Butterfly (7 page)

She flops on the earth beside his feet, hoping to appear winsome. Somebody, possibly the vampiric girlfriend, has painted his toenails blue. His eyes are very black eyes,
and typically their whites are very white; today, the whites are stained scarlet, as if he’s excruciatingly tired. She needs his promise immediately, however — she can’t wait until he’s slept. “So you’re coming to my party?” she suggests wheedlingly.

He blows out smoke, blinks lacklusterly. “I thought I wasn’t invited.”

“I was
joking.
It was a joke! Of course you can come. So will you?”

“No.”

“Cydar! You
have
to! I’m your baby sister!”

He concertinas the cigarette butt against the ground before flicking it into the shrubs, where it joins the slow perishing of stubs innumerable. “Yeah,” he says. “That’s the point.”

“But you have to!
Please!
Pretty please? I’ll write you a special invitation.”

Cydar closes his eyes, pained. “Why would you want me at your party, Plum?”

“My name isn’t Plum now. You have to call me Aria.”

“All right. But I’m not coming to your party. All that shrieking.”

“We don’t shriek!”

“You’re shrieking now.”

Plum clenches her fists, struggling to find the right combination of words that will unlock his kindness. He will always do as she wants, provided she asks the right way. “What about if you just come for the cake?”

He thinks on this; then says, “All right.”

Plum jounces with delight. She would seize her brother by his bony wrists and shake him to prove her gratitude, if only he wouldn’t find the contact humiliating. Instead she inquires, “How’s uni?”

She doesn’t doubt that what her brother is doing at university will make a lasting impression on the world — she places no limits on his cleverness. But Cydar ignores the query, as if unconvinced that her curiosity is genuine. The trees rising above the bungalow scrape its corrugated roof with woody claws; from behind her brother’s back comes the gurgle of a hundred aquatic worlds. The breeze has blown fine brown dust across his lips. For a moment she thinks he’s forgotten her, that he’s gone off wherever his fish go; then he looks at her and she’s reminded that he never forgets anything. “What is it you want for your birthday? That thing you said you can’t have?”

Plum pinkens, shrinking to recall the scene she’d made at the dinner table. There’s no option but to brazen it out. “A television. A teeny-weeny television inside a silver ball with little legs. Like a spaceman’s helmet. It’s really cute.”

“Sounds revolting.”

“It’s not! It’s good. Just because it’s not a dumb fish . . .”

“I thought you’d want your ears pierced.”

Plum straightens with alacrity, hand flying to an earlobe. “What? Why? Do you think I should get my ears pierced?”

“No.” Cydar shrugs. “All the girls wear earrings. I thought it’s what you’d want.”

Plum smooths the lobe between thumb and finger, dwelling on what piercing would mean. “I don’t have to do what everyone else does,” she murmurs.

“Nope.”

“Maybe I should. Do you think I should?”

Her brother looks more tired than ever. “Everyone else does, so no.”

This answer isn’t satisfying; Plum, needing to think alone, climbs to her feet. “So you promise you’ll come for cake?”

“I promise.”

And she has to believe. Halfway across the garden she stops and looks back. He has rested his head on his knees, a hand on a foot, and looks like a crashed bird. “Where’s Justin?” she asks through the tangle of briar and thoughtlessly planted trees. “Mums said he was at work, but I saw his car near the playground. Do you think he’ll come for cake too?”

Cydar shrugs another time, and does not lift his head.

Into his knees, Cydar sighs. The hot breeze ruffles the hairs on his arms, rubs felinely against his face. The drug is moving oilishly through his system, making his limbs long like a spider’s, loosening his skin. Grown in the black soil of mountains, fed by the crumblings of rainforests, watered
by crystalline creeks and mothered by a radiant sun; transported interstate in Hessian bags in the wheel-space of a column-shift Valiant, a spotted dog’s head poking out the window, the speedo watched religiously — all this journeying, from hard seed to sublime smoke, melts through time to peacefully unbuckle Cydar from normality. He had kept to himself the fact that, when Plum was sitting beside him, he could see her skull through her skin.

