‘Project 55,’ corrected Mrs Zing.
‘The funny thing about that,’ continued Radcliffe, ‘was that your friends kept swooping in and stealing the offers! It just goes to show, you can’t –’
‘The spies were supposed to find out what you were unhappy about,’ Vernon cut in. ‘Or what you really wanted. And then we thought up ways to get those things to you.’
‘Nikolai was also keen to steer you in certain directions,’ added Mrs Zing. ‘It wasn’t just us. Occasionally, he would send an edict – a special request for us to concentrate on some aspect of your life. For instance, he wanted you to be refined – a woman of resources. It was his idea to get you horse-riding lessons, and then that wine appreciation course when you were older? Remember?’
‘Ah yes!’ said Radcliffe. ‘And he was so keen that you become a lawyer! His dream was for you to eventually become the managing corporate lawyer for the Valerio Empire! We tried everything to –’
‘Anyway,’ interrupted Marbie, ‘the challenge was how to get these things to you without being obvious.’
‘That was the fun part,’ agreed Fancy.
‘We used scholarships, prizes, raffles, free offers – things turning up on your doorstep – anything we could think of.’
‘The magazines were the stroke of genius,’ smiled Mrs Zing.
‘Fancy wrote most of the content,’ said Marbie, ‘and Radcliffe did the desktop publishing at work – we all thought up the competitions.’
‘We tried hiding things in taxis,’ said Vernon.
‘But you kept not noticing them!’ cried Radcliffe.
‘Or when you did,’ said Mrs Zing, ‘you gave them to the driver. You were so honest.’
Cath was breathing in, ready to unleash a stinging rebuke, when she realised they had stopped looking at her. They were chatting animatedly amongst themselves, reminiscing.
EXTRACTS FROM THE ZING
GARDEN SHED (Burnt Fragments)
COFFEE AND CHOCOLATE
STRAWBERRIES
Cath was feeling pale.
She sat with her chair a little distant from the table, and her chin a little distant from her neck. The Zing family’s explanations meandered around her while her forearms stung faintly and her vision blurred.
‘Here,’ said Fancy quietly, sliding the milk jug towards her. ‘Coffee stays warmer if you add the milk straight away.’
‘Does it?’ said Cath, strangely elated for a moment by this glimpse of everyday, practical truth.
Fancy nodded: ‘The milk is like a little white blanket.’
‘Oh!’ cried Mrs Zing, from her end of the table. ‘I’ve forgotten the chocolate strawberries! Hang on there while I get them.’
Everyone watched as she crossed the lawn, and listened to the gentle thud as she closed the back door behind her.
The family set down their coffee cups and watched Cath.
‘I don’t believe any of this,’ said Cath. ‘I wouldn’t believe it at all if I hadn’t seen that garden shed. But okay, just assuming it’s true, even if you might decide to keep an eye on a baby when you give it up for adoption, why did you all keep going? Why didn’t one of you stop this? I’m grown up now. I’ve got a job. Why did this go on for so long?’
‘Well,’ said Radcliffe, heartily, ‘you didn’t know it was happening, so how could it hurt you? There wasn’t really anything illegal about it. And to be perfectly honest, it was a lot of fun! All the exciting subterfuge and espionage and so on!’
‘Also, it was all for you,’ added Marbie. ‘It was to protect you because, you know, if it had come out that you were Valerio’s daughter, you’d never have had a normal life. The media would have watched you more than we ever did, and they’d have put it in the papers. We only put it in the garden shed.’
‘Maybe that was my decision to make,’ said Cath.
‘We gave you a lot of presents,’ Radcliffe pointed out.
‘Maybe I didn’t want them.’
‘Besides,’ said Marbie, ‘it was part of our life. It was what we did on Friday nights.’
‘Right,’ agreed Fancy. ‘Once you get your filing system up, it’s hard to stop working on the files.’
