The Spell Book Of Listen Taylor (23 page)

Strangely, Cath did not think of the pact about the rose when she found a short-stemmed rose in her pigeonhole on Thursday afternoon. She simply blushed and thought,
That's a risk!
Because people would wonder where she got it from. Then she sat at the table ready for the staff meeting. She would slip the rose into her handbag when nobody was watching, as soon as the meeting finished.

Billson started with a joke about the seventh-graders and how nobody expected them to hang around
this
long! The one Clareville teacher attending smiled warily.

Cath kept her eyes away from Warren. She was talented at pretending there was nothing going on (he was always telling her this).

Billson suggested a new format for the school newsletter, and a couple of teachers had far too many thoughts on this theme.

Cath wanted Billson to get a move on. It was Thursday, and they had to go to her place for their crises and mulled wine.

“A temp is a temp, as fine a temp as Mrs. Rory has been.”

Billson was nodding at the temporary Grade Six teacher, the emergency replacement for Lenny. Cath watched his face carefully for signs of a broken heart when he said Lenny's name. He seemed perfectly all right. Perhaps he was an
actor
like Cath?

“And as you all know,” Billson continued, “we have put our heads to the wheel on this particular one.”

“Heads to the wheel,” murmured Warren from across the staff-room table, “ouch,” which gave Cath an excuse to look at him and smile.

“Excuse me,” said Ms. Waratah, raising her hand slightly. “I think the phrase is
shoulders
to the wheel.”

Billson ignored her and continued, “And Mrs. Rory has agreed to become permanent! As you all know, she's had plenty of experience, she's rock solid, and she's loads of fun!” Mrs. Rory smiled modestly, and everyone said congratulations.

“So!” Billson got a move on, gathering his papers. “So, that's the sixth-graders taken care of! And—” He held both hands high, to still the stirring room. “And, here's some news!” He had trouble keeping his smile in check. “You remember how Lenny used to be sixth-grade teacher
and
school counselor? Well! Never let it be said that we don't fly with the times here at Redwood!”

The teachers paused with their bags and their jackets at the ready.

“Guess what?” Now Billson was beaming. “We have reached a decision to employ a
separate
school counselor. A
full-time
school counselor! And guess who we have chosen?”

Nobody could guess.

“A woman by the name of Breanna!” Billson practically whooped as he beamed his delight about the room. “The psychologist wife of our very own Warren Woodford here!”

“Huh!” cried the room, and, “Congratulations, Warren!”

Warren leaned back in his chair and took a bow.

Returning home after dropping Cassie at school the first day back after the holidays, Fancy paused to look at the vacuum cleaner. She had placed it in the hallway, alongside the umbrella stand, as a cryptic message to Radcliffe that she knew about his affair.

The vacuum cleaner gazed back at her, its hose neatly coiled at its side.
I was once broken,
it said.
I choked on the shattered pieces of a marriage. A glass had been broken by the husband's lover; the husband used ME to clean it up. But no, I choked on his deceit. Now, the repairman has fixed me: Can the same thing be said of the marriage?
So far, Radcliffe had not appeared to hear.

Fancy pushed it a little farther out into the hallway: If Radcliffe tripped over it, he would surely get the message. But, of course, her plan was more concrete than that, and now that Cassie was back at school, she could set it in motion.

First, she ran upstairs and crawled around her bed, peering into the darkness for further clues of the affair. As usual, there was nothing. She returned to the downstairs hallway and picked up the phone, her heart beating gently.

“Radcliffe!” she said, when he answered. “Just thought I'd let you know that I'm going to the city for the day. I'm on my way out the door right now. Doing some work for Mum. So, don't bother coming home for lunch, will you? I won't be here
all day.
”

Radcliffe thanked her, and she hung up, walked out the front door, and sat down on the porch.

The way she walked out the door and sat down, with her head oddly tilted and her posture straight, it was as if she were a ballerina.
My husband is having an affair.
She smiled softly, and hugged her knees. She could have been wearing a gossamer gown.

The Canadian was not on his porch. She longed for it to snow again. Imagine this, she thought, imagine that this is now a
city of snow.
Imagine that
everything
has changed: There are caribou, polar bears, and wolverines. In fact, helpfully, Cassie had left footprints in the muddy front lawn, which could almost resemble claw marks. Bear prints!

Imagine this, thought Fancy: A black bear moving gracefully—as if the bear had glandular fever, or as if the bear's husband were having an affair—is making its way up the street. It passes open curtains, parked cars, and
FOR SALE
signs; pokes its snout into mailboxes; sharpens its claws on telephone poles. Its movement is silent in the snow. It pauses now and then at distant sounds: a truck on the highway; somebody's screen door.

The fantasy was complicated slightly, Fancy realized, by the presence of a man in a pale gray T-shirt and jeans, standing inexplicably still by the side of the house next door. When the bear approached, that man would have to be warned.

It was the Canadian, looking at the wall of his house.

