Pool (14 page)
Authors: Justin D'Ath
Tags: #Juvenile Fiction, #Fantasy & Magic, #Health & Daily Living, #General, #Social Issues, #Juvenile Nonfiction
43
Audrey didn’t speak except to answer questions, and even then her replies were terse and often monosyllabic. She had become moody and withdrawn.
‘Just drop it, would you!’ she snapped when Wolfgang asked about the angels.
As she had on the way in, Audrey guided him through the forested section of the botanical gardens. But she refused Wolfgang’s guiding arm when they emerged onto Millar Street. She used her stick instead. He followed her along the footpath, feeling rejected and confused. Why was she taking it out on him? At the traffic lights he made the mistake of suggesting they cross Acacia Street first, since the lights were already showing green that way. Without a word, Audrey found the metal pole for the traffic signals with her stick and thumped the button for the Millar Street crossing. She led him all the way back to Ironbark Place without once having to ask him for directions.
Outside her house, Audrey mumbled good night and tapped her way up the stairs to the front door without kissing him.
Bitch!
Wolfgang mouthed silently after her as the door clicked softly closed on the strip of light from inside. And then felt guilty for thinking it. She’d hurt herself, that’s why she was in a bad mood. He hoped it was because she had hurt herself. Then he felt guilty for thinking that, too.
He was home by midnight. So much for his plans of becoming Audrey’s nocturnal companion. He was annoyed with himself for having Mrs Lonsdale rearrange his work timetable. Afternoons for the next week. He’d be losing three hours work each day; losing three hours pay for nothing. He would have to keep Keith’s nine hundred and fifty dollars, after all. As compensation. It didn’t seem fair that he should
lose
money over this. Over Keith’s loony daughter. Nocturnal. Sees angels. She’d done him a favour tonight by shutting him out of her life. He was better off without her.
But it took him nearly two hours to get to sleep. His mind would not close down. It kept replaying images of Audrey kissing him, of Audrey holding his hand, of Audrey unbuttoning her shirt on the fountain’s edge. And when he woke at ten minutes past ten in the morning to hear the phone ringing in the hallway, Wolfgang’s heart leapt in anticipation.
Please let it be her! he thought.
44
Wolfgang stood in the hallway in his boxer shorts, the phone pressed hard against his ear.
‘What do you mean,
nothing
was in it?’
‘There was a specimen envelope wrapped in bubble wrap, but nothing was inside it,’ Dr Karalis repeated. ‘You must have packed the wrong envelope by mistake.’
‘Impossible. I only had one envelope. Are you sure there was nothing inside it?’
‘I’ve got it right here in front of me. It’s empty.’
Wolfgang rubbed the corner of his left eye. He had been half asleep when his mother called him to the phone a minute ago, but now he was fully awake. ‘It must have fallen out,’ he said.
‘The envelope was taped closed,’ said Dr Karalis.
‘It could have fallen out after you opened it.’
‘I opened it here on my desk, Wolfgang. Nothing fell out.’
In his mind’s eye, Wolfgang saw himself at his own desk on Thursday morning, using a pair of white plastic tweezers to slip the wing into the envelope, and then sealing the envelope with a small rectangle of Sellotape. ‘I don’t get this,’ he said. ‘The wing was in there.’
‘Well it’s not there now,’ said Dr Karalis.
‘Someone at the post office must have stolen it. Did the package look like it had been opened?’
‘Not that I noticed.’
‘I sent it registered. Damn! Someone must have thought something valuable was in there and stolen it.’
‘Wolfgang, I really don’t think anyone would bother to steal a butterfly wing.’
‘It
was
in there,’ Wolfgang said stubbornly. ‘I’d stake my life on it.’
There was a short pause before Dr Karalis spoke again. ‘You could go down to the post office and talk to them, I suppose. You might be able to claim insurance.’
Wolfgang didn’t care about insurance, it was the black wing that mattered. Whoever stole it must have known something about butterflies.
Dad! he thought suddenly.
