The Spell Book Of Listen Taylor

by Jaclyn Moriarty

  “Oops is right, young lady.” Mummy took an apple core from Marbie’s shorts pockets.

  “Who was it?” Fancy demanded. “On the phone?”

  “But it already had that mark on it when we bought it, remember, Mum?” Marbie licked her fingers and began scraping at the mud.

  “Stop that,” said Mummy. “You’ll only make it worse. Here, take it off right away, and I’ll put it in with this lot. Marbie, who was on the phone, darling?”

  Marbie lifted her T-shirt up over her face and from behind the purple she said, “Daddy.”

  “Daddy?” Fancy cried.

  “Hang on,” said Mummy. She had noticed something deep in the washing machine. Being quite fat, she had to reach over her stomach before she could get into the machine. Marbie and Fancy waited. “Hmm,” she said, coming back out and holding up a sock. She tossed it into the basket and turned around to reach for Marbie’s shirt.

  “Yeah,” said Marbie. “Daddy. And he says he’s still at the airport now because the plane was late, and he’ll come home soon, okay?”

  “Right,” said Mummy, bending to the basket once again. “We may as well get dinner started. No sense in us starving, is there?”

  “I’ll start dinner, Mummy,” offered Fancy.

  The chicken and chips were sitting on the counter, wrapped in a great white bundle. Fancy took the aluminum tray with its burned biscuit stains, and let the food tumble from the paper onto the tray. She switched on the oven and placed the tray on the center shelf.

  Ceremoniously, she moved to the table, took her HB pencil, and crinkled her forehead at the poem.

  Two

  When Marbie Zing was five years old, her father went to Ireland for a year. Every night that he was gone, Marbie crept into the school yard next door and took midnight swims in the pool. During the days she sailed paper boats in the kitchen sink.

  The day that her father came home, Fancy wrote a poem, Mummy washed the curtains, and Marbie turned the hose onto the trampoline.

  It was Marbie who answered the phone when he called from the airport.

  “That’s Marbie, isn’t it?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you remember your old dad?”

  “Ye-e-e-s! Of course!”

  They ate chicken and chips for dinner, and their mother said, “Let’s get this place looking perfect for your dad!”

  Fancy threw away the chicken bones, and Marbie, accidentally, threw away Fancy’s poem. Mummy hung freshly washed curtains in the kitchen windows and stood back. “Girls, what do you think!”

  Fancy said, “Beeeautiful.”

  Marbie said that the curtains looked crinkled and raggedy.

  “Did anybody see my poem?” said Fancy, shifting magazines around.

  Mummy took another step back and bumped into Fancy. “Maybe you’re right. I should iron them.”

  “They look beautiful, Mummy,” Fancy said. “Leave them. But I can’t find my poem. Did anyone see my poem?”

  “Only I don’t know if I have time.” Mummy looked at the kitchen clock, the curtains, and the closed front door. “Oh dear.”

  “Maybe you should just throw the curtains away,” suggested Marbie.

  “That’s not the answer, precious one,” said Mummy, then: “Fancy! What are you doing?”

  Fancy had the kitchen trash can tipped upside down. She was sitting among chicken bones, tin cans, paper towels, tuna fish, carrot peels, and corn.

  “My poem!” Fancy cried. “I can’t find my poem!”

  “The floor!” Mummy cried.

  Headlights flashed through the kitchen curtains, and an engine grumbled in the drive.

  “He’s here!” Fancy shrieked, and Mummy and Marbie jumped.

  “And I’m all ruined, and I can’t find my poem, and—” Then she found her poem.

  “My poem!” Now she was crying properly. “It’s ruined, it’s got chicken grease all over it, and LOOK AT MY SKIRT.”

  Which is why, when Daddy got back from Ireland, the first thing he looked at was Fancy’s new skirt.

  “That’s tuna on your skirt there, isn’t it?”

  Those were his first words. He was carrying a large brown suitcase, and his face, Marbie thought, was like a fat pink balloon. Fancy stood up in a tumble of garbage, and ran from the room in a sob.

