Ten Sorry Tales

by Mick Jackson

  Over the next couple of days he worked through the worn-out manual from cover to cover, then went back to the start and read through it again. Some of the words were distinctly old-fashioned and he had to look up quite a few in the huge old dictionary he’d picked up in a charity shop six months before. Fortunately, the manual contained its own short glossary, where most of the technical phrases of butterfly repair were explained and by the time he’d read right through it a third, then a fourth time Baxter found that the instructions had begun to make their own strange sense.

  The book described six quite complicated procedures which, the reader was assured, would take care of the vast majority of butterfly injuries. Baxter was fairly mechanically minded, which is to say that he had repaired several dozen bicycles and replaced valves and soldered loose connections in as many wirelesses. But he couldn’t help but feel that tinkering with the wings or the insides of such a delicate creature was an altogether different proposition to replacing a spring on a radio dial.

  He cleaned all the tools with wire wool and methylated spirits and, by following the diagrams, acted out the intricate operations on imaginary butterflies, to the point where he just about managed to convince himself that he might have a hope of pulling it off. The problem was that at least half the operations contained the instruction ‘Apply sealing gum’ and every procedure concluded with the instruction to ‘administer revivifying fluid’. Applying the sealing gum seemed remarkably similar to applying glue to paper. Administering revivifying fluid seemed to consist of nothing more than pulling the cork from one of the bottles quite close to the butterfly, and watching it spring back into life. However, the jars which had once contained the ‘sealing gum’ and ‘revivifying fluid’ were both practically empty. If any butterflies were to be revived Baxter would have to get his hands on the necessary gums and fluids. Until this had been done there was no point even contemplating how to get the butterflies out of the museum and up into his room.

  ‘Lepidoctors’ didn’t feature at all in the local telephone directory and there was no sign of them in his big old dictionary. Baxter concluded that either the word was so incredibly old that it had fallen out of circulation or was so shrouded in secrecy that even the most formidable-looking books didn’t dare whisper its name.

  He had just about given up hope of ever finding the appropriate glues and fluids when he made a timely discovery. He was tugging at the leather strap which held the bottles in the lid when the silken upholstery came away in his hand. There, beneath it, on the bare wood was a printed label, which read ‘Lepidoctors’ supplies c/o Watkins and Donalds, 119, Hartley Road, London W11.’

  Baxter knew he had an old London street map somewhere but, like a lot of things, it took a while to find it. He finally tracked it down up in the attic in a stack of 1950s wrestling magazines. Baxter opened out the map on his bedroom floor and in a matter of minutes managed to establish that Hartley Road was somewhere between Westbourne Grove and Portobello Road. So, on the following Saturday, instead of doing his usual round of museums, second-hand shops and jumble sales, he took the train to London’s Paddington Station and, with his old map of London flapping about before him, followed the maze of streets to what he hoped would be the main supplier to the country’s remaining lepidoctors.

  Hartley Road itself was decidedly ordinary, with a terrace of houses down one side and a couple of blocks of flats on the other. Right from the start it didn’t quite feel like the kind of place where a boy might get his hands on butterfly remedies. As he walked along, Baxter kept an eye on the house numbers and soon noticed a row of four or five shops up ahead. When he finally stood before them his heart sank. There was a pub, a newsagent, a launderette and a chemist. The same row of shops you’d expect to find in any town. There were no shadowy doorways, as Baxter had hoped for – no intercoms into which he could conduct some whispered conversation. Nothing secretive or sinister at all.

  Number 119 was the chemist’s shop. The numbers were stencilled in gold on to the glass above the doorway. The shop window was filled with a display of boxes of hair dye. On each packet a middle-aged man with dark brown or jet-black hair smiled out at the world. This in itself was a bit of an eye-opener. Baxter was vaguely aware that some women dyed their hair, but had no idea that men were at it. It was news, but not exactly big news. Yet, Baxter had a sneaking suspicion that this might be about as exciting a revelation as he was likely to have that day.

