Butterfly

by Sonya Hartnett

  Turning from the tanks, he checks his memory against a piece of paper that lies on the desk. On the sheet, in Cydar’s compressed hand, is written a list of species. Alongside each species is a quantity and a price. Near the bottom of the page a final sum is underlined. One species has been crossed out and replaced with another, and there are places where his pen has hesitated, his gaze lifted to survey the tanks and their inhabitants: but Cydar is happy with his final decisions. The prices add up to a bruising amount, the list of species to sparsely-filled tanks — but the aquariums, like the world beyond the glass, have always been places of change.

  Stepping back to the tanks, Cydar combs a net through the water with practiced sweeps, pinning two clown fish into a corner. They are released into the nearer of the two white-lidded buckets that stand at Cydar’s feet, where they join hatchetfish, angelfish, oscars and mollies. Against the white plastic, the creatures are dazzling. Laying aside the net, Cydar counts the collected animals quickly, checking them against the list. He hesitates at the sight of the lionfish — then clamps down first one lid and then the other, buckling the catches tight.

  Justin had said he would help carry the buckets, but he hasn’t appeared; time shouldn’t be wasted, however, so Cydar takes a bucket in each hand and walks stiff-legged through the jungle and down the driveway, to where the Holden is parked. He’d supposed his brother must be in the bathroom preening, and is somehow even more annoyed to find him sitting behind the steering wheel of the car. He pulls open the passenger door, glares sourly across the seats. “I thought you were going to help,” he says.

  Justin only looks at him briefly. “Get in.”

  The sound of the Holden’s engine wakes Plum, who has slept in. She lies blinking into her pillow, groggily unsure what the morning means. What returns first is the sense of doom that has dogged her all week. Today will be another miserable journey inside her skin. Today she might feel the twang of the last lines that tie down her endurance, and she’ll blow away. Then she remembers her resolution of the previous afternoon, her vow to stop fighting to make right what has gone wrong, her decision to live a small still life within the safe walls of this house. The outside world will be alien and perilous, but her home will be sanctuary.

  And then, in a flash, she realizes it is Saturday — Saturday morning, no less, the best corner of the week. Plum feels a huge wearied thankfulness that makes her curl up into a ball. She’s always wished to be one of those girls for whom school is as fun as a carnival, and the weekend a suffocating lull: but she has never been that way, and now she can stop trying to be. Abandoning all her ambitions might prove, Plum discovers, a relief.

  It is only a week since the birthday party, but although there’s still horror in recollecting the day, the day itself seems long gone, a distance stretching through blackness. During the great length of time between then and now Plum has attended to none of the things that seemed important in the days leading up to the party. She has not sluiced her ears in methylated spirit, nor conscientiously rotated the studs. The pain of infection having abated, she’s almost forgotten about them. Now she reaches up, unsure what to expect. She twitches her lobes and probes the earrings, and the tiny diamonds feel ugly to her fingertips: but the studs turn easily in their holes, and do not hurt. That her ears have healed seems a victory — Samantha and Rachael and Dash could wound her, but they couldn’t kill her. And the important thing is this: they won’t get the chance to wound her again.

  She hears her mother, downstairs, calling out something to her father — the newspaper is not in the kitchen but still out on the lawn. Plum decides that, if it doesn’t rain, she’ll take her roller skates outside. Since Sophie pulled them from her feet, Plum hasn’t worn her birthday present, and the skates stand scuffless against a wall. While the Holden isn’t in the driveway she can practice spinning and gliding, and staggering and collapsing. It won’t be a graceful sight, but she doesn’t need to worry. No one who sees her wobbling will use her ineptitude as a weapon, or spread a warped description that becomes the perfect truth.

  The Holden reminds Plum of something else she has neglected: she hasn’t been worrying about Justin’s lost job. Probably he’s driven off to leave the car parked in that out-of-the-way street and then spend the day wandering, constantly checking his watch. Cydar has told her not to interfere, and she hasn’t; but she should have been worrying. Justin is the best thing in her world: it’s important — it’s a thousand times more important now — that he be all right. Among the few good things that survived the party, nothing must go wrong.