  “I hope you’re not hungry,” Mummy announced. “We’ve eaten all the chicken and chips.”

  “Have you got presents?” said Marbie.

  “Of course I’ve got presents!” said Daddy. “I’ll put my suitcase away, and then we’ll all go sit in the lounge.”

  In the lounge, Daddy gave them presents: bags of M&M’s and packets of chips. They waited hopefully, but that was it, so they began to eat the M&M’s. Daddy looked around the room and began picking up objects and putting them back down.

  “Just leave that one,” said Mummy suddenly, but Daddy had put down a photo frame and picked up a magazine. When he did, a dried flower fell onto the floor.

  “Oh,” said Daddy, “sorry,” and he tried to pick up the pieces of the flower. “Just leave it,” Mummy said again.

  Meanwhile, Fancy sat on the carpet in her dirty skirt and sniffed. “I wrote you a poem,” she said eventually, “but it got thrown away and now it’s ruined.”

  “Here, come sit on my lap,” Daddy suggested. “You can write me another poem if you like!”

  “But I can’t…” Fancy burst into tears, and nobody heard what she said next.

  “We can’t hear you,” Marbie explained. “You have to stop crying.”

  Fancy kept crying anyway, and Mummy said, “Hush now,” and leaned forward to stroke her hair.

  “I can’t sit on your lap, Daddy.” This time they heard Fancy. “The couch is broken, and we’ll fall right through, because I’ll be too heavy and my skirt’s too dirty.”

  “Rubbish!” cried Daddy.

  “Yes,” Marbie explained, “it’s rubbish. All over her skirt.”

  “Come along.” Daddy patted his knees. “I think on this special day you can sit on my lap, no?” So Fancy did. Daddy shifted so he wasn’t sitting on the broken spring.

  “Where did you go for a whole year, Daddy?” said Fancy, wiping away her tears.

  “I went to some islands, Fancy, off the west coast of Ireland.”

  “How many islands, Daddy?”

  “Three.”

  “What are they called?”

  “Inishmore, Inishmaan and Inisheer.”

  “What are they like? Are they nice?”

  “The soil is almost paved with stones,” said Daddy, clearing his throat, and continuing, “so that in some places nothing is to be seen but large stones with openings between them, where cattle break their legs. The only stone is limestone, and marble for tombstones. Among these stones is very good pasture, so that beef, veal, and mutton are better and earlier in season here than elsewhere.”

  “Interesting,” said Mummy.

  “Yes,” agreed Daddy.

  “What did you do on the islands, Daddy?”

  “I wrote my novel, Fancy.”

  “Can I see your novel, Daddy?”

  “No. Once I had finished my novel, Fancy, I took the pages, one by one, made each into a paper boat, and sent them all to sea. Because, Fancy, my novel took me away from my family. So I washed it away in the waves.”

  “Daddy!” whispered Fancy, then: “Welcome home.” She cried again, and threw her arms around him.

  “Little Fancy,” whispered Daddy, “little Fancy.”

  Marbie blinked her eyes to make herself cry. “What’s the matter, Marbie?” said her mother. “Don’t tell me you’re allergic to the carpet?”

  PART 14

  Thursday Night

  Late Thursday night, Cath closed the door on Warren, and sat on her couch to imagine.

  She had driven straight home from the staff meeting that day, without touching the rose in her pigeonhole, and had waited, breathless, for Warren to arrive. When he did, she
threw open the door and said, “What’s going on?” Then she laughed at her own melodrama: He was sure to have an explanation.

  It turned out he did not. The truth was set out in his solemn face: Breanna had a job at Redwood Elementary, beginning Monday. In fact, he could not even stay tonight—he had to go home and get the house in order. Her furniture would arrive the next day. The affair was officially over.

  “Why didn’t you tell me before?” she said.

  “I didn’t know until today that it was definite.”

  “But why did I have to hear it from Billson?”

  “I tried to warn you. I left you a rose.”

  “But why didn’t you tell me?”

