Pool

by Justin D'Ath

  On Tuesday while he was at the pool he had an idea.

  ‘Audrey, remember your New Year’s resolution?’ he asked her on the phone that evening.

  ‘Yeah. I was going to take swimming lessons.’

  ‘Were you serious?’

  She hesitated. ‘I guess I was.’

  ‘Good,’ said Wolfgang, pulling his key ring from his pocket and toying with the fluorescent-orange master key. ‘Tonight I’m giving you your first lesson.’

  Audrey answered the door-chime. She was wearing a long-sleeved top that looked black in the muted lighting and navy-blue tracksuit trousers. Her feet were bare. ‘You’re right on time,’ she said.

  ‘Have you got your bathers?’

  ‘Under my clothes.’ She narrowly missed him with the security door as she pushed it open. ‘Come in for a minute.’

  Wolfgang squeezed past her, along with one or two moths that had been circling the outside light. ‘How did you know it was me?’

  ‘Nobody else we know wears that much deodorant.’

  She was supposed to like it. ‘Hi Campbell,’ he said as the dog came trotting down the passage. ‘Am I allowed to pat him?’

  ‘Yeah, it’s okay when he’s not in his harness.’

  ‘Audrey?’ her father’s voice came from inside the house. ‘Is that Wolfgang?’

  ‘Yes,’ she called back. She lowered her voice. ‘My parents wanted to see you before we go. They think we’re off to Brahms in the Park.’

  Brahms in the Park. They could do that one night next week, Wolfgang thought. You didn’t need eyesight to enjoy an orchestra. Audrey led him through to the lounge room, where her parents sat watching a crime show. Keith muted the television.

  ‘Would you like a beer, son?’

  ‘I’m right, thanks. Hi, Mrs Babacan.’

  ‘Hullo, Wolfgang. It’s good to see you.’

  For a few awkward moments, nobody spoke.

  ‘I’ll get my things,’ Audrey said. She smiled in approximately Wolfgang’s direction, then shuffled out of the room with Campbell at her heels.

  ‘It’s lovely to see her so happy,’ Bernadette said quietly.

  Keith caught Wolfgang’s eye and gave him the Furniture King wink.

  Audrey held his arm as Wolfgang led her down the orange-lit driveway. They had left Campbell whimpering at the front door.

  ‘Dad thinks you’re the best thing since sliced bread.’

  ‘He’s obviously got good taste.’

  She gave his arm a squeeze. ‘So have I.’

  You wouldn’t say that if you could see me, Wolfgang thought. Or if you knew I was on your father’s payroll.

  ‘Did you bring the key?’ Audrey asked.

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Where is it?’

  ‘In my pocket. Hey!’ he cried.

  She had let go of his arm and burrowed her hand into his pocket. ‘What if we get caught?’ she asked, fingering his key ring.

  ‘We won’t get caught.’

  They passed beneath a street light, dangling its cloud of swirling insects. Audrey had put on a pair of black sneakers to match her dark top and trousers.

  ‘The clothes are good,’ Wolfgang said as they turned the corner into Federation Avenue. ‘You’re nearly invisible.’

  ‘Welcome to my world.’

  Audrey stopped and took out her cigarettes and lighter. ‘Smoke?’

  Wolfgang accepted one, lit it and took a shallow puff. He would have to be careful – if he spent too much time with Audrey he might wind up being a smoker. ‘Audrey, how did you know that man was drowning?’

  ‘What man?’

  ‘The one at the pool on Saturday.’

  ‘I heard about that,’ she said, exhaling loudly. ‘It’s embarrassing – I must have been asleep when it happened. I didn’t know anything about it till I got home and we heard it on WIN News.’

  Wolfgang drew in too deeply and nearly choked. ‘You were the one who noticed him,’ he said.

  ‘What are you talking about?’

  ‘You came halfway down the lawn and sort of pointed at him and shouted that he was drowning.’

  Audrey came to an abrupt stop. Her hand slipped from his arm. ‘Wolfgang, I’m blind. How on earth would I know someone was drowning?’

  They were standing beneath a tree, halfway between two street lights. All he could see of her was the glowing tip of her cigarette. ‘That’s what I’m asking you,’ he said. ‘How did you know?’

