I Have a Bed Made of Buttermilk Pancakes

by Jaclyn Moriarty

  ‘Okay,’ mouthed Fancy, nodding at Cassie, who accepted the nod as permission to take a noisy skidding jump down the hall.

  ‘It’s not between my legs,’ declared Fancy.

  ‘Whoa!’ said her editor. ‘Check it out, Fancy. This one guy just put his elbow in the other guy’s mouth and somehow it came out the back of his head.’

  ‘Huh,’ said Fancy.

  ‘So, listen, Fancy, whatever happened to pussy? That was your word of choice, wasn’t it? I open up your manuscript ready for your sweet little brand of pussy, and what do I get? Special private place between her legs. Now, would you call that – I don’t know – pithy?’

  ‘No,’ admitted Fancy. ‘But it’s rhythmic, don’t you think?’

  ‘It’s what you might call a crock of shit. If you’re over pussy, choose something new and I’ll do a global search and replace. Go ahead and choose. You’ve got ten seconds on the clock. Ten, nine – fuck me, that was his toenail!’

  ‘I still think we should do that rotating cardboard wheel thing that my sister suggested,’ said Fancy. ‘You know, let the reader decide what she wants. Put all the potential words for private parts on a wheel and you could spin the wheel to your favourite one.’

  ‘Ah yes, that brilliant idea. Well, Fance, okay, I loved the book. The tennis player is a dude, and the scene with the tennis ball tin? Wow. Why not back to pussy? Or, any other ideas?’

  ‘Well,’ Fancy lowered her voice. ‘I was thinking about “cunt”.’

  ‘Who-ahhh,’ cried Tanya, and Fancy waited patiently, but then she said it again, ‘Who-ahhh, Fancy, that is not your readers. You can’t use that word. It’s offensive, Fancy, it’s one of those words that brings down the whole female race, or whatever.’

  ‘I was thinking,’ said Fancy, ‘that it might be time we reclaimed it. You know, made it our own. Can’t women of the world decide to get street smart and refer to each other as cunts?’

  ‘You’re going to have to let me think on this one, Fancy.’

  ‘Hang on,’ said Fancy, ‘that’s call-waiting. Can you hold on a moment?’

  ‘It’s okay, just get it, I’ll call you back. See ya.’

  Fancy pressed the disconnect button and found her sister Marbie on the phone.

  ‘Dressed in black?’ said Marbie.

  ‘Oh really, tonight? What for? It’s cold!’ As she said it, she looked up and there was her daughter, holding out her favourite black jumper.

  ‘Thank you, Cassie,’ she said. ‘Marbie, have you met my beautiful, generous and thoughtful daughter, Cassie?’

  ‘She’s met me, Mum,’ giggled Cassie, ‘she’s my auntie!’ and skidded away down the hall again.

  ‘For the maintenance,’ explained Marbie. ‘It’s blurred, remember? We can do it easy if we leave right now. Meet you at the ice-cream truck?’

  Marbie was not at the ice-cream truck when Fancy arrived. She was already in the tree above the truck.

  Fancy pretended to consider the range of ice creams (single cone, double cone, single dipped in chocolate with a Flake on the side etc), and then squinted briefly up into the darkness.

  Marbie gave the sign for ‘all set’ (both hands flat on the head). She almost lost her balance and had to grab noisily at clumps of leaves.

  Fancy gave the sign for ‘great, and I’ve remembered all the tools’ (a playful twirl of her handbag) then clipped across the road to the apartment block. Without pausing, she firmly pressed in the security code, and entered the building.

  She and Marbie had both learned to pick a lock when their fingers were fresh and nimble. She got into the apartment in less than three seconds, smiled at the cat, and slid silently from room to room in a quick Emptiness check. (There had once been a plumber in the bathroom, but Fancy, ingeniously, recruited him on the spot. He was now one of their best.)

  In the dining room, she opened her handbag, reached in for the nailfile, and accidentally took out her telephone bill. The cat miaowed.

  ‘Hmm,’ she murmured, and sat down at the dining table, turning over the telephone bill. There was a clutter of papers there, which she shifted slightly so she could study her List of Potential Lists.

  Except that the word ‘fish’ was now a tangle of skinny lines, linking ‘fish’ to various fish species. Objects in a family home, Fancy wrote at the end of the list. The cat miaowed again and Fancy said, ‘Hello,’ and added cats in a flash of inspiration. Beside it, she scribbled: (include lions, tigers, panthers, etc!!! also, basic domestic cats?).

