Pool (18 page)

54

It was nearly daylight when Wolfgang climbed back in through his bedroom window. Elsie barked at him from the other side of the fence and he called over his shoulder at her – loudly – to shut up. He didn’t care if his parents heard him; he didn’t care who heard. Audrey loved him. What did it matter if she was a little strange and had some seriously wacky ideas? He could live with that. The important thing was how they felt for each other: she loved him and he loved her. He was covered in mosquito bites, some in places he had never been bitten before, but for once the itching wasn’t a discomfort; rather, it served as a reminder, as proof that what had happened tonight in the cemetery hadn’t been a dream.

Who knows, you might have a chance with a blind one, hey?

Wolfgang undressed and fell onto his bed wearing just his boxers. It was still very warm. He lay face down on top of his doona with one hand trailing on the floor. A fine dew of sweat covered his body. He had walked Audrey back to her place afterwards, then jogged all the way home. His fingertips played with the squashy pile of the carpet, drew an A there, then a B. He felt much too energised to sleep but knew he had to. In three hours he had to be up again. Mass and reconciliation. How had he allowed himself to be roped into that? Still, he
did
have something to confess now. He traced a heart around the A and the B. It hadn’t felt like a sin, though. It hadn’t felt as bad as the lies he’d told her, nor pretending to believe her when she’d told him her loony-tunes story.

Had he taken advantage of her? No way, she was three years older than him. A woman. Physically she was a woman, but mentally?

I’d better go to reconciliation, Wolfgang decided.

Already the room was growing light. He should have shut his curtains. Should have shut the window, too, he thought, listening to the nagging whine of a mosquito somewhere in the room. The flyscreen was still leaning against the weatherboards outside his window. Wolfgang lay on his doona and debated whether or not he could be bothered getting up to drag the curtains closed. How long would it take him? Five seconds to stand up, another five seconds to cross to the window and pull the curtains together, five more to get back to bed. Fifteen seconds. Twenty seconds tops, he thought, and it’d be done. But he felt very relaxed now, his body pleasantly drained of energy, even if his mind was still racing.

It wasn’t dishonest, exactly, pretending to believe Audrey’s loopy ideas; it was part of loving her. It made her feel better about herself, as it did when he told her she was beautiful. Yet afterwards, as they walked back to her place, she’d seemed quiet. He wondered if she regretted what they’d done.

‘I’m sorry,’ she’d whispered when they hugged at the bottom of her driveway.

‘What for?’

‘Oh, I don’t know. For keeping you out so late.’

Wolfgang had the impression she had been about to say something else. ‘It’s Saturday,’ he said. ‘I can sleep in. Anyway, I wouldn’t have missed tonight for anything.’

Audrey squeezed him very tight for perhaps five seconds. ‘Neither would I,’ she said into the front of his T-shirt. ‘Not for the world.’

The mosquito found him. It began buzzing around his head no more than two or three centimetres away. Wolfgang lazily opened one eye and peered over the mound of his pillow, hoping to see his tormentor against the rectangle of dawn sky in the window and perhaps – an optimistic thought – swat it out of the air. He saw, instead, a big moth in silhouette fluttering against the glass, trying to get out.

Go down a bit, Wolfgang would have told it had he been able to speak moth. The bottom half of the window’s wide open.

He watched, one-eyed, for several more seconds, then slowly lifted his head clear of the pillow. The moth’s wings were large, nearly the size of a female gum emperor’s, yet its body seemed slight in comparison. And the way it moved was unusual, too – rather than the heavy, bustling flight characteristic of most moths, this one beat its wings in a slow, almost relaxed manner. It looked more like a ...

Wolfgang swung himself upright on his bed and grappled for the lamp switch, nearly knocking his clock radio to the floor. When the light came on, an involuntary exclamation escaped his lips. Wolfgang sprang towards the window.

‘Stay there!’ he whispered. ‘Stay where you are,
please
!’

What happened next seemed to happen in slow motion. As Wolfgang’s outstretched fingers reached the wooden sash and began to slide it down, the large black butterfly that had been fluttering against the upper window pane launched itself away from the glass, brushed past his face so close he felt the wind from its wings, wheeled down between his arms and disappeared out into the semi-darkness.

