Butterfly (6 page)

Dash looks at Plum. “So will they?”

Plum can only gape. Inside her mind are tussling demons. It’s appalling to realize that her friends discuss her brothers behind her back — these friends who have just ground Plum herself under heel, and who don’t have any decent brothers whom Plum might likewise admire. Justin and Cydar belong to
her,
and they are the best things
Plum has — her face flushes with possessive anger. Yet, at the same time, she sees that this turn of events is a gift. At primary school, some kids had trampolines or swimming pools; Plum had nothing, not even those pencils that could be sharpened by pulling a string. Now, suddenly, just when it counts, she has Justin and Cydar. A gift she can use, like ice picks on a glacier.

Dash says again, “So will they?”

Plum murmurs, “I’ll ask them.”

“Don’t
ask —
tell them! You’re their sister. They
have
to be at your party.”

“Yeah — if they aren’t coming, we won’t be.”

“Sammy!” scolds Sophie. “Don’t say that!”

Samantha shrugs. “Joshing. But still.”

“Yeah, but still,” says Dash.

And Plum understands
but still,
two words as rough as rubble. Nevertheless she tries not to sound terrorized when she vows, “Of course my brothers will be there. Why wouldn’t they? I’m their sister.”

The bell clangs suddenly, a bomb that has been flying toward them in deathly silence for a long while. Across the green lawn girls stand and stretch. Plum and her friends gather their rubbish, tighten ponytails and adjust socks, sweep palms down the backs of their dresses. “Don’t worry, Plummy,” Caroline says, as they drift in the direction of the classrooms and the end of the sweltering day. “I’ll come to your party, even if your brothers don’t. I can bring my new sleeping bag.”

T
HE BUS RIDE TO AND FROM SCHOOL
is a physics experiment for Plum. Each morning, pressed to the vehicle’s seat, nose hovering close to the window on which there are smudges and sometimes a hair, a bubble inside Plum is pulled further and further into her depths until, as the bus draws up outside the school, it lodges in a quaggy place from which it cannot sink any deeper.

All day the bubble waits in the pit of her.

But on the bus ride home, the bubble rises. The journey is frustratingly stop-start, the vehicle crowded and noisy, the boys from the state school are medieval with sweat, there’s no place on Earth less agreeable — yet still the bubble rises, a pearly bead inside a bottle of champagne. When Plum alights from the vehicle at the end of her street, her step is
rarely jaunty, her mood not necessarily good; but she is a different person from the one she’s been all day. Before she’s flung back the screen door and announced, “I’m home!,” the bubble has surfaced and shimmers opaquely, having returned to the light all her coarse clinging power, and all her love for those who must feel it.

She yanks the lid off the biscuit tin, sensing already the black fury that will rampage if all the biscuits have been eaten — fortunately there are four Iced VoVos at the rear of the tatty pack. She balances three in a tower on her hand, shoves the fourth into her mouth. “Mums!” she yells, slumping after her voice through the house. “Where are you?”

Her mother is in the laundry, picking through a pile of clothes still stiff from the line. She is sorting Justin’s colorful socks from Cydar’s monastically dark ones. Plum halts in the doorway: “Is Justin home? Is Cydar?”

Mums holds up a sock to the light. “Justin’s at work. Cydar’s at university. They said they’d be home before dinner. Is this sock black?”

“No, blue. You need glasses.”

“Does Cydar wear navy socks?”

“Mums! Don’t ask me!” Plum lurches away from the wall, collapses against the ironing board. “It’s hot — it’s so hot! Why is it so hot?”

“It’s the weather.”

“Weather! I hate weather. Can I have some money for party invitations?”

“Please.”

“Please.”
Heavy as a washing machine turning its load.

“In my purse.”

“What’s for dinner?”

“Lamb fritters,” says her mother.

“I hope there’s tomato sauce,” Plum warns. “I can’t eat fritters without tomato sauce.”

“There is sauce,” Mums confirms.

