by Carmel Bird
He doesn’t find her until an hour after dawn. She is lying in the alleyway that runs behind the squat. It’s been raining, and the pools of water on the footpath around her reflect theparting clouds. From a distance, her body looks so small and insubstantial that at first he thinks only what’s left of her clothes is bundled there on the path. She is curled up like a baby and clutching her stomach. The reflections beside her are diluted with blood.
‘Beth…’
She’s soaking wet and shivering. He puts his hand on her forehead and slides her hair off her face. Her eyes are closed. They’re swollen and black. The dress with the owls is in shreds across her chest. Miles pulls off his coat and, lifting her from the ground as gently as he can, wraps it around her body.
‘I’m getting help…’ He whispers, stroking her hair. ‘I missed the train. I’m so sorry.’
He looks at the street, which is only metres away from where she is lying. Out there the sun is streaming down, mist is rising from the warm, wet road. A few early commuters cross the entrance to the lane, drinking take-away coffees and plugged into music. He calls out for help in a voice he doesn’t recognise as his own, but the one man who pauses and turns his head looks away again in fear. Miles squats down and slides his arm under the small of Beth’s back. She is cold and limp, like some kind of doll. Her head falls lifelessly over his arm.
There’s a phone-box on the street, just beside the lane. When he reaches it he pushes the door open with his back, and struggles to pick up the receiver. It’s dead. It’s dead like it has been for months, there’s not even a dial tone.
‘Fucking phone!’ He kicks the base of the door. A couple cross the street to avoid them. He starts to walk, unsure of which direction he should take. He can feel the warmth of her blood on his stomach as it seeps into his shirt.
‘We’ll get a bus.’ He whispers, mostly to himself. He manages to get to the stop before his legs start to buckle under her weight. He sinks down to the ground with his back against the shelter. Beth starts to moan.
He closes his eyes and thinks about the book he was reading in the bookshop when he should have been with her, the hard black cover with the oscillating lines, curved into the wings of a butterfly. Chaos. The bus leans so fast around the corner that he is not sure it will stop. But it does, and the doors unfold and before Miles can get up the driver gets out of the booth behind the wheel and steps down onto the footpath. He moves quickly. Miles finds it difficult to understand his accent, but the man kneels down and leans over Beth. He can feel the warmth of his breath on his arm as he folds the coat across the wound on her stomach, and holds it there with the heel of his palm.
‘She needs an ambulance.’ He says, and places Miles’ hand on the coat as he moves his own away. ‘Keep it here. Press firmly. Not hard. I wait with you, all right?’ He climbs back on the bus and speaks into his radio. One of the passengers calls out protests from the back.
‘They’re children,’ he hears someone whisper.
She’s in hospital for seven days. For the first three, she sleeps, and on the fourth, when she wakes, she starts to cry and doesn’t stop.
On the sixth day she asks for water. She is so pale that he wonders if he should call a nurse, but she says she’s ok, and for the first time she sits upright in the bed.
It must be late, the corridors are quiet except for a woman collecting trays of untouched food, and the lights outside the door are dimmed. There’s no window in the room, and without any natural light it is only the rhythms of the staff which mark out the passage of time. Miles knows how the routine goes now: the visiting hours full of whispered conversations and rustling bags of fruit, meals with the smell of over-cooked meat and the irregular roll of the trolley. Through it all there are the visits of nurses in white and doctors with clipboards, who don’t notice he’s there, and the cleaners, who do, who swing their bleach-soaked mops more violently around him on the floor.
‘I kind of like it here. That’s weird, right?’
Beth almost smiles, but doesn’t meet his eye.
‘You are a little weird.’
‘There was someone from the shelterhere, while you were sleeping.’
Beth looks alarmed.
‘What did they say?’
‘The usual. Foster homes and shit.’
‘But not together?’
‘No.’ Before he can say more Beth slides back down into the bed. She rolls onto her side, so she’s facing the wall, and pulls the blanket up under her chin.
