Pool

by Justin D'Ath

  Go down a bit, Wolfgang would have told it had he been able to speak moth. The bottom half of the window’s wide open.

  He watched, one-eyed, for several more seconds, then slowly lifted his head clear of the pillow. The moth’s wings were large, nearly the size of a female gum emperor’s, yet its body seemed slight in comparison. And the way it moved was unusual, too – rather than the heavy, bustling flight characteristic of most moths, this one beat its wings in a slow, almost relaxed manner. It looked more like a ...

  Wolfgang swung himself upright on his bed and grappled for the lamp switch, nearly knocking his clock radio to the floor. When the light came on, an involuntary exclamation escaped his lips. Wolfgang sprang towards the window.

  ‘Stay there!’ he whispered. ‘Stay where you are, please!’

  What happened next seemed to happen in slow motion. As Wolfgang’s outstretched fingers reached the wooden sash and began to slide it down, the large black butterfly that had been fluttering against the upper window pane launched itself away from the glass, brushed past his face so close he felt the wind from its wings, wheeled down between his arms and disappeared out into the semi-darkness.

  The sash slammed shut, cracking the glass from bottom to top.

  Wolfgang swore loudly. He slid the window back open and thrust his head out. Elsie was barking again, stupid damn dog! He shouted at her, angrily this time, and the dog fell silent. Wolfgang strained his eyes out into the early dawn. It was no good; he could barely see the fence, much less the butterfly – the black butterfly. He needed the torch. Where was it? He’d brought it back from the cemetery, hadn’t he? Aha, here it was on the floor beneath the window – he must have dropped it coming in. Its battery was low. The dull orange beam barely penetrated the dark space between the fence and the house. Not that Wolfgang expected the butterfly to be there any longer; it would have flown up – up towards the sky. After a few more seconds, Wolfgang switched off the torch and leaned forward on the windowsill, defeated. He’d had his chance. There had been a live black butterfly in his bedroom and he’d allowed it to escape!

  It was incredible to see a live one at last. And in his bedroom!

  Wolfgang remembered something then, and in the grip of a half-formed idea he reversed too quickly in through the window and bumped his head – clunk! – on the sash. The blow caused him to bite his tongue and drop the torch onto the paving outside.

  His panic was for nothing. The other black butterfly, the dead one, was still on his desk where he had left it last night. Of course it was. Had he seriously expected it to have miraculously come back to life, freed itself from its strips of paper and pins, and flown out the window? Get real, Mulqueen! You’ve been spending too much time with Audrey.

  ‘Holy shit! Can’t you knock?’

  ‘Mind your language,’ his father said mildly. He stood midway between the desk and the doorway, one hand holding the front of his pyjamas closed. Wolfgang had no idea how long he’d been there.

  ‘You scared me half to death, Dad.’

  ‘There was a noise.’

  ‘I ... my window was stuck.’

  The old man shuffled past him and slid the sash down, then up, then down again in its rattly wooden frame. ‘It seems perfectly all right to me.’

  ‘I guess I freed it up,’ Wolfgang said lamely.

  ‘And broke it in the process.’

  ‘It’s only a crack.’

  ‘The whole pane will have to be replaced,’ Leo said. With a fingertip he pushed lightly against one edge of the fracture and the glass made a crackling sound. ‘I thought I heard shouting.’

  ‘The Nielsens’ dog was barking. I had to yell at her.’

  ‘The Nielsens?’

  ‘Our next-door neighbours.’

  ‘Ah, yes, of course. The Nielsens.’ Leo frowned. ‘Where do they live again?’

  ‘Right there.’ Wolfgang pointed.

  They both looked at the window, where their reflections stood side by side in the glass, Wolfgang’s half a head taller than his father’s.

  ‘You know,’ the old man said musingly, ‘sometimes I think God made a mistake. He could have made us old to begin with, and then allowed us to grow younger as the years passed by.’

  ‘I don’t think I’d want to be a kid again,’ Wolfgang said.

  His father smiled sadly. ‘Would you prefer to be a creaky old dinosaur who can’t even remember who lives next door?’

