Ten Sorry Tales

by Mick Jackson

Baxter didn’t much like Mister Matlock. He was the sort of person who was always smiling but never seemed to be thinking particularly nice thoughts.

  ‘It’s a new rucksack,’ Baxter said. ‘So I thought I’d give it a try-out. You know, just a couple of times round the block.’

  Mister Matlock smiled but his eyes were as dead as a dodo’s. It was always his eyes that gave him away – as if he was thinking that if he had his way, Baxter’s house would be bulldozed and he and his dad thrown out of town.

  Baxter said goodnight, pressed on and as soon as he was in the house, crept up to his room and locked the door. He undid the rucksack’s drawstring, gently upended it and watched as a thousand envelopes spilled on to the bed. Baxter thought it was probably about as close to flying the butterflies had got since that terrible moment when they found themselves in Milton Spufford’s killing jar. It was now up to him to see if he could get them flying again.

  He pulled out his box of tools from under the bed and set it down on his old desk. He adjusted the height of his stool, turned the lamp on, reached over to his bed and picked an envelope off the top of the pile. He put the magnifying glass up to his eye and held it there like a monocle. Then he set to work.

  There was a tiny hole where the pin had been inserted and on the other side of the butterfly, where the pin had surfaced, a minuscule tear. This allowed Baxter to peel back the skin with his tweezers and to have a look inside without making any extra incisions. As far as he could tell, most of the muscle and tissue was intact and, according to the manual, all that was necessary was to carefully knit the flesh back together, apply a drop of gum and revivify.

  That first butterfly was a stunning combination of black and amber, with unusually frilly wings. Baxter carefully repaired it, glued it and let it dry for several minutes before daring to attempt to revive it. Then, when he felt quite sure that the adhesive had set, he unwrapped his first cough sweet and slipped it into his mouth. He sucked away until he could taste all the medicinal flavours seep into his tongue and felt his nose begin to tingle. He placed the butterfly in the palm of his hand, just like the chemist had shown him. He rubbed the cough sweet up against the roof of his mouth a couple of times and with the butterfly no more than six inches from him, gently breathed his warm, mentholy breath over it.

  For a moment or two nothing happened. The butterfly just sat there, as mute and motionless as it had been on the museum wall. Baxter felt a great wave of disappointment rise up in him and he was about to give the butterfly a second dose when its wings suddenly twitched. It flexed its tiny antennae and moved its six little legs. And the whole elegant creature began to slowly stretch and shift in Baxter’s hand.

  Baxter laughed out loud as he stared at what had been, until a few minutes earlier, a beautiful but lifeless thing. And yet he was simply witnessing what he’d endlessly dreamt of – of breathing life back into a butterfly. Within ten minutes he had successfully repaired another half-dozen, which were all happily fluttering about his room. Baxter was overjoyed but soon realized that this arrangement was far from practical, so he caught each one in his cupped hands, climbed the steps in the corner up to the attic and from then on, as soon as each one showed the first signs of life he would gather it up and release it through the trapdoor into the attic where it joined all the other revitalized butterflies.

  He worked right through the night, with that magnifying glass up to his eye as he delicately nipped and sealed and knitted. Now and then an envelope would contain a butterfly with more serious internal damage and Baxter would have to consult his manual and employ some of the more unusual surgical tools. But by the morning he had revived what he estimated to be about three hundred butterflies and decided he had better go downstairs for some breakfast, if only to revive himself.

  Half an hour later he was back at his operating table. By mid-morning he had sucked his way through all five packets of cough sweets and had to slip out to the newsagents and buy another dozen or so. The woman behind the counter told him, ‘If your cough’s that bad you should maybe see a doctor.’ But Baxter said he just liked the taste of them, which, by this stage, wasn’t entirely true.

  For the rest of the day he worked almost without stopping. Every couple of hours he would have a little walk around the room, just to stretch his arms and legs. Each time he did so he noticed how the pile of envelopes on his bedspread had grown a little smaller. And every time he looked out of his window he saw how the sun had moved a little further through the sky.