Pausing only to pluck notes from her mother’s purse, Plum moves upstairs. Her big slope-ceilinged bedroom is the place she most wants, every afternoon, to see. Her schoolbag, hulking with homework, is booted sideways across the floor. She strides to the window, looks down into the neighboring driveway, and the Datsun Skyline is gone. Her heart misses several beats. She changes out of her uniform, back turned to the mirror; in shorts and T-shirt she crouches beside the bed, drawing from underneath it the leather briefcase. The silver latches pop open alertly,
chock chock.
Her grandfather owned this case, it’s a very old thing, but the latches are still strong. The key, unfortunately, is gone. If she had the key, Plum would keep it on a chain around her neck. Perhaps with something strung alongside to guard it, a shark’s tooth or a small piece of gold.

Inside the case, the objects lie buttressed in their beds of cotton wool. Plum sucks her fingers clean of marshmallow before selecting her favorite, the lamb. It’s a quaint thing,
solid and see-through, with tiny black dots rendering surprisingly expressive eyes. If it were broken, the pieces would fit into a matchbox coffin. Its loss would be terrible, not least because something so powerful would be difficult to replace: but replace it she would, eventually. Perhaps with a charm bracelet, one dangling a dolphin and a cracked loveheart and a book that actually opens . . . Plum frowns, pondering. Even if the lamb remains unbroken, which it will, because it comes under Plum’s protection, there is still space in the briefcase for a charm bracelet. It could coil thornishly between the jade pendant and the Abba badge. In fact, now that Plum thinks on it, there’s no reason why the collection should not grow as large as the briefcase allows, assuming she can find enough suitable objects. She’s stopped going to church, she’s changed her name: maybe the collection should likewise evolve. The idea fills her with a blur of excitement. She imagines the briefcase packed to bursting, glowing like lava or a UFO, emitting a humming tone.

She kisses the knickknack and returns it to its bedding. The shadow of her hand passes over the broken watch, the yo-yo, the coin. She closes her eyes and spends a moment projecting her will. “Lovely things, lovely things, I am near; see me, hear me, need me, do as I say.” If she were in a movie, there would be a pentacle painted on the floor in blood or red paint, a creaky tome opened on a stone altar, and candles burning everywhere. In a movie, her words would cause a gale to blow, send ravens cawing into the
sky. All this is lacking, but Plum closes the lid satisfied, and shunts the briefcase under her bed.

She has a bike she used to ride when she was younger: lately she feels ridiculous upon it and prefers to walk. Outside, the heat presses on her head like the muscular palm of a revivalist. She lingers at the end of the fence, where the weedy corner of Coyle lawn meets the manicured edge of the Wilks’.
Bernie:
that’s the name of Mr. Wilks, the man who drives the Datsun — she couldn’t remember it before. The kind of man who says, “Another week gone,” when you meet him putting out the rubbish bins. Plum hangs against the fence, picking at timber splinters. She could knock on Maureen’s door, maybe get some party leftovers; she could tell her neighbor about the lunchtime conversation between herself and her friends. “They laughed at me,” she would say, “because of what you said. You promised you’d be my friend, but then I never saw you, your door was closed to me.” The thought makes Plum push away from the fence — she is, as always, forsaken. She is like the poor bird who is stoned to death in
A Girl Named Sooner,
which was a made-for-TV movie, but really good anyway. She crosses the road in depressed wandering steps; then remembers, on the footpath opposite, that she is superior, that suffering makes her strong. The cult leader’s hand pushes hard on her head, but Plum ignores it. The heat is mighty, but she is mighty too.

The suburb in which she lives is muted and leafy, tall-treed and tile-roofed. Many of its residents have survived
well beyond their necessity. Although the neighborhood is her home just as her bones are her own, Plum has never learned the street names, nor the names of the gardeners she sees in flower beds, nor the names of the flowers. Once in a bluish moon, an ambulance pulls up outside one of the houses; generally, however, the neighborhood is a place of nonevent. The loudest noise comes from mynas chastising cats, and from motor-mowers. Nothing happens, there is nothing to do, but Plum has hardly realized that yet. So far, it has been enough.

The neighborhood is served by a cluster of shops that line one side of an almost-busy road. Journeying, Plum traverses a cricket field where cricket is never played. The park hasn’t been mown for some weeks, and pink daisies dot the grass. It’s only when she is halfway across the oval that she remembers being stung by a bee while crossing this same grass wearing these same sandals one afternoon last summer. The bee, trapped between instep and sandal sole, had writhed in frenzy while Plum, screaming, had scrabbled in the grass like a broken-backed mule. The recollection makes her scan the daisies tensely, driving from her mind her usual park-induced thought, which is that she wishes she had a dog — a floppy cocker spaniel, or a bony Afghan hound. At home and at school she forgets the idea, as she would probably forget the dog. She is not really a nurturing person.