  All the same, he was not about to go home without at least making a cursory enquiry, so he pushed the door, which set a small bell ringing above it, and by the time he got to the counter an Indian man in his fifties or sixties had emerged from behind a curtain and was there to meet him. He was a kind-looking fellow – quite thin, with a head full of wavy, grey hair. It occurred to Baxter that, with so many boxes of men’s hair dye in his shop window, the proprietor might have considered dyeing his own hair. The only reason Baxter could come up with for him not dyeing it was that he might actually like it grey.

  ‘How can I help you?’ the chemist asked Baxter.

  Baxter was finding it hard to concentrate. He kept thinking about grey hair and why someone may or may not want to dye it. He glanced up at the shelves to his left and right, as if he might find a sign for ‘Butterfly Gum’ or ‘Revivifying Fluid’, but there was nothing but toothpaste and aspirin and flu remedies, just like in any regular chemists.

  Without quite knowing why, Baxter placed his hands on the counter before him – perhaps to try and stop himself from collapsing in a faint. He leant forward, which encouraged the chemist to do the same.

  ‘I need some supplies,’ Baxter whispered.

  The chemist didn’t move a muscle. ‘And what sort of supplies exactly are we talking about?’ he whispered in reply.

  Baxter leant even further forward, so that his mouth was right up to the ear of the chemist, which was tucked away among all that wavy, grey hair.

  ‘A lepidoctor’s supplies,’ said Baxter.

  The chemist stood up straight and stared back down at Baxter as if he was completely bonkers. Baxter searched the chemist’s face for some hint of comprehension, but found nothing. In fact, the fellow looked as if he was considering calling the police. Baxter was ready to give up, but thought that as he had come all this way and had made such a fool of himself already he had nothing to lose but the last few shreds of his dignity. He reached into his jacket pockets and pulled out the two empty phials from his lepidoctor’s kit. He held them up, where there could be no mistaking them. The chemist stared at one jar, then the other. He glanced at the door over Baxter’s shoulder, pulled back the curtain and nodded his head towards it.

  ‘In here,’ he said.

  The room was not much bigger than a pantry. The shelves on all four walls were packed with great tubs of pills and boxes of sticking plasters. Without saying a word the chemist headed over to an old wooden cupboard. He took a tiny key from his jacket pocket, unlocked it and opened the doors to reveal a whole, lost world of lotions and potions and ancient remedies. Half the jars seemed to contain bits of bark or dried herbs. The rest were filled with exotic-coloured oils. The chemist took Baxter’s phials from him, looked them over and set them down on a wooden worktop.

  ‘How much do you need?’ the chemist asked him.

  Baxter hadn’t the faintest idea.

  ‘Put it this way,’ said the chemist, helpfully. ‘How many butterflies are you hoping to repair?’

  Baxter was a little taken aback to be talking so openly on the subject. He tried to picture the huge mosaic on the wall of the museum. He shrugged his shoulders. ‘Maybe a thousand,’ he said.

  The chemist raised his eyebrows and let out a low whistle, apparently quite impressed with Baxter’s plans. Then he turned back to his cupboard and lifted down a large jar of something syrupy and placed it on the counter. He unscrewed the lid and began to ladle the contents into a smaller bottle – about the size as a jam jar.

  ‘If you don’t mind
me asking,’ said the chemist as he continued ladling, ‘where did you happen to come across the implements?’

  ‘A junk shop,’ Baxter told him and imagined Monty’s horror at such a description.

  ‘That’s quite a find,’ said the chemist and screwed the lid down tight on the jar. ‘Do you know what you’re doing?’

  For some reason, the question cut right through Baxter’s defences, and suddenly all his anxieties about repairing the butterflies, which he’d done his best to bury, began to shift and turn inside him. ‘Not entirely, no,’ he said, at last.

  ‘You’ll be fine,’ the chemist told him. ‘Just stick to the manual. And don’t use too much glue.’

