Ariel, Zed and the Secret of Life

by Anna Fienberg

  Also by Anna Fienberg

  Pirate Trouble for Wiggy and Boa

  Dead Sailors Don’t Bite

  The Magnificent Nose and Other Marvels

  The Hottest Boy Who Ever Lived

  Power to Burn

  Madeline the Mermaid and Other Fishy Tales

  The Tashi series

  The Minton series

  Borrowed Light

  For Barbara and Len

  Copyright © Text, Anna Fienberg, 1992

  Copyright © Illustrations, Kim Gamble, 1992

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher.

  First published in 1992

  This edition published 2000

  by Allen & Unwin

  9 Atchison Street

  St Leonards NSW 1590

  Australia

  Phone: (61 2) 8425 0100

  Fax: (61 2) 9906 2218

  E-mail: frondesk@allen-unwin.com.au

  Web: http://www.allen-unwin.com.au

  National Library of Australia

  Cataloguing-in-Publication entry:

  Fienberg, Anna.

  Ariel, Zed and the secret of life.

  ISBN 1 86508 263 5.

  eISBN 97817 434 336 5

  I. Title.

  A823.3

  Cover photographs and design by David Altheim

  Text illustrations by Kim Gamble

  Text design by Mark Carter

  CONTENTS

  1. The monster from out of town

  2. Live-in friends

  3. The arrival of Zed

  4. The voyage

  5. Island secrets

  6. On being a whuffler

  7. Exploring

  8. The Elixir of Life

  9. The rewrite

  10. Goodshot at your service

  11. A nasty surprise for Clara Krantzbur

  12. Formula for living, by Goodshot

  13. Lies and weak spots

  14. Surprising encounters

  15. Let’s do lunch

  16. Revelations

  17. Dreams and shadows

  18. Jigsaw pieces

  19. The new Zed

  20. Memories

  21. The fourth dimension

  22. Happily ever after?

  1. THE MONSTER FROM OUT OF TOWN

  ‘PSST!’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Look at Ariel!’

  ‘For heaven’s sake, Lynn, shut up. This is the scariest movie I’ve ever seen!’

  ‘But just take a peek at her.’

  A searching silence. Then, ‘Her shoulders are shaking. She’s laughing!’

  ‘I heard her snort. She sounded like a horse with a cold.’

  ‘How can she?’

  When the girls looked back at the screen, the scene had changed. It was dusk, and shadows bled over the ground. A moaning wind had sprung up, and somewhere, amongst the trees, an owl hooted.

  ‘Ooh, look,’ hissed Lynn, her nails digging into her friend Mandy’s arm. ‘Is that him there, crouching behind that bush? Tell me what happens. I’m not looking any more.’

  ‘The nurse is saying goodnight,’ Mandy whispered, ‘she’s leaving. She’ll have to go right past him.’

  The Monster From Out of Town was, indeed, breathing heavily behind a camellia bush. His clawed hands crushed flowers to a perfumed pulp, which made you think of what he would do to necks.

  Ariel Windwood, on the other hand, was concentrating on the monster’s face. She was watching his long front tooth, which shot out occasionally over his flabby lips. He reminded her of someone, but she just couldn’t think who.

  Ariel grinned. The monster’s mask was badly made and his costume looked much too tight—she could see little gaps along his sides where the material had burst. She laughed again. If he attacks that nurse, the sides will split for sure, she thought, and she leaned forward happily to watch.

  Ariel had once met a monster (who was much more terrifying than this one) when her mother had taken her on location with a film crew to Rome. Her mother had been writing an article called ‘The Secret Life of a Werewolf’, and Ariel had discovered all sorts of interesting things, like how the actor had felt under his suit (his skin had prickled and he perspired like a salami), and how all his food must be liquid, drunk through a long straw. Ariel had concluded that it was not all champagne and glamour in the film world.

  Now, on the screen, the heroine was moving nervously through the garden, as yet unaware of the overweight, hard-breathing monster waiting in the shadows. Nearer she came, and nearer still, until her skirt just brushed the outer leaves of the camellia bush.

