Showcasing
a new work of fiction
The Butterfly Stalker
Black Pepper Press
Publication date - April 2002
The Butterfly Stalker
Chapter 1.
|
At the end of a
corridor there's an old window, so old the glass, slow moving like lava, has dripped
within itself to distort the view.
Made up of twelve small panels this window curves out from the blank
face of the building forming part of a hemisphere, a shape which catches the
sun first thing in morning and holds it, swinging it slowly around, till it
escapes in the late afternoon.
I've dragged a small table under this window. It's an elegant antique table
borrowed from Suza, my downstairs neighbour, and here I sit, within the bow
of the window, looking out at a view of a city which warps and contorts in twelve different ways through
this old glass. Within
reach of my right hand a pile of hand written notes, weighed down by a
paperweight, yellows and curls in the sun. The paperweight itself is interesting. Heavy glass. At its centre is a butterfly, not a
glass butterfly, but a real butterfly.
The glass artist who made this paperweight has set the butterfly at an
angle, as if it rides an updraught, the wings open, the delicate dust on them
almost visible. How he has done
this, encased a butterfly in glass without destroying it, nobody knows and he
won't tell. It's a professional
secret. An ordinary brown and
yellow butterfly, common enough, its upper wings are veined and patterned
like a church window and its lower wings bear false eyes, circles within
circles, a dark iris, the pupils orange brown. When the sun swings around through the window and touches the paperweight a
halo forms, and the butterfly, sainted and suspended, quivers in a hologram
of suggested life. Off the corridor, on the right, is my
bedroom. It catches no sun at
all. Even the daylight is toned
down by the deep skirt of pines in the park beyond. I'm not the only occupant of this room for at night I'm
sure a ghostly woman crosses from the door to the window under the sloping
roof and stands looking out.
I've spoken to her. No
one ever answers but in this time here alone, my intuition has honed itself
to a fine sharpness. I know she's there. My
kitchen is rudimentary, early lit but cold by midday, so I tend to live
almost exclusively at this window end of the corridor. You could say I've perched here for a
while, with the butterfly, out of the buffeting winds, my feet resting on a
pile of reference books which will not fit on the table top, and, still wet
from my last incarnation, I'm
unfolding and drying. A
romantic notion but not quite true.
What I'm actually doing, here in my window, is writing a history of
this city. It's not a
particularly adventurous task, more a join the dots companion for the sightseer. What date was the bridge built? Where did the first ferries tie
up? Who sunk the Lady Ann? That
sort of thing. And, of course,
stories of our bold city founders - the exploits of the brave Lieutenant
Welbourne; who was the first fine wool breeder and why is Lady Lennox's ghost
said to haunt the Customs House?
Snippets. The flotsam
gossip of the brave pioneers of this wild colony. Does the current Lord Mayor get his fine oratorical style
from a certain vicar on his mother's side? Noble deeds and fine old houses - with sepia photographs of men in
frock coats and women with parasols and bustles; a horse drawn carriage
outside the old drapery store when the streets were lined with fine laced
fringed verandahs; Elsmore House before it became the psychiatric hospital;
the Ratford family picnicking by the river. A nice little book about the hey-ho and derring-do of this
romantic city, with, perhaps, a little lace work on the cover, or a cameo -
that would be nice - of a past mayor, with mutton chops, and his lady
wife. The book will sell with other local
trinkets - souvenir teaspoons, a
reproduction trooper's hat, a convict brick, a printed scarf, a pair of
wattle earings, a possum forged in pewter, works by local artisans - a clever
paperweight, for instance, with a butterfly caught in flight. I This
is a city where the founding families haven't moved much but have remained
making their mark on the landscape, ordering its civic affairs and accruing
fame, notoriety and wealth for generation after generation. These are the families who made the
history which is the subject of this commission - and I've been left in no
doubt about that. For there was
no history,
I'm told, and no place, nothing but a wilderness, until the brave young Captain Vermont
road up Windy Hill, checked his horse, a rangy bay, and shouted to his second
in command, 'A fine place, ain't
it, McNelly? Will set the tents
up in that lovely valley.' No,
there was nothing here of any importance at all before that. In fact the place didn't exist till
then. So I'am told. I've
been commissioned to write this work by the city council. Now, as the majority of city
councillors are members of the current generation of the founding families,
