Butterfly by Sonya Hartnett Page B

excruciatingly tired. She needs his promise immediately, however — she can’t wait until he’s slept. “So you’re coming to my party?” she suggests wheedlingly.
    He blows out smoke, blinks lacklusterly. “I thought I wasn’t invited.”
    “I was
joking.
It was a joke! Of course you can come. So will you?”
    “No.”
    “Cydar! You
have
to! I’m your baby sister!”
    He concertinas the cigarette butt against the ground before flicking it into the shrubs, where it joins the slow perishing of stubs innumerable. “Yeah,” he says. “That’s the point.”
    “But you have to!
Please!
Pretty please? I’ll write you a special invitation.”
    Cydar closes his eyes, pained. “Why would you want me at your party, Plum?”
    “My name isn’t Plum now. You have to call me Aria.”
    “All right. But I’m not coming to your party. All that shrieking.”
    “We don’t shriek!”
    “You’re shrieking now.”
    Plum clenches her fists, struggling to find the right combination of words that will unlock his kindness. He will always do as she wants, provided she asks the right way. “What about if you just come for the cake?”
    He thinks on this; then says, “All right.”
    Plum jounces with delight. She would seize her brother by his bony wrists and shake him to prove her gratitude, if only he wouldn’t find the contact humiliating. Instead she inquires, “How’s uni?”
    She doesn’t doubt that what her brother is doing at university will make a lasting impression on the world — she places no limits on his cleverness. But Cydar ignores the query, as if unconvinced that her curiosity is genuine. The trees rising above the bungalow scrape its corrugated roof with woody claws; from behind her brother’s back comes the gurgle of a hundred aquatic worlds. The breeze has blown fine brown dust across his lips. For a moment she thinks he’s forgotten her, that he’s gone off wherever his fish go; then he looks at her and she’s reminded that he never forgets anything. “What is it you want for your birthday? That thing you said you can’t have?”
    Plum pinkens, shrinking to recall the scene she’d made at the dinner table. There’s no option but to brazen it out. “A television. A teeny-weeny television inside a silver ball with little legs. Like a spaceman’s helmet. It’s really cute.”
    “Sounds revolting.”
    “It’s not! It’s good. Just because it’s not a dumb fish . . .”
    “I thought you’d want your ears pierced.”
    Plum straightens with alacrity, hand flying to an earlobe. “What? Why? Do you think I should get my ears pierced?”
    “No.” Cydar shrugs. “All the girls wear earrings. I thought it’s what you’d want.”
    Plum smooths the lobe between thumb and finger, dwelling on what piercing would mean. “I don’t have to do what everyone else does,” she murmurs.
    “Nope.”
    “Maybe I should. Do you think I should?”
    Her brother looks more tired than ever. “Everyone else does, so no.”
    This answer isn’t satisfying; Plum, needing to think alone, climbs to her feet. “So you promise you’ll come for cake?”
    “I promise.”
    And she has to believe. Halfway across the garden she stops and looks back. He has rested his head on his knees, a hand on a foot, and looks like a crashed bird. “Where’s Justin?” she asks through the tangle of briar and thoughtlessly planted trees. “Mums said he was at work, but I saw his car near the playground. Do you think he’ll come for cake too?”
    Cydar shrugs another time, and does not lift his head.
    Into his knees, Cydar sighs. The hot breeze ruffles the hairs on his arms, rubs felinely against his face. The drug is moving oilishly through his system, making his limbs long like a spider’s, loosening his skin. Grown in the black soil of mountains, fed by the crumblings of rainforests, wateredby crystalline creeks and mothered by a radiant sun; transported interstate in Hessian bags in the wheel-space of a column-shift