  ‘Aarrhgrrr!’ roared the monster, and he pounced on his victim. Just then a volley of shots was heard (from the brilliant detective behind the tree) and the monster staggered, falling to his knees with an agonised groan. He had played his final scene and, to Ariel’s disappointment, the costume hadn’t burst.

  Now the credits came up over the monster’s dead body and the girl’s watery smile, and people all around the cinema began to stretch and stir. As if waking from a dream, they blinked and hunted around for the ordinary objects of everyday life. Keys jingled reassuringly in pockets, coats and handbags were slung over shoulders. Reluctantly, Ariel pulled on her jumper. She watched the cinema grow lighter, like an artificial sunrise, and she dreaded the day outside.

  ‘Come on, Ariel, let’s get a move on,’ said Lynn, giving her a nudge. ‘My mum will be waiting.’

  The three girls squeezed their way through the crowd, their noses pressed up against people’s backs and arms. The smells of perfume, mothballs and minties mingled in their nostrils, and Ariel tried to breathe shallowly. She hated breathing in people she didn’t know.

  A large, smiling woman hurried toward them. ‘Hullo, girls, the car’s just outside. What a foul wind. Hop in quick!’

  Climbing into the car, Ariel discovered two boys in dirty football jerseys. Ugh! Lynn’s brothers. Scowling at her, they moved up a tenth of a centimetre. Ariel sat bunched awkwardly against the door, wishing there were some magic potion for shrinking time until she got to her own front door. She never knew what to say to these boys. So usually she said too much.

  ‘Airy-fairy, full of Wind,’ sang Brother No.1, not for the first time, and gave her a playful punch on the arm.

  ‘How was the film then?’ asked Lynn’s mother quickly.

  ‘Great. Scary!’ replied Mandy, who was sitting next to Lynn in the front.

  Lynn shivered noisily. ‘The monster was so ugly. He had this front tooth, all pointed and yellow, that he sucked all the time. He could make it shoot out of his mouth, and the tip was full of poison.’

  ‘How revolting,’ said Lynn’s mother. ‘And did you enjoy the film, Ariel?’

  ‘She laughed all the way through it,’ said Lynn in an irritated voice. Shifting around, she looked over her shoulder at Ariel. ‘What was so funny?’

  Ariel sighed. She often had to explain herself. ‘The monster looked just like a man I once knew. He was an actor, too, and he had this trick set of false teeth. Sometimes, they’d just shoot out of his mouth without warning; he’d lean forward to kiss a girl and pow! out they’d come like a secret weapon.’

  There was silence. Ariel fell into it slowly, the blank faces closing over her head like muddy water.

  ‘Well, I can’t see how any normal person, actor or not, could look like that monster. It was the most horrible thing I’ve ever seen. I reckon you’re weird, Windwood,’ Lynn concluded, and p
ursed her lips.

  Ariel pressed closer to the door, and half-hoped it wasn’t locked. I don’t even like Lynn much, she thought, so why should I care if she thinks I’m weird? Still, she found herself trying again.

  ‘My father told me a story once,’ she began, ‘about a missionary who went into the jungle to preach to some cannibals. There were about one hundred of them to meet him, all armed with spears. Well, the missionary couldn’t have made a very good impression because they decided to boil him up for supper. At the last minute, just before he was thrown into the pot, he had an idea. He stared the Chief in the eye and opened his mouth. Out popped his false teeth. He flicked them in and out on his tongue three times.

  ‘Well, the Chief had never seen anything like it. He thought the missionary was a Great Spirit, so he decided not to eat him, but to invite him to dinner instead. I don’t know what was on the menu, but I suppose it was something delicious like roast pig and jungle juice.’

  ‘Fancy that,’ said Lynn’s mother.

  Silence. The boys kicked each other and cracked their knuckles, and that got them to Mandy’s place.

  Lynn and Mandy exchanged long goodbyes, assuring each other that they would talk on the phone the next day. Ariel counted the number of dog droppings she saw on the pavement. It must be a very doggy suburb, she concluded, and wondered if Mandy had a dog. Ariel liked dogs.