  The biggest upset occurred after he’d fixed the wings on a particularly large specimen, which were a luminous turquoise, like a peacock’s. He blew some menthol over it, but the moment it sputtered back into being it became clear that one of its wings was still not quite right. Baxter had to carry out further repairs with it flapping and twitching between his fingers. Once he’d managed to complete all his sewing and gluing, the creature seemed perfectly happy but it was a most unpleasant experience and Baxter vowed that from that point forward he would refrain from reviving a butterfly until he was absolutely certain that all the work was done.

  At about six or seven on the Saturday evening he went down for his dinner, but was so excited by how few envelopes remained unopened that he was determined to get back to them as soon as possible. In those last few hours he began to have problems with his eyesight. His vision became quite blurred and he could feel a terrible headache coming on. And by the time he had repaired and revived the last one and released it into the attic it was long past midnight. He felt as if he’d run a marathon. He lay on his bed and calculated that he must have sucked his way through at least two hundred cough sweets. He wondered if he would ever get the taste of them out of his mouth. He closed his eyes. He just needed to close them for a second. And within a minute he was fast asleep.

  He awoke with a jolt about four hours later. The sun was rising. He looked at his watch. Almost six o’clock. He sat himself up and when he was sure that he was awake and had got his thoughts in order he went over to the corner of the bedroom and quietly climbed the wooden steps.

  He opened the trapdoor, very gently, expecting to find the attic full of frantic life, but the room was perfectly still. He climbed the last few steps and closed the trapdoor behind him. And as he stood there he was suddenly gripped by the fear that all his butterflies had flown away before he’d had the chance to see them together, or had slipped back into their slumber after only a few snatched hours of life. But as his eyes slowly grew accustomed to the darkness, he began to see them – a coat of butterflies covering all his old tape recorders and broken radios, their wings slowly winding backwards and forwards, as if they’d been waiting for him.

  He carefully made his way over to the skylight and pushed it open. Then he slowly crept back to the far side of the room. For a minute the attic was still again. There was just the sound of the town slowly waking far below him and Baxter up in his attic among his butterflies. The sun continued to rise above the rooftops and a gentle breeze swept in through the skylight. The butterflies began to stir. The first few took to the air and fluttered about the rafters. The others gradually joined them on the wing. And soon the air was full of butterflies – every colour and every design – until one or two danced out of the skylight, the others followed and in an instant all that delicate life swept out of the room.

  Baxter went over to the open skylight and watched them leaving: a great cloud of butterflies rolling over the town. They seemed to know where they were going. They seemed to know what they had to do.

  *

  Later that same day Milton Spufford, artist and butterfly collector, was standing up on the Downs, with the Weald to the north and the sea to the south and nothing but open hillside all around him, when he spotted an interesting-looking butterfly about ten feet away.

  It was his first find of the day. In his right hand he held his butterfly net by the handle. In his left he gripped his killing jar. His eyes never left his prey as he crept over towards it. Its
wings were pale green, like two young leaves, and Milton was already imagining what it would look like with all the life drawn out of it and pinned to a museum wall. He got within striking distance and for a moment watched the creature feeding. He raised his net – the same net that had already imprisoned a thousand other butterflies.

  ‘You’re coming home with me,’ he whispered.

  He was about to bring his net down when a dark shadow swept silently over him. The temperature suddenly dropped. The sun was gone and Milton turned to find the silhouette of a massive butterfly hovering above him. The same one he’d so meticulously constructed from a thousand stifled butterflies.

  He dropped the net. His killing jar went rolling down the hillside. The giant butterfly slowly flapped its wings. And as he stood there, gaping at his own strange creation, the huge butterfly fell upon him and wrapped itself around him, until Milton Spufford all but disappeared.