  Maybe, if the rain stays away, she will ask to borrow David, and take him to the park. After all the torments of this arduous week, it would be nice to feel again the harmony her heart felt that day she took the child to the playground.

  Plum stretches her legs, folds her hands on her belly. Her stomach doesn’t feel quite as lumpen as usual — almost definitely, she’s getting thinner. If she walks to the park, and then roller-skates, that will be exercise. But she could unpick her bicycle from the junk in the shed, and ride it around after dinner. She could stop eating raspberry tarts, and start eating vegetables. She could read Charles Dickens instead of Dolly, and watch documentaries instead of horror movies. She won’t ever return to church, but she could aspire to be pure — not so much the girl on the cover of magazines, but the one that poets write poems for, the one whom wild animals don’t fear. She could give herself a new name to match this self: Waterlily, or FlyFree. She could show Rachael and Dash and Samantha that she’s above them, like a star.

  Only yesterday afternoon Plum had resigned herself to being a clod of earth: this morning, she is a star. The electric clock-radio flips its numbers with a tiny click of metal against metal, reminding her that Saturday morning is already half-gone. Fa should have brought her breakfast by now, crooning, “Plummy, Plummy” to wake her. His dereliction stirs a growl of umbrage — but then, with Waterlily’s wisdom, Plum sees the world from an aspect other than her own. She has kept her bedroom door tightly closed all week. She has borne an air of misery that the slightest word risked making worse. The unexpected result of her estrangement is this: no breakfast in bed. In leaving her uncatered-for, Fa is trying to help his daughter in his own, cack-handed way.

  Plum rolls upright, puts her feet to the floor. “Time to get up,” she tells the posters, the ornaments, the teddy bears. Time to get up before everything that’s still good feels unwanted, like breakfast, and ends.

  SHE CAN’T BELIEVE that the girl comes to her. She’s spent all morning considering ways of dealing with this situation — mostly, the difficulty of maneuvering past the girl’s closed window and drawn blind. When the doorbell rings Maureen rushes to answer it, thinking it might be Justin although she hasn’t heard the return of the Holden from wherever he went with Cydar; yet she’s habitually hopeful, and thus disappointed. The girl, however, is the next-best thing, a problem overcome; and through the girl, she melds to him. “Aria!” she cries. “I thought I’d lost you!”

  Plum’s cheeks, already pink, stain pinker. She’d hesitated at the foot of the Wilks’ porch steps, assailed yet again. Plum knows that Maureen had come to the house on the night of the party, and that she had been turned away: so Maureen must know how badly the party had failed. Seeing Plum, the first thing Maureen would think was, All your friends left you. She wouldn’t think it out of unkindness, but because it was a fact. Mortification had loomed up from the ground, Plum had almost turned back . . . but avoiding this meeting forever would mean Rachael and Dash and Samantha had stolen Maureen just like they’d stolen Sophie. She had gritted her teeth, pressed her thumb into the bell. “I know!” she says now. “It’s been ages!”

  “Come in,” says Maureen. “We’re just finishing lunch.”

  Plum steps into the house, and the very perfect smell of it embraces her like nurse’s arms — it occurs to her that the Wilks house, rather than her own, is the safest place in her world. Rachael has never k
nocked on its door, Dash does not know its telephone number, Plum’s protected by Maureen’s sophistication, which could wither Samantha like salt on a slug. She follows her friend into the kitchen, where David is perched on a stool, his hands attached as little anchors to the tiled counter. He’s wearing denim overalls and a blue velour jumper, there’s a plate of chewed crusts on a saucer before him. “Daddy?” he pipes, and Maureen says, “No, it’s Aria.”

  “Hi, Davy.” He’s like seeing water after sand. “I was wondering if you’d come to the park with me? Play on the swings?”

  The boy, deer-eyed, shakes his head. “I’m waiting for Daddy.”

  “Daddy’s not here,” says Maureen. “No daddy today, I’ve told you. Aria will push you on the swing. Coffee first, Aria?”

