I Have a Bed Made of Buttermilk Pancakes Page 3

  ‘Well then, sixth I’m going to sing and – did you say something about my birthday, Mum?’

  ‘Hey Cass-kid.’ Radcliffe glanced in the rear-view mirror at Cassie. ‘Let’s hope you don’t suffer from alektorophobia, eh?’

  There was silence from the back seat for a moment. ‘Pardon?’

  ‘Alektorophobia.’

  ‘Is it something for my birthday?’

  Radcliffe chuckled. He pulled up at a red light, and Cassie sat quietly, waiting.

  ‘It’s a fear of chickens,’ Radcliffe explained to Fancy, in a low voice. ‘Alektorophobia. A fear of chickens. We’ll probably have roast chicken for dinner tonight, eh?’

  ‘Well, tell Cassie then! Cassie, honey, don’t worry about Dad, okay? He’s just being silly.’

  ‘Leave it,’ said Radcliffe, accelerating off as the light turned green. ‘This is how she learns.’

  ‘Learns what!’

  ‘Electra,’ murmured Cassie from the back seat. ‘Alektro? Electro.’

  Fancy felt as if a mosquito had just bitten her chin. She decided to calm herself: drift to the seaside, soothe the angry seagulls, drift, Fancy!, drift!

  Radcliffe turned on the radio.

  MARBIE ZING

  After midnight, the apartment waited, still in the moonlight and the heat. It shifted slightly, trying to find a cooler position. A moth touched a wing on the front porch light and the apartment cleared its throat sharply.

  Inside, the apartment was a sleepy confusion of boxes, paint tins, 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, seeming to float as she did so, in a mist of long hair and white nightie. When she reached the entrance to the living room, she paused. There was a crocus-shaped scar on her forehead.

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

  Next, a young man stepped into the hallway. He was ruffle-haired, sleepy-eyed and dressed in nothing but boxer shorts. He too paused at the entrance to the living room but this was to yawn and stretch. The muscles of his arms and his chest rippled just as if they had been put into place, specifically, for this stretch. He disappeared into the kitchen.

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

  The woman gazed up at him, and he nodded encouragingly, ‘Okay? Okay now? Ready to go back to bed?’ But the woman was looking past his face to the wall on the far side of the room.

  ‘I can not believe it,’ she murmured. ‘Again! How many nights is this?’

  ‘What?’ said the man, looking around uneasily. ‘Are you awake?’

  ‘Watch your eyes, Vernon,’ she ordered. ‘I’ll take care of this.’ She marched across the room, muttering, ‘Oh, you think you can just drop by, do you? Little alien starships! Putting up your elevator shafts on our –’ She stopped as she reached the wall, and stared at its smooth pale surface.

  ‘It was just here –’ She turned back to her boyfriend, who was waiting patiently.

  ‘Yes?’ he prompted. ‘The elevator?’

  ‘Hmm,’ she said slowly, ‘there is no elevator shaft.’

  ‘Are you awake now?’ said the man.

  ‘Sorry,’ said the woman.

  ‘That’s okay.’

  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.

  At last, a twelve-year-old girl appeared at the entrance to the living room, blinking into the darkness.

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

  ‘It’s hot, isn’t it?’ said the girl.

  ‘Exactly,’ said the man.

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

  After ten or fifteen minutes, 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.

  Just beyond the inoffensive house, the small front lawns gave way to a tall dark hedge. Set into the hedge was a wrought iron gate, which carried a black and white sign:

  BELLBIRD HIGH SCHOOL

  To strive itself is to succeed.

  Please Close the Gate.

  The woman looked up and down the street, and 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 car park. They ran across a netball court, and along the stone walls of various 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. They climbed this gate, and then they stopped.

  They were standing at the edge of a swimming pool. Across the pool was a bank of wooden benches; alongside the benches, several neat piles of yellow boards, each stamped in fluorescent white: ‘Training Device

  Do Not Remove’.

  A signboard stood on an easel beside them:

  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, Vernon. The twelve-year-old girl, floating on her back and gazing at the stars, was Vernon’s little sister, Listen. The three of them had just moved in together.