  ‘I didn’t know.’

  ‘You pointed at him and shouted that he was drowning. I saw you, I heard you. Actually, you didn’t say you saw him, you said she was drowning.’

  ‘I called him she?’ Audrey whispered.

  ‘“Help her”,’ you said. ‘“She’s drowning”.’

  Audrey dropped her cigarette and attempted to stamp it out, but it rolled to one side, trailing tiny sparks across the footpath. ‘Take me home.’

  ‘But ... the pool,’ Wolfgang stammered. ‘Aren’t we going swimming?’

  ‘I’ve got a migraine.’

  He crushed out Audrey’s cigarette and then his own. Hadn’t Keith warned him about the fickleness of the Babacan women? ‘Let’s go then,’ he said dully, offering Audrey his arm.

  23

  ‘Goodnight,’ Audrey whispered. ‘I’ll find my own way inside.’

  Wolfgang stood at the top of the driveway, watching her feel her way with her sneakered feet up the six white steps to her front door. He waited until the door had closed behind her, then angrily kicked a spray of gravel at the stairs. What was that all about? Not for a moment did he believe Audrey had a migraine.

  Wolfgang had chained his bike to a wrought-iron bench next to the fish pond – a mistake, he realised now that it was fully dark, because a large weeping maple grew between it and the nearest gaslight. He had to work the four-tumbler combination lock by feel alone. I’d make a useless blind person, he thought as he fumbled to decipher the tiny moulded numbers with his fingertips. It took him several minutes to open the lock. He was about to wheel his bike onto the driveway when the Babacans’ front door clicked open and a shadowy figure slipped out. It was Audrey. This time she had Campbell with her. Closing the door softly behind her, she came down the stairs. Wolfgang stood in the shadows, hardly daring to breathe, not moving a muscle. She thought he’d gone home. She’d faked the migraine to get rid of him, now she was going out again.

  What on earth was she up to?

  Audrey and Campbell passed within three metres of Wolfgang’s frozen figure. The dog looked at him but kept going. When they were nearly at the gate, Audrey made Campbell sit, then she felt her way into a garden bed and stooped down. Her back was to Wolfgang; he couldn’t see what she was doing. After a short time she straightened, turned and shuffled back to the driveway, where Campbell sat patiently waiting. She was holding a bunch of flowers.

  Wolfgang waited until they had disappeared out the gate then followed, wheeling his bike along the grass beside the driveway to avoid being heard. When he reached the street they were forty metres down the footpath, passing beneath a streetlight.

  Where are you going, Audrey? Wolfgang wondered.

  He followed her quietly, keeping well back and staying in the shadows wherever he could. There was no danger of Audrey seeing him, of course, but he felt furtive and self-conscious. Guilty. Whatever she was up to, she didn’t want him to know about it.

  Once Audrey stopped and stood still for half a minute, her head inclined to one side as if she was listening. Finally she spoke to Campbell and moved on. Wolfgang wondered if she’d heard the quiet click of his bicycle’s rear axle. He let her get another half block ahead before he started after her again. Fifteen minutes later he realised where she was going. The cemetery. It explained the flowers, but not who they were for.

  Wolfgang lost her a short distance inside the cemetery gates. It was too dark; he could no longer see Audrey or her dog. He couldn’t see anything. His skin prickled. He wa
sn’t superstitious and didn’t believe in ghosts, but it felt creepy to be on his own in a pitch-black cemetery. Wolfgang turned round and made his way back out onto the street. He leaned his bike against the wall and sat down under a streetlight. He would wait for her. When she came out he would confront her. He’d ask her why she’d lied to him about having a headache. Why she’d changed her mind about going to the pool. Why she’d taken flowers to the cemetery in the middle of the night.

  But she didn’t come out. Wolfgang waited two hours. Finally, shortly after midnight, frustrated, angry and mosquito-bitten, he gave up and rode home through the dark deserted streets.

  24

  ‘Jonathan Karalis,’ said the voice on the phone.

  Wolfgang looked out across the crowded pool, at the empty spot beneath the peppercorn tree. ‘Doctor Karalis?’ he asked.

  ‘I received your email yesterday.’

  ‘Did it come through okay? Did the attachment open?’

