The Spell Book Of Listen Taylor

by Jaclyn Moriarty

  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.”

  “It’s not bad,” said Cassie, replacing her juice on the table and wiping her strawberry mouth. “You try it.”

  Fancy, Radcliffe, and Marbie reached for their glasses.

  Later, while Radcliffe was playing computer games in the study, Fancy said, “What’s going on with you, Marbie? We’ve always known the Secret is illegal.”

  Marbie was stacking Fancy’s dishwasher. “I kind of forgot,” she said.

  “So you also forgot that we let Radcliffe believe we’re safe? He believes in all these loopholes, otherwise, he’d be a wreck. But really, we’d go down in a million different ways if we got caught! There’s trespass, stalking, all kinds of surveillance offenses, and breaking and entering, of course. The fine print in the lease would be worthless to us! Tenants have rights, apparently. We’d all end up in prison, and the civil suits would ruin us, if we got caught!”

  “This is making me feel much better,” Marbie said.

  “The thing is,” Fancy said, “we’re not getting caught.” She leaned over and retrieved a teaspoon that Marbie had placed in the dishwasher’s cutlery rack. “It’s too little,” she explained, holding up the teaspoon. “It falls straight through and gets lost in the works.”

  Nobody knew what was going on with Marbie, but they supposed it was connected with Nathaniel. The fact was, he still had not returned. They were all taken aback by that, so Marbie must have been reeling. She was probably worried that he might use the Secret against them somehow. He would never do that, they all agreed, uneasily.

  Radcliffe offered to replace Marbie on the Maintenance Intrusion, but Fancy said she would not feel comfortable. She and Marbie worked so well together. Besides, she added kindly, Radcliffe had spent hours on the desktop publishing lately. Everyone agreed that the latest issue of Elf Epistles looked fantastic. Such glossy pages!

  “Still,” said Radcliffe, “I’m surprised at Nathaniel. I would have sworn he’d have forgiven her by now.”

  “Would you just?” said Fancy coldly.

  “Well,” said Radcliffe, shelling pistachio nuts and piling the shells onto his thigh, “wouldn’t you?”

  “I miss chatting with Listen,” sighed Fancy unexpectedly.

  Coincidentally, Fancy saw Listen at the gym the next day. She had been on the elliptical machine for half an hour.

  “Two minutes to go,” said the machine. />
  I should hope so, thought Fancy, climbing the stairs.

  The machine provided her with a workout summary, and released her, and she ran into Listen at the water fountain.

  “Well, hello!”

  “Hi, Fancy!” Listen seemed shiny-eyed and sweaty, cute in tracksuit pants and a tank top.

  “You don’t work out at the gym, do you?”

  “No,” Listen explained, “I’m doing rock-climbing classes. In there—see that fake rock wall they have in there? I just climbed it.”

  “Ha! How about you! Mission: Impossible! James Bond!” They smiled at each other for a moment.

  “Anyway,” said Listen, “I’d better go now—Dad’s picking me up. Say hi to Cassie for me, would you? I see her around at Redwood sometimes, but she always looks kind of busy.”

  “Okay, sure. We all miss you so much, Listen, especially Cassie. I hope we get to see you soon.”

  And Listen, running up the stairs to the gym’s front doors, her ponytail bouncing behind her, turned back and gave a strange grin. Afterward, Fancy wondered if it was more a grimace.

  Finally, after several weeks of sitting on the front porch, Fancy decided that she needed a new tactic. It was obvious that Radcliffe had moved his affair to a different location—perhaps the incident with the vacuum cleaner had been enough to scare him away? Dangerous, after all, to bring a clumsy woman like Gemma into his home. They were probably spending all their time at Gemma’s place—breaking her crockery.

  This realization came to her one Thursday afternoon while she was sitting on the front porch and waving at the postman. He was wheeling his bicycle along, and had just pressed a handful of letters into their mailbox. Fancy stood, still waving, thinking to herself, I need a new tactic, and began to walk across her lawn to fetch the mail. It was then that she realized that her gestures were no longer graceful: They were awkward, uneasy, jerky, like a puppet on uneven strings. She blinked, and even her blinking had an arrhythmic twitch.

  Here was the problem, she thought, calming herself as she drew out the mail. She was about to lose hold of the affair. Over the last week, there had been days when she wondered where she got the idea in the first place; there had been days when she doubted that a purple daisy sock could really mean so much; there had even been days when she completely forgot that her husband was having an affair.

  She needed to focus, to give the affair the right sort of attention, pin it down, line it with sandbags. Otherwise, she felt, it would slip from her grasp, rise out of reach, and drift away forlornly like a helium balloon.

  Looking down at the handful of mail, she saw her answer. It was on a flyer at the top of the envelopes.

  RELATIONSHIP COUNSELING

  Affordable

  Discreet

  Confidential

  Guaranteed

  WINSTON HILLS FAMILY COUNSELING CENTER

  (see reverse for contact details)

  Of course! The plan came to her in a tumble: She would set up some sessions with a counselor. She would surprise Radcliffe with these sessions. Tell him it was a kind of gift certificate for their marriage. In fact, the idea would be to ensure an anchor, a controlled environment. Within that environment, she could tell Radcliffe that she knew of his affair. The counselor would ensure that the affair did not skitter away. It was “Guaranteed”! She went straight inside to make an appointment.

  Relieved, having restored the graceful swish to her movements, she decided to hang some laundry. It was breezy and sunny, the chill almost gone. She leaned and pegged, leaned and pegged, then crossed to the other side of the line where yesterday’s clothes were ready to be removed.

