Butterfly (10 page)

“It’s my birthday soon —”

“I know,” the child drawls. “Mum told me.”

“How is everything?” Maureen asks. “Tell me what you’ve been doing.”

Plum slumps on her elbows, the grass tickly on her skin. “Nothing’s been happening. Everything’s the same. I watched
Logan’s Run.
It’s a science-fiction movie where everyone has to die when they turn thirty. But thirty is pretty old, so I don’t know why they complain.”

“It’s not so old,” says Maureen.

“It’s not
old.
” Plum hurries to make amends. She doesn’t know exactly how old Maureen is, but she must be fairly old to be married with a house and a son. “It’s just — old
enough.
People shouldn’t try to cling on to everything —”

“Even to life? To pleasure?”

This is not what Plum wishes to talk about; her fondness for
Logan’s Run
is diminishing. “I haven’t been eating my lunch,” she says instead. “I’m used to it now, I hardly even get hungry. I gave out my party invitations, and everyone can come. . . . My friends want my brothers to be at the party. I think they want Cydar and Justin there more than they want me.”

“I doubt that’s true, Aria.”

“They said they wouldn’t come unless Justin and Cydar were going.”

“Well, that’s just girls being silly.”

Plum nods wonkily, startled by the dismissive truth of it: what seems imperiling is really just girls being silly. It is miraculous, how easily Maureen makes dire things laughable. “My friends are mean to me sometimes,” she says. “I don’t know what to do.”

Maureen is running her fingers down the length of her arm. She doesn’t say it’s better to have no friends than to have horrible friends. She says, “Use their nastiness to make yourself stronger.”

Plum feels a strange eeriness. The objects seem to call out like a choir from the briefcase. “What do you mean?”

“You know what I mean. You have a whole life to get through, Aria. A lot longer than thirty years, probably. Don’t waste it being weak and easily hurt.”

Plum’s breath hitches: Maureen would understand about the ear-piercing and the briefcase. There are no limits to what Maureen will understand. She opens her mouth to explain, but the words simply won’t budge. The risk is too great: Plum could not bear it if Maureen lost her liking for her. She swallows the surge of confessional honesty, her damp gaze careering. In the window of her bedroom are reflected the branches of the melaleuca where the little owl lives — Plum has listened and listened futilely for its hoots. Further along is Justin’s window, closed tight, blind down.
The roof of the house is scaled with lichen; the sky beyond is purple, as if it’s suffered a horizon’s-worth of blows. There are no birds, but there are midges bouncing on the air, and underground a cricket is tuning its saws and pins. She looks back to Maureen and asks, “Will you come to my party? Even for a little while?”

Maureen smiles. “Aria. Of course I will.”

And Plum grins bashfully, hugs her knees to her chest. Warmth fills her stomach when she imagines the scene: her elegant neighbor making her friends feel ugly, her admirable brothers reducing them to giggling fools.
Yes,
she will say to Rachael and Samantha and Dash.
This is my actual life. This is ordinary for me.

Things will be different after that.

David is heaping sand into the tray of the dump truck, making a truck’s growling noise. Maureen has tipped her face to the sky and closed her black-panther eyes. A midge has landed and is walking on the fine skin of her neck. “What an evening,” she breathes. “Hardly a cloud. Shh, David, don’t make that noise.”

Plum glances at the sky — no stars are out yet, and the moon is as cracked and colorless as a cafeteria plate — but her eyes, compelled, flick back to the midge. Maureen’s hands rest in her lap, she doesn’t seem to feel the insect’s exploration. “Summer is leaving us again,” she says. “Nights like this always make me sorrowful.”

“Sorrowful?” Plum’s voice is a donkey’s bray against a cheetah’s sigh. “How come?”

“Because it feels like something lovely is ending, and all that’s coming is coldness.”

The girl stares at the woman, whose closed eyes and unmoving body are like moats. A bird cries in the she-oak and the cricket stops creaking: in the garden’s sudden silence David’s hands grow still, he turns his face away. “Daddy,” he asks distractedly. Plum, embarrassed, dredges something to say. “It’s sad when good things finish. I don’t like change. I don’t care if bad things finish. But good things shouldn’t change.”

“Aria. A moment ago you said that people shouldn’t cling to things.”

Her immediate instinct is to twist and weave, attempting to justify her nonsensical self. To anyone else in the world, she’d do it. But there’s relief in conceding to Maureen, “Yeah. I get confused sometimes. Real life isn’t the same as a movie.”

“No, it isn’t. Everything has to change, Aria. There would be something very bad about a good thing that didn’t change.”

