The Spell Book Of Listen Taylor

by Jaclyn Moriarty

  “Well, I don’t know about that.” Fancy frowned at him sternly, but also with a flicker of unease.

  “Aren’t you going to have dessert?” said Radcliffe. “I was thinking of a coffee, and now it’s too late. You’ve gone and asked for the bill.”

  “It’s never too late,” said Fancy mysteriously. “Nothing is ever too late, Radcliffe.”

  “Okay,” he agreed, and when the waiter put down a slender leather wallet containing two chocolate mints and the bill, Radcliffe said, “Might I add an espresso to that, do you think?”

  “Easy,” said the waiter, and smoothly whisked it back.

  Fancy’s car skidded along in the afternoon light. She was listening to a pair of excited radio announcers canceling flights, trains, ferries, parties, fetes, and festivals, all on account of the snow. They were canceling Harbour Bridge Walks (indefinitely), but replacing them with sled rides down the Opera House (hilariously). They sympathized with a caller who had never seen snow before, and had been saving the experience for her fortieth birthday: Now it was too late! She had seen it! (“Still,” the next caller pointed out, “I suppose she could have stayed inside and kept the curtains closed.”) They were warmed by a caller who phoned to say she had opened her house to strangers, on account of her potbellied stove. “It heats the whole house!” They were fretful about what would happen when the snow melted. There would be floods, wouldn’t there? They invited callers to confirm or deny.

  “Hello!” said Fancy, brushing snowflakes from her jacket as she jangled the Banana Bar door. “Busy today?” She sounded odd and bright.

  “Nope,” said Nathaniel. “Not one single customer. The weather, I guess.”

  “Well!” (She could not stop the brightness.) “I’ll be your first! I’ll have a banana milk shake, thanks.”

  “On the house.”

  “No! No!”

  And then Fancy looked at him meaningfully, to indicate that she knew, and Nathaniel shrugged to himself.

  “So,” continued Fancy, building on her meaningful glance, “I just wanted to see how you were—see if there’s anything I can—and about the campervan—isn’t it a bit too cold?”

  “We won’t sleep in the campervan. We’ve got a generator for the shop, so we’ll sleep back there. And also, if your mother’s worried. I understand about the Secret. The Zing Family Secret. I would never—”

  “Nathaniel! No! Of course we’re not worried about that. I’m just hoping it will work out again. I mean, Marbie…” She was going to say that Marbie was a brat, a fool, a wicked witch, but one with the right sort of heart—only there was something about Nathaniel’s eyes when she said the name. So she changed the subject. “Where’s Listen? How is she?”

  “She’s not so happy.”

  “Did you tell her about—about Marbie—about…”

  “I just said that Marbie and I had a fight. I said I didn’t think we’d ever get over it. The fight. I said that was most probably it between Marbie and me.” He took Fancy’s milk shake back from her, although it was not quite finished, and dumped it in the sink.

  “Ah,” said Fancy.

  Their eyes met for a moment, and they both looked up at the giant plastic bananas hanging from the ceiling.

  “She’s out the back now in the campervan, I think. Practicing her Tae Kwon Do.”

  “Okay,” said Fancy, standing and gathering her purse. “Well, lovely to see you, Nathaniel. Make sure you call if you need anything. Or if you want to talk…And give Listen my love, won’t you? Tell her to—”

  But she didn’t know what to tell Listen, and simply waved.

  It took years before you could do a proper flying side kick. Carl Vandenberg could do one, but he was going for his black belt, and even he looked messy in the air. The other day, Listen had been one of the four people who crouched on the floor in a row, so that Carl could jump over them and kick the piece of board held by the master.

  Listen had decided she would secretly teach herself the flying side kick. Out in the cold, she ran, leapt, and fell onto her face. Her feet were bare. She wore summer pajamas. She ran, leapt with her leg tucked under, and fell face-forward in the snow. She leapt and fell, leapt and fell.

  When she got up, she could not feel her face, except her nose, which ached. Her hands were purple, her fingers were stinging, her knees and elbows were bruised or grazed, and all the time she thought, I deserve this.

