Pool (10 page)
Authors: Justin D'Ath
Tags: #Juvenile Fiction, #Fantasy & Magic, #Health & Daily Living, #General, #Social Issues, #Juvenile Nonfiction
30
‘Wolfgang. Wolfgang.’ His mother stood over his bed, silhouetted against the light from the passage. ‘There’s a phone call for you.’
Wolfgang squinted bleary-eyed at the glowing green display on his clock radio: 4:55 a.m. ‘What’s going on?’
‘It’s Mr Babacan. He says it’s important.’
Bummer! Wolfgang pushed back the covers and sat up. He had stayed on the Internet all evening, just to keep the phone line busy so they couldn’t call and ask why he wasn’t at Audrey’s party. By eleven-thirty, when finally he’d gone to bed two hours after his parents, he had assumed the threat was over. Obviously not.
Keith came straight to the point. ‘Wolfgang, do you know where Audrey is?’
‘N-no,’ he said. ‘I’m thorry I didn’t come to her –’
‘Never mind about that,’ Keith cut him off. ‘I’m looking for Audrey. We thought she might have been with you.’
‘I haven’t theen her thince yesterday morning.’
Keith sighed. ‘Okay. I’m sorry I woke you.’
‘Wait! When did you last see her, Mr Babacan?’
‘Last night. She went out at about six. Normally she never goes out that early – that’s why we thought she might be with you.’
‘I haven’t seen her since yesterday morning,’ Wolfgang repeated. He looked out the window at the end of the passageway. There was a pale bruising of dawn at the bottom of the star-speckled sky. ‘But I think I know somewhere you could look.’
Keith parked the Mercedes outside the wrought-iron fence.
‘Why the
cemetery
?’ asked Audrey’s sister Martine, who had driven up from Geelong the previous afternoon.
Wolfgang opened his door and stepped out into the grey dawn. ‘I don’t know. She brought me here on New Year’s Eve. It was like she knows her way around.’
‘My crazy sister.’
‘Martine!’ her mother said reprovingly.
Keith caught Wolfgang’s eye across the car’s roof. ‘We appreciate your help, son.’
None of them had mentioned the party, nor the fact that Wolfgang hadn’t been there. Without Audrey, of course, there wouldn’t have been a party, regardless of whether he was there or not. It made him feel less responsible. Less guilty. But he was still guilty about Audrey. About yesterday. The lipstick had been for him.
He led her family up the wide gravel path between the headstones. The cemetery seemed smaller in the spreading light of the new day than it had the last time he’d been here. Even the headstones seemed smaller. It was chilly. Wolfgang wished he had thought to wear more than just a T-shirt and shorts. Keith had on a fawn windcheater and grey tracksuit trousers. His wife wore a blue cardigan over a fancy-looking black dress that came nearly to her ankles and looked incongruous with her sneakers. Martine, who had Audrey’s colouring but finer features and a slim, almost boyish build, wore low-cut jeans below a short yellow and green striped top that left her pale midriff bare. She seemed slightly drunk. Wolfgang had the impression that all three of them had been up all night.
They saw Campbell first. The dog sat up and wagged its tail as they walked down the long grassy slope. Audrey lay in roughly the same spot where she and Wolfgang had spread their blanket on New Year’s Eve. As they approached – Bernadette hurrying ahead – Wolfgang saw half a dozen orange flowers scattered across the grass beside her.
‘Audrey!’ cried her mother, kneeling and attempting to gather Audrey in her arms. ‘Darling, are you all right?’
Audrey stiffened as she came awake. She struggled free of her mother’s clumsy embrace and sat up, her right hand reaching automatically for Campbell.
‘Mum?’ she said, frowning. ‘What are you doing here?’
‘We could ask you the same thing, young lady,’ said her father.
Martine nudged past and squatted in front of her sister. ‘Hi Auds. Happy birthday.’
‘Marty! Hey, what’s going on?’
‘I come all the way up here for your birthday party and you shoot through.’
Audrey let go of Campbell and brushed her fingertips through the grass, finding one of the flower stems. ‘What time is it?’
‘It’s morning,’ her mother said. ‘Darling, we’ve been worried sick.’
Bernadette reached for her daughter again and this time Audrey allowed herself to be held. Martine took one of Audrey’s hands – the one without the flower – and with the other she lightly touched her sister’s cheek.