  “I’m sorry,” said Warren. “You’re completely right. But it was up in the air until this morning, and I just didn’t want it to be true. Really. I left you a rose.”

  “But at our school! Why didn’t you stop it from happening?”

  “I couldn’t stop it—how would that have looked? When it came up a couple of weeks ago, I didn’t think it was serious. I really didn’t think it could happen.”

  They spent the evening sitting on the couch, while Cath tried to cry. She found that she could not. There was nothing to cry about. Here he was beside her. The idea of his not being there was absurd.

  “It’s just that I think I love you,” she murmured, eventually, into his shoulder. Then she panicked: It was the first time this had been said between them. It was the first time she herself had ever said it first.

  “I think I love you too,” he replied, and stroked the hair behind her ears.

  “It feels impossible,” she said.

  Warren agreed. His voice was sad, but practical. “I can tell we’ll be together one day,” he said. “Someday, soon, it will all work out.”

  “You’re married,” she reminded him, but in a teary, smiling voice.

  “Yes,” he replied, “but it’s coming apart at the seams.”

  Then he left, pausing at the door. They stared at each other fiercely, and then laughed, and he placed his hand on her forehead as if checking for fever.

  Cath returned to the couch to imagine the affair being over. She pictured a train screeching to a halt with a jolt and a tick-tick-tick into silence. (The sound of a window squeaking open and a passenger blustering, “What now?”) But, in her vision, the train slid back into motion almost at once. She could not imagine it simply standing still.

  It would be intellectually interesting, she decided, but otherwise would probably not hurt. It was not as if he was leaving her, he just had to return temporarily to his wife.

  They had always agreed that contact would cease when Breanna moved to Sydney. Otherwise, they would have to sneak around like people having an affair. And, although she would miss his body, this would be altogether different to broken hearts of her past. After all, she and Warren were in love. They had just admitted it. Shortly, the marriage would unravel.

  Warren would still be around. She would be able to see him, talk to him, tell him her secrets. “It will be fine, won’t it?” she confirmed with her cat, Violin.

  Late Thursday night, Fancy stood at the long, narrow window by her front door and gazed out across the shadowed lawn.

  Radcliffe had driven to the corner store for milk, and Cassie was asleep. For the first time that day, Fancy had a moment to consider how she felt about the end of her husband’s affair.

  Instead, she thought about hotel lobbies.

  Ah, she thought, hotel lobbies! The smooth integration of elevator doors, marble floors, and granite reception desks! The concierge behind his helpful little glasses, which glint in the chandelier light. The glass shop fronts with their indoor plants and neat subtle lettering: Armani, Gucci, Dolce & Gabbana. The wine bar in curving stainless steel with dashes of electric blue (martini glasses!)—and the bathrooms, especially the bathrooms! Their frosted glass and their clever taps, towels folded in neat white piles, dried flowers, and the sensors! Everywhere the sensors! Hand driers, toilet flushers, doorways!

  As generally happened when she thought of hotel lobbies, Fancy’s breathing slowed. She calmed enough to return to her own front hallway. Your husband is NOT having an affair, she reminded herself. But watching the front lawn, and hearing the occasional gear change of passing cars, she felt herself jolted back to the imaginary lobby.

  Immediately, she ran into a man in a pale gray T-shirt.

  She thought she might kiss him deeply. No! She would lean in to kiss him, and he would turn away! She saw him, the man (not quite his face, more his T-shirt), and she longed for his touch: Please, put your hand on my wrist! But he refused.

  Jolted again, she was back in her home. She shrugged deeply, feeling the spasm of the stranger’s non-touch by touching her own arms with her fingertips.

  Was that him now? Had he followed her out of her dream? That was a car!

  She peered beyond her reflection into the night. A car was pulling into the driveway. There was a succinct click as the headlights turned off. The engine was quieting. It was him! The man from the hotel lobby! It was his strong hands unbuckling the seat belt, his thumb on the button of his keys: bip-bip!

  His shoes were on the gravel—a quiet crunching, a few running steps up the stairway—and now he would knock! “That was you in the hotel lobby,” he would accuse enigmatically.

