by Justin D'Ath
‘It’s standing right beside me.’
‘Don’t talk crap.’
‘She was here this morning,’ Michael said, ‘looking for you.’
Wolfgang stopped what he was doing. ‘Really?’
‘It was me she talked to. When I told her you weren’t here, she turned round and marched right on out of here.’
‘Did she have her dog?’ Wolfgang asked, carefully protecting what he held in his hand from the wind.
Michael leaned forward to see what he was holding. ‘No, she had a white cane. What’s that you’ve got there, Hulk?’
‘A butterfly wing.’
‘Pretty ugly butterfly,’ Michael said. ‘Or is it just black because it’s wet?’
It was a forewing. Wolfgang’s initial reaction was to assume it was the same wing he had found on the radiator of the Range Rover – the wing his father had twice stolen – until he looked closely and realised it was a left wing. The lost one had been a right wing. Were they a pair? Could they have come from the same butterfly? It would be a huge coincidence, but it was possible.
As soon as he arrived home Wolfgang measured it with his vernier and compared its dimensions with those of the first specimen, carefully recorded in his field notebook. The second wing was larger by 2400 micrometres from its base to its apex, and 1400 micrometres broader. Different butterflies. Which meant, counting the complete specimen his father had caught, there had been three of them. Three black butterflies in two weeks. They were quite common. So why had nobody ever seen one?
Wolfgang searched the whole house for the other wing – including all the rubbish bins – but found nothing. His addle-brained father, of course, could remember nothing about it. Not that it mattered now. Wolfgang had a whole butterfly to show Dr Karalis on Monday, as well as the wing he’d found today at the pool. It was more than enough to prove to science that a new species had been discovered. By me, Wolfgang thought. He would be part of history.
46
Thursday was the second hottest January day on record. In the north of the state the temperatures soared to almost fifty degrees. New Lourdes recorded a maximum of forty-five. The dust storm had passed but the day was so hot that those who came to the pool could only stay out in the sun for short periods of time. Most crowded beneath the sun umbrellas or in the thin strip of shade along the east side of the changing sheds. The spot beneath the peppercorn tree, where Audrey usually lay, was a thicket of bodies and limbs. But no Audrey, again. Wolfgang wondered how she was. How Campbell was. But he wasn’t going to phone her. It was up to her to make the next move. She owed him an apology after the way she’d behaved the other night: for stopping speaking to him and then barely saying goodnight before she went inside. For not kissing him. That was twice now that Audrey had flipped out for no apparent reason, and both times it had happened when they’d gone for walks at night. Nocturnal. Sees angels. She was a nut case. More trouble than she was worth, Wolfgang had told himself repeatedly over the past few days. But he kept waiting, hoping, praying for the phone to ring.
Mark Cowan and Steve Taylor arrived late in the afternoon. Steve flashed a season pass then slipped it back below counter-level to Mark.
‘I saw that,’ Wolfgang said.
Mark held up the pass anyway. ‘How was your Christmas, Wolfman?’
‘Bit slow. How was yours? I thought you were at the beach.’
‘Came back on Tuesday. Didn’t want to miss Stevo’s party.’
‘What party?’
‘It’s for my brother,’ said Steve. ‘He’s going back to Singapore on Sunday. Want to come?’
‘Sure. When is it?’
‘Tomorrow night.’
‘Do I need to bring anything?’
‘It’s BYO drinks. Do you reckon you could score a bottle of Jack Daniel’s?’
Wolfgang frowned. ‘Won’t your parents be there?’
‘Course they will.’ Steve gave him a toothy grin. ‘But how are they to know what a guy’s got in his Coke?’ he asked innocently.
After Steve and Mark had gone in, both without paying (Wolfgang knew the pass belonged to Steve’s little sister, Merri), Wolfgang worried about the Jack Daniel’s. He had never bought alcohol. He might look twenty years old, but he felt sixteen. If he went to a bottle shop he was sure he’d be asked for proof of his age. All they would do was refuse to serve him, but Wolfgang wasn’t willing to risk the embarrassment of being turned away. There was enough embarrassment in his life already – thanks to his cleft palate, thanks to his geriatric parents. So he was left with only one option.