  Grevilleas were blooming, she noticed as she unpegged a pair of her own underwear—cotton underpants, apricot in color. Spring was certainly here. The return of the graceful, floating feeling meant that her hands did not quite grasp at things, so that the wind, when it breezed by, found it easy to take the underpants from her fingers and fling them through the air. Whoosh! Up into the sky! Whoosh! Over the fence and into the neighbor’s yard.

  She ran to the fence in time to see her underpants blow into the face of the Canadian next door. They flattened against his face, and then dwindled toward the ground. He was surprised, but caught them before they hit the grass. He had a peg out ready himself, she saw, and was hanging his own laundry.

  Specifically, he appeared to be hanging out three pairs of women’s underpants: tiny, multicolored G-strings, like colorful lizards. He turned to face her, smiling, holding up her underwear.

  “And you,” she called, apologetically, “with all that pretty underwear!” Then she wondered at herself.

  But he laughed and clumped over his lawn, companionably, to the fence. “Your panties?” he offered graciously.

  She took them from him, thinking that the word panties was the most intimate thing she had ever heard. She, a writer of wilderness romance. “Sorry to blow them in your face,” she said.

  He gave a chin-lift of laughter, and leaned against the fence, and they both turned back toward his clothes hoist, to stare at the row of frilly panties. Which was when Fancy saw it. A single purple sock, hanging from his line, flickering slightly in the wind.

  “Excuse me,” she said, “but may I see that sock?”

  “Well, sure,” he agreed, and clumped back over to his clothesline. Good-naturedly, he unpegged the sock and brought it back.

  Yes, it was the one. It was the pair. A purple sock stitched with a daisy.

  “Where did you get this from?” she said, realizing that her voice quivered melodramatically.

  “That’s a funny question.” He remained good-natured. “I found it in the bottom of my washing machine just now. Unexpected. It belonged to my ex-girlfriend. Ex-ex-girlfriend, as a matter of fact. I guess she left some of her laundry behind, and this sock was maybe stuck in the bottom of my washing machine for a while. You know socks.”

  “Well, the thing is,” said Fancy, “the thing is that I found the pair to this sock in my bedroom a few weeks back.”

  “Did you really?”

  They both stood still for a moment, while the wind dabbed at their clothes and at their hair. They found themselves gazing at the cotton underpants in Fancy’s left hand and the purple sock in her right.

  “I guess,” said the Canadian reflectively, “that Tammy’s sock might’ve got blown over the fence one time, just like your panties did today. I guess I might have hung the one sock up to dry while the other one was stuck in the machine, and the line one got blown over the fence and mixed up with your laundry.”

  Fancy was doubtful. She was caught up in much more vibrant explanations: a threesome between Radcliffe, his Affair, and this Tammy, for example. Or, kinky Canadian climbs into her bedroom in the middle of the night and hides his girlfriend’s sock under her bed.

  “I guess that could have happened,” she conceded eventually. “I do sort my laundry in the bedroom sometimes, so I guess I might have sorted it there and the purple sock fell and got kicked under the bed.”

  They were still again. The sun sat on their shoulders.

  “Funny,” said the Canadian, “me finding the sock in my washing machine like that, on the day your panties blow over the fence.”

  “Shall I get the matching sock for you?” suggested Fancy. “So you can send them back to—Tammy?”

  “Ah, forget it,” he shrugged endearingly. “Tammy can live without her purple daisy socks, I guess. She didn’t turn out all that nice. Now, Gina…,” he continued, looking back at the underwear frill along his line. “But she had to go back to Naples in a hurry. I’m sending on her valuables,” he added vaguely.

  “Say ‘out and about,’” said Fancy, out of nowhere.

  “Out and about,” he obliged at once. But then, as he strolled back to his clothesline, he turned and called, “Oot and aboot!” and rolled his eyes, in a friendly way.

  There is no purple sock, thought Fancy as she smiled her thanks at the Canadian. There i
s no purple daisy sock belonging to a woman from the pay office at Radcliffe’s work. Radcliffe’s affair—she thought next, with a strange little thud, like a book falling off a bedside table—Radcliffe’s affair is over.

  My husband is not having an affair.

  Three

  The day after the picnic on the living-room floor, the first day of the new school term, Marbie hit snooze on her alarm clock just as the telephone rang. It was the aeronautical engineer.

  “Don’t call me at home!” she hissed, pretending that Nathaniel and Listen were still there.

  “If your boyfriend had answered, I’d have just hung up. Okay? Just chill, okay? Can you talk?”

  “No.”

  “Well, can you listen for a moment? Marbie, you are a riot. What was that yesterday? Showing up at my place, telling me a story about spying on a second-grade teacher, and waltzing right out the front door? You didn’t even touch my picnic! I thought to myself, who was that?”

  “Well,” said Marbie, “it was me.”

  “Okay, whatever, I just want to say one thing. I want to say that you are gorgeous, and I want to say how happy I am about the decision that I made, way back when I first met you at the Night Owl Pub.”

  “That’s more than one thing. And you didn’t meet me at the Night Owl Pub. You met me at work.”

  “Huh. Yeah, I remember that too. Your paper airplanes! Wo-ho! Dodgy! But what I’m talking about here is my decision. At the Night Owl Pub? When I saw you sitting there? All your pals were gone, and my car had just got towed. So I asked you what the time was, and “Five o’clock” you said, in that voice of yours—and right away I made a decision. The best decision I ever made.”

  “What decision?”

  “The decision to get a taxi. I thought—like shazam!—I thought, I’ll get a taxi. I was running late for a meeting, see, and I knew I’d miss the bus if I stayed. So I was about to say, “See ya,” but then I thought, Shazam; I thought, A taxi, that’ll do the trick! And it was the best decision I ever made.”