The Boy Who Was Afraid of Butterflies - Chapter 8

Chapter 8 Alarms

I thought I was having a bad dream. Vague threatening noises, flashing lights, shouts, doors slamming. Panic, I’ve missed my alarm, I’m going to be late for school. I jerk up, rubbing my eyes; it is still pitch dark. I try to read my clock, but cannot make out the time.

I then become aware that the lights and noise are real. Someone is moving downstairs. I am frightened. Have we got burglars? I step light-headedly out of bed and tiptoe to the window, parting the curtains and peering through the net drapes. The scene is bathed in pulsating blue, people are moving about the front garden, directly below my window. I can’t recognise anyone, I’m dazzled by the light, shadows and silhouettes are all I can make out.

With a gulp of panic I realise that the vehicle outside the front gate is an ambulance. Someone has just slammed the rear doors and is now securing them into position. The dull orange street lamp glows through the spindly fir tree that brushes against my bedroom window, even though its roots are just over next door’s creosoted fence. While I’m squinting, trying to make out the identity of the figures, the ambulance drives off, its blue light still revolving, but in an eerie silence. Voices can still be heard, but I cannot make out what they are saying, nor recognise their owners. I stare for ages waiting for something else to happen, but nothing does. I pick up my alarm clock and take it to the window, so I can tell the time from the reflected glow. It looks as if it’s not quite two o’clock.

I slip back into bed and shut my eyes tightly, but of course there is no way sleep will come. Someone is ill, but who? I strain my ears trying to pick up any clues from murmured voices that come from downstairs. I try to recollect the voices in the porch just before the ambulance drove away. Did I hear a woman’s voice? I can’t remember any. They have taken away my mother. In rising panic, I break into a sweat. Tossing and turning in bed, the undersheet becomes rucked and uncomfortable. I get up and look again at the clock. Barely ten minutes have passed. I force myself back and stuff my head under the pillow to try to stop myself being curious about the voices. But I am now wide awake, my mind is racing.

It’s all my fault. I shouldn’t have upset my mother like that, I didn’t want the wretched boxing medal. It’s only a cheap badge anyway, I’ll give it back tomorrow if it’ll make a difference. I pray, don’t let it be my mother, please, but I dread that it is. I make a pretence of going to the bathroom, hovering a while straddled over the banisters at the top of the stairs, straining to catch voices in the living room. I know somebody’s still there - I can see the crack of light under the door, reflected against the hall cupboard. When I hear movement I scurry back to my bedroom lest I be caught out of bed, my heart pounding in anxiety. Propping myself up on my elbows, I listen intently for further clues, but as I try to stay awake, so eventually tiredness overtakes me and I drift in and out of a very restless sleep. My eyes begin to twitch.

The curtains are drawn. My feet hop from the warm bed to the tufted pile of my carpet depicting ‘Doc’ of the seven dwarfs. I hesitate; I am pulled as if by a magnet towards the window, yet my feet are unwilling, the floor beyond the little rug is icy although it is summer. Hot ice, cold clammy moisture; my mind flits from one to the other, knows it is wrong. My left arm stretches out and gives the curtain drape a little tug; it is no good, I am leaning over too far, I cannot get sufficient leverage to draw it back. I stretch my arm further; I am surprised that it extends like a snake, coiling out from my armpit until it glides the curtain back revealing sunlight glinting on the frosty pane. A movement flickers in the corner of my eye. There is something lurking behind the folds of cloth. In dread I snatch the hem of the material and shake. I recoil in horror. There on the pane, eyes fixated on my breast, is a trapped purple peacock. My hair stands on end, I scream wordlessly. For a lifetime I kneel at bay, back to the wall, putting as much distance between us as I dare.

I lie face down across the bed, my toes drumming on the pillow and lean across to try to prise the window up to give sufficient space for the butterfly to vacate the room. I cannot shift it. It is stiff; normally the window is opened from the top. Even as I strain, the butterfly suddenly levitates and beats its wings against the dusty glass. I shoot back into my bed beneath the eiderdown and peer petrified above the rim. It is back in place, still, waiting for my next move. I want to tiptoe from the room, barricade myself outside, but my legs now weigh like concrete, I am rooted. And as I am pinioned there, the butterfly begins to grow, it is the size of a hand, it fills the window pane, the giant wings flap, they will be at my throat; I hurl whatever I can find; my clock; my pillow; eventually a shoe. There is a shattering report and the outrageous insect spurts black liquid, pulsating, expanding and contracting, a disgusting slimy blob that overwhelms my mind and has me whirling, spinning until I am falling into unconsciousness………

I shudder out of my superficial slumber, disturbed perhaps by the shutting of my parents’ bedroom door as they eventually make their exhausted way to bed. They had paused outside their children’s doors, satisfied themselves that they could hear no movement. Perhaps I have subconsciously absorbed the truth - that both my parents are still, outside the bedroom door. I sigh, shudder again from head to foot, and this time fall back into a heavy sleep.

