Shooting Butterflies

by Marika Cobbold

  Grace had resisted the smell of freshly baked biscuits. Instead she had turned and run down the path and across the road to Northbourne House. Noah, who lived most of the time with his mother in Canada, was over for his holidays already.

  ‘Another station for Blackstaff Enterprises.’ Noah stretched across to grab Liverpool Street station.

  ‘Why don’t you want to look for your ghost?’ Grace nagged.

  ‘I don’t believe in her.’

  ‘But lots of people have seen her. That’s why you’re so lucky. My mother is a ghost but I never see her. No one does.’

  ‘So how do you know she’s a ghost?’

  Grace threw the dice and got a double three. ‘Because I don’t believe in angels.’

  ‘That doesn’t make any sense,’ Noah said.

  ‘Oh look,’ Grace said, moving her top hat. ‘Park Lane.’

  They took a break for tea and cake. ‘You should be nicer to your grandmother. If you had a grandmother like Roberta O’Reilly, you would know about it.’

  ‘Granny’s all right; she’s just not much fun. You can’t do things with her like you can with Grandpa.’

  ‘She’s always looking at you when she thinks you’re not noticing and she has this funny expression in her eyes.’ Grace thought for a moment. ‘It’s like she misses you.’

  ‘How can she miss me, dumbo, when I’m right there?’

  Grace shrugged. ‘I don’t know.’

  Nell Gordon: Once more the young Grace was hit by tragedy when her father died from a heart attack in her first year of A-levels.

  Poor Mrs Shield had cried so hard there were no tears left for anyone else. Finn was over from Australia for the funeral, but he would have to fly back the next day because they needed him at work. And he was getting married. His fiancée, whose name was Robyn, did not like it when he was away. Grace looked at her tall dark-haired brother, and searched for a way back to the time when they were central to each other’s life. ‘We need you, Mrs Shield and I.’

  Finn put his arm round Grace, awkwardly, as if he was not sure how to do it. ‘I know.’ His cheeks had gone pink, as they always did when he was feeling guilty. ‘I have to get back. There’s really nothing I can do.’

  Grace shrugged free. She thought, I’m seventeen and no one in the world loves me best.

  Mrs Shield had told Grace to leave her ‘wretched camera’ at home. ‘I’m sorry, Grace, but there’s something unhealthy about a young girl taking pictures at her own father’s funeral.’ Grace had put her camera back on the hall table without protest.

  The service was about to begin when Noah’s grandfather, Arthur Blackstaff, strode in through the church portals and everyone turned to look. His wife had arrived earlier and slipped into her pew, but that kind of quiet fitting in was not for Arthur. There were not many men, Grace thought, who could upstage a corpse at its own funeral. Arthur made much of taking a seat at the back and slowly the congregation settled once more, all eyes towards the coffin. As the first hymn was sung, Grace thought about how all those people, most of whom she did not even know, were alive and the one person who had been hers lay dead in front of the altar. ‘Excuse me for living’ – was that not what people said? Well, Grace thought, looking around her fiercely, I won’t, I bloody won’t. But wherever she looked she met pity. She wanted sympathy and she wanted love, but pity was for freaks. Roll up, roll up, for the girl who can’t stop losing her loved ones. Her angry eyes met the calm blue gaze of Louisa Blackstaff, Noah’s grandmother. Until that moment, if you had asked Grace what Louisa Blackstaff looked like she would have said, ‘Pale, sort of old,’ and shrugged to indicate that that was about it. But now, as she looked into the slanted deep-blue eyes that looked back at her not with pity or curiosity, but with understanding, she would have said that Noah’s grandmother was beautiful.

  The organ started up and the congregation got to its feet. Grace stood mute as the singing started; it was pretty rude, she thought, expecting an orphan to sing.

  The sun was shining. The birds were on the wing and a faint breeze ruffled the feather in Mrs Shield’s black velvet beret. Grace was staring down at the deep-dug grave. Any moment now her father would be lowered into that dark hole. Grace would return to the house and who would chase away the pictures in her mind of what each new day would do to her father’s body?

