In the afternoon light of a summer day, Fancy, a teenager then, sat on her beach towel and watched Radcliffe’s toe. The toe sprouted from his foot like a plump little table-tennis paddle. It also sprouted hairs, like an unkempt hedge. The toe was writing in the sand:
Radcliffe Mereweather
LOVES
Fancy Zing
The toe took a long time to write this.
Next, Fancy was distracted by Radcliffe’s hands. The hands were thin and knobbly, and were clutching at her sunburnt shoulders. I should put some sunblock on those shoulders, Fancy thought. But now was not the time.
Radcliffe’s hands clutched tightly. He had a tear on the edge of each eye. “I don’t want to hurt you,” he was saying. “I never meant to hurt you.” She stared at him. He was hurting her shoulders, but apart from that, it didn’t really hurt.
“I appreciate your telling me,” she said, pleased by her own maturity.
Radcliffe had kissed another girl. He had gone to the surf club party the night before, leaving Fancy at home with an asthma attack.
“Did you meet a girl?” she teased him the next day, sitting side by side in the sun.
“Well, kind of,” he replied, alarmed.
“Did you kiss her?” She did not think for one moment that he had.
“Well…” and then he was silent, and the odd feeling started, her face stretched out, and she thought: Perhaps he did!
And he had.
Radcliffe! Her First True Love! Her long-lashed boy with the sneakers and guitar! Radcliffe, who bought her marzipan and chocolate, had kissed another girl! They had only been together for a month.
“I don’t want to hurt you,” he said, fervently, and his toe had just proved it by etching in the sand: Radcliffe Mereweather LOVES Fancy Zing.
They sat solemnly, looking at the words, their legs stretched out in the sun. A man shouted, “Turkey! Win a turkey in the raffle!” Nearby, Marbie shook her towel, and Daddy growled, “Marbie! The sand!” Mummy called, “Look, everyone! There’s a skywriter!” and an announcement warned about the dangers of the riptide.
“If you will only forgive me”—Radcliffe was anxious—“I will love you forever and ever. Even, say you get old and wrinkled? I will love you. Even, say you get as fat as your mother?”
At that, Fancy pounced. “Don’t call my mother fat!”
“Sorry.”
“I mean it. That’s a stupid thing to say.”
“Sorry, I didn’t know,” he explained. “I didn’t know you were sensitive about your mother’s weight.”
“That’s not the point! You don’t know a thing about my mother.”
“What do you mean? What’s to know?”
Strange. How she told the whole story, in a flood, right then. Radcliffe stared, the sun burned freckles onto Fancy’s shoulders, and the Zing Family Secret ran straight into the letters of Radcliffe Mereweather LOVES Fancy Zing.
The first few weeks of the school year were hot, and as usual when the sun burned white, Fancy remembered the day at the seaside when Radcliffe revealed he had kissed another girl. Fancy had trumped him with the Zing Family Secret.
Also, during the first few weeks of the school year, Fancy wrote seventeen notes to her daughter’s Grade Two teacher. She was just finishing the third of these notes—
Dear Ms. Murphy,
Thank you so much for teaching Cassie (and the rest of your class, I suppose) that lovely song about the sparrow and the ironbark tree, etc., etc. She has been entertaining her father and me with the song (on and off) all week, and it is such an unusual tune!
Just thought I should let you know.
Best regards,
Fancy Zing
—when her husband, Radcliffe, arrived home from work.
“FANCY THAT! MY FANCY IS AT HOME!”
Fancy sat up straight and waited patiently for the sound of his key in the front door, the scraping of his feet on the welcome mat, and the “Huh!” of pleasure as he put his umbrella in the stand. He had given Fancy the stand for a birthday, and he used it assiduously, taking his umbrella back and forth to work each day, even during heat waves.
The footsteps approached. Fancy scraped a wisp of hair out of her bun.
“Mwah!” said Radcliffe, at the study door.
“Hello,” she replied. “How was your day?”
Radcliffe leaned into the room and smiled around at the bookshelf, the scanner, and the corkboard. He looked at the printer next and chuckled. “What have you done with Cassie?” he said, wandering away down the hall.
“I haven’t done anything with Cassie,” murmured Fancy. She opened her desk drawer and took out her Irritating Things notebook.
They had frozen quiche for dinner, and watched Hot Auctions!, and the next day, the moment she woke up, Fancy remembered this: It is possible to change a person.
