Pool (22 page)

64

It was going to be another very hot day. Already the temperature must have been nearly thirty degrees and it was still an hour before noon. This time Wolfgang had remembered the umbrella. He held its shade over his father as they made their way slowly down the wide grassy slope. In his other arm he cradled a shoebox and a bunch of white carnations wrapped in tissue paper and cellophane. The flowers were Leo’s idea. He had paid for them himself.

‘You’ve got to take flowers,’ he’d said when Wolfgang told him where they were going, so they had made a slow detour to the supermarket.

Leo hadn’t asked what was in the shoebox.

There were already flowers on her grave: a bunch of yellow and white daisies – they looked fresh – and a wilting red rose in an empty glass. The dirt had been cleared away but Wolfgang could still see the cuts in the turf where the sods had been replaced. There was no plaque yet, just a small numbered wooden marker.

Leo bent stiffly and picked up the glass with the rose in it. ‘I saw a tap back there,’ he said, and started back up the slope.

Wolfgang hurried after him. ‘Here, take the umbrella.’

‘It isn’t going to rain,’ his father said, crotchety as ever.

‘For the sun.’

‘I know what it’s for. I’m not stupid.’

‘I know you aren’t stupid, Dad.’

Without another word, Leo took the umbrella and shuffled off.

Wolfgang returned to Audrey’s grave. He placed the carnations beside the daisies. They had buried her in the exact spot where she used to spend her nights. ‘Whose grave?’ he’d asked her two weeks ago. Now he knew.

Wolfgang opened the shoebox. As he lifted the setting-tray out, the umbrella’s wide shadow fell over him.

‘Isn’t that the one Doctor What’s-his-name from the museum keeps phoning about?’ his father asked.

‘Yes.’

‘I thought you were taking it down to him.’

‘I’ve got another wing – I’ll send him that,’ Wolfgang said. Although he wasn’t sure it wouldn’t disappear like the first one. ‘Dad, do you think there are other places besides this world where people can live?’

‘That’s a strange question,’ Leo said.

‘There have been some pretty strange things happening lately.’

Leo knelt beside him and replaced the wilted rose in its refilled glass of water on Audrey’s grave. ‘It’s hard when someone close to you dies,’ he said, his voice slightly hoarse. ‘I’m sure she’s happy.’

Wolfgang thought so, too. ‘Can you give me a hand with this?’

His father lay the umbrella upside down on the grass. ‘What do you want me to do?’

‘Take the pins out.’

Wolfgang held the setting-tray while Leo began removing the pins and strips of paper that secured the black butterfly to its cork mounting. As the first wing came free, there was a tiny but unmistakeable shiver of movement.

‘Good heavens!’ Leo whispered, pulling his hands away. ‘You can’t have used enough cyanide.’

It was Leo who had set the butterfly but Wolfgang didn’t correct him. In any case, he thought, it wasn’t a question of cyanide.

‘Undo the other wing,’ Wolfgang said.

His vision swam as Leo’s trembling fingers freed the second black wing. For a moment nothing happened, then the butterfly slowly closed its wings and opened them again, as if it was waking from a deep sleep. It rose onto its feet and walked jerkily across the cork and on to Wolfgang’s thumb. He held his hand out over Audrey’s grave, not sure what to do.

‘Go,’ he told it, then lowered his voice to a whisper, ‘go and join her.’

The butterfly tested its wings again: open, closed, open.

Then it flew.

Wolfgang helped his father to his feet. Neither of them said a word. Together, father and son watched the big black butterfly circle up into the faded blue of the summer sky. Up it went, up and up and up, a small black dot spiralling skywards, becoming smaller and smaller until Wolfgang was no longer sure he could see anything at all.