The Spell Book Of Listen Taylor (13 page)

“Don't stop her,” said Warren. “I feel like going to a party tonight.”

“You're coming?” cried Cath, startled and almost giddy. Then she said lightly, “So you'll bring Breanna along? I finally get to meet her!”

“Cath Murphy,” said Warren. “Where exactly have you been all day? Has it passed you by that the weather is
really weird
? That this is Sydney's first
ice storm
on record? Have a look at these school buses here, Cath, and tell me what's happened to their tires. They have
chains
on their tires, Cath. Do you think they'd let trains run? How exactly do you think Breanna's getting down from the coast tonight? And another thing, how exactly did you get your class to talk about anything
other than weather
today? You're a better teacher than I am, that's for sure.”

Cath giggled and said, “I wonder how we'll get to Lenny's party?”

Then she explained casually that she lived down the road from Lenny's place, and that Warren might as well share a taxi with her. After the party, he could take a taxi to his home, and she could walk back to her own place.

Warren was pleased with this idea.

Lenny wept into Cath's neck.

“Oh my God, Cath! I
loved
my job! I
loved
that man! I will
miss
you so
much
!”

Cath, on the couch beside Lenny, tried to balance a gin and tonic around her sobbing shoulders. Also on the couch, sipping a cup of tea and turning the pages of Lenny's photo album, was Heather Waratah (teacher, Grade 4C).

“Lenny,” murmured Cath. “You know you could just change your mind and come back? You want me to call Billson for you right now?”

“I can't,” sniffed Lenny, shaking her head. “But you have to keep in touch,” she sobbed again, drank from her beer, and dribbled beer alongside her tears. “You have to
promise
you'll keep in
touch
!”

“Ha!” exclaimed Ms. Waratah, pointing to a photo of Lenny and her brothers dressed as reindeer.

“All right,” said Cath. “I promise.”

Warren was as plastered as a wall, he said. Cath said that she was too.

They caught one another in the kitchen, and made some rude sentences with the magnet words on the fridge. Katie Toby (teacher, Kinder A) and Jo Bel Castro (teacher, Grade 5A) wandered into the room, and Katie Toby said, “Ice? Where's the ice?”

Jo Bel Castro put a friendly arm around Katie's shoulder and declared, “Where
would
a person find ice?”

Warren opened the dishwasher and took out the cutlery container. “Not here,” he shrugged, and put it back.

Katie Toby stared and frowned. “Thank you, everyone,” she said, and left the room. Jo Bel Castro raised an eyebrow, and walked in the other direction.

Cath giggled and fell against Warren, on purpose more or less, by the fridge. Warren held her up, with his arm around her shoulder, and pressed his face into her hair. He was saying something.

“What?” she said, not wanting to let go. “What are you saying?”

“Thank you,” he murmured in his muffled voice. “I'm saying thank you for last night. For not coming home with me. Cath? I don't trust myself around you anymore.”

Cath stayed still. His nose was pressed just above her ear, and the warmth of his face was in her hair. “Well,” she said eventually. “What does that mean?”

“It means,” said Warren, “that I'm relying on you. You have to be the strong one, okay?”

“Right,” said Cath. “Right.”

She pressed her whole body against his for a moment, as hard as she could, and then she stepped clean away.

“Right,” she said. “I'm going to the bathroom.”

Lenny's bathroom had an apricot theme and an art nouveau pattern around the tiles. Cath looked at herself in the mirror and immediately knew that she was drunk: It was just as she'd suspected.

“Nine times seven is sixty-three,” she said to the mirror. So she was not all that drunk. She was still there, inside her head, doing her nine times tables.
But that woman there, that woman in the mirror? Who is that, Cath Murphy, who is that?

Seven times nine is—

In reverse, it was not so good.

“You'll never get a cab in this.”

It was snowing outside.

“Freakish weather!” whispered Katie Toby, gazing through the window. Then, to the room: “Snow in Sydney! I mean, maybe a few flakes, once in a blue moon! But
heavy
snow! I mean, it's really kind of
heavy
? You know? Ha ha!”

“Promise me something,” said Warren, who was holding his phone to his ear. “
Never
lose that sense of humor.”

“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 cell 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 percent cotton. It might even be Egyptian cotton, you never know. Plus I have a spare featherdown 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.”

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 cell 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 seawater 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! It's not you. He always turns his back on strangers.”) 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 among her books and chairs. At each thing she showed him he said, “Mmm,” with fascination and a crunch on a corn chip.

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

“Yeah,” 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 of snow.

“No way,” 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 corn chip 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 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 boot down and took her foot onto his lap.

“Yes,” he said, “that's better,” and pressed the sole of her foot.

“No,” explained Cath. “That's not what I meant.” But she left her foot in his lap, safe in its 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,” Warren frowned. “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:

“Lovely,” said Warren. “Where's the rest?”

“That's it. I've only done the title 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.
L
istening and
L
ong and
Llll
ens.”

Warren confessed that he preferred the repetition of vowel sounds. He was more an assonance man, he said. 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 all that? Get the bit for knees.” She crunched on a corn chip 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.”

“Okay, listen,” said Warren. “I'll rub your foot a tiny bit at a time, 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 title 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. That's an A-plus, 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.
”

“Maybe I have to kiss the knee directly?” said Warren. “Maybe the foot won't do?”

“I don't know,” admitted Cath.

He stopped for a moment and stared at her. He 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.

Irritating Things About My Husband # 12

Let's say it's an ordinary weeknight, I'll be cleaning up the kitchen, and I've
just
about finished—the dishwasher stacked, detergent neat in its compartment, only the large baking tray left to rinse—when Radcliffe, right on cue, will step into the room and announce: “Leave it” (grandly), “I'll do the rest.”

