The Spell Book Of Listen Taylor (32 page)

Shortly after her father returned from Ireland, Fancy's family went to the seaside and stayed in a house on the hill.

Each morning, the family gathered their towels, buckets, spades, sunblock, T-shirts, and beach umbrella, and tumbled down the hill to the beach.

Each evening, Fancy stood with her back to the mirror and turned her head to see her shoulders. She wore a purple sarong, which she tied in various ways: between her legs, over her shoulder, or around her waist so it flapped low against her ankle chain. Her shoulders, as she watched, turned golden brown.

But one day, Fancy's parents told her to take her sister to the beach on her own. “We'll just be doing some cleaning here in the house,” said Mummy, “don't worry about us.”

“Only swim between the flags,” said Daddy.

“Or in the rock pool?” said Marbie.

“Right,” agreed Mummy. “And I've made you some buttered sandwiches, so you can buy hot chips for your lunch. Give them some money, David.”

“Stay at the beach until they take the flags down,” Daddy reminded them.

Two lifeguards in yellow-red caps marched past the girls, flagpoles on their shoulders, and Marbie said, “Are the flags down now?”

Fancy, who was making Marbie's towel into a shepherd's veil, agreed, “Yes. Let's go.” She frowned at her golden shoulders, which were peeling.

“Can I peel some of your skin?” said Marbie, swinging her shepherd's veil.

Fancy allowed her to take three pieces of skin.

They washed the sand from their feet and ankles, and walked on the gravel road home. Fancy was carrying the sunblock, the flippers, and the beach umbrella, and Marbie was carrying her flip-flops.

“Put your flip-flops on,” said Fancy, “or you'll kick your toe.”

“No,” said Marbie, “because my feet are wet and that makes the flip-flops slippery. Whose car is that?”

From the bottom of the hill they could see their house, but it looked strange and unfamiliar. A long silver car stood in the driveway. They approached slowly, and saw that the car was shiny, its windows dark. A sticker on the back window said,
SEA LION
. Another sticker on the bumper said,
IF YOU CAN READ THIS SIGN, BACK OFF
.

They ran up the stairs to the veranda and paused at the livingroom window. Inside, they could see their mother, sitting on the couch with a straight back and a small, interested tilt to her head. Next to her was their father. And seated in a row of kitchen chairs, their backs to the girls, were three men dressed in black. One of the men, Fancy saw, was tapping a polished shoe on the floor.

Fancy and Marbie stood at the window and watched as Daddy coughed into his fist, Mummy laughed, and the three men in black each picked up a briefcase from the floor. There was a scraping of chairs, a shaking of hands, and the front door opened so that voices and light spilled out onto the veranda.

“Oh!” said Mummy from the front door, seeing the girls.

“We waited till the flags came down,” said Marbie.

The three men stepped out and lowered their heads. One of the men
said, “Girls,” but the others did not appear to see them. One man unlocked the car and opened three doors, politely. The men got into their car.

Then the Zing family stood in a mosquito-slapping row on the veranda and watched as the car slid away.

“Who were they?” said Fancy.

“Nobody,” replied her father.

Shortly after her father returned from Ireland, Marbie's family went to the seaside.

Each day, Fancy made Marbie's beach towel into a turban, a crown, or a shepherd's veil. She had to hold her head straight or the towel fell into her eyes, making the world a soft, speckled white. If she shivered slightly, it brushed against her shoulders like long hair.

One day, Fancy and Marbie were allowed to go to the beach on their own until the flags came down. Another day, they woke up and their mother was gone.

Their father was sitting at the head of the table waiting for them. He had placed the box of Coco Pops in the center of the table, alongside the milk. On the table: three bowls with spoons in straight lines beside them.

Formally, he explained: “Mummy had to go away for a few days. She will miss you very much.”

“Has she gone to Ireland?” said Marbie, and her father smiled.

The three of them went to the beach, as usual, and had fish and chips for lunch. Daddy wanted to participate in their beach games: He helped with a sand castle, but wanted to build it higher than was necessary, and also wanted to decorate the castle with sea grapes and Popsicle wrappers. The girls grew bored and went for a swim.