  Mrs Shield reached for Grace’s hand. ‘My darling girl,’ she said, her voice barely audible. ‘Thank God for you.’

  Nell Gordon: First love ends in heartbreak.

  Grace stood outside the house where once she had lived with her mother and father and her brother Finn when she was one of the lucky people. She had returned to Kendall, the eternal small town where everyone was busy but life flowed by slowly, where people sat on their porches on warm summer evenings watching the world go by, where they were born and grew up and stayed to make new families and died to be taken across the river to be buried. Grace was there to try to learn enough to forget.

  She was staying with the Singletons, her Aunt Kathleen and Uncle Leslie. Theirs was a big house, a house that was waiting in vain for children to occupy its rooms. But none came and although by now Aunt Kathleen and her husband Leslie had all but given up hope, they could not bring themselves to leave the house for a smaller, more convenient place. That house was their home. There was a closed-in porch where Uncle Leslie went to smoke and a large yard at the back where roses thrived in the dry heat, flowering bright red and filling the air with scent, and in the summer of 1976, here was Grace, their orphaned niece, not exactly a child at eighteen, but messy and noisy enough to make the house seem just right.

  Grace had heard talk from friends, leaving school like her, of the need to get away, to break free of the maternal bond and to strike out and find yourself. But it was easy for them; they knew from whom it was they were trying to cut loose. Grace remembered a sea-green frock and eyes to match, coral lips, and a cool hand across her hot forehead. How little that was, she had realised only when her father died.

  She had tried to explain to Aunt Kathleen that it was as if she had lost her mother all over again when Gabriel died. While he was there she felt secure in the knowledge that she could visit her mother through him, so consequently she seldom did. Now it was too late.

  ‘I know what you’re saying.’ Aunt Kathleen nodded. ‘Everyone goes on and on about the Monument across in Vermont, but have I been there? No, I have not, because I live just round the corner, that’s why.’

  ‘Something like that,’ Grace said and all at once she remembered hearing, a long time ago, her mother being discussed and someone saying how she was a really sweet woman but not very clever.

  There weren’t many photographs; Grace’s father had not been one for taking pictures and the one Grace had taken herself with her first camera had disappeared. In the few she had seen, her mother looked different from how she did in Grace’s memory. Grace had tried in vain to get the memories and the photographs to add up to one whole person, but it never worked. How do you let go of memories? Memories entwined themselves in your thoughts and stole into your dreams at night. They could go everywhere and anywhere, they travelled with you, invited or not, and they never grew old and slow enough to leave behind.

  Aunt Kathleen was said to look quite like her late sister. Same transparent pale-freckled skin, same sea-green eyes, same soft voice. It was Kathleen who had first given Moira the brand of indelible lipstick she used right until the day she died. Moira had even named her only daughter Grace after her favourite shade; a soft shimmery coral called Princess Grace. You couldn’t get that brand of lipstick any more, not since it had been discovered that its unusual staying power was due to harmful chemicals. Kathleen told Grace that Moira had been lucky not to suffer the effects, as for months, even after the banning of the cosmetic, you could see women walking around with lips that were swollen and purple, as if they had just gorged themselves on blackberries.

  ‘I know I was the one who got her on
to it, after I found it at the drugstore in West Lebanon,’ Aunt Kathleen told Grace as they sat together in the kitchen, fanning themselves with the straw placemats and drinking iced tea. ‘But then I told her, “There’s no such thing as an easy option. Lipstick just doesn’t stay put and, if it does, then you should probably be worried about it.” No, she was lucky she didn’t suffer any ill effects.’

  Lucky, Grace thought. Was her mother lucky to have crashed her car before her lips had had time to swell and turn purple from over-use of her stay-put lipstick? Now, there was a new way of looking at it. ‘I wish someone had thought of keeping a tube of the stuff,’ she said. ‘Full of chemicals or not, it was such a part of my mother, and me too, what with the name and everything.’ Most of Moira’s belongings had been cleared away soon after her death. It had been thought best by the helpful friends gathered around, as the little girl in particular was given to almost unstoppable floods of tears at the mere sight of a familiar frock or the whiff of scent from a pretty glass bottle.

