I peel the tape carefully off. Underneath is a display case, mahogany with a glass lid, and, behind the glass, is a pair of butterflies. Their wings are rimmed in a black that seems to seep in from the edges, run along invisible channels to expose grey markings on the top wings, yellow on the bottom. Around the black bud of a body is an almost unbroken circlet of crimson.
‘You should keep it. As part of your collection.’
Mama indulges my collection, a wild, unruly thing. It is in my drawers, between the blotting paper of my flower press, in the drawings that cover the walls of my room. She says I started it when I was two, I wouldn’t stop filling the pockets of my jacket with flowers and leaves and sticks until she gave me an empty jar to put them in. Now, I can spend an entire weekend collecting in a London park, or organising and reorganising seeds, cones, dried leaves, or trying to commit to paper the details of a single flower. When she asks me what I’d like for my birthday or Christmas, the answer is always the same: colour pencils; botanical books; a new flower press.
‘Really?’ I say, because I know that she is making an exception for me, she is adding to my collection from her hidden hurting one. Her parents never even told her that they were sick. She just found a letter from a lawyer inside one of the boxes that arrived, informing her that her father had died and then, eight months later, her mother.
‘Who else would appreciate them?’ she says. She comes to sit beside me on the bed. Together, we stare into the glass, and I think, she’s right. This shard of nature – beautifully preserved, eternally captured – feels like it’s mine already.
‘Take it,’ she says, her arms round my shoulders. And although this memory is so precious – the butterflies passed down from mygreat-grandfather to me, the sweet warmth of my mother’s body around mine – if I could turn back time, I know what I’d do. I’d stand up, carry the case through our flat and drop it in the bin.
That is one beginning. But there is never just one beginning, there are hundreds. If I’d thrown away the butterfly case, it wouldn’t have happened. But it also wouldn’t have happened if my mother hadn’t left Singapore to attend the Royal Academy of Music, if she hadn’t got pregnant with me, if she hadn’t stayed in London to raise me alone, if the autumn I was thirteen, the concerts Mama was due to perform at hadn’t fallen through.
But my mother did get pregnant, she raised me in London, her concerts were cancelled. ‘Ask if anyone needs any music lessons,’ she says as I leave for school. It is the first time I see her certainty that the violin is enough, that I am enough, waver. That afternoon, Mama doesn’t greet me, she hasn’t made dinner. She is playing Paganini Caprices that light up the flat with technical pyrotechnics – clashing harmonies, vicious scrapes of bow against string. Every day, it’s the same, she plays uninterrupted from when I get home until late at night. I eat cereal for dinner, buy box after box whenever we run low; I go to bed with the walls still shuddering from her playing. I want to clap my hands in her face, shout,Call my father, call someone, ask for help, please. But I never do. It feels dangerous, like rousing someone from a nightmare. I press my hands over my ears and will Mama to stop.
Eventually, she does. Whatever god Mama is offering her virtuoso performances to finally answers. A few weeks later, the dining table is littered with objects – twelve jade horses,an intricately carved ivory box, the peach earrings, the peacock brooch. The feather painting has been unwrapped and is leaning against the sofa.
‘Lauren!’ cries Mama, because I am crouching in front of it, smoothing down a spotted feather. I jolt back. Mama blinks at me, then softens. ‘Sorry, baby, sorry.’ She comes over, strokes my hair. ‘I just need to get everything valued. Where are the butterflies?’
I don’t say she can’t have them, they’re mine, even though I’ve squandered whole afternoons on the library’s stuttering internet trying to identify what they are, where they’re from, how they’ve been preserved, even though they have pride of place on the shelf above my desk, between the study of a maple leaf I won a prize for at school and the most perfect pressing of a daisy I have ever accomplished. I just fetch them. She sets them down with everything else.
Mama sells the jade horses and the jewellery at Portobello Market. She shows the feather painting and the butterflies to a dealer, who tells her they should be professionally appraised. Mama takes photos, sends emails. The feather painting sells for £5,000 through a London auction house – Mama buys exotic fruit for me every day for a week. But the butterflies require a specialist. Someone is coming from the Natural History Museum.
The night before the visit, I wait for Mama to go to bed, listening for the end of her violin practice, the turn of the taps, the rustle of sheets. When I’m certain she’s asleep, I pull back the covers and tiptoe to the display case. Mama has left it on the coffee table, ready for tomorrow.
The moonlight changes the butterflies, muting the crimson, deepening the black, the segments of the body indistinct inshadow. I flick the catch. My fingers hover over the wings, they shiver under me, I want to snatch them up, crumble them to dust, then Mama can’t sell them, they’d be mine, always. But then I remember the fear in Mama’s eyes after her concert was cancelled, the empty fridge, the boxes of cereal. I shut the case.
From: Kit McDermott
21:25
I’m outside the police station. I can’t do this. I don’t feel normal, I’m shaking, my heart is so loud. Help me, babe, please. Don’t make me go in.
6
Binomial
Then
We tidy the apartment before he comes. I tackle the kitchen – wash dishes, wipe down the counters, thin the refrigerator of school timetables and drawings of leaves. Mama is everywhere, bringing bowls in from the dining table, scrubbing the toilet. The air smarts with bleach.
But when I see him, the cleaning seems absurd, the apartment irredeemably shabby against the richness of his brown hair, the clearness of his eyes. His blazer is navy, his shirt a crisp, dove grey. A beige trench coat is draped over his arm. ‘Ms Tan? I’m Daniel Prior from the museum.’
Mama, accustomed to her effect on men, is speechless at his effect on her. She beckons him through, directing him to the sofa she spotted outside one of the Westbourne Park mansions. She dragged it through the streets and then up two flights of stairs, her smile infectious as she called me over. After we hauled it through the door, I did a running jump onto it, landed laughing in its soft, velvet blue, she did too and then we sat there, imaginingthe people it belonged to, doing impressions of theirsottovoices, smug at possessing something worth so much for free. But now, watching him hesitate before he sits down, I see the sofa through his eyes – the scuffs on its wooden legs, the coffee splatter that never quite washed out, crumbs lining the seams. Later, I would realise it was one of his talents. Taking away your vision. Giving you his.
Mama is speaking faster than normal, offering him coffee, tea, lunch, even though it’s only eleven a.m. He accepts a glass of water, declines lunch, engages in small talk, but whenever Mama disappears off to the kitchen, his eyes are on the butterflies.
When Mama finally slides the case across to him, he gives a sharp intake of breath and then hesitates, as if he is aware of this moment and wants to savour it.
‘Are they special?’ she asks.
‘Very. Where did you get them from?’
‘They were my grandfather’s.’
‘Was he Malaysian or Singaporean?’
Mama frowns. She bristles at questions about her origins; too many people assume she can’t speak English when she went to one of the best international schools in Singapore; her English accent is cut-glass. But she decides it’s about the butterflies, so she answers. ‘Singaporean.’
