Butterfly

by Sonya Hartnett

  If none of them is curious as to the state of her ears, it’s a silence that Plum welcomes. Now that the swelling has nearly subsided and the pain almost gone, it’s embarrassing to recall how close she’d come to failing to be a girl with pierced ears. Twice a day she sluices her lobes with methylated spirit before feeding the blunt end of a needle into the holes to keep the piercings open. When she recollects the scarlet agony of infection, it’s easy to believe there’s something miraculous in her recovery. Maureen, like a nun, had divined what to do.

  Plum starts dabbing methylated spirit on other parts of her body that need fixing, and goes to bed each night feeling slightly parched.

  The Datsun Skyline is in the Wilks driveway on Monday and Tuesday nights, but both evenings Maureen comes out into the garden and waves at Plum in her window. “David keeps talking about you, Rapunzel. Every day he asks, Where’s Aria?” The thought makes a proud feeling bloom inside Plum, brings a loopy smile to her face. The same thing happens on Thursday when Maureen sings the birthday song to her, David mumbling several words behind. It is the eve of Plum’s birthday and they are sitting at the counter in Maureen’s kitchen, and in Plum’s hand is a purple velvet box containing Maureen’s present to her: a pair of silver earrings sporting the sparkle of two tiny but genuine diamonds, the receiving of which had rendered Plum teary. After the cake is cut there is a second gift, which Maureen fetches from her bedroom. It’s a cornflower-blue, elastic-waisted dress, with no straps to hold the top half up, only another line of elastic that clings perilously to Plum’s underarms when she tries on the garment in the bathroom. She stares at herself in the mirror, sees a strong-looking girl with black hair thick as horsetail falling to her bare shoulders. Partway down her arms begins what remains of her tan, and the piece of her chest that is exposed by the dress is pallid and spotty. “Don’t worry about that,” Maureen reassures her, and shows Plum how to use makeup to disguise the piebalding. From her cupboard Maureen takes a pair of strappy silver sandals, and somehow these Cinderella shoes harness Plum’s ugly-sister feet. Her hair is brushed, lip gloss is applied, the earrings are pushed into place. “Stand up straight, shoulders back, nice cheery smile.” Plum gazes at her image, breathing shallowly. The sandals, the dress, the diamonds in her ears seem to quiet the bleat that her heart has been making for months. She’s seeing, in the mirror, the bird inside the box. She looks up at Maureen, face pinched with emotion. Maureen chuckles: “Shush, you deserve it. You’re worth more than you think, Aria.”

  When Plum wakes the next morning, there’s a large square present sitting on the end of her bed. Although diamonds could easily throw all other gifts into the shade, Plum is delighted with the roller skates her parents have given her, two smart white leather boots sporting chunky red wheels. In pajamas and dressing gown she tries on the skates; wobbles tectonically across the floor of the bedroom; takes them off again.

  The day passes like a dream. Everyone is kind to her, as if a relative is dead. Her friends sing the birthday song when they gather under the tree. At dinner that night, Justin gives her a big paperback called The Films of George Romero. Inside are dozens of black-and-white photographs of the living dead. Cydar says callously, “I haven’t had time to buy anything, sorry.” Plum is hurt, but manages to stuff it down. She’s too clever to spoil her day, or, worse, her tomorrow.

  What she does do — because she’s fourteen, because the redness is cured, because she has diamonds in the pocket of her cargo pants — is reveal to her family the fact of her pierced ears. Her brothers and parents crane across the table to get a better look. “Cool,” says Justin. “What’s done is done,” says Fa. “They’re your ears, I suppose,” Mums tells her. Cydar sits back against the pew, turns the purple jewel box to the light. “Are these real?” he asks. “Why would she buy you diamonds?”

  The smile falters on Plum’s face. “I don’t know. She’s my friend.”

  “My friends don’t give me diamonds.”

  “It’s too much, isn’t it?” realizes Fa.

  Plum chews her lip, feels something recoil inside. By rights she should rush to Maureen’s defense — Maureen who understands her, who respects her opinions, never treats her like a baby, doesn’t laugh off and forget what Plum says — yet oddly her instinct is to conceal her instead. “I have a new dress too,” she says. “A blue one. I bought it with my babysitting money. I saved up.” And no one queries this, or possibly even hears. The earrings are passed across the table to Justin, who considers them impassively and remarks, “At least they’re something you can pawn.”