The Monday after Cassie's birthday, 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
A.M.

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 on an autumn day) from her eyes.”

Voilà!
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 under way 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, puffer fish, clown fish, and tangs—but then she discovered an extremely comprehensive Web site. It broke fish down into categories (such as marine and fresh), but then it expanded each category into several more. Subcategory 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 dialed 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 inquire 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
A.M.
After she had watched for a while, it said 10:43
A.M.

“So, that's that,” she declared, pleased.

In the backseat 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 station. 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. “There's a cold front coming in the next week or so, so this could be our last chance for a while.”

“We can't go sailing this weekend!” said Mum. “There's the Bellamys and Samsons for dinner on Saturday and then your parents on Sunday!”

“We don't need to see the Bellamys and the Samsons,” said Dad. “We can cancel.”

“I think you'll find that we do, actually,” declared 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 backseat. “‘What do you
mean
when you say
routine
?'”

“I also don't like being told what I can and cannot do,” her dad said 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.

Irritating Things About My Husband #22

Let's say we've just had the Bellamys and Samsons to dinner on a Saturday night. Let's say, after a night of booming storytelling, buttoned shirts, swishing skirts, etc., the Bellamys and Samsons set off, leaving behind candle wax, salad bowls, bread knives, eggshells, stacked plates, and beetroot on the floor.
Well,
after such a party, closing the front door, I like to take a garbage bag from beneath the kitchen sink and begin with the dirty napkins.

Behind me, at once, the bleary port breath! Radcliffe with his gravelly voice: “Leave it,” he murmurs, “leave it for now,” his hands on my shoulders ready to steer me to the bed.

Leave it! As if he were a king, offering the wondrous treasure of
himself

Fancy flipped open a notebook, took the cap 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.

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

Fancy replaced the cap 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 toward his mouth. “That'll be the telephone,” he announced next, as it had just begun to ring.

“Dressed in black?” said Marbie.

“Oh really?
Tonight?
What for? It's
cold
!”

“For the Maintenance,” explained Marbie. “Mum just paged me. It's blurred, remember? We can do it easy if we leave right now. Meet you at the ice-cream truck?”

Marbie was not at the ice-cream truck when Fancy arrived. She was in the tree above the truck.

Fancy pretended to consider the range of ice creams (single cone, double cone, single dipped in chocolate with a Flake on the side, etc.), and then squinted up into the darkness.

Marbie gave the sign for “all set” (both hands flat on the head). She almost lost her balance and had to grab noisily at clumps of leaves.

Fancy gave the sign for “Great, and I've remembered all the tools” (a playful twirl of her handbag), then clipped across the road to the apartment block. Without pausing, she firmly pressed in the security code, and entered the building.

She and Marbie had both learned to pick a lock when their fingers were fresh and nimble. She got into the apartment in less than three seconds, smiled at the cat, and slid silently from room to room in a quick Emptiness Check. (There had once been a plumber in the bathroom, but Fancy ingeniously recruited him on the spot.)

In the dining room, she opened her handbag, reached in for the nail file, and accidentally took out her telephone bill. The cat meowed.

“Hmm,” she murmured, and sat down at the dining table, turning over the telephone bill. There was a clutter of papers there, which she shifted slightly so she could study her List of Potential Lists.

UNPLEASANT
SOUNDS
!!!

things that are very hot

delicious things to drink

foreign currencies

fish

Except that the word
fish
was now caught in a tangle of lines, each linking
fish
to various fish species. “Objects in a family home,” Fancy wrote at the end of the list. The cat meowed again, and Fancy said, “Hello,” and added
cats
in a flash of inspiration. Beside it, she scribbled, “Include lions, tigers, panthers, etc.!!! Also, basic domestic cats?”

Meow, meow,
said the cat.

“Are you hungry, is that it?” Fancy murmured soothingly, reaching out her left hand to stroke the cat, but not being able to find it.

She looked up, and the cat was standing way across the room in the doorway, its collar bell tinkling faintly.

“How—?” began Fancy.

Then she gasped, took out her pager (which meowed at her even as she pressed the message button), and read: GET OUT
NOW.

At which exact moment, a key turned in the lock.

On Friday night at Grandpa and Grandma Zing's, Fancy sat on the carpet next to Listen and said, “Tell me some sounds that you don't like to hear.”

“The sounds of cars crashing,” offered Nathaniel from the dining-room table.

“Not you,” Fancy said, but she wrote it down in her notebook. “I'm asking Listen now. I'll ask you later.”

Listen thought hard.

“You have to think outside the box,” advised Radcliffe dryly. “Otherwise, she cuts you to the quick.”

“Oh!” cried Grandma Zing. “Radcliffe! Was she mean to you?”

“Not mean,” said Radcliffe thoughtfully. “More malicious.”

“The sound of a puddle,” Listen said now, “going splat when you just accidentally stepped in it with your sneaker.”

“Good!” Fancy wrote fast.

“The sound that our school library computer makes,” Listen said calmly, still thinking about Fancy's question. “Kind of a mean-sounding
bleep
? When you return your book, and it turns out it's overdue. Does that count?”

“Perfect!” Fancy scribbled frantically.

“Come on, Fancy!” Grandma Zing called. “We're all going out to the shed!”

“Fancy,” beckoned Radcliffe, at her mother's shoulder, “come on, hon.”

From the slightly raised platform at the far end of the shed, Grandma Zing frowned at her clipboard.