this history is necessarily limited, or it will be if I stick to the
guidelines I've been given which are quite strict. The families know their histories, of course they do, the
stories passed down from generation to generation, and it's these stories
which constitute the one and only history, from its beginning to now. I am to confine myself to their
stories. I have a box of
interviews on cassette to work from and the photographs have been supplied
from family albums. A simple
enough task. But the real
history of this city has begun to fascinate me. Among my yellowed notes, weighed down by the butterfly, I
have photocopies of extracts I was never meant to see, articles from old
newspapers, buried reports, odd pages from a journal or a diary. Through these I'm uncovering another
history, which warps and twists between the commissioned lines of print. But
let me tell you about this pretty little city as it is now. To begin with, the first defining
factor, we are on an island - this is a city on an island. Now, You
can see the shape of the volcano quite plainly from here, a depression
between those ancient hills which I have sometimes thought mould the sky like
the bodies of recumbent women, their breasts, their thighs, their hips, giant
women who recline at the crater's edge as at a well. They're its guardians, I suspect,
these Olympian landforms - but whether they be the muses or the furies I
can't tell. From here I can look
down into the centruiii7ikkkkal business district, which is built,
appropriately enough, over the core, and upwards to the opposite rim, a shoulder
curve, where the blackened trees of last years fires hedgehog against the
skyline. This volcano is so old
and cold and crusty and its passions so deeply buried that nothing has
rumbled in its belly since before the dinosaurs roamed, or so it's believed,
and the occasional little tremor can be discounted. We think we are safe here. The sides of the crater are planted thickly with
houses. I look down on shapely
rooves to where the matchbox cars glide the grid of roads and, at night,
lighting by numbers, the streets throw harlequin ribbons across the crater
floor. It's a pretty view day or
night. But the fact is we are
all falling down, little by little, year by year, inch by inch, very slowly. Sometimes I'm sure I can feel the foundations of
this building slip, and in such dry weather as this the cracks in these old
walls open wide and grin. Nobody
ever mentions it but we are edging fraction by fraction into the core. One gulp of the earth could swallow this
city whole. A
morsel for a kraken. A pretty
little mouthful. One day, maybe,
should the depths decide, this whole island might explode and disappear
beneath the sea like Krakatau.
Ha! Sometimes
I wonder what the ghost woman stares at from the bedroom window. There's no view of the city from
there and she avoids the lights.
This building sides onto the smallest of the parks. Its grand old pines, prickly and
spicy sweet, extend in a belt almost to the top of Windy Hill. Beyond the trees odd moving spots of
light go out at bedtime and the pool from the one street light is only
visible if you lean sideways to see it.
Nothing else. So she
stares into the dark. Sometimes,
too, an odd wailing floats across the space of the park. A woman wailing. I had thought at first that she
wailed in trouble and I've stood on the back steps at night listening, trying
to place her. But the sound
moves reaching me in rising and falling bursts through the more obvious moan
of the wind in the pines. She's
further off than the trickery of the wind would have me believe and I've
decided that it's not trouble she's in but the arms of some demon lover. She comes in crescendos on regular
nights. This
building was one of the first, built originally as an inn. Rats tick in the skirtings, spiders
spin in the cracks. The stables
against the back wall now house the communal laundry. The old convict brick has been
stuccoed over and the whole edifice painted white. Inside, it's been divided horizontally into three flats. We are three women in these flats,
living one above the other, tiered like a wedding cake. Immediately
below me lives a nursing sister, Suza.
She's escaping her marriage for love, heaven help her, of a
clergyman. Avoiding a wife
somewhere, he trots briskly up her stairs at night, his crisis of conscience
palpable, while she,, taking a short cut across the park after the late shift
at the hospital, her uniform white and startling as an apparition against the
pines, hurries breathless up the side path where she shouts to her love on
the stairs. He
says, 'Shush'. She's
rescuing him, she tells me, it's her mission - she's rescuing him from his
church, from his religion, from his god, from his wife, from the patriarchy
and from all notions which do not fit with the wild and pagan yearnings of
the soul - her
words, not mine. He needs rescuing,
is worthy of rescue, Suza says.