‘Have they said when they think I’ll be ok to go?’
‘No. Sorry. I don’t really know. Soon, I guess.’
On the bus, Beth keeps her eyes on the window beside her, but the stares of the other passengers are reflected in the glass. When they get to the squat, Yani is drunk so they have to break in through the window in the bathroom. Miles drops the bag of bandages and medicines they’d taken from the hospital onto the floor, then turns to go out to the kitchen to see if there’s any food, but Beth grabs hold of his forearm.
‘Could you stay with me?’ She asks. ‘And just talk? Tell me something good, maybe stuff about your mum?’
Miles leans back against the wall and closes the door and tightens the wire around the handle. He looks up at the ceiling and the sagging black sheet with its galaxies of pin-hole planets. One corner has come loose from its nail and he can hear the bulb behind it buzzing, like it’s on its last legs. Hold on. He thinks. Just one more night. He closes his eyes and tries to clear his head. He blocks out the swell of white noise on Yani’s radio in the kitchen, the drone of the braking buses on the road behind the glass. He looks at Beth, curled up under the threadbare yellow blanket, and tries to block out the image of her lying in the lane that hovers at the edge of his thoughts.
‘I used to go to this place with Viv sometimes, where they kept butterflies… over the river.’ He drags the rug off the mattress behind him and tugs it around his shoulders. ‘At the gate they gave us pictures of a certain kind of butterfly to find. Just one type of butterfly that had red across its wings, or a striped black body, shit like that.’ He looks over at Beth who is lying so still that at first he thinks she might have fallen asleep, but he can see her eyes are open, staring up at the sheet. ‘When you left you were meant to tell them if you’d seen it—this one butterfly—and where and what it was doing and they’d write it all down like it was some big deal and you’d done something so great. I used to love that. But mostly I never found the right one. When you got in there they were everywhere. Every colour you could dream of. And they’d just land all over you and not evencare…’ In the kitchen the radio goes dead. Yani starts swearing, and Miles hears something shatter. ‘We used to spend all day out there. We’d eat chips on the grass and you couldn’t see the sky for all thebirds.’ Yani’s ranting now, mostly meaningless stuff, but occasionally Miles hears his own name. ‘There was something about that place,’ he says. He looks at Beth, her eyes are closed. ‘They were the best days… All those butterflies, all different… Like the whole world was there. Just in that one place.’
It’s winter, and the city is always dark. The lights don’t seem to make a difference. Without Beth’s busking Miles has to steal so they can make it through the day. For weeks, Beth doesn’t leave the squat. She sleeps rolled up in the blanket and when she wakes she stares up at the collapsing milky way. Most days, the only thing she seems interested in is listening to his stories. He tells her about the Christmases he spent with Viv, when things were good, and winters in the house outside the city he can only just remember.
Beth had always had nightmares, but now she has them more. She wakes up screaming. Sometimes she gets out of her bed and starts kicking him and screaming:
‘GET OUT! GET OUT!!’ before she wakes. Yani thumps the wall:
‘Yeah that’s right! Just fuck’n get out! You can both just fuck off! Fuck’n kids.’
Afterwards, she falls asleep again, crying, but quickly, while Miles lies awa
ke and thinks about the things he could have done and the things he did instead.
Beth is sleeping. He knows she will sleep all day. At the butterfly house there’s a charge on the gate so he has to go in over the fence. It’s easy enough. At the far end of the park there’s a grove of oaks, their branches hanging low over both sides of the wall. A notice on the door of the glass-house says the butterflies are in between seasons. He pushes through the over-grown ferns to the stone edge of the fountain where his mother used to sit. He pulls off his scarf, his jacket. Below the fountain, a trail of ants navigate their way between the shrivelled purple flowers where the water used to be.He watches them disappearing into a crack in the base of the empty pool. The air smells sweet and stagnant. He hears the click of a shutter and thinks about his mother and the crappy little camera she used to use.
