nearest to the toilets, at the back, and take out my notebook, which has kind blank pages that don’t scream at me to stay within the lines. I make a List of Things That I Like: “Conkers, Sherbert, Gold Ingots, The Smell of Petrol, Dessert Trolleys, Graveyards, Sneezes, Terrapins, Scars that Tell Stories, The Number 49, The Smell of Pencil Parings.”
Now I imagine I can smell pencil parings, so I sniff deeply. The man at a nearby table turns to look at me. He has three mobile phones laid out like playing cards on the table in front of him. One of them rings and he turns back to answer it. I continue with my list: “Donkey’s Tufty Heads, Marshmallowed Silences, Butter Lumps, Elephants, Zoos in Winter, Pencils that Write Sootily, The Name Aloysius, Anything Egg-Shaped, Moths that Think They Are Butterflies, Hospital Noises, Liquorice Sweets in the Shape of Pink Toilet Rolls, The Smell of Garden Sheds, Damp Canteen Trays, Marbles with Coloured Swirls.”
I’ve smeared some chocolate from the eclair onto the page, so I include “Chocolate Eclair,” with an arrow to explain the stain. The man in front of me is still talking on his phone. I take out mine and put it on the table. There’s a greyish tint to the screen: I have a message! I open the message and an unfamiliar number appears. It reads: “Hello, Vivian, I am Penelope. Can you meet me in the tearooms beside the hardware tomorrow at eleven?”
As I re-read the message, my belly feels like a pot boiling over. I have a new friend called Penelope who spells out her numbers; it just can’t get much better than this. Now I decide to make a List of Words That I Like. I start off with “Propane and Butane.” I want to go on a camping trip just so I can use these words. I don’t know exactly what they are, but I imagine myself saying to the person in the next tent, “My propane’s running low, mind if I borrow some?” Or I could show off my camping experience with an abbreviation, “I’m all out of bute, have you any to spare?” I’ve written down “Propane and Butane” because they go together, but now it looks like “and” is one of my favourite words, which would be like saying that flour is my favourite food. I scratch out “and” and write: “Propane, Butane, Smear, Pufferfish, Trodden, Eiderdown, Plethora (but only the way I pronounce it, pleh-THOWE-ra), Beachcomber, Mischief, Bumble Bee.”
I like the words “Bumble Bee” so much that I once said them over and over until they stopped making sense as words, and became meaningless babble. I drain the last of my coffee—I love meals that are all puff and froth and little else besides—and walk up North Frederick Street, my knees crunching like overcooked biscuits. If I have biscuit knees, maybe I have chocolate blood and a blancmange brain, a Hansel and Gretel house of a body. When I get home, I trace my route. Today I walked the shape of a head with a hollow scooped out of the back, and a quiff of hair blown flat to the front. I place it on the kitchen table, next to yesterday’s route.
To celebrate my success in finding a Penelope, I pour a dash of my great-aunt’s wine into a mug. It tastes sweet and sneezy but it isn’t cold. There’s no ice in the freezer so I drop some frozen peas into mug; now it looks like a diseased pond. I sit on the blue velvet armchair, the kind of chair an off-duty policeman might sit in, and drink with my lips pursed to keep the peas out. After some large gulps, I feel garrulous and wine-smug. I don’t want to waste this fruity connected feeling, so I call my sister.
“Hello?” She whispers the word, as if the phone has threatened to bite her ear.
“Vivian? Hi, it’s Vivian,” I giggle.
Never has this sentence sounded funnier.
“Vivian? Is everything alright?”
“Everything is better than alright,” I say. “I tried to make thunder, and I advertised for a friend.”
My sister sighs, a sigh so long that I snatch it up in my mouth and spit it right out again.
“What are you doing?”
“I’m cancelling out your sigh.”
“Oh, Vivian.”
Her voice sounds like it’s coming from another century.
“How are Lucy and Oisín?”
“Oh, they’re great. Lucy is … Oisín is …”
Her voice has plumped up again, and she sends a clatter of words down the line. In between sups of wine, I say words like, “wow, ooh, mm, really, oh, aren’t they great, ah that’s nice.” The small words seem to be the most important, but I’m not sure if they count as actual words.
“I’d better go, there’s something in the oven,” I say, when I have run out of new words to use.
“This late?”
“I’m making midnight cake.”
“Oh?”
She has managed to make a full question out of a two-letter word.
“Good night,” I say and hang up.
I write “Call my sister” on a blank sheet of paper, and put a line through it with a pencil. A pen is too neat; a smudged grey line is more like my relationship with my sister. I check the oven, hoping that a cake has magically appeared from my lie, but there are only crumbs and stalactites of old cheese that could feed a family of three gerbils for a week.
I WAKE EARLY and it’s cold, so I decide to keep my night clothes on under my day clothes like stealth pyjamas. I get up, open my wardrobe, close my eyes and feel around for enough clothes to cover all parts of my body. I go into the hoard-room and take a fresh notebook from the pile. My great-aunt allowed me to keep all my treasures in the small box room, which I call the hoard-room. No dragon guards my hoard because there isn’t a nugget of gold within it. I collect: stationery, sweet wrappers (only the jewel-coloured ones), old milk bottle tops, newspaper photographs of animals, bows, ribbons, wrapping paper, stamps, bus tickets with symmetrical dates on them, maps, old Irish punt currency, jigsaws, dolls, teddy bears, toys, games, knick-knacks and everything anyone has ever given me.
I’m missing a dice from Snakes and Ladders, the candlestick from Cluedo and an “H” and a “V” from Scrabble. If I replaced the pieces, though, the newer ones would be too clean and unused and might be mocked by the older pieces, so I do without. My hoard is made up of things from my childhood and early teens, with a big gap from my adulthood that I am trying to fill. I don’t like to separate it into containers, so it piles up in two large mounds with a Vivian-wide path running through the middle. I see a small cloth foot sticking out from the left mound and pull out my sister’s old doll. She has dangly limbs filled with sawdust, a happy face on one side and a sad face on the other. I put her on a chair in the landing and sit on another chair facing her. I suck my pencil and try to remember what people on buses and in cafés talk about. I write:
1. Weather
2. Transport
I could say “Traffic was a NIGHTMARE.” People always speak in capital letters when they talk about traffic, but I’ll be walking to the café. I’ll say that I noticed from the footpath that traffic on the road was terrible. I continue:
3. Favourite Colour
4. Favourite Sweet Food
5. Favourite Salty Food
6. Favourite Zoo Animal
7. Favourite Farm Animal
I need to practise using my voice aloud because sometimes it squeaks and gets pulled back into my throat if it’s been out of use for a while.
“Hi, Penelope,” I say, holding