  Miaow, miaow, said the cat.

  ‘Are you hungry, is that it?’ Fancy murmured soothingly, reaching out her left hand to stroke the cat, but not being able to find it.

  She looked up and the cat was standing way across the room in the doorway, its collar bell whispering faintly.

  ‘How –?’ began Fancy.

  Then she gasped, took out her beeper (which miaowed at her even as she pressed the message button), and read: GET OUT NOW.

  At which exact moment, a key turned in the lock.

  On Friday night at the Zings’, after dinner, Fancy sat on the carpet next to Listen and said, ‘Tell me some sounds that you don’t like to hear.’

  ‘The sounds of cars crashing,’ offered Vernon from the dining room table.

  ‘Not you,’ Fancy said, but she wrote it down in her notebook. ‘I’m asking Listen now. I’ll ask you later.’

  Listen thought hard.

  ‘You have to think outside the box,’ advised Radcliffe, dryly. ‘Otherwise, she cuts you to the quick.’

  ‘Oh!’ cried Grandma Zing. ‘Radcliffe! Was she mean to you?’

  ‘Utterly cruel.’

  ‘The sound of a puddle,’ Listen said now, ‘going splat when you just accidentally stepped in it with your sneaker.’

  ‘Good!’ Fancy wrote fast.

  ‘The sound that our school library computer makes,’ Listen said, calmly. ‘Kind of a mean-sounding BLEEP? When you return your book and it turns out it’s overdue. Does that count?’

  ‘Perfect!’ Fancy scribbled frantically.

  ‘Come on, Fancy!’ Grandma Zing called. ‘We’re all going out to the shed!’

  ‘Fancy,’ beckoned Radcliffe, at her mother’s shoulder, ‘come on, hon.’

  From the slightly raised platform at the far end of the shed, Grandma Zing frowned at her clipboard.

  ‘Have you got the beeper issue?’ Fancy called to her mother, who nodded with a little smile, so Fancy turned to her sister. ‘Marbie,’ she said, opening her notebook again. ‘Tell me some sounds that you don’t like to hear.’

  ‘I think your mother wants to start the meeting.’ Radcliffe sat straight in his chair. He had his reading glasses on and had already replaced two of the bulbs in the halogen track-lighting.

  ‘No, no,’ said Grandma Zing. ‘Carry on, I’ll just be a moment.’ She flipped through documents piled in a box.

  Marbie thought. ‘Some people,’ she said, after a moment, ‘make this kind of grunting sound. This sound kind of like uh, and they don’t even know that they’re doing it. They just do it while they’re reading or thinking.’

  Fancy wrote the word: UH.

  ‘I imagine the sound of a key in a lock might be a sound you don’t like to hear!’ called Grandma Zing, with a mischievous glint.

  There was a clamour at this as everyone cried, ‘Yes, Fancy, what did you do?’ and ‘How did you make it out the window?’ and ‘That was such a close one’, and Radcliffe said, bossily, ‘We should discuss this at the appropriate time in the meeting, shouldn’t we?’

  ‘Oh God,’ said Fancy, closing her notebook again. ‘How did I let it happen? I think I must have lost my touch!’

  There was another clamour as everyone assured her she had not lost her touch.

  ‘Look at the way you opened the window, closed it behind you, jumped into a tree, and climbed down without being noticed!’ cried Marbie. ‘I think you’re amazing. And anyway, Fancy, it was all my fault – I didn’t n
otice the car coming down the street until the last moment.’

  ‘Why didn’t you see it?’ said Radcliffe, pointedly.

  ‘I was distracted.’

  ‘Distracted by what?’

  ‘But still,’ interrupted Fancy, ‘it was so lucky that she switched on the TV right away like that, and just stayed in the front room – if she hadn’t . . . who knows?’

  ‘Gotta change that beeper sound,’ said Radcliffe.

  ‘And we all thought that it was the cat’s miaow,’ offered Vernon.

  Everyone groaned and Marbie hit his leg, but then she embraced him proudly, while Grandma Zing said, ‘Shall we start the meeting? We have an edict today!’

  ‘Worn out brake-pads,’ whispered Grandpa Zing, leaning over to Fancy, ‘make an awful squealing sound.’ He pointed at Fancy’s notepad, and she mouthed, ‘Thanks, Dad,’ and noted it down.

  ‘I will.’

  Cassie had seven hundred hands in the air; her shoulders were stretched like string. Her head could fall off any minute. Marcus Ellison, meanwhile, had his chin on his hand, and his other arm slumping from the desk into the air. His hand wobbled like a puppet.