“Where’s Daddy?” David asks loudly. Plum and Maureen ignore him. “Like robots,” Plum offers, trying hard.

“Exactly.” Maureen’s eyes go to the girl. “Human beings change. Who you are now is not the person you’ll be in a few years. The things you do, the decisions you make — they won’t always seem right, later on.”

Plum nods; she accepts this is true for some people, but not necessarily for herself. She is, after all, already quite
astute. Rather than point this out, she says, “There’s a creature on your neck. An insect. A gnat.”

Maureen’s hand rises to her throat. “Aria, I almost forgot. Would you babysit David on Sunday? I need the afternoon.”

Plum has no choice but to say, “I guess.”

“I’ll pay you, of course.” She smiles quickly at Plum, who smiles back instantly, adjusting her features to covetous. But Maureen’s searching fingers have crushed the midge into a paste, and the sight of the mess on the graceful throat is disturbing and somehow disappointing. Plum had imagined Maureen was above such helpless, human things.

The following day dawns clear. Plum wakes earlier than usual, a tall solid girl lying haphazardly across a bed, her blue pajamas pinched in the brown clefts of her body. She lies, humming dully, waiting for her father to bring her breakfast. Her hands clench and unclench at the sides of the mattress. When she stops humming, the room is hush, like a memorial to her.

In the bathroom she showers for a long time, skimming the English Leather over the hills and valleys of her body. Her breasts hurt when she presses them. Her tan halts at her elbows and knees. She has the arms of a juvenile shot-putter, the calves of a bicycle rider. A week of missed lunches hasn’t made any difference that she can see. But
maybe today will: maybe, after today, many things will alter. When she’s dried and dressed herself, Plum spends a short time with the objects, distilling their energy, whispering voodoo. Rearranging their positions inside the briefcase, something makes her think of Maureen. Maureen is like the objects come to life — she is happiness, she is power. The thought occurs that the objects brought Maureen to Plum: talismans, soaked through with feeling, must be capable of doing unguessable things. She closes the briefcase lid with more than her usual care.

Her mother drives her to Sophie’s house at the arranged time. Plum is quiet on the journey, answering her mother’s chatter with grunts. As she walks up the driveway of Sophie’s home, she can feel her mother watching her. Although her heart is thudding, Plum is not tempted to run back to Mums and be comforted. At such times she knows herself to be a very determined girl. She knocks on the front door and, as it is opened, turns and waves a succinct good-bye.

Rachael, Dash and Samantha have already arrived; Plum suspects they conspired to arrive earlier, and her alienation entangles her like wire. But she reminds herself of why she’s come, and shoves the disgruntlement down. This afternoon they are all here for her, in ways they cannot imagine. The longer they have been here, the more they’ve given her.

With the arrival of Caroline and Victoria, an urgency lights the edges of the afternoon. Sophie’s parents won’t be away forever, and her younger brother and sister will
become nosy before long. Gripping her wrists, the friends propel Plum down the hall, crowding her into the bathroom. Sophie bellows, “Stay out!” to her siblings, and slams shut the door.

The bathroom into which Plum has been pushed is sunless and small, with a rectangular frosted window and a smell of rotten wood. The taps and rails are enameled white, the tiles are holiday-yellow. The decorations are aquatic — fish on the shower curtain, coral on the shelves. It makes Plum think of Cydar’s bungalow, although the two rooms have really nothing in common. She fights down a fluttery desperation to be there, in the bungalow’s bubbly gloom, hearing Cydar’s wolf-voice explain. He’s told her that a sea horse is difficult to keep alive in captivity; in Sophie’s bathroom there’s a dead one, a prickly husk hooked by the snout to the rim of the toothbrush holder.

The bathroom has already been organized for the operation. There’s a high-backed chair in the center of the room, a hard bare arrangement of planks. Samantha slaps its seat, “Sit, sit.” Plum sits, her heart galumphing like a pony in a sack. “Caz, Vics,” says Samantha, “you’ll need to hold her down. She’ll probably try to run.”

“I won’t,” Plum corrects. “You don’t need to hold me.”

“Well, if you struggle, you know what will happen. A needle in the eye.”

Plum blasts the big blonde with hatred, then quickly retracts it.
Strength.
“I won’t,” she vows.