  Grace did remember looking at the leftover bits of her birthday cake and wondering how it could be that her mother was gone for ever whilst a strawberry cake was still there. Roberta O’Reilly called things like cakes perishables. That, her father had explained, meant they did not last very long.

  ‘Your mother is an angel in heaven,’ one kind lady had told Grace.

  ‘No, she is not.’ The little girl had shaken her head. ‘She is a perishable.’

  Now Grace asked Aunt Kathleen, ‘Do I look like her?’

  Aunt Kathleen put her glasses on and studied Grace before saying, ‘At first glance you favour your father – you have his height and his dark hair and square chin – but I can see Moira there too, in the cheekbones and the freckles and the eyes, although hers were kind of misty, misty-mild, and yours are very clear. And you’re a strong athletic-looking girl. There’s nothing fey or fragile about you, which is a great good thing as far as I’m concerned.’

  ‘I can’t help thinking if only I had paid more attention to her when she was alive.’ Grace sighed.

  Kathleen said she thought that was an odd way of looking at it. Children as young as Grace had been, back when her mother was still alive, did what they did. It was up to the parents to pay attention. She brought her photograph album to the kitchen table for the two of them to look at while they finished their iced tea. The photos of Grace’s parents showed two people who, although standing side by side, would have preferred to have been in separate pictures. Grace could not say exactly what it was that made her think this; maybe the stiffness of their arms crammed up against their sides, the way their shoulders just missed touching, or their tight smiles as if someone was counting to ten. ‘I thought they were happy,’ she said.

  Aunt Kathleen leant over Grace and paused to gaze at the pictures in the old album. She gently tucked back the lock of hair that flopped across Grace’s forehead. ‘They were, dear.’

  Grace tilted her head to look up at her. ‘No. No, they weren’t. Of course I wanted to believe they were, but I think I always knew what it says here.’ She jabbed her finger at the photographs.

  After that she looked out for people who, although physically close to one another, were actually a world apart; and also for their opposites: people who, although at the other end of the room from each other, were connected in a way you could almost see. She thought she would very much like to meet someone to whom she could feel connected like that. Up in her room, the never-used nursery, where little blue fish still swam along the ceiling borders, Grace drew a picture of a matchstick woman and a matchstick man each at opposite ends of a piece of paper, but with a cord running from one stomach right to the other.

  The days grew hotter and there was no cooling breeze. Aunt Kathleen stayed inside with the air conditioning, but Grace, who swore she had her own body thermometer that kept her just right whatever the temperature outside, was out most days exploring with her camera. Aunt Kathleen noticed that Grace had little to say about what she had seen during her excursions other than a shrugged ‘You know, stuff,’ until she brought home the developed photographs and then she talked and gesticulated so that you had trouble stopping her. ‘It’s like she only just saw it all,’ Aunt Kathleen said to Uncle Leslie. ‘And then I look and I think, yes, there’s more to this place than you see at first glance.’

  ‘I keep telling you,’ Uncle Leslie lit his pipe and leant back in the rocker, ‘you won’t find anywhere better.’ He spent his life fighting to be allowed to stay just where he was while Aunt Kathleen kept glancing around looking for something better. Luckily for Uncle Leslie, she never settled on where that better thing might be for long enough for them to go anywhere very much, even for a visit.

  Already Grace had a second roll of film developed. ‘Who is that?’ she asked Aunt Kathleen. ‘That boy standing on the corner lighting a cigarette.’

  Aunt Kathleen put on her reading glasses and peered at the picture of Main Street on a Sunday morning. ‘Well, firstly he should have been in church, as should you, although I know better than to try to force you. And second, his parents would be none too happy to see him with a cigarette in his mouth. They’re always boasting about what an athletic boy he is.’

  ‘Who? I want to know who he is.’

