Authors: Justin D'Ath
Tags: #Juvenile Fiction, #Fantasy & Magic, #Health & Daily Living, #General, #Social Issues, #Juvenile Nonfiction
55
Wolfgang clicked the door shut behind him and lowered himself onto the padded kneeler. Even though he knew he couldn’t be seen through the small gauze-covered opening, he averted his eyes selfconsciously when the hatch slid across. Coming here was a mistake. He would never be able to confess.
And what was the point, when he felt absolutely no remorse?
‘I’m thorry, Father – I ... I ... I’ve changed my mind,’ Wolfgang said, rising awkwardly to his feet.
‘That’s okay,’ Father Nguyen’s soft, boyish voice came through the grille. ‘But before you go, can you help me with something? I didn’t hear last night’s score from England.’
Wolfgang paused. ‘You mean the test? Ricky Ponting got a century.’
‘So Australia has beaten the Pommies.’
‘No, Father. At least, not yet – there are still two or three days to go.’
‘Such a long game!’ the priest marvelled. ‘When I first came to this country, I did not believe it when they told me a match of cricket can last nearly for one week.’
‘Yeah, it’s pretty boring.’
‘You don’t play?’
‘Sometimes. I prefer baseball, actually,’ Wolfgang said, his fingers finding the door handle. ‘I’d better go.’
‘Do you play Aussie Rules?’
‘A bit.’
‘It must be difficult with that ball you use,’ said the priest. ‘I played soccer when I was a young man. We used a nice round ball – always we knew which way it would go.’
‘Yeah, soccer’s an okay game.’
‘You have played soccer?’
Wolfgang quietly turned the door handle one way and then the other. ‘I’m in my school’s first team.’
‘What position are you?’
‘Father, there are people waiting.’
‘I am sure they have some prayers to say,’ Father Nguyen said lightly. ‘Sometimes when I am in here I like to hear about good things, not just the people’s sins.’
I could tell you a good thing, Wolfgang thought, but
you’d
think it was a sin. ‘I play forward flanker, mostly. On the left, because I can kick with either foot.’
‘Do you score many goals?’
‘Eighteen last season. I was equal-top scorer. Father, can I ask you a question?’
‘Please do.’
Wolfgang released the door handle and leaned back against the wall. It creaked. ‘Is heaven an actual place?’
‘It is most definitely a place,’ said the priest. ‘But where it is, we cannot understand.’
‘So it’s kind of like another dimension?’
‘A dimension? My English is not so good, I am sorry.’
Wolfgang stared hard at the small, rectangular grille that shielded them from each other’s eyes. ‘Could heaven be
here,
sort of all around us, only we can’t see it?’
The priest chuckled. ‘You have a strong brain, I think. But no man can understand God’s mystery. We must wait until we die to know how it is.’
‘Is it possible to go there before you die? You know – to go there and then come back?’
‘No.’
‘What about if you died and someone brought you back to life?’ Wolfgang asked. ‘It happened to a man at the pool a couple of weeks ago. In the newspaper it said how he remembered being in heaven.’
‘I read about Mr Cooper,’ Father Nguyen said. ‘This is called, I think, a nearly dead experience. Psychologists have found it is dreams people have when they are thinking they will die. They wish in their brains they are in heaven, they don’t see it with their eyes.’
But the psychologists could be wrong, Wolfgang thought. They hadn’t met Audrey. Who, anyway, saw nothing with her eyes, yet who had known somehow that Wolfgang was at the pool last night, and that he’d been wearing his bicycle helmet in the water. And who, two weeks ago and despite her blindness, had been the only person at the pool to notice Mr Cooper was in trouble – even if she’d got his gender wrong.
‘Maybe it’s a vision,’ he said. ‘Some of the saints had visions, didn’t they?’
There was a deep silence. Someone coughed in one of the pews just outside the confessional – it sounded like Leo. Suddenly all Wolfgang wanted was to be out of there. Home in bed, preferably, where every other person his age would be at that hour on a Saturday morning. His body sagged against the wall. His eyelids drooped. He had only managed to get about two hours sleep before his mother woke him at eight. Way too early.
Father Nguyen was talking again. ‘It is a beautiful gift to have visions,’ he said, ‘but sometimes, with young people especially, what they believe to be visions are actually caused by illness.’ A shadow appeared on the gauze, as if the priest was trying to peer through it. ‘Forgive me for saying this. Have you spoken of these visions to a doctor?’