  Plum retires early that night, having spent some time alone with the briefcase, holding each item in her hands. Rattled by the questioning of the diamonds and the lie about the dress, she requests of the objects, “Share your strength, share your strength. Today and tomorrow, share your strength.” And although she does indeed feel some strength moving through her like soup, it’s only when Maureen comes into the garden, and Plum sees her lovely face and hears her reassuring voice, that her certainty returns, brawny as concrete — as if Maureen is a thousand times more powerful than the objects, and all that Plum really needs.

  She goes to bed cleansed, having smeared methylated spirit on the marred parts of her body. Her bed has fresh sheets on it; in the corner, where she can see them, sit the roller skates and The Films of George Romero. Balled in her blankets, Plum is cozy with the sense that things have finally become good. Thirteen and all its bad luck is behind her. Fourteen will be the best.

  Her guests arrive at four o’clock. Bowls of Twisties and Maltesers are waiting for them in the den. Sophie’s gift is a little carousel. When a knob is turned, the skewered horses parade and a tinny “Edelweiss” plays. Victoria gives a fountain pen, which feels too classy for anything Plum would write. Caroline gives her an umbrella printed with quavers and treble clefs. Plum does not mention that she already owns an umbrella. The girls sit in the den, trying on Plum’s earrings and admiring the new dress, stroking the crimps baked into Victoria’s snowy hair. They talk about the essays they’re working on, the nuisance of younger siblings, and whether or not Plum should be ashamed about the antique furniture. But all this is only killing time, and nothing important is said. They know they are waiting for Rachael, Samantha and Dash. Until these arrive, the party can’t begin.

  They knock on the door just as Plum is starting to feel stretched and panicky. “It’s Dash’s fault!” caws Samantha, and Dash says, “It’s Sam’s fault!” The gift in Rachael’s hands attracts buzzing attention: no present has ever been the wellspring of so much plotting and whispering. When it’s passed into Plum’s ownership the girls gather around the coffee table, shuffling close on their knees. The gift is small, as bumpy as a criminal’s cranium, and the wrapping paper is not secondhand and creased from another present, but crisp and new. Plum peels the tape off carefully as the friends exchange lightning glances. “What is it?” asks Caroline, as though it’s obvious to everyone but her. “Shut up,” says Samantha. “Just watch.” Plum folds back the paper, and there, lying in the cup of golden wrapping, is a tube of mascara, a pot of blue eyeshadow, a compact of blusher and a canister of lipstick. “Wow!” Plum lifts a pleased face. “Thanks!”

  “It’s for when you’re a model.” Samantha smiles creamily.

  “Told you you’d need it,” says Dash.

  “We thought you could start practicing now —”

  “Even though you’re already such a goddess,” injects Dash.

  “— and then, when you’re in magazines, you’ll remember us.”

  “Rach! Aria will be too famous to remember us!”

  The smile clings leech-like to Plum’s face. She cannot let it fall. The merest hint of weakness will begin the unraveling of the day. She knows how to lessen the impact of hurt: pretend it isn’t happening, that the words aren’t said and the deed not done. “Thanks,” she says again, and when her hand closes around them the cosmetics knock together as richly as yachts. “That
’s great.”

  “That’s mean.” Caroline looks across the coffee table at Rachael, Samantha and Dash. “You’re mean.”

  “It’s not mean,” corrects Plum. “It’s great.”

  Samantha plucks the lipstick out of Plum’s fist, pulls the cap with a pop. “If Aria’s going to be a model, she better start practicing now. Pucker, Aria.”

  So Plum, on her knees, is forced to make a ridiculous face, her mouth a tight circle while the lipstick is scuffed from lip to lip. The cosmetic feels like wet soil as it’s applied, and smells reptilian. Although the process is quicker and without pain, it is strangely worse than her ears. There’s nothing about it that is courageous, there’s only Samantha’s gigantic fingers and Plum’s cravenness, and the silence that descends on the five witnesses. There is her party, already spoiled, and the realization that, at fourteen, nothing will change. She won’t tell Samantha that, this close, her face is as hairy as a fly’s; she won’t squeeze the lipstick like butter in a fist, or jump to furious feet. She will let them treat her how they like, because the alternative is worse. “There,” says Samantha. “How’s that?”

