Shooting Butterflies (3 page)

With an anguished yelp, the baby snatched her puppy and swung her little fist at her tormentor, sending him tumbling on to the fireguard and into the fire, barbecuing his freckled cheek on the grid of the guard.

‘She's obsessed with that toy,' the father was saying on the landing outside the children's bedrooms that night. ‘And why does she call it Father? Why not Daddy or Gabriel if she had to call a velveteen dog after me?'

‘I asked her that,' the mother said. ‘It's nothing to do with you. She's called him after Father O'Toole because, she says, Father O'Toole is important. It seems to make sense to her.' The mother sighed. ‘She'll have to be punished. She's quite old enough to know that what she did was very naughty.'

‘I don't expect she meant her brother to fall into the fire,' the father said.

The baby lay trembling in her bed. What would her punishment be? In her brother's fairy-tale books people had their tongues cut out. But the grown-ups kept telling her to talk, so they probably wouldn't want to do that. In those books they also rolled people down hills in barrels of a thousand nails. Her brother had explained that it meant barrels with nails hammered through so that all the spikes were on the inside sticking into you as you rolled. But she was fat and the only barrel she knew of was the barrel of wooden
bricks in the nursery. She would never fit and her father always said that they did not have enough money, so they would hardly go out and buy a new one, just for her. In some ways she was clever for her age, so she knew that a thousand nails as well as a barrel would cost a lot. Then she remembered another line in her own book of stories. ‘You will lose the thing you love best.'

She yelped in distress and clutched Father to her chest. That would be her punishment! They would take Father from her. She lay stock still, as if by not moving, by staying absolutely silent, they would not be found. Once she heard footsteps approach on the landing, pausing by her door. Then it went quiet. But as the minutes ticked away on her red clock she could bear it no longer. What if she did it herself; the punishment? They might leave it if she got there first. She felt calmer now. When the idea came into her head she felt scared but she knew too that she had found the right thing to do. She climbed out of bed, Father in her arms, and padded downstairs listening out for voices or steps, but all was quiet. She found the right room although it was dark. Once in there she dared to put the light on. The box of extra-long matches lay on top of the mantelpiece. She placed Father on the floor at a safe distance before dragging up a chair and clambering up on the seat to reach. She lit the match at the third strike and only hesitated a moment before putting the flame to her cheek.

Her screams woke everyone up.

At kindergarten, Sister Francis, the youngest and prettiest of the nuns, looked at her with kind eyes. ‘Poor wee thing, she looks like an angel who's had a bad landing, so she does.'

‘Angel,' Sister Joseph sniffed. ‘Have you seen her brother? No, she's a little devil, more like.'

‘We don't like Sister Joseph, do we?' Grace muttered in Father's floppy velveteen ear.

Nell Gordon:
Her parents' marital problems marred an otherwise idyllic childhood in New Hampshire.

Once upon a time up a neat shingle drive there stood a white clapboard house with blue painted window frames and a blue door. The house lay on Brook Street and Brook Street was in Kendall. Kendall was a small town in America, a clapboard and red-brick and ivy town, a place for skating on the pond on winter's days and swimming in the lazy river in the summer, a soda-parlour and neighbourly kind of town where every mother made her child a new costume for Hallowe'en.

In the white house on Brook Street lived a mummy and a daddy and a big brother and a little sister. The mummy was beautiful as a mermaid and the daddy was handsome and strong. The brother was a pain in the butt and the little sister was as pretty as a princess and just as lucky, with her lovely yellow and white room and her own swing in the yard. The mother and father loved each other very much. They always said so. And they loved their children and wanted only what was best for them. The mother's name was Moira and the father's was Gabriel. The brother was christened Finnian but his little sister called him Pigface. The little sister was called Grace, such a good name for a princess. When Pigface wanted her attention he called out, ‘Oi, Clothears!' Pigface was at boarding school in England during term-time, which was lucky, although for some reason Grace and her mother cried at the start of each new term. ‘Women,' the father said to Pigface and then they both shrugged and drove off in the station wagon towards Boston and the airport. Grace would run as far as the end of the street and wave at the departing car and Pigface would always be
waving back with a look on his face like he didn't want to leave all that much.

