Butterfly (5 page)

“Aria.” Mums’s face crinkles around the word. “It’s all right. A bit cold, I think.”

“Cold? Cold!” A crust of toast leaps off the plate. “What do
you
care if it’s cold? You never call me
darling,
or
sweetie,
or anything like that —
you’re
the cold one, not me!”

“Plum!” calls Fa from downstairs. “Stop yelling!”

Mums retreats under the barrage. “Aria,” she says. “I’ll try to remember. But you might always be Plum Pudding to me.”

She strides away in her churchgoing shoes while her daughter is rendered mute.

At lunchtime the next day, the topic is the new art teacher. The previous year, when Plum and her friends had been the babies of the school, the girls had accepted all facets of secondary-college life with awe and quiet dismay. Now, in their second year, their inexperience buffed from them, their place at the bottom of the hierarchy passed to a new influx of waifs, they are confident enough to complain about every aspect of the timetable, curriculum, faculty and uniform that doesn’t completely suit them. The new year has brought to their academic lives many changes for the worse, including double periods of mathematics, detention for anyone who doesn’t wear her tracksuit to gym, and a rearrangement of students into different
homerooms, a move that has fragmented cliques and separated best friends. The art teacher is not the worst of the year’s changes, but she is one of the more satisfying. There are so many offensive elements to the woman that it’s hard to know where the annihilation should begin. “What about her dress?” Samantha’s roaring. “It was foul! Like she’d spewed!”

“I thought I was going to chuck just looking at it!”

“It wasn’t any worse than her face,” says Dash.

“Her head’s all pinched, like it was slammed in a book. . . .”

“And what does she call herself?
Mess?
Is that how you say it?”

“Miz,” corrects Rachael.
“Not Miss, girls — Miz.”

“She went crazy when I said
Miss,
didn’t she?” Which Sophie had done with her usual innocence that is easily misconstrued as stubbornness.
“Miz! Miz! Say it, girl! It’s not difficult!”

The friends, sprawled in the safety of their gang of seven, laugh like squeaky toys. It is another hot day, and they are gathered on the grass beneath their oak tree, sleeves pushed up to their shoulders, socks rolled down their shins. Last year they had all been in the same classes, but this closeness has been fractured by the new timetable: so the oak has become their assembling point at the beginning of each lunchtime and recess, the place to which they bring the gossip that has budded in their various classrooms. Here they talk to each other about pen-friends and enemies,
siblings and parents, the superiority of T-bars over lace-ups. The seven of them are not among the most studious, most spoiled, most flirtatious or wealthiest of the girls in their year, but nor are they the most despised. They are the girls who lose library books, pass notes in class, audition for the chorus in the annual musical, plead weak stomachs when the time comes to dissect rats. Their stake around the shady oak is something better than they have earned, and one day the territory will be seized by an older, stronger, more justifiable gang — Plum is fatalistically sure.

“I don’t care what she looks like, or what she wears.” Rachael is lying on her back in the grass, keeping her pale self in the shade. The sight of the blue veins under the milky skin gives Plum the shudders. “The worst thing about her is she’s trying to be our friend.”

“Yeah!
Call me Miz, or call me Leah.
”

“No, not Leah:
Leearr.
”

“Yeah,
Leearr. Miz Leearr.
Talk to me, girls: I’m your
friend.
”

“Having a lady as a friend is OK,” suggests Plum.

“Not if she’s a
teacher
!”

“No, not a teacher,” Plum agrees.

Victoria, fanning her face with a geography test, says, “Maybe if we refuse to call her Miz, she’ll quit and leave?”

None of the others think this likely, so no one bothers to reply. The art teacher had offended Plum, not least when she’d grabbed her wrist and forced her to draw long lines over her crabbed daubings, chanting, “Loose movements,
free, free!”— but a teacher is something about which nothing can be done, and there are other concerns on Plum’s mind. For a start, she hasn’t eaten. She had dropped her lunch — a chickenloaf sandwich and a pair of Kingstons parceled inside a creased chemist’s bag — into a bin as soon as she’d arrived at school. It had proved an unexpectedly traumatic thing to do. Plum had projected herself forward, to this lunchless lunchtime; she’d looked guiltily back, seen Mums carefully slicing and bundling the bread. Nevertheless, swallowing hard, Plum had done what was needed. She’s determined to whittle from her bones every dollop of fat that’s blighting her life. And now, if not exactly ravenous, she is distressed by the sights and smells of lunchtime, by the baby-bird emptiness of her mouth. She has her drink bottle — Mums had put it into the freezer overnight, and the morning spent in Plum’s locker has melted the green cordial into tactile shards — and she sips a few drops at a time. None of her friends have noticed she’s not eating, but she runs interference over the grief this negligence is causing. “Hey,” she says. “Guess what?”