  Later that night, Marbie and Vernon lay sleepily in bed, wet hair tangled on their pillows, hearts still pounding from the midnight swim. Marbie said to Vernon, ‘I think I’ll go check on the pot plants.’

  Vernon rolled over and gazed at her. ‘You’re awake?’ he said.

  ‘I’m awake,’ she confirmed.

  ‘Stop being so beautiful,’ he said, and he fell asleep.

  Meanwhile, Listen Taylor was down the hall, sitting 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 am, 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 brother 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 Vernon knew the Secret – Marbie had told him when they bought the apartment together a month ago. So only Vernon went inside 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 start high school next week.

  Primary school had already gone back for the year – the Zings were excited about Cassie starting 2nd grade that day – but Listen had another week of holidays. In just one week, she thought, it will all be different.

  But it was already different: she and her brother had moved out of the caravan 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. It would be funny if they still hadn’t figured out how to unpack by next week. Vernon would have to write a note to the school:

  To whom it may concern.

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

  Fondly,

  Her big brother,

  Vernon

  XXX

  It was just as Listen was smiling sleepily to herself, at this idea, that 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 we 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 pm.

  At that moment, Listen jumped because Marbie was knocking on her window and calling, ‘Listen? Can you let me in?’

  Marbie Zing was the kind of person who wandered outside in the middle of the night to check on pot plants, forgetting to bring her keys. Marbie also was the kind of person who walked around with this sentence in her head all the time:

  It was a decision she would regret for the rest of her life.

  Because she was so excited by her good luck in meeting Vernon and his little sister Listen, she feared she would take one tiny wrong step and lose them.

  For example: Let’s say Marbie is running late for work and she opens her wardrobe and sees her short blue dress hanging alongside her long floral skirt. Which one should she wear? Hurriedly, she chooses the long skirt. It was a decision she would regret for the rest of her life – because later! On her way to work? The skirt gets tangled in her sandals and trips her up! And she breaks her ankle! And she has to go to hospital! And Vernon comes to visit with flowers for her, and the nurse says to Vernon, ‘What lovely daffodils,’ and he says, ‘Actually, they’re tulips,’ and then their eyes meet, and they fall in love, and Vernon leaves Marbie for the nurse.

  The next day, Tuesday, running late for work, Marbie chose her long floral skirt (it was a decision she would regret for the rest of her life), and then with a shiver she replaced it and picked the blue dress.

  ‘Vernon,’ she said, waking him with a kiss on his bare shoulder, ‘Vernon, what would you think of a woman who didn’t know the difference between daffodils and tulips?’

  Vernon opened his eyes and said: ‘There is no such woman.’

  Marbie worked in insurance, third party recoveries, and along with her colleagues, played car crash on the edge of her desk. Second party car enters roundabout here, third party car is reversing here, family of elephants distracts attention here (these doughnuts are the family of elephants), our car heads straight through the middle and boom! Little plastic people go zipping through the air.

  She read their explanations for their sorry little smashes.

  ‘I sneezed and lost control and hit a fence.’

  ‘I sneezed, hit a pothole and ran into a tree.’

  ‘I sneezed and collided with the rear end of an elephant.’

  She sent out the mercantiles to bang their doors at midnight (mercantile agents never got a cent); she smacked them with Intentions to Sue. She hushed angry customers and redirected hostility: ‘Don’t speak to me like that, please . . . I’m hanging up now. I’m just about to hang up the phone.’

  On Tuesday evening, they ate takeaway Thai, sitting on boxes on the living room floor. Then Vernon found the stereo, and Listen taught Marbie how to dance the modern way while Vernon made them chocolate bananas for dessert. Listen had her hair pulled back from her forehead and tied into a single, high-swinging plait. She wore her T-shirt and sweat pants, and she was a patient and dexterous dancing teacher.

  Later that evening, Marbie called goodnight to Listen from her bedroom door, and Listen looked up from her pillow with sleepy eyes, her hair about her shoulders now, the collar of her nightie looking frayed, and Marbie went into the room, and sat down on the edge of the bed like a mother.