  Ms Murphy had already nodded and smiled at Marcus when Cassie said ‘I will’ in an almost-shout, and put seven hundred hands into the air. Ms Murphy lifted her nose in surprise.

  ‘Cassie!’ she said and everybody murmured, ‘Cassie wants to do it’ and ‘Now what?’

  Ms Murphy moved her neck in a straight-up swivel for a moment, and then she said, ‘Thank you, Cassie, that’s very generous. But what about if you write the play for the next big assembly, and we’ll have Marcus write the end-of-year one. Seeing as he just volunteered, and he’s always writing such great plays for us. Don’t you think?’

  ‘No,’ said Cassie, and put her hands down.

  ‘He is so,’ was the outcry all around.

  ‘Ms Murphy?’ said Cassie. ‘That’s sex discrimination. Choosing Marcus instead of me. Sex discrimination.’

  ‘Sex discrimination,’ said Ms Murphy. ‘Interesting, Cassie. Maybe we should talk about discrimination for a while. Who can tell me what that word means?’

  Cassie lifted her desk-lid and slammed it down.

  ‘Cunt,’ she murmured, ‘cunt, cunt, cunt.’ Then she leaned forward and began to count on her fingers, whispering to herself.

  Ms Murphy kept her neck in a straight line and her eyes on the Solar System poster up the back.

  ‘Anybody?’ she wondered. ‘Discrimination?’

  ‘Ms Murphy,’ cried Elaine Yin. ‘Can’t you hear what Cassie is saying?’

  ‘Do you know what?’ Ms Murphy exclaimed. ‘I have a wonderful idea. I think we should have a play with two parts, and I think we should have Marcus write one part and Cassie write the other. All right, Marcus? All right, Cassie?’

  Cassie looked up from her feverish counting in surprise. ‘All right, I suppose.’

  Marcus Ellison opened his whole face in fury, but Ms Murphy pretended not to notice.

  ‘What are you going to write for your play, Cassie?’ Lucinda asked as they walked out of the classroom at lunch.

  ‘I haven’t decided yet,’ explained Cassie. But, in fact, she had decided. It was easy. Erotic fiction.

  ‘I’ll get you, Cassie Zing,’ whispered Marcus Ellison.

  ‘I’ll get you first,’ said Cassie, with a tilt of her head.

  Hanging up the phone after chatting with her sister, Fancy walked into the TV room, and said to Radcliffe: ‘We never go out.’

  ‘Where are they off to now?’ He was lethargic in his reclining chair with the retractable corduroy footrest.

  ‘Who?’ said Cassie. ‘Who’s going where?’

  ‘Marbie, Vernon and Listen. They’re going to the Blue Mountains to see the snow. Did you know it was snowing in Katoomba? They were calling from the train; they’re on their way right now. At this hour. On a Wednesday night! Remember when we used to go to the Blue Mountains, Radcliffe?’

  ‘As the actress said to the bishop,’ murmured Radcliffe.

  Fancy stared. ‘WHAT?’

  ‘Of course I remember!’ he collected himself, and Fancy explained to Cassie: ‘That’s where your dad proposed to me!’

  ‘It’s going to snow right here,’ said Cassie from the floor by the TV. ‘It’s a waste of a train ticket.’

  ‘Darling, you sit too close to the TV, you know.’

  ‘It’s not going to snow here, Cass.’

  ‘Yes, Dad. It’s going to snow. I heard it on the news.’

  ‘It don’t snow in Sydney, kiddo.’

  ‘Cassie, honey,’ Fancy fretted, ‘I read somewhere about an experiment where they put these bean trees in pots and made them watch TV, right up close like you are, and the bean trees grew up pale and slender, and with hardly any beans.’

  ‘I’m not a bean tree.’

  ‘Cassie’s not a bean tree,’ agreed Radcliffe.

  ‘Yes, but she still sits too close to the television.’

  ‘She’s going to ruin her eyes, I’ll grant you that. She’ll cost us a fortune in optometrist fees one of these days. Cassie, will you pay your own optometrist fees?’

  ‘Yep.’

  ‘Well, that’s settled then. Stop fretting, Fance, and sit down.’

  Cassie was growing up pale and slender, a very fast runner, but with hardly any beans.

  At the Zing dining table, on a Friday night, with one week left of school before the holidays, Fancy, who had just been chatting with Listen, declared that they all had to help choose a topic for Listen’s school assignment: ‘Choose two creatures of the sea,’ recited Fancy, while Listen nodded encouragingly. ‘They may be mythical creatures and they need not be fish.’

