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 out my hand and shaking a small sawdust hand. “Lovely day, isn’t it?”
I lean forward and look out the bedroom window. The coat of a passer-by is flapping and an empty crisp packet is a salty whirligig around his feet. I turn back to the doll and start again.
“Hi, Penelope, bit windy, isn’t it?”
The doll just smiles.
“No sign of spring yet.”
I turn the doll around, and her crying eyes face me. This is my cue to stop the conversation. I go into the bathroom and wash my hands with a fresh bar of soap in preparation for a handshake with Penelope. I feel like saying some kind of prayer or performing a ritual dance—the occasion feels this big—so I stand in the living room and roar “Gaaaaaaaaah!” from the bottoms of my lungs, and slap each hand in turn across my chest. I put my notebook in my bag, leave the house, sprint past Bernie’s and then turn the sprint into a calm walk. I huddle and tighten myself against the wind, and think up ways to describe it to Penelope. Is “a rape of a wind” too strong for the first sentence of a first meeting? I push the door of the café and the bell jangles. There are men in navy overalls eating fried breakfasts and elderly people sitting alone or in pairs. I walk up to the counter and order coffee and a coffee slice.
“Normally I wouldn’t double up,” I say to the lady in the white uniform with the white cap, who looks like a medieval wench. She stares at me.
“Double up how?”
“A coffee drink and coffee-flavoured bun might seem excessive, but today’s a special day.”
“Yeah, okay, love,” she says. “I’ll bring them down to you, have a seat.”
I have wasted this topic on someone who doesn’t like it, but no matter, I can reuse it on Penelope. I sit in the corner table facing the window. The lady brings my coffee and cake, and I squash the coffee slice flat so that the cream oozes out the sides. Then I scoop it up and add it to my coffee. A couple of pastry flakes poke out of the cream, like planks of wood in a miniature snow scene. I look out the window. Potted plants and huge tubs of paint and garden ornaments are laid out on the footpath in front of the hardware next door. A woman comes up to the café window, a thin woman who should be fat, with the kind of face that looks like an empty sack when it’s not smiling. Her clothes are red and yellow and screaming. This must be Penelope: only people with three “E”s in their names could dress so loud. I wave. She smiles, the kind of smile that could reheat cold coffee, with yellow gappy teeth in need of a power hose. She bustles into the café, sweeping in leaves with her long skirt. A net bag swings from the crook of her elbow, and she is carrying a melon. In two giant steps, her feet eat up the floor and reach me.
“You must be Vivian, I’m Penelope.”
She grabs my hand and thrusts the melon into my chest, as if playing some kind of new fruit sport.
“Hold this, I’m going to get some tea. You’re alright for everything?”
I open my mouth to speak but she is gone, and I’m left holding the melon. It’s yellow, the kind of yellow that seas should be made of, or swimming pools at least. I sit down and put the melon on Penelope’s chair. She scuttles back in a breeze, squeezing between tables and knocking a salt cellar off a table: smash! Penelope doesn’t look surprised; smashes must soundtrack her every move. I take a breath to warn her about the melon, but she sits straight down on the yellow hump and doesn’t seem to notice.
“So, Vivian, what possessed you to go on a Penelope hunt?”
She guffaws and her breath hits me, a stench so powerful it could fell trees. It’s too soon for this question. I hadn’t prepared for it, so I stick to my original conversation plan.
“Bit of a nip in the air, isn’t there?”
Penelope’s forehead bunches and warps, and she squints at me. “I wanted to know why Penelope doesn’t rhyme with antelope.”