There wasn’t any Jack Daniel’s in his father’s liquor cabinet, but Wolfgang found an unopened bottle of Dimple Scotch Whisky right at the back. Not bourbon, but it would have to do. He slipped it into his backpack, along with a large bottle of Coke he’d bought on his way home from the pool, then set off on his bicycle for Steve Taylor’s place.
He was the first guest to arrive. Mrs Taylor directed him to the garage where he found Steve and his father breaking bags of ice into three eskies. Steve’s thirteen-year-old sister, Merri, was sitting cross-legged on a plastic chair with a black and white puppy in her lap.
‘Wolfman!’ Steve greeted him. ‘Got anything that needs chilling?’
‘Just some Coke,’ Wolfgang replied. He hooked it out of his backpack, careful not to reveal the whisky. ‘Hullo, Mr Taylor.’
‘Good to see you, Big W,’ said Steve’s father. Mr Taylor was their soccer coach and sometimes umpired school basketball tournaments. ‘Steve tells me you’re working at the pool these days.’
‘Just for the summer.’
‘I envy you on a day like this. Apparently it reached forty-eight.’
Wolfgang had heard forty-five, but he didn’t correct him. ‘I don’t actually get to swim,’ he said.
‘What? I’d go to my union if I were you,’ Mr Taylor said lightly. He popped a piece of ice into his mouth and crunched on it. ‘You do look a bit hot. Been working out?’
‘I rode my bike here.’
‘Phew! Get yourself a drink, champ.’
There was a crate of beer glasses on the end of the trestle table beside Merri’s chair. Wolfgang filled one with Coke. ‘Cute puppy. How old is he?’
‘She,’ said Merri, who was a fuller-lipped, slightly slimmer version of her older brother. ‘She’s eight weeks. We got her for Christmas.’
‘What’s her name?’
‘Audrey.’
‘Audrey?’ Wolfgang echoed, feeling the heat rise in his face.
‘Dad’s idea.’ Merri rolled her eyes dramatically towards the corrugated iron ceiling. ‘He named her after some old film star from about a hundred years ago.’
‘Audrey Hepburn,’ said Mr Taylor. ‘And for your information, Miss Smartypants, she was still making films in the sixties.’
‘That’s nearly a hundred years ago.’
Wolfgang waited for someone to say something about Audrey Babacan, but the moment passed.
‘Hey Wolfman, let’s go inside,’ Steve said to him.
They made a detour through the kitchen where Steve took a can of Pepsi from the fridge, then the two of them went to his bedroom. As soon as the door was closed, Steve reached for Wolfgang’s backpack. ‘Let’s see what you brung, pardner.’
Wolfgang showed him the Dimple. ‘It was all I could get,’ he said apologetically.
Steve broke the seal and sniffed from the big rounded bottle. ‘You did good,’ he said. He took his can to the window, pushed open the flywire and poured a stream of Pepsi into the thicket of hibiscus growing just outside. Then he topped up his can with whisky. ‘We’s gunna have us a party tonight!’
‘When’s Cowie getting here?’
‘Shouldn’t be too long.’ Steve watched Wolfgang drink off half of his Coke to make room for several generous fingers of Dimple. ‘That stuff’s top shelf, Wolfman. Where’d you score it?’
‘The old man donated it.’ Wolfgang sniffed his drink, then took a sm
all mouthful. Powerful! ‘I think they gave it to him when he retired. It’s been sitting in the cupboard ever since. I figured we’d better drink it before it went off.’
Steve raised his can in a toast. ‘To your old man.’
‘To my old, old man!’ Wolfgang said.
It was easier if you joked about it.
The other guests didn’t begin arriving until nearly nine o’clock. Most were friends or former classmates of Steve’s twenty-four-year-old brother, Darryl, who worked for a bank in Singapore and had been home on two weeks holiday. There were a few adult relatives as well. Wolfgang, Steve and Mark – and Merri, who had attached herself to their group once Audrey, the puppy, had been put to bed in her basket in the laundry – were left largely to themselves. They had claimed the small gazebo at the edge of the lawn. It was unlit; no one could see them. Only twenty metres from the open garage door, they were having a little party of their own. Whenever they needed another drink, they simply slipped in to the kitchen for another can of Pepsi, then to Steve’s bedroom to top it up with Dimple. By nine-thirty they were becoming quite reckless. On his most recent trip inside, Steve had poured the remainder of the whisky into Wolfgang’s empty 1.25 litre Coke bottle and smuggled it out under his T-shirt.
