Butterfly

by Sonya Hartnett

  Cydar is stunned by the sight of the boy. Maureen Wilks’s son is sitting at the Coyle dinner table with a plate of soldier-cut sandwiches before him, tiny against the great pew and the vast tabletop, peaceful as a dust beam, and his presence can only mean that worlds have catastrophically collided — and all the while Cydar has been feeding sea monkeys to the angelfish, unaware of even a tremor. He pauses: “Hello. What are you doing here?”

  But instead of demanding that Cydar confess what he knows, all Plum says is, “This is David, from next door. I’m babysitting.”

  “He’s just turned four,” announces Fa.

  Cydar comes cautiously closer, into the shadows overhanging the table. Mums shuffles sideways, and he sits beside her. “I know David. Hi.”

  The boy considers him but says nothing, a snowflake hand feeding a sandwich into his mouth. Plum says, “We’re going for a walk after lunch, aren’t we? Then maybe we can see Cydar’s fishes. Would you like that, Davy? To see the fish?”

  “The clown fish?” Fa speaks loudly. “They’re called clown fish, but they don’t look like clowns. They don’t have hats or red noses. And the eel? A big old eel like a long black sock.”

  The boy’s gaze cruises his audience while he painstakingly chews up the sandwich. When the child’s glance touches her, Cydar feels his mother twitch. He’s always thought that Mums could have lived happily without her offspring — there are many things she’s interested in besides them. She is what Cydar is, a distant heart, and her children and husband are things she chooses to tolerate, like rare parrots nesting in the chimney. When the boy looks at Mums, however, Cydar feels something strike in her — something too hot and too tender, a thing that makes his mother look away. Wishing, Cydar sees. And in his tightly stoned state he has a profound realization: Everyone in his family is sad. Mums and Fa, living lives that never managed to rise above the ordinary. Plum and Justin, aware of the peril, but neither of them clever enough to avoid a similar fate. Cydar himself, who will achieve enough for all of them, but will never feel rightly made for the world. Through the wide halls and spacious rooms of the house waft sorrows as vintage as antiques. “What do you want to eat at your party?” Mums is asking Plum, while, in the seat beside her, her son expires inside.

  “Nothing homemade,” Plum reiterates. “For snacks: Twisties, popcorn, chips. For lollies: Jaffas, Eclairs, Fantales, chocolate aniseed rings.”

  “Coke? Lemonade?”

  “No, I want the punch you made at Christmas, the one with pineapple and ginger beer. But not too many bits of fruit in it. They get all soggy and disgusting.”

  “Not too much fruit,” memorizes Mums.

  Cydar’s eyes seek out the child, who is contemplating the last honey soldier. A slim mop-haired boy like a little old dog is how Justin described him. He’ll leave home as soon as he can pack a bag. Cydar starfishes a hand on the table, the oak under his palm as slick as kelp; David considers with interest the onyx stone worn on the starfish’s ring finger, the curl of silver in the image of a snake coiling around the finger alongside it. Cydar flexes his hand so the snake strikes — the boy obligingly smiles. Justin will surely see this child sitting in the kitchen for exactly what he is: a black sign. A crack that will tear open to inundate everything, not if, but when. “Don’t eat that sandwich if you’re not hungry, David,” Cydar tells him.

  “No, he’s probably had enough.” Fa is shouting now. His pleasure in the boy’s presence is painful. It occurs to Cydar that when the truth rushes through their house, this is where his parents’ sympathies will fly: to the son who is not their own. The one whose potential is not yet threadbare, who can yet perhaps offer hope. “We can give your sandwich to the birdies in the park,” Plum tells the child; and there follows one of the oddest moments that Cydar has ever known, when for an instant the whole room seems to quake with a yearning that pours out from the people inside it, a lack that desperately wants comforting but meets only empty air. While the moment holds, no one moves or says anything, and Cydar fears he might stumble from the kitchen like Munch’s screamer, fingers gouged into his cheeks.

  “What else?” Mums asks then. “A barbecue?”

