The Spell Book Of Listen Taylor (5 page)

In the early light of a birthday once when she was small, Cath Murphy woke to the shapes of presents huddled by her bed. One was a short, fat, barrel-shaped present, wrapped in bright pink paper.

I know what that is.
She sat up from her pillow with a whisk of excitement.
That's a pair of Rollerblades!

Only Rollerblades would come in short, fat, barrel-shaped presents like that. Under the pink wrapping, there would be a silver barrel. She would prise the lid open with her fingers and inside, wrapped in bubble paper: sleek, black Rollerblades.

Cath had never tried Rollerblading before, so she lay in bed thinking about how she could learn. On the front lawn first. Maybe her father would mow the lawn, leaving a trail of grass clippings so she could build grass castles to fall on? Then in the rose garden, because the thorns would be an incentive to stay up.

Opening her presents on the veranda that morning, Cath saved the Rollerblades until last. Her father ate his bran flakes, and her mother peeled an orange, wiping her sticky hands now and then on a roll of paper towels. They watched while Cath opened each present until there was nothing but the Rollerblades left. All the time, she had been tempering her reactions, conserving energy for this particular gift. Now she regarded its pink wrapping. What would she do when she saw the Rollerblades? She would let out a high-pierced squeal, shout, “NO WAY!”, jump to her feet, and give both parents a high five. That should do it.

She felt intensely nervous as she opened the wrapping. Then the paper fell away.

It was not Rollerblades. It was not even a silver barrel.

It was a wastepaper basket. There were plastic butterflies sewn into the straw.

Cath held the basket for a moment. It was shaped like a barrel.

“Butterflies,” she whispered. She had one of those moments of dissociation:
Can this be happening? Am I really here? Is it a dream?

Then she rallied: “Butterflies! Hey, Mummy, you know how I've got birds on my curtains? You know what's going to happen? The birds are going to fly off the curtains and play with the butterflies on my new basket!”

Her parents laughed happily.

Cath joined them at the table, feeling shaky at the knees. “Okay there?” said her father. “You look kind of white.”

Her mother explained that it was just the excitement.

Cath sat quietly, feeling strange and wise. She had been tested. She had passed. For here was an important lesson in life, and one she had never suspected:
Sometimes you get a bad surprise, but you have to act calm and unamazed.

The first few weeks of the school year seemed to Cath to be stage lit. She was always shading her eyes from the sun, blending her squint into a smile. Often, she threw back her head in laughter, or tilted her chin as if struck by an inspired thought. She smiled warmly or ironically at children, and she told quick, quirky stories to Lenny and Suzanne, who obliged her by shrieking, “Cath! Cut it
out
!”

While they hooted—or while she shaded her eyes or tilted her chin, opened her car door or adjusted her rearview mirror—Cath would glance around quickly, and sometimes, there he would be: Warren Woodford.

Watching her.

He often had a single eyebrow raised.

In the first few weeks of the school year, also, Cath and Warren became friends. This was only natural—they were the Grade Two teachers and had to hold curriculum meetings after school. When they held their meetings, one of them would run across the highway in the heat to bring back iced caffe lattes. Then they would have a break, and Warren would ask Cath's advice about difficult children. This was his first year of teaching, whereas it was her third, so she had wisdom to share. He also liked to hear about her part-time law classes, and she would memorize the best cases to describe to him. As she talked, he would gasp slightly at surprising facts, and ask innocent questions, and she would explain the law to him, feeling articulate and smart.

Meanwhile, Warren quickly gained the reputation, among teachers, as a charming and lighthearted young man, quick to give an inquisitive look whenever someone said something obtuse. “He cuts through the crap,” Lenny declared to Cath, and she nodded, feeling proud to be his friend.

Among children, Warren had a reputation as VERY funny, and you never know what he's going to do next, and sometimes he doesn't make sense, but he's nice if you hurt yourself.

It was now acknowledged by Lenny and Suzanne that, as far as information was concerned, Warren Woodford belonged to Cath. “Hey, did Warren do any acting work before he became a teacher?” Lenny might say. “He's so funny with that face of his at staff meetings!”