A rich, virescent, rank-smelling drug, strong as a train and loaded with paranoia: Justin, when he tries it, will be reduced to jabbering imbecility. Even Cydar, usually impervious, had had to fight the anxious urge to grip Plum by the collar and plead,
Don’t: whatever you’re doing, don’t do it.
Cydar loves Plum and always has, from the moment he saw her on the day she was born. He remembers the hospital, standing beside Fa at the nursery window, pressing to the pane a card that said
Coyle;
he remembers the nurse walking the aisles of cribs until she came to one, their one,
his one.
Slotted inside her blankets, Plum was only a baby — only a baby’s head, in fact, swollen as an apricot, spout-lipped, bald — but Cydar had craved to reach through the glass,
hello hello hello.
He had sought his father’s eyes, and they had exchanged a look they’ve never shared since. Hushed and shivery. This new thing come to change everything. Make Cydar no longer the youngest, give Cydar something to guard. Plum loves Justin more than she loves Cydar, people usually do and cannot be blamed, and although he’d hoped that his sister might be something other than usual,
Cydar accepted the situation years ago. It’s never diminished the rumble of responsibility he feels in his chest for her. But the honk of her voice, the slope to her stance, the sore look of the skin on her forehead, the unwillingness of her clothes to fit well: all these are making Cydar, who loves Plum more than anyone does, reluctant to look at her. The desperation which singes the edges of her — this is even worse. She’s not fourteen, but sitting on the bungalow step Cydar is sure he sees how her life will unfold.
Be fearsome,
he wants to tell her.
Defy.
His own life depends on her doing so. His existence will never be all it can be if Plum stands in its corner, happy for and proud of him, but misaligned and alone. She will stunt him, and he will let her.

A blackbird breaks his concentration, the dope abruptly drops him from its teeth. Cydar yawns and straightens, rubbing his eyes with a fist. It’s impossible to guess how much time has passed since he sat on the step and struck a match, but it must be nearing dinnertime. He stands up cautiously from the torpid trough of stonedness, and the chemicals sink through him to settle at his feet as heavily as boots.

The interior of the bungalow is lit like a cinema in which Gatsby would have watched silent films. The fish tanks emanate a frosty radiance that’s shot through with amber and emerald. There is a damp, purgatorial smell. Standing against a wall are the handcrafted housings of an expensive hi-fi. Cydar flicks a switch, and threadlike needles jump. As the stylus arm rises, the record on the turntable begins to spin. Every day ends with The Velvet Underground.

There’s not much time until lamb fritters, but enough to make a start on her homework. Plum takes the recorder and the book of tunes out to the swinging lounge on the veranda, and sits with the instrument perched on her lips and the book splayed over her knees. Plum is not musically inclined, and the noise she blows from the plastic tube is discordant in the extreme.
Like a cat trodden on by a plumber,
her music teacher says, having grimaced out the same line several hundred times over the past decade. Yet Plum persists, because she has in her head a seraphic image of herself playing a flute. She would be the exact person she wants to be, if only she could play the flute.

And Maureen, cooking dinner in her kitchen, might hear her playing, and come outside.

In fact, in the shadows, it is Plum’s brother Justin who listens, unable, as long as his sister occupies the veranda, to step beyond the door.

M
AUREEN SAYS,
“Your sister asked if we were expecting a king.”

Justin is standing by the window of Maureen’s lounge room. The window is draped by a gauzy curtain, and while he can see out into a grainy world, no one, outside, may see in. Only stifled light penetrates the gauze — Maureen wants nothing to fade — so the room is dim, cool as a well even at the end of this long summer. Everything in the room matches — the smoked glass, the beige paintwork, the pair of Matisses framed in chrome — and accords with the current vogue of the middlingly classy. The lounge suite is upholstered in white leather, and reminds Justin of ice cream. The carpet is equally colorless, the enemy of shoes. It is a flawless but not a restful room: Justin has seen
Maureen’s son refuse to cross the carpet-edger of its threshold, his deerish eyes blank with unwillingness.

Although right now the boy is sitting at Justin’s feet tracing shapes with his fingertips onto the carpet, and Justin feels his presence as a whiff of Ovaltine and cinnamon toast.

