Butterfly (12 page)

Justin looks up at the plasterwork metropolis, carried as if her words were wings to a dusty loft in an elusive city, a wide window overlooking an avenue of elms. He sees
himself standing behind the glass, a mug of coffee in one hand, a hand-rolled cigarette in the other. He seems, in this vision, to be wearing a beret.

“I’ll run a gallery. It’s what I’ve always wanted to do. The artists will bring me their paintings, and I’ll sell them to people who deserve them.”

She nuzzles his shoulder, her weight against his ribs. He asks, “What will I do?”

“You can buy a guitar and busk at railway stations.” He sees the beret openmouthed on the ground. “And in the evenings you can model nude for the artists.”

The idea makes her laugh merrily, kicking her long legs so the sheet billows off their bodies, puffing out a sweaty scent. Justin catches her hand, holds it against his chest. The ceiling above him is all whiteness and angles, like snow on the roofs of a Bavarian village. He knows nothing about Bavaria, Berlin, artists or guitars, he can think of no more dire prospect than spending his life in a warehouse with Maureen, but he can chuckle and unfold a daring map of life because it is only words, nothing will happen, he is quite safe. Yet it’s something that has always charmed him about Maureen, her belief that he is capable of doing and being anything. To her, he has more promise than he’d ever have use for. To her, he’s not just a man like any other. He might miss this feeling when it’s gone. “You’d get tired of me,” he says. “You’d get bored, and run off with some foreigner.”

“I would never be bored. Maybe by sauerkraut. Not by you.” She presses nearer so her breast lies against him,
her breathing shifts his hair. “You can fall asleep, Justin. I would like to watch you sleeping.”

But sleep would signal the acceptance of something. “No, I should go.”

“Stay one more minute.” She begs it as usual. And although he should shake her off, make a stand, he does not; he lies as if paralyzed, his gaze seeking out the Escheresque pattern above his head. “We could hitchhike to the Black Forest.” She speaks tickingly against his chest. “Eat cake.”

“Hmm.” He has no lingering interest.

“They bombed the Berlin zoo during the war, you know. Blew the elephants to pieces.”

“Well,” he says, “we won’t go then.” Ten more minutes, and he’s home.

Plum holds David’s hand as they walk, feeling the faith within the curled paw. Inside her there’s blooming a sense of pride that she has been judged capable by him. Guarding the child, she’s like a girl who’s arrived to save the world.

It is autumn, but it still feels like summer. The sun is like an angry dog, and they move quickly from shade to shade. Plum does not want him to be bored so she unspools a running commentary about birds, clouds, colors, pets, trees, shoes. David is not a talkative boy but he listens, his face turned up like a flower; and when she asks him a question he replies matter-of-factly after giving brief thought to the answer. He trips along the footpath beside her, his
small arm forming a right-angle up to her hand, and Plum realizes with some shock that she feels different in his company. It’s not like being with her friends at school. It’s not like sitting at the dinner table. With him, she is just she. It’s a weightless feeling, like dragging off muddy gumboots and leaving them at the door.

They go to the playground, having skirted the oval carefully, discussing the danger of bees. As usual the playground is deserted, so they have the equipment to themselves. Tanbark crumples underfoot, huffing out tawny dust. “The slide?” David asks, and Plum says, “No, it’s too hot.” To illustrate she puts her palms on the metal, which is scorching as a skillet, and dances about yelping. David mulls over this, suggests, “Maybe the swing?”

So she lifts him onto the swing and pushes him back and forth while the child grips the chains and says nothing, stoically enjoying the ride. Plum finds a rhythm, and her thoughts wander. She remembers the day before, lying alone in Sophie’s bedroom, knowing her friends were in the kitchen discussing her, someone about whom they know nothing. She’d felt so clever in those few minutes — ruthless
happiness,
pitiless
power
— but now, swinging the child, it all seems pathetic. Why does she care so much? What does it matter if her friends don’t like her? After all, she hates them. Tomorrow she’ll stop hanging around with them. She will step out of their coven and purify into a lone dove. Become the kind of girl who doesn’t care what other girls think. The kind who sits in the quadrangle at
lunchtime reading a book. The one whose surname you can’t remember when writing names on the flipside of the school photograph. The one beside whom only a teacher will sit on the bus, en route to an excursion.

And Plum is frightened, and shunts the idea from her mind.

