by Justin D'Ath
When he reached the top of the pool, Wolfgang picked up an ice-cream stick and flicked it out onto the water’s tilting surface. That was against regulations, too, but it was one of the hardest rules to enforce – human nature seemed to demand that you throw something in, just to see it carried down the slope. Tourists, particularly those with video recorders, came halfway around the world to witness the miracle for themselves. Wolfgang had even seen pilgrims surreptitiously dropping things in. The stick floated away from him, its small, broadened shadow sliding along the bottom of the pool four lanes over. He looked at the girl. She still hadn’t moved. Her dog lay beside her, its head rested on its crossed-over paws. Wolfgang slipped off his sneakers and T-shirt. He pushed his keys into the toe of one of his runners, then entered the pool by one of the ladders, careful not to make a splash. The water was blood warm – too warm, really, to be refreshing. Rolling onto his back, Wolfgang closed his eyes and, like a tourist, allowed himself to be carried softly down the incline.
It took about two minutes to cover the fifty metres to the pool’s low end. The padded edging brought him to a gentle stop. He opened his eyes and dropped his feet to the smooth painted concrete below him.
‘Good boy, Campbell,’ the blind girl said.
Wolfgang’s heart lurched. She was barely three metres away, standing partway down the wheelchair ramp with her dog in its leather harness. She wore bathers, a blue one-piece with a sewn-in nylon skirt that barely reached the top of her thighs. Surprisingly, she didn’t seem as overweight in her bathers as she did fully-dressed. Rather than fat, she looked rounded. Womanly. Wolfgang held his breath and backed slowly away from her across the pool. The opportunity to reveal himself had passed. He should have said something immediately, now it was too late. The dog, Campbell, watched him with what seemed to be a frown rumpling the loose skin between its eyes.
‘Okay,’ the girl said, feeling along the water’s edge with her toes. Her thighs and forearms were prickled with goose bumps even though it wasn’t cold. ‘Okay,’ she repeated, and released Campbell’s lead.
Stooping, her arms outstretched, the girl shuffled down the ramp into the pool. When the water came up past her knees, she bent right forward and plunged her face beneath its glass-clear surface. For two, three, four seconds, she held her face under. Her long red hair floated around her head like a halo. Wolfgang found himself holding his breath as she must have been doing, and hoping, despite his scepticism, that it would work – that the pool would cure her. Five, six, seven, eight seconds passed. Campbell, behind her on the ramp, began whining. Finally, after about fifteen or twenty seconds (Wolfgang had stopped counting) the blind girl lurched upright. Blinking and gasping, pushing the dark ropes of hair off her face, she turned and looked straight at Wolfgang.
He nearly gave himself away then, nearly asked was she cured? could she see? but the girl spoke first.
‘Shit!’ she said.
Wolfgang’s heart raced with a warring mix of disappointment and relief. Disappointment that he hadn’t been witness to a miracle, relief that she couldn’t see him. And he was surprised, for no logical reason, that a blind person would swear.
She swore again, though more softly this time, and with the air of someone who was beyond disappointment. Then she turned and shuffled back up the ramp to her dog.
Wolfgang breast-stroked slowly, his head above the water, all the way to the high end of the pool. It was hard work, the slope was against him, but he was a strong swimmer. He was breathing heavily nonetheless when he climbed the four-runged ladder. Shaking the excess water off himself, he used his T-shirt to dry his hair. His shorts were dripping wet. For a moment he considered going into the men’s changing sheds, then shrugged, removed his shorts and wrung them out on the grass at the end of the pool. Nobody was there to see him – nobody who could see, anyway, Wolfgang thought as he pulled his shorts back on.
Thirty metres away, near the fence, the blind girl had already slipped her dress on over her wet bathers and was scrabbling about on her hands and knees for her shoes. Her movements seemed clumsy, hurried. Were those tears Wolfgang saw on her cheeks, or was it simply the run-off from her wet hair? Her mouth was small and pinched as she tied her shoelaces. Stuffing her towel into her backpack, she took hold of Campbell’s harness and made her way quickly to the entrance.
