The Spell Book Of Listen Taylor

by Jaclyn Moriarty

  It is well known that Nikolai Valerio’s second movie, Pie in the Sky, was secretly filmed in the western suburbs of Sydney. Despite careful secrecy, news of the shoot leaked to the press as filming neared completion, and mobs of hysterical fans began to form. They had to whisk the cast away to Lord Howe Island to wrap up.

  The movie is a classic—gentle, yet ambitious; dangerous, yet ineffably sweet. As with all of Nikolai’s movies, it swept the pool at Cannes and at the Oscars that year, and many Valerio critics rate it as his best. He had been polished by his first movie, yet he still exuded the naïveté of the oil-smeared motor mechanic. Later, he lost some of that innocence.

  Of course, Maude knew who Nikolai Valerio was and, like most women, had seen his first movie several times. Like most women, also, she had engaged in secret fantasies in which she imagined Nikolai greeting her at the auto shop. But when she auditioned for the pie-chef position, she had no idea it was for a Valerio film—that was still a secret. She thought she was going to help with a series of TV ads for Mama’s Frozen Desserts.

  Eighty pie chefs auditioned for the job, and twelve were selected. Maude was asked to pass a national security check and told to sign five separate confidentiality agreements. She began to suspect that this might be more than a series of ads for Mama’s Frozen Desserts.

  Maude, tonight, was wearing a silver headband in her hair. Her daughters were asleep, and she was sitting in the living room, watching through the window. Her husband, David, had been away (in Ireland, writing a novel) for almost a year, and she, Maude, was having an affair. Specifically, she was having an affair with Nikolai Valerio.

  Technically, Nikolai Valerio was also having an affair with her: He had recently married Rebekka. But, really, Maude thought, when you are as famous as all that, the same rules do not apply.

  The affair consisted of odd fragments: messages in code; a fireplace in a sandstone pub; wet shaking hair; a frangipani flower that she pressed between the pages of a magazine; kisses in a claw-foot tub; silk sheets; Egyptian cotton bathrobes.

  In her living room now, Maude was recalling her first days on the film set. All twelve pie chefs had been jittery with excitement until it emerged that their days would be spent in one dark trailer, seated together around a long table, ingredients and cooking utensils set out at each place, sweltering in the heat of baking ovens.

  At break times, they stood around on the dry, dusty grass, trying to get a glimpse of Nikolai. Only it turned out that movie stars were rarely there when movies were made. Most of the day, the dull film crew walked around, measured things, talked to each other, set up equipment, looked at papers, frowned at the sky, shouted commands—as if building an imaginary skyscraper.

  Nikolai and the other stars were whisked onto the field in dark-windowed cars only when the sets were ready for them. Even then, you could only see fragments—the top of a head, an arm reaching out—through the clusters of cameras and assistants.

  It was not until the third week of shooting that Maude saw Nikolai’s face. She had been asked to help place some pies in the shot—Pie in the Sky called for a general backdrop of pies. As any film student will tell you, apple pies, pumpkin pies, cherry pies, and pecan pies, each with golden crust, were artfully scattered in the distant background of every camera shot in the film.

  Maude was carrying a steaming cherry pie in each hand when the limousine paused beside her. A window was rolled down. Nikolai Valerio was smiling at her.

  A woman seated beside Nikolai leaned around him. “He wants a piece of your pie,” she called. “Can you give him a piece?”

  Everyone in the car laughed, while Nikolai continued to smile at Maude.

  “I’m sorry,” he said in his movie-star accent. “I’m sorry, I keep seeing these pies everywhere I look. You make all these pies?”

  Maude explained that she was only one of twelve pie chefs. He tilted his head, interested, and asked, “Do you think I may have a piece of one? It doesn’t have walnuts, does it? I am allergic, and my lips will swell to the size of a balloon!”

  She shook her head about the walnuts, but then she didn’t know what to do: She had no knife for cutting, and no saucer or spoon on which to place a slice of pie.