She arrives at the shops sweating, the preacher’s hand on her head very tight and crawly, a hand which commits
unpleasant sins. The shopping strip consists of a milk bar, a fish-and-chippery, an accountant’s, and a hairdresser who deals with hair as an abattoir deals with life; as well as a news agency, which Plum enters. She wanders the length of the greeting-card rack until she reaches the party invitations. A poor or a daggy person might make her own invitations, but Plum is neither of these, so she needn’t go to that trouble. After some indecision, she selects the dancing silhouettes of
There’s going to be a party!
over the cavorting cavies of
Party’s happening!
There are twelve cards in the box, so she will be able to make mistakes and give a spare to herself, as a joke.

Her fourteenth birthday. Her fifteenth year. Invitations that suggest youthful maturity combined with fun. Plum is happy. She spends her mother’s change on a bag of Pop Rocks.

Paranoid about bees, she takes the longer route home, keeping to the footpath that skirts the oval. The path meets a playground where there are swings and monkey bars and a slide, all these constructed from chain and steel and hefty slabs of wood, as if children have the destructive strength of draft horses. Plum dallies on a swing for a while, kicking back and forth. She imagines that she presents a thoughtful picture to any onlooker. She climbs the ladder to the top of the slide and sweeps down the slant of steel; at the bottom of the slide she leaps off yiking, clutching the backs of her thighs. “Uh uh uh!” she cries, skittering forward but bending backward, away from the pain. As the agony subsides
Plum whips in circles, trying to see if her skin is cooked or perhaps flayed. She hisses at the slide, snatches the invitations from the grass, and thumps off grouchily.

Detouring along the footpath has led her away from her usual route; but there’s another road, close to the playground, which will also wend her home. Plum stumps along, the invitations knocking her knee, impatient with the heat and wishing only to be home now, for the day to be done. She rounds a corner and sees, parked in the shade of a paperbark, a large, greenish, flat-flanked car so similar to Justin’s that the word jumps out of her —“Justin!”— and she halts as if lassoed. Plum doesn’t know Justin’s plate number — she senses indistinctly the thousands of details she ignores every day — but the vehicle’s familiarity, its relationship to her, is recognized in her marrow. She steps across the naturestrip, wary of bees, and peeks through the passenger window. There, on the long vinyl seat, is a scraggy striped fisherman’s cap that is indisputably Justin’s. There are his bronze sunglasses, folded on the dashboard. There, on the floor behind the driver’s seat, is the street directory that Plum herself gave him for Christmas; it doesn’t look like it’s been used.

Plum crunches a mouthful of Pop Rocks, puzzling. Mums had said Justin was at work, but the bottle shop is nowhere near here. She looks around at the house before which the Holden is parked, thinking perhaps her brother is visiting someone; but the house is clearly owned by a geriatric, there are roses along the fence and a revolting
gnome by the letter box, and no one young has lived there for decades. She could mull over the matter further, but it’s easier to lean against the blank wall of cluelessness. “A mystery,” she says, knowing it won’t actually be so. The reason why Justin’s car is here will not be astounding, due to the fact that so few things ever are. Plum walks away dispirited by the very dullness of existence.

Cydar is home when she arrives, and his presence revives her. She pushes through the jungly garden to where his bungalow, a large wooden cell as morose as a hangman, stands decaying in a corner of the yard. He is sitting on the bungalow’s doorstep, a slinky black-and-white cat smoking a cigarette which he ashes with a tap against the step. The breeze wafts flakes of ash across his feet, and he watches them skip his fine toes and flat nails with a concentration that fades when he looks up at her. Sometimes, when Plum thinks of Cydar, she sees a mobile of origami cranes turning gently near the ceiling of a tall white ornate house like the one in
The Amityville Horror.
She has never told Cydar about this vision, because doing so would be as bad as shouting something that desperately needed to be kept secret. Cydar is clever, capable of demolishing his sister and everyone else with a tilt of his head, a lancet-like word — but he needs care. Plum doesn’t know why, but she’s always felt this way.