  Plum looks at her. “What else? Hot dogs!” And everyone is again their enduring selves. “Hot dogs, garlic bread, vol-au-vents with chicken. Ice-cream cake — chocolate, I hate strawberry. For breakfast the next morning, pancakes. Do you know how to make pancakes? If you’re not sure, you should practice. I don’t want hopeless pancakes at my party . . .” Plum pauses, pulling at her hair. Her gaze skates around the table before fixing on her brother. “Don’t forget you said you’d come to the party, Cydar.”

  “Did I?”

  “You know you did.” Her voice is iron. “You promised.”

  Knowing all, he understands this isn’t just her usual bossiness. Something hulks behind her insistence, and it’s darkly important to her. Some adolescent melodrama is occurring in his sister’s world; the Wilks boy’s presence in the Coyle kitchen testifies to what Justin has allowed his world to become. Only Cydar, it seems, lives a quiet life, a garden snail’s honest existence. “It’s all right,” he says. “I’ll be there.”

  The ceiling of the bedroom is elaborately mapped with a plasterwork pattern that reaches out geometrically into the corners of the room. Justin studies the interlocking rectangles while Maureen talks. She, too, is facing the ceiling, but only Justin sees it. He knows Maureen dislikes the decoration — it doesn’t suit what she’s trying to do with the house. She needs smooth ceilings, canvas light-shades. The ceiling survives the way it is only because her husband likes it. The fact, recollected, makes Justin look away, like an altar boy encountering a sleeping priest. He hardly knows Bernie Wilks and doesn’t think of his neighbor often; but when he does, Justin does not see him as an enemy or even a rival, but rather as a confederate. A picture sometimes comes to Justin, of himself and Bernie Wilks talking through the dense stone of a cell wall. It is Papillon, it is Cool Hand Luke, it’s The Great Escape. It is strange.

  Maureen has said something. When Justin turns his head to her, the pillow sighs a vanilla scent. “Barcelona or Rome or Berlin?”

  It’s easier to simply choose than to query what he’s choosing. He selects what seems the most unlikely, the least trampled road. “Berlin.”

  She rolls over to face him, her mouth very close. “Let’s catch a plane to Berlin. We’ll rent an empty warehouse near the zoo. It will have big dirty windows and a timber floor, and high ceilings like a cathedral. We’ll have no furniture except a bed, and we’ll wear nothing but black — black suits, black hats, black boots. We’ll only be friends with artists. In winter we’ll hibernate in the only room we can afford to heat, eating sauerkraut. We’ll have a little stove for boiling water, and we’ll grind our own coffee beans.”

  Justin looks up at the plasterwork metropolis, carried as if her words were wings to a dusty loft in an elusive city, a wide window overlooking an avenue of elms. He sees himself standing behind the glass, a mug of coffee in one hand, a hand-rolled cigarette in the other. He seems, in this vision, to be wearing a beret.

  “I’ll run a gallery. It’s what I’ve always wanted to do. The artists will bring me their paintings, and I’ll sell them to people who deserve them.”

  She nuzzles his shoulder, her weight against his ribs. He asks, “What will I do?”

  “You can buy a guitar and busk at railway stations.” He sees the beret openmouthed on the ground. “And in the evenings you can model nude for the artists.”

  The idea makes her laugh merrily, kicking her long legs so the sheet billows off their bodies, puffing out a sweaty scent. Justin catches her hand, holds it against his chest. The ceiling above him is all whiteness and angles, like snow on the roofs of a Bavarian village. He knows nothing about Bavaria, Berlin, artists or guitars, he can think of no more dire prospect than spending his life in a warehouse with Maureen, but he can chuckle and unfold a daring map of life because it is only words, not
hing will happen, he is quite safe. Yet it’s something that has always charmed him about Maureen, her belief that he is capable of doing and being anything. To her, he has more promise than he’d ever have use for. To her, he’s not just a man like any other. He might miss this feeling when it’s gone. “You’d get tired of me,” he says. “You’d get bored, and run off with some foreigner.”

  “I would never be bored. Maybe by sauerkraut. Not by you.” She presses nearer so her breast lies against him, her breathing shifts his hair. “You can fall asleep, Justin. I would like to watch you sleeping.”

  But sleep would signal the acceptance of something. “No, I should go.”

