Margaret ran to the toilet, but was sick before she got there.
Colin listened to her patiently, his face smooth as Margaret recounted what had happened earlier. Arriving home, he had found pans boiled dry on the stove and a cut of beef reduced to clinker in the oven. His normally composed wife was in a state close to apoplexy. He stopped her over and over again to question or check something, not believing half of the story, but anxious to diffuse her anguish. When he felt he had calmed Margaret as much as he was going to, Colin picked up the stick as she had been repeatedly asking him to do. It took a couple of minutes to get his fingers on the correct holes. Afterwards, brushing the tears from his eyes, he called the police.
Two officers came to the house and listened to the stick. They were upset, bewildered; they called it in. Their superiors, following a set procedure they didn’t understand, made a number of calls and eventually, the Head of the Metropolitan Police was informed. He knew only to ring somebody unnamed in the upper echelons of the Government. That somebody knew somebody else, who understood what had occurred. His name was Mr Bank. Within two hours, he was sitting in Colin and Margaret’s lounge, drinking tea.
“It’s very rare to find these relics nowadays, especially in the developed world.” He was a tall man with big hands and a huge froth of greying beard. “But, of course, occasionally …” He gestured at the artefact that lay on the coffee table between him and the Hawthornes.
In the doorway to the kitchen, two plain-clothed officers shuffled about like unwanted guests at a party. Everyone kept glancing back at the stick, as if expecting it to speak or move or do something even more incredible.
Margaret began to speak and Colin raised a hand.
“So you’re expecting us to believe that this thing … what it sings about … that it’s all–”
“All true I’m afraid. It’s quite a shock, I know.”
“Rubbish! I’m sorry but this won’t do.” Colin’s face darkened as he leaned forward. There were so many arguments against what he was being told. He simply didn’t know where to begin. “Ten thousand years ago?”
“Yes, give or take.”
“But carbon dating disproves that in a second.”
“Yes, of course it does, Mr Hawthorne, as could a number of other scientific procedures.”
Colin turned to his wife triumphantly. “You see! Utter nonsense!”
“I’m afraid not. We as a species find and create proof all the time. Subconsciously, we make science fit. And if it doesn’t fit, we overlook it.”
“Overlook it? Somebody would realise.”
“Only when something like this happens.”
“So why doesn’t it get out?” Margaret asked.
“People forget.”
“Forget?” Colin gestured at the stick. “How can anyone forget something like that?”
They all studied it for a moment.
“I’ll come to that presently.”
“It’s all nonsense.”
“I realise it must sound that way to you. Look, occasionally we find a suitable planet, like this one. We set things up, put a population in place and move on. People then do what comes naturally. Cultural and genetic memories fill in the spaces.”
“What do you mean, ‘set things up’?”
“Among other things, we suffer from nostalgia. So we go back to a point in our history and try it all again without memory, to see if we can get it right. Little changes, however … well … it seems we are fated to repeat the same mistakes.” Mr Bank leaned back in his chair and sipped his tea. He didn’t look crazy at all. “You see, this planet will eventually wear out like all the others. It’s difficult to hold back human progress.” He smiled as if to apologise.
“My God!” Margaret whispered. “So where are we now, I mean in terms of this planet’s sustainability?” She laughed at her own question. It was all so ridiculous, like an absurd play they were practising, each one of them with their own outrageous lines to recite.
Mr Bank brightened a little. “We are doing pretty well: on the cusp of a downward trend. This is about as good as it gets.”
“Let me get this straight. This is not Earth?” Colin asked, snorting incredulously.
“No it isn’t. The original Earth was quite a bit different to this one, so I’m led to believe. Luckily, by the time we’d broken it, there was the technology to move on.”
The Hawthornes, a double act perfecting incredulity, stared at Mr Bank for a few moments. It was Margaret’s turn.
“And we just repeat it all? How many times?”
“I’m not sure to be honest: many, many times.”
“Oh God!”
Mr Bank gave Margaret a sour look for a second, as if her words, so full of disgust, were wounding him. He took a digestive from his saucer and bit off a tiny piece, chewing it slowly. “I’m sorry this has happened to you, but–”
“It appears we don’t integrate very well,” Colin remarked to his wife.
Mr Bank scratched behind his right ear. His face seemed to settle a little, the show of joviality drained from the lines around his eyes. He set his teacup back onto the occasional table beside him with a clink.
“It’s inevitable that there are casualties to indigenous species, I’m afraid.”
“Casualties? It’s called genocide.”
“Our nature is to conquer.”
“It’s an outrage!” Margaret stated. She looked at Colin for something as she always did when distressed. For the first time in their twenty-five year marriage, he came up short. His mouth worked silently, as if trying to vocalise something profound, but nothing came out. He took Margaret’s hand and they sat in silence on the edge of the sofa. Mr Bank studied them both.
“These painful memories will leave you,” he said gently, “a genetic trick we seem to have developed.”
“I don’t want to forget.”
