The Spell Book Of Listen Taylor Read online

  The

  SPELL BOOK

  of

  LISTEN TAYLOR

  (And the Secrets of the Family Zing)

  Jaclyn Moriarty

  Table of Contents

  Cover Page

  Title Page

  Extracts from the Zing Garden Shed

  PART 1 Monday

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  PART 2 Tuesday to Friday

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  PART 3 Friday Night

  PART 4 The First Few Weeks of Term

  One

  Two

  Three

  PART 5 Cassie’s Birthday Party

  PART 6 The Story of the Watercolor Painter

  PART 7 The Last Few Weeks of the School Term

  One

  Two

  Three

  PART 8 Extracts from the Zing Garden Shed (Burnt Fragments)

  PART 9 Snowstorm

  PART 10 The Story of Professor Charles

  PART 11 The First Six Weeks of the New Term

  One

  Two

  Three

  PART 12 The Story of Madame Blanchard

  PART 13 The Story of the Trip to Ireland

  One

  Two

  PART 14 Thursday Night

  PART 15 Friday Night

  PART 16 The Following Week

  One

  Two

  Three

  PART 17 The Thursday aftter Next

  PART 18 The Story of the First Trip to the Seaside

  One

  Two

  PART 19 The Story of Nikolai Valerio

  PART 20 Friday Morning

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  PART 21 Friday Afternoon

  PART 22 Lunchtime on a Saturday Two Weeks Later

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  PART 23 The Story of the Spell Book

  PART 24 That Evening, in Cath Murphy’s Apartment

  PART 25 The Story of Monsieur Blanchard

  PART 26 The Redwood Sports Carnival

  One

  Two

  Three

  PART 27 The Story of the Confectioner

  One

  Two

  Three

  Acknowledgements

  Also by Jaclyn Moriarty

  Copyright

  Extracts from the Zing Garden Shed (Burnt Fragments)

  IMAGINE IF YOU DID NOT HAVE KNEES!

  WHEN YOU WALK DOWNHILL, YOUR BODY’S NATURAL TENDENCY IS TO FALL FORWARD. UNCONSCIOUSLY, YOU BEND YOUR KNEES, CONTRACTING THE QUADRICEPS MUSCLES AS YOU DO. THE KNEES PREVENT YOU FROM FALLING.

  NOW, IMAGINE IF YOUR QUADRICEPS MUSCLES ARE SO WEAK THAT THEY CANNOT STOP YOUR KNEES FROM BENDING ONCE THEY START! IF THE KNEES DID NOT STOP BENDING, YOU WOULD FALL FLAT ON YOUR FACE.

  FALLS CREEK INSTITUTE FOR ARTHROSCOPIC SURGERY

  PART 1

  Monday

  One

  After midnight, the apartment waited, still in the moonlight and the heat. A moth touched its wing to the front porch light, and the apartment cleared its throat sharply.

  Inside was a sleepy confusion of boxes, paint cans, sandpaper, buckets, and bananas. A wooden ladder, flat on its stomach, stretched the length of the hallway.

  A young woman, perhaps twenty-eight years old, emerged from a bedroom at the end of the hall. She stepped over the rungs of the ladder, one careful rung at a time, and paused at the entrance to the living room. There was a crocus-shaped scar on her forehead.

  The moonlight followed, intrigued, as the young woman drifted to the kitchen.

  Next, a man stepped into the hallway. He wore boxer shorts and sleepy eyes. He too paused at the living room, but this was to yawn and stretch. The muscles in his arms and his chest seemed perfectly placed for this stretch. He disappeared into the kitchen.

  When he emerged his arm was through the elbow of the woman, and he was speaking to her gently. “No, Marbie, there’s no green turtle in the kitchen.”

  The woman eyed him suspiciously.

  “Okay?” he said. “Ready to go back to bed?” But she was looking past his face to the wall on the far side of the room.

  “I cannot believe it,” she murmured. “Again! How many nights is this?”