  Wolfgang shrugged. He was sixteen; he was in love; a butterfly was going to be named after him. ‘God doesn’t make mistakes.’

  ‘He can be quite cruel, though,’ Leo said. He moved over to the desk and picked up the setting-tray. ‘What’s this?’

  ‘I’m not sure. I think it’s a new species.’

  ‘It’s very beautiful.’

  Watching his father admire the black butterfly, Wolfgang felt a catch in his throat. ‘You set it for me, Dad.’

  ‘I did?’ The old man raised his eyes. ‘You know, Edward, it’s peculiar. I spent most of my life caring for animals on the one hand, and killing butterflies on the other.’

  ‘You killed them because you cared for them.’

  ‘That’s an oxymoron, if ever I heard one.’

  Wolfgang marvelled that his father could forget something so fundamental as which of his sons was which, yet remember a word like oxymoron. ‘If you hadn’t caught these butterflies’ – he waved a hand at the display cases that lined the walls – ‘they’d all have died and rotted away to nothing within a few weeks.’

  ‘True enough,’ said Leo, tipping the setting-tray slightly to get a better view of the dead butterfly. ‘If this one was given the choice, though, don’t you think it would have taken its few weeks?’

  ‘I don’t suppose it really knew the difference,’ Wolfgang said.

  The old man placed the setting-tray back on the desk exactly where he’d found it. ‘But I did,’ he said softly. ‘God does.’

  55

  Wolfgang clicked the door shut behind him and lowered himself onto the padded kneeler. Even though he knew he couldn’t be seen through the small gauze-covered opening, he averted his eyes selfconsciously when the hatch slid across. Coming here was a mistake. He would never be able to confess.

  And what was the point, when he felt absolutely no remorse?

  ‘I’m thorry, Father – I ... I ... I’ve changed my mind,’ Wolfgang said, rising awkwardly to his feet.

  ‘That’s okay,’ Father Nguyen’s soft, boyish voice came through the grille. ‘But before you go, can you help me with something? I didn’t hear last night’s score from England.’

  Wolfgang paused. ‘You mean the test? Ricky Ponting got a century.’

  ‘So Australia has beaten the Pommies.’

  ‘No, Father. At least, not yet – there are still two or three days to go.’

  ‘Such a long game!’ the priest marvelled. ‘When I first came to this country, I did not believe it when they told me a match of cricket can last nearly for one week.’

  ‘Yeah, it’s pretty boring.’

  ‘You don’t play?’

  ‘Sometimes. I prefer baseball, actually,’ Wolfgang said, his fingers finding the door handle. ‘I’d better go.’

  ‘Do you play Aussie Rules?’

  ‘A bit.’

  ‘It must be difficult with that ball you use,’ said the priest. ‘I played soccer when I was a young man. We used a nice round ball – always we knew which way it would go.’

  ‘Yeah, soccer’s an okay game.’

  ‘You have played soccer?’

  Wolfgang quietly turned the door handle one way and then the other. ‘I’m in my school’s first team.’

  ‘What position are you?’

  ‘Father, there are people waiting.’

  ‘I am sure they have some prayers to say,’ Father Nguyen said lightly. ‘Sometimes when I am in here I like to hear about good things, not just the people’s sins.’

  I could tell you a good thing,
Wolfgang thought, but you’d think it was a sin. ‘I play forward flanker, mostly. On the left, because I can kick with either foot.’

  ‘Do you score many goals?’

  ‘Eighteen last season. I was equal-top scorer. Father, can I ask you a question?’

  ‘Please do.’

  Wolfgang released the door handle and leaned back against the wall. It creaked. ‘Is heaven an actual place?’

  ‘It is most definitely a place,’ said the priest. ‘But where it is, we cannot understand.’

  ‘So it’s kind of like another dimension?’

  ‘A dimension? My English is not so good, I am sorry.’

  Wolfgang stared hard at the small, rectangular grille that shielded them from each other’s eyes. ‘Could heaven be here, sort of all around us, only we can’t see it?’

  The priest chuckled. ‘You have a strong brain, I think. But no man can understand God’s mystery. We must wait until we die to know how it is.’