  The car chugged off again. Just ten minutes now around the park, down Catherine Street, and she’d be home.

  ‘Have you heard from your father lately, Ariel?’ Mrs Peters asked over her shoulder. ‘When is he coming home?’

  Ariel hesitated. Her father, Frank, was an engineer who built dams, and he was always being called away to give advice in foreign parts. Ariel was used to saying goodbye to him, but lately he had been grumpy about going away. He said he was too old to have permanent jet lag, and he missed home with his two favourite women.

  ‘Soon,’ said Ariel firmly.

  ‘Geez, that girl in the film was beautiful,’ sighed Lynn as they waited at the traffic lights. ‘Monica Minkelfoot—I’d love to have my hair curled like that. Amazing how it stayed all neat and springy even when she was being mauled by the monster.’

  ‘Oh her!’ Ariel wrinkled her nose. ‘She was a real wimp. All she did was scream and cry. Soggy as a wet cornflake. I’d have given the monster a good punch in the jaw. He was a flabby old thing, really, with more fat than muscle. If she’d had any brains she could have whacked him with her handbag and sprinted off—he’d be left well behind.’

  The car turned into Catherine Street, and Ariel waved to Mrs Beesbom who was hanging out her washing. Mrs Beesbom had never looked so attractive.

  ‘That’s not the point,’ said Lynn, after a pause.

  ‘What is then?’ said Ariel. But she was not really concentrating as the car had stopped and she was scrambling over the boys’ knees to get out.

  ‘If Monica Minkelfoot had punched the monster, the movie wouldn’t have been scary. That’s the point,’ said Lynn, her eyebrows meeting in annoyance.

  ‘But if Monica had a good right hook, the movie would have been much more interesting.’

  ‘For you, maybe,’ said Lynn, and her lips grew thin.

  ‘For me, yes,’ said Ariel, willing to make any concession now that she was out of the car and could say goodbye.

  Lynn grunted and turned to her mother. ‘She always has to argue,’ she whispered. ‘Who wants her opinion anyway? Motormouth.’

  ‘Thankyou for the lift, Mrs Peters,’ said Ariel loudly, as she slammed the door. ‘I’ll see you at school on Monday, Lynn,’ she added.

  ‘I suppose so,’ Lynn shrugged.

  ‘See you, Airy-fairy!’ cried Brother No.1.

  ‘Bye Windy Weirdo!’ yelled Brother No.2.

  Ariel heard Lynn giggling with her brothers before the car zoomed off down the road. She made a face, and tried to imagine what they’d all be saying about her, now that she was gone.

  But it was hard to tell what people were thinking, she’d discovered since she’d come to Birchwood Bay, and that made it hard to know how to act. Just being herself didn’t seem to be enough. So, since arriving at the Bay, she’d had to develop a set of First Principles to live by. She carried them round in her head like the ten times table, and as she opened the gate to her house, she ticked them off in her mind:

  No.1 Be suspicious of people whose mouths smile but not their eyes. (Avoid them.)

  No.2 Be careful of a person whose stomach rumbles. It means they’re angry. (or HUNGRY!)

  No.3 Popular girls have small ears and incredibly tiny teeth. They laugh a lot but don’t hear too well.

  No.4 Don’t talk about what Mum does for a living.

  No.5 Dogs understand more than people think.

  Ariel was still working on the rest, but she wasn’t too worried as she had a lot of spare time in which to think.

  She trudged up through the garden, looking at the wild creepers and the hopeful faces of the daisies growing in the green. She felt comfortable here—there were no puzzled looks or sneering whispers. Just the woody damp smells and the silence: that vast, indifferent presence that held everything in its arms, saying not a word.

  But out there, beyond the gate, it was different. Words weren’t absorbed silently, like sunlight. Instead, objections were raised, and explanations demanded. As Lynn had said, Ariel never seemed to get the point. Well, what did go on inside other people’s heads Ariel couldn’t imagine, but she was sure that it was a very different world from her own. It was like being colour-blind inside a paintbox. She always chose the wrong colour.

