Plum stares after Sophie, keeping her thoughts to herself. Her friend has lost a treasure, but she still gets to go to the tuckshop. She doesn’t have to throw her lunch in the bin. Sophie goes home to her carpeted bedroom with its mirrored cupboard doors, and she doesn’t spend the night worrying if her friends will still be her friends in the morning. She can buy another treasure, and it will be the same as if she’d never lost the original. Things could be worse, but Sophie’s the type who’ll never know.
The girls don’t ask to see Plum’s ears, and she doesn’t offer to show them. Today it feels as if rabbits have buried their teeth in her lobes. At home, unbelievably, the Datsun is in the driveway. “Go away!” Plum seethes. “Can’t you see nobody wants you?” She slams downstairs to take out her frustrations on her mother, pawing roughly through the frozen food that Mums has bought for the party. Blissfully, a scandal: “I told you chicken vol-au-vents! No one in the world likes tuna!” It is so upsetting that she flings herself upstairs again, thumping the wall as she goes. She squeezes her ears — she is drawn to molesting them — and the pain makes her clutch at her skull.
At lunchtime on Wednesday, Plum is lunar. She sits with her friends underneath the oak, floating above their debate about the strictness of Victoria’s dad, her mind as shifty as the northern lights she’s heard about in Geography. She’s hungry — she’s a helium balloon — and thinks about unearthing her sandwich from the bin. Her ears are raw protuberances as angry as the creature in Eraserhead. She is staring vacantly across the quadrangle, a clump of straw in the shape of a sad girl, when something happens, and partially revives her. Rachael, Samantha and Dash have a hump-backed powwow about the present they’re clubbing together to buy her. Rachael glances up from the huddle, warns, “Don’t listen, Aria!” And Plum, returned to earth, is surprised to find that the mood is good, that she’s welcome among them today. “Where’s your lunch, Plummy?” Caroline asks. “Did you forget to bring it?” And although Plum is picky, and prefers not to eat food prepared by fingers that might not be clean using knives that mightn’t have been properly washed, she accepts half of Caroline’s salami sandwich, and it makes her want to cry.
That afternoon she sits against her bedhead, the briefcase on her knees. The wristwatch with its fine band is like a bird’s skeleton. The fastening pin of the Abba badge is still spiky and well-sprung. Today the yo-yo is her favorite, but she feels kind toward them all.
Maureen walks in the garden after dinner, and it’s a miracle: Plum pulls on her sandals and runs. “Hello, hello!” she warbles, rushing up her neighbor’s drive. The garden is a glade still dripping from the hose — Maureen stands out against the lawn like an orchid, all lankiness and waxen beauty. “David’s asleep?” Plum is disappointed. Over the past few days she’s found her mind returning to their afternoon at the playground. “Thank goodness,” says Maureen. “He’s been under my feet all day. Would you take him again this Saturday? For a few hours in the evening?”
“OK,” says Plum.
“You’ll be rich! You can buy new clothes. . . .”
“I wanted to get my ears pierced,” Plum reminds her. “But I don’t need to do that anymore.”
Her earlobes have become a treacherous reef of concern, something around which Plum has been trying to maneuver as if they are merely an inconvenience, secretly fearing they’re about to rip the hull from her. Her ears aren’t getting better, and the logical consequence of leaving them to fester is first tragic and then terrifying. Instead of a birthday party, the casualty ward. In common with Mr. Potato Head, a pair of plastic ears. She needs relief from the secrecy, aid for the agony: she needs Maureen. Sheepishly she draws her hair aside to expose her ears. Maureen’s mouth makes a circle of appreciation on seeing the bossy studs. Then she looks closer. “They’re infected, Aria.”
“I know . . .”
“Did you do this yourself?”
“My friends did.”
“With what? A rusty nail?” Maureen recoils. “Those wretched girls! You silly child! Why would you let them maim you? You’re not their plaything, Aria! Have you shown your mother? Have you been to a doctor?” She prods a lobe with a fingernail. “Oh, Aria!”
“I haven’t shown anyone,” the girl says meekly; and even in her outrage, Maureen hears what this means. You are vital. “Please don’t tell Mums.”