  Sophie tips her head. “Oh, she looks pretty.”

  “She does!” Victoria laughs marvelously. “Aria, you do!”

  “It doesn’t look super-good,” Dash tells Plum.

  “I think it does,” says Caroline. “You look like a model, Aria.”

  The door opens, and the friends look up like daisies: but it is only Mums wheeling in the drinks table, on which sits a vat of ginger-beer punch. “Hello Mrs. Coyle,” chorus Samantha, Rachael and Dash. “Thank you for having us.” They help themselves to scoops of punch while Mums tops up the Twisties bowl. Plum sees her notice the lipstick on her daughter’s mouth, sees her keep the observation to herself. As soon as the door closes and Mums is gone, Samantha asks like a whipcrack, “Are your brothers home?”

  “Cydar is. He’s in his bungalow. Justin is at work.” Plum had been aghast when he’d driven off that morning, though he’d promised and vowed and sworn to be home in time for dinner. She has walked near the park, and his car wasn’t there, which has given her hope that he has told the truth. “He’ll be here later.”

  Rachael elbows Caroline. “Caz wants to marry Justin.”

  The pale girl shies backward. “I don’t! As if I do!”

  “You do! You said you do! You want to have a wedding cake with a little plastic Justin and a little plastic Caz. And you and Aria can be sisters-in-law —”

  “Sammy! Shut up! All I said was that he looks like a nice husband!”

  “Yeah — your nice husband!”

  “How do you know what a nice husband looks like?”

  Caroline flails. “You can tell! You can! It’s that look, like he’d paint the house —”

  “Paint the house!” The words force the friends to the floor, six dissolving witches. They laugh because they’re sure they know everything able to be known and life holds no further mystery for them, not even about things they haven’t yet known and will not know for years — first touch, first defeat, nights shared, days forgotten, mistakes made, words unsaid, the saying of too many words. The heaviness of success, the gray valleys of loss, the clay feet of love, the greediness of time. Plum laughs because she can, it is so extremely funny; and because when they’re laughing at Caroline they are not laughing at her. Yet deep inside, a knot of disquiet ties up in her. Justin won’t marry Caroline — but other things will happen, and they will make Plum’s life, and Plum will have little choice about some of them, and no choice at all in many. She claws at the flank of an armchair, feeble with laughter; but life has turned to look over its shoulder at her, and life has the look of a dragon. When no one is watching she drags her wrist across her tacky lips.

  They lie for a while side-by-side on the floor, beached on their unrolled sleeping bags, talking about songs and the lead singers of bands, about teachers and which ones have been made to cry, about the state-school boys who throw the private-school girls’ bags onto the tracks at train stations. They talk, of course, about Rachael’s Youth Group leader, whom some of the friends are beginning to hate. “This is boring,” Samantha says suddenly; and they all recognize it then, as if boredom has a bad smell, and Plum is mortified. “Let’s go to your room, Aria. We’ll do some more modeling.”

  Plum must clamber to her feet. “OK!”

  Noisily they carry their glasses of punch and the bowl of Twisties upstairs. Plum’s bedroom is large, but the seven girls seem to fill every inch of it — they bump against the furniture, reach for the same item, squeeze past one another to look out the window. Their voices collide like clashing colors, crowd like balloons against the ceiling. Everything Plum owns is exposed to their slab-sided scrutiny. When she was young, last year, last month, Plum had loved showing off her bedroom to her friends; now, hedged into a corner as her clothes are inspected and the radio turned on, as her porcelain cats are tortured and the photographs turned to where the light will fade them and the teddy bears are made to attack, she feels awful, strangulated. This room is her, her one place in the whole world: but, “What’s this?” her friends are asking, demanding as seagulls. “Where’d you get it? How much was it? Why did you choose that color? What’s so good about that? Can I have this? I had one of these. It broke, so I threw it away.” And because defending the toys and the record albums and the brand-new jeans and her first pair of baby shoes would dangerously expose their preciousness, Plum can only stand in the corner, apologizing and disowning, barely coherent and grinning.

