Butterfly (2 page)

“The gorillas would win. They’re stronger.”

“But those skeletons are dodgy.
And
they’ve got spears.”

Fa asks, “How was school today, old Plummy?”

Plum answers offhandedly, “All right.” School is an endurance test for her, a situation she faces like a brick wall every day, but she seldom answers anything but
good.
She knows precise things about her father — that he works with numbers, prefers his eggs cooked through, has a plate in an ankle from a boyhood broken bone — but there is an obscuring fog of softness around him that Plum is wary of disturbing with truths that aren’t
good.
Her father catches a tram at ten past eight each weekday morning, taking a seat where he can see the tram’s wide door slipped open and closed by the grade of the road. “Why do you watch the door?” she’d asked once, expecting an answer about mathematics or time; instead Fa had replied, “It rests me.” And the words had terrified Plum, because what they implied was terrifying; and she’d vowed never to expose, or expose herself to, such wistfulness again. For this same reason, Plum will never ask her mother what she thinks about when she’s alone in the house and it’s raining, those cold afternoons when Plum arrives home to find Elvis gazing up from record sleeves shuffled over the floor. It is one thing for Plum to exist on the edge of desolation: but the thought of anyone in her family being anything less than happy fills her head with the noise of an untuned radio. She longs to shout at Fa,
You’ve got what you’re supposed to have!
A job, a house, children, a wife.
What else do you want?
Sometimes she almost hates him for being the way he is.

Anyway, it is Plum’s growing conviction that a mother and a father have no right to feelings. A parent should be a person the way a door is a door, something like the robot in
Lost in Space —
loving and providing and cleaning, not distracted by wishes and needs. The only thing that really matters about a parent is the existence of the child. If Mums and Fa ever were fourteen, they’re well beyond it now; beyond the time when their lives are vital things. Even when they were fourteen, it’s unlikely that they had problems as grievous as Plum’s.

And now everyone is talking about something that doesn’t concern her, scooping out globes of fuzzy rice, shunting the water jug down the table. Justin and Cydar are deciding what time they should leave, and Justin thinks the car will need petrol; Fa is saying he’ll build shelves in the kitchen to accommodate Mums’s collection of jelly molds. Mums has picked up a dropped cluster of rice and the sticky grains are clinging like grubs to her fingers, won’t be shaken onto her plate. “Trouble is,” she’s saying, “you’re not a
builder.
Everything you build
falls down
. . .” And all of it is so unworthy of being spoken at all.

“Listen!” Plum barks. “Everyone be quiet. I have something important to say. I’m not going to church anymore.”

It’s a decision she’s hardly known she has made, coming upon her like the urge to burp. Immediately, however, she’s committed. Having released the words, she’s relieved.
“All right?”

Across the table Mums’s mouth twists, as if her daughter is something bitter she’d expected to be sweet. “Plum.”

“Justin doesn’t go. Cydar doesn’t. Fa never did. Why should I?”

“You
need
to.” Justin stabs a stump of sausage with a hundred-year-old fork. “You’re unholy. You’ve got horns on your head.”

Plum pauses — she’s seen people-beasts in movies with horns on their heads, and thinks the look charismatic. Horns would change her life. “Well,” she says, “I’m not going. God’s never done anything for
me.
And I don’t believe in Him.”

Mums clicks her tongue. “Don’t say that at the table.”

“Why not at the table?” But Cydar is ignored.

“You can’t make me.” Plum is captured by strange determination. This is what she is supposed to do, now that she’s nearly fourteen and the docility of childhood is behind her. She is meant to start becoming what she wants to be. “If I don’t believe in God, it’s stupid to go to church. It’s hypothetical.”

“It’s what?” says Cydar.

Fa says, “What’s made you stop believing in God, Plummo?”

Plum’s head pivots. There is no overhead lamp and the table is lit only by what light vaults the kitchen counter, so Fa sits in shadows. “I never did. I’ve always thought it was silly.” She speaks with certainty, although what she says isn’t strictly true. As a child, she’d believed: but believing is what
children do. “Look at it sensibly. The whole thing doesn’t make sense. If God is real, where did He come from? And what about the dinosaurs — how come they weren’t in the Garden of Eden? And why do bad things happen, if God is so kind? And how come, if God made everything, everything can be explained by something that
isn’t
God, something that’s
normal
—”

Cydar says, “It’s called science.”