It was only after she had gone that Wolfgang saw the raffia hat lying on the grass beneath the tree. Pulling his sneakers on, he ran to get it and hurried out through the gate, but already the girl and her dog were on the other side of the road, halfway to Acacia Street. He looked down at himself – no shirt, wet shorts, laces undone – shrugged, put the hat on his own damp head – it was a surprisingly good fit – and went back in to close the pool.
4
Wolfgang dropped the hose on the driveway and peered in through the Range Rover’s grille. The butterfly’s wing was stuck to the radiator. An eggfly? He released the catch and lifted the bonnet, exposing the radiator and its unexpected gift. It wasn’t the blue-black wing of a male eggfly, he saw straightaway – there weren’t any spots. And it was the wrong shape. The way it curved and narrowed towards its tip reminded him of a jay. The colour was wrong, though. How many butterflies were black?
Biting his lower lip, Wolfgang tried to peel the wing gently from the radiator. But it was stuck there, moulded to the sharp metal gauze, and his fingertip came away dusted with a powder of microscopic black scales. Take it easy, Mulqueen. Don’t wreck it. He hurried inside and returned with his plastic tweezers and a yellow specimen envelope. Positioning the envelope just below the wing and using the flattened point of the tweezers like a blade, Wolfgang slowly, painstakingly, worked it loose.
‘What are you?’ he whispered, his neck tight with excitement as he carried his prize inside.
Fifteen minutes later Wolfgang’s mother found him in his bedroom, a magnifying glass in one hand, a pair of tweezers holding the black wing in the other, and eight butterfly books – several of them open – scattered across his desk.
‘Weren’t you going to wash the car, Wolfgang?’ asked Sylvia Mulqueen.
‘I’ll do it in a minute,’ he said without looking up. There was no match for the black wing in any of his books, and nothing remotely like it in the display cases that lined his bedroom walls. Was it – could it possibly be – a new species?
‘We’re leaving for church in a minute,’ his mother said in the rising, faintly querulous senior citizen’s voice that so irritated him lately. ‘You aren’t even dressed yet.’
Wolfgang glanced at his watch. Damn! He placed a jar upside down over the wing and reluctantly stood up. ‘I didn’t realise it was so late.’
‘Hurry and get changed,’ Sylvia said. ‘Your father’s already in the car.’
Leo Mulqueen drove even slower than usual. He was probably doing it on purpose. If they missed the start of mass, he would blame Wolfgang for making them late. Silly old grump.
‘I’ll do the car when we get home.’
‘Do what to the car?’ asked Leo.
Wolfgang sat in the back seat gazing out the window. It would have been almost as quick to ride his bicycle. ‘Wash it,’ he said tiredly.
His father said nothing and Wolfgang’s thoughts returned to the black wing. He asked, ‘Did either of you drive out of town during the week?’
‘I did my rounds as usual.’
‘You retired four years ago, Dad.’
Sylvia lowered her sun visor and surveyed her thinning grey hair in the small mirror attached to its rear. ‘Your father and I went to Maryborough on Wednesday.’
Maryborough was forty minutes drive away. They could have hit the butterfly anywhere between the two towns. Wolfgang tried to visualise the route in his mind, searching for a likely habitat.
‘Estelle lives in Maryborough,’ Leo said.
Sylvia nodded. ‘We had afternoon tea with her. It was her seventieth birthday.’
‘Why didn’t you remind me?’ The
old man sounded peevish.
‘It’s all right, Leo. We drove over and visited her.’
‘When was this?’
‘Last Wednesday. I baked a cake and we took it over there.’
They pulled up beside the line of parked cars in front of the church. It was three minutes to eleven and little Father Nguyen stood at the top of the steps greeting people as they went in. He saw them and waved.
‘Who’s that?’ Leo asked suspiciously.
‘Father Nguyen,’ Sylvia said. ‘He’s our new parish priest.’
‘What happened to Father Frazer?’