  ‘Is it possible to go there before you die? You know – to go there and then come back?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘What about if you died and someone brought you back to life?’ Wolfgang asked. ‘It happened to a man at the pool a couple of weeks ago. In the newspaper it said how he remembered being in heaven.’

  ‘I read about Mr Cooper,’ Father Nguyen said. ‘This is called, I think, a nearly dead experience. Psychologists have found it is dreams people have when they are thinking they will die. They wish in their brains they are in heaven, they don’t see it with their eyes.’

  But the psychologists could be wrong, Wolfgang thought. They hadn’t met Audrey. Who, anyway, saw nothing with her eyes, yet who had known somehow that Wolfgang was at the pool last night, and that he’d been wearing his bicycle helmet in the water. And who, two weeks ago and despite her blindness, had been the only person at the pool to notice Mr Cooper was in trouble – even if she’d got his gender wrong.

  ‘Maybe it’s a vision,’ he said. ‘Some of the saints had visions, didn’t they?’

  There was a deep silence. Someone coughed in one of the pews just outside the confessional – it sounded like Leo. Suddenly all Wolfgang wanted was to be out of there. Home in bed, preferably, where every other person his age would be at that hour on a Saturday morning. His body sagged against the wall. His eyelids drooped. He had only managed to get about two hours sleep before his mother woke him at eight. Way too early.

  Father Nguyen was talking again. ‘It is a beautiful gift to have visions,’ he said, ‘but sometimes, with young people especially, what they believe to be visions are actually caused by illness.’ A shadow appeared on the gauze, as if the priest was trying to peer through it. ‘Forgive me for saying this. Have you spoken of these visions to a doctor?’

  56

  Had his parents not been there, and had it not been the first anniversary of his Uncle Brendan’s death, Wolfgang would not have stayed for mass. He didn’t want Father Nguyen to see him in the church and identify him as the young soccer forward flanker he had so hastily diagnosed as suffering from schizophrenia. (For what other vision-causing illness could the priest have meant?) Wolfgang hadn’t corrected him; he hadn’t said he was talking about someone else – his friend – because he knew how lame that would sound. He had simply slipped out of the confessional without another word and retreated to the very last row in the left hand bank of pews, choosing a seat directly behind Mr Sampson, who used to play VFL football and was nearly two metres tall. After they had made their confessions, his parents had eventually joined him there. His father looked annoyed at having to sit on the opposite side of the church to where he was accustomed, but Wolfgang didn’t care. He slouched in the pew with his head down, hoping not to be noticed.

  Schizophrenia, he thought. Or, quite possibly, brain damage. Who was to say what a two-year coma could do to someone’s head? But Wolfgang didn’t care. He loved Audrey. Even if she was crazy.

  He’d made love to her.

  A large, pure-white butterfly circled him once, twice, three times, then landed heavily on his shoulder. Its powerful legs gripped him through the fabric of his T-shirt, gripped him with surprising force, then shook him.

  ‘Wolfgang?’

  He jerked his head up. No butterfly rested there, just a hand. His mother’s disapproving face hovered above him. She was on her feet, as was his father on the far side of her, and Mr and Mrs Sampson in the pew in front. Father Nguyen’s disembodied voice floated up from the sanctuary: ‘ ... a reading from the gospel, according to Saint Luke.’

  Wolfgang rose quickly from the hard wooden seat. He must have dozed off. Luckily they were in the back row; nobody apart from his mother seemed to have noticed his lapse. His eyelids were heavy, his eyeballs felt gritty from lack of sleep. He could still see, in his head, the large white butterfly that had been circling him.

  Mr Cooper, who’d had the nearly dead experience, had seen white butterflies, too, Wolfgang recalled. How had Audrey known that Mr Cooper was drowning before anyone else at the pool became aware of it? You can’t attribute that to schizophrenia, Father Nguyen.