  ‘I still think Monica Minkelfoot wouldn’t last a day in the real world,’ Ariel said to herself as she pulled at a monstrous weed. But how well, she wondered, was she doing herself?

  2. LIVE-IN FRIENDS

  ARIEL SPENT MOST of her Saturdays in the garden. It was wild and overgrown, and there was always something to watch. Ariel kept a notebook where she described the dimensions of a gecko she’d found in a rock crack, or the number of bats that flew overhead at dusk. It was just as well that Ariel liked the garden, as there was not much else to do in Birchwood Bay. That was, of course, if you didn’t have many friends.

  Ariel had lived in the Bay for just two years. She was fond of the house, with its high ceilings and wooden balcony, but it suffered all the diseases of old age. Damp patches swelled across the walls, and the plumbing bellowed when the taps were turned. It was a large house, and some of the rooms had been left empty for years. Paint hung from the walls in long strips like dead skin. At night, Ariel hated picking her way through the rooms in her cold bare feet, the air full of whispers and ghosts.

  ‘Good for your imagination,’ said Ariel’s mother briskly, whenever her daughter complained. ‘Think of the stories you can invent on your way to the bathroom.’

  Ariel’s mother, Concetta, was a firm believer in the imagination. The ‘mind muscle’, she called it, and said it needed exercise every day. Of course, Concetta’s imagination needed to be in good shape, as she was currently writing a best-seller that would make her rich and famous throughout the land. That, at least, was what she hoped (particularly when the rent was due, or the fridge died).

  Ever since Ariel could remember, Concetta had been writing something. At one time she wrote for Tantalising Tours, travelling the world to cover festivals in Peru and food fairs in Bologna. Ariel bumped around in the sack on her back when she was a baby. Later, whenever Frank was busy, Ariel still travelled with her mother, trotting along attached to a lead when she was little; poking about in bazaars and markets when she was older.

  Finally, on that memorable day in Mexico, when they were lost together in the back streets of Chihuahua, Ariel had taken over.

  ‘I am ten years old,’ she had announced, ‘and I am an excellent map reader. I have a sixth sense when it comes to finding good, cheap hotels.’

  Surprised, Concetta let Ariel lead her into a narrow, dark alley
which boasted a cheap hotel and a gang of hooligans who offered to relieve them of all their money. It was that day that Concetta decided they’d both had enough of unpleasant surprises and being away from home, and they flew back to the house Frank had found for them at Birchwood Bay.

  On the afternoon that Ariel went to the movies with Lynn, Concetta was thinking about the tenth chapter of her book. She worked in her usual place, in the old wooden shed at the bottom of the garden. Concetta liked that shed because it had a pointed roof like a witch’s hat.

  Walking up to the house now, Ariel saw the dark blank windows, and sighed. She knew exactly where her mother would be. She switched on the light in the hall, and climbed up the worn stairs to her room.

  In the full-length mirror, Ariel surveyed herself. Shoulder-length, dead straight hair (black and shiny), green eyes (startled, like cats’ eyes caught in head-lights), large ears (she tried to hide them with her hair), and big teeth (the two front ones were the worst, in her opinion).

  Ariel hated her teeth. Once she had measured them, and they had come to 1.3 centimetres. It was shameful. She felt like a horse. She’d have given anything to be small and pale and delicate, with tiny ears and pearl-like teeth.

  Ariel pulled back her lips and glared at the offending biters. She remembered the times she had come home from school, happily unaware of the lunchtime apple peel or parsley sprig wedged firmly between her two front teeth like a lacy bookmark. Until she had looked in the mirror.

  With a sigh, Ariel turned away from the mirror now and decided that on the whole she’d rather look like herself than that wimp, Monica Minkelfoot. She pulled on her old woolly jumper and tights. Brrh! It was cold in this house. And quiet. It was time to think about something cheery, like dinner.

  Sir Lancelot thought so, too. There was a feverish pounding on the stairs, a loud bump (he always took the corner too fast) and Lancelot shot into the room.

  ‘Back at last!’ said his open jaws and lolling tongue.

  ‘You’re the true monster from out of town,’ said Ariel fondly, and nuzzled her face in his neck.