The distaste seeps from the woman’s face; she draws the girl to her, inspects the damage carefully. Plum keeps her gaze down while Maureen’s arms move around her, her breasts shuffling close to her face. Her friend’s fingers feel cool against the fire-filled lobes. Methylated spirit is fetched from the house, along with a clutch of tissues: these are applied, dripping and stinging, until the earrings can be eased from their niches. “Cheap things,” scorns Maureen, tossing them into the garden. “Never wear cheap jewelry, Aria, it lessens your worth.” She dabs with the tissues, smoothing aside Plum’s hair, and the smell of the spirit is a physical entity, hot and cold at the same time. It smarts, but Plum can feel the infection contracting like a tick from a flame. She keeps her eyes closed and savors the garden around her, the soft evening air, the tranquilizing touch of the woman’s hands. Suddenly it is finished: “Take the methylated spirit home with you,” says Maureen, “and use it whenever you can.”
Plum opens her eyes reluctantly. “What about earrings?” The hard-won holes will close without them.
“One thing at a time,” Maureen replies.
“Will I be all right?” She can’t shake the image of plastic ears.
“Yes, you will. If not, I’ll take you to a doctor. Your mother doesn’t need to know.”
Plum sways slightly. “Thank you.”
Maureen crosses the lawn to the tap. “And besides receiving a dose of tetanus from your friends,” she says, “how have you been? How is everything at home?”
Now that she is no longer the sole caretaker of her ears, everything seems revitalized to Plum. “Good! Mums has bought the party food. I’m still not eating my lunch. I’ll be getting skinnier soon.” Then, scouting, she remembers something interesting — the Holden parked in the obscure street. “That Justin’s up to something, I think.”
“What do you mean?” Maureen shuts off the tap.
Plum hesitates, trying to see beyond the car, to hear what the car is saying; but she’s deafened by the scantness of her experience, blind to the horizons of a young man. She attempts, instead, to be cryptic. “He’s got a secret he’s not telling. I’m not sure if it’s a good thing or a bad thing: but I think it might be a bad thing.”
“A bad thing! You’re very dramatic. Maybe it’s — a girlfriend?”
“No, I don’t think so.” Plum shakes her head slowly. “He always shows off when he’s got a girlfriend. He talks about her all the time, takes her to the movies instead of me, invites her over for dinner. If he had a girlfriend, he wouldn’t keep it secret. He wouldn’t tell lies about a girlfriend.”
“How do you know he’s telling lies?”
“Because he says he’s going to work, but he isn’t.”
It sounds, she hopes, like the flipping of an ace card. Maureen stands on the lawn, her skirt wavering, wiping her hands together. “So what do you think is happening?” she asks.
“I don’t know. I’m not sure.” Plum, now she thinks on it, is really quite uneasy. She can’t hear what the Holden is telling her, but something about it is foreboding. And she desperately doesn’t want anything to be wrong for Justin — she can lie awake at night, skin crawling with dreadfulnesses, but it’s unbearable to think of Justin doing the same. Plum would scatter her brother’s life all over the lawn if it would make things good for him, if she actually had something to reveal; instead she must confine herself, lamely but at least mysteriously, to, “Whatever it is, it’s bad.”
Cydar’s bungalow is one of Plum’s favorite places, but she only visits rarely, aware of the consequences of making a nuisance of herself. He is home the following evening, looks up gu
ardedly from his lecture notes when she knocks. He’s a pale wraith in a corner, lit at the fringes by the beam of a desk lamp. “What?” he says. She asks, “Can I come in?” And because he doesn’t say she can’t, he means she may.
Cydar, like Mums, is a collector. The floor of the bungalow is padded with overlapping rugs, its walls are puzzled with pictures, and books stack like bricks along the skirting-board. Every found object, every gift, every coveted possession or passing whimsy is kept, each item imprisoned in its allotted place. Even the cigarette butts are pressed neatly into the ashtray, no flake of ash permitted to spill. Viewed from the doorway, it’s a complicated, intriguing room, yet nevertheless only a room. But then the sound of the sea calls, compelling the visitor to turn.