  “Won’t you come in for a drink?” she would reply, breathless, and—

  Fancy jumped as keys rapped on the window.

  “Fancy that!” cried a voice. “My Fancy is at home!”

  Radcliffe leaned around the door with a grin, holding up a carton of milk.

  Late Thursday night, Marbie drove home from the A.E.’s house, relieved she had finally ended the affair.

  She walked down the hallway of the empty apartment, switching on lights and checking behind doors for intruders. Then she sat down on a beanbag in the living room to think.

  The A.E. was not attractive, kind, intelligent, poetic, or interesting, she thought. In fact, he was mostly annoying. Despite that, she had slept with him twice, told him the Secret, and spent several nights in his home. All the time, she had been conscious of a mild voice asking, Excuse me, but where is your mind? She had treated the voice in the same way you might treat a person asking, What’s that burning smell? You might look vaguely toward the kitchen and then turn back to the TV.

  Now she would suffer the consequences. She would wake each morning, conscious of the fact that she had failed to pay attention while her house burned to the ground.

  PART 15

  Friday Night

  From the campervan, Listen watched her father emerge from the back door of the Banana Bar. He turned, locked the door, lifted his head to the night sky, and sighed. She could see the sigh because it took his shoulders with it and then slumped them down. He leaned against the door now and lit a cigarette.

  He gave up smoking years ago.

  Now he would get cancer and die, and this would be her fault. Everything was her fault, she realized with amazement. She was pretty sure she had caused the flooding of the Grade Seven classrooms at Clareville: something to do with those fuses she had knocked in that storage room.

  She had broken up her dad and Marbie with a spell, and the Spell Book was taking much too long to fix its mistake.

  When you thought about it, she had caused Donna and the others to break their eternal pact. They had to break it, because she jeopardized their survival. Now they probably felt guilty, and that was her fault.

  Right this moment, she and her dad should have been at the Zings’ for the Friday Meeting.

  Her dad flicked his cigarette between his fingers, and Listen realized something: She’d been wrong when she decided that the Secret was about family life.

  In fact, the Secret was a murder.

  The Zing family had murdered somebody, and now they had to cover it up. They had to shovel graves and bribe police and blackmail witnesses. They spent Friday nights organizing robberie
s to cover the costs of the cover-up. The garden shed was a bare concrete floor with a wooden table in the center. The family sat around the table and smoked, squinting at maps and at plans of bank vaults. They were jumpy, looking up uneasily when a bird landed on the shed roof.

  Eventually, they would have recruited her to a life of crime. That would have been appropriate too. There was something wicked and wrong about her. She was connected to the Zings by her shame.

  If you put a baby sea horse in an aquarium, she thought, it will swallow an air bubble and die. If a whale ever falls asleep, she thought, it will forget to breathe, and it will die.

  She watched her dad stamp out his cigarette and brush his hands together.

  PART 16

  The Following Week

  One

  The following week, Cath found out how it felt, the end of her affair.

  It felt suspenseful, frightening, surprising, confusing, obvious, outrageous, and eventually like despair. These emotions arrived individually or in clusters, and sometimes one would brush the surface for a moment before eliding into another. On the first day, Monday, the primary emotions were suspense and fear.

  Three significant events took place that day:

  Seeing Breanna for the first time;

  being introduced to Breanna; and

  having coffee with Breanna.

  At Monday Assembly, she sat in her usual place, mistaking the suspense and fear for an exciting arriving-at-the-theater sort of feeling. Warren ran in late, as usual, and sat beside her, with a friendly yet restrained, “Hey, hey.” His face was grim and gray, and her excitement increased. She ignored Billson’s introductory remarks, but then tuned back in when she realized he was no longer talking but was breathing, unpleasantly, into the microphone.

  “I’m waiting.” He held up his thumb and then his pointer. He was going to count ten fingers, while the children whispered and giggled. “All right,” he said, growing bored with the game. “Let’s show our newcomer how well-behaved we are at Redwood! A round of applause to welcome our new school counselor, Breanna Woodford!”