Butterfly Read online

  Inside the case, the objects lie buttressed in their beds of cotton wool. Plum sucks her fingers clean of marshmallow before selecting her favorite, the lamb. It’s a quaint thing, solid and see-through, with tiny black dots rendering surprisingly expressive eyes. If it were broken, the pieces would fit into a matchbox coffin. Its loss would be terrible, not least because something so powerful would be difficult to replace: but replace it she would, eventually. Perhaps with a charm bracelet, one dangling a dolphin and a cracked loveheart and a book that actually opens . . . Plum frowns, pondering. Even if the lamb remains unbroken, which it will, because it comes under Plum’s protection, there is still space in the briefcase for a charm bracelet. It could coil thornishly between the jade pendant and the Abba badge. In fact, now that Plum thinks on it, there’s no reason why the collection should not grow as large as the briefcase allows, assuming she can find enough suitable objects. She’s stopped going to church, she’s changed her name: maybe the collection should likewise evolve. The idea fills her with a blur of excitement. She imagines the briefcase packed to bursting, glowing like lava or a UFO, emitting a humming tone.

  She kisses the knickknack and returns it to its bedding. The shadow of her hand passes over the broken watch, the yo-yo, the coin. She closes her eyes and spends a moment projecting her will. “Lovely things, lovely things, I am near; see me, hear me, need me, do as I say.” If she were in a movie, there would be a pentacle painted on the floor in blood or red paint, a creaky tome opened on a stone altar, and candles burning everywhere. In a movie, her words would cause a gale to blow, send ravens cawing into the sky. All this is lacking, but Plum closes the lid satisfied, and shunts the briefcase under her bed.

  She has a bike she used to ride when she was younger: lately she feels ridiculous upon it and prefers to walk. Outside, the heat presses on her head like the muscular palm of a revivalist. She lingers at the end of the fence, where the weedy corner of Coyle lawn meets the manicured edge of the Wilks’. Bernie: that’s the name of Mr. Wilks, the man who drives the Datsun — she couldn’t remember it before. The kind of man who says, “Another week gone,” when you meet him putting out the rubbish bins. Plum hangs against the fence, picking at timber splinters. She could knock on Maureen’s door, maybe get some party leftovers; she could tell her neighbor about the lunchtime conversation between herself and her friends. “They laughed at me,” she would say, “because of what you said. You promised you’d be my friend, but then I never saw you, your door was closed to me.” The thought makes Plum push away from the fence — she is, as always, forsaken. She is like the poor bird who is stoned to death in A Girl Named Sooner, which was a made-for-TV movie, but really good anyway. She crosses the road in depressed wandering steps; then remembers, on the footpath opposite, that she is superior, that suffering makes her strong. The cult leader’s hand pushes hard on her head, but Plum ignores it. The heat is mighty, but she is mighty too.

  The suburb in which she lives is muted and leafy, tall-treed and tile-roofed. Many of its residents have survived well beyond their necessity. Although the neighborhood is her home just as her bones are her own, Plum has never learned the street names, nor the names of the gardeners she sees in flower beds, nor the names of the flowers. Once in a bluish moon, an ambulance pulls up outside one of the houses; generally, however, the neighborhood is a place of nonevent. The loudest noise comes from mynas chastising cats, and from motor-mowers. Nothing happens, there is nothing to do, but Plum has hardly realized that yet. So far, it has been enough.

  The neighborhood is served by a cluster of shops that line one side of an almost-busy road. Journeying, Plum traverses a cricket field where cricket is never played. The park hasn’t been mown for some weeks, and pink daisies dot the grass. It’s only when she is halfway across the oval that she remembers being stung by a bee while crossing this same grass wearing these same sandals one afternoon last summer. The bee, trapped between instep and sandal sole, had writhed in frenzy while Plum, screaming, had scrabbled in the grass like a broken-backed mule. The recollection makes her scan the daisies tensely, driving from her mind her usual park-induced thought, which is that she wishes she had a dog — a floppy cocker spaniel, or a bony Afghan hound. At home and at school she forgets the idea, as she would probably forget the dog. She is not really a nurturing person.