  “Here,” he said, reaching his hand out of the car window. “I’ll just tear off a corner if you—ow, this is a very hot—and I’ll just—oh, this is cherry pie, I cannot explain how happy that—my godfather, this is a beautiful pie!—and now, I will just straighten the edge, and so! It is still fine now…like nobody has touched it.”

  The people in the car quietly watched all this, and then they laughed and said, “All right, Nikolai?”

  “All right,” said Nikolai, smiling at Maude again. “And the best cherry pie I ever ate. Did you make this cherry pie, or was it one of the other eleven?”

  “Me,” said Maude.

  “And you are?”

  “Maude,” she said. “Maude Zing.”

  Then the car moved away from her again.

  She did not see any more than fragments of him for the next few days, until one night, when most of the cast and crew had left. Nikolai and the leading lady remained for the midnight boating scene. Maude also remained—she had left her girls with a neighbor for the night—along with one other pie chef, and the two were extremely busy. The river had to be lined with pies. Furthermore, each pie had to look freshly baked, a twirl of steam rising from the neatly scored lines in its lid.

  It was exquisitely intimate, this filming with only the two main actors and a skeleton crew: For the first time, Maude was able to watch and hear the slow unfurling of a scene. Furthermore, she was part of that unfurling. She heard an assistant comment, “That coffee smells great,” and he meant the coffee she herself had just brewed!

  Then the two actors and the collection of crew wandered over to where Maude was laying out the pies.

  “Hello, Maude Zing,” said Nikolai, remembering her name, and holding the name, for one breathless moment, in his accent.

  The leading lady was less friendly, and seemed to be complaining to the director. “Come over here,” said the director in a low voice.

  Nikolai and a makeup lady tried to persuade Maude to let them eat one of her pies, and she jauntily refused. She found she was no longer nervous of Nikolai. He was an ordinary person with an accent. She was chatting with him! She was making him laugh!

  Then there was an angry shout from the leading lady, and she strode into the distance.

  “Oh, come off it!” called the director. “This is nothing. We’re fighting about nothing. Come on, you’ve got to be kidding me!”

  But the leading lady refused to return, and disappeared in a long black car.

  The director was distressed. The moonlight sprinkles were perfect on the river, and the scene was almost done.

  Maude was trying to gather up her pies, to keep them hot in the oven, when she realized the director was staring at her. “Turn your head slightly,” he instructed. “Now back, now left, now right.”

  It turned out that Maude’s hair, the back of Maude’s neck, the smooth curve of her cheek, all precisely matched that of the leading lady. She would be the double, they informed her.

  Which is how it came to be that Maude spent most of the night in a long slender boat being punted up and down the river by Nikolai Valerio. Nikolai chatted as he punted, applying his disarming accent to every word he said. He asked questions about Maude’s daughters and about her life, and he told short, witty anecdotes about Hollywood actors who were close personal friends.

  The night grew colder, so the director let them drink glasses of port to keep warm; the port made them clumsy, so that when Nikolai tried to cross the boat toward Maude, to fix a strand of her hair, he capsized the punt. This resulted in shaking wet hair, huddling together under blankets, shivery giggles, and patient amusement from director and camera crew, all packing up to go home.

  Nikolai suggested that Maude accompany him in the limousine to his hotel room,
to bathe and to sit in a robe by his fireplace, and dry her hair with his towel. Which was how the affair got its start.

  In her armchair now, some months later, Maude felt that she was floating just above the chair. Nikolai would visit any moment. It would be the first time he had come to her home. For months, they had spent elaborately secret nights in his hotel suite. She had used her wages to pay babysitters for Fancy and Marbie, had stopped working on her pie-making business altogether, and had spent luxurious evenings bathing in his claw-foot tub while he watched, turning the hot-water tap with her toe. Nikolai had listened to her stories, and had sworn he would fly her away in a gold-trimmed balloon one day. He wanted to know everything about her, he said, as his hands traced the curves of her body. He seemed, genuinely, to love her body. Even though it was quite plump.