It is morning. Apparently my mother has called in vain to get me down for breakfast, so she has entered my room and finds me curled and buried deep beneath the blankets, despite the warm June daybreak. Receiving no acknowledgement from me, she draws back the curtains, flicks out a buzzing fly through the top half of the sash window which is open wide to let in the balmy air. Then she returns and sits on the edge of my bed, staring at me, wondering.

She brushes her brown wavy hair from her face, pulls tentatively at my only visible shoulder as if she is half afraid to wake me.

“David, David, son. You’ve got to get up. It’s time for school. David, wake up, come round!”

She passes her hand across my brow and my face tries to resist as though I want to postpone reality. She tries again.

“David, come on, son, try to open your eyes.”

She shakes me a little more vigorously. I eventually open an eye and squint at my mother, I jerk awake and snatch my shoulder from her palm and sit up looking at her wildly, my hair tangled and distraught from my thrashing slumber. I have questions, many questions, but I can’t frame them coherently at the moment. I am pre-empted.

“David, listen carefully. We had a bit of a problem in the night. Your grandpa wasn’t very well, he’s had to go to hospital. No, no, don’t worry, he’ll be alright,” she adds hastily as she sees the alarm flash across my pasty face. “Did the ambulance wake you up?”

“I saw it go. I thought it was you.” I admit my nightmare, then wish I hadn’t.

“David, if you were awake and thought that, why ever didn’t you call down to us. We thought you’d slept through it all and didn’t want to wake you.”

I mutter something dismissive, harbouring my secret fear; I don’t want to be trapped into admitting anything more.

“What’s the matter with grandpa? Is it the same as grandma?”

“No, David, it’s nothing like that at all, not so serious.”

“Why has he had to go to hospital then?”

“Well, he had a pain and we called the doctor. He thought he ought to go to hospital to get it checked.”

“Don’t they know what it is, then? How do you know it’s not serious in that case?”

“Well actually,” says mother in some embarrassment, “he had a problem going to the toilet. There’s a gland that sometimes gets a bit swollen when you are getting old.”

“Oh, I see.”

I don’t actually, but I am embarrassed too and don’t want to probe it further with my mother. I find out what a ‘prostate’ is at school. I asked Uttley who didn’t know, but he asked Fleming who enquired of Packman and that fount of worldly knowledge described to me in full technicolour that it blocked you up and stopped you pissing and if you did nothing, you’d explode, and in hospital they’d stick a tube up your willy and so on until I was nearly sick with a fevered imagination.

When I go to bed that night I kneel on the linoleum and draw out my routine incantation of a prayer, going back and making sure God has understood that I really want my grandfather better. I rather beat about the bush. I want to tell God precisely what is wrong so he can heal him, but I don’t like to describe the symptoms as they seem too rude for praying. I eventually say enough, clumsily, to think God should have got the point, then I climb into bed and pull out a book from under my pillow. Before I can find my place, though, I glance at the curtains and see a gap of about a couple of inches at the top by the pelmet. I scramble out of bed and yank the curtains together so hard that I’m in danger of pulling them off their tracks. I step back and survey my handiwork. I’m still dissatisfied. I carefully select the right-hand drape and fold it over the left, tucking the latter securely behind the former. When it is tight, and no light pierces the opaque material which is lined for extra thickness, I am content and settle back into bed, putting the light out and shoving my book back under the pillow without reading anything.

As my grandfather recovers, then relapses with a fever caused by an infection, then is slowly on the mend again, I institutionalise my bedtime habits. Each night I rearrange the curtains. I begin to get out of bed and check that I have done it properly, at first just once, then sometimes two or three times before I can be sure that the right-hand drape overlays the left. I cannot sleep until this ritual craving has been satisfied. Then I begin to fear that the night draught through the open window might derange the curtains from the position in which I’ve fastidiously placed them. At first I deal with this by closing the window, remembering to open it in the morning to avoid questions from my mother. Then there is a heat-wave that makes this action insufferable. I solve the riddle by jamming my wooden bedside chair hard up against the curtains to prevent movement.

