Sound of Butterflies, The by Rachael King Page A

and went up his nose. He took the cigarette out of his mouth and sneezed.
    They sat down while George negotiated a fee for the children, who gestured and shrieked in their excitement. Thomas inhaled carefully at first, but became bolder as a pleasant buzzing filled his head. There was something about Ernie — the way he sat with his legs crossed and the cigarette in his hand, his rakish hairstyle that was never quite tidy, and his easy charm — that for a moment Thomas coveted. He crossed his legs as well, and studied the way Ernie held his cigarette, not scissored between his first and second fingers, but pinched between his thumb and forefinger, using them like tweezers. He did the same and inhaled once more. The smoke drifted from the end of the cigarette into his eyes and they twitched and squinted.
    ‘Now all we need is …’ Ernie reached into his jacket pocket and drew out a silver hip flask. He toasted Thomas with it — ‘Here’s to us’ — and took a swig. He held it out to Thomas.
    The whiskey scorched his throat but seemed to make a natural companion to the smoke from the cigarette, which was burned down to a thin pinch of paper and a few curly strands of tobacco. He pulled a piece off his lips and another from the tip of his tongue.
    ‘I could grow accustomed to this,’ he said.
    ‘That’s my man,’ said Ernie, and gave him a hearty slap on the back.

    As the weeks wore on, talk turned to speculation about their benefactor. They hadn’t met him yet; nor had Antonio given them an indication of when they might. They began to imagine what sort of a man he might be. Ernie pictured him as a huge oaf who couldn’t speak English and had more money than intelligence. He puffed out his cheeks and lurched around the veranda, grunting, to make his point. George said he was sure Mr Santos was perfectly sophisticated; that he was a man who loved the rainforest and wanted to share its riches with the world. John concluded that perhaps he was a man up to no good; that he was only putting them up in order to placate the British directors of his company so they wouldn’t ask too many questions. Thomas laughed at John’s cynicism. It seemed ill fitting in his quiet personality; but then, it was delivered as dry as the bread they ate every morning for breakfast, and he was beginning to learn that he couldn’t imagine what John was thinking, no matter what his tongue was saying.
    For his own part, Thomas pictured Santos as a kind and gentle if somewhat parochial man, with a handlebar moustache, who had recently come into a large sum of money due to the explosion of the rubber market, and who was putting it to good use.
    They always dined at four o’clock, with the cook complaining in croaky Portuguese that he had to work through the hottest part of the day for their dinner. The meal invariably consisted of beef, which seemed to be the only type of meat available to them, despite the chickens and pigs Thomas saw roaming the streets among broken fenceposts. Every meal was always finished with bananas and oranges, which were in constant supply, and Thomas often went out walking with two or three pieces of fruit stuffed into his bag among his equipment. He found that a blackened banana, squashed and left on a log, so that its fermented aroma was released, was useful in attracting certain lofty butterflies that until then he had only gazed at from below.
    They spent the evenings preserving their collections and making notes, often while the last of the afternoon deluge — which struck most days — faded away, and they received regular invitations to dine with other British citizens in Belém — traders mostly, but the British Consulate also put on a formal dinner for them. They walked into town down a long avenue lined with silk cotton trees, heavy with balled red flowers like Christmas decorations. Many of the larger houses had fallen into disrepair; stucco crumbled from whitewashed walls, and red roof tiles lay