People went around warning you: Never imagine you can change someone, for people NEVER CHANGE. Then they talked about leopards and spots. Forgetting altogether about chameleons. Or that octopus, which lives on the ocean floor and can change its shape to become a stingray, a sea anemone, or even an eel, depending upon its fancy.
Furthermore, Fancy recalled, she herself had changed. There had been a time when, after a shower, she would leave the shower curtain where it was when she stepped onto the bath mat: crowded together, pressed against the bathroom wall.
Radcliffe explained, a month or so after they were married, that this was unhygienic. “The shower curtain should be drawn closed,” he explained, demonstrating, pulling the curtain all the way along its metal bar as if somebody were taking a shower. This would help to prevent mold.
Just like that, Fancy changed, and began to close the shower curtain tight.
Stepping out of the shower that morning, and drawing the curtain closed behind her, Fancy regarded her husband, shaving at the basin. Tap, tap, tap, said his razor.
“So, that’s how you get the whiskers out of the razor, is it?”
He turned to her. He had a white towel around his waist, a white smear of shaving cream around his chin, and he was squinting in the steam from Fancy’s shower.
“Is there another way you could get the whiskers out?” she suggested.
“We should change this routine,” he replied, turning back to the steamy mirror. “Me shaving, you showering. Same time, eh? Look at the mirror here. Can’t see a thing.”
She leaned around him and flicked the switch on the overhead fan, so the room was filled with its buzz.
“What’s with that rash on your arm there?” he said, raising his voice over the buzz.
“I know.” She reached for her skin cream. “I feel like a fish. It’s just dry skin. I burned my skin too often as a teenager.”
“Wouldn’t be that, would it? It’s eczema. Or what? Psoriasis?”
“No,” said Fancy coldly. “It is not.” But Radcliffe was picking up her arm, turning it this way and that to catch the light, and whistling through his teeth.
“Here, Cassie, don’t forget to take this note to your teacher, okay? Where are you going to put it so you don’t forget?”
“In my pocket.”
Cassie stood on the footpath, next to the open car door, and showed her mother her open pocket.
“Good girl. Will you remember it there?”
“Yes, because I’ll sneeze, and then I’ll have to get out my hanky, and then I’ll find it there and I’ll go: I HAVE TO REMEMBER TO GIVE THIS TO MS. MURPHY.”
“See over there.” Cassie pointed to a bench just inside the school gate. “That’s Lucinda.”
“So it is! We’ll have to invite her over again one day soon. What do you think?”
“Okay,” agreed Cassie, nodding. She walked through the school gate and, without turning back, raised one hand in farewell to her mother.
“Eczema, eczema, eczema.”
Cassie had a new word. It was a disease that made your skin fall off and then your blood went everywhere, like a laundry flood. Then you turned into a fish. Then you died.
“Eczema, eczema, eczema.” Cassie sang her word, eating her sandwich before school had even started.
“Eczema?” Lucinda put her elbow in Cassie’s side. “I’ve got eczema.”
“No, you haven’t.” Cassie rolled her eyes at an imaginary person on the bench alongside Lucinda. She looked back from her imaginary person to Lucinda and saw that Lucinda was also eating her lunch before school. Lucinda’s lunch was brown bread with soggy tomato. It was disgusting.
To change the subject, Cassie pointed to the ground and said, “See that? That’s a stick insect.”
“No,” said Lucinda. “It’s just a stick.”
It was a stick insect though.
Lucinda pointed to her wrist: “See that? That’s eczema.”
“There is no point in our having this discussion,” Cassie announced.
“Yes, there is.”
“Eczema’s when you turn into a fish, actually, Lucinda.”
“Do I look like a fish? No. I don’t think so.” Lucinda swung her legs and ate her tomato sandwich.
The word, Cassie realized, was spoiled now.
“Eczema, eczema, eczema,” she said listlessly. She had her eye on the stick insect, but so far it was just asleep.
When she got back from taking Cassie to school, Fancy knew that she ought to be working on her wilderness romance. She had promised thirty thousand words to her editor by tomorrow, and she had only written eleven. Specifically:
His rhinoceros smelled like a pappadam: sweaty, salty, strange, and strong.
Her editor would cut that line.
She reached for the phone and selected the button for MARBIE AT HOME.
“Hello,” said Marbie’s voice.
“You’re at home! Why aren’t you at work? I was just going to leave a message. Well, if you’re home, let’s go out for a coffee!”