The confines of the bathroom mean that the friends
must crowd around the chair, and there’s a warmth in the closeness of their bodies that vanishes the moment a gap opens between them, a yellow tile is seen; then the room becomes instantly frigid, and the girl on the chair shivers. Plum’s hair is bundled into a shower cap, her shoulders are draped with a towel. “There won’t be much blood.” Sophie reassures her with a pat. “But just in case.” Ice is brought and tipped into the basin, where it begins to melt. “I’m not touching her disgusting ears.” Dash’s lip can’t curl higher. “I’m only here to watch. Don’t ask me to do anything.” So Sophie and Caroline each take charge of an ear, pressing ice cubes to the lobes. The coldness is a drilling pain that scrabbles at the nerves of Plum’s teeth. She screws her eyes shut and endures what she can; then, “Wait!” she gasps, and digs the towel furiously into each earhole. “Are you numb?” asks Rachael.

“Numb in the head,” says Dash. Plum squeezes a lobe consideringly. It feels peculiar, detached from her. “Just a bit more, maybe.”

She sits with her hands clasped in her lap, ankles together and head high. The girls bob around her like bridesmaids. They are wearing their best casual clothes — knickerbockers, polo shirts, lolly-colored plastic sandals. Her friends have dressed up because of Plum, this afternoon exists because of her, the subject of their discussion is Plum — when they say
she,
they mean Plum. But Plum, silent and single-minded on the chair, is merely their object — she’s a Christmas tree, a hunk of meat, merely the source of today’s entertainment.
Plum feels the betrayal of her dignity, and it’s nearly enough to make her cry. But
power,
she consoles herself: safety, place. She has a plan, and she concentrates on it.

Sophie pinches an earlobe. “Feel that?”

Plum does, but the sensation is muffled, and such deadness will do.

Victoria says, “I’ll draw the dots.”

A dot of marker is applied to each lobe, and criticized as uneven, then redecided as even. Plum, given a hand-mirror, stares at her image. Her broad forehead, her mane of hair, the round chin, the dark eyes. None of it seems familiar, it’s the face of an emotionless enemy. The dots balance well enough, and Plum nods. “Show me again,” says Sophie, and Plum looks up. “It’s good,” her friend tells her.

There is a candle burning in a holder, a burned-feather smell from the striking of the match. Now Samantha is holding a needle to the flame — a thick silver sewing needle, the kind over which Plum’s fingers blunder in Needlework. The little fire dodges and ducks around the point. Plum squirms, plunging through nervousness and into real fear. Caroline glances at her, smiling tightly. “Don’t worry,” she says. Victoria says, “Hurry.”

When Samantha douses the needle in water the steel should sizzle, but it does not. The bridesmaids fall back like the petals of a flower, and Plum is engulfed by yellow chill. “We could use two needles,” Caroline suggests, a tinge of desperation in her voice. “Do both ears at once?”

“No,” says Sophie. “It would hurt too much.”

Samantha steps forward. “Lift your head.” And although her body spasms with her treachery, although her heart kicks and whinnies, Plum raises her chin. She feels Samantha’s manly fingers pincer the lobe; then, in a lull, nothing. The first thing that comes is sound, not pain. A burrowing, excavating sound. Then, “Ow!” Plum says. “Ow-ow-ow-ow —”

“Oh, yuck.” Victoria hides her mouth.

“Wah wah wah wah!” A crow’s noise warbles unstoppably from Plum. Knuckles dig into her cheek as Samantha leans closer — Plum hears her teeth grit, feels her fist push and turn. Fiery pain skims Plum’s scalp, spears into her eyes and sinuses, bucks the wisdom teeth buried in her jaw. Her feet dance electrically on the linoleum. “Uk! Uk! Uk! Arh! Arh! Arh!”

“Hurry up, Sam!” Rachael shouts. “Put her out of her misery!”

Samantha’s hand pivots; pain shoots through Plum’s brain, accompanied by the sickening noise: “There!” says Samantha, stepping back. “That’s one done. You’ve got fat ears, Aria.”

Plum feels the needle prized backward, then the snub-nosed probing of the earring. Her lids, fiercely scrunched, are painful to unfurl. Through swirling vision she sees Victoria and Sophie staring; Caroline, behind her, pats her head. “There, there,” she says.

Samantha crosses to Plum’s other side, needle drawn
like an arrow. “Wait!” says Plum; she can’t help but say it. “I don’t — I can’t — I don’t want to!”

Her hands quaver, ready to fight. Samantha looks down at her, her face remorseless as a goddess’s. “Only boys have one earring, Aria. Only boys . . . and girls who love girls.” And though Plum isn’t sure exactly what Samantha means, she does recognize the scorn that crouches, tail whipping, inside the words. “All right then,” she moans.