15
A drawer scraped noisily open. Wolfgang blinked in the harsh glare of his bedroom light. He was sweaty and disoriented. He’d been dreaming that he was swimming up the slope of the pool; the harder he swam, the more the water tipped, until finally he was being pushed backwards towards the wheelchair ramp, where a fearsome creature, half-human, half-butterfly, awaited him.
‘Dad?’ he said. ‘What are you doing?’
His father, wearing brown cotton pyjamas, stooped over Wolfgang’s desk methodically emptying one of the drawers and placing its contents in a row along the desktop. He seemed unaware of his son’s presence.
‘Are you awake, Dad?’
‘It’s in here somewhere,’ the old man said, positioning a box of pins on the desk next to two pairs of scissors.
Wolfgang glanced at the clock on his bedside table. 1:15 a.m. ‘What are you looking for?’
‘I know you’ve taken it.’
‘Taken what?’ Wolfgang asked, rolling out of bed.
Leo regarded him with vacant eyes. His wispy white hair stood out from his head like spider webs and his mouth was a gummy black hole in the shrunken lower part of his face. Without his false teeth, he looked like an escapee from a psychiatric ward.
‘My own son,’ he said bitterly.
‘Are you okay, Dad?’
The old man brushed past and lifted down one of the cases of mounted butterflies from the wall above Wolfgang’s bed. ‘Did you think I wouldn’t notice?’ he asked.
‘Notice what?’
‘This isn’t yours.’
‘You gave that to me.’
‘What nonsense! I might be getting old, but I’m not stupid. You took it out of my study.’
Old and stupid, Wolfgang thought, returning the scissors, the pins and a box of thread to the drawer.
‘Did I ever take you to New Guinea?’ Leo asked.
Wolfgang sighed. They’d had this conversation a hundred times. ‘No, Dad, I haven’t been to New Guinea.’
His father was holding the heavy case at arms’ length, studying the jewel-bright butterflies pinned to the black felt lining. ‘We’ll have to go there, Edward,’ he said. ‘Just you and I.’
‘Okay,’ Wolfgang answered, not bothering to correct him. Edward – or Teddy, as he was called by the media – was Leo’s son by his first marriage.
Rhodes scholar, owner of a racehorse stud in Tasmania, married to the daughter of a former Governor General – how could Wolfgang compete?
‘Your mother can stay home. No place for a woman, New Guinea.’
‘I guess not.’
‘It’s an extraordinary country. Not just for its butterflies, but the bird life, too.’ The old man’s stick-thin arms were beginning to quiver from the strain of holding the heavy display case. ‘Have you ever seen a bird of paradise, Edward?’
‘Here, let me take that.’
‘Keep your hands off!’
‘You’re going to drop it, Dad.’
‘Did I ever take you to New Guinea?’
Wolfgang saw a movement out of the corner of his eye. His mother stood in the doorway wearing a nightie and a concerned frown.
‘Leo, why don’t you put the butterflies down now?’ she said gently.
The old man turned to face her. ‘Look what I found – my New Guinea collection.’
‘Aren’t they beautiful,’ said Sylvia. ‘Why don’t you put them on the desk and come back to bed?’
‘The boy stole it from my study.’
‘Wolfgang didn’t steal it, Leo. You gave it to him.’
‘He stole it.’
Wolfgang raised his eyebrows at his mother. ‘Dad and I are going to New Guinea. A collecting trip.’
‘Are you?’ she said, playing along. ‘What a lovely idea.’
Leo looked sheepish. ‘I was saying to the boy that you probably wouldn’t want to come.’
‘You’re quite right, dear,’ Sylvia said. ‘You and Wolfgang go. But let’s all go back to bed for the moment.’
‘New Guinea,’ said Leo, laying the case carefully on Wolfgang’s bed. He tapped the glass, pointing at a small yellow butterfly down in the bottom corner. ‘After rains, Edward, you see these ones in their thousands, swirling in the sky in clouds like yellow confetti.’
He allowed his wife to lead him slowly from the room.