The Spell Book Of Listen Taylor (17 page)

She had a moment of pleasure at that thought, and then the pleasure faded like a pilot light burning out.
What if the handyman came back?
What reason could she give for being here? She could be practicing her Tae Kwon Do. She could say that she had a grading right after recess, and this was the only place to practice.

For authenticity, she tried a spinning hook kick. As she did, something happened in her mind:
I can't even make friends with the other kids at Tae Kwon Do.
They were funny, some of the other kids, and she was always careful not to laugh. She planned to wait until she contributed something of her own before she laughed. But when she thought of funny things she worried,
Is it funny enough?
By the time she had decided it was, the conversation had moved on. So she never said a word.

I am a lost cause.
She swiveled and tripped on a tangle of cords. She fell against the fuse box and slid to the ground with a sound like someone flicking through playing cards. She stood back up in a panic and flashed her eyes over the fuses. Some said
OFF
and some said
ON
—which ones had she knocked?

They should probably all be
ON
. She flicked them all, breathing hard, and backed out of the utility room, closing the door behind her.

There was nobody on the balcony. There were distant sounds of girls laughing and chatting on the lawn. Somewhere, teachers were also chatting, in deeper, more sardonic voices. She used up the last five minutes of
recess standing at the bag rack outside 7B, and leafing through the contents of her schoolbag.

Walking home from school that day, hunched against the pale cold sky and the thin waves of rain, Listen thought:
Don't worry, there are only two more days until the end of the week.
Also she thought:
Don't worry, soon I'll find a new group to join.

As she stepped around the edges of muddy puddles, Listen tried once again to go through the different groups of girls in her grade, but instead found herself remembering a particular day from a weekend a few years back. On that day, she and her dad had taken a ferry ride on the harbor. Alongside a ferry wharf she had seen a large yellow sign, which announced, in black letters:
CAUTION: SUBMARINE CABLES
.

Reading the sign, she had shivered with delight.
There was a submarine right beneath her!
She imagined it must be slender and silver, and inside, a group of harried sailors hunched over long, low tables, sipping black coffee and studying maps. The submarine would be tethered to the seafloor with a cable that might trip you up.

Later, her dad explained that
submarine
just meant “below water.” The sign was saying
CAUTION: UNDERWATER CABLES
.

As she stepped up onto the apartment porch, Listen thought,
There is nothing magic in the world. There are no flying motorbikes, just airplanes. There are no shooting stars, just satellites. There are no submarines, just underwater cables. There are no eternal pacts.

Then, as she found her key in her pocket, she thought,
I don't think I can make it to the end of the week.

Inside the apartment door, she had to stop as the weight of her schoolbag had become too much for her shoulder. There was a noise down the hall. “Hello!” called Marbie's voice. “Is that Listen or a burglar?”

Marbie was sitting at the kitchen table, and the radiator buzzed at her feet. The room was so warm it was like a velvet hug. “It's my beautiful Listen!” cried Marbie, leaping to her feet and throwing her arms into the air. “Look, I've got you a welcome afternoon tea!” She swept her arms back and forth across the table, which was set with a lace cloth, a chocolate bar arranged in pieces on a saucer, wedges of orange in a bowl, and a steaming cherry pie.

“Wow,” said Listen, dropping her schoolbag. “How come you're not at work?”

“Do you think you could take the rest of the week off school?” said Marbie, ignoring the question and pushing the saucer of chocolate closer to Listen. “I'm about to call Nathaniel and see if he can close the Banana Bar. Because guess what? I heard on the news that it's snowing in the Blue Mountains! So I've arranged the deluxe package for the three of us at the Hydro Majestic. There'll be flowers and chocolates on arrival! And there are fireplaces in the rooms! And we can toboggan down gentle slopes, and then we'll come inside for spa baths, and hot chocolate, and marshmallows, and we'll all play Pictionary or whatever game you like. What do you think? Would you like to take the rest of the week off school? I'll write a note and say you've got a brain tumor!”

Listen laughed so hard she started crying.