  Marbie wrote a Letter to the Editor inside her head as she fell asleep that night.

  Sir:

  I am writing with respect to my boyfriend. He has a younger sister, Listen, and the three of us, I should explain, live together.

  To be frank, it is difficult to capture (with words) the magic of the Taylor siblings: their eyes are like maple syrup! They are very quiet, observing the world with their maple syrup eyes, but now and then they chatter, like unexpected fountains. Also, they are musical: Vernon sings along with every single song on the radio, no matter the musical genre, and Listen likes to dance wherever she goes.

  Furthermore – and this is the point of my letter – Vernon is an extraordinary lover. When he makes love to me, I find myself in rooms filled with tiny, vibrant empires. Orgasms come at me, really, from every direction.

  Yours sincerely,

  Marbie Zing

  Marbie Zing was a slippery person. In restaurants, serviettes slid from her lap to the floor. Hairclips never stayed in her hair, they slipped to her shoulders where they perched like silver butterflies. And her shoes were always falling from her feet. (It was because of this that she was first – aged six and a quarter – stung, on her toe, by a bee. ‘You ran right out of your thongs,’ scolded her mother, who was always cranky when they hurt themselves.)

  On Wednesday morning, running late for work, Marbie tripped out of one of her high-heels. A bicycle courier had to hold the lift door open while she reached a stockinged foot back to collect it.

  Later that morning, boiling the kettle for her ginger tea, Marbie watched the kettle (it always boiled, even though she watched) through narrow, sultry eyes as it bubbled quietly to itself. She watched as it gathered its excitement about it, and then, in particular, she watched as the bubbling reached the quiet point: the point at which the kettle seemed to disappear deep within itself. After that moment of stillness, there was the explosion of boiling and then the click! as it turned itself off. I know just how you feel, thought Marbie.

  It turned out to be an excellent, efficient, document-stamping sort of a day. She sipped from her tea, used the ‘DRAFT’ stamp, and the ‘PRIVATE AND CONFIDENTIAL’ stamp, and then she made photocopies and added the ‘COPY’ stamp. She did this all day with occasional breaks to chat to the others about how much she enjoyed stamping documents (they thought she was being ironic, and laughed), and when she looked at her watch it was almost five o’clock.

  She phoned Listen to fill in the last five minutes.

  Obligingly, Listen chatted to her, explaining in detail how she felt about st
arting high school next week. She thought there would be a fundamental shift in the universe but her old friends, Donna Turnbull and them from Primary, had made an eternal pact to stay friends to keep the universe stable.

  ‘Hey,’ said Listen, interrupting her own philosophising, ‘What time is it, Marbie?’

  ‘It’s five! It’s the end of the day!’

  ‘Gotta go,’ said Listen. ‘Gotta go do something.’ And she hung up the phone.

  Hooray for you! You waited until 5 pm on Wednesday! You can clearly follow rules, and that’s just what you need to be able to do, because otherwise this Spell Book won’t work!

  Here are the rules:

  1. You have to do every single Spell in the book, one at a time. You can’t skip ahead!

  2. Usually, you won’t even know if a Spell has worked or not! But never mind! Trust us! It has.

  You can turn the page now.

  Okay!

  Now put the Spell Book back underneath your pillow and DON’T GET IT OUT AGAIN until 4 PM this FRIDAY.

  YOU WILL THEN BE ABLE TO DO THE FIRST SPELL!!!

  (Note: take great care not to say the word ‘walnut’ from now until then.)

  On Thursday morning, running late for work, Marbie almost stepped into the path of a semitrailer. A pencil-seller shouted a warning just in time.

  Later that day, she phoned Vernon at the Banana Bar, to tell him about it. She liked to phone Vernon at work, especially when he was busy, surrounded by customers. It was then that his voice took on the cool restrained edge that it had way back when she first met him.

  Actually, when she first met him, his voice had been jocular, like someone playing tennis. They had met in a hotel lift in Melbourne, and had spent the next few days drinking coffee together, while Listen danced around their table.