Her friends look at her incuriously; Samantha rolls onto her stomach to tan her calves. “I’m changing my name,” says Plum.

Dash peers flintily over the edge of her sandwich. She is tiny and smart in a way Plum will never be, like a small wicked dog on a leash. “To what?”

And it’s only in this instant that Plum understands the courage the next moment will require. And that although
she has no courage, it’s too late for cowardice. “To Aria. Aria — like a song.”

“Aaariaaa!” Caroline sings it, flinging back her heron head and thumping it into the oak. She clutches her skull, groans, “Ow ow”: Plum thinks,
Serves you right.
In her truest thoughts Plum knows that she, Plum, is only tolerated amid these friends; and yet they seem to love Caroline, who in Plum’s secret opinion is an absolute idiot. Who hasn’t a brain to be damaged in her skull, who looks like a child kept in a cupboard for years.

“Aria is pretty.” Victoria is blue-eyed and mellow, pink like a doll. “I wish my name was a song.”

Samantha makes a spitting, guffawing noise, sitting up to yawn leoninely. As burly as a youth, no one wants to tell Samantha that she has translucent hairs along her jaw which glimmer in afternoon light. Her father travels, and every day since school resumed she has found reason to mention the fact that he has tickets to the opening ceremony of the Moscow Olympics. Samantha is a passer-of-notes, a whisperer-in-corners, a giggler-behind-hands, an exchanger of meaningful looks, the kind of person who should by rights be ostracized and spurned: yet it’s Samantha whom they all battle to impress, Plum achingly included. If she could make Samantha
want
to be her friend, things would be almost perfect. “God, it’s so
hot.
” The strappy girl sighs expiringly. “What do you want to change your name for? Plum suits you. It’s sort of . . . squashy.”

“And juicy.” Sophie doesn’t mean it nastily; she is Plum’s
original best friend. In the early days of their first year here, when they were both lost souls, she and Sophie had found one another, and made each other laugh. For a few months it had been just the two of them, sitting together on a bench eating lunch, saving chairs for one another in class, sleeping the night on each other’s bedroom floor, and Plum had been happy. But then Sophie’s charm had caught the attention of these others, and they had abducted her; Plum had been accepted as part of the deal, like Spam in a raffle-won hamper. The theft of Sophie had been traumatic, but not unexpected: as a kid in primary school, Plum had endured the abandonment of first one best friend and then, agonizingly, of another, and the reason for the phenomenon seems to be that there are flaws in Plum which become obvious over time, and render her companionship dissatisfying. The single positive aspect of Sophie’s loss is that, diluted among the gang of girls, these flaws might not be so easily discovered. And it’s not that Plum hates her friends, or that they completely hate her. Sometimes she loves them so much that her affection gives her pain. Yet she often wishes that Sophie had resisted them, and chosen to stay with just her. Life would be less . . . straining.

“And sticky,” adds Dash.

“And stony-hearted.” Rachael is their leader, one of the cleverest girls at school.

Caroline, still rubbing her head, comes to the rescue. “And sweet. That’s why Plum suits you: because you’re sweet. Don’t be Aria, Plum.”

“We don’t like Aria,” the others agree.

“But Plum is dumb! I should change it to something — more stylish. I met somebody who knows about modeling, and she said I could do it — fashion modeling. She said I have the hair and the face and the bones that magazines want . . .”