  “What?” The man looked around uneasily. “Are you awake?”

  “Watch your eyes, Nathaniel. I’ll take care of this.” She marched across the room, muttering, “Little alien starships! Putting your elevator shafts on our—” She stopped as she reached the wall, and stared at its smooth surface.

  “It was just here—” She turned back to Nathaniel, who was waiting patiently.

  “Yes?” he prompted.

  “Huh.”

  “Are you awake now?”

  “I was sleepwalking.”

  “I know.”

  They both stood still in the moonlight.

  “It’s hot, isn’t it?” said the woman, after a moment. “I wonder if we should—”

  “It depends on whether Listen is awake,” agreed the man, peering into the hallway.

  “Yes.” The woman raised her voice slightly. “I wonder if she is awake?”

  “COULD SHE BE AWAKE?” boomed the man.

  “I HOPE WE HAVEN’T WOKEN HER!” shouted the woman.

  They both paused hopefully.

  A twelve-year-old girl appeared in the hallway, blinking into the darkness.

  “Oh no!” cried the woman. “We didn’t wake you, did we, Listen?”

  “Hot, isn’t it?” said the girl.

  “Exactly,” said the man.

  A few moments later, all three walked out of the apartment, down the driveway, and onto the street. They walked beneath the streetlights and the starry charcoal sky, their bare feet silent on the asphalt. The man slapped a mosquito on the woman’s shoulder. The girl kicked her toe, hopped for a few steps, and then recovered completely.

  Eventually, they passed a row of suburban houses, each with a small front lawn. One particular, inoffensive blond-brick house caused all three to crouch and scurry past.

  Alongside this house was a hedge, a wrought-iron gate, and a sign:

  BELLBIRD JUNIOR HIGH

  To strive itself is to succeed.

  Please Close the Gate.

  The woman looked up and down the street, then nodded to the others. All three climbed over the gate.

  On the dark front lawn of the school, they began to run. They ran through a courtyard and a parking lot. They ran across a basketball court and along the stone walls of the school buildings. Occasional security lights flickered.

  At the back of the school was a sloping lawn, which fell into patches of long grass and tangled bush. A narrow dirt path wound through this bush and ended at a gate that, once again, they climbed.

  They stood at the edge of a swimming pool. Across the pool was a bank of wooden benches; alongside the benches, several piles of yellow boards, each stamped in fluorescent white: TRAINING DEVICE. DO NOT REMOVE.

  On an easel beside them:

  BELLBIRD JUNIOR HIGH SWIMMING POOL RULES

  NO RUNNING

  NO JUMPING

  NO BOMBING

  NO SPLASHING

  NO SWIMMING WITHOUT TEACHER SUPERVISION (MEMBERS OF SENIOR SWIM TEAM EXCEPTED)

  Without a word, all three dived in.

  The woman in the pool was Marbie Zing. The man was her boyfriend, Nathaniel. The twelve-year-old girl, floating on her back
and gazing at the stars, was Nathaniel’s daughter, Listen. The three of them had just moved in together.

  Listen Taylor sat on the floorboards by her bed. Her nightie had dried in the breeze on the walk home, but her hair spilled occasional water drops down her neck.

  It was 3 A.M., but she was wide awake, and she was thinking about her name. “Listen Taylor,” she said, and then in its place she tried: “Listen Zing.” Only that was a question: Listen Zing? Because she was considering: Am I now a Zing?

  If you and your father move in with a Zing, go shopping with a Zing, paint the walls with a Zing, go swimming in the middle of the night with a Zing, go along with a Zing to Zing Family Secret Meetings each week—do you, eventually, become a Zing yourself?

  Maybe.

  To be fair, only her dad knew the Zing Family Secret—Marbie had told him a few months ago when they bought the apartment together. So only he went into the garden shed for the Zing Family Secret Meetings. Listen stayed in Grandma Zing’s house and watched movies with little Cassie.