“I know Mrs Hawthorne, but it’s for the best. I, and a few chosen others, will remember it for you.”
For a moment Mr Bank caught Margaret’s eyes and she saw the weariness there and had to look away. He rose and wiped his mouth.
“Thanks for the tea.”
“I want–”
“Can’t let you have it, I’m afraid.” He picked the stick up from the coffee table and walked briskly from the room with his escorts. Then the front door clicked shut, leaving them in silence.
That night, Margaret dreamed of a grey child with wide, dark eyes.
His world was sap green and ocean blue. He rose and fell through the sky with his siblings, emitting strangely empathic sounds. Margaret could see the songs like watercolours spreading against the clouds above.
Suddenly, the air split as bright, deafening shapes ripped through it and bruised the planet’s surface. There came a flood of pale, clumsy things that jabbered painfully and dashed here and there.
On the day he was to be taken along with his family to the factories, the grey child sang a diary and thrust it into the earth, as filthy brown smoke belched into the sky on the horizon.
Margaret awoke with a gasp. She sighed and eased back onto her pillow, breathing deeply as she studied the swirls of Artex on the ceiling. She was clammy from a recurring dream that she could never quite remember. The digital clock by her bed said 10.17 a.m.
Downstairs, she stood at the sink for a while, sipping a coffee, hugging the mug as she gazed out of the rain-slashed window at her back garden. The men from the Government had dug it all up and then re-landscaped it as she had always wanted. Apparently, a WW2 bomb had been found nearby and to make sure there were no more around, they had dug the whole street up. No expense had been spared and yet the garden gave her little pleasure anymore. She didn’t seem to have the energy for it, or the enthusiasm.
Margaret realised
the coffee was cool in her hands and flicked the kettle back on. She sat in the living room for a while, staring at the mantelpiece, watching the second hand on the carriage clock make its incremental climb and fall, following a well-worn pattern of inertia that had gripped her since the bomb had been found. What had come over her? She was so scared all the time and she was … well, sad – infinitely and crushingly sad, and she didn’t have the faintest idea why. And yet there was something, something she couldn’t quite get a fix on that was skirting her consciousness like a shark circling her as she trod water in the darkness. She had given up her job, her independence and was just waiting for the teeth to finish her. Whose teeth?
She decided to clean the under-stairs cupboard. At the back, between a Scrabble box and an old sewing tin, she found a shoebox with a piece of A4 taped to the side. It said, READ ME! The papers inside were in her handwriting. The top sheet had one line:
Last read on October 21st 2008 – Maggie Hawthorne.
That was last week: impossible. She went to the sheet underneath.
Firstly, your breakdown was not caused by a late menopause and there was no bomb scare. You found something …
The words ran into the darkness behind her eyes.
When Colin came home from work she was standing by the barbecue with a large sheaf of papers in one hand and a box of matches in the other.
“Are you okay, love?”
“No, I think I’ve lost my mind. I found these papers, five sets of them, hidden around the house.”
He put down his bag and read the papers, holding her hand gently. “You’re right, Maggie, I think it’s for the best.”
She turned to him, her eyes like clear, glistening stones, too large for their settings. “Is it?”
He took the papers from her and put them on the grill. Margaret watched them curl and wither and as the heart of them took hold, a gush of smoke went up into the grey sky. She wanted to inhale all that smoke, all that terrible knowledge, and keep it within her, so she could look upon it sometimes and try to make sense. But it drifted away like whispers on the wind.
Margaret sat down on the sofa and tried to picture the Home Office man who had apparently come to see them: Mr Bank, wasn’t it? She laughed out loud. Colin came through chewing the last of his sandwich, the Daily Mail in his hand.
“What’s funny, love?” he asked.
“Oh nothing really. Is there anything interesting in there today?”
He looked at the paper a little sheepishly. “They’ve made a new find in Egypt: an emperor’s tomb. It dates back almost four thousand years, they say.”
“Who do?”
“Well … Egyptologists. It’s a change from hearing about that bloody black butterfly anyway. They still haven’t found the boy you know, after that fiasco in New York.”
“Well, I’m a believer … in the butterfly I mean. It makes you think that anything is possible.”
Colin turned to the sports pages and grunted. “It’s all a big con. Stories only he can read that disappear after he’s read them … How convenient.”
She flicked on the television when Colin had gone back to work. This Morning was just finishing. A pet clairvoyant was telling the owner of two shih tzus that they weren’t happy with the new suits she had bought for them or the new food she had introduced to their monographed bowls. They were, she said, very stressed and needed a pampering weekend at a Canine Health Spa. Phillip Schofield looked nonplussed and the lady owner looked mortified at how she had let her babies down. She promised to do something about the trauma she had caused and was close to tears as the camera pulled away from her.
