Butterfly (17 page)

Caroline climbs to her feet, says, “I wish you hadn’t done it, Plummy.”

Only Sophie says nothing, and does not look at Plum.

“No — listen — wait!” Plum stumbles back to life, recognizing this is the moment to make the final protest: but she is just a doll now, empty and half-alive. Her words are scraps of nothingness that catch on the balustrade as she follows her friends down the stairs. “I’m not like that, that’s not true, you don’t understand.” None of it means anything, and it’s a relief when Samantha, reaching the front door, wheels to spit, “Get away from us.”

“What about our sleeping bags?” frets Caroline.

Rachael says, “Roll up our sleeping bags and leave them outside. My dad will come and get them.”

“What a great party!” Dash laughs.

“She makes me sick,” reiterates Samantha.

The six girls in their party clothes herd each other down the veranda steps and across the patchy lawn. Not even
Caroline glances back to where Plum stands at the door. When her friends have marched out of sight, Plum’s gaze begins a slow journey through the trees, across the gardens, along brick fences and thin power-lines. The evening sky is still blue, but dusk has dirtied its hem. It’s the time of day for boiling water, feeding children, switching on the television, shutting windows and closing doors. Soon Mums will call out to say that the vol-au-vents are ready, having delivered them on a platter to the den.

Everything has been decimated, but for now the house is peaceful. Plum turns on her silver-sandaled heels and climbs the stairs to her bedroom. The room seems unusually quiet, and bigger than normal, the walls untypically high. The air inside it is tanged with the odor of ginger beer. The briefcase is lying where Rachael kicked it, half-hidden under the bed. Cotton balls tumble over its sides. Plum gets stiffly to her knees, tucks the padding back into place, closes the lid and secures the catches, and slides the case into the darkness.

From along the hallway she can hear the drumming of water: Justin is taking a shower. Downstairs, in the kitchen, Fa will be laying out napkins and mismatched cutlery. Mums will be reading the cooking instructions printed on a box brittle with frost from the freezer. Outside, in his bungalow, Cydar will be leaning back in his chair, stretching his arms to the ceiling.

Plum perches carefully on the edge of her bed, and wonders how to make herself die.

C
YDAR SITS ON THE BUNGALOW STEP,
a cigarette between two knuckles, sitting like a folded bird so his kneecaps touch his chest and his toes hook the tread. Between the bungalow and the house tall trees rise randomly, weeds smother rockeries, shrubs straggle across paths. Earthen trails weave through a wilderness of privet and geranium, linking house to clothesline to shed to side gate; there’s a broad bowl in the dirt that was once a pond, or the idea of a pond, where Cydar might have raised spotted koi but instead is the site of a forest of thistle. There are no gardeners in the Coyle family, and what interference the plants receive occurs when storms break a branch from a husky gum or the plumber comes to dig into the old pipes, uncovering as he does so small items lost for decades.
Plastic soldiers, metal cars, the crumbling bladder of a football. Autonomy should make the garden serene, but Cydar knows enough about the nature of life to understand that every living thing is a battlefield.

Beneath the clothesline with its network of baggy wires, lurking around the door like a dog hoping to come inside, is an area of lawn that Justin keeps mown, a sea-green breaker between civilization and the wild. Across this field is hopping a troupe of sparrows. The fat little creatures must be acquaintances, possibly friends: yet they squabble and bully, flee and pursue. One small bird pecks at a hub of garlic bread the way a sculptor taps at stone, wiping his beak intermittently on the ground between his toes; others are investigating Cheezels, picking flakes of pastry from the grass. Mums has thrown out the uneaten food from Plum’s party, and the birds skitter amid a flotsam of popcorn, potato chips, hot dogs, bread rolls. An hour earlier, just as he’d finished tamping down the papers of a joint, Cydar had watched his mother step sideways out the back door, the pile of leftovers heaped in her arms. She’d stood on the lawn upending bags and boxes, shaking their contents to the ground. Frozen pies and sausage rolls had bounced away. His mother had crushed the empty boxes with her feet, and stood for a time staring at nothing. Then, as Cydar had struck a match, she’d noticed her son watching her. She had waved a hand at the strewn bounty, looked helplessly across at him. “What else could I do?” she’d asked.