  He mustn’t have struggled for much more than a minute. With his last breath he tried to call out, but his words were muffled by the butterflies as they gently smothered him. For those last few moments he was full of colour. He was alive among his butterflies. Until the butterfly collector was finally extinguished and his lifeless body fell to the ground.

  He lay on the grass, as if he was deeply sleeping. And when an old lady came across him not long after, she found nothing remotely suspicious in the circumstances. It was a beautiful day, she told the inquest, with the sun high in the sky, a gentle wind blowing and hundreds of butterflies dancing everywhere.

  Hermit wanted

  Some people are born rich. Some become rich. Others aren’t quite so fortunate. Giles and Virginia Jarvis were of the fortunate variety. Giles had made lots of money working in the City. Ginny had inherited hers from her mum and dad. So when they married it was like a great clanging-together of bank vaults that rang out across the land.

  They bought a big old house out in the country with dozens of bedrooms and stone columns at either side of the front door and a long gravel drive which swept up to it through the hundreds of acres of woodland that came with the estate. They liked the idea of running their house in the way a squire and his wife might have run it a couple of centuries earlier, so they created a deer park and commissioned a couple of follies and a croquet lawn with peacocks strutting around it, and employed plenty of staff to do all the cooking and cleaning and to treat Giles and Ginny with the kind of respect they felt their considerable wealth deserved.

  One Saturday morning Ginny was riding her horse through a part of the woods she’d never explored before when she happened to come across a dank little cave. She climbed off her horse, crept up to the entrance and peered into the darkness.

  ‘Hello?’ she said.

  A minute later she was back on her horse and charging towards the house, barely able to contain her excitement. She abandoned her horse at the front door and went haring straight up the stairs in her muddy boots.

  ‘Giles,’ she called out, ‘Giles, darling,’ and her words went flapping all around the high ceiling and echoing up and down the corridors.

  Her husband peered over a banister, convinced that Ginny had done something truly dreadful, like take a pot-shot at some pesky pigeon and hit a local by mistake. But when he finally located his wife she was positively beaming.

  ‘I’ve found a cave,’ she said.

  It wasn’t the sort of news that Giles had expected and it took him a couple of moments to come up with what felt like an appropriate response.

  ‘Well done,’ he said, at last.

  ‘We must get ourselves a hermit for it,’ Ginny declared. ‘Like people used to.’

  Unlike his wife, Giles had never paid much attention in history lessons and consequently wasn’t up on hermits and, more precisely, what a hermit was for. But, as Ginny explained that afternoon and all through supper, one doesn’t have a hermit for anything in particular, except for looking rather wild and living a life of solitude and generally occupying what would otherwise be an empty cave.

  At first, Giles found the idea rather baffling. But within a couple of days he began to think it quite a novelty. And by the end of the week he considered a hermit an absolute necessity and was quite indignant that no one had brought it to his attention earlier on.

  The following week they put an advert in the local newspaper, under Situations Vacant:

  HERMIT WANTED

  Free meals and accommodation.

  Situated on grand estate.

  Would suit the quiet type.

  with their name and address printed beneath it, to which all aspiring hermits should apply.

  The Jarvises had high hopes. After all, they reasoned, how many jobs could there be which offered free meals and accommodation for doing nothing except sitting and thinking all day? So they were, frankly, surprised and a little disappointed when, a full week later, they hadn’t received a single application. How very strange, they thought. Then, how very ungrateful. Here they were, offering a cave with all the trimmings and the general public were too hoity-toity to take them up on it.

  Ginny began to talk vaguely about turning the cave into a grotto and making up a couple of sightings of fairies, to stimulate interest. Either that or just filling the damned thing in. But the following Tuesday as they took tea in one of their many lounges and listened to a concert on the radio a maid shuffled in and announced that a rather rough-looking fellow had fetched up at the back door and was asking if the hermit job was still available.

  Ginny let out a little yelp – a peculiar noise, similar to a small dog being trodden on, which, in Ginny, tended to indicate profound delight. Giles hadn’t heard that little yelp half as much as he would’ve liked to lately so, to show his support, he slapped his thigh and let out a low guffaw of his own.