But now it was the holidays. Grace was preparing for her forthcoming birthday. She liked the word forthcoming; it seemed to make an already important occasion even more so. She used the word often, making the ‘o' in forth long and drawn out. She had already decided which pyjamas to wear for waking up on the day; and for later she would be wearing her best dress, of course: the white one with red polka dots and a wide red sash to tie round the waist.

Grace's Aunt Kathleen and Uncle Leslie lived in the same town, but they could not come to the party because they were away. Roberta O'Reilly was there, though. She was Finn and Grace's grandmother, Moira's mother. It was hard enough, the children thought, to believe that Roberta O'Reilly was their grandmother, but to think she was actually someone's mother was close to impossible. She had only been in the house for a couple of days, but already she was causing trouble.

‘You spoil her, Moira,' she said, sending a spiteful look in Grace's direction. ‘There's nothing good that comes from spoiling a child.'

‘Daddy says you think the sun shines out of Uncle Michael's backside,' Grace said, returning the look with a long hard stare of her own. ‘That means
you
spoil
him
.'

Roberta O'Reilly was large apart from her feet that were small but so fat that they spilt over the edge of her navy-blue court shoes. She had washed-out fair hair curled tight and brushed away from her face. Her eyes were mean and her fat cheeks looked as if they could slide down her face at any time. Those cheeks turned bright pink and wobbled as she looked at Grace's father and at Moira,
that child's
mother. Then they all looked at Grace. Grace, who sometimes rode her bicycle so fast down the hill that she knew for sure it would end up with her crashing into the hedge; Grace, who had to clamp her hand tight over her mouth in church to stop herself from shouting, ‘Bugger, bugger, bugger baby Jesus
and
the Holy Ghost'; Grace, who always walked too close to the edge of the river where it was at its deepest and most wild.

‘
Grace
.' Her parents spoke in unison. But Grace was too far
gone to heed the warning. ‘And it's really funny that you think that about the sun shining out of Uncle Michael's backside, because Daddy says Uncle Michael is a pompous fool who talks through his arse. Arse,' she added helpfully, ‘is the same as backside.'

Grace, the offender, the bad girl, a mosquito child all eyes and teeth and knees, got sent to her room, which was absolutely fine with her because she had lots to do. She had to change the sign on her door, for a start. At the moment it read
Trespassers will be persecuted
– ‘it's prosecuted, Clothears,' Pigface had said. But Grace had assured him that hers would be persecuted. (She had been reading about Bloody Mary in Finn's schoolbook.) But for tomorrow, her birthday, there had to be a different sign. When it was all done and stuck to her door, it read
Trespassers will be welcome
.

There was a knock on the door. It was her father. He knocked on his children's doors even when he was angry. It was useful because it gave them time to hide stolen goods, stub out cigarettes or blow out small fires. Finn had shown Grace how to smoke during his last holidays. He said that his friend Nathan's little sister could blow smoke rings already. But, for now, Grace was doing nothing worse than work on her sign.

He perched on the end of her bed. ‘Grace, you know that what is said within a family should never be repeated outside. Not even to grandparents. In fact, especially not to grandparents. We must be able to trust each other to be discreet. Do you know what discreet means, Grace?'

Grace nodded hastily. ‘It's still my birthday tomorrow?' she asked nervously.

‘Of course it is. But no more talking out of turn, Grace. Can I rely on you for that? If we can't trust each other, who can we trust?'

‘God,' Grace said.

‘
Yes
.' Her father dragged out the word. ‘Of course we can trust God, but I'm talking about here on earth. So try to be a good girl, Grace, especially during your grandmother's visit.'