The sight of the party food had become oppressive. His
mother hates waste, but opening the freezer should not be so depressing. So, “Nothing,” Cydar had answered.
We are incapable of doing anything more than this.
He’d proffered the joint, and instead of frowning and telling him off, his mother had just shaken her head.

And now, an hour later, most of the food is gone, and Cydar wishes that the worst of life was like this, something that could be pecked away by tiny birds and converted into flight.

He had stepped into the house, on the night of his sister’s party, expecting the kitchen to be nightmarish with adolescent girls, their jostling and volume and vanity. He’d expected to see Mums by the oven, swearing under her breath, hot dogs surging in a pot of boiling water. There should have been a mountain range of wrapping paper, gifts lined up on the sideboard, birthday cards slipping off the mantel. This is how it has been at all Plum’s parties past. Instead there had been silence, and the pot of water on the stove was flatly cold and clear. Cydar had not thought to worry, however, because the silence and the emptiness hadn’t seemed dire, only unexpected; he hadn’t thought to be apprehensive, only displeased to have closed his textbooks before the necessary time. When he found Justin and Mums and Fa in the hall, he’d asked, “What’s going on? Is dinner ready?”

“Her guests have gone.” Mums had whispered it, as if
gone
meant
deceased.
Cydar had misunderstood: “What?”

“Plum’s friends walked out of the party,” Justin said.

“We think they’ve gone home,” explained Fa. “We don’t know why. Plum won’t say.”

And Cydar had felt it then, the dankness. Something had happened, the kind of happening that would never completely stop happening. Years from now, the four of them will be able to remember standing here, remember the compression in their chests. “Where is she?” he’d asked, his first instinct being to see her — not to question or to bolster her but just to check, as he’d once checked her in a hospital nursery thinking
hello hello hello.
Yet when told his sister was in her room and not saying anything beyond a few dull words —
they don’t like me, they wanted to leave —
the instinct had released its grip. Cydar would not be someone she was forced to endure, he wouldn’t come like a crow.

And he has kept to himself in the days since — all of the family has kept to itself, bottling down its dismay like a bad genie. They have watched Plum move around the house, sit at the table, switch on the TV, and no one has asked
what did happen?
They have found many things to talk about in her presence, and never about what happened. They’ve watched her hoist her socks, leave for school, do her homework, go to bed, they’ve heard in her voice a subduedness that was never there before: still no one has uttered a word. They can’t save her, these parents and brothers who have never been able to save themselves. Any of them would gladly return happiness to her, if happiness were something lightweight and easy to retrieve, but it’s a long time since
anything beyond the rudimentary was within their reach. So Cydar spends hours at university, and Fa brings home Violet Crumbles for dessert, and Mums cooks the meals her daughter prefers, and Justin scans the guide for classic films. This is the best they can do.

Cydar sits forward, chin on his knee. Smoke weaves whitely through his hair. A sparrow pecks up a bud of popcorn and flies away, skipping over the paling fence and into the neighboring yard.

There’d been a knock at the front door on the night of the party, the disturbance sending volts through the air. Mums had hurried to answer it. Fa had turned down the television, and he and his sons had sat still and prick-eared. When they’d heard the pleasant purr, Justin’s glance had swung to Cydar. There was nothing troubled in his look, only a cool annoyance. Mums returned, flopped into her chair, said, “It was Mrs. Wilks, from next door. Plum had invited her for cake. I told her the party was over. I didn’t know what to say. But she seemed to know what I meant.
Girls can be unspeakable,
she said.”

It’s not
girls,
Cydar had wanted to retort: it’s the
world.
Instead he’d reached out to turn up the volume of the television. Now, on the bungalow step, he adds,
Us, too.
We, who can’t help her, as if she’s made of stone, like us. Something other than just a child.

His chin is digging into his knee, but he doesn’t straighten. He lifts the cigarette and smokes it down to the very stub. Curls of fringe come close to being burned;
smoke makes his eyes water. A magpie has arrived at the banquet now, forcing the sparrows away. Behind the birds rises the weathered house, its windows darkened and doors cheerlessly closed. Cydar’s bungalow is refuge — his brother and parents find reason to visit, to stand before the priestly fish. Plum, however, hasn’t come. She hasn’t anything to confess to the fish, or to him. She can’t form the words, as nobody can. If he could speak, Cydar would say,
Don’t let them win.
Instead, unforgivably, nothing.