  He returned to his old cupboard and took down a large brown bottle, which he seemed to handle with a good deal more care than the previous one. He turned his head away as he prepared to remove the large cork which plugged the top of the bottle, then suddenly stopped.

  ‘Now, this revivifying fluid,’ he said, and faltered slightly.

  ‘You know, it’s not exactly cheap.’

  Baxter had to admit that he didn’t. ‘What’s it going to cost me?’ he said.

  ‘The sort of numbers you’ve got in mind …’ said the chemist and did a bit of quick mental arithmetic, ‘you’re talking about a hundred and fifty quid.’

  Baxter felt his jaw drop. There was no way in the world he could conjure up that kind of money. He’d just begun to feel a little confidence growing in him. Now all his hopes were dashed again.

  The grey-haired chemist could clearly see what Baxter was thinking.

  ‘If that’s a bit steep,’ he said, ‘there is an alternative.’

  Baxter said he’d like to hear it.

  ‘Menthol,’ the chemist told him.

  Baxter was none the wiser.

  ‘Just suck on a cough sweet for a couple of minutes,’ the chemist explained. ‘Then exhale.’

  He pursed his lips and gently breathed out into the palm of his hand.

  ‘Does it work?’ said Baxter.

  The chemist nodded at him. ‘Oh yes,’ he said.

  The old man popped his head back through the curtain to make sure that no one was watching, then ushered Baxter back into the shop. He took a handful of packets of cough sweets down from the shelf and packed them into a brown paper bag, along with the jar of adhesive, then totted everything up on his till.

  The whole lot came to less than a fiver. Back behind his counter, the old man looked like an ordinary chemist again. Baxter paid, picked up his bag, thanked the chemist and headed for the door. He’d almost reached it when he stopped and turned.

  ‘Do you mind if I ask you a question?’ he said.

  The chemist shook his head. ‘Fire away,’ he said.

  Baxter was having trouble putting his thoughts into words. ‘If you’ve … If you’ve never actually done it before,’ he said, ‘how do you know if you’re doing it properly?’

  The chemist thought about it for a moment. ‘It’s the same as anything else,’ he said eventually. ‘You just pick it up as you go along.’

  *

  The actual break-in took less than a week’s preparation. Baxter visited the museum on two separate occasions, discreetly investigating its every nook and cranny, then back in his bedroom, drew up plans of the layout of the building, devised a route through it and compiled a list of exactly which part of the museum he hoped to be in at what particular time.

  His biggest concern was how to transport the butterflies. He’d never actually handled one, but it was perfectly clear that if they got knocked about too much between the museum and his bedroom there wouldn’t be much hope of them being brought back to life. His first thought was to use his old cricket bag. Then he began to favour the sheet off his bed with all the butterflies gathered up in the middle. But he finally settled on a canvas rucksack he’d bought at a jumble sale the previous summer. He reckoned it was probably big enough to accommodate all the butterflies and was less likely to attract any unwanted attention out on the street. The small brown envelopes were something of an afterthought. He’d bought a giant box of them from a closing down sale in a stationery shop in January and just had a hunch that they would come in handy one day.

  On the Friday he raced home from school in under five minutes, picked up the rucksack he’d packed the night before and left a note for his father saying that he’d gone for a walk out to the rubbish dump and that he’d be back in a couple of hours. He got to the museum half an hour before closing and spent five minutes simply strolling around the place, in order to blend in with the other visitors. Then he slipped into the Gents and, once he’d satisfied himself that all the cubicles were empty, opened the broom cupboard he’d discovered on one of his earlier visits and quietly crept inside.

  As far as he could tell the cupboard had been abandoned several years earlier. Baxter had taken pity on it and as he crouched on its floor clutching his rucksack he thought he sensed the cupboard’s appreciation in being used again. At five o’clock, right on cue, someone popped their head into the Gents, called out, ‘Anybody in?’ turned the lights out and departed, leaving the door to slowly close on its spring. Baxter didn’t move for another twenty minutes. He just sat in the dark and went through his itinerary one last time. At some point he ate a bar of chocolate, to keep his strength up. Then he crawled out, like some animal emerging from hibernation, and waited patiently by the wash basins for another twenty minutes, just as he had planned to do.