Marbie agreed, explaining that she and Listen were taking a day off because they had ticklish throats, which could be the start of colds.
“Or hay fever,” suggested Fancy. “I’ll call Radcliffe and let him know, in case he was thinking of coming home for lunch. And then I’ll see you in Castle Hill.”
Marbie looked fine when Fancy saw her, although Listen appeared to be weary. Also, she was behaving strangely: wearing sunglasses inside the shopping center; walking backward wherever she went.
Marbie was excited about buying a tennis racquet, and wanted to talk about something that the tennis racquet had that was called the sweet spot.
After the coffee break, Fancy did not feel ready to go home, so she shopped for Cassie’s birthday. At home again, she stood before her computer, and decided she ought to do some housework.
“Oh, Cassie,” she said aloud to herself when she put on the washing-up gloves. Cassie was always putting soapy wet hands into the gloves, and leaving them wet, cold, clammy, and unpleasant on the inside.
Luckily, by the time she had finished washing up, it was just about time to fetch Cassie from school.
Dear Ms. Murphy,
This is just a note to thank you for keeping an eye on my daughter (Cassie) yesterday afternoon. I noticed that you were on “bus duty,” and I also noticed that you are very good at keeping all the children within your “radar.” As I waited for Cassie, this is something I observed, and as a mother, I was pleased.
I do hope our Cassie is behaving herself. I know she can be a little erratic, but she has a good heart.
Kind regards,
Fancy Zing
At nights, staying up with her wilderness romance, Fancy felt afraid sometimes when she went to the bathroom. She would glance at the shower cubicle, with its curtain tightly closed, and think, There is somebody in there!
She supposed she would see a shadow through the curtain, but it was a thick forest green material, and she was nearsighted, not wearing her glasses in the bathroom generally (preferring to see herself, in the mirror, as somebody blurry and unmarked).
Sometimes she swung the curtain open quickly, to catch the stranger out, but so far the cubicle was always empty.
“You look tired,” remarked the Canadian from his porch next door. He was eating sliced mango and kiwifruit this morning.
“It’s funny you should say that,” said Fancy, “about me looking tired. Because I just saw myself in the hallway mirror without my glasses on and I thought, ‘I look awful,’ and then I thought, ‘Isn’t it lucky I wear glasses so that nobody can see my eyes?’ I put my glasses on and felt safe. And now I come out here, and you notice right away.”
The Canadian took a pensive sip of coffee.
“Cassie, honey!” Fancy called, as usual, through the screen door.
“Mum, I can’t find my shoes, where are my shoes? What did you do with my shoes?” came a panicky little call from upstairs.
“I didn’t do anything with your shoes. They’re right here by the front door where you left them.”
“To be honest,” said the Canadian from his porch, “I didn’t notice that you look awful. If you look awful,” he continued, and peeled the foil lid from a boysenberry yogurt, “your glasses are hiding that well.”
Fancy looked at his wide white breakfast plate, with its elegant butterflies of fruit, and tried to think of something to say besides, Isn’t it hot?
“Kiwifruit is very good for you,” she declared. “Vitamin C and zinc.”
“You don’t say?”
Cassie clattered down onto the front-door mat to put on her shoes.
“I’ll do one lace, and you do the other,” offered Fancy.
“No, Mum. I’ll do them both.”
“Bye now,” called Fancy to the neighbor as she tightened the straps on Cassie’s satchel, her keys at the ready to open the car door.
“It is possible,” called the Canadian, his voice melting distantly against their car windows, “to be both beautiful and tired. A sleeping beauty. You see?”
Fancy adjusted the rearview mirror and reversed with the regular bump of the fender on the steeply graded drive. Cassie, meanwhile, wound the window down slightly, and gave the Canadian a stare.
Please excuse Cassie for being late today.
It was all my fault! I was up late last night, working, and then overslept this morning.
Best regards,
Fancy Zing
Dear Ms. Zing,
Thank you very much for your note!
I’m sure that Cassie was not more than a few minutes late—some of the children are much later than that, and we seem to get along all right. It is very kind of you to write notes of explanation, but please do not trouble yourself.
I look forward to meeting you at the parent-teacher night later this year, when we can discuss Cassie properly. She certainly does seem to have a good heart, and is quite popular. (I often see other children gathered around her while she entertains them with funny stories—I wonder what she tells them!)
