The Spell Book Of Listen Taylor (4 page)

Tuesday, running late for work, Marbie Zing chose her long floral skirt (
It was a decision she would regret for the rest of her life
), and then with a shiver replaced it and picked the blue dress.

“Nathaniel,” she said, waking him with a kiss on his bare shoulder, “what would you think of a woman who didn't know the difference between daffodils and tulips?”

Nathaniel opened his eyes and said, “
There is no such woman.
”

Marbie worked in insurance, third-party recoveries, and along with her colleagues, played car crash on the edge of her desk. Second-party car enters roundabout
here,
third-party car is reversing
here,
family of elephants distracts attention
here
(these doughnuts are the family of elephants),
our
car heads straight through the middle, and boom! Little plastic people went zipping through the air.

She read their explanations for their sorry little smashes.

“I sneezed and lost control and hit a fence.”

“I sneezed, hit a pothole, and ran into a tree.”

“I sneezed and collided with the rear end of an elephant.”

She hushed angry customers and
redirected
their hostility: “Don't speak to me like that, please…I'm hanging up now. I'm just about to hang up the phone.”

Wednesday, running late for work, Marbie tripped out of her high heel. A bicycle courier held the elevator door open while she reached a stockinged foot back to collect it.

Marbie had always been a slippery kind of person. In restaurants, napkins slid from her lap to the floor. Hair clips never stayed in her hair; they slipped to her shoulders, where they perched like silver butterflies. And her shoes were always falling from her feet. (It was because of this that she was first—aged six and a quarter—stung, on her toe, by a bee. “You ran right out of your sandals,” scolded her mother, who was always cranky when they hurt themselves.)

That day, however, she was slippery because she was distracted: It was Listen's first day at Clareville Academy. “She's too small for that school,” Marbie had said to Nathaniel last year. “Send her somewhere nice and little, like Bellbird Junior High.”

Nathaniel had pointed out that Listen was an average size. Also, that her friends from elementary, Donna Turnbull and the others, would take care of her at Clareville; also, that the only thing Listen's mother ever did for her, besides sending a postcard or two, was set up an education trust fund. It was important that he spend every cent.

But Nathaniel was older than Marbie, and seemed to have forgotten school. She herself remembered junior high as a cacophony of shrieking bells and thudding teachers' voices. All day she was distracted by images of Listen quietly dissolving in the noise. Papers drifted out of Marbie's hands, and ink slipped from pens and stained her fingers.

She phoned Listen at home as soon as she could, to ask about her first day, and was strangely relieved to hear that the girl still had a voice.

Thursday morning, running late for work, Marbie almost stepped into the path of a semitrailer. A pencil seller shouted a warning just in time.

She phoned Nathaniel at the Banana Bar to tell him about it. She liked to phone Nathaniel at work, especially when he was busy, surrounded by customers. It was then that his voice took on the edge that it had when she first met him.

Actually, when she first met him, his voice had been jocular, like someone playing tennis. They had met in a hotel elevator in Melbourne, and had spent the next few days drinking coffee together, while Listen danced around their table.

It was not until they were all back home in Sydney that he began to telephone.

He carved off an edge of his voice for the phone calls, making it cool and restrained, which caused her to press her forehead to the wall, hushing even her breath so she could hear.

“Are you there?” he would say, in his nonchalant voice.

“Uh-huh.” And then she would fall silent at once so that his voice would go on in that way.

Friday, Marbie was not late for work, and she met the aeronautical engineer.

Tabitha (Marbie's supervisor) had arranged for an aeronautical engineer to visit the small boardroom, the one with bowls of mints on the sideboard and views of Darling Harbour. He was there to demonstrate the tendencies of airborne cars.

They were always dealing with airborne cars in their work. Cars seemed to leave the ground at the slightest suggestion: a tap from a semitrailer; the bark of a dog on the side of the road. One claimant even said that her car took flight when she changed the radio station.

Marbie and her colleagues tended to be dubious about these claims, but
Perhaps,
they often said,
we are wrong.

Fridays at work, everyone was cocky and buoyant, saying cheerful things with their heads tilted sideways. The aeronautical engineer arrived with his swinging paisley tie and purple shirt, and right away he recognized their Friday mood. He put both hands to his closely shaved head and said, “To begin. The airplane!” Then he asked for a page from Marbie's notepad and showed them how to make a paper plane.

They spent the afternoon making paper planes, paper fans, or paper swans, and drinking all the wine from the small boardroom fridge, while the aeronautical engineer wandered around with his hands behind his back. He praised Marbie's fan exuberantly.

