Butterfly

P
LUM IS SOON TO TURN FOURTEEN,
and one evening she stands in front of a mirror with her school dress around her ankles, her body reflected naked and distressing in the glass. If her reflection is true then she has gone about in public like this — this thick black hair hugging her face like a sheenless scarf; these greasy cheeks with their evolving crop of scarlet lumps; this scurfy, hotly sunburned skin; these twin fleshy nubbins on her chest that are the worst things of all, worse than the downy hair that’s feathered between her legs, worse than the specks of blackness blocking her pores, worse even than the womanly hurdle that still awaits her, the prospect of which occurrence makes her seize into silence — and nobody has informed her of the fact that she is hideous. Her reflection is so troubling that
her gaze veers, seeking comfort in the posters tacked to the walls. One shows glossy kittens, another is David Bowie. She breathes deeply and lets a moment pass before sliding her sights back to the mirror. This is she, Ariella Coyle, aged thirteen. Carefully she scans her face, her shoulders, her waist, grimaces at the sight of a meaty bottom and thighs. Her hands gather her hair in a dense ponytail, and her face, unshielded, looks round and inflamed, her eyes the tarred tips of poison darts. Her arms are strong, her neck utilitarian, not vulnerable at all: indeed, Plum’s entire body is somehow
too much
— too tall, too thriving, too
there.
Her stomach is the color of uncooked dough, and feels, when poked, like dough.
Ariella Coyle,
aged nearly fourteen, waylaid monstrously on the path to being grown. “There is no God,” she tells her reflection: as quickly as that, she knows it is true. “And even if there
was
a God,” she adds vindictively, “He wouldn’t love you. Look at you.
Nobody
could love you.”

The words should be like pools of blood, but the idea of such forsakenness actually makes Plum smile. Of late she’s been attracted to all things ruthless and peculiar. She sometimes feels edgy and dangerous, like an animal with unblinking eyes. She’s starting to think there might be something supernatural about her. She can guess what people are about to say, and when the telephone will ring; once, she heard her name spoken loudly behind her, though nobody was standing there. And yet, despite her superiority, Plum can never quite make herself immune to
human needs. She can’t quite make herself not care.

Her mother calls “Dinner” from downstairs, and Plum hears the word like a dog hears
walk.
She catches herself — her greed is infuriating — and points a finger at the mirror. “You eat too much. Don’t eat so much.
Try.
” Her thoughts, these days, waltz obsessively around the subject of food — how much she might get, how long until she’ll get more — and it’s an obsession that is exhausting. So much about being almost fourteen is, in fact, so wearying that for an instant Plum feels light-headed with all she must endure. She has older brothers whose duty it is to tease her — if the situation requires, they’ll find her taste in clothes and music and heartthrobs a source of crushing mirth. But lately Justin and Cydar have been keeping their opinions to themselves, and their silence rolls up Plum’s spine like a hearse.

Mums calls, “Dinner!”

Plum kicks her uniform aside and takes from beneath her pillow a pair of baby-blue, lace-trimmed pajamas. Dressed, she checks the mirror, ensuring the worst is disguised. She hunches her shoulders, shakes out her hair, stoops her overgrown height. Her cheeks, in the summery dusk, in the anguished infancy of teenagerhood, are the pasty yellow of cereal left to float all day in milk.

The Coyle house is big, and humiliating. The staircase down which Plum runs is gloomy with pastoral paintings, hazardous with piled books. Nothing in the house is new: indeed, the more elderly an object, the more Mums and
Fa must possess it. On weekends they trawl antique shops, returning with chairs and statues and complicated wooden boxes. Before she’d known better, Plum had trawled with them; now she stays at home on weekends, curled on the couch watching science-fiction movies, and wishes she lived somewhere less mortifying. It’s unfair that she must endure timber and stone, when all her friends know the joy of plastic and smoked glass. The dinner table to which she’s been called is a lengthy slab of wood over which drunken friars might have drooled inside murky taverns. The seats are two ungiving pews salvaged from a church. It is embarrassing to ask a friend to dinner when they won’t have their own separate chair, rude to expect anyone to use ivory-handled cutlery to eat from crazed china plates at a table that should have been torched. Plum’s wildest dream is to have her bedroom carpeted in white shag — walls, ceiling, door, floor, all pristinely white and furry. The possession she craves more than anything is a miniature television — not one cased in wood, like the one in the den, but set inside a sphere of chrome, with three stumpy legs and a rapier-like aerial. She has seen such a thing in a shop, and it made her feel strangely like weeping.