  Tonight, he had promised to come in a plumber’s van, labeled “EMERGENCY—24-HR PLUMBING SERVICES,” SO the neighbors would not be suspicious. He was going to drive himself. He was going to wear a mustache and a blond wig. She was going to make him pancakes while her daughters slept.

  They were in love, she and Nikolai, but had always known that their affair could not go on. Often, they spoke in wonder of the strangeness of the affair: It was both essential and impossible. It must cease to exist for it floated between two realities: his star-spangled career, his beautiful wife, his collection of vintage cars; her daughters, her remote and troubled husband, her unpaid electricity bills, repossession warnings, and the foreclosure notice from her bank.

  Yet, although they had often blinked tears from their eyes, knowing the affair had to end, Maude had never believed that it would. The realm of the affair was too exquisite. In fact, for the past five months she’d kept a secret from him—easy enough with her plump body. She’d been waiting to share it, knowing that this secret, revealed at the right moment, would bind them forever. It would transform their gossamer love into something real.

  The night before, she had told him the secret and his face had crumpled with joy. “No more visits to my hotel, darling,” he had whispered. “This changes everything. Tomorrow, I come to your house.”

  Any moment now he would arrive. He would probably help her make the pancakes: He would watch in his reverent way as she cracked eggs and measured out flour. That was the nature of their realm: a collection of precious moments. She loved him so much she felt that they, together, would become the pancake batter. Intertwined, they would spill into the pan, and together they would breathe with slow new bubbles.

  The moon tonight, Maude thought idly, was as round as a tablet. It would do very well for cutting pastry. As a matter of fact, so would Fancy’s hula hoop, which she could see through the window, luminescent on the lawn. Or her own watch face, here on her wrist, showing Nikolai to be an hour late.

  PART 20

  Friday Morning

  One

  Early Friday morning, the sun just touching the sky, Listen read the final spell by flashlight.

  Here it is!

  The Final Spell!

  Once you have completed this Spell, all will be well!

  It’s A Spell to Make Two People Fall in Love Again.

  Gather up the following things:

  An overnight bag

  Four candles

  A bottle of wine

  Bread, cheese, olives, and chocolate brownies

  That’s it! Just by gathering these things together you will make the Spell take effect. (And by the way, you will know when the time is right to use these things!)

  Good-bye then. It’s been a lot of fun.

  (In the next few hours, you should be sure to hide this Book someplace you are never likely to see it again.)

  Listen crept out of bed and gathered everything on the list, packing it together in her overnight bag while her dad slept. By lucky chance, she found bread, cheese, and olives in the Banana Bar fridge, chocolate brownies in the campervan cupboard, and a bottle of wine in a crate underneath the table. Someone had given her candy-pink candles as a Kris Kringle present last year. She added the Spell Book to the overnight bag, so she could hide it somewhere later that morning, and she got back into bed. A Spell to Make Two People Fall in Love Again. It was perfect. She fell asleep through tears of happiness.

  When she woke again, her dad was already up and gone. She was so excited she could hardly dress or clean her teeth. Maybe he was already with Marbie! Maybe he had driven straight to her place when he woke up!

  Walking from the campervan to the back door of the Banana Bar, she tried to stay calm but felt the sun on the back of her neck, saw the pale blue curve of the sky, and thought: It’s the beginning of everything!

  As she walked into the shop, the phone was ringing, and she reached for it, but her dad, who was behind the counter, called, “Just leave it.”

  The answering machine switched on, and there, as Listen knew it would be, was Marbie’s voice. She reached for the phone again, but her father said, sharply, “Listen.”

  So they both stood quietly while Marbie chatted: “Nathaniel! Sorry, it’s me. Sorry to bother you. Sorry, I’m sniffing, I’ve got a cold, and that’s why I’m calling you, not really, that’s not really why. But I decided I shouldn’t go to work today, and then Mum called and said she and Dad are going away for the weekend, to this Festival of Balloons somewhere in the Hunter Valley, and I thought, seeing as I’m not going to work, I might as well go away for the weekend with them, and I thought, well! Maybe Nathaniel and Listen want to come along! I thought it could be fun for you guys to see the balloons, and you know, and anyway, give me a call if you’re interested. We’re leaving in the next hour or so, so it’s spontaneous. Okay? Great. Hear from you soon, I hope.”