  ‘They need not be fish,’ murmured Grandma Zing, impressed.

  ‘Ocean bream and rainbow trout,’ suggested Grandpa Zing at once.

  ‘Mullet and mermaids,’ tried Grandma Zing.

  ‘Blowfish and stingrays,’ said Vernon.

  ‘Fish and chips,’ declared Cassie, giggling.

  ‘Blue-eyed cod and . . .’ Radcliffe clicked his fingers a couple of times.

  ‘Pickled herrings and lobster mornay,’ said Marbie. ‘Oysters and mussels.’

  ‘I was thinking that I would try to do something kind of opposite,’ said Listen. ‘Like one thing very very big, and one thing very very small.’

  ‘Whales then,’ said Vernon.

  ‘Definitely whales,’ said Listen.

  ‘Do a little bit of seaweed,’ said Cassie, ‘or a tiny teeny little sea-grape.’

  ‘Good idea, Cassie, but I was thinking of the seahorse.’

  ‘You already know what you’re doing,’ Grandpa Zing observed. ‘Whales and seahorses. See that everyone? Whales and seahorses. So why is she asking us?’

  ‘I didn’t know until this moment,’ argued Listen. ‘You all just helped me decide. Thank you very much.’ She looked around and everybody nodded, except Fancy, who was thinking.

  ‘Does it have to be creatures of the sea?’ said Fancy. ‘Can’t it be, I don’t know, dragons and cows?’

  ‘I don’t think so,’ Listen said, apologetically. ‘It’s for our Ocean unit. But the other day, at Tae Kwon Do, we learnt about this Grandmaster who was the first person to knock over a cow with a flying side kick. I could have put that in the project if I was doing dragons and cows.’

  ‘He knocked over a cow! Why would he do that?’

  ‘It wasn’t a cow,’ Listen remembered. ‘It was a bull.’

  ‘Vernon,’ whispered Marbie, ‘read out the letter. Everybody quiet now. Do you have it with you, Vernon? Good. Everybody listen. Vernon’s going to read.’

  Vernon held his fork in one hand while he took a piece of folded paper from his pocket. He cleared his throat as he unfolded it.

  ‘But a bull is a cow, I guess,’ said Listen to herself. ‘Or is it?’

  Fancy leaned towards the gravy. ‘Can you –?’ she said. ‘The gravy?’

&nbs
p; ‘Shh,’ said Marbie, and passed her the gravy. ‘Vernon’s trying to read.’

  Vernon smiled kindly at Fancy, to show that he forgave her and also to show that he knew he had not yet begun to read. Then he cleared his throat again and began to read.

  ‘Dear Parents,’ he read. ‘Dear Parents – this is a letter from Listen’s school I should add.’ He looked around the room and everyone nodded except Listen, who said coldly, ‘Vernon, why are you reading out a letter from my school?’

  ‘Shush,’ said Vernon, and looked down at the letter again. ‘Wait and see, Listen. Wait and see. Okay. We regret to inform you that an unexpected crisis has occurred here at St Carmel Catholic Girls.’

  ‘A crisis!’ cried Grandma Zing, excited.

  ‘Due to a faulty connection,’ Vernon continued, nodding, yes, a crisis, ‘due to a faulty connection, a water pipe has burst and many of the Year 7 classrooms have been flooded.’

  ‘A water pipe!’ burst Grandpa Zing. He had to shift his chair back as if to show his serviette around. ‘Does your school not ensure that water pipes don’t burst?’

  They all looked at Listen for the answer.

  ‘Well, I guess they don’t!’ cried Radcliffe. ‘Since one just burst!’ Everybody shouted, except Listen, who gave a polite little breath of laughter, and blinked.

  ‘Did you see it burst?’ said Fancy. ‘Did your feet get wet?’

  Listen explained that it had happened the previous Thursday, while she was away in the Blue Mountains, so her feet didn’t get wet. She also explained that they had been taking classes in the Science labs or outside ever since, even though it was freezing cold.

  ‘You should take along a little knee rug,’ suggested Grandma Zing.

  ‘Unfortunately,’ read Vernon solemnly, ‘technicians could not be located in time to stop excessive damage occurring to these classrooms. Year 7 lessons are currently being taken in the Science labs, and where possible, in the school grounds –’

  ‘We already know that,’ Grandpa Zing interrupted. ‘Listen just told us.’