The mantel clock strikes six with a ladylike chime. The clock is new, still foreign enough to make Justin and David look around at its sound. Maureen, stretched out on the ice cream, smiles: Justin knows why. She tends an ever-changing flock of costly periodicals, and every lounge room in their burnished pages features a small chiming clock on a mantel. Other things she sees there can make her less happy. “Yellow doesn’t suit me, does it? But everyone seems to be wearing it. My skin’s too pale for bright colors, isn’t it? But colors are so much in fashion. Yellow is awful on me, I shouldn’t have worn it.”

“It’s not awful,” he assures her. “It’s fine.” Over the past year he’s said this or something similar so often he hardly hears himself say it. In the beginning, he had thought her worries touching. It was as if she was trying to rise to a standard Justin had unintentionally set. Justin is twenty-four years old: the world will never be more suited to him than it is now, he will never feel more embraced by life or have greater faith in his right to exist. The earth and the oxygen, the cities and lights, the nights and the beaches seem created for him and for those like him. Maureen Wilks is thirty-six, married for most of that differing dozen
years, a mother and a housewife. It would be tempting for someone like her, Justin supposes, to stop trying. Instead, in her relentless reaching for what’s fresh and new, she’s almost more youthful than he is.

But in the last few months something has changed, smudging his view of her. Something has leaked from a pool of indifference that Justin hadn’t even noticed was filling, and everything he’d once craved has become less vital to him. The hankering he’d felt at the start is subsiding as it has subsided before, away from other girls he’s loved, for no more scurrilous reason than that he’s too restless to be in love for long. And although he’s been aggrieved by the fickleness of his heart, Justin is also relieved. He is still free. He won’t spend his life with this woman. He’s embarrassed by the Justin who had once, boyishly, wanted to.

Embarrassment is like the fatal stick in KerPlunk — with the smallest tweak, everything falls. Justin now finds odious what once flattered and entranced. Maureen’s conversation, her pride, even her attempts to please: all these irritate. Her battle to stay at the forefront of what’s fashionable is pathetic in someone living her life. She doesn’t seem willing to accept that she’s just a middle-aged housewife. She speaks with dissatisfaction of the house, its furnishings, the neighborhood, the stores. And if she never exactly states that her husband and child also rank deficient in her world, she often tells Justin, “You are my fine thing. You’re what’s worth living for.”

Such words had once sounded like poetry. Now they
slide off Justin forgettably. His immunity makes him pity her. To which Cydar had said: “That doesn’t sound like love.”

“I should have chosen the square face instead of the oval.” She’s referring to the clock, which is still trilling prettily, liking the sound of its own voice. Justin doesn’t reply. If he’s shanghaied into one more conversation about the price, prospects and quandaries posed by yet another piece of tat he will, without question, be sick.

David, overcome with weariness, stretches out on the carpet, resting his cheek on Justin’s right shoe. A flame of affection lights up for the child, but Justin stamps it down. He leans closer to the window, searching out Plum. She’s sitting on the Coyles’ veranda, tooting a recorder. Through a scrum of camellia he glimpses her kicking foot, the back of a hand, the edge of her downturned face. If Justin were to leave through the front door, his sister would certainly spot him. Yet her presence isn’t imprisoning — he could slip out the side door, jump the fence into the next property, walk from there to where he left his car. Plum would never see him, the buildings would block her view. Escape is not only possible, but easy, especially for one used to subterfuge — dressing for work he’s not rostered to do, inventing the details of afternoons spent playing pool, learning another man’s routine, memorizing the sound of a particular car. Never so much as a sidelong glance when there was a risk someone shrewd might see.

But instead of escaping, Justin simply stands, as if the
weight of the child’s head has compressed his feet into the ground. He feels the exhaustion of doing what he hasn’t yet attempted.

For a year they have played their game. A year of hands clamped to mouths, lipstick buffed from shoulders, care taken not to bruise. For much of that time, Justin’s blood has run fast. Not so long ago, he would have loved Plum for sitting on the veranda and making an obstacle of herself. Now, though, he’s bored. Now, he’s longing for the freedom to leave through the front door. . . . The sight of his sister on the veranda swing is oddly beckoning. She must be waiting for Fa, or for Justin himself. And he wants to go and wait with her: if he could sit beside her, waiting for Fa, rightness would be restored. As long as he’s here, behind a gauze curtain, nothing is as it could be.