It’s only after he sits still for a while that he really starts to notice the butterflies. They make short flights—from leaf, to wall, to stone. They move awkwardly, as if they needed the wind to propel them through the air, as if flight were new and their wings untried. Once he starts to focus, he realises they are everywhere around him: hovering above the dried-up pool, flapping against the curved glass roof. Beside his boots, a group of them sit drinking the beads of water that collect under the leaking tap. They flutter around his mohawk as though it were some exotic, nectar-drenched flower. He wants to laugh, but the silent garden makes him feel self-conscious. He lies back along the wall and lets them crawl across his chest. He watches them long after the tourists have gone.
When he gets back to the squat Beth is heating an open tin of spaghetti on the single burner stove, stirring it as effectively as she can with a fork. She pulls the sleeves of her jumper over her fingers so she can grip hold of the half-opened top of the can, which is constantly threatening to fall over. He can hear the sound of the television in the flat next door through the plaster walls, a quiz show punctuated by sporadic applause and the same exuberant musical refrain repeated over and over. She doesn’t turn from the stove when he comes in but he can see enough of her face to notice how the bruising around her eyes has changed colour. The black has been replaced by purple rings, there are bright yellow blotches where there was blue.
‘I’ve been out to that place, with the butterflies,’ he says. He stands two bowls and a fork under the tap, and clears a space on the table. ‘You’re gonna love it. It’s over the river. We could ride out there tomorrow if you want?’
Beth puts the tin on the table next to the fine black ash of an upturned pipe, which she slices in two with her fingertip, and shrugs. The spaghetti is old and tastes bitter, fermented. Next door, the volume of the game show goes up:
‘Two weeks in Ibiza!’ they hear, over the music and applause.
‘You have it.’ Beth whispers, sliding her bowl towards him across the table. ‘I’m not that hungry… I thought I was, but I’m not.’
Later, lying in bed, he thinks of those days when he’d tried and failed to find the right butterfly. He rolls over and looks at Beth who is wrapped up so tightly in her blanket he can’t see her at all.
He’d spent the whole day begging in the streets of the inner city. It was raining, he was soaking wet and freezing and he had made next to nothing. On the way to the station he took a detour past the back door of a bakery where he used to go with Viv, and found bags of bread loaves and rolls by the bins. They were still so fresh they were almost warm. He sat on the train and crammed the soft white dough into his mouth.
At the squat, the kitchen smells like the bleach the cleaners had used on the hospital floor. The stink is stained with something blue.
‘Beth?’ He takes the bag of rolls to their room and calls her name before he opens the door. The room is empty. Beth’s blankets are spread across the floor. There is a strong perfume-like scent in the air. After all the dough he’s eaten it makes him want to wretch.
It’s the middle of the night when she turns on the light. Miles rolls over, and pulls the covers over his head.
‘Let’s go now.’ Beth is leaning right over his bed and trying to pull back the blanket.
‘Go away.’ He groans, but opens his eyes just enough to see her face.
‘I want to see if they sleep,’ she is saying. ‘What do they do at night—butterflies?’ There is just enough light for him to be able to make out the source of the smell, and the colour of her hair.
‘Your hair…’ he mutters. ‘Do you realise it’s blue…? I think they just sleep. Most things sleep.’
‘Not us,’ she is smiling. It’s enough of a smile for him to drag himself up off the bed. ‘We’ve slept enough.’
Before they reach the river, they trace out a path through a maze of lanes and alleys, and along the banks of the canals. The city is old, much older than any of its roads. Its pathways stink of urine and chips, but if you follow them, they can lead you away from the hive to the river, or into its belt of parks.
The wind is bitterly cold. As they ride, Beth buries her face in the hood of Miles’ coat.
At the river, they drop the bike on the grass and slide down the muddy bank. Miles tosses a handful of stones into the water. Beth climbs down onto the flood wall and sits on the edge and skims the surface with the heels of her boots. A few metres from the shore there’s a river-bird fishing in the reeds around a half-submerged trolley. It ducks its head under the mud-coloured water, and Miles counts the seconds before it comes up.