‘You gave us quite a scare, Auds.’
‘I’m sorry,’ Audrey murmured into the folds of her mother’s cardigan. She began quietly sobbing.
‘It’s okay, baby. You’re safe now,’ Bernadette said.
Keith knelt next to his wife and two daughters and began stroking Audrey’s tangled red hair. For once he seemed lost for words. Wolfgang, standing a few paces away, felt like an intruder. He had no connection with these four people, no place in their lives. What had he been thinking when he’d accepted Keith’s money?
‘It isn’t fair,’ Audrey whimpered.
‘What isn’t fair, baby?’ her mother asked.
‘Being blind! No one likes me because I’m blind.’
‘Don’t be silly, darling. We love you very much.’
‘Not you, Mum. Other people.’ Audrey’s voice became small and plaintive. ‘I’m never going to have a boyfriend.’
Bernadette brushed Audrey’s hair back and kissed her forehead. ‘What are you talking about, darling? Wolfgang’s right here.’
31
Wolfgang’s father met him in the hallway as he slipped quietly in through the front door. Even though it was only six-fifteen in the morning, Leo was already wearing his suit. He held the teapot, a grey worm of steam rising from its spout.
‘Whose car was that?’
‘Keith Babacan’s.’
‘He phoned you.’
‘I know that, Dad. That’s where I’ve been.’
Leo made a jerky gesture with the teapot, sprinkling a trail of steaming water drops across the polished wooden floor. ‘Would you like a cup of tea, Edward?’
Wrong son, Dad, Wolfgang thought. ‘No thanks,’ he said. All he wanted was to go back to bed.
‘I got your butterfly,’ Leo said.
‘What butterfly?’
‘The black one.’
‘I know you did. Luckily Mum found what you’d done with it.’
‘But your mother isn’t even up yet,’ said Leo.
Wolfgang sighed. It was like talking to a child. ‘I’m going back to bed.’
‘Sleep well,’ his father said amiably, then wandered off down the passage carrying the steaming teapot.
Wolfgang sat on the bed and dragged his sneakers off without untying the laces. Silly old fart, he thought. He stood to remove his T-shirt and draped it over the bed end. Something caught his eye.
What was his setting-board doing in the middle of the desk?
‘Damn you, Dad!’ he muttered. ‘Have you been going through my stuff again?’
Approaching the desk, Wolfgang drew in a quick involuntary breath. Neatly pinned to the cork, its four wings perfectly aligned and set beneath two rectangles of semi-transparent kitchen paper held flat by entomological pins, was a large black butterfly.
32
Leo led him into the spare room. ‘It was in there,’ he said, pointing.
One of Wolfgang’s traps lay up-ended on the dusty work table.
‘Where did you have it?’ Wolfgang asked.
‘Have what?’
‘The trap.’
‘It was in the shed where you left it.’
‘Dad,
I
didn’t catch the butterfly,’ Wolfgang said,
‘you
did! This is a
different
butterfly!’
‘It was in the trap.’
‘I know that. But where was the trap?’
‘In. The. Shed,’ Leo said loudly, an edge of anger in his voice. ‘Are you deaf, boy? The trap was in the shed, the butterfly was in the trap. Is that too hard for you to understand? I’m surprised, frankly, that you left it in there – it might have damaged itself.’
Wolfgang stared into his father’s watery brown eyes. ‘When did you find it, Dad?’
‘Yesterday, I think.’ Leo tugged on one ear for a moment. He nodded. ‘Yes, it was yesterday morning, just after you went off to work.’
Was it possible? Wolfgang wondered as he made his way barefoot along the brick-paved pathway to the garage. Could he have caught the butterfly himself on Thursday and not noticed it in the trap? If it had been sitting in the corner of the wire frame beneath the fold of the funnel, it might have been difficult to see. It was black, after all, not the most eye-catching of colours.