  “Stay one more minute.” She begs it as usual. And although he should shake her off, make a stand, he does not; he lies as if paralyzed, his gaze seeking out the Escheresque pattern above his head. “We could hitchhike to the Black Forest.” She speaks tickingly against his chest. “Eat cake.”

  “Hmm.” He has no lingering interest.

  “They bombed the Berlin zoo during the war, you know. Blew the elephants to pieces.”

  “Well,” he says, “we won’t go then.” Ten more minutes, and he’s home.

  Plum holds David’s hand as they walk, feeling the faith within the curled paw. Inside her there’s blooming a sense of pride that she has been judged capable by him. Guarding the child, she’s like a girl who’s arrived to save the world.

  It is autumn, but it still feels like summer. The sun is like an angry dog, and they move quickly from shade to shade. Plum does not want him to be bored so she unspools a running commentary about birds, clouds, colors, pets, trees, shoes. David is not a talkative boy but he listens, his face turned up like a flower; and when she asks him a question he replies matter-of-factly after giving brief thought to the answer. He trips along the footpath beside her, his small arm forming a right-angle up to her hand, and Plum realizes with some shock that she feels different in his company. It’s not like being with her friends at school. It’s not like sitting at the dinner table. With him, she is just she. It’s a weightless feeling, like dragging off muddy gumboots and leaving them at the door.

  They go to the playground, having skirted the oval carefully, discussing the danger of bees. As usual the playground is deserted, so they have the equipment to themselves. Tanbark crumples underfoot, huffing out tawny dust. “The slide?” David asks, and Plum says, “No, it’s too hot.” To illustrate she puts her palms on the metal, which is scorching as a skillet, and dances about yelping. David mulls over this, suggests, “Maybe the swing?”

  So she lifts him onto the swing and pushes him back and forth while the child grips the chains and says nothing, stoically enjoying the ride. Plum finds a rhythm, and her thoughts wander. She remembers the day before, lying alone in Sophie’s bedroom, knowing her friends were in the kitchen discussing her, someone about whom they know nothing. She’d felt so clever in those few minutes — ruthless happiness, pitiless power — but now, swinging the child, it all seems pathetic. Why does she care so much? What does it matter if her friends don’t like her? After all, she hates them. Tomorrow she’ll stop hanging around with them. She will step out of their coven and purify into a lone dove. Become the kind of girl who doesn’t care what other girls think. The kind who sits in the quadrangle at lunchtime reading a book. The one whose surname you can’t remember when writing names on the flipside of the school photograph. The one beside whom only a teacher will sit on the bus, en route to an excursion.

  And Plum is frightened, and shunts the idea from her mind.

  She lets the swing simmer until the child is able to step off. There’s a cage of crisscrossing metal bars over which he runs to swarm. Plum, fanning her face, flops on the bench in the shade. She is muggy in the underarms, there’s a napkin of sweat between the nubbins, another dampening her shoulder blades. Her hands and face feel swollen, even her eyes seem to bulge: she is such a beast. She has been throwing away her lunch for a week, enduring daily the ravages of starvation, yet still she is a monster. She shuts her eyes, which is mercy of a sort. Her hands creep up to rest on her ears. In the mirror this morning the lobes had been red, exuding heat like hot-water bottles — except, when she had touched them the lobes weren’t pliable, as hot-water bottles are. They were firm as muscle. When she’d flicked them, they hadn’t wobbled, and they don’t wobble now. Touching them spills a blunt-nosed pain into her skull. She rotates the studs as instructed, and meets a sticky resistance that can’t be right. “Poo,” she mutters. “Oh, poo . . .”

  “Poo,” the word echoes: Plum’s eyes startle open. David is standing beside her, clutching a piece of tanbark. Plum doesn’t know how big a child should be, but David seems tiny, a doll. He has a doll’s glossy hair, pink lips and exaggerated eyes. His head is tipped sideways with inquisitiveness. “I’ve got sore ears,” she tells him. “My friends pierced my ears, and it hurt and hurt, and now my ears are sore and I might get sick . . . ”

  Tears, which so frequently swell behind her joys and her furies, squirm out and run down her cheeks. She’s ugly, she’s fat, her friends hate her — she hates herself. The first tear plunges through the wooden slats of the bench. “I wish I was four, like you,” she moans. “Look at my ear, Davy — look!”