Best Wishes,
Cath Murphy
Turning into her driveway one day, Fancy looked across at her neighbor’s veranda and saw that there were two of them. Her neighbor had become two.
She got out of her car, and glanced over quickly. Yes, there were now two men sitting at the breakfast table, slicing up kiwifruit, sipping from their coffee mugs. She kept her back straight, and hurried across the burning driveway to the soft, cool grass. She never wore shoes to drive.
“—so he ate his own arm,” she heard from the porch next door, just as she reached her front door. And then a chuckle.
She couldn’t help it. She turned and stared.
“Fancy,” said her neighbor, “hello there. This is my brother, Bill. He’s out from Canada for a couple of days. Bill. Meet Fancy.”
“Did I startle you?” said Bill-the-brother with a friendly nod. “You heard what I just said? He ate his own arm?”
How direct the Canadians were. “Well…” she began.
“It’s what happened to a guy I know,” he explained. Meanwhile, Fancy’s neighbor looked down, slicing up another kiwifruit. “You want to hear the story? Okay. My buddy’s hiking in the Rockies up Jasper way; he stops to take a picture of some plant or other; somehow he crouches down by a cougar trap; he gets his arm caught in the cougar trap. I mean, seriously caught. Next thing, dumb effin luck, a big mother of a bear comes along and takes a bite out of his leg. Seriously, a bite out of his leg. He’s screaming and punching it with his one unstuck arm, but nothing he can do. The bear goes off but he knows, he can just tell, that it’s coming back later to finish him off. But he can’t get out of the trap! I mean, his arm is completely stuck! You’re in that predicament, what are you going to do?”
Fancy tilted her head to the side. “What are you going to do?” she asked.
“You’re going to chew through your own arm.”
Bill-the-brother nodded to himself and picked up a slice of kiwifruit. “That’s what my buddy did,” he said, green juice dripping down his chin. “He ate through his arm and got away.”
Fancy stared.
Her neighbor offered her a cup of coffee.
“No, thank you. And thank you for the story, Bill. Nice to meet you.”
She opened the screen door to her house, and it let out a long, thin squeal.
Dear Ms. Murphy,
How kind of you to write! I, also, look forward to meeting you at the parent-teacher night.
I’m so pleased to hear that Cassie is popular! I hope she does not give you any trouble.
You know, I just thought I would let you know that I was talking to Barbara Coulton the other day—she is Lucinda’s mother—and she told me that Lucinda is happier than she’s ever been at school! Barbara is delighted with the standard and variety of work that Lucinda brings home, and is especially pleased that you correct Lucinda’s spelling mistakes—such a rare thing in modern teaching.
Take care, and best wishes!
Fancy Zing
“Write this down,” Fancy said to Radcliffe on Sunday afternoon: “Toilet paper.” Radcliffe wrote it down. “Follow me down the hall,” she instructed, taking out the vacuum cleaner from the hall closet. Obediently, Radcliffe followed, writing the list.
“The vacuum cleaner’s broken, you know.”
“I don’t want the vacuum cleaner,” said Fancy patiently. “I just want the bucket from behind it. Kitchen towels. I’ve decided to wash the glass doors. Or will Cassie just run through them? Okay: Butter, self-rising flour, Valerio Pies.”
“I think she’ll run through them,” agreed Radcliffe, writing carefully. “Don’t wash them. Let’s go for a walk instead. Anything else?” His pen was at the ready.
“Yes. Spaghetti. Okay. Let’s go for a walk. Radcliffe, what do you mean it’s broken?”
“What’s broken?”
“The vacuum, you just said it was broken. Since when?”
“Oh,” he said vaguely, “since the other day. I came home to surprise you at lunchtime and you weren’t here, so I smashed a glass, then I tried to vacuum it up, and the vacuum cleaner jammed, and now it’s broken.”
“You smashed a glass? Because I wasn’t here? Where was I?”
“That came out wrong. I think you were having coffee with your sister in Castle Hill. Remember that day? And Marbie brought Alissa along, you told me. They both had colds. Or at least Alissa did. That’s how you put it.”
“She prefers to be called Listen, you know.”
“Anyhow, let’s go for a walk and, tell you what, I’ll take the vacuum into that new repair shop by the hardware store.”
Thursday already, and tomorrow she had to prepare for the Zing Family Secret Meeting, and Saturday was Cassie’s birthday, and Sunday she never worked, so that only left today to write thirty chapters of her wilderness romance. Fancy stared at her computer in wonder.
