The Girl In the Cave (2 page)

Chapter Three

Butterfly Day

Uncle Dermott was a lepidopterist. This means he collected butterflies. Not as a job, but as a hobby. During the week he worked for the tax department, but on the weekends he spent all his time improving his butterfly collection.

His collection was massive. It was probably one of the best in the country, possibly even the world, but it would be impossible to tell, because Uncle Dermott never let anyone else see his butterflies.

“People might steal them,” he would say, and so Uncle Dermott's butterfly collection was never seen by any of the professors or scientists who study these things. Instead, it stayed locked up in the spare rooms of the house, where he could gloat over it all by himself.

And it was a collection worth gloating over. He had the very rare
Papilio demoleus,
with its beautiful black and white pattern and tiny red dots on the bottom of its wings. He had several rare
Eurema herla,
which have bright yellow wings, and all manner of common butterflies and moths.

His pride and joy, though, was his European
Zerynthia polyxena,
which sat in its own special case on the wall in his study. It was the only thing in the whole house that Kate wasn't expected to clean.

“That is the rarest butterfly in all of Australia, girl,” he would lecture while she dusted his study. “I obtained it purely by accident. It doesn't even belong here: it came from southern Italy.”

Sometimes Kate would look at the pretty little creature pinned into the display case. Its wings were patterned with delicate black and cream waves, with little red and yellow dots between them.

“If anyone knew I had one of those, we'd never hear the last of it,” Uncle Dermott would boast. “They'd be banging down our door, all those scientists and collectors, all of them wanting to see my
Zerynthia.
And do you know what? They'd all be jealous. Hah!” And then he would return to his books on rare butterflies.

Kate often wondered how the little creature had wandered so far from its home in Italy, but she never had the courage to ask, because Uncle Dermott had an awful temper.

Where Aunt Tina was fat, Uncle Dermott was whippet-thin, like a rake. He had pointy-out ears, a long, narrow nose, and his eyes were very close together, giving the impression that he was looking through you rather than at you. He kept his wispy, dark hair plastered down onto his head with shiny hair oil. His chin poked out in front of him, and his lips were so thin that they sometimes seemed to vanish altogether. He always wore a dark suit and tie, even on the weekends.

On Sunday mornings Uncle Dermott rose early and loaded his car with hunting gear: long-handled nets with soft fine mesh, field guides and maps, powerful binoculars, and a compass. Last of all, strapped carefully into the back seat, he would carefully arrange a special glass tank which held small branches from the backyard mulberry tree.

Once the car was loaded, he would drive off for the day. Sometimes out to the farmlands, sometimes high into the mountains, or sometimes to the beach. It all depended on what type of insect he was seeking for his collection.

When he caught a butterfly, he would gently place it in the tank and then replace the lid. The butterfly would flit around, quite happily chewing on the mulberry leaves. Usually, there'd be ten to fifteen contented butterflies fluttering around in the tank when Uncle Dermott pulled into the driveway.

“Girl!” he'd shout from the car.

“Yes, Uncle?”

“Carry all of this gear into the study, right now. Then get my dinner ready—I'm starving!”

Kate would pick up all of the nets and field guides and carry them carefully into the study. The only thing that she wasn't allowed to touch was the tank itself. This was lifted gently by Uncle Dermott and taken inside and placed carefully on his big desk.

After Sunday dinner came the part of the week that Kate hated the most. Uncle Dermott would retire to his study, while Kate waited for the dreaded yell: “Girl! Time to do today's butterflies.”

And Kate would be expected to get to his study as fast as she possibly could. At the door she had to knock and wait for permission to enter.

“Come!” he would bellow from behind his desk.

“About time!” Uncle Dermott would say no matter how fast Kate had run to get there. “Try and be a little quicker next time. Now, get the jar.”

Kate hated the killing jar. It was really two jars, stuck together at their bases, with tiny holes drilled from one into the other. It was kept in the cupboard, on its own special padded shelf. To reach it Kate needed to climb three steps up a small stepladder, then she'd carefully lift it down.

“Good. And now the chloroform.”

Chloroform was the chemical that Uncle Dermott used to put the butterflies to sleep. It came in a jar and looked like ordinary water, but when he poured a little bit onto cotton wool, it turned into a gas that put butterflies into a deep sleep. Then Uncle Dermott killed them with sharp pins. Some collectors use a poison called ether to kill their butterflies, but Uncle Dermott believed that ether made their colours go dull.

“Pins are the only way,” he would tell a horrified Kate. “The only way indeed. Right, let's get started.”

Uncle Dermott knew that Kate hated helping to kill the butterflies, which was the only reason he made her do it. He could have easily done the work himself, but he enjoyed seeing how upset Kate became as she poured just a few tiny drops of chloroform onto the cotton-wool balls and then carefully placed the balls into the bottom half of the killing jar. Once this was done he would smile, a thin and nasty expression, before pointing at the tank.

“Which one shall we do first, girl? You choose.”

Every week Kate had to choose the first butterfly, and every week she would try to take as long as possible, hoping that all of the gas would dissolve from the cotton wool before the butterfly was put into the jar. It never worked.