“Hello!” she shouted.

He turned slowly and waved. “Just checking for structural damage,” he called. “I had a
minor
explosion in my basement just now. Did you hear it?”

“No!”

“Great!”

He turned back to the wall and stared some more. After a while, he waved and smiled at Fancy again, and then disappeared into his house.

Fancy waited on her front porch until 3
P.M.
that day, but the
Canadian did not reappear. Nor, for that matter, did Radcliffe and his lover.

Over the next few weeks Fancy's days fell into a pattern. She would drive Cassie to school, return home, phone Radcliffe and tell him she was out for the day, and then she would sit on her porch. After a few days, she remembered that Gemma-from-the-pay-office worked afternoons, so she decided she could stop around lunchtime. Any liaison must surely take place in the morning.

This was fortunate because she needed the afternoons to work on her prize-winning novel, or on the Zing Family Secret, or to go to the gym. Meanwhile, her sister Marbie kept arriving unexpectedly at dinnertime and asking frantic legal questions.

Very occasionally, on her morning vigils, the Canadian would emerge onto
his
front porch and sit at his breakfast table. These days he was eating blueberry muffins and breadfruit with his coffee. He never seemed to wonder at Fancy's presence on
her
front porch, simply chatting to her about this and that, and Fancy felt that her neck was slender and that her hands, when she spoke, were like butterflies.

One day the Canadian had a small portable stereo alongside his blueberry muffin. “Hey, Fancy,” he called, “you want to help me out with this?”

“Okay!” she called back happily.

It turned out that he was required, for some reason, to compare two different versions of a song called “Love Cats.” One version was the original, by a band called The Cure. The other was a more recent cover, by a man called Tricky. Such a jumble of intriguing words and names! Fancy felt nervous and excited.

“Which one do you think is slicker?” the Canadian called. “Which one
is more powerful? Which is more beautiful? Which one makes you want to dance? Which one do you think is sexier?”

He played the two songs over and over, facing the stereo toward her porch, and the space between their houses filled with drumbeats. Fancy answered his questions solemnly, and he jotted down her words, nodding with interest.

“I like them both a
lot,
” said Fancy.

“Tell you what,” offered the Canadian, “I'll make you a copy.”

“Thank you!” said Fancy, tears in her eyes.

Not once did Radcliffe's car appear in the driveway, nor did Gemma arrive to reclaim her purple sock. Meanwhile, Fancy's prize-winning novel had stalled. She had reread the book about love-and-leaves and had made a discovery. The author had done more than simply list leaves, he had also provided information about them—there were entire sections of the book devoted to pigmentation and photosynthesis.

It was not just lists that were required, Fancy realized, it was
language.
By the time a reader reached the end of a prize-winning novel, she or he had to know a new language—photography, geography, topology. The language of fly fishing, Malta, or bread making.

Fancy was not sure she knew any languages worth teaching, and sensed that she ought to learn one. Meanwhile, each new prize-winning novel released took another language away—the better books, the
Booker
-winning books, often used four or five.

One day, Cassie's mum collected her from school and took her to the dentist.

“This is not the way to the dentist,” said Cassie.

“You have an excellent memory, darling,” her mother declared. “You're right. It's not the way. But we're going to try a new dentist at Round Corner. On the way, tell me how school is going.”

“Okay,” agreed Cassie. Then she thought about other things for a while.

“How's Ms. Murphy?” tried Mum. “Do you still like her?”

“Uh-huh. She's pretty nice, actually.”

“Mmm. Do you think she's good friends with any of the other teachers at your school?”

“Well,” said Cassie, thinking and staring out the window. “She's got two friends. Mrs. Barker and Mr. Woodford.”

“Mr. Woodford, eh? He's the other Grade Two teacher, isn't he? What's he like?”

“He is
so
funny.” Cassie swung back from the window. “Everyone's always laughing at his jokes.”

Actually,
she thought,
Ms. Murphy laughs the most.
But she didn't mention that to her mum.

At the dentist, Mum held out her toothbrush. “Here,” she said. “Run to the bathroom down the hall and clean your teeth.”

Cassie took the toothbrush, and the woman at the desk said, “Cassie? Would you like a treat?”

By treat, the woman meant the tiny plastic zebra she was holding up. Cassie did not want a plastic zebra, but she said, “Okay.” The zebra could be a trick. The woman might have a fun-size Mars Bar hidden in her other hand.

Fancy sat in the dentist's waiting room, took out her cell phone, and selected her mother's number.

“I'm here,” she murmured. “Nobody else in the waiting room. Perfect layout. Now is good.” She hung up.

Almost immediately, the phone behind the reception desk rang.

“Round Corner Dental Center,” the receptionist said. “How can I help you? Uh-huh? Oh, gosh! Hang on then. No, I'll—wait right there and I'll be out!”

She stood up, and hurried into the corridor. The elevator doors opened and closed.