  Aunt Kathleen smiled to herself. ‘You sound mighty interested in someone you’ve never even met.’

  ‘Of course I’m interested. He’s beautiful.’

  Aunt Kathleen looked again at the tall blue-eyed boy with his loose broad shoulders and brown hair that was a little too clean, too shiny, to be entirely fashionable. ‘Jefferson; yes, I suppose he is a good-looking boy. He could do with a good hair-cut, though.’ She glanced sideways at Grace. ‘I happen to know from his mother that he’s nursing a broken heart. And don’t you go taking that as a challenge.’

  The McGraws, Jim and Gene, played Kathleen and Leslie at doubles, although Gene, Kathleen said, could not serve to save her life. ‘Mostly we go along for her baking. No one bakes cookies like Gene McGraw.’

  And, Grace thought, her son was handsome enough to be a film star; handsome enough never to be interested in someone like Grace Shield. It wasn’t that she was bad-looking; she was just that bit too tall, and she was angular. There was no softness to her, no curves to speak of, and she was aware that she looked fierce a lot of the time when all she was doing was concentrating. Mrs Shield always told her that she had the kind of looks that older, more sophisticated men would like. She had meant it as a comfort, but it hadn’t worked. Older and more sophisticated meant forty at least. What use did Grace have for the admiration of men like that? No, what she wanted was to look like the girl standing next to Jefferson in the second picture. ‘Who is she?’

  ‘I don’t know. This might be a small town, but that doesn’t mean I know everyone.’

  ‘She’s pretty.’

  ‘Sure, she’s pretty,’ Aunt Kathleen said.

  She was of medium height, a little plump but nicely so, with loose dark curls falling to her shoulders, pouty lips and an upturned nose. Aunt Kathleen must have noticed Grace’s wistful look because she quickly added, ‘But so are you. Maybe not in such an obvious way, but you’ll see, your time will come.’ Grace told her she sounded just like Mrs Shield.

  ‘Anyway, I want to be obvious. And I don’t want to wait for this mystical day when my kind of looks, whatever they are, suddenly become everybody’s cup of tea. I want to be obvious and I want to be obvious right now.’ Aunt Kathleen just smiled and shook her head.

  Grace took to walking down Main Street at least twice a day hoping to catch a glimpse of the boy.

  ‘A hamburger? In this heat!’ Aunt Kathleen raised both eyebrows; auburn and pencil thin like her dead sister’s. She and Uncle Leslie had not believed Grace when she told them she had never been to a McDonald’s. ‘There’s a Wimpy but no McDonald’s in our nearest town. They’ve got them in London, but I haven’t been.’

  ‘No McD?’ Uncle Leslie had s
ounded like a missionary who had discovered a place where no one had heard of Jesus; incredulous but excited all the same. ‘Well, someone’s standing to make a lot of money over your way,’ he said.

  On her own, Grace dawdled, looking into nearly every shop window on her way downtown. She went inside one of her favourite places: the small electrical-goods store with its shelf of photographic equipment. She bought herself a photograph album that she had admired for some time now. It was matt-black and squat, requiring little stick-on corners that you bought on a reel, an old-timer surviving amongst the shiny red and green ones with their pockets and self-adhesive pages. She walked on down Main Street, thinking there were more people than usual about, although none of them was Jefferson McGraw. But she did not want to give up just yet so she went into the last shop on the street, Andersen’s, just to eke out the time and get some more air conditioning. The shop was having a pre-summer sale. There was a poncho in the window, knitted in bright red wool, its voluminous hood trimmed with dark fur. Grace thought of how snug that would be in winter and how becoming; Little Red Riding Hood wearing the wolf.

  It turned out that the poncho was reduced to less than half its original price. The assistant, a heavy-set girl with long permbleached curls and a smile that showed she was relieved to finally see a customer, said, ‘Mr Andersen had planned to keep the fur stock over to the next season, furs being classic and always just right, but it looks like he might not stock any fur items no longer so he thought he’d get them into the summer sale.’