  Also, and more importantly, the name Listen worked better with Taylor. The Taylor part relaxed the Listen, or gave it an approving tick. “What’s your name?” “Listen Taylor.” “Oh. Okay. Well, hi.”

  “What’s your name?” “Listen Zing.” The stranger, already skating on Listen, would whack her head hard against the Zing. “It’s what?”

  You had to think about these things when you were about to begin Grade Seven.

  Elementary school would start the year today, Monday—the Zings were excited about Cassie going into second grade—but Listen would go to an exclusive, private school, and it began the year on an exclusive, private day: Wednesday.

  In just three days, Listen thought, it will all be different.

  Of course, it was already different: She and her dad had moved out of the campervan and into an apartment with a Zing.

  She sat up to look around at the boxes. It was not possible to open the boxes because they were so well taped you needed scissors or a knife to get through. Meanwhile, the scissors and knives were packaged up inside the boxes.

  Listen wondered which box had her new school uniform inside. If they hadn’t figured out how to unpack by Wednesday, her dad would have to write a note:

  To whom it may concern:

  We are very sorry but Listen Taylor will not be able to attend Grade 7 this year. Her uniform is stuck in a box.

  Fondly,

  Nathaniel Taylor

  XXX

  She was smiling sleepily at this idea when she noticed the book. It was sitting on top of a box.

  It was a flimsy book, lime green with huge white letters on the cover: SPELL BOOK. It looked like one of those early school workbooks, in which you have to do things like draw diagonal lines between COLD and HOT, or BUSY and CALM. But when she opened the first page of the book, that’s not what it was at all.

  Congratulations! You have found this Spell Book! Hooray for you!

  Listen gave the book a skeptical look and noticed, when she did, way down at the bottom of the page, a disclaimer:

  Disclaimer

  This Spell Book will only work if you follow the instructions VERY CAREFULLY. For example, you may only turn a page when I say you can. If you skip ahead, it WILL NOT WORK. Right now, you have to put the book under your pillow. You can only turn the page on Wednesday, at 5 P.M.

  At that moment, Listen jumped because Marbie Zing was knocking on her window. “Listen?” she called. “I think I’m asleep. Can you let me in?”

  Two

  Cath Murphy (teacher, Grade 2B) stood on the second grade balcony, blinking and smiling in the morning sun, her hands in the pockets of her new baggy trousers, her neck feeling warm beneath her short blond hair.

  It was the first day of term, and the children were gathering downstairs.

  The new guy, Warren Woodford, was at the other end of the balcony, outside the 2A classroom. He leaned his chin toward the railing and gave Cath a firm little nod: Yes, there they are, gathering.

  She responded with her own solemn nod.

  The new guy was sure to be a hit with the kids. He was very tall, so he would be able to reach up to touch the ceiling, or to tack paintings high on the wall. Also, he could pull down one side of his mouth while raising the opposite eyebrow. Kids think that kind of face, especially when done to tease them, is the essence of grown-up humor.

  Cath looked back at Warren, and he was making that exact face at her.

  It was actually funny, and she surprised herself by imitating him. He smiled softly, looked away, and then called something that sounded like “From the highlands.”

  “Pardon?”

  “Aren’t the highlands!”

  “Yes,” she agreed tentatively. Then she really wanted to know, so she ran a few steps along the balcony toward him. “I’m sorry?”

  He waved her back. “I only asked if you were frightened! Are you scared?”

  “Of course I am! Aren’t you?”

  Then she ran back to her spot to wait again, and felt awkward and foolish, but also she felt this: quirky, cocky, small, funny, wicked, and extremely blond.

  In fact, she was not really frightened, more excited. But, as her mother liked to say, all meetings with new people, even locksmiths or seven-year-olds, can make you a little afraid.

  Cath had been teaching for three years now, and had a reputation among the children as very nice and pretty, can be strict sometimes, but mostly nice.

  She was known to be generous with gold stars and SUPER WORK! stamps.