“Hurry up, child!” Uncle Dermott would snap, eventually. “We haven't got all night, you know.”

And finally Kate would just close her eyes and point.

“That one, Uncle Dermott.”

Her uncle would use a tiny net to scoop the delicate creature out of the tank.

Carefully he would slip the butterfly through a gap in the lid of the killing jar and close it again. Now the butterfly was trapped in the top half of the jar, with the poisonous sleeping gas seeping up from the chloroform-soaked cotton wool in the bottom half. For a few moments the butterfly would flap around wildly, fluttering and battering against the clear glass walls, trying to escape. Then its fluttering would slow down little by little, until it stopped all together and the thing slipped quietly to the bottom of the jar.

“Right, then. Let's get to work.”

This was where things became really awful. Using a fine pair of tweezers, Uncle Dermott retrieved the sleeping insect from the bottom of the jar and laid it out on a piece of black felt. Then, using a pair of magnifying glasses, he took up a fine stainless-steel pin and slowly pushed it through the butterfly's body. Often the body would twitch a couple of times, before falling still forever. Once he'd done that, Uncle Dermott would place the butterfly to one side.

“Good. Next one …”

And so they would continue, until all of the butterflies he had caught were lying in stiff little rows on his desk. Then he would take the jar to the window, test the breeze and, certain that the remaining chloroform wouldn't blow back into his face, open the jar.

“Now, let's see what we have.”

Uncle Dermott used his tiny tweezers to examine the dead butterflies one by one, arranging the limp wings to reveal the patterns more clearly.

“Hmm. Posterior extensions on the hindwings … Brightly coloured osmeterium … Turquoise patches on the undersides of the wings …”

And then he would sigh.

“What a pity. Nothing more than a common
Graphium sarpedon
and I already have ten of those.”

And with a quick flick of the tweezers he would throw the dead butterfly off his desk and into the bin.

All Kate could do was watch. One time she was brave enough to ask, “Uncle Dermott, why don't you identify the butterflies before you kill them? Then you could let go of the ones you don't need for your collection.”

Uncle Dermott paused with his magnifying glass halfway to his face, a dangerous glint in his eye.

“What did you say?”

“It's just that if you let them go, they could make more butterflies for other people to look at …”

Uncle Dermott lowered the magnifying glass again, placing it carefully on the black velvet.

“Since when were you permitted to tell me how to organise my collection?”

Kate didn't answer.

“You stupid little girl. You, who wouldn't even be able to tell a
Danaus affinis
from a
Argynnia cyrila
presume to tell ME what I should and shouldn't do?”

“I'm sorry, Uncle Dermott.”

“SORRY! It's far too late for SORRY my girl.”

And he grabbed Kate by the ear, pulled her across the room to the cupboard, and shoved her into the cramped, dark space, closing and locking the door behind her.

“You can wait in there and think about your manners. If I hear a single peep out of you I'll pour a bit of chloroform under the door and we'll see what happens to you then! ”

And so poor Kate crouched in the cupboard, careful not to bump into Uncle Dermott's nets and books. There was a musty smell and not enough room to sit down, or to stand up properly. Outside Uncle Dermott muttered as he classified the rest of his catch. It seemed to take hours and hours until, finally, his footsteps crossed the room and the door was flung open.

“Right, then. I hope you've learned your lesson.”

“Yes, Uncle Dermott.”

“Good. And the next time you think you can tell me how to collect butterflies, I imagine you'll keep your ideas to yourself.”

“Yes, Uncle.”

“Now get out to your cave. It's very late and I want my breakfast ready on time.”

Since that night, Kate had never spoken to Uncle Dermott unless she absolutely had to. And so now, every Sunday night, she stood silently and watched as he flicked one dead butterfly after another into the bin. Most weeks he threw out all of the butterflies that had been killed. Occasionally though, when he found a specimen that he wanted, he whooped and leapt around the room, shouting at the top of his lungs, something like this:

“A Geitoneura acantha
! I knew I'd find one of these eventually!”

And when he was done cheering, he'd write up a label in neat printing, and then remove a small container of gleaming steel pins from the bottom drawer of his desk.

“Right, then. Girl! Bring me the fifth display case in the back room.”

Kate would hurry to whatever room she was directed to. All of the walls in the house were lined with display cases, each filled with rows and rows of tiny butterfly bodies pinned onto special felt cushions. Each case had a number, and after finding the right one, Kate would very carefully lift it from the wall and carry it back to the study. She hated to think what would happen if she ever dropped one.

“Good. Now, watch carefully.”

Uncle Dermott always made her stay to watch the pinning, and in a way this was the part of the whole thing that she hated the most.

He would place the creature down carefully on the black felt, using his tweezers to re-arrange the wings so that they looked natural and lifelike. Picking up one of the long steel pins he would slowly, very slowly, poke it through the middle of the tiny, limp body and into the cushion. A special glue held the butterfly wings on the cushion, so that they wouldn't flop down when hung on the wall. Finally, he would spray the little creature with special preservative out of an aerosol can, and stick the label in place.

“Excellent!” he'd say. “I'll need to catch another next week so that I can display the underside as well.”