ll start dinner, Mummy,’ offered Fancy.
The chicken and chips were sitting on the bench, wrapped in a great white bundle. Fancy took the silver tray with its burnt biscuit stains, and let the chicken and chips tumble from their paper onto the tray. Then she switched on the oven, and the timer, and placed the tray in the centre of the shelf.
Ceremoniously, she moved to the table, took her HB pencil, and crinkled her forehead at the poem.
MARBIE ZING
When Marbie Zing was five years old, her father went to Ireland for a year. Every night that he was gone, Marbie crept into the school yard next door and took midnight swims in the pool. During the days while he was gone, she put the hose on the trampoline so she could jump with the splashes of water. Also, she sailed paper boats in the kitchen sink.
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