As they walked home together in the cooling light, Marbie said, “Will Mummy be home when we get there?”

“No. Just a couple of days, and she'll be back.”

In the kitchen, Fancy set the table for dinner while Marbie spun in circles. She bumped into a chair, spun away from the chair, and landed with her feet apart for balance. Then the room spun itself, the windows tipped, the couch capsized, and the clothes rack draped in swimsuits jumped.

She fell against the chair, which crashed to the floor.

“Marbie!”
cried Fancy.

Daddy stood at the kitchen door and said, “Stop it, Marbie. You'll make yourself sick.”

But it never made her sick.

They had sausages for dinner, which Daddy fried with smoke, a tea towel, and a frown. They pulled out their chairs and sat down quietly. Daddy took a fork and put sausages on each plate, then cut a tomato into three chunks. Fancy and Marbie looked at each other about the tomato.

That night Marbie lay in her bed and thought that the sound of the waves on the beach was the sound of the silver car bringing Mummy home. Daddy was out in the kitchen, clanking the plates, sweeping the floor, and switching off the lights to go to bed.

The next couple of days were similar. At the beach, they were allowed Splices, Chocolate Hearts, and Chiko Rolls. Daddy built his sand castles higher and higher. The girls swam between the flags, but returned occasionally to admire Daddy's castles.

Mummy came home in a taxi at breakfast time one day.

Fancy and Marbie ran outside in their nighties, and Daddy emerged slowly behind them. The taxi driver was more excited than they were. He was chattering, laughing, and opening doors.

Mummy's voice came from inside the taxi.

“Girls,” said Daddy, “wait a moment.”

He leaned down to Mummy. When he stood back up he was holding something like a pink shopping bag. Marbie thought it might be presents.

“Here we go!” cried the taxi driver. “Look what we've got! Look, girls, see what your mummy's brought home for you!”

Fancy took one step and said, “
It's a baby.
”

“Not just any baby!” cried the taxi driver, but he had to stop as Daddy wanted to pay him the fare.

“Whose baby is it, Mummy?” Marbie said. “Where did you get a baby from?”

“Just a moment, precious one,” said Mummy.

The taxi driver talked his way around to the driver's door, “Congratulations! All the best! You take care of Mummy now!” He seemed to continue talking as he drove away.

Daddy said, “Do you think you can manage that box between you, girls?”

Fancy and Marbie carried the box, Daddy carried the baby, and Mummy carried nothing.

Inside, Fancy and Marbie sat on the couch and took turns holding the baby. Marbie grew bored: The baby simply lay in its blanket, and you couldn't scratch your knee. But Fancy crinkled her eyes and sang, “
Hello,
little baby,
hello,
little cutie baby,
hello,
little baby.” Mummy sat beside her, leaning over, watching.

Daddy and Marbie opened the box, and it turned out to be a new bassinet for the baby. Daddy found baby sheets and diapers in a cupboard that Marbie had never noticed.

“I didn't know you were pregnant, Mum,” said Fancy, grown-up and casual.

“That's because I'm quite plump already,” explained Mummy. “It doesn't show so much, see? Nobody knew, darling. Don't worry.”

“Is it
our
baby?” Marbie said.

“Well,” said Mummy, “it is, and it is not. This is where you have to listen carefully, now.”

Fancy was on the couch with the baby in her arms. Marbie was sitting by the empty box on the floor, and Daddy was standing at the kitchen door with his arms folded.

“This baby,” said Mummy, looking closely at the girls, “is a secret baby. Do you understand?”

Fancy and Marbie said they understood.

“No,” said Mummy. “It's more important than that. It's more important than anything ever before. It's a special Zing Family Secret. Okay?”

Fancy and Marbie nodded.

“This baby,” continued Mummy, “can only stay with us for one week.”

“
No!
” cried Fancy. “Only a
week
!” She kissed the baby's forehead.

“I hope you will help to take care of her this week,” said Mummy.

“Of
course,
” said Fancy.

“Okay,” said Marbie, thinking:
What about the beach
?

“What's her name?” said Fancy. “What's the new baby's name?”