Mr Zing cleared his throat. Everyone turned to him, a little surprised. He had hardly said a word for the entire meal. ‘It’s like this,’ he said, holding out the palms of his hands. ‘Some people are good at changing things by seeing them in just the right light. Let’s say, for example, a man has a mid-life crisis. He thinks he’s destined for greater things than a family, and he runs away to a one-room apartment in West Ryde. Let’s say his wife makes that event into something else. Let’s say she calls it an artistic mission, a trip to Ireland to write novels. Now, take a look at that! He’s not a selfish fool anymore, he’s just a dreamer. See what I mean? Call a thing by a different name and you change it.’
Even the kookaburra was surprised into silence.
‘Okay,’ continued Mr Zing, clearing his throat. ‘Now let’s say this woman gives up her baby. Oh, she does it for all the right reasons – she thinks she’s giving the baby a better life, she thinks she’s saving her family. But the fact remains, she gives up her baby. So let’s say she calls this event something else – a Zing Family Secret. A complicated secret with subterfuge and spies, but most of all, a secret which is all about taking care of the child. Let’s say we ever put a stop to that. We might have had to see what it was.’
Quietly, he pressed out his final words, ‘It was a bribe, Cath. She gave up her baby and they paid her off. That’s what it was.’
Somewhere, in the bush behind the fence, a whipbird commenced a long, suspenseful toooooo which ended in a sharp whip-crack. Then the back door slammed and Mrs Zing emerged with the strawberries.
16
THE HOT AIR BALLOON
Although Maude set out to be scrupulously honest in her narration of the Zing Family Secret, she did not tell Cath everything. For example, she did not tell her that once Cath had been transferred to Valerio’s people – after which the Zings returned home from the seaside – she had not considered the garden shed for weeks.
Instead, she lay in bed, and only got up to do the ironing. David slept on the living room couch at this time. He made sausages and tomatoes for dinner each night and did the girls’ homework for them.
In the bedroom, Maude lay still with her eyes open wide, exhausting her imagination by forcing it to hold, steady on her chest, the image, weight, fragrance and warmth of her baby girl. A soft little cat pressing itself ever closer.
When she did fall asleep, she dreamt that she was standing in the basket of a hot air balloon. Behind her was her baby, strapped into a small bassinet, and Maude, without pausing, gathered up the bassinet and tipped it over the side. A parachute opened from the bassinet as it fell, and Maude caught her breath: the child is saved!, but then she saw that the parachute was upside down. The bassinet crashed to the ground and was smashed to pieces.
Day after day, Maude lay in bed, snapping in and out of this nightmare: the balloon, the bassinet, the baby rushing to the ground. Each time she woke in horror at the sound of the crash, wept into her pillow, and rebuked herself sharply for throwing the baby overboard. Then she fell into a fit of yearning. If only, she yearned, if only in just one of these dreams the bassinet could catch an up-draught! If only the up-draught could carry it high into a zinging blue sky, over a hill of whipped butter, across a maple syrup pond. And finally, gently, deposit the child on a buttermilk pancake bed.
Until one night, after such a dream, she regarded the circle of the moon through her bedroom window – so sharp-edged it would sever the tendons in your hands if you reached up to hold it – and she thought: I’ll make her one.
Maude wrote the entire Spell Book on her bedroom floor that night.
First, she stapled a set of blank pages together with some lime green cardboard, folded at the edges for a cover, and she printed the words ‘SPELL BOOK’ on the front. Then she sat ba
ck on her knees and considered the issue. She knew the language of spell books, having read plenty in her herbal remedy phase, and, at a pinch, she could draw on the language of her recipe books. But what was she hoping to achieve?
As soon as she asked herself this question, she turned the book over and wrote on the back cover:
‘This Book will make you Fly, will make you Strong, will make you Glad. What’s more, this Book will Mend your Broken Heart.’
She had sent Cath over the edge, and she would always be crashing to the ground. If nothing else, decided Maude, this book would provide a soft landing.
Opening the first blank page, she decided she must recreate the important events – her love affair with Nikolai; her broken heart and abandonment – and then she would write a resolution.