Five, six, seven, eight…
They watch it surface. Beth reaches down and runs her fingers through the icy water. It is so dark, so polluted that they disappear from sight.
‘Dad made me wings once. Out of cellophane…’ She dips in her knuckles, her whole hand, her wrist. ‘He told me anytime I needed, I could close my eyes and fly away… and I believed him.’
Across the river, a canal boat thumping out music glides into the dock and the bird disappears. Miles scrambles back up the bank to the bike.
‘Let’s keep going. It’s fucking freezing.’
Getting in is as simple as opening the door behind the shed, which Miles had unbolted the day before.
‘Oh God. So warm!’ Beth gasps and pulls off her coat and in the darkness he can see her smile. The butterflies, suspended upside-down from the branches - some clumped together, others alone—are unsettled by the movement. They lift in jittery, shivering clouds. There is very little light, but enough to see their hovering silhouettes. Beth stretches out her arms and two white moths land on the sleeve of her jumper.
‘I knew you’d love it—’ Miles begins, but she holds her finger to her lips.
‘Don’t scare them’ she whispers. ‘I want them to stay.’
Miles leaves her. He tunnels through the thickest of the foliage behind the fountain, towards the paved circle under the dome. He pulls off his coat and lies on his back in the middle of the warm stone floor. A large, mottled butterfly settles on his chest. It holds its wings wide, almost flat, against his shirt. In the upper corner of each burnished wing, two turquoise circles watch him like eyes.
‘All it takes is one wing beat,’ he murmurs, ‘Just one… to make everything different.’
Beth’s beside him now. She’s lying on her side, her knees towards her chest and her head on her coat, and he sees the flicker of a lighter.
‘Where’d you get that?’
‘A friend.’ The light brightens as she inhales. She gets to her feet, the burning end of thejoint glowinglike a firefly. It floats jerkily upwards as she climbs and starts to circle the rim of the pool. Miles watches it twirling away through the palms. It takes the butterflies with it, into the dark.
In mid-winter, Yani drinks too much to work, and there’s no power at the squat. They go to bed in the late afternoon. Without light, Beth tears down the sheet with the stars. Miles finds it later, on the bank of the canal, snagged on a tree beside the footbridge. It floats lifelessly in the water, and when he tries to drag it free he finds the water-logged body o
f a bird underneath.
When Yani isn’t drunk they light a fire out the back and he tells them about the country where his father was born. Islands of chalk in a sea of blue. He tells them when he’s sober he’ll take them there, to a place where they’ll never be cold. Miles thinks about those islands, on nights when he wakes to the stench of the old man leaning over his bed.
This butterfly is the colour of fire, like a lit match. It orbits Miles’ mohawk for several minutes before landing on the skin of his lower arm. Wings twitching, it feels as though it’s shuffling its feet, and its tongue seems to be testing him for nectar - the lightest of pin-pricks. He watches it slowly close those wings, and the way this one movement alters its shape.
Behind him, Beth is glowing again and she’s reciting some rhyme as she circles the pool.
‘It’s not that one.’ As though she is reading his thoughts. ‘It’s too obvious, I don’t think it’s that one…’
At the sound of her voice, the butterfly alights, and Miles rolls over on the stone. He looks at Beth, who is crouching like a bird up on the wall. She leans forward and the blue hair falls over her face. She brushes it over her shoulder. In the dim yellow light filtering in from the street, her skin looks almost translucent. Her lips are coloured, like the butterfly’s wings. Miles stares at her for a moment, and then looks away.
‘Why are you wearing all that shit on your face?’
‘I just like it. I thought you liked it.’
‘It was better before.’
She’s always moving. She paces around the squat and hovers around the windows. As soon as the streetlights turn off after dawn, she goes out, and doesn’t come back until dark. Miles doesn’t know where she goes anymore. He doesn’t ask her if she busks, but sometimes she comes back with money. He sees her leaving, under her coat she wears a crinkled violet dress, red tights cling to her bony legs.