56
Had his parents not been there, and had it not been the first anniversary of his Uncle Brendan’s death, Wolfgang would not have stayed for mass. He didn’t want Father Nguyen to see him in the church and identify him as the young soccer forward flanker he had so hastily diagnosed as suffering from schizophrenia. (For what other vision-causing illness could the priest have meant?) Wolfgang hadn’t corrected him; he hadn’t said he was talking about someone else –
his friend
– because he knew how lame that would sound. He had simply slipped out of the confessional without another word and retreated to the very last row in the left hand bank of pews, choosing a seat directly behind Mr Sampson, who used to play VFL football and was nearly two metres tall. After they had made their confessions, his parents had eventually joined him there. His father looked annoyed at having to sit on the opposite side of the church to where he was accustomed, but Wolfgang didn’t care. He slouched in the pew with his head down, hoping not to be noticed.
Schizophrenia, he thought. Or, quite possibly, brain damage. Who was to say what a two-year coma could do to someone’s head? But Wolfgang didn’t care. He loved Audrey. Even if she
was
crazy.
He’d
made love
to her.
A large, pure-white butterfly circled him once, twice, three times, then landed heavily on his shoulder. Its powerful legs gripped him through the fabric of his T-shirt, gripped him with surprising force, then shook him.
‘Wolfgang?’
He jerked his head up. No butterfly rested there, just a hand. His mother’s disapproving face hovered above him. She was on her feet, as was his father on the far side of her, and Mr and Mrs Sampson in the pew in front. Father Nguyen’s disembodied voice floated up from the sanctuary: ‘ ... a reading from the gospel, according to Saint Luke.’
Wolfgang rose quickly from the hard wooden seat. He must have dozed off. Luckily they were in the back row; nobody apart from his mother seemed to have noticed his lapse. His eyelids were heavy, his eyeballs felt gritty from lack of sleep. He could still see, in his head, the large white butterfly that had been circling him.
Mr Cooper, who’d had the
nearly dead experience,
had seen white butterflies, too, Wolfgang recalled. How had Audrey known that Mr Cooper was drowning before anyone else at the pool became aware of it? You can’t attribute that to schizophrenia, Father Nguyen.
The gospel ended and everyone sat down again. Wolfgang struggled to remain awake. His head throbbed. He was hung-over, he supposed – the experience was new to him. Hung-over and overtired. He should have stayed home, stayed in bed. Only two hours sleep: it wasn’t enough. Not nearly enough. He had to work this afternoon. How had Audrey known? His head sagged forward; he jerked it upright again. How had she known he was at the pool last night? There had to be a logical explanation. Wolfgang had never believed in psychic powers, nor in any other kind of spiritual or paranormal phenomena. He believed in God, of course, but not in all that other mystical nonsense: astrology, the occult, reincarnation – how could any rational person take them seriously? Audrey was Catholic, she should have known better. His eyelids dragged closed. Stay awake! he told himself, forcing them open again. He didn’t believe in miracles, either – not in modern day miracles, anyway. Marceline Flavel was a fraud. Someone had paid her, either Mrs Lonsdale or the city council. Her so-called ‘miracle cure’ had brought untold wealth to the town. It was nothing but a very clever hoax. Everyone, even
60 Minutes,
had been fooled. But not me, Wolfgang thought. He knew better. There was no such thing as a miracle. His arm hadn’t been grazed, he’d just knocked it. What he’d mistaken for blood was actually oil from his bike’s chain that had washed off in the pool. Everything could be explained. They hadn’t found him for five minutes because of the lights reflecting on the water. He’d been floating on his back with just his mouth and nose above the surface, unconscious but still breathing. Delayed concussion. It was coming back to him now, shadowy and half-remembered: a strange sensation of seeing things in reverse, colours jumbled like in a photographic negative. The sky was orange. His hands, desperately flailing, looked green. And the water, all around him, was pink.
Drowning, he recalled vaguely. I was drowning.
Yet he hadn’t drowned. He’d broken through the surface and found himself not in water but on land. Warm and completely dry. Sunlight on his skin, a bright orange sky, pink trees. And white butterflies swirling around him. Butterflies in paradise.
Father Nguyen was wrong about everything. Mr Cooper had been to heaven and come back.
Wolfgang woke with a start when his mother nudged his arm. Stand up, she gestured. Everyone else was standing.
‘Holy, Holy, Holy,’
their senior citizen’s voices echoed around the cavernous, mostly-empty church.
Swaying to his feet, Wolfgang gripped the back of the pew in front of him for support and stared at Mr Sampson’s crepey, wrinkled neck. For a moment he’d dreamt the large white butterfly was circling him again. Stay awake, he told himself. Stop dreaming. In any case, it wasn’t white butterflies he should be dreaming about, it was black ones –
live
black ones. But Wolfgang had been so over-tired when he’d discovered it, and so over the moon about what had happened in the cemetery with Audrey – and possibly still slightly concussed or drunk – that he had largely forgotten the visit of the live black butterfly to his bedroom just a few hours earlier. Obviously, he thought now, its being there was not a coincidence: the dead one on his desk had something to do with it.