  The machine clicked and whirred backward. Listen looked over at her father with shining eyes. Here, now, it was going to happen.

  “All packed?”

  She raised her overnight bag and swung it around slightly.

  “You need to leave now, or do you have time for breakfast?” he asked next.

  “I guess I need to go now,” she said. “But I’ve got a minute if you want to call Marbie back.”

  “That’s okay,” he said, and switched the sign on the Banana Bar door to BACK IN TEN MINUTES. “Hang on,” he said. “Left my keys in the campervan.”

  Listen stood on the path in front of the Banana Bar, the hot wind brushing at her face. She leaned against the glass door to wait.

  When her dad pushed the door open again, jangling his keys in her face, she said, “So, are you going to call Marbie?”

  “Nope.”

  She watched his back as he opened the car door.

  “What do you mean Nope?”

  “Listen, I’m sorry, I’m not going to call her.” He was standing with the door open, waiting for her to come across to the car.

  “You should go to the balloon festival,” she said, beginning to panic. “You have to go to the balloon festival. Don’t you get it? Dad, it’s perfect. I’m going away for the weekend; What are you going to do if you don’t go to the balloon festival?”

  “Run the Banana Bar, for one thing,” he said. “Listen, I’m sorry, baby, I thought you understood. I’m not getting back with Marbie. Not ever. It’s over. Finito.” Then he slammed his car door closed.

  They drove toward Redwood Elementary, where coach buses would collect the girls to take them to the mountains for their camp. Listen watched her father’s profile, but it was set and calm. There was nothing she could do to change it.

  She looked into her overnight bag, at her pajamas, shorts, T-shirts, swimsuit, and beneath them, the glint of a bottle of wine, the lid of the jar of olives, the candy pink of the candlesticks.

  She was not going to the school camp.

  She knew where she was going instead.

  It was just like the Spell Book had said. You will know when the time is right to use these things.

  The time was now. She was supposed to hear Marbie’s message, not because it meant Dad
and Marbie would fall in love again, but because it told her that the Zings were going away. She would hide in their place for the weekend. She would hide in their garden shed. She would live on olives, bread, cheese, and chocolate brownies for the next few days.

  But what were the candles and wine for? They suggested some kind of ritual. Did she have to perform a ritual? She pictured the Zings’ back garden: the large wooden shed, the sagging trampoline, the scribbly gum with its old rope swing. She thought of the old rope swing, how it swayed sometimes, white against the nighttime, when she watched through the Zings’ kitchen window. She thought of rituals with candles.

  She thought: A Spell to Make Two Happy People Have a Fight.

  It was her fault that Marbie and her dad had split up.

  She thought of the school counselor saying, “It’s not your fault that your mother left.”

  But it must have been her fault. Why else would the counselor have raised it? Who knew what she did as a baby to scare her mother away, maybe cried too much or didn’t sleep enough. That was what she did: She caused mothers to leave. Her father would always be lonely as long as she was around.

  She thought: Two’s company, three’s a crowd.

  She thought: You will know when the time is right.

  She thought: This book will make you strong.

  And the whole thing fell into place.

  Fancy found it too hot in the kitchen, and took her breakfast outside for the breeze.

  She sat on the edge of the porch, which burned her thighs, and carefully set her breakfast bowl, orange juice, and coffee around her. Radcliffe had offered to drive Cassie to school on his way to work, which was unusual. But she expected him back any moment. He had forgotten his lunch: She had just seen it in the fridge.

  She was thinking vaguely of her prize-winning novel. The book she had finished reading the previous night had employed a lyrical tone. The one she had finished last week was written with startling coarseness. You had to choose your tone, she realized. That was one of the rules. You chose slapstick, pastoral, melancholy, magical, lyrical, poetic, or flatulent. But, she wondered, wouldn’t you increase your chances of a prize if you combined some of these?