Mummy looked at the baby and straightened the folds of the blanket. After a minute, she said, “I have decided to give this baby the gift of a normal life. So her name is Catherine.”

“Is it?” breathed Fancy.

“Yes,” her mother replied.

Maude was making pastry when her husband, David, announced that he was leaving.

It was not surprising that she was making pastry; she was always making pastry in those days. She was determined to become a successful pie chef. Already, the local cake shop had said it would take a few pies now and then, and this had given her hope so she practiced whenever she could. She could no longer look at a circular object without thinking of its use as a pastry cutter: teacups, breakfast bowls, steering wheels, balloon baskets.

“Hmm,” she said vaguely, when David made his announcement. She was rubbing butter into flour, her favorite part of pastry making, fluttering her fingertips as fine crumbs emerged, neither flour nor butter.

“I'm so sorry,” said David softly. (It was after midnight and the girls were asleep.)

Now Maude paid attention. “You can't
leave,
” she cried.

He explained that he had no choice, and as he talked—about how he needed time alone to figure things out; how he hoped it would not take long, the figuring out; how he also hoped, when it was done, that she would take him back—as he said all this, Maude slowly sank into a kitchen chair, and thought:
Of course.

Her pie-making must have distracted her. Her husband was fading into nothing. Where was the vibrant, vivacious boy with excited expectations of invention? She recalled how he used to spring down the aisles of
department stores, looking for inspiration; then how he took to wandering, more slowly and thoughtfully. The wandering grew listless, and now he never wandered, except down the hallway of their home. Now and then he picked up one of Fancy's or Marbie's toys, turned it over distractedly, and put it back down on the carpet.

He had never lost his gift for electronics and gadgets, but he only used it to repair the girls' clock radios or install deadlocks on the doors.

David's talent had been consumed by family life, Maude saw now. And here he was, a grown-up Zing who had never invented a thing. His parents and relatives commented on this now and then, but were friendly and forgiving. “The inventiveness had to stop
somewhere
!” they said. “Why not with David?” He had, after all, created two lovely girls. That was enough for them!

But David spent hours watching TV, or playing Fancy's Donkey Kong game. His vertigo grew worse instead of better—these days, he could not even go to the movies. The seats were at such a steep gradient, he said, he feared he would fall into the film.

Now, as he talked and apologized, Maude considered all this, and played with her flour-dusted wedding band. Eventually, she pulled it off her finger and dropped it on the table between them. David breathed in sharply, and buried his head in his arms. Maude regarded the wedding ring, imagining its use as a pastry cutter. Thousands of tiny pastry circles for thousands of tiny pies.

“Well,” she said, surprising him with the kindness in her voice. “Well, I understand you have to go. But we'll say that you're going to Ireland. We'll say that you plan to paint pictures or write poems, or maybe a novel.”

“Why Ireland?” David wanted to know.

Maude thought it was the romantic sort of place where people ran away to do creative things. “That way,” she explained carefully, “if you happen
not
to invent anything, you can come back to us, without—”

“But people will ask me about Ireland when I get back,” David pointed out.

“You can look it up in a library book,” suggested Maude. She stood up again, and returned to the counter where her pastry was waiting.

As a good-bye present for the girls, David hung a swing from the highest branches of the scribbly gum out back. This tree had no low-lying branches. He stood a ladder against it to reach the closest branch and climbed the rest of the way up. This was the bravest thing he had ever done.

Fancy, who was a formal eleven-year-old, waved him off in the taxi, wishing him the best of luck on his trip to Ireland. She hoped he would write a good novel. She hoped he would come back soon. She would miss him
very
much. But Marbie was only five, and didn't wish him anything.

David quit his job in sales and found a small flat in West Ryde. He promised Maude he'd invent something quickly and make a fortune for the family. Maude told everyone he'd flown away to Ireland to write a novel, and immersed herself in pie making. The local cake shop had been replaced by a Laundromat so she had lost her only client, but she pinned notices to community bulletin boards, visited restaurants, and even set up a table on the front lawn, offering pies to passersby.

Unexpectedly, nobody wanted Maude's pies. Not even the students or teachers from the school next door. By now, David had used up half their savings on his rent and equipment for inventions that never materialized; Maude had used the other half as a down payment on an industrial oven. They were living on credit, but neither would admit they were in trouble.