  Among teachers, she had a reputation as serene and conscientious, perhaps a little shy, but prone to fits of giggling.

  She ate a Granny Smith apple at lunchtime each day, and believed in smiles that continued for 5-4-3-2-clear! after corridor nods. She had a Mary Poppins glint in her eye, but not the Mary Poppins spots on the cheeks, or the carpetbag.

  Now, as the children filed up the stairs, jostled and excited, chatting with each other and at her, she herself chatted back: “Good morning!” and “There you go!” and “Just leave your bag on the rack, that’s a good girl!” and “Oops! It’s a bit early in the day to be tripping on your shoelace, isn’t it; okay there?”

  But she noticed, as she chatted, that the new guy, Warren, was welcoming his class in silence. He was holding one arm high in the air and using the other to wave them into his classroom. He was like a stately policeman. The children, she noticed, were obeying him in wide-eyed wonder.

  Later, as she spent the morning playing educational welcoming games (“Luke’s name begins with the same letter as Lion! Scary!”), Cath was conscious of long periods of silence in the classroom next door. The silence was interrupted now and then by storms of laughter.

  Three

  The telephone rang like a rooster that was learning how to crow.

  It was Grandma. She was on the walk-around phone. “Why, it’s my Cassie! How’s my Cassie?”

  She was fine.

  “And how was your first day of second grade today? Was it exciting?”

  “A bit.”

  “And who will be your friends, do you think? Still friends with that Lucinda?”

  “Yeah.”

  “You’re such a fast runner, aren’t you? Will you win all the races at the carnival again this year?”

  “Probably.”

  “And what about your new teacher, Cassie? Ms. Murphy! Was she nice? Was she nice to you today, sweetheart?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “And were you nice to her?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “And were the other children nice to her too?”

  “A bit.”

  “Well now, Cassie, can I talk to your mummy? Is she around?”

  Cassie took Grandma down the hall, nestled in her arm like a soft baby duckling, and into her mother’s study. Her mother wasn’t there. She put the phone on the spare bed, and sat at her mum’s desk to read some words from the computer screen.

  The
n she remembered, collected Grandma, and flew her down the hall like a kite without a string. Grandma got bumped against the wall once, and then Cassie saw her mum at the kitchen sink, and said, “Grandma’s on the phone.”

  “All right,” said her mum, peeling off her washing-up gloves. “Just put her over there for me.”

  Cassie put Grandma down, gently, alongside the teapot and a saucepan lid.

  Four

  Picking up the phone from the kitchen counter, Fancy Zing announced, “Today, Mum, the sky was very blue.”

  At which her mother cried, “Yes! Wasn’t it? A beautiful first day of term! Cassie seems excited about second grade, doesn’t she? I can’t wait to hear more! I bet you had trouble getting her up this morning. She likes her sleep, that Cassie, doesn’t she? Now then, as madcap as it sounds, I’m thinking of making a strawberry risotto for dinner.”

  They discussed the merits of strawberry risotto, but Fancy found herself drifting to a day at the seaside, years before, when she had scolded a pair of seagulls. The seagulls were stretching their necks to bully one another. “You stop that!” she scolded. “You be nice to each other.” The birds had glanced up at her, startled but also repentant, and she had longed to gather them into her arms and say, “I’m so sorry for shouting, darlings, but you really mustn’t fight.”

  “And then,” said her mother, “there’s beef Stroganoff. It’s a good old standby, isn’t it?”

  “It is,” Fancy agreed, “but I’d better go now, Mum—I think Radcliffe’s at the door.”

  Radcliffe was Fancy’s husband and just that moment he had called from the front porch, “Fancy that! My Fancy is at home!” This was his standard greeting from the porch, before he even opened the front door.

  “I’m in my study!” called Fancy, and she hurried down the hall from the kitchen to her study, and sat down at her desk. She took a notebook from the drawer, and at the top of the page, she wrote: Irritating Things About My Husband. Then she used a ruler to draw a box.