Plum slides into place on a pew, skidding sideways to let Justin sit beside her. He pinches her arm as he sits down, and she pinches him back harder, her heart fattening with love. Rangy as a tall ship, handsome as a prince’s portrait, a power of aliveness radiates from Justin the way light beams away from the stars. To Plum he is without flaw, a kind of
sun-king. He works behind the counter of a bottle shop, and has earned enough to buy a Holden as big as a barge. Occasionally he drives Plum to school in it, dropping her off by the side gate where the tough girls smoke before assembly. It is often the only moment of her day when Plum feels all is not lost. “
Planet of the Apes
tonight,” she reminds him, but he shakes his head, says, “Can’t.” She whines and screws her face up, but he just reaches for the water jug. “You’ve seen it before. You’ve seen it a hundred times. If you watch it again you’ll
turn into
an ape.” Fa comes in from the den then, half-asleep and rubbing the ear that’s been compressed by the transistor, and Justin turns to him gladly. “What’s the score?”

“Australia six for ninety at stumps. Border not out on forty.”

“We’re going to lose.”

“We’ll be cooked like a curry!”

“What about Imran?”

Justin’s eyes flash toward Plum. Fa says, “Imran went out for nine.”

“Plummy loves Imran.”

“I don’t!” Plum denies. “He’s just good.”

“Where’s Cydar?” asks Mums, passing out slabs of plate; and suddenly Cydar is there in the room, a hawk whistled down from the sky. He drops into his place opposite Plum like a sheet snapping on the wind. Cydar is the middle child, shy-eyed and secretive, a breeder of nightlife-colored fish which he sells to men who don’t talk. He
keeps himself and his aquariums in a weathered bungalow at the end of the garden, where he is visited by acquaintances as languid as the fish. He is studying at university something to do with microscopes, something that makes Plum proud but bored. She thinks he should be a rock star — he has that wastrel look. He should play Judas in
Jesus Christ Superstar.
Cydar has a girlfriend, Justin once claimed, about whom they must never speak. “Why not?” Plum had asked; and Justin explained, “Because she has no reflection. Because her eyes are white. Because she can only eat what she’s killed with her bare hands. Don’t say her name! You’ll summon her.”

Cydar’s gaze had merely glided away, as if there was so much he could say in retaliation that it was most satisfying to say nothing. Now he says, “I thought you loved that other one. Pascoe.”

“I don’t love any of them! Pascoe’s all right.”

“Big bad Lenny,” contemplates Fa.

“A girl at school has his name all over her folder.
Lenny Pascoe, Lenny Pascoe,
about ten thousand times. I like his hair,” Plum admits.

Mums sits down beside Cydar, polite distance between their elbows. “Hot pot,” says Justin approvingly, lifting the lid from the casserole dish; he is not home for dinner often enough to notice the frequency with which his mother serves this meal, as if she’s discovered, running beneath the kitchen’s tiles, a seam of sausage and segmented pineapple. Plum, however, decides stoutly, “Mums, I don’t want that.
I’m not eating hot pot ever again. It’s fattening. I’m fat.”

“Poo,” says her mother, which means many things, none of them being that Plum may not eat. She shifts the lid from a sarcophagus of rice, releasing a curse of steam. “Imran caught off Chappell for nine,” Fa reflects dreamily; he comes alive to ask “How’s the car?” of Justin, who’s been tinkering in the driveway all afternoon.

“The starter motor is soon to be kaput.”

Fa frowns with sympathy or possibly confusion; Justin, reminded, waves beneath Plum’s nose a knuckle he has skinned with a spanner. “Get away!” she squeals, swatting with her knife. “That’s revolting! Mums, Justin is being revolting! You’re revolting, Justin!”

“Revolting!” He’s pleased. Cydar, who this morning sold a glimmering finned creature for the fantastic sum of fifty dollars, who can feel the note and all its potential in the hip pocket of his jeans, who will never spend a single minute of his life laboring over a car, says, “You’re driving it tonight though, aren’t you? I don’t want to catch a taxi.”

“Where are you going?”

“Away from you.”

“To the pub, I bet! When you could be watching
Planet of the Apes
. . .”

Fa has turned to Cydar now. “How are the fish doing?”

“Swimmingly,” says Cydar.

“You know what I’d like to see?” Justin elbows his sister. “A battle between the gorillas from
Planet of the Apes
and the skeleton warriors from
Jason and the Argonauts.
”