It all began, she recalled, efficiently, on the day that her husband, David, called a taxi and left her (A Spell To Make Someone Decide To Take A Taxi). Then she had discovered the pie-chef job in the Trading Post, when looking for a new vacuum cleaner (A Spell To Make A Vacuum Cleaner Break). She had won the boat-scene role in the film when the leading lady fought with the director (A Spell To Make Two Happy People Have A HUGE Fight Over Absolutely NOTHING) and in such a way the affair had begun. The affair had ended, effectively, when the set supervisor sent her the artificial rose (A Spell To Make Someone Give Someone A Rose).
Now, bravely, she considered her broken heart. She looked at its anatomy closely: her yearning for Nikolai’s return; her anger with him; her hatred of Nikolai’s wife, for having got to Nikolai first and for keeping him from her. Thus, she included her fantasy that someone might find some evidence of the affair – a note, perhaps, from his jeans pocket – so that the marriage would end (A Spell To Make Someone Find Something Unexpected In A Washing Machine). She had also imagined him eating chocolate cake laced with walnuts, so that his lips might swell like balloons (A Spell To Make Somebody Eat A Piece Of Chocolate Cake). In her lowest moments, she had thought of the famous wedding photograph in which Nikolai and Rebekka pranced barefoot in the fields (A Spell To Make A Person Get Stung By A Bee).
The end of the affair had been sealed, in her mind, when her husband returned from his apartment. He had caught a cold, which turned into a fever, and in a delusional state he had finally seen the truth: he would never become an inventor, and in pursuing this fruitless path, he was losing the only things that mattered. As soon as his voice came back, he had phoned Maude, apologised, and begged her to take him back. Knowing that the affair with Nikolai was only a fiction, thinking of the girls, remembering that once she had loved him, Maude had agreed. He arrived home two weeks later, phoning from Strathfield station when his train was cancelled, and pretending that the plane had been delayed. So: A Spell To Make Someone Catch A Cold.
Now, Maude paused again. She had reached the final Spell. Where was the resolution? It was too late to get her baby back. All she could really do for Cath, she thought slowly, was to secretly watch over her, find ways to solve her problems and guide her through her life. She had access to Valerio funds for this reason, but how could she put it to use?
She would need her husband. David would know how to modify cameras and microphones, to conceal them in shirtsleeves and collars. He would know about zoom lenses and bugging devices. She would recruit the spies and he would fit them out. He would gather the information; she would study it and make the requisitions. He could insulate the shed; she would set up the filing system.
They would work closely together. Fancy and Marbie would have their parents back. The Zing Family would be intact. At least in this small way, the sacrifice of Cath might have been worth it.
She trembled as she wrote the final spell. (A Spell To Make Two People Fall In Love Again.) She closed the Book, climbed into bed, and fell into a deep dreamless sleep.
She thought she would post the Spell Book to Cath on her eighteenth birthday, but shortly after she wrote it, she threw herself into the Secret: painting the garden shed and making some early recruitments. In the midst of this practical excitement, she began to see that the Secret was the real way in which she would take care of Cath. The writing of the Book, she saw, had really been for herself, a sort of desperate, feverish therapy.
In fact, flicking through the Book one day, she realised that it reminded her of a self-help book she had once read, which suggested humming exercises to combat stress. She looked up the humming book and smiled, remembering how the endorsement on the back cover had persuaded her to buy it. ‘This book really truly works,’ said Elinor Daisy Weaver of Jacksonville, Alabama. ‘You’ve got to do all the exercises of course but boy oh boy! Until I did those exercises, I was the unhappiest girl in the State.’
On a whim, Maude copied this endorsement word for word (with slight adaptation – ‘exercise’ had to be ‘spell’) onto the inside flap of the Spell Book.
Then the Book got lost, probably mixed up with Fancy or Marbie’s school things, and she forgot all about it. She only ever performed one of the Spells herself.