“It’s common sense!” shrills Plum. “Angels and Hell and Satan and Heaven — only a
kid
would believe that stuff! Only somebody who wasn’t brave, or wasn’t —
educated
— or wasn’t — modern! And
I’m
not a kid!”

“You are,” says Justin. “You’re a little goat. Those horns.”

“I’ve grown up!” Plum squawks; then quickly rounds her shoulders lest the ludicrous nubbins show and it’s assumed she’s referring to them. “I’m nearly fourteen!”

“Are you going to have a party?” asks Fa. “For your birthday?”

Plum glares at him, distracted. “What? I don’t know. I haven’t decided. I’m not talking about that —”

“Parties are for kids,” Cydar suggests.

“No they’re not! That’s a stupid thing to say. Justin had a party when he was twenty-one.” The occasion is one of Plum’s most satisfying memories, Justin’s crowds of fabulous friends and the noisy fuss they’d made of young Plum; the highlight had come when a female guest fainted, and Fa had tapped her face until she revived. “Everyone’s
having slumber parties. Can I have one, Mums?”

Her mother looks tortured, which means her daughter may. The girl scrambles upright on the pew. “I want everything bought from the supermarket — nothing homemade. I want mini pizzas and chicken wings, and cashews and macaroons. An ice-cream cake from a cake shop, not some horrible sponge. No balloons or streamers or games either. And punch instead of soft drink —”

“And bags of lollies to take home?”

Plum’s lip hoists. “We’re
fourteen,
Justin. You don’t get bags of lollies at our age.”

“Do you giggle about boys instead?”

It’s the kind of brotherly comment that makes Plum feel like a deer in a huntsmen’s forest. She glances past the casserole dish to where Cydar sits in dimness, wrists bent above his plate. She does not need light to know his eyes are still and cool on her. “None of your business. We’ll talk about whatever we want. You’re not invited, so you’ll never know.”

Cydar says nothing, which is more disconcerting than words. Mums is standing to saw slices from the lumpy loaf. “And what do you want as a present?”

The miniature television in its globe of chrome flames like a star in Plum’s mind, blinding Cydar from sight. The television is, without question, the most desirable item she’s ever seen. None of her friends have a TV to themselves, let alone one so enviable. Nor, Plum suspects, will she, for its price tag had made her swing away, swallowing with
disappointment. Her family isn’t poor, but some things are beyond the realm of reasonable expectation. Nevertheless she has cleared a space on top of her dresser, to prove that the object would fit. She has lain on her bed and imagined watching the pint-sized screen. “I don’t know,” she mumbles; to her horror, tears are close. She has seen herself unwrapping a television-sized box on the morning of her birthday; she’s accompanied herself to school, casually announced the new possession, reveled in the envious mewls of her friends. She’s constructed a new and entirely perfect life around something that is, in reality, as unattainable as Everest’s peak. It’s the kind of make-believe thing a child would do, as poignant as a broken heart. Indeed, Plum feels her heart
is
breaking over the loss of what never was. She dredges her voice past a clot of grief that has bulged inside her throat. “The only thing I want is something you won’t let me have. I won’t even bother telling you what it is, because I know I won’t get it.”

“Oh no,” Justin sighs. “Not another bloody pony?”

Tears, humiliated and humiliating, spurt from Plum’s eyes: she throws down her cutlery and struggles to her feet. “Shut up!” she wails. “You always laugh at me! I’m a
person,
I have
feelings,
I’m not a
joke
! Why can’t you all just
leave me alone
?”

And having clambered over the back of the pew Plum departs the table, pounding through the house like a rock down a cliffside, storming up the stairs like a centurion.