It was only by chance, while looking for a secondhand vacuum cleaner in the
Trading Post
one day—thinking she could try housecleaning for cash and finding her own vacuum was broken—that Maude came across
the ad. “
WANTED
,” it said. “Twelve Pie Chefs for Short-Term/Full-Time Baking.” The pay was minimal, but it might just keep her afloat until her business took off.

It is well known that Nikolai Valerio's second movie,
Pie in the Sky,
was secretly filmed in the western suburbs of Sydney. Despite careful secrecy, news of the shoot leaked to the press as filming neared completion, and mobs of hysterical fans began to form. They had to whisk the cast away to Lord Howe Island to wrap up.

The movie is a classic—gentle, yet ambitious; dangerous, yet ineffably sweet. As with all of Nikolai's movies, it swept the pool at Cannes and at the Oscars that year, and many Valerio critics rate it as his best. He had been polished by his first movie, yet he still exuded the naïveté of the oil-smeared motor mechanic. Later, he lost some of that innocence.

Of course, Maude knew who Nikolai Valerio was and, like most women, had seen his first movie several times. Like most women, also, she had engaged in secret fantasies in which she imagined Nikolai greeting her at the auto shop. But when she auditioned for the pie-chef position, she had no idea it was for a Valerio film—that was still a secret. She thought she was going to help with a series of TV ads for Mama's Frozen Desserts.

Eighty pie chefs auditioned for the job, and twelve were selected. Maude was asked to pass a national security check and told to sign five separate confidentiality agreements. She began to suspect that this might be more than a series of ads for Mama's Frozen Desserts.

Maude, tonight, was wearing a silver headband in her hair. Her daughters were asleep, and she was sitting in the living room, watching through the window. Her husband, David, had been away (
in Ireland, writing a novel
) for almost a year, and she, Maude, was having an affair. Specifically, she was having an affair with Nikolai Valerio.

Technically, Nikolai Valerio was also having an affair with her: He had recently married Rebekka. But, really, Maude thought, when you are as famous as all that, the same rules do not apply.

The affair consisted of odd fragments: messages in code; a fireplace in a sandstone pub; wet shaking hair; a frangipani flower that she pressed between the pages of a magazine; kisses in a claw-foot tub; silk sheets; Egyptian cotton bathrobes.

In her living room now, Maude was recalling her first days on the film set. All twelve pie chefs had been jittery with excitement until it emerged that their days would be spent in one dark trailer, seated together around a long table, ingredients and cooking utensils set out at each place, sweltering in the heat of baking ovens.

At break times, they stood around on the dry, dusty grass, trying to get a glimpse of Nikolai. Only it turned out that movie stars were rarely there when movies were made. Most of the day, the dull film crew walked around, measured things, talked to each other, set up equipment, looked at papers, frowned at the sky, shouted commands—as if building an imaginary skyscraper.

Nikolai and the other stars were whisked onto the field in dark-windowed cars only when the sets were ready for them. Even then, you could only see fragments—the top of a head, an arm reaching out—through the clusters of cameras and assistants.

It was not until the third week of shooting that Maude saw Nikolai's face. She had been asked to help place some pies in the shot—
Pie in the Sky
called for a general backdrop of pies. As any film student will tell you, apple pies, pumpkin pies, cherry pies, and pecan pies, each with golden crust, were artfully scattered in the distant background of every camera shot in the film.

Maude was carrying a steaming cherry pie in each hand when the
limousine paused beside her. A window was rolled down. Nikolai Valerio was smiling at her.

A woman seated beside Nikolai leaned around him. “He wants a piece of your pie,” she called. “Can you give him a piece?”

Everyone in the car laughed, while Nikolai continued to smile at Maude.

“I'm sorry,” he said in his movie-star accent. “I'm sorry, I keep seeing these pies everywhere I look. You make all these pies?”

Maude explained that she was only one of twelve pie chefs. He tilted his head, interested, and asked, “Do you think I may have a piece of one? It doesn't have walnuts, does it? I am allergic, and my lips will swell to the size of a balloon!”