She lets the swing simmer until the child is able to step off. There’s a cage of crisscrossing metal bars over which he runs to swarm. Plum, fanning her face, flops on the bench in the shade. She is muggy in the underarms, there’s a napkin of sweat between the nubbins, another dampening her shoulder blades. Her hands and face feel swollen, even her eyes seem to bulge: she is such a beast. She has been throwing away her lunch for a week, enduring daily the ravages of starvation, yet still she is a monster. She shuts her eyes, which is mercy of a sort. Her hands creep up to rest on her ears. In the mirror this morning the lobes had been red, exuding heat like hot-water bottles — except, when she had touched them the lobes weren’t pliable, as hot-water bottles are. They were firm as muscle. When she’d flicked them, they hadn’t wobbled, and they don’t wobble now. Touching them spills a blunt-nosed pain into her skull. She rotates the studs as instructed, and meets a sticky resistance that can’t be right. “Poo,” she mutters. “Oh, poo . . .”

“Poo,” the word echoes: Plum’s eyes startle open. David is standing beside her, clutching a piece of tanbark. Plum doesn’t know how big a child should be, but David seems
tiny, a doll. He has a doll’s glossy hair, pink lips and exaggerated eyes. His head is tipped sideways with inquisitiveness. “I’ve got sore ears,” she tells him. “My friends pierced my ears, and it hurt and hurt, and now my ears are sore and I might get sick . . . ”

Tears, which so frequently swell behind her joys and her furies, squirm out and run down her cheeks. She’s ugly, she’s fat, her friends hate her — she hates herself. The first tear plunges through the wooden slats of the bench. “I wish I was four, like you,” she moans. “Look at my ear, Davy — look!”

She pushes back her hair, and the lobe is a mirror turned to the sun, a source of bushfires and global catastrophe. David, however, does not flinch. From the corner of an eye Plum watches him study the wounded appendage thoughtfully. Then, like a sniffing animal, he edges closer, so close she feels the air feathering from him. When his lips brush the convex shell of her ear, a tingle runs down her spine. He steps back in silence, gripping the tanbark with both hands, and Plum stares at him in wonder. “Thank you,” she says. “I think my ears will get better now.”

The sky is too blue, it is too hot to stay. She climbs off the bench and takes his hand. They do not cross the oval, but opt for the side street that will loop them home. Aside from the bees, there’s no reason to take this longer route; with the sun above and the child beside her, there are good reasons not to. But when she sees Justin’s car, Plum knows
why she chose that path. She wants to see the car exist in another’s eyes.

The Holden is parked in the same place as before, underneath the paperbark opposite the house with the gnome. Its tires aren’t flat, it is stopped neatly against the gutter, the chrome around its headlights flares with recent polishing. The two children stand before the vehicular mystery, Plum swinging David’s arm. “What’s Justin’s car doing here?” she asks the trees, the oxygen, the life-force, the child.

“I don’t know,” says David.

“Don’t you?” Plum sighs. “I don’t either.”

O
N
M
ONDAY MORNING
her friends flock to her; it’s not her they want to see, but their handiwork. “Ugh.” Victoria sticks out her tongue. “It looks infected.”

“It’s not infected!” Samantha squawks. “Everything was clean, you saw it!”

Plum stands like a cow in a yard while her friends mill about her. Their Monday-morning uniforms smell clean and freshly ironed. They are gathered in the thoroughfare of the locker corridor, and around them parts a noisy tide of girls burdened by bags as unwieldy as rhinos, armed with spiked plates of textbook. Plum is bumped and knocked, scuffed and buffeted. Caroline’s face puckers at Plum’s cauliflowered head. “Does it hurt?”

Plum nods briefly, as one for whom suffering is inevitable.

Sophie says, “My ears didn’t look like that after I got them pierced. Mine didn’t go all purple.”

“Well aren’t you so
special.
” The assembly bell is ringing, and Samantha wheels away. “There’s nothing wrong, Aria!” she yells over a shoulder. “In a few days you’ll be fine! Stop sooking!”

“I wasn’t sooking,” Plum points out — but her friends are dispersing, flicking away like minnows into the crowd, and a strong broad girl whom Plum doesn’t know advises her curtly, “Out of the way, idiot.”