  She arrives at the shops sweating, the preacher’s hand on her head very tight and crawly, a hand which commits unpleasant sins. The shopping strip consists of a milk bar, a fish-and-chippery, an accountant’s, and a hairdresser who deals with hair as an abattoir deals with life; as well as a news agency, which Plum enters. She wanders the length of the greeting-card rack until she reaches the party invitations. A poor or a daggy person might make her own invitations, but Plum is neither of these, so she needn’t go to that trouble. After some indecision, she selects the dancing silhouettes of There’s going to be a party! over the cavorting cavies of Party’s happening! There are twelve cards in the box, so she will be able to make mistakes and give a spare to herself, as a joke.

  Her fourteenth birthday. Her fifteenth year. Invitations that suggest youthful maturity combined with fun. Plum is happy. She spends her mother’s change on a bag of Pop Rocks.

  Paranoid about bees, she takes the longer route home, keeping to the footpath that skirts the oval. The path meets a playground where there are swings and monkey bars and a slide, all these constructed from chain and steel and hefty slabs of wood, as if children have the destructive strength of draft horses. Plum dallies on a swing for a while, kicking back and forth. She imagines that she presents a thoughtful picture to any onlooker. She climbs the ladder to the top of the slide and sweeps down the slant of steel; at the bottom of the slide she leaps off yiking, clutching the backs of her thighs. “Uh uh uh!” she cries, skittering forward but bending backward, away from the pain. As the agony subsides Plum whips in circles, trying to see if her skin is cooked or perhaps flayed. She hisses at the slide, snatches the invitations from the grass, and thumps off grouchily.

  Detouring along the footpath has led her away from her usual route; but there’s another road, close to the playground, which will also wend her home. Plum stumps along, the invitations knocking her knee, impatient with the heat and wishing only to be home now, for the day to be done. She rounds a corner and sees, parked in the shade of a paperbark, a large, greenish, flat-flanked car so similar to Justin’s that the word jumps out of her —“Justin!”— and she halts as if lassoed. Plum doesn’t know Justin’s plate number — she senses indistinctly the thousands of details she ignores every day — but the vehicle’s familiarity, its relationship to her, is recognized in her marrow. She steps across the naturestrip, wary of bees, and peeks through the passenger window. There, on the long vinyl seat, is a scraggy striped fisherman’s cap that is indisputably Justin’s. There are his bronze sunglasses, folded on the dashboard. There, on the floor behind the driver’s seat, is the street directory that Plum herself gave him for Christmas; it doesn’t look like it’s been used.

  Plum crunches a mouthful of Pop Rocks, puzzling. Mums had said Justin was at work, but the bottle shop is nowhere near here. She looks around at the house before which the Holden is parked, thinking perhaps her brother is visiting someone; but the house is clearly owned by a geriatric, there are roses along the fence and a revolting gnome by the letter box, and no one young has lived there for decades. She could mull over the matter further, but it’s easier to lean against the blank wall of cluelessness. “A mystery,” she says, knowing it won’t actually be so. The reason why Justin’s car is here will not be astounding, due to the fact that so few things ever are. Plum walks away dispirited by the very dullness of existence.

  Cydar is home when she arrives, and his presence revives her. She pushes through the jungly garden to where his bungalow, a large wooden cell as morose as a hangman, stands decaying in a corner of the yard. He is sitting on the bungalow’s doorstep, a slinky black-and-white cat smoking a cigarett
e which he ashes with a tap against the step. The breeze wafts flakes of ash across his feet, and he watches them skip his fine toes and flat nails with a concentration that fades when he looks up at her. Sometimes, when Plum thinks of Cydar, she sees a mobile of origami cranes turning gently near the ceiling of a tall white ornate house like the one in The Amityville Horror. She has never told Cydar about this vision, because doing so would be as bad as shouting something that desperately needed to be kept secret. Cydar is clever, capable of demolishing his sister and everyone else with a tilt of his head, a lancet-like word — but he needs care. Plum doesn’t know why, but she’s always felt this way.