She shook her head about the walnuts, but then she didn't know what to do: She had no knife for cutting, and no saucer or spoon on which to place a slice of pie.

“Here,” he said, reaching his hand out of the car window. “I'll just tear off a corner if you—ow, this is a very hot—and I'll just—oh, this is cherry pie, I cannot explain how happy that—my god
father,
this is a beautiful
pie
!—and now, I will just straighten the edge, and
so
! It is still fine now…like nobody has touched it.”

The people in the car quietly watched all this, and then they laughed and said, “All right, Nikolai?”

“All right,” said Nikolai, smiling at Maude again. “And the best cherry pie I ever ate. Did you make this cherry pie, or was it one of the other eleven?”

“Me,” said Maude.

“And you are?”

“Maude,” she said. “Maude Zing.”

Then the car moved away from her again.

She did not see any more than fragments of him for the next few days, until one night, when most of the cast and crew had left. Nikolai and the leading lady remained for the midnight boating scene. Maude also remained—she had left her girls with a neighbor for the night—along with one other pie chef, and the two were extremely busy. The river had to be lined with pies. Furthermore, each pie had to look freshly baked, a twirl of steam rising from the neatly scored lines in its lid.

It was exquisitely intimate, this filming with only the two main actors and a skeleton crew: For the first time, Maude was able to watch and hear the slow unfurling of a scene. Furthermore, she was
part
of that unfurling. She heard an assistant comment, “That coffee smells
great,
” and he meant the coffee she herself had just brewed!

Then the two actors and the collection of crew wandered over to where Maude was laying out the pies.

“Hello, Maude Zing,” said Nikolai, remembering her name, and holding the name, for one breathless moment, in his accent.

The leading lady was less friendly, and seemed to be complaining to the director. “Come over here,” said the director in a low voice.

Nikolai and a makeup lady tried to persuade Maude to let them eat one of her pies, and she jauntily refused. She found she was no longer nervous of Nikolai. He was an ordinary person with an accent. She was chatting with him! She was making him laugh!

Then there was an angry shout from the leading lady, and she strode into the distance.

“Oh, come off it!” called the director. “This is nothing. We're fighting about
nothing.
Come on, you've got to be kidding me!”

But the leading lady refused to return, and disappeared in a long black car.

The director was distressed. The moonlight sprinkles were perfect on the river, and the scene was almost done.

Maude was trying to gather up her pies, to keep them hot in the oven, when she realized the director was staring at her. “Turn your head slightly,” he instructed. “Now back, now left, now right.”

It turned out that Maude's hair, the back of Maude's neck, the smooth curve of her cheek, all precisely matched that of the leading lady. She would be the double, they informed her.

Which is how it came to be that Maude spent most of the night in a long slender boat being punted up and down the river by Nikolai Valerio. Nikolai chatted as he punted, applying his disarming accent to every word he said. He asked questions about Maude's daughters and about her life, and he told short, witty anecdotes about Hollywood actors who were close personal friends.

The night grew colder, so the director let them drink glasses of port to keep warm; the port made them clumsy, so that when Nikolai tried to cross the boat toward Maude, to fix a strand of her hair, he capsized the punt. This resulted in shaking wet hair, huddling together under blankets, shivery giggles, and patient amusement from director and camera crew, all packing up to go home.

Nikolai suggested that Maude accompany him in the limousine to his hotel room, to bathe and to sit in a robe by his fireplace, and dry her hair with his towel. Which was how the affair got its start.

In her armchair now, some months later, Maude felt that she was floating just above the chair. Nikolai would visit any moment. It would be the first time he had come to her home. For months, they had spent elaborately secret nights in his hotel suite. She had used her wages to pay babysitters for Fancy and Marbie, had stopped working on her pie-making business altogether, and had spent luxurious evenings bathing in his claw-foot tub while he watched, turning the hot-water tap with her toe. Nikolai had listened to her stories, and had sworn he would fly her away in a
gold-trimmed balloon one day. He wanted to know everything about her, he said, as his hands traced the curves of her body. He seemed, genuinely, to love her body. Even though it was quite plump.