Wolfgang lifted the roller door and let himself into the garage. What his family referred to as the shed was actually an extension of the garage, little more than a storeroom at the back. Wolfgang kept his traps and his father’s old long-handled nets there. Entry was by way of a creaky iron door opening from the rear of the garage. There was an outer door too, but that was never used – Wolfgang was not even sure if there was a key. He tugged the interior door open and switched on the light. Everything appeared to be just as he’d left it on Thursday, except for the absence of his second trap. Wolfgang brushed away a European wasp buzzing around his head. What had his father been doing in here anyway? Wolfgang was about to turn and leave when he noticed a flash of colour inside the remaining trap. What on earth? He crouched and lifted the trap gently onto its end. There was a butterfly inside it – a faded and very battered common brown.
Wolfgang carried the trap outside and set the butterfly free. It fluttered away, brown and yellow in the slanting fingers of sunlight that poked through the grevilleas growing beside the driveway. It was possible that he might have overlooked one butterfly in his traps on Thursday evening, but two?
Dad, thought Wolfgang, what have you been up to?
He returned the trap to the shed and removed the baited cloth. Normally he did this when he returned from a collecting trip, but on Thursday he’d forgotten. Careless. Then something occurred to him: perhaps his father had used fresh baits. The coarse-weave cloth was still slightly sticky. He sniffed it. The alcohol had long since evaporated, but he could still smell the apricot jam he’d been using lately. Not his father’s work then – the old man had always sworn by honey.
The wasp was back, circling Wolfgang’s head. It could smell the jam, too. Wolfgang stood and batted the insect away. He wasn’t fond of wasps, but they didn’t scare him as they did some people. There were two wasps, he realised. One was still circling, the other crawled along the top edge of one of the partially open louvres in the small window above him. No, there were
three!
A third yellow and black wasp had just landed on the trap.
How were they getting in?
Wolfgang pulled on the stiff, cob-webby window lever until he could see between the frosted panes of glass. Aha! A section of the flywire had pulled out of its frame, leaving a triangular hole roughly the size of his hand. Another common brown – this one in better condition than the one he had just released – hovered just outside the opening.
So the old man had been right. Wolfgang had caught the black butterfly.
It had flown in through the window and found its way into the trap he’d carelessly left baited.
33
Audrey phoned later and invited Wolfgang to her birthday party.
‘I thought it was last night,’ he said.
‘It was supposed to be last night, only I wasn’t there,’ said Audrey. ‘Will you come?’
‘If you want me to.’
‘I wouldn’t be inviting you if I didn’t want you to.’
‘I’ll be there,’ Wolfgang said. He played with the telephone cord. They hadn’t had a chance to talk at the cemetery that morning. ‘Audrey, I’m sorry about yesterday.’
‘That’s okay. I’m sorry about the other night.’
‘It wasn’t your fault. You got a headache.’
‘I didn’t have a headache,’ Audrey said in a small, guilty voice. ‘I got scared.’
‘Scared?’
he said. ‘Of what?’
‘Of the pool.’
‘But you go there almost every day.’
‘I don’t go
in
the pool,’ Audrey said.
Wolfgang remembered the day she’d walked down the ramp and put her face under the water, and how disappointed she’d been when her sight wasn’t restored. ‘I think your dad’s right,’ he said. ‘That whole Marceline Flavel thing was a put-up job. They probably arranged it to con people into coming here – you know, to get more tourists. There’s nothing
miraculous
about the pool.’
‘The water slopes, doesn’t it?’
‘Apart from that. Father Nguyen more or less admitted there are no such thing as angels.’
Audrey was silent.
‘Are you still there?’ Wolfgang asked.
‘Yes.’
‘Well, um ... What time’s the party?’
‘Around seven, seven-thirty. It’ll be mostly rellies, but they’re a pretty friendly bunch.’ There was a short pause. ‘Wolfgang,’ Audrey said softly, ‘do you believe we have other lives?’
‘Reincarnation, you mean?’
He heard her sigh. ‘I don’t really know what I mean. See you tonight, okay?’
‘Okay.’
‘You will come, won’t you?’ she added quickly. ‘You don’t think I’m too crazy or anything?’
‘I don’t think you’re crazy, Audrey.’
It was only after he had put the phone down that Wolfgang remembered he had told her parents he was going to Melbourne that day. Well, he had changed his plans. Perhaps he could say that the early morning trip to the cemetery had resulted in him missing his ride to Melbourne. No. He had told enough lies already. If they asked – and he didn’t think they would – Wolfgang would simply say that Audrey had invited him to her party and he hadn’t been able to refuse. And this time he wouldn’t be telling them a lie.