Toni got the key to the big boardroom, and came back with seven half-bottles of white wine, and the aeronautical engineer praised her, which made Marbie slightly jealous, so she showed him the paper turtle she'd been working on. He didn't understand what it was but praised it anyway. Then Rhamie interrupted with a handful of toy cars, and the aeronautical engineer remembered why he was there and made them throw the toys at one another to demonstrate the tendencies of airborne cars.

It was wonderful.

At four o'clock, everyone decided they had done enough work for the day, and they invited the aeronautical engineer to join them at the Night Owl Pub for their Friday drinks. He said he had to run and move his car because he had just that moment remembered it was in a one-hour parking spot!
Oh no,
they cried,
you could have parked in our building!
They wanted him to park in the building now, but he had a meeting in Chatswood and maybe didn't even have time to have a drink? He'd try to join them for five minutes or so, once he had moved his car.

Marbie ran to phone Nathaniel at the Banana Bar and tell him she was having a drink but would be back in time for the Zing Family Secret Meeting.

“Don't get hit by a semitrailer on your way,” instructed Nathaniel.

“Okay,” agreed Marbie. “Where's Listen?”

“Well,” said Nathaniel, “I suppose she'd be at home.”

At the Night Owl Pub, they were depressed because the aeronautical engineer had not shown up. They had made airplanes out of beer-damp coasters and wanted to show him. And now Tabitha and Toni had to go to their step class, and Abi and Rhamie had their husbands waiting, so Marbie said good-bye, and she would just stay and finish her beer and take care of their coaster airplanes, and then she'd go home.

“You've all gone home!” It was the aeronautical engineer. Standing beside her in the Night Owl Pub.

“Have
I
gone home?” said Marbie rhetorically.

“May I?”

He was carrying a beer and tilting his chin at the seat opposite.

“Of course.”

He sat down and nodded to himself, as if agreeing with a thought.

“My car got towed,” he said sadly. “That's why I was late. So now I'll have to take the train to my meeting. And look at this, I've missed everybody.”

He looked around glumly at the empty beer glasses and soggy airplanes.

“Am I not
somebody
?” said Marbie.

“What time is it?” he asked.

“Five o'clock.”

“So late!” cried the aeronautical engineer. “I've got to
run
!”

But he moved his chair closer, and smiled.

Listen peered out of the kitchen window. She had turned off the light so she could see into the moon-splashed yard: a sagging trampoline, a tangled hose, crouching trees, a vegetable patch, and hulking down by the far back fence, the Zing Family Garden Shed.

Cassie was asleep on the couch in the living room, but the rest of the Zings were hidden in that shed, and Listen was trying to see through its walls.

Today, Listen had walked to the Art rooms with Donna, where they separated for their different classes. “See you,” Donna had said, and then stared at Listen hard. Listen had had the curious feeling that Donna wanted something from her. Maybe she was upset that they were in different groups for Visual Arts? Maybe she needed more reassurance about the eternal pact? To be honest, Listen was getting a bit tired of Donna's obsession with that pact.
Get over it,
she almost said.
Nobody's going to break the pact.
But she only smiled in a compassionate way, and went to her own art group.

Then, after school, she had done the first spell in the Spell Book:
A Spell to Make Somebody Decide to Take a Taxi.

Exactly why she had done that spell (or why anyone would ever need such a spell) was a mystery to her. Somehow, the imperious tone of the book had made her do it. Or the fact that she had waited obediently before turning pages.

She'd only just cleared the remains of the spell (lemons and banana peels) from the bathtub when her dad arrived home and took her to Grandpa and Grandma Zing's for the Friday night dinner and meeting. Marbie met them there. She always came straight from work, and that night she had arrived late.

They had started the night in this kitchen. Gravy simmered in a saucepan on the stove; the chicken glowed golden in the oven. Grandma Zing had leaned against the counter, drinking ginger ale through a curly straw. Grandpa Zing had shown Listen's dad how flexible his knees were, bending low and looking up in triumph. Listen's dad had been impressed. Marbie and her sister Fancy had been sitting side by side on the edge of the table, their legs swinging in time to their chat. Fancy's husband, Radcliffe, had been standing where Listen was now, gazing out into the backyard and shifting his jaw from side to side to make it click. Little Cassie Zing had tipped the contents of her school satchel onto the floor.