Later I reinforce the business of the curtains with a new ritual involving the removal of my shoes. After I hang my school blazer across the chair-back, and drape my tie around the blazer’s empty neck, I untie the laces of my right shoe, pull the shoe off and carefully place it under my bed. Then I do likewise with the left shoe. When both black shoes are nestling side by side, I kneel and tap each in turn upside down upon the floor to loosen and reject any stone or any piece of gravel in them. There never is, of course. If there had been, I would have ejected it long ago. Then, and only then, can I progress to the rest of my disrobing, the closing of the curtains and the recitation of my prayers - word perfect. If I stammer or leave out a phrase, or put one of my requests in the wrong order, I will go back and start again lest God reject the formlessness of my petitions.

Three days before the end of term I am waylaid by the bullies in my class as I saunter in the sunshine down the pathway beside the iron railings. I struggle ineffectually and half-heartedly as they pinion my arms behind my back and begin to toss my cap and then my satchel from hand to hand. They let go of me, the better to taunt me as I lunge in vain after my possessions. Then there is a piercing shriek from the far side of the station and I realise that the regular train of van empties is approaching from the west. As I wheel towards it, one of the boys, Lomax I think, suddenly grasps the possibility of a new torture and thrusts his palms round my eyes so I cannot see the passing train. I beg them to let me see and squirm this way and that with energy born of desperation, but Lomax hangs on grimly. I can hear the rhythm of the vans as they clatter past and finally manage to shake the boy off only to see the rear vans disappearing in a brown haze under the spacious arching roadbridge high above the cutting.

“What was it, what was it?” I ask somewhat wildly. They won’t say at first, then one of them volunteers:

“It was a Bournemouth ‘King Arthur’. He knows that will rile me most.

“No, it wasn’t. It couldn’t have been, I’d have heard it. It was a ‘Nellie’s’ exhaust, and I’ve got all those, so there!”

“It was an ‘Arthur’ I tell you. Hi, throw over his ABC, I’ll check if he would have ‘copped’ it.”

One of the others unstraps my bulging satchel, while I have been repinioned to stop me protecting my prize possessions. They find my well-worn engine-spotter’s reference book and peer intently at the numbers neatly underlined in red ink.

“It would have been a ‘cop’!” Lomax cries in triumph.

“No it wouldn’t, “ I object doggedly, “I tell you it was never a ‘King Arthur’; and I’ve got all the ‘Nelsons’ already, so it couldn’t have been a ‘cop’.”

But I’m unsure. They look so triumphant at my chagrin, surely they aren’t just acting? Even then, however, a bigger disaster befalls me. Lomax has got my spotter’s book. I hold out my hands to take it back, but the older boy suddenly realises my desperation and senses a new form of sport.

“Say please.”

“Please, Lomax, please give me my book back.”

“That wasn’t good enough. Get down on your knees and beg me.”

“Please Lomax.” The other boys push me down. One shoves me forward so that I nearly topple to the ground. “Please Lomax.”

Lomax thinks for a moment while I grovel.

“No, not yet. Cry for it.”

“What ?”

“Cry. Tears. Real tears. Go on.”

“I can’t just do that when you tell me to.”

Although I say that, I am in fact not far from tears; though something holds me back from suffering the ultimate humiliation.

“I can’t . Please give it back to me. Quickly, my train’s coming in a minute.”

“You can have it tomorrow.”

“Please let me have it now.”

“You can have it tomorrow. I’ll underline the engine we saw for you.”

They push me away and hand me my raped satchel. I turn and make one last plea, but it falls on deaf ears.

“I’ve told you already. Tomorrow. Don’t you trust us? I’ve a good mind not to give it to you then, just to teach you good manners.”

“Alright then, as long as you do give it back.”

But they didn’t. Nor the next day.

“Oh, I forgot to bring it” was the first excuse.

“Oh dear me, my memory’s like a sieve. I’ve forgotten again”; the next day.

But by the third and final day there is no pretence.

“Don’t be such a bloody nuisance, Maidment. All that fuss over a stupid little book. Go and wet yourself.”

I know now. They have no intention of returning my collection. I am distraught. Six years given over to my hobby and nothing to show for it. For a couple of days I am morose, in mourning. Then it seems to me that I can replace the book and use my phenomenal memory. In feverish excitement I replicate my list of numbers, underlining the virgin book in green this time. I hesitate a couple of times. I’m sure I’ve seen this number; then uncertainty creeps in. I put it down, probably I’m right. But those numbers always niggle. I feel relieved when weeks or months later I confirm the numbers for a second time; in the end only a couple remain on my conscience.