  ‘I’m looking at it now,’ said the scientist.

  And? Wolfgang thought. He felt his heart pounding. ‘Ith it a new spethieth?’

  ‘It’s ... difficult to say. This is all you have? There’s no hind wing?’

  ‘No. Just the one forewing.’

  ‘And not in very good condition,’ the scientist said gruffly, as if it were somehow Wolfgang’s fault. ‘Where did you say you found it, again?’

  ‘On the radiator of Dad’s car.’

  ‘So it could have come from anywhere.’

  ‘No. My dad’s really old. He hardly ever drives out of town.’

  There was a short pause. ‘Where exactly are you?’

  ‘New Lourdes,’ Wolfgang said.

  ‘Lovely place,’ said Dr Karalis. ‘They have that extraordinary swimming pool with the slanting water.’

  Wolfgang’s eyes were drawn once again to Audrey’s vacant spot near the fence. ‘That’s where I am at the moment.’

  ‘You work at the famous New Lourdes Pool?’ said the scientist, sounding animated for the first time in their conversation. ‘Your father gave me your work number, but he didn’t mention you had such a glamorous job.’

  It was surprising the old man even remembered I have a job, Wolfgang thought. ‘Doctor, have you ever seen a butterfly like it?’

  ‘It’s difficult to say without seeing the real thing,’ Dr Karalis said. ‘Would you be able to send it to me?’

  Wolfgang rode home during his lunchbreak. He was very excited. Dr Karalis had been guarded in giving his opinion about the wing, but the fact that he had phoned and asked to have it sent to him suggested he didn’t know what it was. And if Dr Karalis didn’t know, nobody would.

  It was gone. Wolfgang stood at his desk, staring into the open drawer. Everything else was in its place, just the cigar box was missing.

  Dad, he thought.

  ‘Cigars?’ Leo said, shading his eyes with the secateurs. Wolfgang had found him in the garden, hacking at one of the rose bushes. ‘You know I don’t smoke.’

  ‘Cigar box, Dad. You took it from my room.’

  ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

  ‘It was a little wooden box with a hinged lid,’ Wolfgang said, finding it difficult to keep his anger in check. ‘You gave it to me yourself.’

  His father lowered the secateurs. There were red smears of blood on the backs of both of his papery-skinned hands. ‘I know the one you mean. Are you sure it’s missing?’

  ‘Yes. It was in my desk this morning.’

  ‘Ask your mother when she gets home,’ Leo said. ‘She might have moved it.’

  ‘Where is Mum?’

  ‘Bowling. Today’s Wednesday – Ladies’ Day.’

  Wolfgang sighed. It was incredible how his father remembered some things and not others. ‘Dad, you should be wearing gloves.’

  Leaving the old man in the garden, Wolfgang did a quick search of his parents’ bedroom, but there was no sign of the cigar box.

  Damn you, Dad! he thought angrily as he rode back to the pool without having eaten any lunch. If you’ve lost it, I’ll wring your scrawny neck!

  25

  Wolfgang and his mother searched for the cigar box while Leo sat in the lounge watching the evening news. Sylvia found it almost immediately – on a dusty bookshelf in the spare room that was formerly Leo’s study.

  ‘I remember this is where he used to keep it,’ she explained, opening the lid. ‘Oh dear.’

  ‘What’s the matter?’

  ‘There’s nothing in here.’

  Wolfgang took the empty box and swore softly.

  ‘Wolfgang!’ his mother said. She and his father came from a time when apparently nobody swore.

  ‘I’m sorry. But if he’s done something with it ...’

  ‘Let’s see now,’ said Sylvia, turning slowly around, tapping her lower teeth with one finger as she surveyed the room. She lifted the small metal rubbish bin out from under the desk. ‘Bingo!’ she said.

  The black wing lay on the newspaper lining in the bottom of the rubbish bin, the rectangle of cotton wool partially covering it.

  ‘Here, let me,’ said Wolfgang. Holding the cotton wool, he carefully tilted the bin until the wing flipped onto it. It seemed undamaged. His heart thumped in relief. ‘He’s getting worse, Mum.’

  ‘I know. He pruned all the roses today, and it’s the middle of summer.’ Sylvia gave Wolfgang an encouraging smile. ‘Never mind, dear, at least your butterfly’s all right to send to the museum.’