He tried to reconstruct the events of Thursday morning. What had he done between packaging the wing and posting it? His mother had asked him to put the recycling out, then on the way back in from the street he’d popped into the shed to sort out his collecting gear for later and had wound up fixing a hole in one of his nets. He’d been out of the house for how long? Fifteen or twenty minutes. Where was the package with the wing in it while he was doing this? On the bench in the kitchen. He had taken it in there looking for the heavy-duty parcel tape to seal the CD mailer, but his mother had interrupted him to do the recycling before he got the job done. Which meant the mailer had sat on the kitchen bench for all that time, unsealed. His father must have opened it, taken the wing out of the envelope, then replaced the empty envelope in the mailer. Sneaky old bastard.
‘Are you still there?’ asked a voice in Wolfgang’s ear.
‘Yeah. Sorry.’ The telephone felt sweaty in his palm. What did it matter anyway if the first wing was missing? ‘I’ve got another one, Doctor Karalis.’
‘Another wing?’ the scientist asked, surprised.
‘Another black butterfly – a complete specimen. I caught it in one of my traps the other day.’
‘Is it alive?’
‘No. I killed it and set it,’ Wolfgang said. There was no need to mention his father’s involvement – the silly old fool wouldn’t remember anything about it anyway. ‘It’s in perfect condition, Doctor Karalis. No scale loss or anything. It’s completely black, forewings and hind wings. There’s nothing like it in any of my books. I’m positive it’s a new species.’
‘Can you send it to me?’
Wolfgang scratched his armpit. ‘I ... I ... I’d really rather not take the risk. Not after what happened to the wing.’
‘Wolfgang, if you want this butterfly of yours identified, I really need to see it,’ the scientist said.
‘What if I bring it down to you?’ Wolfgang asked. ‘I could come down tomorrow on the train.’
‘You could, I suppose, but it’s a lot of trouble to go to.’
‘It might be a new species, Doctor Karalis.’
‘Let’s just wait and see, shall we?’
Wolfgang tried to ignore the scientist’s condescending tone. ‘I’ll catch the early train because I have to be back for work in the afternoon. I should be there by about ten o’clock.’
‘That’s fine,’ Dr Karalis said. ‘Find your way to the science department and leave it at reception.’
‘Won’t you be there?’
‘I’m going away for a few days. Just leave it at reception and I’ll take a look at it when I get back.’
Wolfgang felt diminished. Dr Karalis didn’t even want to meet him. ‘When will you be back?’
‘Next Monday.’
‘I’ll come down on Monday, then.’
‘If that’s what you really want to do,’ said the scientist. ‘But you could save yourself a lot of bother, Wolfgang, by simply putting the thing in the post.’
It wasn’t a
thing,
it was a butterfly. A butterfly that had never been seen before. A species unknown to science.
Lepidoptera Mulqueen.
I want to see your face when you first lay eyes on it, Doctor I-know-every-butterfly-in-the-world Karalis, Wolfgang thought as he put down the phone. I want to see you eat humble pie.
45
There was nobody in Audrey’s spot beneath the peppercorn tree that afternoon. Wolfgang wasn’t surprised. The weather had changed. After two weeks of fine, settled weather, a hot northerly wind had sprung up. Sweeping down from the drought-ravaged Mallee to the north, it carried with it a fine cumulus of dust that turned the sky brown and reddened the sun. The air tasted gritty and smelled of dirt; it stung the eyes. By mid-afternoon fewer than two dozen people, nearly all of them children, remained at the pool. The only adult was a one-legged man wearing a yellow life vest kicking himself in monotonous circles out near the centre.
‘Do you think he’s hoping his leg’ll grow back?’ Michael Hobson asked snidely.
Because there were so few patrons, Mrs Lonsdale had set him and Wolfgang the task of cleaning debris from the pool.
‘It’s not the leg,’ said Wolfgang, leaning out over the edge to chase a gum wrapper along the bottom with his long-handled pool net. ‘He’s got bowel cancer.’
Michael screwed up his face against a gust of wind. ‘Gross! It beats me why they don’t close the place down. All the germs and diseases that must be floating round in this water.’