Fancy moved behind the reception desk, opened the top drawer of a filing cabinet, and flicked through manila folders. Her fingers landed on
MURPHY, CATH
. She slid the folder out and glanced around the room. She opened the folder, held her wristwatch over the first document, and clicked the side of the watch. A flash flickered. She turned to the second page, and clicked again. She closed the folder, returned it to the drawer, and sat back down in the waiting room.

She was reading a magazine when the receptionist returned. “Funny,” said the receptionist to Fancy as she resumed her seat, “a courier just phoned and said she'd backed her van into our service entrance and couldn't get it out! But when I got down there, she was gone. Must have got out on her own.”

“Oh,” agreed Fancy. “She must have.”

Cassie in the dentist chair felt small because the dentist was a giant. “WELL!” he giant-voiced, wheezing and buzzing a button which made the chair bend backward. Going to the dentist would be fine if the dentist wasn't there, and you could just be alone and play on the chair.

“WELL!” the dentist boomed again, buzzing another button, which made the chair rise slowly upward. It practically hit the spotlight in the ceiling. The ceiling itself was good, she noticed. It was painted green, like
a jungle, with a lot of elephants, monkeys, lions, and giraffes. So you had something to look at.

Cassie thought about offering her asthma puffer for the dentist's wheezing. But then he would put it in his mouth.

“How old are you, Cassie? What is it—seven, eight, nine?”

“Seven,” replied Cassie from her sticky leather chair.

“Seven!” The dentist seemed to find this funny. “Let's have a look here, shall we?” he chuckled, and leaned over her with a wheedley, “Open wide.”

The dentist began to play with her teeth instead of the chair. “Rinse out,” he said.

She did not want to rinse out because the dentist's water was pink and warm, but you had to.

“Mrs. Zing?” The dentist was wiping his hands on a towel at the doorway.

“How is everything? Everything all right?” Her mother appeared looking cheerful.

“A teeny little hole, just the one,” boomed the dentist with a chuckle, probably still thinking about her age. “I can do it now if you like. Won't take a minute. Shall we have happy gas? And then the fluoride treatment, and we're done.”

“
Fluoride,
” said Cassie from the chair. “Mum, you know that makes me cry.”

Her mum just laughed, agreed to happy gas, and happily returned to the waiting room to wait.

Cassie breathed slowly into the happy-gas mask, sank into the chair, and stared up at the jungle pictures. She took herself from the chair into the jungle for a moment. A pair of cheetahs, she saw, were running side by side toward the edge of the ceiling, as if they planned to escape. But all the other animals got on with their lives.

During those weeks of the new school term, when Fancy spent her mornings on the porch, difficulties arose in relation to the Family Secret. Specifically, Marbie refused to attend Meetings or do Maintenance. This meant that the camera in the dining room window of Cath Murphy's apartment remained broken. The other camera that they kept in the apartment had never been any use.

Meanwhile, Marbie kept appearing at Fancy's front door in time for dinner, and asking frantic legal questions.

“She's a
lawyer,
” she said, in the doorway, on one such occasion. “Why have we never
considered
that?”

“She's not a lawyer.” Fancy stood aside so that Marbie could come in. “She's a schoolteacher. She's only studying law. And only
part
-time.”

“No difference,” declared Marbie, handing Fancy a bottle of wine. “She's still going to sue. Can I stay for dinner again?”

“She's not going to find out,” said Fancy, “so she's not going to sue. Of course you can stay.”

“If she does find out, she'll sue.”

“What for?” Radcliffe appeared at Fancy's shoulder—pressing his
chin
into her shoulder, in fact. “What will she sue for? What's the charge?”

“Hey,” said Marbie, ignoring Radcliffe, and wandering into the kitchen, where Fancy's music was playing. “Hey, you're listening to 'Love Cats' again. I love this song.”

Another night, over spinach soufflé, Marbie said, “As soon as she's a lawyer, she'll sue.”

“What's the charge?” said Radcliffe predictably. “What charge?”

“Who's going to sue?” Cassie had her hands around her strawberry-orange juice, just about to drink.

“Nobody, darling.” Fancy gave Marbie a meaningful look. “What do you think of the juice, Cassie? It's new! A new variety.”

“Wait,” said Cassie, “I'll try it.”

“Ever heard of the Convention for the Protection of Individuals with Regard to Automatic Processing of Personal Data?” pounced Marbie.

“Gosh!” said Fancy. “Is there really such a thing?”

“
That!
” Radcliffe was scornful, scraping at the burned bits of cheese on the edge of the serving bowl. “That's to do with computer processing. Government databanks, that kind of thing. For big corporations. Nothing to do with us.”

“Seriously?” said Marbie. “But I guess it's illegal to break in to—”

“Who says we're breaking in?” Radcliffe interrupted. “We're the landlord, and it's all in the lease. In the fine print, I admit, but: ‘Access shall be granted blahdy blahdy Maintenance blahdy blahdy' nice and vague.”