He's a small man, almost dainty, quick at argument, with benign
eyes. After her work at the
hospital, Suza's wild and pagan soul resurrects itself out of her starched
uniform. Suza has a penchant for
velvets and satins, patchwork and old lace, crystals and feathers which she
buys at the markets. Suza's
resurrected soul dresses itself like some half crazed bag woman; her flat
reeks of incense and flowers dumped by the armful in vases; she covers her
walls with Rossetti prints, a Beardsly hangs in the bathroom and a Klimpt
over her bed. Suza's soul pines
for some past incarnation from which she was born again too soon and too
starched. When that soul breaks
through there is nothing to connect her to the nursing sister who has spent
the last hours holding some old woman's hand, wiping some old man's arse at
the hospital, except for the sensible white shoes left at her door. On these light evenings, draped in an
Edwardian shawl, she serves the clergyman red zinger tea in Chinese cups on
the lawn beneath my window. He,
sprawled beside the white lace cloth she spreads, reads her Morte d'Arthur from a blue velum copy. Obviously fascinated by her laugh,
her hair, her Modigliani face, her butterfly notions of love, men and life,
he gives up with barely a struggle, or so it would seem, on God, the hanging
Christ and his own forgotten prim, bible studies wife. I
watch them from my window, down there in the garden under the ancient fig
tree, its brown fruits splitting around them on the grass like sexual
innuendos, showing pink. At
night their sandpiper cries of
delight in adulterous love, drift upwards through the floorboards to
disturb my rock solid solitude with something too redolent of envy, while I
imagine Suza's empty uniform hanging against her wardrobe door like a
chrysalis shell. Then I wish I
could undress my soul as easily as Suza does, but I suspect that if I did I'd
disappear, blow away, as dust. The
basement flat is the largest and the most expensive to rent but the
darkest. The sun hardly reaches
it at all. There, a young
couple, Angela and Hadley, live out an intense nightmare of married life. At least that's what it sounds
like. In the night, often, the
sounds reach me through the floorboards, Angela's sobbing, Hadley's rage, the
slam of doors. Sometimes she
locks him out and then he blows around the outside of the building like a
gale, banging on windows, abusing the walls. It seems he suspects her of every kind of fickleness while
she, screeching her innocence, points out his faults. What these faults are is unclear but
her pitched tone is impressive.
On good days he comes home with his faults, whatever they may be,
smothered in roses and the nights are silent. Next morning she is singing at the clothesline, a pretty
thing in a soft porn camisole of embroderie englaise and a swinging skirt of virgin
blue. I've seen bruises on her shoulder and her
cheek, purple turning yellow, and a distinct imprint of fingers on her upper
arm. Once she saw me looking. 'Love play,' she said, 'Hadley's very
passionate,' An ingenue's shrug
- and a coquette's smile. Such
dangerous games. And
as for me, in the topmost flat, caught in light, a hologram - I am a marm for
all seasons, a witch in a window, all eyes and ears, watching this little
world of ours swim through the waves of the glass. Away
to the right, where it's worn a gap in the hills, a river winds off under a
light industrial fug till, further out, it bends and twists like a broken snake
and pretends it's silver. An
abused river, a sewerage flow, yet it persists in an illusionary beauty,
especially when the light catches its scales in the morning, or in the
evening when the sun bleeds into it.
Perhaps it's a distortion caused by these old glass panes, or more
likely a trick of distance, but the eye seems to step up to the river as if
it's higher than the city, an ascending glory, an incandescent twist through
a green land to where it wedges itself, misty, into heaven. This, of course is quite untrue, the
river stinks. Human excreta
catches in the rice grass and last year it yielded up a leg, just a leg, with
the sandshoe still attached. Romantic,
paradoxical, this is, most of all, a city of churches. Five spires are clearly visible from
where I sit. Testament to the
faith and the achievements of those brave and noble settlers, once the spires
would have dominated the landscape, soaring high over the huddle of the
barracks, the prison and the warehouses built of sandstone which fringe the
river. But now, a sign of
the times, God in perspective, they are merely little pricks between the
chain stores, the office blocks, the banks and motels. Even the multi storeyed car park is
higher - this city gets it priorities right and cars are closest to heaven
these days. Several of the
churches are architecturally splendid and the subjects of a series of highly
prized water colours which hang in the state gallery and, although many have
lost most of their congregation, the buildings are protected. Some, however, not considered so
worthy, have been sold off for other purposes but God's. One is no longer a church but a
private dwelling. It is here
that a man called Daniel climbs the turret like a fly to a window and hangs
there against the light through the blues and vermilions, tapping on glass. One
day, soon, I will break into his church, and then, quite simply, I will kill
him. |
©Robyn Friend 2002
return to start
Writers Reign
|