And Cath would explain: “No, he only did two years of drama training—then he went straight to teachers college.”

“How come?” Suzanne would ask humbly.

“Well, one day,” Cath explained, “he was doing this practical drama exercise with a bunch of kids, and he realized he loved working with them, and he thought,
What if I could do MORE than entertain them?
”

“Huh,” Lenny and Suzanne would say, impressed.

Sometimes, Cath would watch their faces, waiting for some hint that they expected romance between Warren and herself. Had they not noticed how he
watched
her? Did they not think she was
good enough
for him?

But there was never even a suggestion; instead, the three talked about the romance between Lenny and Frank Billson (school principal). Suzanne liked to suggest new hair colors for Lenny, to help the relationship along, and was pushing for a rich dark red to bring out Lenny's cheekbones, but Lenny thought blonde with candy lipstick. Sometimes Cath thought wistfully,
Shall I die of boredom?
But she was pleased for Lenny.

The late afternoons were sultry and hot, and once all the other teachers had gone, Cath and Warren would sigh in the heat of the staff room, leaning forward over their work, elbows sliding out in either direction so their chins were low above the table. They would flick sweat from their foreheads, and open the windows. Or agree that the windows were only letting in hot air, and close them.

Once, Warren slid an ice cube along the back of Cath's neck to cool her down.

During school days, they held joint singing or arts-and-crafts lessons, with all of Grade Two in a circle on the Assembly Hall floor. Warren had a surprisingly deep voice when he sang, which made the children stare and sometimes giggle.

One brightly lit Thursday, Cath sat on the edge of her desk in her classroom, swinging her legs and looking around at the room full of small, fidgeting people.
I'm pretty happy, you know,
she thought. She was the Queen of Her Own Life! She had so many little kingdoms! Her
classroom, the staff room, her car, her apartment! And in between the kingdoms, she went to law classes, or had iced caffe lattes with friends.

“Let's talk about the
environment,
” she said to her class happily. “Anybody here know what the environment is?”

They all nodded, and many said, “Yeah.” Anthony McMasters said contemptuously, “The
enviroh-ment
?” and put his fingers in his ears.

“Take your fingers out of your ears, Anthony.”

Lucinda Coulton said, “I know,
Miss
Murphy, because do you know why? My dad's a biological engineer.”

“Hands up, Lucinda,” chided Cath. “Is he
really
?”

Marcus Ellison said, “My dad's an astronaut.”

“He is
not.
” Cassie Zing turned to Marcus in a fury.

“You don't have to put both hands in the air,” Cath explained to Lucinda.

“My dad
is
an astronaut. He already went to Venus, okay for now?”

Cassie Zing lifted the lid of her desk and slammed it down hard. The slam ruffled her hair and surprised her eyes.

“We'll do careers then, shall we?” Cath said smoothly, imagining her voice through the wall between the classrooms, imagining how gentle and sensible it might sound. “We've had biological engineers and we've had astronauts. Anybody know another career?”

While the children listed careers for her, against a background of Cassie slamming her desk lid, Cath imagined a knock on the classroom door. She imagined Mr. Woodford leaning into the room and bumping his head on the door frame (he was that tall). “Ouch!” he would say quietly to himself. Then, “Word with you for a moment, Ms. Murphy?” She would nod, and explain to her class: “Keep it down, guys? I won't be a moment,” in a firm yet casual voice. Then she would sidestep to the door, where she would look up at Warren with her short, smart hair, and say, “Hi.”

What would he say in reply?

Cassie Zing put her desk lid down and announced, “My mum is a writer of wilderness romances.”

“Anthony,” said Cath, “take your fingers out of your nose.”

Driving home, Cath wondered again why Lenny and Suzanne never mentioned Warren as a potential boyfriend for her. Did they not realize how good-looking he was? Did they not see that he was sexy?

Or were they, like her, simply waiting? Perhaps they sensed that this would be romance of a different kind—romance so fine it was as fragile as crystal; romance unfurling delicately, like a silken bud, or a cygnet hatching. It had to be watched through binoculars with the steadiest hands.