  The maid was told to take the fellow through to the library and, a couple of minutes later, Ginny and Giles strolled in after him. He was an oldish chap – in his fifties or sixties – and was standing before the shelves of books looking thoroughly dumbfounded, as if he’d been thrown into a book-prison.

  ‘Do you read much?’ Ginny asked, by way of starting up a conversation.

  The fellow turned and shrugged, as if he didn’t have particularly strong feelings on the subject either way.

  ‘I know,’ said Ginny, ‘it’s so hard to find the time.’

  As she spoke, Ginny gave her budding hermit a quick once-over. He was a fairly bedraggled specimen, which was no bad thing since bedragglement was quite fitting for a hermit, but there was a ripe old smell about the fellow so, rather than risk him ruining their upholstered furniture, Ginny found him a wooden chair to sit on, thinking it might be easier to have it scrubbed clean after he’d departed. Or burned, if necessary.

  Giles and Ginny settled themselves on to one of the enormous sofas and for a moment simply sat and observed their guest as he continued to marvel at the opulence of his surroundings.

  ‘Are you a religious man?’ Ginny asked, eventually.

  The fellow considered the question, then shrugged. ‘Not really,’ he said.

  Ginny could see that her guest wasn’t particularly well versed in the art of chit-chat. ‘But, if you don’t mind me saying,’ she said, ‘you strike me as someone who likes to do a little thinking.’

  The fellow thought about it for a moment. ‘I suppose,’ he said, then nodded. ‘Yes, I sometimes like to think.’

  Ginny smiled, as if the fellow was finally confirming the sort of intelligence she had suspected him of having, and she took this as a cue to go more fully into what the job entailed. They had a cave, she explained, and wanted someone to live in it. Someone who might cultivate the long-haired, solitary attitude of a hermit.

  As she spoke the bedraggled fellow nodded but continued to gaze around the room.

  ‘Which means that you must agree not to shave, or cut your hair, or trim your fingernails,’ Ginny insisted. ‘We want that savage look.’

  The fellow nodded again.

/>   ‘And you must stay in your cave – or thereabouts,’ Giles added, in case there was any chance the fellow had failed to grasp the whole living-in-a-cave idea.

  The fellow nodded once more, then all three of them sat in silence for a moment, until the old fellow suddenly seemed to find his voice.

  ‘There was something about food …’ he said, ‘… in the advert.’

  ‘That’s right,’ said Ginny. ‘One of the staff will drop something off every morning. You know, a little bread and cheese – that sort of thing.’

  This talk of bread and cheese certainly seemed to perk the old fellow up and, not long after, he suddenly sprang to his feet, like some soldier standing to attention.

  ‘Right then,’ he said.

  ‘Very good,’ said Ginny, and she and Giles hauled themselves up from their sofa. ‘When would you be able to start?’

  The old fellow tugged back his jacket sleeve and stared at his wrist, as if a watch might suddenly appear there.

  ‘Well, straightaway,’ he said.

  So they all marched down to the cloakroom, where Giles and Ginny pulled on their wellington boots. Then they all trooped out through the back door and headed off towards the woods. As they marched along Ginny did her best to impress upon her newly appointed hermit what sort of behaviour was expected of him. Contemplation, she said. That was what they were after. Nothing too noisy or demonstrative.

  ‘As a rule, hermits tend to be quite introverted,’ she told him.

  Ginny had envisaged her hermit dressed in a shroud or simple cassock, but the old fellow’s clothes were already so rough and ragged that she saw no need to make a fuss. Enquiries were made as to whether there were family members who might need to be informed of his new position or any personal knick-knacks which might need picking up. There weren’t.

  ‘We’ll have one of the boys bring you out an old straw mattress,’ Ginny told him as they continued walking. ‘And a spade,’ she said, and waved vaguely at the woods off to her right, ‘for your convenience.’