She decided to write to Cassie’s teacher.
Dear Ms. Murphy,
Just wanted to let you know that Cassie has a loose tooth—
But then there was a knock at the front door.
She opened the door and there in the sun’s shadow stood a handsome stranger. Tears sprang at once into Fancy’s eyes. She blinked them away.
The stranger was carrying a plate covered in a tea towel. He was wearing a loose T-shirt and jeans, and sneakers without socks. His shoulders were broad, his face was tanned, and his eyes, behind small, wire-rimmed spectacles, were glinting.
“Hello there,” he said.
At that, he transformed into the Canadian-next-door.
She was so disconcerted, she did not open the screen door. She stood and simply stared.
“Not in any way intending to bother you,” he continued, in a slightly formal voice. “But I’ve baked you an apology cake. My brother from Canada. The other day. I just wanted to apologize for him. He’s a good guy but not exactly—and I just about died when he told you that apocryphal story of his. I could tell it bothered you, and I just about died, and now I am here to apologize.”
“Oh!” cried Fancy, in a flutter. “The man who ate his arm! I wasn’t bothered by that story at all! I mean, I didn’t believe a word of course. Ate his own arm! And what about the blood loss from the wound in his leg…Anyway, but I write wilderness romances. That’s my occupation. So, see, bear and cougar stories are fine! My characters are always running from cougars and into the arms of handsome strangers. They don’t usually eat their own limbs, of course, because then there’d be no arms to run into…But, anyway, it’s my career! I know it must sound strange, me, a mother in the suburbs, writing wilderness romances, and the only person I ever slept with my whole life is my husband!”
There was silence for a moment.
Fancy opened the screen door, and it let out its usual squeal.
“I could fix that for you.” He was looking at the door.
“No! No! I can do that! All it needs is a bit of WD-40!”
“I agree,” he said, with that odd little smile. “I still think my brother bothered you, so please take this maple cake. Okay?”
He used one foot to hold open the screen door as he passed the cake toward her. She took the cake, and he withdrew his hands, palms upward. She saw that his palms were calloused. Then he saluted, with the same glint in his eye, and ran down the steps of her porch.
Rather than crossing directly to his own porch, he took the driveway, walked along the street, and then walked back up his own driveway. She found this extremely moving.
Driving to the Zing Family Meeting the next night, Fancy felt very happy. She was excited about dinner that night—it would be roast chicken, as usual—and about the meeting afterward (she had prepared a slide show). She also felt relaxed about Cassie’s birthday tomorrow. How wonderful that Marbie, Nathaniel, and Listen were hosting it! She might go to the gym before the party. How thin she was these days, now that she was going to the gym regularly. And she could always get an extension for her wilderness romance.
She leaned back into her seat, humming along with the tune that Cassie was singing in the backseat.
Then Radcliffe said what he said. “You remember Gemma in the pay office?” he said, changing lanes.
“No,” said Fancy.
“Come on! You must remember Gemma. She’s the one who spilled her drink everywhere at the office Christmas party? Remember?”
“No,” repeated Fancy.
“Well.” He shrugged. “Well, trust me, there’s a Gemma who works in my pay office. She works afternoons only, lucky duck. Anyhow, turns out she had some kind of laser treatment done on her moles. You know, you’d call them freckles, but they’re really moles. Anyhow. Extraordinary. She got about ten of them zapped.”
Fancy could not believe it. She lowered her chin to check the freckles on her bare shoulders: nicely spaced, attractive freckles. Beauty spots, really.
“What exactly do you mean by that?” she said coldly.
Radcliffe turned swiftly toward her, a hurt, confused expression on his face. Then he looked back to the road.
Tomorrow, it would be Cassie’s birthday. It was a secret, almost scary, wonderful fact which she’d been carrying around the last few weeks, like a smile about to happen on her face.
But what Cassie was actually realizing today was that it used to be better than this, back when she was little. Maybe when she turned five or six, it was more than just a smile: It was like everything was whispering and just about to skip. Now, turning seven, her excitement felt a bit wrong.
It’s because I know you can get disappointed, she realized. One time, she got too excited on her birthday and jumped on the table where the grown-ups were sitting, and at first they laughed, but then she knocked over their champagne and champagne spilled onto her dad’s lap and she got in trouble.
She cried, and you should never cry on your birthday.