  Because she had ruined everything. She was a stupid, selfish person, and she stamped her bare feet in the snow to prove this, and found herself stamping up the stairs into the campervan to burn the book.

  A SPELL TO MAKE TWO HAPPY PEOPLE HAVE A HUGE FIGHT OVER ABSOLUTELY NOTHING.

  She could not believe she had done a spell like that. She could not believe it meant her dad and Marbie. She never thought these spells even worked.

  She took the Spell Book from her backpack, where she had packed it in the middle of the night last night, and slapped her hand scornfully against the lime green cover. She would never open it again. Excuse me, but why had she even bothered? The spells were useless. A spell about making somebody catch a taxi. A spell about breaking a vacuum cleaner. And then, the first spell that actually worked was an evil spell to make two happy people have a fight.

  She was supposed to do the next spell today, but she was actually going to throw the book away, burn it, tear it up, or maybe just throw it in the recycling bin.

  She would drown the book. She slammed it down into the tiny campervan sink, although it only made a slow popping sound, not the thwack she wanted, and she reached for the tap, but of course nothing happened. The water pipes had frozen.

  It was then, looking down into the sink, that she noticed tiny silver italics at the bottom of the back cover. She picked up the book and squinted at the words.

  This Book Will Make You Fly, Will Make You Strong, Will Make You Glad.

  What’s More, This Book Will Mend Your Broken Heart.

  She read this over, her face throbbed cold, and goosebumps pricked her pajama sleeves. She opened the Spell Book and read the next spell.

  A Spell to Make Someone Give Someone a Rose

  Put your finger on your nose and say, “Golly!”

  This Spell will work on a Thursday afternoon in about eight weeks or so.

  You can do the next Spell next Saturday!

  “Cassie, honey, you know you don’t need cushions and things for the snow. It’s okay to fall on it. It’s soft.” Fancy explained this as she drove Cassie home from Lucinda’s place, keeping the car in low gear and skidding to the wrong side of the road occasionally.

  “Not soft enough. See, there’s not enough snow, so you have to get the pillows, and take the cushions off the couch, and put them around on top of the snow so you can fall on them.”

  “Hmm. Well. I’m sure that’s wrong.”

  “And we used Lucinda’s mum’s cake tins and frying pans to slide on, but you had to push yourself along with your legs because they don’t really have any kind of hills in Lucinda’s backyard.” Cassie drew a picture of herself on a cake tin in the window steam. “See, Mum? This is how we pushed ourselves along.”

  Fancy glanced over and said, “Oh!” Then, a few moments later, “I suppose that’s okay, about the cake tins. I suppose you can’t really hurt them.”

  “But I think we broke their VCR.”

  “Oh, Cassie, I thought you were outside playing the whole time.”

  “We were. We broke the VCR when we were sliding on it.”

  “Cassie! Did Lucinda’s mother know about this?”

  “No,” explained Cassie. “Lucinda hid the VCR under her bed. They should get a DVD anyway.”

  “Well,” said Fancy, “I suppose so.”

  Then they listened to the radio together for a moment. All over the city, people were tripping over, tobogganing down Martin Place, catching skis on parking meters, and leaving ski poles outside shops.

  “Brrrrrrrrr,” said Cassie as they walked th
rough the front door.

  “Here’s trouble,” exclaimed her father. “Cass, you’re walking snow into the house, kiddo. I think you ought to take your shoes off. Call me old-fashioned.”

  “Come and sit on the steps beside me,” her mother offered. “I bet this is what they do in cold countries. They take off their shoes on the steps. Radcliffe, shouldn’t we put snow chains on the tires?”

  “I’ll ring up the Living With Snow help line,” agreed Radcliffe.

  “There’s a help line?! So they think the snow’s going to last?”

  “I think we should have chicken noodle soup for dinner,” suggested Cassie, “and then roast beef and roasted potatoes, and then cherry pie, and then we should get a fireplace with a fire and marshmallows and games. That’s what they do in cold countries when it snows.”

