The Butterfly Stalker
Book Sample


I

1


At the end of a corridor there’s an old window, so old the glass, slow moving like lava, has dripped within itself to distort the view. Made up of twelve small panels this window curves out from the blank face of the building forming part of a hemisphere, a shape which catches the sun first thing in morning and holds it, swinging it slowly around, till it escapes in the late afternoon. I’ve dragged a small table under this window. It’s an elegant antique table borrowed from Suza, my downstairs neighbour, and here I sit, within the bow of the window, looking out at a view of a city which warps and contorts in twelve different ways through this old glass.

Within reach of my right hand a pile of handwritten notes, weighed down by a paperweight, yellows and curls in the sun. The paperweight itself is interesting. Heavy glass. At its centre is a butterfly, not a glass butterfly, but a real butterfly. The glass artist who made this paperweight has set the butterfly at an angle, as if it rides an updraught, the wings open, the delicate dust on them almost visible. How he has done this, encased a butterfly in glass without destroying it, nobody knows and he won’t tell. It’s a professional secret. An ordinary brown and yellow butterfly, common enough, its upper wings are veined and patterned like a church window and its lower wings bear false eyes, circles within circles, a dark iris, the pupils orange brown. When the sun swings around through the window and touches the paperweight a halo forms, and the butterfly, sainted and suspended, quivers in a hologram of suggested life.

Off the corridor, on the right, is my bedroom. It catches no sun at all. Even the daylight is toned down by the deep skirt of pines in the park beyond. I’m not the only occupant of this room for at night I’m sure a ghostly woman crosses from the door to the window under the sloping roof and stands looking out. I’ve spoken to her. No one ever answers, but in this time here alone my intuition has honed itself to a fine sharpness. I know she’s there.

My kitchen is rudimentary, early lit but cold by midday, so I tend to live almost exclusively at this window end of the corridor. You could say I’ve perched here for a while, with the butterfly, out of the buffeting winds, my feet resting on a pile of reference books which will not fit on the table top, and, still wet from my last incarnation, I’m unfolding and drying.

A romantic notion but not quite true. What I’m actually doing, here in my window, is writing a history of this city. It’s not a particularly adventurous task, more a join the dots companion for the sightseer. What date was the bridge built? Where did the first ferries tie up? Who sunk the Lady Ann? That sort of thing. And, of course, stories of our bold city founders - the exploits of the brave Lieutenant Welbourne; who was the first fine wool breeder and why is Lady Lennox’s ghost said to haunt the Customs House? Snippets. The flotsam gossip of the brave pioneers of this wild colony. Does the current Lord Mayor get his fine oratorical style from a certain vicar on his mother’s side? Noble deeds and fine old houses - with sepia photographs of men in frock coats and women with parasols and bustles; a horse drawn carriage outside the old drapery store when the streets were lined with fine laced fringed verandahs; Elsmore House before it became the psychiatric hospital; the Ratford family picnicking by the river. A nice little book about the hey-ho and derring-do of this romantic city, with, perhaps, a little lace work on the cover, or a cameo - that would be nice - of a past mayor, with mutton chops and his lady wife. The book will sell with other local trinkets - souvenir teaspoons, a reproduction trooper’s hat, a convict brick, a printed scarf, a pair of wattle earrings, a possum forged in pewter, works by local artisans - a clever paperweight, for instance, with a butterfly caught in flight. I need the money. I need the distraction. A distracting little history. A tedious and superficial history. And I’m perfectly placed to write it; the city lies beyond my window, spread out and quite exposed.

This is a city where the founding families haven’t moved much but have remained making their mark on the landscape, ordering its civic affairs and accruing fame, notoriety and wealth for generation after generation. These are the families who made the history which is the subject of this commission - and I’ve been left in no doubt about that. For there was no history, I’m told, and no place, nothing but a wilderness until the brave young Captain Vermont road up Windy Hill, checked his horse, a rangy bay, and shouted to his second in command, ‘A fine place, ain’t it, McNelly? We’ll set the tents up in that lovely valley.’ No, there was nothing here of any importance at all before that. In fact the place didn’t exist till then. So I am told.