  She flops on the earth beside his feet, hoping to appear winsome. Somebody, possibly the vampiric girlfriend, has painted his toenails blue. His eyes are very black eyes, and typically their whites are very white; today, the whites are stained scarlet, as if he’s excruciatingly tired. She needs his promise immediately, however — she can’t wait until he’s slept. “So you’re coming to my party?” she suggests wheedlingly.

  He blows out smoke, blinks lacklusterly. “I thought I wasn’t invited.”

  “I was joking. It was a joke! Of course you can come. So will you?”

  “No.”

  “Cydar! You have to! I’m your baby sister!”

  He concertinas the cigarette butt against the ground before flicking it into the shrubs, where it joins the slow perishing of stubs innumerable. “Yeah,” he says. “That’s the point.”

  “But you have to! Please! Pretty please? I’ll write you a special invitation.”

  Cydar closes his eyes, pained. “Why would you want me at your party, Plum?”

  “My name isn’t Plum now. You have to call me Aria.”

  “All right. But I’m not coming to your party. All that shrieking.”

  “We don’t shriek!”

  “You’re shrieking now.”

  Plum clenches her fists, struggling to find the right combination of words that will unlock his kindness. He will always do as she wants, provided she asks the right way. “What about if you just come for the cake?”

  He thinks on this; then says, “All right.”

  Plum jounces with delight. She would seize her brother by his bony wrists and shake him to prove her gratitude, if only he wouldn’t find the contact humiliating. Instead she inquires, “How’s uni?”

  She doesn’t doubt that what her brother is doing at university will make a lasting impression on the world — she places no limits on his cleverness. But Cydar ignores the query, as if unconvinced that her curiosity is genuine. The trees rising above the bungalow scrape its corrugated roof with woody claws; from behind her brother’s back comes the gurgle of a hundred aquatic worlds. The breeze has blown fine brown dust across his lips. For a moment she thinks he’s forgotten her, that he’s gone off wherever his fish go; then he looks at her and she’s reminded that he never forgets anything. “What is it you want for your birthday? That thing you said you can’t have?”

  Plum pinkens, shrinking to recall the scene she’d made at the dinner table. There’s no option but to brazen it out. “A television. A teeny-weeny television inside a silver ball with little legs. Like a spaceman’s helmet. It’s really cute.”

  “Sounds revolting.”

  “It’s not! It’s good. Just because it’s not a dumb fish . . .”

  “I thought you’d want your ears pierced.”

  Plum straightens with alacrity, hand flying to an earlobe. “What? Why? Do you think I should get my ears pierced?”

  “No.” Cydar shrugs. “All the girls wear earrings. I thought it’s what you’d want.”

  Plum smooths the lobe between thumb and finger, dwelling on what piercing would mean. “I don’t have to do what everyone else does,” she murmurs.

  “Nope.”

  “Maybe I should. Do you think I should?”

  Her brother looks more tired than ever. “Everyone else does, so no.”

  This answer isn’t satisfying; Plum, needing to think alone, climbs to her feet. “So you promise you’ll come for cake?”

  “I promise.”

  And she has to believe. Halfway across the garden she stops and looks back. He has rested his head on his knees, a hand on a foot, and looks like a crashed bird. “Where’s Justin?” she asks through the tangle of briar and thoughtlessly planted trees. “Mums said he was at work, but I saw his car near the playground. Do you think he’ll come for cake too?”

  Cydar shrugs another time, and does not lift his head.

  Into his knees, Cydar sighs. The hot breeze ruffles the hairs on his arms, rubs felinely against his face. The drug is moving oilishly through his system, making his limbs long like a spider’s, loosening his skin. Grown in the black soil of mountains, fed by the crumblings of rainforests, watered by crystalline creeks and mothered by a radiant sun; transported interstate in Hessian bags in the wheel-space of a column-shift Valiant, a spotted dog’s head poking out the window, the speedo watched religiously — all this journeying, from hard seed to sublime smoke, melts through time to peacefully unbuckle Cydar from normality. He had kept to himself the fact that, when Plum was sitting beside him, he could see her skull through her skin.