  “Yes please,” says Plum; David looks to his plate without comment. Plum takes the stool beside him and watches her neighbor moving around the kitchen, filling the kettle and placing it on the stove, opening a packet of Butternut Snaps. Maureen is fluid, like a ballerina, in everything she does. A tight-fitting turtleneck jumper shows how lean and long she is. It seems wrong that something so lovely is stuck here, in this ordinary place, a nugget of gold underground. Her husband is hardly home to admire her; in the whole time Plum has been taking notice, no visitors have come to her house. Yet unlike Fa, who has everything worth having yet is still somehow sad, Maureen seems content with what she has, and Plum is glad. If she were unhappy, Maureen might leave, and sitting at the counter Plum tastes, with shock, how frightening this would be. She needs Maureen as much as, maybe more than, she needs her mother and father. Her throat thickens: “It’s nice to see you,” she says, and must stop.

  Maureen glances over a shoulder. “It’s very nice to see you too, Aria.”

  Plum nods too many times, chews on her empty mouth. “I’m thinking about changing my name,” she blurts. “To Waterlily. Or FlyFree.”

  Maureen laughs. “Awful! Like a feminine product. Don’t you dare. Have faith in yourself. Just be who you are.”

  “But being who I am isn’t good . . . ”

  “Naming yourself Waterlily won’t improve things, believe me.”

  “Waterlily is a frog’s name,” David opines.

  Plum looks at him, and croaks like a frog, and the child chuckles, and his chuckling fills her with pleasure, so Plum croaks again. They giggle and croak while Maureen makes the coffee, and when she takes a seat opposite Plum with the mugs and a plate of biscuits between them she says, “Shush, you two! This is a house, not a pond. How has school been, Aria?”

  She asks it as if she’s ignorant of everything — Plum knows it’s a chance to tell the truth or to duck it, and that the choice is hers. How childish she’ll appear to Maureen, if she chooses wrong. She looks down into the circle of coffee, says, “Well” and “It’s been . . .” and stops both times, her fingers dithering around the mug’s handle. Her mouth tugs, her nose creases. When she lifts her head, Maureen must see the torment in her eyes: Maureen does see, and knows how surely she’s won. “Not very good,” Plum groans. “You can imagine.”

  Maureen moves a hand across the counter to rest two fingers on the girl’s arm. “I can imagine, Aria,” she says, “because I remember what it’s like.”

  Plum’s lip trembles. “It was all just — silly —”

  “The worst things usually are. Silly, and murderous.”

  The girl nods slackly, without looking up. She goes to speak but can scarcely breathe; then tries again, dredging up muddy words. “All my friends hate me.”

  “Hmm. Well, that happens sometimes. But you’ve never been absolutely sure of those girls, have you? You’ve never really liked them.”

  “But now they hate me!” Tears leap the brink and skid down Plum’s cheeks — she hits them away forcefully. Her resolution to be star-like has crashed to earth already. She wants to have friends, even friends whom she doesn’t like and who aren’t always nice to her: having even those friends was better than being outcast and alone. She isn’t strong or unconventional or stupid enough to survive this, she is going to die, she would rather be dead than live amongst the shards of this life. “They won’t talk to me,” she weeps. “Everyone’s whispering about me. No one’s going to be my friend.”

  Maureen doesn’t say, Don’t be silly. She says, “Whatever you did that caused this, you are still a good person, Aria. Don’t let them make you think that you aren’t.”

  An ursine noise comes from Plum —“hunuh!”— as if she’s been knocked over. Tears flood down her cheeks, more tears than she’s ever cried before. The prospect of recounting what happened at the party makes her feel bilious, makes the tears flow faster and brews another hunuh in her chest — yet she must tell, she’s committed to telling, because otherwise the story will grow in her stomach like the hair-and-toothed tumor she once saw on TV. She needs someone to take the horror and hammer it into laughable particles which can be swept away. “Tell me what happened,” Maureen prompts. “Maybe things aren’t as ruined as you imagine.”

