4
Wolfgang dropped the hose on the driveway and peered in through the Range Rover’s grille. The butterfly’s wing was stuck to the radiator. An eggfly? He released the catch and lifted the bonnet, exposing the radiator and its unexpected gift. It wasn’t the blue-black wing of a male eggfly, he saw straightaway – there weren’t any spots. And it was the wrong shape. The way it curved and narrowed towards its tip reminded him of a jay. The colour was wrong, though. How many butterflies were black?
Biting his lower lip, Wolfgang tried to peel the wing gently from the radiator. But it was stuck there, moulded to the sharp metal gauze, and his fingertip came away dusted with a powder of microscopic black scales. Take it easy, Mulqueen. Don’t wreck it. He hurried inside and returned with his plastic tweezers and a yellow specimen envelope. Positioning the envelope just below the wing and using the flattened point of the tweezers like a blade, Wolfgang slowly, painstakingly, worked it loose.
‘What are you?’ he whispered, his neck tight with excitement as he carried his prize inside.
Fifteen minutes later Wolfgang’s mother found him in his bedroom, a magnifying glass in one hand, a pair of tweezers holding the black wing in the other, and eight butterfly books – several of them open – scattered across his desk.
‘Weren’t you going to wash the car, Wolfgang?’ asked Sylvia Mulqueen.
‘I’ll do it in a minute,’ he said without looking up. There was no match for the black wing in any of his books, and nothing remotely like it in the display cases that lined his bedroom walls. Was it – could it possibly be – a new species?
‘We’re leaving for church in a minute,’ his mother said in the rising, faintly querulous senior citizen’s voice that so irritated him lately. ‘You aren’t even dressed yet.’
Wolfgang glanced at his watch. Damn! He placed a jar upside down over the wing and reluctantly stood up. ‘I didn’t realise it was so late.’
‘Hurry and get changed,’ Sylvia said. ‘Your father’s already in the car.’
Leo Mulqueen drove even slower than usual. He was probably doing it on purpose. If they missed the start of mass, he would blame Wolfgang for making them late. Silly old grump.
‘I’ll do the car when we get home.’
‘Do what to the car?’ asked Leo.
Wolfgang sat in the back seat gazing out the window. It would have been almost as quick to ride his bicycle. ‘Wash it,’ he said tiredly.
His father said nothing and Wolfgang’s thoughts returned to the black wing. He asked, ‘Did either of you drive out of town during the week?’
‘I did my rounds as usual.’
‘You retired four years ago, Dad.’
Sylvia lowered her sun visor and surveyed her thinning grey hair in the small mirror attached to its rear. ‘Your father and I went to Maryborough on Wednesday.’
Maryborough was forty minutes drive away. They could have hit the butterfly anywhere between the two towns. Wolfgang tried to visualise the route in his mind, searching for a likely habitat.
‘Estelle lives in Maryborough,’ Leo said.
Sylvia nodded. ‘We had afternoon tea with her. It was her seventieth birthday.’
‘Why didn’t you remind me?’ The old man sounded peevish.
‘It’s all right, Leo. We drove over and visited her.’
‘When was this?’
‘Last Wednesday. I baked a cake and we took it over there.’
They pulled up beside the line of parked cars in front of the church. It was three minutes to eleven and little Father Nguyen stood at the top of the steps greeting people as they went in. He saw them and waved.
‘Who’s that?’ Leo asked suspiciously.
‘Father Nguyen,’ Sylvia said. ‘He’s our new parish priest.’
‘What happened to Father Frazer?’
‘He went to another parish.’
Wolfgang sighed in the back seat. He’d lost count of the number of times his parents had had this same conversation. ‘Dad, we’ll be late.’
His father changed gears and reversed deftly into a parking space behind the Westons’ Kombi. Apart from a tendency to crawl along on the shoulder of the road at forty kilometres per hour, the old man had lost none of his driving skills.
‘Seventy,’ Leo said, stepping out of the Range Rover and carefully locking the door behind him. ‘I can remember the day she was born.’
Sylvia leaned over and removed the keys from the ignition. ‘Thank you for being patient with him, Wolfgang,’ she said softly. ‘He finds it terribly humiliating.’
St Pius Church was octagonal, the pews arranged in four wide rows that formed a semi-circle around the altar. Wolfgang and his parents always sat on the right hand side, two or three rows from the back. Because the floor was dished, sloping down towards the sanctuary, and because Wolfgang was half a head taller than anyone around him, he had an unimpeded view of most of the congregation.
He saw the blind girl straightaway. She was standing in the third or fourth row from the front on the opposite side of the church. Her lips moved as she joined in the opening hymn. It surprised him to see her at mass. He’d never noticed her there before. She didn’t seem the church-going type. The way she talked. The cigarettes. Her age. Across the width of the church, she looked younger than she had yesterday. Almost his age. Wolfgang trawled his eyes slowly around the church. Apart from the Westons – and the eldest, Caitlin, wasn’t there again – he and the blind girl were the only teenagers in the congregation.
Wolfgang considered approaching her after mass and telling her he’d found her hat, but quickly dismissed the idea. She was with a prim-looking blonde woman – her mother, presumably – and Wolfgang felt awkward about introducing himself. The mother would make assumptions, much as Michael Hobson had the previous day. You might have a chance with a blind one, hey? Besides, if he introduced himself, he would have to introduce his parents as well.
As soon as they arrived home, Wolfgang disappeared into his room and closed the door. Even his mother seemed to have forgotten his promise to wash the car. He sat down at his desk and lifted the jar off the black wing.
‘Lepidoptera Mulqueen,’ he said softly.