I’ve been commissioned to write this work by the city council. Now, as the majority of city councillors are members of the current generation of the founding families, this history is necessarily limited, or it will be if I stick to the guidelines I’ve been given which are quite strict. The families know their histories, of course they do, the stories passed down from generation to generation, and it’s these stories which constitute the one and only history from its beginning to now. I am to confine myself to their stories. I have a box of interviews on cassette to work from and the photographs have been supplied from family albums. A simple enough task. But the real history of this city has begun to fascinate me. Among my yellowed notes, weighed down by the butterfly, I have photocopies of extracts I was never meant to see, articles from old newspapers, buried reports, odd pages from a journal or a diary. Through these I’m uncovering another history, which warps and twists between the commissioned lines of print.

But let me tell you about this pretty little city as it is now. To begin with, the first defining factor, we are on an island - this is a city on an island. Now, when you understand it this islandness explains much of the psyche here, the ingrown and hierarchical nature of the place, which in turn explains much about the history I’m commissioned to write. For on islands it’s easy to imagine that beyond this place, this fortress attacked by the sea at all its edges, there is nothing, this is the world and all else is an echo. Therefore on islands we grow intensely inward and self obsessed; here the petty becomes powerful for it’s easy to grow the power and hold onto it in a place where all invasions of modifiers can be swept away by the sea and the wind - like voices. And the second defining factor? - this lovely valley where Captain Vermont set his tents is in the crater of a volcano.

You can see the shape of the volcano quite plainly from here, a depression between those ancient hills which I have sometimes thought mould the sky like the bodies of recumbent women, their breasts, their thighs, their hips, giant women who recline at the crater’s edge as at a well. They’re its guardians, I suspect, these Olympian landforms - but whether they be the muses or the furies I can’t tell. From here I can look down into the central business district, which is built, appropriately enough, over the core, and upwards to the opposite rim, a shoulder curve, where the blackened trees of last year’s fires hedgehog against the skyline. This volcano is so old and cold and crusty and its passions so deeply buried that nothing has rumbled in its belly since before the dinosaurs roamed, or so it’s believed, and the occasional little tremor can be discounted. We think we are safe here. The sides of the crater are planted thickly with houses. I look down on shapely roofs to where the matchbox cars glide the grid of roads and, at night, lighting by numbers, the streets throw harlequin ribbons across the crater floor. It’s a pretty view day or night. But the fact is we are all falling down, little by little, year by year, inch by inch, very slowly. Sometimes I’m sure I can feel the foundations of this building slip, and in such dry weather as this the cracks in these old walls open wide and grin. Nobody ever mentions it but we are edging fraction by fraction into the core. One gulp of the earth could swallow this city whole.

A morsel for a kraken. A pretty little mouthful. One day, maybe, should the depths decide, this whole island might explode and disappear beneath the sea like Krakatau. Ha!

Sometimes I wonder what the ghost woman stares at from the bedroom window. There’s no view of the city from there and she avoids the lights. This building sides onto the smallest of the parks. Its grand old pines, prickly and spicy sweet, extend in a belt almost to the top of Windy Hill. Beyond the trees odd moving spots of light go out at bedtime and the pool from the one streetlight is only visible if you lean sideways to see it. Nothing else. So she stares into the dark. Sometimes, too, an odd wailing floats across the space of the park. A woman wailing. I had thought at first that she wailed in trouble and I’ve stood on the back steps at night listening, trying to place her. But the sound moves reaching me in rising and falling bursts through the more obvious moan of the wind in the pines. She’s further off than the trickery of the wind would have me believe and I’ve decided that it’s not trouble she’s in but the arms of some demon lover. She comes in crescendos on regular nights.

This building was one of the first, built originally as an inn. Rats tick in the skirtings, spiders spin in the cracks. The stables against the back wall now house the communal laundry. The old convict brick has been stuccoed over and the whole edifice painted white. Inside, it’s been divided horizontally into three flats. We are three women in these flats, living one above the other, tiered like a wedding cake.

Immediately below me lives a nursing sister, Suza. She’s escaping her marriage for love, heaven help her, of a clergyman. Avoiding a wife somewhere, he trots briskly up her stairs at night, his crisis of conscience palpable, while she, taking a short cut across the park after the late shift at the hospital, her uniform white and startling as an apparition against the pines, hurries breathless up the side path where she shouts to her love on the stairs.

He says, ‘Shush.’