From floor to ceiling, one wall of the bungalow is glass. The glass is divided into the rectangles of fish tanks that stand on a grid of steel shelves. The tanks are lit by white fluorescence that gleams off the gravel and emanates a foggy glow. The sea-sound comes from the relentless filtering of water through canisters packed with wool and charcoal; thrumming pumps force a trillion bubbles through the water, so the aquariums are as vibrant as bloodstreams. The bungalow should smell of cigarette smoke but instead the odor is of chemicals and aquarium water, a fluidy, vegetable smell. Most of the tanks are heated, which makes the bungalow dank and close. The lulling sound, the organic fragrance and the moist atmosphere combine into something like the laboratory in The Island of Dr. Moreau, an electrically powered womb.
And within the living whiteness are the beasts it keeps alive. Catfish, angelfish, loaches of many kinds. Firemouths, tetras, gourami, idols, barbs; red-tailed sharks, a loaf-sized nurse shark, several candy-striped coral shrimp. Thirty or forty different types of creature — Plum can never keep track of them all. The fish patrol ceaselessly over rocks and coral, nibbling at vegetation. Every drifting particle catches their eye, is swallowed and spat out in a disgruntled purge. Occasionally there’s action, a fish jolted by hair-trigger energy; then a chase might erupt, fish darting and slashing — before harmony returns just as suddenly, bestowing immediate calm.
Plum stands close to the glass, as visitors always do. Her gaze chips from fish to fish, as the gaze of an unpracticed watcher always does. She wonders what these animals mean to Cydar. They are pretty — striped and dashed and psychedelically smudged, their tails like chiffon — but pretty is all they seem to her. To him, they must be something more. She imagines her brother lying on his bed at night, the bungalow illuminated by the aquariums’ haze, listening to the water churn and churn. He would watch the fish weaving between the weeds, investigating the rocks, rifling the gravel. Plum hears what Cydar would hear, sees what Cydar would see, but she can’t understand what he thinks. Justin’s car has been silent as a sphinx to her, and Cydar’s fish slip through her fingers. It occurs to her that she lives in a house with people she knows only from the outside. That everything she thinks she knows about them has been a guess.
“What do you want?” Cydar asks.
The fish swim through Plum’s reflected body, exactly as if she were drowned. “What’s that?” She points to a luminous whip-beast she hasn’t seen before.
“A neon goby.”
“Good.”
Cydar says, “Hmm.”
“Where’s my favorite?” She scans the wall for the bad-tempered destroyer, the night-blue jewel fish. There he is, close to the ceiling, swimming alone in the tank he has rendered a wasteland. A fighter not a lover, he can’t have friends. Plum likes everything about him.
“I have a new favorite.” Cydar gets up and comes to the tanks, his reflection clarifying alongside hers, a black snake beside a goose. He points out a fish, gray on the belly, darker on top. Its eyes are large, its tail trim, its whiskers half as long as itself. It sweeps the gravel without pause. “A shovel-nosed catfish.”
Plum knows catfish are lowly, and there are more spectacular specimens on all sides. “What’s so good about it?”
“Well, think. It’s timeless. Shovel-nosed catfish looked just the same as that when they were picking the bones of drowned dinosaurs, Plum. When we were still rat-men hiding in trees.”
“Aria.”
He looks askance, as if he’s never seen her before. “What?”
“It’s Aria, not Plum. I told you.”
With that, his enthusiasm evaporates; he returns to the desk, shakes a cigarette from its box, lights it with a sharply struck match. “What do you want?”
A yellow tang poises like a coin over Plum’s reflected eye. She had come wanting only a few minutes of her brother’s company, but suddenly she wants more. It has always been Justin and Cydar; she wants it to be Justin and Cydar and Plum. “Remember how I saw Justin’s car parked near the playground the other day?”
“What about it?”
“I saw it there again on Sunday, when I took David to the swings.”
Cydar draws on the cigarette, contemplating the tang, which is like an emperor’s tea-saucer, a disc of flawless gold. “So?”
“So?” Plum spins to him. “It’s funny, don’t you think? Both days Justin said he was going to work — he got dressed for work, he said he’d be home for dinner after work — but both days his car wasn’t anywhere near where he works.”