I
N HER BEDROOM SHE DROPS TO HER KNEES,
reaching into the darkness beneath her bed for the handle of an old briefcase, which she pulls into the light with such aggravated force that the case leaps like a seal into her lap. The latches snap open militarily,
chock chock,
and as Plum lifts the lid her breath comes out snotty and rasped. She gazes upon the case’s contents with an archaeologist’s eye: here lies her treasure, her most sacred things. She has lined the briefcase with lavender satin and provided several bags’ worth of cotton-ball cushioning so that each token sits within its own bulky cloud, untroubled by her manhandling of the case. Plum brushes the items with her palm, incanting as she does so a string of whispery words. The glass lamb.
I belong.
The Fanta yo-yo.
Admire me.
The jade pendant.
Beauty fades.
The Abba badge.
You don’t touch me.
The brown coin.
I fear nothing.
The dainty wristwatch.
I am more than you see.
Each object is as important as every other, but this last is the most daring, Plum can hardly bear to touch it — sometimes the mere sight of the watch makes the hair prickle up on her neck. Sometimes, to calm herself, Plum will fix her mind on a single item — usually the glass lamb, which is like staring through ice. Now, however, she plucks up the one thing that doesn’t belong among the others, and was never destined to remain. She closes the briefcase, fastens the latches and shoves the case under her bed. Then she crosses the room to the window and lifts the heavy sash.

Warm air wraps her as she forces the window higher; and birdsong, and the smell of mown grass, and the rusty calls of cicadas. Plum notices none of these. She has not opened the window with the aim of appreciating the summer evening, but so that she might lean a little closer, yearn a little more actively, toward the view that the high window allows. Spread out before her are rooftops in their scaly thousands; and church steeples, telephone poles, shopping centers, parkland. Beyond these, distance blurs suburbia into a fawn-and-green smudge; behind the smudge rises the purple backbone of a modest mountain range. Plum once visited these mountains with her Sunday-driving grandmother: they’d had Devonshire tea and walked through a rhododendron garden, and Plum had bought a leather bookmark in the shape of a flattened hound. A nice
day, but recently she’s tried to blot from her memory the gingham curtains and crumbly scones and the innumerable mustard pots for sale in a streetful of arts and crafts, and pretends that the mountains are an unexplored shadowland, mysterious and promising. And there’s something mysterious, promising and deeply satisfying about leaning on a windowsill, baying for the hills.

She unwraps the MARS Bar with her practiced teeth, her head lodged against the window frame. The hot weather has softened the fudge so it’s bendy in her hand, the caramel bleeding lanky strings from the severed end. Plum should not be eating a MARS Bar, nor anything that will contribute to the clumpiness of her body and the festeriness of her face. Every bite is making her life more intolerable, and she should have the will to resist, the discipline to
improve
herself . . . yet she feeds the chocolate into her mouth dutifully, obeying an impulse as irresistible as a hypnotist’s command. Tears seep down her cheeks as she eats, and slip past her chocolated lips; she is making a dull, unbroken, grief-encouraging noise, “Brr, brr, brr.” The view of the ranges is blurred by her woe, which is a witch-brew of frustration and self-hate. Plum suspects she is special, and that she has a grand destiny: yet all her life she’s suffered more cruelly than others seem to do. She has always been more mocked, more misunderstood, more sidelined. Presumably it is her fate, to be persecuted until something — something foretold on parchments lying undiscovered in a cave, something that will occur when
three dark stars align — makes her rise and spread her awesome wings; and then the whole world, gulping, will understand.

“Her, her, her,” she bawls, chewing heroically.

Her eyes are pinched closed, but when she hears her name spoken they flip open with surprise. The evening sky is marlin-blue and pink, extraordinarily beautiful; the breeze that fiddles in her hair is as jestful as a sprite. Her name flutters around her like the skeleton of a leaf —
Plum, Plum, Plum —
uttered in the hushed but unswerving voice of the Underworld. Plum is so startled that she stops both chewing and howling, the chocolate turning to clay in her mouth. For all she has daydreamed, she’s never believed, but suddenly she’s rigid with what’s true. There are no angels, but there
are
demons, and one of them has come for her. And suddenly Plum would rather be ordinary after all.

“Plum? Are you hurt?”

Her sights plunge toward the ground, over the fence and into the garden of the house next door, where their neighbor stands with her hands clutched together, peering up troubledly. “Can I help you? You’re so sad.”

Plum’s face scalds. The Coyle family is not on such personal terms with the people next door that the woman — whose name,
Maureen Wilks,
Plum knows, but little else, and nor does she want to — may take the liberty of intruding in this way. The Coyles have lived in this street forever, their Wilks neighbors for only a few years, qualifying Plum to regard them with the hoitiness of landed gentry. She
tucks the MARS Bar out of sight, smears her eyes with the flat of a hand. “I’m fine,” she says, infusing each word with enough curtness and weight to impact into the earth. “I’m not — sad.”