  Over the next few days, the snow slowly melted, but the weather stayed exceptionally cold, and everyone expected more to fall. Just in case, the City of Sydney commissioned a series of television ads under the slogan, Living with Snow. The ads advised on such things as shoveling the driveway and not wearing slippery shoes. Also, they pointed out that snow was designed to be “fun” so nobody should panic if it did happen again.

  Meanwhile, the Bureau of Meteorology cautioned that more snow was highly unlikely since snow in Sydney was a freakish event. It could not resist adding now and then: But still, you never know!

  Each morning, the Canadian sat on his front porch, dressed in his overcoat and a black woolen hat, drinking coffee and breathing mist as he answered Fancy’s queries about cold.

  Each morning, Marbie woke at her parents’ place, tangled in her childhood bed. She could not bring herself to go home, or to go to work. She took long hot baths and showers, left long phone messages for Nathaniel at the Banana Bar, and asked her parents whether he had called back while she was in the bath. He never had.

  One morning she woke from a dream of Listen dancing, and she yearned to replay the night of the snowstorm: herself at the table with the empty Twix wrapper; Nathaniel and Listen home from canceled Tae Kwon Do; Listen dancing through the kitchen. Then, later, telling Nathaniel about the A.E. What had she been thinking? She had been acting at the level of stupidity she’d learned about back when her sister told her parents she’d revealed the Secret to Radcliffe! How had she forgotten that lesson? If you do something wrong, you keep it to yourself! You don’t tell people!

  If only she’d not told Nathaniel! If only she’d not eaten the Twix bar meant for him!

  If only she’d not slept with the aeronautical engineer.

  She stopped for a moment, staring at her high school swimming trophies and wondering if she might have got the meaning of stupidity wrong.

  But something was catching at the edges of her wonder, something significant and wrong.

  She realized what it was.

  She fell out of bed, ran to the phone, and called Nathaniel.

  Listen’s dad wanted to build a snowman. Neither of them had ever built one before, and they were surprised by how difficult it was. The snow wouldn’t roll into a ball; it kept crumbling in their hands.

  That was another thing: They didn’t have gloves.

  While they were taking a break to blow on their hands and consider the problem, Listen’s dad said casually, “So, this is a real bummer, eh? Being back in the campervan after finally getting a place of our own?”

  Listen laughed, as if he’d made a joke, and fell onto her knees to try a snowball again. As she scraped snow together, she thought of her brand-new bedroom in the apartment. For the first time in her life, she’d had a chest of drawers, a lamp, a desk, and a bed with two ends. Marbie had helped her choose the furniture.

  Now she was back in a corner with a curtain for privacy, and a bathroom in the back of the Banana Bar. Also, no ironing board. Her Clareville Academy uniform would always be crumpled from now on.

  “It must make you pretty angry though,” her dad persisted. “Being back here. Would it help if I promise I’m going to get us out as soon as I can? We’ll find a place to rent for a while. Who needs a mortgage anyway?”

  He was collecting pebbles and bark now, choosing eyes and a mouth, maybe thinking that if he got attractive features ready, the snowman would be grateful and appear. Watching her father frown in concentration, Listen felt so sad for him. His mouth trembled a little whenever he said Marbie’s name these days, but each time he quickly smoothed out his face into a smile.

  And he was so clueless about Listen herself. He had actually thought that the guys at Tae Kwon Do were “hitting on her.” In fact, they were just talking to each other while she stood nearby. It was true that Carl Vandenberg had spoken to her. He had asked her for the time. She’d held out her wrist to show him her watch. Then her dad had arrived, and that was that.

  “Doesn’t make me angry,” Listen said. “But you could try to make up with Marbie, couldn’t you? I mean, if the fight was over nothing? You could phone her up?”

  “I guess there’s one good thing,” her dad said, as if he hadn’t heard her. “No more meetings at the Zings on Friday nights. You get to go out with your friends instead of sitting with Cassie. Hang on, I think that’s the phone.”

  He opened the back door of the Banana Bar, stamped his feet on the mat, and went inside to answer the phone.

  “Nathaniel, she doesn’t dance anymore.”

  “Marbie?”

  “Yeah. It’s me. I have to—”

  “Marbie, you can’t keep phoning me, okay? I’m sorry but you can’t.”