On the train home from the mountains, while Listen was asleep, Marbie and Nathaniel talked again about how remote she was. They decided it was her age. This was the sullen phase, and next it would be drugs and vandalism.

“I thought she might skip adolescence,” Nathaniel reflected.

A lot of things were changing in her life, they realized: new school,
new home, new family, new way of spending Friday nights. It was not surprising that she was retreating into such a busy social life with her friends.

Marbie said she thought the best approach was to be as loving as possible. They should praise her constantly. Nathaniel agreed.

The following week, Listen arrived at school with a snow burn, and found that the Grade Seven classrooms had been flooded. Everyone was as excited as if it was a holiday, and they had to take their lessons in the Science labs or even outside on the lawn. The teachers laid plastic sheets on the grass to stop them getting chills in their kidneys.

She sat in the school library at lunchtime, and watched as a fat teacher wearing a caftan and spectacles rolled out a poster for the wall. A lot of the teachers at this school wore spectacles, she realized. Was it just Clareville Academy or was it junior high? Did it cause some kind of eyesight problem for adults?

A group of Grade Seven girls stopped outside the library door. Listen slipped down in her seat so they would not see her. One of them was tipping out another one's pencil case; one was making a song out of her timetable; one was writing on another one's schoolbag; one was complaining that she had forgotten a textbook. None of them seemed to be listening to any of the others. All of them were shouting. A librarian sighed and closed the door.

It was a mystery to Listen: Why could she not just walk out the door and shout along with the other girls? Why could she not relax, the way she did when she was with the Zings? Just last Friday, at the Zing dining table, she had told them the topic for her science assignment. “We have to choose two creatures of the sea,” she recited. “They may be mythical creatures, and they need not be fish.”

“They
need not be fish,
” murmured Grandma Zing, impressed.

“Ocean bream and rainbow trout,” suggested Grandpa Zing at once.

“Mullet and mermaids,” tried Grandma Zing.

“Blowfish and stingrays,” said Listen's dad.

“Fish and chips!” Cassie giggled.

“Blue-eyed cod and…” Radcliffe clicked his fingers a couple of times.

“Does it have to be creatures of the sea?” said Fancy, looking dreamy. “Can't it be, I don't know,
dragons
and
dodo birds
?”

“I don't think so,” Listen said apologetically. “It's for our Ocean unit.”

It was just as if she lived in parallel universes. In one, with the Zings, she said whatever she liked, and her words became part of a stream of words, and they praised her and found her fascinating. In the other, she was at school or at Tae Kwon Do, and she never said a word.

The first universe must never find out about the second. The Zings would look at her in a completely different way. Their universe would disappear.

Nathaniel reached under the driver's seat to adjust it back. “You must be shorter than you look,” he commented to Marbie, who was in the passenger seat beside him.

They were driving home after a Zing Family Secret Meeting.

“How was the meeting?” said Listen from the backseat.

“Okay,” said Nathaniel. “How was your movie with Cassie?”

“Fine,” agreed Listen. Passing headlights striped all three in turn.

There was silence in the car, except for the
tch
ing of the indicator as they waited in a right-turn lane.

“How's school anyway, Listen?” Marbie said.

“Fine.”

Nathaniel and Marbie each sighed slightly.

“Looking forward to the holidays?” Marbie tried next.

“Yep,” said Listen. “Oh, did I tell you I'm going to a party at Sia's place tomorrow night? Is that okay?”

“Of course!”

“You've got such a busy social life, Listen,” Marbie said. “You're a lot cooler than I was at school.”

“Her friends have always loved her,” Nathaniel confirmed. “How is Sia anyway, Listen?”

“Fine.”

Marbie and Nathaniel winced. There was silence from the backseat.

Then she surprised them, as Nathaniel took the corner, by asking, “Marbie, can you tell your swimming-pool story again?”