  Samantha’s big head is in the cupboard. “You don’t wear peasant skirts, do you? They make your bum look huge, you know. Before you buy clothes, Aria, you should ask my advice.”

  Victoria is tilting novels out from the shelves. “Can I borrow one of these? Or all of them? I’ve got nothing to read.”

  Rachael is peering into the mirror, dotting Plum’s acne cream on her spots. “I’ve tried this stuff before,” she says. “It doesn’t work.”

  Caroline is sprawled across the bed. “You’ve had that poster of kittens since you were little, haven’t you, Aria?”

  “Only a few years.” The elastic around the bib of Plum’s dress is beginning to feel tight. When she shifts it, she sees it has carved a blazing line into her flesh. “Since I was ten.”

  “Probably time to take it down,” says Dash. “Kittens!”

  Sophie is trying on the roller skates, tightening the white laces at her ankles. Everyone knows Sophie can ice-skate and ride horses, and learned gymnastics for seven years. The skates fit her perfectly, and she stands and spins about. “Can I take them outside?”

  “OK!” The word bumps up, lurching Plum from the wall. “Hey, everyone, that’s a good idea, let’s take the skates outside —”

  “Shh!” says Victoria. “Listen!”

  Like a herd of deer they lift their heads and look toward the door. There’s a man’s voice laughing somewhere below them; suddenly, a man’s feet coming up the stairs. It is Justin, home. The girls swivel to Caroline: “Now’s your chance!” Samantha hisses. “He’s here, you can ask him! Wedding bells, wedding bells!” And Caroline, yowling with terror, drops from the bed and scrambles underneath it even as Justin appears in the doorway, as tousled and vital as an Olympian. His elegant face, his long legs, his twinkling eyes and baby-sweet smile eclipse completely the ugly bottle-shop polo shirt with its gallivanting bottle of beer. “Hello,” he says, and the appeal he radiates could loosen planets from their rotations. “Hi, old Plummy.”

  “Hi Justin.” The friends hunker into themselves. Plum says, “Hi,” so casually.

  Her brother slouches in the doorway, nudges a lock of hair from his eyes. “What’s been happening?”

  “None of your business. We’re taking the skates outside.”

  “Ah.” He glances around, and Plum realizes that he’s lost for words, is swamped with panic on his behalf. Then he notices the roller skates on Sophie’s feet, and, in
a moment that scores into Plum’s heart unforgettably, he says, “Be careful, Soph. You could break yourself on those things.”

  It’s like a slap with a rose: everyone is jealously and absolutely stunned not by the fact that he so clearly knows her name but that he actually shortened it. Sophie, red in the cheeks, mumbles, “I’ll try not to.”

  “Good.” Justin searches the forest of staring faces for his sister. “So everything’s fine? Anything I can do?”

  “No.” Plum has regained a cocky equilibrium — indeed, she’s soaring. Probably nothing in the world is as wonderful as Justin. “You can go away, that’s what. Shoo.”

  “All right. But I’ll be coming back later for birthday cake, remember.”

  “Bye, Justin.” Her friends are a zombie chorus, immobile while they listen to him walk down the hall. Plum teeters, destabilized by reflected glory. Samantha turns and asks almost pleadingly, “Does he have a girlfriend?”

  Dash gasps at the audacity. “I don’t think he’d like you —”

  “Shut up, Dash, I’m only asking —”

  “Lots of girls like him,” says Plum solemnly.

  Caroline’s legs are kicking as she caterpillars out from under the bed — Victoria jumps sideways to avoid a flying foot. Gathering her limbs she sits up, blinking and splotched with dust. “Your husband’s gone,” Rachael tells her, “but he’s coming back later for birthday cake.”

  Caroline, though, is looking at Plum. She unfurls a spidery hand and asks, “Plummy, what’s this?”

  Later Plum will wonder why she didn’t hear the familiar chock chock of the briefcase latches springing open. While Justin had lounged in the doorway, the whole room had seemed to roar — but not so loudly that she shouldn’t have heard the sound of the coming catastrophe. Perhaps a warning would have made no difference, or even made things worse; but how fragile power must have been, how feeble must have been happiness, to have disintegrated so inaudibly, like crumbs dropped from a height.