She trails off, realizing too late that she’s peeled herself of skin. Under the navy shade of the oak tree her friends stare in post-nuclear silence. Scattered across the lawn are young ladies in paste-colored uniforms chatting, walking, squealing, luxuriating, smoothing Reef Tan into thighs. There are teachers wandering about on yard duty, pointing out rubbish that must go in a bin. There are leaves blowing about, chip packets scooting across the quadrangle, trucks changing gear beyond the gates. There is the school dog, Ebenezer, an overweight Labrador housed at the adjoining convent, rambling from lunch box to lunch box. From the tuckshop in the undercroft comes the summery scent of jam doughnuts, chocolate milk, damp salad rolls. Soon a bell will ring, summoning everyone back to class, where the teachers will drone exhaustedly and wilted discussions will take place, and the clocks above the blackboards will be watched with gamblers’ intensity. It is Monday afternoon. It is the start of March. The week, the year, the whole torturous span of Plum’s education stretches ahead of her. She doesn’t know why she insists on making unbearable for herself this place that is already so hard.

Then they explode. “Hair like a wig?”

“A face like a cat’s bum?”

“Everyone’s got bones! What’s so good about your bones? Even a dog wouldn’t want
your
bones!”

“Hello, I’m Mizz Aaariaaa Coyle, I model cats’ bums —”

“I’d like to thank my art teacher, Mizz Leeahh, for making me look like the Moaning Lisa —”

And even Plum is chuckling, as she absolutely must. Not being wounded by any of it, as she absolutely must not. “I’m just saying what she said!”

“Are you sure she wasn’t blind?”

“What sort of fashion will you model? Paper bags for heads?”

Even lovely Victoria has never had the gall to suggest she could be in magazines: Plum sees in the eyes of her friends something hotter and more drying than the wind. With the exception of Rachael, who’s calmly determined to study law, none of the girls know what they want to do with their lives. They foresee husbands and babies for themselves and each other, but there’s emptiness surrounding these. Certainly there’s nothing enviable awaiting Plum Coyle. “I think she was joking, Plum.” Dash balls the plastic wrapper of her sandwich and throws it into the grass. “I mean Aria.”

“Probably,” agrees Plum, brutalized.

“It was a good joke, too,” says Samantha; and the subject is forever finished with this final sword, leaving Plum to sag bonelessly. She sits plucking grass and smiling, listening to her friends talk. They talk about the Youth Group that has started in a scout hall near Rachael’s home; Rachael and
Dash attended on Saturday night, and there’s a boy — a man — the group leader, who must be discussed. “He kept looking at us,” says Rachael. “He was looking, wasn’t he, Dash?” Samantha glowers, “Why didn’t you invite me?” and Dash has to placate her: “It was a spur-of-the-moment thing, Sam. You should come next week.” But for the occasional snicker, Plum stays quiet. Her hands feel swollen, her eyes unwilling to blink. Lunchtime is never long enough, except for the days when it is too, too long, and this is such a day. Compared to sitting here, famished and steeped in shame, a classroom would be sanctuary.

But before the bell rings, which it must eventually do, Plum moves to repair her shaken standing. The bell will separate the gang into segments, and it’s vital that these needle-pointed fragments go away well-disposed toward her. She drags out her voice like a grimy cloth, interrupts Victoria’s assessment of her new headband to say, “I’m thinking of having a slumber party for my birthday. Should I?”

It’s an important tradition of the group’s, the remembering and fussing-over of one another’s birthdays. In this, at least, Plum is an equal. “Hooray!” Caroline claps her hands. “I got a new sleeping bag for Christmas.”

Rachael’s slinky orange gaze fixes on Plum. “I know what to get you for your birthday, Aria. You’ll love it. Dash and Sam, we’ll have to pool our money.”

Samantha looks at Plum for the first time. “Will your brothers be there? I’m only going if your brothers will be there.”

“My brothers?” Plum frowns. “What? Why?”

“We like them, that’s why.”

“Yeah, we like your brothers.”

“What do you mean?” Plum is confused. Her friends and her brothers have crossed paths on occasions when Plum has had one of the girls to the house — but she can’t remember anything important ever being said. Her brothers, Plum knows, can never distinguish which of her friends is which. Justin is twenty-four, Cydar twenty-two: to them, Plum’s friends are inconsequential, mere kids. Children to be tolerated for the sake of their sister; little girls to be otherwise forgotten.

But Victoria is saying, “Justin is the
biggest
spunk,” and Plum can’t believe her ears.

“Yeah, Justin’s nice, but Cydar is better. He’s got those black eyes —”

“No, Cydar’s too scary! And Justin’s got that voice and that smile —”

“But Cydar’s . . . interesting. He hardly ever talks.”

“They’re both spunks,” decides Victoria, and Caroline echoes, “Yeah, they’re both spunks.”