“Well,” said Marbie at once. “I was five years old, and this was a hot summer day. I was playing on the swing that Dad had hooked up for us, as a good-bye present when he left to go to Ireland, you know, the swing that hangs from the big gum tree down in the back of the yard? So, I was swinging back and forth trying to pick up a breeze to cool me down, so higher and higher I swung, and the higher I went the more I could see: Mummy's flower beds, our old trampoline, the tops of small trees, the tops of taller trees, and the roof of the garden shed. Higher and higher I swung until I could even see the roof of our own house, and then of course, I started to see the neighborhood—the empty school yard of Bellbird Junior High next door, their basketball court and its goalposts, their tennis courts, their old stone buildings, the sloping lawn at the back of the school, how it falls into scrub and forest, and then, with one final
swing
of my knees, I went higher than I ever had before. And that's when I saw the spark of something blue in the bush there.

“That night, I waited until everyone was asleep, and I climbed out of
my bedroom window, and ran down to the back of our house. I found a gap in the fence between our place and the school, and I ran down into the bush, and there were rocks and dried grass that hurt my feet, but I didn't notice because I wanted to find out what it was. And what it was, of course, was the school's new swimming pool. I was hot and dirty from running through the bush so I jumped in and swam around a bit. Then I went home and went to bed.”

“And then for the rest of that summer,” prompted Listen sleepily.

“And then for the rest of that summer, every night, after midnight, I would slip through the gap in the fence and go for a swim in the pool. I thought it was my own secret pool. Of course, after a couple of years I stopped being able to fit through the gap in the fence, which is why—”

She turned around to the backseat, but Listen was fast asleep.

It was exhausting having a secret.

Saturday night, Listen sat shivering by the Bellbird Junior High swimming pool. The pool was covered, and the signboards were facedown on the frosty ground.

It was a mistake coming here to hide out. She had thought it would cheer her up, sneaking into Bellbird like she used to with Marbie and her dad, over the summer. Now it was just cold and dark.

She looked up and there was something impossible in the sky. A magical, pulsing, blue light; something enchanted, or maybe a spaceship. Her heart leapt up onto its toes, and she trembled with excitement.

Then she realized what it was. It was a screen advertising cars, on the side of the Goodyear blimp.

On Wednesday, an intriguing pink envelope was tossed onto Marbie's desk by the mailboy. Her name appeared on the front in swirling purple.

Inside: a large piece of paper bearing two yellow sticky notes. The first sticky note said in scratchy pen,
Just wrote this and you came to mind. So here it is for you.

On the large piece of paper, Vision # 1,451 was neatly typed.

The Visions of an Aeronautical Engineer
Vision # 1,451

Deep within the icicles of muddy, cruddy space

I see this, I see this, I see:

Gosh!

I see your face! Your own precious face!

I see black cats, umbrellas, and streaks of spilling milk.

I see a footpath crack, a burning ear, a ladder and a wooden door—

A necklace clasp is glinting from beneath a dimpled chin!

The second sticky note said,
Tomorrow night. My place. Here's your Second Chance.

The next day, Thursday, Marbie sat at her desk and unwound paper clips. A little pile of ragged wires formed on her desk. Every now and then she took one from this pile and tried to bend it back into paper clip shape. It was never possible.

The yellow sticky note was on her corkboard:
Tomorrow night. My place. Here's your Second Chance.
Each time she read it, she felt a chill breeze waft through her mind:
You must not go! You must not go! You must not go!

Of course not! She gave a contemptuous laugh, but continued to unwind paper clips. The telephone rang. It was Fancy.

“Marbie!” Fancy's voice was urgent and breathless—and Marbie felt at once that Fancy knew. “You must not go!” Fancy would instruct her. “Of course not,” Marbie would reply.

“Marbie, something terrible has happened! I left a
phone bill
of mine on the dining room table at the last Intrusion! I just realized! I have to go back in and get it! But what if it's too late? I can hardly breathe! I've called Mum, and she's put out an Urgent Request for a Distraction. So, if we get one, is tonight okay?”

“Of course,” agreed Marbie. “I'll leave work early and wait for your call. I'm sure it's not too late, or we'd have heard something. Just calm down and breathe and have a foot massage.”