17
CATH MURPHY
The evening following the Explanation Lunch was a still and balmy one. Cath’s apartment blinked, apprehensively, when she threw open its front door. She gazed at her living room with such contempt that it drew up its chin defensively.
In her arms she held a Tupperware container filled with Mrs Zing’s meringues, and a brown paper bag of lemons from Mr Zing’s tree. These she appeared to notice now with startled exasperation, and she allowed them to tumble to her feet. Then she marched straight to the dining room window, and ran her fingers up and down the frame. It took only a moment to find the camera, although it was smaller than her smallest fingernail.
At the Explanation Lunch she had deliberately calmed herself, and set herself apart, by finding the Zing family absurd. I don’t believe a word of this, she had said to herself now and then, comfortably, but it’s very amusing! But even as she reassured herself, the contents of the Zing Family Shed had drifted across her memory so that her heart began pounding again (if not this nonsense, then how to explain that shed?).
And now, here was a camera in the palm of her right hand.
Was it all true? Had this tiny object been observing her all this time? Could something so slight as this have shaped her life? Had fat Mrs Zing watched her eat dinner, making notes about what she might need? Had those strange smiling Zing sisters slipped into her home and replaced or repaired the camera when she wasn’t home? She brought her palms together hard, crushing the camera. When she opened her hands again she almost expected to see a drop of blood, as if she had killed a mosquito.
She began a frenzied search through the apartment, without knowing quite what she was looking for: more of the fingernail cameras, of course, but also anything electronic or odd, anything she might recognise from movies about spies or surveillance. The Zings had assured her that the only equipment in her apartment was the dining room camera, but she thought she had also caught odd half-references that day, to one additional camera, which only ever photographed her ankles. So she ran a knife along the skirting boards, prised open electrical outlets, and even turned her socks inside out. Her cat, Violin, watched.
Finally, she collapsed onto the living room couch, but found that her head was shaking back and forth in disbelief. Her hair was getting caught on the fabric.
She sat up and gazed around the room, from the low bookshelf to the standing lamp, to the plasma TV on its chrome stand. At that moment her eyes caught the shape of a small green ‘V’. It was the ‘V’ on her TV remote control. There was a similar ‘V’, she saw now, on the side of the leather-bound box which sat by the DVD player. It was her collection of Valerio Classics.
Valerio! She had almost forgotten. The Valerio Empire had been funding the entire thing!
Well that part, she thought scornfully, was certainly not true.
Valerios connected to her mediocre life? It was ridiculous enough to think of the Zing family examining her ordi
nary days, but the Valerios! She had studied Nikolai’s films in high school Social Studies! She owned a Valerio electric toothbrush, and used Valerio conditioning treatments on her hair! She loved to eat Nikolai Gingerbread Men and she had recently signed up for the Valerio Young & Fit Health Plan. That small green ‘V’ filled her life!
She reached for the leather-bound collection of classics, opened it, and took out the movie at the top of the pile. Nikolai Valerio smouldered up at her from the photo on the front cover. There was the trademark smudge of motor oil, and there were the elegant cheekbones. Unconsciously, she touched her own cheekbones. I am the daughter, she thought, doubtfully, of Nikolai Valerio. It was like thinking: I am a princess.
It’s not true, she reminded herself, as Violin skirted her ankles. But just in case, she took the movie collection down the hall and hid it in the linen closet. Even as she pressed the cupboard door closed, she was distracted by the small green V on the side of her coat rack. Her eyelid began to flicker.
18
THE HOT AIR BALLOON
When Maude lay in bed for several weeks, she only got up to do the ironing and to write the Spell Book. David, who was sleeping on the living room couch at that time, saw only her closed bedroom door. He placed arrangements of food at the foot of the door – a bottle of orange juice alongside a bowl of black plums, for example – but otherwise left her alone.
The day after she wrote the Spell Book, Maude got up. David, seeing her at the breakfast table, pretended she was there every day and offered her the coffee. Fancy and Marbie, in their school uniforms, followed his example.
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