  “Okay, but I have to tell you something. Listen doesn’t dance anymore. I woke up and remembered she was dancing on Friday afternoon, the day I—the day before you moved out. Remember she was dancing in the kitchen when she got home from Tae Kwon Do?”

  “So she does dance. What’s your point?”

  “But that’s the first time I’ve seen her dancing in weeks. She’d stopped dancing completely, Nathaniel, then the first day of the school holidays she started again. I think it’s a problem at school. I think there’s something wrong at school.”

  “She’s fine, Marbie. School is fine. She’d tell me if it wasn’t. And if she’s stopped dancing, maybe that’s a good thing. Maybe it was a nervous habit? I really need you not to call. I’m hanging up now, okay?”

  While her dad was on the phone, Listen gave up on the snowman and went back to the campervan to get warm. She almost slid on the aluminum step up to the doorway, and remembered the welcome mat with the picture of a curled up cat at Grandma and Grandpa Zings.

  Suddenly she knew what the Secret was.

  It was nothing to do with espionage and undercover agent work.

  It was the Secret to family life.

  The Zings spent Friday nights exchanging recipes and making shopping lists. No. The garden shed was a replica of an average suburban house, and Friday nights were spent redecorating: reupholstering furniture and pasting friezes around the walls. No. On Friday nights, they leaned their heads together and discussed the ingredients of love and happiness: how to stay together and keep children entertained. (That’s why Cassie was always making jewelery from pink beads.)

  Actually, it was more than that.

  The Zings were the Keepers of the Family. Friday nights, they painted the stars that children see through bedroom curtains. They curled the smoke from chimneys; they slipped into homes and put dollhouses in corners, cushions on windowseats, place mats on tables, potted plants and lemon-thyme soap in guest bathrooms.

  Now that she was back in the campervan, the Zing family were no longer her Keepers.

  On the first Friday of the holidays, Fancy visited her parents for morning tea.

  “Marbie’s still asleep,” explained Fancy’s mother, sitting down and taking the teabag out of her cup. “And your dad’s in the shed. He’s taking it hard, this breakup of Marbie’s—you know how fond he was of Nathaniel and Listen—and really, I wonder what Marbie thinks she—”

  At
that moment, Marbie walked into the kitchen, wearing slippers and her mother’s pink dressing gown.

  “Hello,” said Marbie, seeing her sister. “Did you bring Cassie?”

  Fancy raised her chin toward the kitchen window, and Marbie turned around. In the back garden, Cassie and her friend Lucinda were stamping around in the mud.

  “Oh,” said Marbie vaguely. “I felt like talking to her.”

  “Never mind, darling. Have some ginger cake with us. It’s still warm!”

  “Why aren’t you at work, anyway?” Fancy wanted to know.

  “Well, I phoned Tabitha on Monday, she’s my supervisor, and I told her what happened, and she said I should take as much time as I need, and—”

  “You can’t stop working,” interrupted Fancy, pointing her teacup at Marbie, “just because you’ve got a broken heart. It’s no excuse. It’s like when you have a hangover. You have to go to work even then.”

  “I would think it’d be pretty quiet at Marbie’s office these days,” their mother soothed, “what with this funny weather.”

  “Actually, imagine how many claims are coming in with all the skidding cars,” Marbie admitted thoughtfully.

  “Cassie and Lucinda have been outside playing every day,” said Fancy. “They’ve adapted to the cold, and my point is, Marbie, there are some things you just have to do.”

  “I’m going to have a bath,” Marbie said to her mother. “See if you can find out what’s wrong with Fancy. She’s gone all right-wing and Protestant.”

  “Well,” said Fancy, “if the children can get on with their lives…”

  “Nathaniel? Is that you? It’s me. I’m calling from the bath.”

  “Marbie, you’d better stop phoning me, okay?”

  Marbie was quiet.

  “Marbie? Did you hear me?”

  “You prefer me not to call?”

  “That’s right. Please stop leaving messages. Okay? This is not going to work.”

  “I can’t even leave messages to say I’m sorry?”

  “Not even that.”

  “But it makes me feel better.”