  A rich, virescent, rank-smelling drug, strong as a train and loaded with paranoia: Justin, when he tries it, will be reduced to jabbering imbecility. Even Cydar, usually impervious, had had to fight the anxious urge to grip Plum by the collar and plead, Don’t: whatever you’re doing, don’t do it. Cydar loves Plum and always has, from the moment he saw her on the day she was born. He remembers the hospital, standing beside Fa at the nursery window, pressing to the pane a card that said Coyle; he remembers the nurse walking the aisles of cribs until she came to one, their one, his one. Slotted inside her blankets, Plum was only a baby — only a baby’s head, in fact, swollen as an apricot, spout-lipped, bald — but Cydar had craved to reach through the glass, hello hello hello. He had sought his father’s eyes, and they had exchanged a look they’ve never shared since. Hushed and shivery. This new thing come to change everything. Make Cydar no longer the youngest, give Cydar something to guard. Plum loves Justin more than she loves Cydar, people usually do and cannot be blamed, and although he’d hoped that his sister might be something other than usual, Cydar accepted the situation years ago. It’s never diminished the rumble of responsibility he feels in his chest for her. But the honk of her voice, the slope to her stance, the sore look of the skin on her forehead, the unwillingness of her clothes to fit well: all these are making Cydar, who loves Plum more than anyone does, reluctant to look at her. The desperation which singes the edges of her — this is even worse. She’s not fourteen, but sitting on the bungalow step Cydar is sure he sees how her life will unfold. Be fearsome, he wants to tell her. Defy. His own life depends on her doing so. His existence will never be all it can be if Plum stands in its corner, happy for and proud of him, but misaligned and alone. She will stunt him, and he will let her.

  A blackbird breaks his concentration, the dope abruptly drops him from its teeth. Cydar yawns and straightens, rubbing his eyes with a fist. It’s impossible to guess how much time has passed since he sat on the step and struck a match, but it must be nearing dinnertime. He stands up cautiously from the torpid trough of stonedness, and the chemicals sink through him to settle at his feet as heavily as boots.

  The interior of the bungalow is lit like a cinema in which Gatsby would have watched silent films. The fish tanks emanate a frosty radiance that’s shot through with amber and emerald. There is a damp, purgatorial smell. Standing against a wall are the handcrafted housings of an expensive hi-fi. Cydar flicks a switch, and threadlike needles jump. As the stylus arm rises, the record on the turntable begins to spin. Every day ends with The Velvet Underground.

  There’s not much time until lamb fritters, but enough to make a start on her homework. Plum takes the recorder and the book of tunes out to the swinging lounge on the veranda, and sits with the instrument perched on her lips
and the book splayed over her knees. Plum is not musically inclined, and the noise she blows from the plastic tube is discordant in the extreme. Like a cat trodden on by a plumber, her music teacher says, having grimaced out the same line several hundred times over the past decade. Yet Plum persists, because she has in her head a seraphic image of herself playing a flute. She would be the exact person she wants to be, if only she could play the flute.

  And Maureen, cooking dinner in her kitchen, might hear her playing, and come outside.

  In fact, in the shadows, it is Plum’s brother Justin who listens, unable, as long as his sister occupies the veranda, to step beyond the door.

  MAUREEN SAYS, “Your sister asked if we were expecting a king.”

  Justin is standing by the window of Maureen’s lounge room. The window is draped by a gauzy curtain, and while he can see out into a grainy world, no one, outside, may see in. Only stifled light penetrates the gauze — Maureen wants nothing to fade — so the room is dim, cool as a well even at the end of this long summer. Everything in the room matches — the smoked glass, the beige paintwork, the pair of Matisses framed in chrome — and accords with the current vogue of the middlingly classy. The lounge suite is upholstered in white leather, and reminds Justin of ice cream. The carpet is equally colorless, the enemy of shoes. It is a flawless but not a restful room: Justin has seen Maureen’s son refuse to cross the carpet-edger of its threshold, his deerish eyes blank with unwillingness.

  Although right now the boy is sitting at Justin’s feet tracing shapes with his fingertips onto the carpet, and Justin feels his presence as a whiff of Ovaltine and cinnamon toast.