‘He went to another parish.’
Wolfgang sighed in the back seat. He’d lost count of the number of times his parents had had this same conversation. ‘Dad, we’ll be late.’
His father changed gears and reversed deftly into a parking space behind the Westons’ Kombi. Apart from a tendency to crawl along on the shoulder of the road at forty kilometres per hour, the old man had lost none of his driving skills.
‘Seventy,’ Leo said, stepping out of the Range Rover and carefully locking the door behind him. ‘I can remember the day she was born.’
Sylvia leaned over and removed the keys from the ignition. ‘Thank you for being patient with him, Wolfgang,’ she said softly. ‘He finds it terribly humiliating.’
St Pius Church was octagonal, the pews arranged in four wide rows that formed a semi-circle around the altar. Wolfgang and his parents always sat on the right hand side, two or three rows from the back. Because the floor was dished, sloping down towards the sanctuary, and because Wolfgang was half a head taller than anyone around him, he had an unimpeded view of most of the congregation.
He saw the blind girl straightaway. She was standing in the third or fourth row from the front on the opposite side of the church. Her lips moved as she joined in the opening hymn. It surprised him to see her at mass. He’d never noticed her there before. She didn’t seem the church-going type. The way she talked. The cigarettes. Her age. Across the width of the church, she looked younger than she had yesterday. Almost his age. Wolfgang trawled his eyes slowly around the church. Apart from the Westons – and the eldest, Caitlin, wasn’t there again – he and the blind girl were the only teenagers in the congregation.
Wolfgang considered approaching her after mass and telling her he’d found her hat, but quickly dismissed the idea. She was with a prim-looking blonde woman – her mother, presumably – and Wolfgang felt awkward about introducing himself. The mother would make assumptions, much as Michael Hobson had the previous day. You might have a chance with a blind one, hey? Besides, if he introduced himself, he would have to introduce his parents as well.
As soon as they arrived home, Wolfgang disappeared into his room and closed the door. Even his mother seemed to have forgotten his promise to wash the car. He sat down at his desk and lifted the jar off the black wing.
‘Lepidoptera Mulqueen,’ he said softly.
5
For the first time in the three-and-a-half weeks that Wolfgang had worked at the pool, the blind girl wasn’t there. He didn’t give her absence much thought. It was the black butterfly wing that preoccupied him. He had almost called in sick that morning, simply so he could be at home when Dr Karalis answered his email.
It was December twenty-first, the longest day in the year. And the slowest. Wolfgang must have looked at his watch a thousand times before – finally! – the display showed six o’clock.
He rode home in a hurry, pedalling all the way, and went straight to his bedroom. He switched on the computer. But when he went online, only spam came up in the messages box. There was nothing from Dr Karalis. Wolfgang’s shoulders slumped. He opened the ‘Sent’ box and re-read his email to the scientist; then, just to be sure, he sent it again. Clicking on the attachment, he brought up the scanned image of the black butterfly wing he’d made the night before. Enlarged four times, it filled half the screen.
‘Check your emails, Doctor Karalis,’ Wolfgang muttered at the computer.
Sylvia was in the kitchen making a rice salad. She looked up and smiled when Wolfgang came out of his bedroom. ‘I thought I heard you come home. How was work, darling?’
‘Okay.’ He took a glass from the draining rack and filled it from the cold tap. ‘Were there any phone calls for me today?’
‘I don’t think so. Have you asked your father?’
As if he’d remember, Wolfgang thought. He gulped down the water and refilled the glass. He was still hot from his ride. ‘I was kind of hoping Doctor Karalis might have rung.’
‘The butterfly man?’ Leo said behind him.
Wolfgang turned and saw his father standing in the doorway. ‘Did he ring, Dad?’
The old man pulled on one of his over-large ears. ‘Not that I recollect. Have a look on the pad near the phone – I might have written it down.’
Wolfgang slipped past him into the hallway to check the message pad.
‘Anything?’ his father asked.