The sash slammed shut, cracking the glass from bottom to top.

Wolfgang swore loudly. He slid the window back open and thrust his head out. Elsie was barking again, stupid damn dog! He shouted at her, angrily this time, and the dog fell silent. Wolfgang strained his eyes out into the early dawn. It was no good; he could barely see the fence, much less the butterfly – the
black
butterfly. He needed the torch. Where was it? He’d brought it back from the cemetery, hadn’t he? Aha, here it was on the floor beneath the window – he must have dropped it coming in. Its battery was low. The dull orange beam barely penetrated the dark space between the fence and the house. Not that Wolfgang expected the butterfly to be there any longer; it would have flown up – up towards the sky. After a few more seconds, Wolfgang switched off the torch and leaned forward on the windowsill, defeated. He’d had his chance. There had been a live black butterfly in his bedroom and he’d allowed it to escape!

It was incredible to see a live one at last. And in his bedroom!

Wolfgang remembered something then, and in the grip of a half-formed idea he reversed too quickly in through the window and bumped his head –
clunk
! – on the sash. The blow caused him to bite his tongue and drop the torch onto the paving outside.

His panic was for nothing. The other black butterfly, the dead one, was still on his desk where he had left it last night. Of course it was. Had he seriously expected it to have miraculously come back to life, freed itself from its strips of paper and pins, and flown out the window? Get real, Mulqueen! You’ve been spending too much time with Audrey.

‘Holy shit! Can’t you knock?’

‘Mind your language,’ his father said mildly. He stood midway between the desk and the doorway, one hand holding the front of his pyjamas closed. Wolfgang had no idea how long he’d been there.

‘You scared me half to death, Dad.’

‘There was a noise.’

‘I ... my window was stuck.’

The old man shuffled past him and slid the sash down, then up, then down again in its rattly wooden frame. ‘It seems perfectly all right to me.’

‘I guess I freed it up,’ Wolfgang said lamely.

‘And broke it in the process.’

‘It’s only a crack.’

‘The whole pane will have to be replaced,’ Leo said. With a fingertip he pushed lightly against one edge of the fracture and the glass made a crackling sound. ‘I thought I heard shouting.’

‘The Nielsens’ dog was barking. I had to yell at her.’

‘The Nielsens?’

‘Our next-door neighbours.’

‘Ah, yes, of course. The Nielsens.’ Leo frowned. ‘Where do they live again?’

‘Right there.’ Wolfgang pointed.

They both looked at the window, where their reflections stood side by side in the glass, Wolfgang’s half a head taller than his father’s.

‘You know,’ the old man said musingly, ‘sometimes I think God made a mistake. He could have made us old to begin with, and then allowed us to grow younger as the years passed by.’

‘I don’t think I’d want to be a kid again,’ Wolfgang said.

His father smiled sadly. ‘Would you prefer to be a creaky old dinosaur who can’t even remember who lives next door?’

Wolfgang shrugged. He was sixteen; he was in love; a butterfly was going to be named after him. ‘God doesn’t make mistakes.’

‘He can be quite cruel, though,’ Leo said. He moved over to the desk and picked up the setting-tray. ‘What’s this?’

‘I’m not sure. I think it’s a new species.’

‘It’s very beautiful.’

Watching his father admire the black butterfly, Wolfgang felt a catch in his throat. ‘You set it for me, Dad.’

‘I did?’ The old man raised his eyes. ‘You know, Edward, it’s peculiar. I spent most of my life caring for animals on the one hand, and killing butterflies on the other.’

‘You killed them
because
you cared for them.’

‘That’s an oxymoron, if ever I heard one.’

Wolfgang marvelled that his father could forget something so fundamental as which of his sons was which, yet remember a word like oxymoron. ‘If you hadn’t caught these butterflies’ – he waved a hand at the display cases that lined the walls – ‘they’d all have died and rotted away to nothing within a few weeks.’

‘True enough,’ said Leo, tipping the setting-tray slightly to get a better view of the dead butterfly. ‘If this one was given the choice, though, don’t you think it would have taken its few weeks?’

‘I don’t suppose it really knew the difference,’ Wolfgang said.

The old man placed the setting-tray back on the desk exactly where he’d found it. ‘But I did,’ he said softly. ‘God does.’