Cath changed gears, and her hand seemed to tremble on the gearshift. Perhaps, when she was not looking, Lenny and Suzanne glanced at one another, and held the glance a moment, silent and steady, glad for their young friend Cath.

At home that night, Cath phoned her mother across the country, and her mother said, “
Darling!
” and wept a little. It was a recent habit, this weeping, and must have been hormonal. After all, it was not her but her parents who had moved across the continent, leaving Cath with no home, no Mum, no Dad, no my-room-become-a-sewing-room, no Sunday baked dinner, no cappuccino-Sunday-afternoons.

After her mother had wept, she called: “Dad! It's Cath! Pick up!”

Cath's parents were named Mum and Dad, even when she was not around. She had paint-stripped their names, and now they existed only so long as she herself existed.
Too much power for one girl to have,
she sometimes decided grimly.

“I was just reading that the child you love best is the one who is far away,” said Mum. “And aren't you far away, Cath, darling?”

“Yes,” agreed Cath. “So you love me best.”

Cath was the only one. There were no siblings. But anyway.

“Cath, you all right, love? How goes the new school year? Any little monsters in your class?”

That was Dad on the extension, his voice a layer closer than Mum's.

“Yes,” said Mum. “Yes, I also read that the child you love best is the one who is ill.”

“What's that?” said Dad.

“Well, I'm perfectly healthy, so where does that leave us?”

“Breaking any hearts over there?” said Dad.

“Any young men on the horizon?” agreed Mum, changing abruptly to a businesslike voice.

“Breaking any hearts” was funny. Cath's own heart was broken so often it was just about a write-off. But she always considered the horizon, obediently, for her parents.

And there he was on the edge of a sunset sky: Warren Wishful Woodford, a little self-conscious, damp with drops of ocean mist.

“No,” she said. “Not really.”

She shook the horizon gently, tipping him off the edge. Let him climb back up in his own time.

“Hey, Cath,” whispered Warren, sneaking into the Assembly Hall and sitting down beside her, late on Monday morning. Mr. Billson was giving a lecture on punctuality, so a lot of kids pointed at Warren and said, “WAH-HAH.”

“Hi,” she murmured. “How was your weekend?”

“Oh, fine, fine. Kind of a strain, you know? Eh, cut it out,” sternly, to some kids who would not stop pointing and trying to get the principal's attention.

“Kind of a strain?”

He nodded, distracted, and she raised her eyebrows, watching him.
His shirt was already patched with sweat; he must have run from his car to the Assembly Hall. He must be in some kind of trouble—
kind of a strain
—and mentioning it like that, he must want to talk. She would find a gentle way to ask him later.

For now, she looked down at the folder of papers on her lap; at Monday Assemblies, she always pretended to be making notes of what Billson was saying, but in fact she was catching up on class records. She was ticking through last week's lesson plan when she came across this word:
Environment.
She put a check mark beside it.

Then she thought,
Hmm,
and changed it to a half check, before writing “Careers” at the end of the list with another half check.

“Did you know,” she whispered to Warren softly, “that Cassie Zing's mother writes wilderness romances?”

“As you do,” agreed Warren, nodding.

“And Marcus Ellison's dad is an astronaut.”

Now his nod became a slow, impressed tilt. “An
astronaut
?” He looked at Cath admiringly, as if she were the astronaut.

She returned to her class plan and flipped the page, but Warren was leaning into her shoulder and taking the pen from her hand. He turned a page in her notebook and wrote:

This Friday, the Carotid Sticks will be playing at the Borrowed Cat.

(1) Does Cath like the Carotid Sticks:

(a) Yes

(b) No

(c) Does not know them

(2) Will Cath come along with Warren to see the Carotid Sticks:

(a) Yes

(b) No

(c) Does not know him

She leaned forward and circled “Yes” and “Yes.” Warren studied her answers, and then he put a check alongside each “Yes.” Underneath, he wrote the word:
Excellent.