She’s rescuing him, she tells me, it’s her mission - she’s rescuing him from his church, from his religion, from his god, from his wife, from the patriarchy and from all notions which do not fit with the wild and pagan yearnings of the soul - her words, not mine. He needs rescuing, is worthy of rescue, Suza says. He’s a small man, almost dainty, quick at argument, with benign eyes. After her work at the hospital, Suza’s wild and pagan soul resurrects itself out of her starched uniform. Suza has a penchant for velvets and satins, patchwork and old lace, crystals and feathers that she buys at the markets. Suza’s resurrected soul dresses itself like some half crazed bag woman; her flat reeks of incense and flowers dumped by the armful in vases; she covers her walls with Rossetti prints, a Beardsley hangs in the bathroom and a Klimt over her bed. Suza’s soul pines for some past incarnation from which she was born again too soon and too starched. When that soul breaks through there is nothing to connect her to the nursing sister who has spent the last hours holding some old woman’s hand or wiping some old man’s arse at the hospital, except for the sensible white shoes left at her door. On these light evenings, draped in an Edwardian shawl, she serves the clergyman red zinger tea in Chinese cups on the lawn beneath my window. He, sprawled beside the white lace cloth she spreads, reads her Morte d’Arthur from a blue velum copy. Obviously fascinated by her laugh, her hair, her Modigliani face, her butterfly notions of love, men and life, he gives up with barely a struggle, or so it would seem, on God, the hanging Christ and his own forgotten prim, bible studies wife.

I watch them from my window, down there in the garden under the ancient fig tree, its brown fruits splitting around them on the grass like sexual innuendos, showing pink. At night their sandpiper cries of delight in adulterous love drift upwards through the floorboards to disturb my rock solid solitude with something too redolent of envy, while I imagine Suza’s empty uniform hanging against her wardrobe door like a chrysalis shell. Then I wish I could undress my soul as easily as Suza does, but I suspect that if I did I’d disappear, blow away, like dust.

The basement flat is the largest and the most expensive to rent but the darkest. The sun hardly reaches it at all. There, a young couple, Angela and Hadley, live out an intense nightmare of married life. At least that’s what it sounds like. In the night, often, the sounds reach me through the floorboards, Angela’s sobbing, Hadley’s rage, the slam of doors. Sometimes she locks him out and then he blows around the outside of the building like a gale, banging on windows, abusing the walls. It seems he suspects her of every kind of fickleness while she, screeching her innocence, points out his faults. What these faults are is unclear but her pitched tone is impressive. On good days he comes home with his faults, whatever they may be, smothered in roses and the nights are silent. Next morning she is singing at the clothesline, a pretty thing in a soft porn camisole of embroderie englaise and a swinging skirt of virgin blue. I’ve seen bruises on her shoulder and her cheek, purple turning yellow, and a distinct imprint of fingers on her upper arm. Once she saw me looking. ‘Love play,’ she said, ‘Hadley’s very passionate.’ An ingénue’s shrug - and a coquette’s smile. Such dangerous games.

And as for me, in the topmost flat, caught in light, a hologram - I am a marm for all seasons, a witch in a window, all eyes and ears, watching this little world of ours swim through the waves of the glass.

Away to the right, where it’s worn a gap in the hills, a river winds off under a light industrial fug till, further out, it bends and twists like a broken snake and pretends it’s silver. An abused river, a sewerage flow, yet it persists in an illusionary beauty, especially when the light catches its scales in the morning, or in the evening when the sun bleeds into it. Perhaps it’s a distortion caused by these old glass panes, or more likely a trick of distance, but the eye seems to step up to the river as if it’s higher than the city, an ascending glory, an incandescent twist through a green land to where it wedges itself, misty, into heaven. This, of course is quite untrue, the river stinks. Human excreta catches in the rice grass and last year it yielded up a leg, just a leg, with the sandshoe still attached.

Romantic, paradoxical, this is, most of all, a city of churches. Five spires are clearly visible from where I sit. Testament to the faith and the achievements of those brave and noble settlers, once the spires would have dominated the landscape, soaring high over the huddle of the barracks, the prison and the warehouses built of sandstone which fringe the river. But now, a sign of the times, God in perspective, they are merely little pricks between the chain stores, the office blocks, the banks and motels. Even the multi-storeyed car park is higher - this city gets it priorities right and cars are closest to heaven these days. Several of the churches are architecturally splendid and the subjects of a series of highly prized water colours which hang in the state gallery and, although many have lost most of their congregation, the buildings are protected. Some, however, not considered so worthy, have been sold off for purposes other than God’s. One is no longer a church but a private dwelling. It is here that a man called Daniel climbs the turret like a fly to a window and hangs there against the light through the blues and vermillions, tapping on glass.

One day, soon, I will break into his church, and then, quite simply, I will kill him.

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