Grace hung her head. She wanted to be good. It was just that sometimes she could not help giving things a stir, that was all. Like the time she put the slug on the anthill. She had been very
young, no more than five, and she had regretted doing it ever since, even having nightmares about it. But at the time, there had been the slug, all plump and sticky, and there had been the anthill, all hungry and busy. One thing had led to another. The slug landed neatly on top of the anthill. Grace wiped her sticky hands on her dress and squatted down to watch. Her eyes grew round. Now she really wanted to rescue the slug, but when she put her hand out to pick it up she couldn't bring herself to touch it, it looked so horrible oozing desperate slime under a crust of tormenting ants, so instead she ran away and was sick. Afterwards she tried to pretend the whole thing had never happened. But as Grandmother Roberta O'Reilly always said in that satisfied voice she used for pronouncing doom, ‘Sweep a thing under the carpet and sooner or later it'll trip you up.' Grace's father had explained that sweeping something under the carpet was a figure of speech meaning
not facing up to something.

Grace did not wish to face up to the slug incident so it faced up to her instead, at night in her dreams and when she sat in church listening to the things good people did. Putting a poor little slug on an anthill to be eaten alive was not a good thing. Children, however, were supposed to be good, and innocent. Grace, and there was no denying it, was a child. But Grace had also done a very bad thing which meant that she was not good. After pondering this seeming contradiction, she went to her father and said, ‘To you I'm but a child but, know this, I am capable of great evil.' She had read a book where the hero, a little boy not much older than Grace, had said almost exactly that, only with him it was deeds – ‘capable of great deeds' – not evil. But she had particularly liked the sentence, memorising it for when it would come in useful.

Her father had looked at her, shaking his head and laughing. Grace had watched him for a while and then she had walked off. Only the previous day he had whacked her on the thigh for being rude. Now, when she told him she was evil, he just laughed. There were times when things just did not make sense.

‘Now, try to be the sweet little girl I know you are,' her father concluded, getting to his feet. He walked out of the room a little bent, as if he was carrying the trouble that was his daughter on
his shoulders. He was Clark Kent today, his dark hair combed into a neat side parting and his bright blue eyes dimmed behind smudged spectacles. But when he took the lead in the Kendall Players' production of
Guys and Dolls
, he had whisked his glasses off and his dark hair had fallen across his forehead and he had definitely looked a bit like Superman. Apart from her eyes that were sea-green and almond-shaped like her mother's, Grace looked like her other, dead, grandmother. So there they were, Grace's mother looking like a mermaid, her father looking like Clark Kent and a little like Superman, Grace looking like a dead person and her brother looking like a geek.

The evening before her birthday was meant to be a good time, with everyone having little secrets and being nice just in preparation. But this year something was not right. Like her record player dragging the record half a note behind, the tune was recognisable yet wrong.

‘Tell me the story of when you and Mummy first met,' she said to her father when they were on their own in the sitting room after supper. But her father kept getting it in a muddle. Grace had to prompt him. ‘So there you were, a young man visiting Boston, and there she was, the prettiest girl outside the prettiest doorway in town.'

‘Oh yes,' Gabriel said, ‘the doorway. Your grandfather had it shipped all the way from Dublin although he couldn't even pay the rent at that time.'

‘You thought she was a mermaid …' Grace had to prompt again.

‘Grace, I can't remember.'

‘You always remember.' Grace's voice turned shrill with anxiety. ‘You thought she was a mermaid, so you …'

‘If your mother is a mermaid, then I'm afraid she is the kind who wants nothing more than to paddle in her goldfish bowl with a nice piece of plastic seaweed and a tasteful plaster shipwreck.'

‘I don't understand what you are saying.' Grace was close to tears. ‘You fell in love with Mummy, then and there, because she looked like a mermaid and the girls you knew back in England all looked like silly Imogen Jones and
she
looked like a horse.'

‘If I remember right, Imogen was rather a jolly girl. Fun,
always laughing. Nothing was ever difficult. I can't imagine what I thought was wrong with her.'

‘She wasn't a mermaid,' Grace yelled. ‘That's what was wrong with her.
You wanted a mermaid!
'

She slammed out of the room in search of her mother and tried her. ‘Anyway, you were fed up with living with Roberta O'Reilly …'