In the bushes close to the fence, behind the festering pile of vegetable shavings and the remains of last year’s autumn leaves, an ice-cream cake is melting into the soil, slumping sludgily, bleeding chocolate sauce. Around its crawling edge a million ants have gathered to drink themselves into oblivion.

She is never hungry: for days she’s had no desire to eat. She picks at dinner and breakfast, forcing her jaws to work. She is relieved when her lunch leaves her hand and thumps the bottom of the rubbish bin. She finds it difficult even to think, and what thoughts she has clog up in her head and fuse indecipherably. She doesn’t want to talk to herself, inhabit herself, continue to be herself. If she could, she would shrug free of her body, and leave this mess behind.

The morning after the party Plum had woken in her bed, and the recollection of the previous day must have
been in her head waiting impatiently for her consciousness to return, for it swooped down like an eagle, terrible talons bared. It’s a feeling she’s grown accustomed to in the days since; she walks in anguish, breathes it in, sighs it out. She had telephoned Caroline that afternoon, chewing her fingernails, prepared to be contrite and also defensive if necessary, perhaps indignant over the spoiling of her party. Caroline should have been the weakest, the most forgiving, the easiest to persuade. Instead she said, “Maybe we shouldn’t talk to each other, Plum. I don’t care about the yo-yo. But sometimes things aren’t the same, don’t you reckon?”

“But listen Caz, I’ve been thinking, let’s just you and me be friends! We don’t need those others, I’ve always liked you the best anyway —”

“We
can
be friends,” agreed Caroline: “We’ll be secret friends, OK? Because I still want to be friends with them. But I’ll be your secret friend . . .”

Plum had put the receiver in its cradle, returned to her bedroom. She’d drawn the briefcase out from under her bed, examined the lining and the cotton balls as if something might have been missed: nothing had. She had closed the lid and fastened the locks, and carried the briefcase downstairs to the junk cupboard and pushed it far toward the back, where she wouldn’t have to see it again.
Secret friend.

On Monday morning Plum had gone to school, because the choice was to plead sickness for the rest of her life or to
tell Mums the reason why she didn’t want to go. During the bus journey she had noticed the absence of something, some feeling she’d come to know: and what was gone was the bubble that’s her home-self, her certain-self. The bubble didn’t sink that morning, because it wasn’t there to fall. Plum looked inside, and found it no longer existed. That piece of her was gone. She felt like someone living alone on a planet.

She’d expected rumor of the briefcase to have reached the school before she did — for Dash and Samantha to have caught an early train so every girl could hear the story before the ringing of the assembly bell. But in the corridors no one looked at her sideways or sniggered as she walked past. This could only mean that nobody knew. Plum wasn’t so foolish as to hope it meant nobody would ever know. Rachael and Samantha and Dash would leak the scandal slowly, like poisonous fumes from the ground; and part of Plum was morbidly interested to see it happen. In the classrooms she had watched as the story flowed like a tide from girl to girl, passed inside notes, whispered into ears. Watching, she’d felt unusually and keenly alive, alive the way a knife is sharp, so the humiliation she was enduring was perfect, like the paring of skin from a hard apple.

At lunchtime Plum hadn’t known what to do or where to go. She discovered it is difficult — it is almost impossible — to maintain the pretense of preoccupation for an hour. She knew that some girls were staring at her, following her with their words. Other girls neither stared nor cared, uninterested in her crimes and indifferent to her
plight. Finally she found a concrete corner, far from the lawn with its graceful oak tree, littered with icy-pole sticks and chewing gum and cardboard, yet still a sanctuary: she had covered her face with her hands and cried, hot with anger and lank with suffering, and crying didn’t console her but it did kill some time.

During the last lesson of the day, Geography, a girl had circled an arm around her pencil case as Plum walked past her desk. “Mine,” the girl said, and there had been giggles and snorts. Plum had taken a desk in a corner, and no one sat beside her. She concentrated on the blue lines on her paper until they wavered and blurred. She thought about
The Village of the Damned
and
The Stepford Wives.
She thought about
Carrie,
and wished she was her.