‘Cancer isn’t contagious.’
‘Nah. But a lot of other stuff is. Did you see that chick yesterday with scabs all over her face and neck?’
‘Those were burns,’ Wolfgang said.
‘How do you know that?’
‘Her mother told me. She and some friends went camping and some idiot threw petrol on the fire.’
Michael pulled his net out of the water and bashed some debris out of it onto the grass. ‘You’re incredible, Hulk. Where do you get all this stuff?’
‘People talk to me. Pilgrims. I’m the first person they see when they get here and a lot of them want to know about wheelchair access or what they’re allowed to wear in the water – things like that. Sometimes they tell me a bit about themselves.’
‘So what’s with hippo-girl?’ asked Michael.
‘She’s blind.’
‘Well, we all know that, Einstein. Why does she come here every day? I’ve never seen her go near the water.’
Wolfgang scooped up a dark triangular leaf floating against the padded edging at the bottom of the pool’s fifty-metre slope. ‘She likes it here.’
‘I think there’s something else that makes her come here,’ Michael said.
‘And what’s that?’ asked Wolfgang, turning his net inside out to free the leaf.
‘It’s standing right beside me.’
‘Don’t talk crap.’
‘She was here this morning,’ Michael said, ‘looking for you.’
Wolfgang stopped what he was doing. ‘Really?’
‘It was me she talked to. When I told her you weren’t here, she turned round and marched right on out of here.’
‘Did she have her dog?’ Wolfgang asked, carefully protecting what he held in his hand from the wind.
Michael leaned forward to see what he was holding. ‘No, she had a white cane. What’s that you’ve got there, Hulk?’
‘A butterfly wing.’
‘Pretty ugly butterfly,’ Michael said. ‘Or is it just black because it’s wet?’
It was a forewing. Wolfgang’s initial reaction was to assume it was the same wing he had found on the radiator of the Range Rover – the wing his father had twice stolen – until he looked closely and realised it was a left wing. The lost one had been a right wing. Were they a pair? Could they have come from the same butterfly? It would be a huge coincidence, but it was possible.
As soon as he arrived home Wolfgang measured it with his vernier and compared its dimensions with those of the first specimen, carefully recorded in his field notebook. The second wing was larger by 2400 micrometres from its base to its apex, and 1400 micrometres broader. Different butterflies. Which meant, counting the complete specimen his father had caught, there had been three of them. Three black butterflies in two weeks. They were quite common. So why had nobody ever seen one?
Wolfgang searched the whole house for the other wing – including all the rubbish bins – but found nothing. His addle-brained father, of course, could remember nothing about it. Not that it mattered now. Wolfgang had a whole butterfly to show Dr Karalis on Monday, as well as the wing he’d found today at the pool. It was more than enough to prove to science that a new species had been discovered. By
me,
Wolfgang thought. He would be part of history.
46
Thursday was the second hottest January day on record. In the north of the state the temperatures soared to almost fifty degrees. New Lourdes recorded a maximum of forty-five. The dust storm had passed but the day was so hot that those who came to the pool could only stay out in the sun for short periods of time. Most crowded beneath the sun umbrellas or in the thin strip of shade along the east side of the changing sheds. The spot beneath the peppercorn tree, where Audrey usually lay, was a thicket of bodies and limbs. But no Audrey, again. Wolfgang wondered how she was. How Campbell was. But he wasn’t going to phone her. It was up to her to make the next move. She owed him an apology after the way she’d behaved the other night: for stopping speaking to him and then barely saying goodnight before she went inside. For not kissing him. That was twice now that Audrey had flipped out for no apparent reason, and both times it had happened when they’d gone for walks at night. Nocturnal. Sees angels. She was a nut case. More trouble than she was worth, Wolfgang had told himself repeatedly over the past few days. But he kept waiting, hoping,
praying
for the phone to ring.
Mark Cowan and Steve Taylor arrived late in the afternoon. Steve flashed a season pass then slipped it back below counter-level to Mark.
‘I saw that,’ Wolfgang said.
