Free Butterfly by Sonya Hartnett Page A

hands. “Why not? You’d look lovely.”
    “Lovely.” Plum scoffs. Something in the distance catches her eye and makes her scowl. “Your — Mr. Wilks — is coming. I can see his car.”
    Maureen says, “Poor Bernie. He works late.”
    “I’m writing invitations!” The girl beams. “I chose the ones with silhouettes.”
    Maureen smiles up at her, though she has no idea what the girl means. She says, “Aria, would you be interested in babysitting David occasionally? Playing with him, taking him for walks? He likes you, and I want him to have friends. I’d pay you, of course. You could save to have your ears pierced.”
    The girl hesitates as the Datsun swings into the driveway and rushes up the concrete guides. Maureen hears the hand brake secured, the driver’s neat door eased open. “I would, I will,” Plum decides swiftly. “Maybe I’ll see you tomorrow?”
    Cydar pauses, stilled as a prowler hearing a lamp switched on. The door to Plum’s bedroom is unlatched, and through the gap he sees a sliver of cupboard festooned with stickers and pictures cut from magazines. Only his sister’s voice carries through the gap, but he guesses who she’s talking to. When the window rumbles down its frame he uses the noise as a thief uses darkness, to proceed.
    Justin is lying on his bed wearing a pair of Fa’s old trousers and a set of headphones, each cup the size of a muffin. The room is dark, the blind is down, his arms are folded across his chest; Cydar thinks of an Irish farm boy laid out on the kitchen table. Seeing him, Justin pulls off the headphones and drops them to the floor, where they bark out tiny noises like furious miniature dogs. Cydar asks, “Why don’t you turn on a light?”
    Justin’s glance goes to the window; Cydar looks wry. “You’re a rat in a wall,” he says.
    “Yeah.” Justin smiles, in Cydar’s mind transforming from dead farm boy to dying matinee idol. “A rat in a wall.”
    Cydar takes from his pocket a snugly bound parcel of marijuana and tosses it onto the bed. The drug will wreak havoc on Justin and his laconic friends, but Cydar is nobody’s keeper, and charity is a trait that, from childhood, he’s understood to have its own rewards. He hesitates before stepping over the threshold — he doesn’t often come into Justin’s room, this attic-space of maleness and dog-eared car manuals, its walls hung with glum oil paintingsthat Justin didn’t choose; but when he does, Cydar makes a beeline for the single curiosity. On the chest of drawers is a shallow bowl that has a rotating base. The interior of the bowl is divided into six compartments, each with its own flip-top lid. The lids are inscribed in copperplate:
cuff links, rubber bands, spare change; paper clips, safety pins, keys.
A manly ornament from two decades earlier that attracts Cydar like fireworks. He spins the bowl, the lids whirl around — then stops it sharply with a jabbing finger.
Paper clips.
Lifting the lid reveals not paper clips but a purple button entangled in cotton. Pleasing nonetheless, and Cydar smiles. Justin says, “Just have it. Take it.”
    “I don’t want to.”
    “Well, I don’t need it. I don’t even know how it got here.”
    Cydar knows: Fa had brought the bowl home from a junk shop, and put it in Justin’s room without even considering that his younger son might appreciate it more. But Cydar tells Justin, “If I take it, you’ll have nothing. Nothing except that cat outside the wall.”
    Justin draws breath to reply, but doesn’t; his chest falls, his fingers close around the crackly bag of dope. Cydar waits, spinning the bowl. Beneath them the house sighs, shifting wooden bones on its stumps. They feel the weight of the dust that coats the roof joists and sloughs from the plaster and lies between the floors; they feel the presence of their mother and father in the den downstairs, their sister moving in her bedroom down the hall. Cydar keeps hisvoice low, as if the house is one