On the bus ride home there’s a moment in which the bubble that is Plum’s self-confidence seems unable to rise, and the prospect is that, even at home, she will feel weak and unwanted. This has never happened before. Arriving home, she heads straight to her room, where she retrieves the briefcase with urgency. She touches each object, balances their weights, compresses them inside her hands. Today the coin is her least favorite. She has tried to befriend the coin, admire it, see good in it, but has failed. The coin is ugly, and should never have been minted. She wonders if a coin can be burned or melted. She conjures a force field around her body, tells the coin in a monotone, “I cause you pain I cause you pain.”

She rocks on her haunches, craving to run to Maureen — Maureen who is always pleased to see her, who is a river, rather than a war — but the Datsun Skyline is parked
in the driveway like a great blue tumor. That man is a pest. Instead she lies on her bed flipping through an encyclopedia of movies, thinking about her birthday, her upcoming party, the many potholes in her life. Her bag-of-concrete body. Her ball-of-fire ears.

On Tuesday at lunchtime, Sophie is crying. It is not Plum’s shoulder upon which her old friend chooses to weep, so Plum does as Rachael and Caroline are doing, and hovers in the background being concerned. “What is it?” they ask Victoria, when Sophie has recovered enough to stumble off to the tuckshop for a Wagon Wheel. Victoria explains that Sophie has lost the bracelet of which she’s been so proud, and Caroline gasps, “Oh no! Lost already? Father Christmas only just gave it to her!”

Plum stares after Sophie, keeping her thoughts to herself. Her friend has lost a treasure, but she still gets to go to the tuckshop. She doesn’t have to throw her lunch in the bin. Sophie goes home to her carpeted bedroom with its mirrored cupboard doors, and she doesn’t spend the night worrying if her friends will still be her friends in the morning. She can buy another treasure, and it will be the same as if she’d never lost the original. Things could be worse, but Sophie’s the type who’ll never know.

The girls don’t ask to see Plum’s ears, and she doesn’t offer to show them. Today it feels as if rabbits have buried their teeth in her lobes. At home, unbelievably, the Datsun is in the driveway. “Go away!” Plum seethes. “Can’t you see nobody wants you?” She slams downstairs to take out her
frustrations on her mother, pawing roughly through the frozen food that Mums has bought for the party. Blissfully, a scandal: “I told you
chicken
vol-au-vents! No one in the world likes
tuna
!” It is so upsetting that she flings herself upstairs again, thumping the wall as she goes. She squeezes her ears — she is drawn to molesting them — and the pain makes her clutch at her skull.

At lunchtime on Wednesday, Plum is lunar. She sits with her friends underneath the oak, floating above their debate about the strictness of Victoria’s dad, her mind as shifty as the northern lights she’s heard about in Geography. She’s hungry — she’s a helium balloon — and thinks about unearthing her sandwich from the bin. Her ears are raw protuberances as angry as the creature in
Eraserhead.
She is staring vacantly across the quadrangle, a clump of straw in the shape of a sad girl, when something happens, and partially revives her. Rachael, Samantha and Dash have a hump-backed powwow about the present they’re clubbing together to buy her. Rachael glances up from the huddle, warns, “Don’t listen, Aria!” And Plum, returned to earth, is surprised to find that the mood is good, that she’s welcome among them today. “Where’s your lunch, Plummy?” Caroline asks. “Did you forget to bring it?” And although Plum is picky, and prefers not to eat food prepared by fingers that might not be clean using knives that mightn’t have been properly washed, she accepts half of Caroline’s salami sandwich, and it makes her want to cry.

That afternoon she sits against her bedhead, the briefcase
on her knees. The wristwatch with its fine band is like a bird’s skeleton. The fastening pin of the Abba badge is still spiky and well-sprung. Today the yo-yo is her favorite, but she feels kind toward them all.

Maureen walks in the garden after dinner, and it’s a miracle: Plum pulls on her sandals and runs. “Hello, hello!” she warbles, rushing up her neighbor’s drive. The garden is a glade still dripping from the hose — Maureen stands out against the lawn like an orchid, all lankiness and waxen beauty. “David’s asleep?” Plum is disappointed. Over the past few days she’s found her mind returning to their afternoon at the playground. “Thank goodness,” says Maureen. “He’s been under my feet all day. Would you take him again this Saturday? For a few hours in the evening?”

“OK,” says Plum.

“You’ll be rich! You can buy new clothes. . . .”

“I wanted to get my ears pierced,” Plum reminds her. “But I don’t need to do that anymore.”