Mark held up the pass anyway. ‘How was your Christmas, Wolfman?’
‘Bit slow. How was yours? I thought you were at the beach.’
‘Came back on Tuesday. Didn’t want to miss Stevo’s party.’
‘What party?’
‘It’s for my brother,’ said Steve. ‘He’s going back to Singapore on Sunday. Want to come?’
‘Sure. When is it?’
‘Tomorrow night.’
‘Do I need to bring anything?’
‘It’s BYO drinks. Do you reckon you could score a bottle of Jack Daniel’s?’
Wolfgang frowned. ‘Won’t your parents be there?’
‘Course they will.’ Steve gave him a toothy grin. ‘But how are they to know what a guy’s got in his Coke?’ he asked innocently.
After Steve and Mark had gone in, both without paying (Wolfgang knew the pass belonged to Steve’s little sister, Merri), Wolfgang worried about the Jack Daniel’s. He had never bought alcohol. He might look twenty years old, but he
felt
sixteen. If he went to a bottle shop he was sure he’d be asked for proof of his age. All they would do was refuse to serve him, but Wolfgang wasn’t willing to risk the embarrassment of being turned away. There was enough embarrassment in his life already – thanks to his cleft palate, thanks to his geriatric parents. So he was left with only one option.
There wasn’t any Jack Daniel’s in his father’s liquor cabinet, but Wolfgang found an unopened bottle of Dimple Scotch Whisky right at the back. Not bourbon, but it would have to do. He slipped it into his backpack, along with a large bottle of Coke he’d bought on his way home from the pool, then set off on his bicycle for Steve Taylor’s place.
He was the first guest to arrive. Mrs Taylor directed him to the garage where he found Steve and his father breaking bags of ice into three eskies. Steve’s thirteen-year-old sister, Merri, was sitting cross-legged on a plastic chair with a black and white puppy in her lap.
‘Wolfman!’ Steve greeted him. ‘Got anything that needs chilling?’
‘Just some Coke,’ Wolfgang replied. He hooked it out of his backpack, careful not to reveal the whisky. ‘Hullo, Mr Taylor.’
‘Good to see you, Big W,’ said Steve’s father. Mr Taylor was their soccer coach and sometimes umpired school basketball tournaments. ‘Steve tells me you’re working at the pool these days.’
‘Just for the summer.’
‘I envy you on a day like this. Apparently it reached forty-eight.’
Wolfgang had heard forty-five, but he didn’t correct him. ‘I don’t actually get to swim,’ he said.
‘What? I’d go to my union if I were you,’ Mr Taylor said lightly. He popped a piece of ice into his mouth and crunched on it. ‘You do look a bit hot. Been working out?’
‘I rode my bike here.’
‘Phew! Get yourself a drink, champ.’
There was a crate of beer glasses on the end of the trestle table beside Merri’s chair. Wolfgang filled one with Coke. ‘Cute puppy. How old is he?’
‘She,’ said Merri, who was a fuller-lipped, slightly slimmer version of her older brother. ‘She’s eight weeks. We got her for Christmas.’
‘What’s her name?’
‘Audrey.’
‘Audrey?’ Wolfgang echoed, feeling the heat rise in his face.
‘Dad’s idea.’ Merri rolled her eyes dramatically towards the corrugated iron ceiling. ‘He named her after some old film star from about a hundred years ago.’
‘Audrey Hepburn,’ said Mr Taylor. ‘And for your information, Miss Smartypants, she was still making films in the sixties.’
‘That’s nearly a hundred years ago.’
Wolfgang waited for someone to say something about Audrey Babacan, but the moment passed.
‘Hey Wolfman, let’s go inside,’ Steve said to him.
They made a detour through the kitchen where Steve took a can of Pepsi from the fridge, then the two of them went to his bedroom. As soon as the door was closed, Steve reached for Wolfgang’s backpack. ‘Let’s see what you brung, pardner.’
Wolfgang showed him the Dimple. ‘It was all I could get,’ he said apologetically.