  He picked up his rucksack, put his head out into the museum and listened. He couldn’t hear a thing. Then he tiptoed out into the darkened gallery and began to make his way down one of the aisles. The whole museum felt very different in the half-light. Everything was vague and unfamiliar, as if the glass cabinets might house an entirely different collection of beast and artifact to those on show during the day.

  Half-way down the aisle he stopped and pulled out the old miner’s helmet he’d picked up at Monty’s a couple of years earlier and sometimes used to read in bed. It had a torch fixed to the front, just above the peak. He had one final, good long listen. ‘Hello?’ he called out into the dark. Nobody answered. He waited another couple of moments, then turned the torch on his helmet on.

  The glass case before him was suddenly illuminated. Inside, a pair of owls sat and stared at him, rather haughtily. Baxter did his best to ignore them and as he went on his way the owls’ shadows slowly shifted, until they settled back into the dark.

  Every worn old bone and bit of broken pottery seemed to be aware of his presence and somewhat alarmed that anyone should be creeping around the place after dark. Baxter avoided looking into the cabinet which contained the handcuffs. He didn’t want to consider the consequences of being caught.

  When he finally stepped into the large white room the light from the lamp on his helmet suddenly spread and filled the place, as if he was a pot-holer who’d just come out into some underground cavern. The giant butterfly was still there – still pinned in position. Baxter tiptoed over to it. He put his face right up to one of the butterflies. Its fine black wings were laced with blue and gold.

  ‘Let’s see what we can do for you,’ he said.

  It took him a while to work out how to remove the pins without causing even more damage, but found that by sliding the nails of his thumb and middle finger under the head of each pin and giving it a sharp tug, both the pin and the butterfly came quite cleanly away from the wall. Then it was just a moment’s work to take the butterfly off its skewer and slip it into its own little envelope. He studied the first three or four. All were punctured by the tiniest holes. And as he carried on he wondered, not for the first time, if it really would prove to be possible to revive a creature that had effectively been crucified.

  After half an hour the sheer effort of concentration was beginning to make Baxter’s head spin. After an hour the tips of his fingers were dreadfully sore. By then he’d managed to prise away and deposit in their individual envelopes at least two
-thirds of the butterflies. The rest were out of reach. So Baxter set off to try and find something to stand on.

  He walked around the whole museum in his miner’s helmet without finding a single chair or stool. In fact, the only thing which looked as if it might be capable of supporting him was the old polar bear. He dragged it back and pushed its plinth right up against the gallery wall. It was about the right height and when Baxter climbed up on to its shoulders the bear’s raised paws felt as if they were holding on to his shins to stop him falling, which gave him some much-needed confidence.

  Half an hour later Baxter slipped the last butterfly into its brown envelope. All that remained were a thousand tiny holes in the wall in the shape of a butterfly, and a thousand pins scattered about the floor. The polar bear leant against the wall, apparently exhausted. When the head of the museum arrived the following morning it would look suspiciously like the polar bear had dragged itself into the snow-white gallery where it had indulged in a midnight feast of butterflies. Whatever had taken place the polar bear had clearly played some part in it, but the bear, like every other animal in the museum, was keeping mum.

  Baxter slipped out on to the street and pulled the museum door to behind him. His rucksack was full, but not too heavy. Those precious envelopes made him walk with a great deal of care. He saw himself as some sort of Postman of the Butterflies. He walked with his head up, so as not to look guilty, and everything went smoothly until he was less than a hundred yards from his house and he bumped into Mister Matlock, one of the neighbours, who happened to be out walking his dog.

  ‘Hello, young Baxter,’ he said. ‘Have you been camping?’