The explanation came to him in a rush: phero-mones!
Wolfgang had read about them in an article on the Internet. In few other creatures were the chemical signals that brought the two sexes together so strong as they were in butterflies and moths. When they were ready to mate, the females of some species emitted a scent that could be detected by males over a distance of up to a kilometre. Wolfgang’s butterfly, although dead, must have still contained traces of those pheromones in its body. It was these, slowly leeching out into the atmosphere, that had attracted the live butterfly in through his open window. What was odd, he thought, was that it had arrived at night. Butterflies were active in the daytime, they slept during the night.
Wolfgang gave a start. Suddenly it occurred to him why he had never found a living specimen of the black butterfly when he’d been out collecting. And why nobody else had ever seen one. They were like Audrey – nocturnal!
Everyone knelt for the consecration. Wolfgang knelt, too. But his mind wasn’t on the ceremony as Father Nguyen bowed over the bread and wine that was soon to become, through the mystery of transub-stantiation, the body and blood of Jesus Christ; he was thinking about the black butterfly. And a small knot of fear was forming inside him. No wonder he hadn’t been able to find it in any of his books. His books were about butterflies, whereas his discovery of a lifetime, his
Lepidoptera Mulqueen,
was a moth!
57
Wolfgang heard the phone ringing inside the house as his father fumbled to fit the key into the lock.
‘Here, Dad – let me do that.’
‘I’m quite capable of unlocking a door.’
‘Can you hurry then?’ Wolfgang asked. ‘They’re not going to hold on forever.’
‘Who isn’t?’
‘Whoever’s on the phone.’
Leo paused to listen. He had the key upside down. ‘Is it ringing?’
Deaf as well as stupid. ‘It
was,’
Wolfgang said, his fingers clenching and unclenching by his sides. ‘It’s stopped now. Try the key up the other way.’
‘They’ve probably left a message,’ his mother said behind him.
But there was no message on the answering machine. Wolfgang dialled Call Return. Yes! he thought with a surge of elation when he heard the recorded number. He called her back, but it wasn’t Audrey who answered.
‘Hi, Mr Babacan, this is Wolfgang. Can I speak to Audrey, please?’
There was a moment’s pause. ‘You don’t know where she is?’ asked Keith.
‘Didn’t she just call here?’
‘That was me. I was hoping she was with you. Did you see her last night?’
‘We went for a walk,’ Wolfgang said guardedly. Hadn’t they had this conversation before? ‘Isn’t she home?’
‘Would I be
calling
you if she was home?’ Keith snapped. He lowered his voice. ‘Sorry, we’re a bit on edge here. Audrey’s bed hasn’t been slept in. When did you see her last?’
Wolfgang’s eyes darted to the end of the passage. His parents had gone into the kitchen. ‘Around midnight. I walked her home.’
‘Did you see her come inside?’
‘No. We said goodbye at the gate.’
‘She didn’t come in,’ Keith said. ‘Or if she did, she went out again soon after. Her mother checked her room at about three and she wasn’t there.’
At three, Audrey was in the cemetery with Wolfgang, or maybe halfway back from the cemetery. But it was too late now to change his story. ‘Have you checked since?’ he asked.
‘Of course we have. What do you take us for, idiots?’
‘I’m thorry.’
Keith made a soft blowing noise into the phone. ‘She’s usually back well before this. She hasn’t even got her dog with her.’
‘She’s quite good at finding her way around,’ Wolfgang said. ‘She had a stick.’
‘What good would her stick be if someone attacked her? She couldn’t even see him to defend herself.’ Keith’s voice hardened: ‘I’ve told her a thousand bloody times that it just isn’t
safe
to go wandering the streets at night!’
Please, God, Wolfgang prayed, don’t let anything bad have happened to her. ‘Have you tried the themetery?’
‘It was the first place we looked. And I’ve driven all over town. How did she seem last night? Was she upset about anything?’
‘She theemed ... happy enough,’ Wolfgang said.
‘She’s done this kind of thing before, but not for a couple of years.’
‘Do you think she might have run away?’
‘Strange as it may sound,’ her father said tiredly, ‘I’m actually beginning to hope that’s what’s happened. If you hear from her, son, could you let us know right away?’
Wolfgang stood staring at the phone for some moments after he’d replaced the receiver. He had told Keith that Audrey seemed happy, but that wasn’t strictly true. After they’d made love, and all the way back from the cemetery, she had seemed quiet and withdrawn. ‘I’m sorry,’ she’d murmured as they hugged goodbye at the bottom of her driveway, and then covered up by pretending the apology was for keeping him up so late. Now he knew the real reason Audrey had been sorry: she had been planning to run away.
Perhaps that’s why she’d held him for so long. She was saying goodbye
forever.