Steve broke the seal and sniffed from the big rounded bottle. ‘You did good,’ he said. He took his can to the window, pushed open the flywire and poured a stream of Pepsi into the thicket of hibiscus growing just outside. Then he topped up his can with whisky. ‘We’s gunna have us a party tonight!’
‘When’s Cowie getting here?’
‘Shouldn’t be too long.’ Steve watched Wolfgang drink off half of his Coke to make room for several generous fingers of Dimple. ‘That stuff’s top shelf, Wolfman. Where’d you score it?’
‘The old man donated it.’ Wolfgang sniffed his drink, then took a small mouthful. Powerful! ‘I think they gave it to him when he retired. It’s been sitting in the cupboard ever since. I figured we’d better drink it before it went off.’
Steve raised his can in a toast. ‘To your old man.’
‘To my
old,
old man!’ Wolfgang said.
It was easier if you joked about it.
The other guests didn’t begin arriving until nearly nine o’clock. Most were friends or former classmates of Steve’s twenty-four-year-old brother, Darryl, who worked for a bank in Singapore and had been home on two weeks holiday. There were a few adult relatives as well. Wolfgang, Steve and Mark – and Merri, who had attached herself to their group once Audrey, the puppy, had been put to bed in her basket in the laundry – were left largely to themselves. They had claimed the small gazebo at the edge of the lawn. It was unlit; no one could see them. Only twenty metres from the open garage door, they were having a little party of their own. Whenever they needed another drink, they simply slipped in to the kitchen for another can of Pepsi, then to Steve’s bedroom to top it up with Dimple. By nine-thirty they were becoming quite reckless. On his most recent trip inside, Steve had poured the remainder of the whisky into Wolfgang’s empty 1.25 litre Coke bottle and smuggled it out under his T-shirt.
‘It sucks that you don’t have a pool,’ said Mark, topping up his Pepsi can with whisky.
Steve blew softly into his own can, producing a low, mournful wail. ‘We had a pool at our last house.’
‘Not much good to us tonight, Stevo.’
‘Have you got a pool, Wolfsiegang?’ asked Merri. On three occasions over the past hour she had sworn solemnly to her brother that she was drinking nothing but straight Cola, but Wolfgang was beginning to wonder.
‘I don’t have a pool,’ he said, taking great care to enunciate each word slowly and clearly, ‘but I work at a pool.’
This made them all laugh, so he repeated it. It was even funnier the second time.
Merri gripped his arm. ‘You should be working tonight, Wolfsiegang.’
‘The pool’s closed.’
‘I know. But if it wasn’t.’
‘If it wasn’t ...’ he said slowly, thinking it through. ‘If it wasn’t closed, I wouldn’t be here.’
They all laughed again. Steve was first to recover.
‘Neither would the rest of us,’ he said.
‘Why not?’
‘Because we’d all be at the freaking pool, wouldn’t we?’
Mark held his T-shirt away from his body and flapped it to circulate the air between it and his bare skin. ‘I can’t remember it ever being this hot.’
‘Forty-eight degrees,’ said Steve.
‘Forty-five, actually,’ Wolfgang corrected him.
‘Jeez, listen to the scientist!’
‘I’m not a scientist,’ said Wolfgang, thinking of Dr Karalis.
‘You’re a piss artist.’
‘So are you.’
‘Chill out, guys,’ said Mark.
‘How can we chill out,’ asked Steve, ‘when it’s forty-eight degrees?’
‘Forty-five,’ Wolfgang said.
‘Forty-eight.’
‘Forty-five.’
‘Forty-eight.’
‘Forty-five.’
It became a competition, then a joke.
‘Anyway,’ someone said when the giggling had died down, ‘it’s cooler now.’
‘Doesn’t feel cooler,’ said Steve.
Wolfgang raised his can to his mouth and was surprised to find it empty. ‘I’ve got a key to the pool,’ he heard himself say.
‘Have you got it with you?’
He reached into his pocket for his key ring, then remembered he’d removed the bright orange master key a few days earlier. He didn’t want to be seen with it when he opened his locker at work. ‘It’s at home.’