  She pushes back her hair, and the lobe is a mirror turned to the sun, a source of bushfires and global catastrophe. David, however, does not flinch. From the corner of an eye Plum watches him study the wounded appendage thoughtfully. Then, like a sniffing animal, he edges closer, so close she feels the air feathering from him. When his lips brush the convex shell of her ear, a tingle runs down her spine. He steps back in silence, gripping the tanbark with both hands, and Plum stares at him in wonder. “Thank you,” she says. “I think my ears will get better now.”

  The sky is too blue, it is too hot to stay. She climbs off the bench and takes his hand. They do not cross the oval, but opt for the side street that will loop them home. Aside from the bees, there’s no reason to take this longer route; with the sun above and the child beside her, there are good reasons not to. But when she sees Justin’s car, Plum knows why she chose that path. She wants to see the car exist in another’s eyes.

  The Holden is parked in the same place as before, underneath the paperbark opposite the house with the gnome. Its tires aren’t flat, it is stopped neatly against the gutter, the chrome around its headlights flares with recent polishing. The two children stand before the vehicular mystery, Plum swinging David’s arm. “What’s Justin’s car doing here?” she asks the trees, the oxygen, the life-force, the child.

  “I don’t know,” says David.

  “Don’t you?” Plum sighs. “I don’t either.”

  ON MONDAY MORNING her friends flock to her; it’s not her they want to see, but their handiwork. “Ugh.” Victoria sticks out her tongue. “It looks infected.”

  “It’s not infected!” Samantha squawks. “Everything was clean, you saw it!”

  Plum stands like a cow in a yard while her friends mill about her. Their Monday-morning uniforms smell clean and freshly ironed. They are gathered in the thoroughfare of the locker corridor, and around them parts a noisy tide of girls burdened by bags as unwieldy as rhinos, armed with spiked plates of textbook. Plum is bumped and knocked, scuffed and buffeted. Caroline’s face puckers at Plum’s cauliflowered head. “Does it hurt?”

  Plum nods briefly, as one for whom suffering is inevitable.

  Sophie says, “My ears didn’t look like that after I got them pierced. Mine didn’t go all purple.”

  “Well aren’t you so special.” The assembly bell is ringing, and Samantha wheels away. “There’s nothing wrong, Aria!” she yells over a shoulder. “In a few days you’ll be fine! Stop sooking!”

  “I wasn’t sooking,” Plum points out — but her friends are dispersing, flicking away like minnows into the crowd, and a strong broad girl whom Plum doesn’t know advises her curtly, “Out of the way, idiot.”

  On the bus ride home there’s
a moment in which the bubble that is Plum’s self-confidence seems unable to rise, and the prospect is that, even at home, she will feel weak and unwanted. This has never happened before. Arriving home, she heads straight to her room, where she retrieves the briefcase with urgency. She touches each object, balances their weights, compresses them inside her hands. Today the coin is her least favorite. She has tried to befriend the coin, admire it, see good in it, but has failed. The coin is ugly, and should never have been minted. She wonders if a coin can be burned or melted. She conjures a force field around her body, tells the coin in a monotone, “I cause you pain I cause you pain.”

  She rocks on her haunches, craving to run to Maureen — Maureen who is always pleased to see her, who is a river, rather than a war — but the Datsun Skyline is parked in the driveway like a great blue tumor. That man is a pest. Instead she lies on her bed flipping through an encyclopedia of movies, thinking about her birthday, her upcoming party, the many potholes in her life. Her bag-of-concrete body. Her ball-of-fire ears.

  On Tuesday at lunchtime, Sophie is crying. It is not Plum’s shoulder upon which her old friend chooses to weep, so Plum does as Rachael and Caroline are doing, and hovers in the background being concerned. “What is it?” they ask Victoria, when Sophie has recovered enough to stumble off to the tuckshop for a Wagon Wheel. Victoria explains that Sophie has lost the bracelet of which she’s been so proud, and Caroline gasps, “Oh no! Lost already? Father Christmas only just gave it to her!”