  Wolfgang had told her about Dr Karalis’s call. But his exhilaration had been tempered by the events of the afternoon.

  ‘It isn’t fair what’s happening to Dad.’

  ‘I know. But there’s a reason for everything.’

  ‘That’s ridiculous, Mum,’ Wolfgang snapped. ‘What’s the sense in losing your mind?’

  ‘He isn’t losing his mind, just his memory.’

  ‘And you think that’s fair?’

  ‘I didn’t say it was fair, I just said there was a reason for it.’

  ‘You mean it’s God’s will?’

  ‘No, I don’t think we should blame God,’ his mother said.

  ‘Who then?’ Wolfgang demanded. ‘Who can I blame for thith?’ he asked, pointing to his crooked upper lip.

  26

  Wolfgang packed the wing in a CD mailer and took it to the post office. He paid extra to send it registered mail, then hesitated when filling out the slip. Value of goods: $10, he wrote. Even though it was registered, Wolfgang felt insecure as he watched the counter attendant push the slim package containing the precious black wing down a chute in the wall.

  I should have written Priceless, he thought.

  It was his day off from the pool. His life off from his other job. He wasn’t having anything more to do with Audrey after the way she behaved the other night. She was too weird. Lying about her headache, then sneaking off to the cemetery and staying there past midnight. What was she, a vampire or something? Her father could have his four hundred dollars back. It had never felt right accepting the money anyway. Mr Keith ‘Furniture King’ Babacan would just have to learn that some things could not be bought at any price, and a boyfriend for his daughter was one of them.

  The day was sunny, not too hot, and windless. Wolfgang persuaded his mother to drive him to Milkmaid Flat, halfway out the Maryborough road, and drop him off. He had only been there twice before, both times with his father back when his father still collected butterflies (and still had a mind). There was a swamp, dry at this time of year, and several hectares of scrubby grassland ringed by wattles, ironbarks and yellow-flowering gum trees – good butterfly country.

  His mother left him at the roadside and promised to be back at four o’clock. As well as his collecting bag and the big bamboo-handled net that had been his father’s, Wolfgang had brought two traps. He baited them with strips of cloth impregnated with his special formula and left one of them at the edge of the trees. He put the other one among the pampas
grass in the centre of the dry swamp. Then he went off with his net.

  He’d brought sandwiches and an apple, which he ate sitting in the shade of a grey box eucalypt shortly after midday. As he chewed, he found himself thinking about Audrey, wondering if she was back at the pool today. He pictured her lying under the big peppercorn tree with her hat over her face. Hippo-girl. No wonder she was overweight – all she did was lie there all day listening to music. Why did she even bother going to the pool?

  It became quite hot in the afternoon. By three-fifteen Wolfgang had had enough for the day. Despite the promising weather, he had not caught anything of interest – a few little blues, a grass yellow, a well-travelled monarch – all of which he released. There was an admiral in one of the traps, but like the monarch it was not in good condition. Wolfgang expanded the funnel leading into the large, wire-framed box with its translucent skin of mosquito-netting and flushed the insect out.

  ‘Hope you don’t get a hangover,’ he said, watching the admiral fly jerkily off through the reeds.

  His mother was twenty minutes late.

  ‘Sorry, dear,’ she said. ‘Dad had to go to the doctor and we waited nearly an hour to get in.’

  ‘Is he okay?’ Wolfgang asked.

  ‘Nothing too serious. One of those rose thorns yesterday left its tip in his thumb.’

  ‘I told him he should be wearing gloves.’

  Sylvia sighed and ran her fingers along the inside of the steering wheel. ‘You know your father. Stubborn.’

  Senile, Wolfgang thought.

  27

  It wasn’t until after dinner, while they sat waiting for the news, that Wolfgang’s father told him someone had phoned him.

  ‘When?’ Wolfgang asked.

  ‘Today sometime. This afternoon, I think.’ Leo stared hard at the television. ‘You weren’t here.’

  ‘Who was it?’

  The old man stretched one of his rubbery ear lobes. ‘I can’t recall, exactly,’ he said, frowning. Then his face brightened. ‘Maybe I wrote it down.’