‘It sucks that you don’t have a pool,’ said Mark, topping up his Pepsi can with whisky.
Steve blew softly into his own can, producing a low, mournful wail. ‘We had a pool at our last house.’
‘Not much good to us tonight, Stevo.’
‘Have you got a pool, Wolfsiegang?’ asked Merri. On three occasions over the past hour she had sworn solemnly to her brother that she was drinking nothing but straight Cola, but Wolfgang was beginning to wonder.
‘I don’t have a pool,’ he said, taking great care to enunciate each word slowly and clearly, ‘but I work at a pool.’
This made them all laugh, so he repeated it. It was even funnier the second time.
Merri gripped his arm. ‘You should be working tonight, Wolfsiegang.’
‘The pool’s closed.’
‘I know. But if it wasn’t.’
‘If it wasn’t ...’ he said slowly, thinking it through. ‘If it wasn’t closed, I wouldn’t be here.’
They all laughed again. Steve was first to recover.
‘Neither would the rest of us,’ he said.
‘Why not?’
‘Because we’d all be at the freaking pool, wouldn’t we?’
Mark held his T-shirt away from his body and flapped it to circulate the air between it and his bare skin. ‘I can’t remember it ever being this hot.’
‘Forty-eight degrees,’ said Steve.
‘Forty-five, actually,’ Wolfgang corrected him.
‘Jeez, listen to the scientist!’
‘I’m not a scientist,’ said Wolfgang, thinking of Dr Karalis.
‘You’re a piss artist.’
‘So are you.’
‘Chill out, guys,’ said Mark.
‘How can we chill out,’ asked Steve, ‘when it’s forty-eight degrees?’
‘Forty-five,’ Wolfgang said.
‘Forty-eight.’
‘Forty-five.’
‘Forty-eight.’
‘Forty-five.’
It became a competition, then a joke.
‘Anyway,’ someone said when the giggling had died down, ‘it’s cooler now.’
‘Doesn’t feel cooler,’ said Steve.
Wolfgang raised his can to his mouth and was surprised to find it empty. ‘I’ve got a key to the pool,’ he heard himself say.
‘Have you got it with you?’
He reached into his pocket for his key ring, then remembered he’d removed the bright orange master key a few days earlier. He didn’t want to be seen with it when he opened his locker at work. ‘It’s at home.’
47
His mother had left the porch light on, but otherwise the house was in darkness. Wolfgang congratulated himself for being so quiet as he felt his way along the hall towards his bedroom. It proved he wasn’t drunk (a drunk person would be noisy). Only when he had closed the door did he turn on the light (a drunk person would have turned it on first). He looked around the room. Nothing had been moved. But just to make sure, he carried the chair over to the wardrobe, climbed carefully onto it and checked in the suitcase. The black butterfly (his beautiful black butterfly) was still there. Wolfgang stepped down from the chair with great precision, without so much as a wobble (a drunk person would have lost his balance and fallen). He was fully in control. Fully in control but confused. What was he doing here? He’d come home to get something. The pool key! he remembered. Mark and Steve were meeting him at the pool. Wolfgang removed his shorts and kicked off his boxers, then hunted around for his bathers. He had to sit down on his bed to pull them on. His reflection grinned at him from the mirror on the back of his wardrobe door. ‘Boo!’ he said to it. The scar on his lip glistened pink beneath a sheen of perspiration. He should grow a moustache. I will grow a moustache, he thought, pleased with the idea. Then no one, not even Audrey’s sister, would question his age.
The orange key was in his bottom drawer, pushed inside a pair of balled-up football socks. Wolfgang threaded it back onto his key ring. When he tried to slip them into his pocket, he discovered his bathers were inside-out. It made no difference – they had no pockets anyway. Should he bring a towel? He was being very meticulous about this. Very sober. (He wasn’t drunk.) The other two had drunk most of the whisky anyway, and Merri as well. One bottle of whisky between four of them – it wasn’t really a lot. Not enough to make them drunk. Now ... what was he looking for?