The tang sails on without effort, an orange wrasse moving aside without argument to let it pass. The cigarette unspools smoke into the humid air, and when Cydar taps it on the ashtray, gray flakes break to reveal the burning hub. “It’s funny,” he agrees, “but probably none of your business.”
“Cydar! It is my business if something’s wrong —”
“No, it isn’t. Justin’s not a baby.”
“Yes, but he’s my brother — your brother too!”
A moment goes by before Cydar answers. He props on his desk smoking his cigarette, following the fish. Finally he says, “Whatever it is, my advice is leave it alone. You might make things worse. Then you’ll wish you had stayed out of it. Won’t you?”
Plum draws breath to deny this; then turns, frustrated, back to the fish. The fish, whose gravest concern is what their next meal will be — a concern to which Plum also used to give priority. Without even trying, she’s collected more important things to bother about. “Justin’s a grown-up,” her brother consoles her. “You shouldn’t worry about him.”
“Hmph.” Plum touches a finger to the warm glass. “But things go wrong for grown-ups, you know. They show bad things on TV all the time. And even if Justin was really old, I wouldn’t want something horrible happening to him.”
In the shadows, the tip of the cigarette glows as tropically as a fish. “It’s only a car in a street, Aria. It’s nothing.”
“It’s not nothing. It’s something. And I know what it is.”
Cydar lifts blackbird eyes. “What?”
“Justin’s been fired.” The explanation had come to her that morning, during Home Economics, the single solution that makes sense. She’d been creaming butter, and her hand had grown still. “He’s lost his job at the bottle shop, and he’s too ashamed to tell. So he gets dressed in his work shirt and drives away, and hides the car and goes off somewhere until it’s time to come home.”
Cydar smokes silently, his gaze traveling the tanks. The many legs of a coral shrimp flail like cut kite strings. Then he gives a short laugh and says, “That sounds like something Fa would do.”
Plum’s heart clutches, her hands go to her face. “Cydar! It’s awful! What will we do?”
“I told you. Mind your business. Let Justin live how Justin likes.”
“But”— she’s stymied —“we should do something —”
Cydar smiles vexingly. “No. Learn a lesson from these fish, Aria: don’t interfere. Whatever’s happening, it’s Justin’s stuff. You’re a kid: worry about kid stuff.”
Plum scowls and looks away, glowering into the tanks. The aquariums are beautiful, like living pirate chests, almost too beautiful to be true. But what Cydar has learned after
years of living amid such glory is something that seems ugly — that it’s easier not to get involved. If she dared, Plum might disagree: but she doesn’t, because Cydar is so clever that it’s possible he is right. And although she’s not a kid — not in the disparaging way her brother means; she’s a real person, with feelings, and it’s right for her to fret over Justin, who is the best thing in her world — she must stay on Cydar’s good side. She’s promised her friends he will be at the party. “You can call me Plum,” she says; she’s actually relieved now that she’s accepted his advice, she feels like a pigeon who’s flown a long distance and is finally home. “It’s no good when you say Aria.”
IT RAINS: THIS SEEMS APPROPRIATE. Justin dresses with characteristic attention to his clothes. He stands in front of the bathroom mirror, twitching his hair until it sits correctly, searching his jaw for missed whiskers. He adjusts his belt, straightens his creases, plucks a thread from a buttonhole. Whenever he can, he likes to look his best. Tonight, he thinks of this care as his gift.
Plum is watching television with David in the den. Justin steps down the staircase lightly, avoiding the loudest treads. “I think you want to get caught,” Cydar had accused, having informed him that their sister had seen the Holden parked, yet again, in the same street. “That way, you can blame someone else for whatever happens.” The unfairness of this had peeved Justin greatly. He dreads the prospect of discovery — all those questions that will demand to be answered, all those wounded looks and uncomfortable encounters to be endured — and now he creeps to the front door on tiptoe. He doesn’t want David to see him. The child will chirp with recognition. Nor does he want to cross Plum’s path — she will remind him that Rosemary’s Baby is the late-late movie, and badger to know when he’ll be home. The bolt makes a sound like knuckles when he turns it, and everything in Justin winces. And the wincing itself is appalling, a sign.
Outside, the rain coming down is cooling relief, although it ruins his hair.
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