The Zings had asked Cassie a hailstorm of questions about her first week of Grade Two: whether there were any new kids (three, but all boys), exactly what she had learned that week (alphabetical order and how to make a pom-pom), details about her teacher (Ms. Murphy: She was nice). They had asked just as many questions about Listen's first week of Grade Seven. She wondered if they were good actors. Could they really be as interested in her as they were in Cassie? She was not a Zing, so how could they be? But they seemed enthusiastic about everything she told them, and when she mentioned her school's Walkathon next week, most of them offered to sponsor her.

Of course, she didn't tell the Zings about the beseeching look on Donna's face when they arrived at the Art rooms that day.

Eating dinner with the Zings that night, Listen had concentrated hard. She was very interested in how families worked. She had grown up with her dad in a campervan parked out behind the Banana Bar, and they had spent their nights mopping the café floor, or lying in their bunk beds reading books to each other, or sitting at the fold-out table outside, Listen doing her homework while her dad used an oversize calculator for his accounts. She knew that this was all irregular, and had always watched carefully when visiting friends to find out the truth about families. But the Zings seemed like the ultimate family, and she got to see them every Friday night so she could observe them closely over time.

Also, this was the first family ever to include her as one of them.

So she stared at the Zings in the same way you might stare at the stars on a clear, cold night in the country. You think to yourself,
Look at them all! Who knew there were so many and so bright? Now, at last, I'll see the constellations!
But you can't see the constellations because they're tangled in the excess of stars. (And you don't really know what they look like anyway.)

The family had told stories about a tennis ball that fell onto the roof of a car; about a bird that landed on a fence, tipped backward, then swiveled itself upright again, an embarrassed look (Fancy assured them) on its face; about how strong the coffee was at the Muffin Break these days; about the schoolkids at Bellbird Junior High next door (Listen looked sideways at Marbie when they talked about Bellbird, but her face stayed engaged in general chat); about the value of marshmallows; about reality TV, macrobiotic food, lemon trees, ants, and the future of photo albums.

Some of the stories were extremely dull. Grandma Zing tended to repeat the last phrases of these stories, in a voice heavy with amazement, and Listen wondered if she did this to liven up the story, or to emphasize just how dull it was.

Listen's eyes flew from Zing to Zing, but there was an excess of conversation, and no constellations became clear.

Then, at dessert time, while she was spooning cream onto her cherry pie, she heard Radcliffe say, quite distinctly, to Fancy, “It's getting on a bit. Shouldn't we head out to the shed?”

She thought of all the secrets in the room. Her own small secret (a Spell Book underneath her pillow at home); the secret she shared with Marbie and her dad (midnight swims in the Bellbird Junior High pool); and, like a great tarpaulin draped across the room: the Zing Family Secret itself.

Those were just the secrets she knew about too. She looked at Fancy Zing, who was ignoring her husband and murmuring with disbelief that her glasses were lost again. (“Look on the piano,” Marbie instructed. “Whenever I lose anything here it turns up on top of the piano, and
I don't even play!
” Meanwhile, Cassie was crawling around under the table in search of the missing glasses.) Fancy, Listen noticed, had a long, elegant neck that made her seem calm and poised, but she also had flighty, nervous hands. She wore almost invisible, rimless glasses, which she was always losing. No wonder, since they were almost invisible. And she had a way of gazing at her daughter, an astonished expression on her face (especially when Cassie found her glasses for her), which Listen guessed must be the way mothers gaze at daughters.

Also, there were surprising dimples at the edges of Fancy's smile, and Listen suspected that the dimples were full of little secrets.

Maybe, she thought now in the darkened kitchen, leaning her forehead against the window glass, maybe family secrets were a sort of constellation? And now that she had a secret of her own, she herself was linked to the Zing Family Secret constellation?

Something occurred to her: Maybe
all
regular families had family
secrets? All these years, her friends' families might have been meeting in their garden sheds on Friday nights, and
Listen had never noticed.
Could she have missed something like that? It was possible. She had missed the fact that people got things dry-cleaned, and had once asked Sia what a dry cleaner was. It could even be that her friends knew each
others‘
family secrets, forming a separate constellation amongst themselves, to which she could never belong.

Maybe that's what Donna wanted from her? A secret.

She could tell her about the Spell Book, but wouldn't Donna say, “Bring it in so we all get to do the spells”?

Or more likely, “Yeah, like I really believe in
spell books.
Power up your brain cells, I don't
think so.
”

Well.

She could tell Donna about the Zing Family Secret.

But first she'd have to find out what it was.

The backyard was still and silent. The shed walls were dark and unblinking. A warm breath was touching her arm.

Cassie, in pajamas, was beside her. “You can't see into the shed,” Cassie told her through a yawn. “I've tried but there aren't any windows.”