‘Over here!’ Steve called softly. Wolfgang freewheeled his damaged bicycle – click-scrape, click-scrape – over to the three dark figures that had emerged from the trees at the edge of the car park. It confused him that there were three of them. ‘I thought just you and Mark ...’
‘Merri wanted to come, too. What took you so long?’
‘Ran over a cat.’
Merri gasped. ‘Was it hurt?’
‘Who cares about the frigging cat?’ Wolfgang said. ‘Look what it did to me!’
He leaned his bike against one of the trees and held up his grazed right arm. It was too dark to see the extent of the injury, but judging from the pain it was pretty bad. Without warning, Wolfgang’s knees buckled and he staggered heavily into Mark.
‘Hey, careful man!’
‘Thorry. I better thit down.’ He lowered himself onto the concrete kerbing at the edge of the car park. ‘Woh!’ he said, turning his neck experimentally from one side to the other, then blinking his eyes to clear his vision. For a moment – perhaps half a second – everything had turned black.
The others stood around him, a fence of legs against the lights across at the pool entrance.
‘Are you okay?’ asked someone – a girl.
‘Yeah.’
‘Are you sure?’
Steve’s little sister, he remembered. Merri.
‘Be all right in a minute. Just give me a minute, okay?’
‘Can’t hold your drink, Mulqueen,’ Steve teased him.
‘I wondered who hogged all that whisky,’ said Mark.
Their voices seemed to come from a great distance away.
‘It’th not that,’ Wolfgang said, speaking slowly and carefully. He still felt strange. ‘I think I landed on my head when I came off my bike.’
‘Can you stand?’
‘Think tho.’
Mark and Steve helped him to his feet. They supported him, one on either side.
‘You’ll be okay as soon as you get in the water,’ he heard Mark say.
‘Did you bring the key?’ asked Steve.
‘It’th in my backpack.’
‘Where’s your backpack?’
‘On my back.’
‘No it isn’t.’
‘Here it is,’ said Merri, picking it up off the ground.
With Steve and Mark taking most of his wei
ght, Wolfgang limped slowly across the shadowy car park towards the pool entry. His head felt clear now but his grazed arm felt like it was on fire.
‘Th-tupid cat ran th-traight out in front of me,’ he said. ‘I wath halfway down Lithgow Road, on the steep bit. Wham! Went right over the handlebarth.’
‘Poor cat,’ Merri said behind them.
‘Cats are tough,’ said her brother.
‘Anyway,’ Mark said, ‘it’ll still have eight more lives to fall back on.’
‘Hey, nobody worry about me,’ said Wolfgang.
‘You?’ Steve gave a little snort. ‘You’re just drunk.’
‘I am not. Anyway, I’m okay now. I can walk on my own.’
They released him and Wolfgang shuffled the final few metres to the pool gate unsupported. Whatever had come over him had passed. Inside the gate, a row of three fluorescent tubes in protective wire cages shone down from the ceiling of the covered entryway. Lit up by their light, Wolfgang felt exposed and vulnerable as he crouched over his backpack searching for the keys. Anyone driving along Millar Street would be able to see them.
‘Woh!’ Steve said suddenly, causing Wolfgang to jump. ‘Look at his helmet!’
‘Hooley dooley!’ said Mark.
‘What about my helmet?’
‘It’s totalled, man!’
Wolfgang reached up to undo his helmet, but his fingers wouldn’t cooperate. ‘Will thomeone give me a hand?’
‘Man, you’re totally wasted!’ Mark giggled.
‘Am not. I hardly had any compared to you guyth.’
It was Merri who crouched down and carefully unclipped the helmet’s chinstrap. ‘Lucky you had it on,’ she said.
Wolfgang thanked her and removed the helmet. He watched his hands bring it down into view. They didn’t seem to be his own hands. Neither did the helmet look familiar. Mark hadn’t been exaggerating: a large section of the red and black plastic covering had been shredded, exposing a fist-sized triangle of badly scored polystyrene imprinted with an acne of pebbles and tar.
‘How’s your head?’ Mark asked.
Still kneeling on the hard concrete, Wolfgang ran his fingers gingerly through his sweaty hair. There was a slight throbbing behind his eyes, but that was probably from the whisky. ‘Feelth okay,’ he said. Then he added, to make a joke out of it, ‘Apart from the thpinning.’