  “They are!” Plum’s face crumples, and while David concentrates on the countertop and Maureen watches through eyes soft with concern, she wallows without caring that her face looks ugly and that her nose is blowing bubbles: she wants to cry, she has a right to cry, she’s only fourteen and her life is ended, and she might have bawled all afternoon if Maureen had not said, “Aria, stop now. Crying fixes nothing, and you’re scaring David.” And her reluctance to frighten the little boy makes Plum sniff her desolation back into her head, makes her wipe her wet cheeks and soppy chin. “Sorry, Davy,” she sighs, “it’s all right,” and the boy shoots a glance at her, deeply unsure. It isn’t all right, but Plum has come too far to retreat. Her eyes roll around miserably until they fix on the tea towel folded over the oven rail. If she had other personalities, like Sybil in Sybil, she could make one of them tell the story; instead she must tell it herself, glaring at the tea towel with terrible eyes.

  “I took some things from my friends. Not expensive things — little things. A yo-yo, and a penny, and a tiny glass lamb. A broken watch — that was Rachael’s. An Abba badge that belonged to Dash. A charm bracelet from Sophie — it was her lamb, too. A jade necklace — not a fancy one. I was keeping them in a briefcase underneath my bed. At my party, they found the case.”

  “Ouch!” says Maureen. “I bet that took the fizz out of the lemonade.”

  The girl glances up shyly. “They were really angry.”

  “I’m sure they were! I’m sure they were delighted by the chance to be angry, too. I assume you had a reason for taking these things?”

  Plum’s gaze swings back to the towel. “It’s hard to explain.” Her mouth pinches, and tears spill again. “I thought that if I had these objects where I could see them and touch them and — sort of — influence them, I might make things different — I could make myself important, and they would want me to be their friend, they’d be proud that I’m their friend, and I wouldn’t be so — kind of — weak all the time. I could be — sort of — in charge, sometimes. Or at least — not always on the bottom.”

  Maureen smiles around the mug’s rim. “I think you’ve been watching too many voodoo movies in the middle of the night.”

  Plum swallows hard. “I guess. It was stupid.”

  “It wasn’t stupid. It’s not a crime to want respect. You shouldn’t be ashamed of that. Perhaps you went about trying to get it the wrong way, that’s all.”

  The unfairness of the world rises up in her throat. “I didn’t even want the dumb necklace! I didn’t want an ugly badge or a broken watch or any of that junk! I just — needed —”

  “I know,” soothes Maureen. “I understand. You needed secret weapons. But you knew it wasn’t going to work, didn’t you? You know you can’t change things just by touching a penny. All you’ve done is given your friends an excuse to make you more unhappy than they were already doing.”

  The girl’s eyes leap to the woman’s face, despera
te for the wise words that will return light to her world. Maureen lets her thrash in darkness for a drawn-out moment before announcing, “You’re better off without them, Aria. They’re no loss to you. You are a loss to them. They’ll understand this one day, but then it will be too late because we don’t go back, we don’t forgive. School will be a difficult place for you now — but it’s always been difficult, hasn’t it? You’re strong, and you’ll just have to get stronger. And you’ll always have me, Aria. If it’s any comfort, I promise I will always be your friend. No matter what you do.”

  The relief is so tremendous that a moan is pressed from Plum. “Thank you,” she sighs. Then laughs wheezily: “I’m always saying thank you to you.”

  “You needn’t. I’ve told you before: I’m glad we’re friends.”

  “You don’t think I’m awful?”

  “For stealing from your friends?” Maureen takes a Butternut Snap from the plate and breaks it into parts. “Do you think you’re awful?”

  “Only a little bit. Not much.”

  “I agree. I think you’re naughty, but I don’t think you’re awful.”

  Naughty makes Plum chuckle. She takes a biscuit, sits straighter, pulls a funny face at the boy. Her eyes are drying, her heart is buoyed: to Maureen she confesses, “I was scared to tell you. I thought you’d hate me.”

  “I’m honored you told me. It shows you trust me.”

  “I do trust you!” A speck of Butternut Snap jumps to the counter. “I’d rather have you as my only friend than have ten of those others!”

  “Thank you,” says Maureen. “And I trust you. Shall I tell you my secret, in exchange for yours?”