  The gospel ended and everyone sat down again. Wolfgang struggled to remain awake. His head throbbed. He was hung-over, he supposed – the experience was new to him. Hung-over and overtired. He should have stayed home, stayed in bed. Only two hours sleep: it wasn’t enough. Not nearly enough. He had to work this afternoon. How had Audrey known? His head sagged forward; he jerked it upright again. How had she known he was at the pool last night? There had to be a logical explanation. Wolfgang had never believed in psychic powers, nor in any other kind of spiritual or paranormal phenomena. He believed in God, of course, but not in all that other mystical nonsense: astrology, the occult, reincarnation – how could any rational person take them seriously? Audrey was Catholic, she should have known better. His eyelids dragged closed. Stay awake! he told himself, forcing them open again. He didn’t believe in miracles, either – not in modern day miracles, anyway. Marceline Flavel was a fraud. Someone had paid her, either Mrs Lonsdale or the city council. Her so-called ‘miracle cure’ had brought untold wealth to the town. It was nothing but a very clever hoax. Everyone, even 60 Minutes, had been fooled. But not me, Wolfgang thought. He knew better. There was no such thing as a miracle. His arm hadn’t been grazed, he’d just knocked it. What he’d mistaken for blood was actually oil from his bike’s chain that had washed off in the pool. Everything could be explained. They hadn’t found him for five minutes because of the lights reflecting on the water. He’d been floating on his back with just his mouth and nose above the surface, unconscious but still breathing. Delayed concussion. It was coming back to him now, shadowy and half-remembered: a strange sensation of seeing things in reverse, colours jumbled like in a photographic negative. The sky was orange. His hands, desperately flailing, looked green. And the water, all around him, was pink.

  Drowning, he recalled vaguely. I was drowning.

  Yet he hadn’t drowned. He’d broken through the surface and found himself not in water but on land. Warm and completely dry. Sunlight on his skin, a bright orange sky, pink trees. And white butterflies swirling around him. Butterflies in paradise.

  Father Nguyen was wrong about everything. Mr Cooper had been to heaven and come back.

  Wolfgang woke with a start when his mother nudged his arm. Stand up, she gestured. Everyone else was standing. ‘Holy, Holy, Holy,’ their senior citizen’s voices echoed around the cavernous, mostly-empty church.

  Swaying to his feet, Wolfgang gripped the back of the pew in front of him for support and stared at Mr Sampson’s crepey, wrinkled neck. For a moment he’d dreamt the large white butterfly was circling him again. Stay awake, he told himself. Stop dreaming. In any case, it wasn’t white butterflies he should be dreaming about, it was black ones – live black ones. But Wolfgang had been so over-tired when he’d discovered it, and so over the moon about what had happened in the cemetery with Audrey – and possibly still slightly concusse
d or drunk – that he had largely forgotten the visit of the live black butterfly to his bedroom just a few hours earlier. Obviously, he thought now, its being there was not a coincidence: the dead one on his desk had something to do with it.

  The explanation came to him in a rush: phero-mones!

  Wolfgang had read about them in an article on the Internet. In few other creatures were the chemical signals that brought the two sexes together so strong as they were in butterflies and moths. When they were ready to mate, the females of some species emitted a scent that could be detected by males over a distance of up to a kilometre. Wolfgang’s butterfly, although dead, must have still contained traces of those pheromones in its body. It was these, slowly leeching out into the atmosphere, that had attracted the live butterfly in through his open window. What was odd, he thought, was that it had arrived at night. Butterflies were active in the daytime, they slept during the night.

  Wolfgang gave a start. Suddenly it occurred to him why he had never found a living specimen of the black butterfly when he’d been out collecting. And why nobody else had ever seen one. They were like Audrey – nocturnal!

  Everyone knelt for the consecration. Wolfgang knelt, too. But his mind wasn’t on the ceremony as Father Nguyen bowed over the bread and wine that was soon to become, through the mystery of transub-stantiation, the body and blood of Jesus Christ; he was thinking about the black butterfly. And a small knot of fear was forming inside him. No wonder he hadn’t been able to find it in any of his books. His books were about butterflies, whereas his discovery of a lifetime, his Lepidoptera Mulqueen, was a moth!

  57

  Wolfgang heard the phone ringing inside the house as his father fumbled to fit the key into the lock.