Margaret turned the television off. She cried for an hour without knowing why and then went to prepare dinner. As she fumbled around at the back of the freezer, searching for a bag of chicken breasts, her hand came up against something hard and flat underneath them. She pulled the mysterious item out and stared at it for a moment. It was some ice-furred papers. Margaret brushed some of the ice crystals off and saw her own handwriting, and her heart fluttered. She had the strangest feeling, a mixture of déjà vu and black fear, and almost put the papers back into the freezer, but curiosity and a growing feeling of excitement changed her mind. She closed the freezer door, placed the brittle sheaf on the breadboard and waited for it to defrost.
The Piecrust Promise
Adam stepped into the meadow and closed the door behind him. He held his hand over his eyes for a few moments as they adjusted to the sunshine and began walking through the pasture, relishing how the long grass licked cool and sharp at his shins. Above him, swallows criss-crossed the cloudless blue. He rolled his shoulders as he moved, sighing with contentment; it was so good to feel the sun on his back again. A dense wood lay half a mile ahead of him, still seeping mist like some primordial landscape. He increased his pace.
A young woman was sitting at the edge of the treeline on a crude bench. She had her back to Adam and did not notice him as he approached. She was wearing a white, lace-trimmed dress with a red cummerbund and a white, wide-brimmed hat. A patch of dry dirt in front of the bench was holding her attention and her feet, clad in white, leather sandals, kept darting out to stamp at it. She stood with a growl of exasperation and began jumping up and down, throwing her arms around and grunting with emphasis every time her feet hit the ground. It was a petulant, childish act and Adam found it incredibly attractive.
“There!” she said triumphantly, delivering one final stamp.
“You look beeyootiful, Mary Poppins,” Adam declared.
The woman gave a startled yelp and spun around to face him. Her hand skipped to her chest. “Oh my God! Don’t do that! I nearly had a heart attack.”
Adam put down the picnic hamper. “Sorry,” he laughed. “You jumped a mile.”
“It’s not funny! Feel my heart.” She grabbed his hand and went to put it to her chest, but thought better of it and let it go again. “Never mind.”
Adam looked down at her feet. “What were you doing anyway?”
The woman sighed and readjusted her lace hat. “Killing ants … Killing time really.”
“Are you going to a fancy dress party or something?”
“No, I always dress this way.” She gave him a sharp look and sat on the bench with a sigh, smoothing her dress underneath her. “I’m going to fry in this thing.”
Adam sat next to her, quite close, and she didn’t shuffle away. “That’s my favourite film,” he said, pointing at her dress.
“It is? Mine, too.”
“A bit early to be going to a party, isn’t it?”
“Ha, well, I was going to meet my boyfriend, have a few drinks first and make a day of it, you know?”
“Sounds a good plan.”
She got to her feet again. “But the thing is, he’s a …” Her face clouded over for a moment. “… pinga. I mean dickhead. Is that right?”
“Er, I’m not sure.”
“Doesn’t matter.” She shook her head and smiled. “What the hell’s up with me? Anyway, I don’t really want to be with him today.” She rattled on for a couple of minutes then, telling Adam that this Phil had once cheated on her with her best friend, Chloe, how he never took her anywhere and how he always humiliated her in front of his friends. It all came out of her in a torrent of expletives and rhetorical questions and then abruptly dried up.
They sat in silence for a few seconds.
“So … are you going to the party or not?” Adam asked.
The two of them burst into laughter. The woman undid the ribbon tied under her chin and whisked her hat into the sky. It hung in the flawless blue for a moment, before falling into the trees ahead of them.
“Oh bugger! I better get that or I’ll lose my deposit.” She hitched her dress a little and trotted towards the wood. Adam picked up her parasol and followed her in
to the cool silence beneath the trees. Narrow corridors of bluebells and pink purslane lay before him between smooth, soaring columns of beech. Countless butterflies bobbed and winked in the cathedral stillness.
“Beautiful isn’t it?” the woman said quietly as he joined her.
“Beautiful,” he agreed and held out his hand. “I’m Adam.”
“I’m Gabriella.” They shook hands with an awkward formality.
“Well,” he said, “I’m going for a picnic. Want to come?”
“You picnic alone?”
“I will be, unless you join me.”
“That’s pretty weird, going for a picnic alone. Do you have champagne?”
“Of course. Never go anywhere without it.”
“In that case, I’ll take the chance. Surely psychopaths don’t carry champagne. I’d better take that, it doesn’t suit you.” Gabriella took the parasol from Adam and set off into the wood, moving unhurriedly, as though the wood were familiar to her. He gradually fell further behind, content to watch her drifting through the trees like a lost, Edwardian ghost.
Eventually she stopped and waited for him. “You are slow,” she said as he caught her up.
“Be nice! I’ve got the provisions remember? Plus, there is still a chance I’m a psychopath.”
“Good point.”
Adam became aware of the sound of running water coming from the trees to his right. He stepped off the track, pushed through a thick tangle of low-hanging branches and came out on the other side, his face peppered with tiny welts of blood. To his right was a clear, gurgling stream, filled with long, wavy strands of harlequin-green weed. The water came down a tumble of smooth pebbles and swirled into a small pond right in front of him. He fell to his knees.
The Dreams of the Black Butterfly Page 5