‘Nothing,’ he said. And there were no messages on the answering machine. ‘Dad, have you got a minute? There’s something I’d like you to look at.’
He led the way to his bedroom. It was more than a day since he’d found the wing and he couldn’t keep it to himself any longer.
‘What do you make of that?’ Wolfgang said, a tremor in his voice – seeing the enlarged image of the black wing on the computer screen was enough to make his heart rate increase.
Leo spent some moments studying the image. Butterflies were the one thing he and his son had in common. Or did have in common, before he began losing his memory.
‘One of the crows?’ the old man asked finally.
Wolfgang shook his head. ‘It’s too black, don’t you think? And look at the shape of it.’
‘Yes ... yes. Very much like the ... like the ... what do you call them?’
‘The jays?’ Wolfgang suggested.
‘No, no, no, no,’ his father said impatiently. ‘None of the jays are black. Are you colourblind?’
‘I was talking about the shape.’ You silly old fool! Wolfgang almost added.
‘The shape. Yes. It’s very much like the ... what do you call it?’
This time Wolfgang wasn’t going to help him. ‘I thought it might be a new species.’
‘A new species? Good heavens!’
Wolfgang sighed. Why had he bothered? ‘I don’t know for sure if it’s a new species, Dad. I only found it yesterday.’
‘You found it? But here it is on the ... um ...’ Leo waved a hand at the screen.
‘Computer,’ Wolfgang said. ‘I scanned it. It’s like taking a photograph,’ he said tiredly, explaining it for the hundredth time. He opened a drawer and brought out a small cardboard box containing the wing on a bed of cotton wool. ‘Here’s the original. It’s a little battered. I cleaned it up a bit on the screen.’
His father held the box in his lump-jointed fingers. He adjusted his glasses. ‘Is there a hind wing?’
‘No, that’s all there was. I found it in the radiator grille when I went out to wash the car yesterday.’
Leo set the box on the desk beside the keyboard. He turned on his son. ‘You didn’t wash the car!’ he hissed, a bubble of spittle forming in the corner of his lips.
‘I started to,’ said Wolfgang, ‘but –’
‘Do you think, boy,’ his father shouted him down, ‘that just because I’m forgetful, you can ignore whatever I say?’
6
The next day there was still no response from Dr Karalis. Wolfgang considered phoning him. He went as far as dialling Directory Assistance, but as soon as the recorded Telstra voice asked, ‘What name please?’ he hung up. He and the scientist had only ever been in touch via email. In any case, Dr Karalis was probably on holiday. That would explain his silence. It was only three days until Christmas, a bad time to have discovered a new butterfly. Assuming it was a new butterfly. Most likely it was a variant colour phase of another species, a j
ay after all.
Don’t get your hopes up, Wolfgang warned himself. You’ll only be disappointed.
7
The blind girl wasn’t at the pool again on Wednesday. That was three days in a row. During his lunchbreak, Wolfgang took her hat to Mrs Lonsdale’s office.
‘How do we return lost property to people?’ he asked.
Mrs Lonsdale looked up from the romance novel she was reading. ‘You can make an announcement over the PA, if you like.’
Wolfgang was terrified of the PA. He would start lisping for sure. ‘The owner isn’t here today.’
‘Then put it in the lost property box.’
He rotated the hat by its brim. ‘I thought maybe I could take it round to her place after I knock off.’
‘That’s up to you, I suppose.’
‘I don’t know her address.’
Mrs Lonsdale gave him a quizzical look.
‘She’s got a season pass,’ he explained.
‘Ahhh,’ Mrs Lonsdale said, eyebrows raised. She put her book down and swivelled her chair around facing her computer. ‘What’s the young lady’s name?’
Wolfgang blushed. ‘I don’t actually know her name. It’s that blind girl – you know, the one who comes with her seeing-eye dog every day?’
‘B-A-B-A-C-A-N,’ Mrs Lonsdale said, her fingers tapping the keyboard. She waited a moment, then read from the screen: ‘Audrey Babacan, 16 Ironbark Place. Would you like me to write that down?’