Arno Benton, a man known for his kindness to animals, children and all things living, drove along Malaysia's Federal Route 19 and pondered his host's parting words.
"In the kampongs, you'll see chickens by the roadside. If you hit one, don't stop."
Arno's mild features registered bewilderment.
"If you hit a dog, don't stop. If you hit a child, don't stop!" Spoken earnestly, without a hint of smirk. Was the man serious, or was this an initiation ritual for credulous foreigners?
"If I hurt a child, of course I'd stop."
"Don't stop! Drive straight to a police station, but don't stop there in the village."
Arno recalled that amok was a Malay word. He imagined trying to explain to enraged villagers that it was not his fault, the child had dashed out…
"If I hit a child…" He stopped, aware that his protestations sounded ridiculous. Arno had a coward's aversion to violence, but this very natural instinct was thwarted by a self-respect which, paradoxically, and against his better judgement, made him brave. He considered two headlines, "Conservationist Jailed For Hit-And-Run Slaying" and "Conservationist Murdered Saving Child Accident Victim," and knew which made the better epitaph. But Arno's anxiety gradually faded as, in kampong after kampong, the browsing chickens failed to cast themselves beneath his wheels. He did, however, give a wide berth to schoolgirls Islamically scarfed in blue head kerchiefs, and from time to time found himself wondering what his wife Sara would feel if he didn't return.
All day Arno drove his rental car through the Malayan rainforest. He was looking for butterflies: to be specific, for Trogonoptera brookiana, Rajah Brooke's birdwing. His goal was not to snare one in a net, but to recapture on film his first sighting, during a trip to Sarawak, of a wild brookiana. It had alighted in a patch of forest sunlight, its green and black wings coming together slowly, slowly separating, in time with the pumping of its insect heart. Arno had almost stopped breathing. Then the butterfly flew up and he saw with horror what it had been feeding on.
***
Arno, thrilled and sickened, saw what must be done. Sara protested when he brought home the brookiana—said it gave her the creeps—but Arno said that he would hang the frail body on his study wall, to be a reproach, reminder and spur to action. The birdwings, brookiana among them, were coming out of the Solomon Islands, New Guinea, Malaysia and the Philippines. He would hunt down their killers and not rest until he had outlawed the trade in gorgeous bodies.
Thus Arno, in his mid-forties, by training a mining engineer, became a campaigner for a wildlife organisation. His first mission was to a limestone quarry in Sarawak, the only known roosting site of a certain fruit bat. But the local politicians snubbed this alo gajah lecturing them on the ethics of chiroptericide, and did not grieve when the bats, which were smelly and not thought to be bringers of luck, faded into the sunrise. Only when the durian harvest failed did stricken locals realise that the departed bats had been the sole pollinators of the disgusting fruit. Back home, Arno tried to explain his failure to Sara as she tended the daturas and brugsmansias in her conservatory, but she smiled and moved on, dispensing miniature monsoons from her watering can. His marriage was a country where he seemed to be a stranger.
The road to Melaka, a rough-edged ribbon of tarmac, ran through groves of durian trees, kampongs of wooden houses perched on stilts, gardens full of bananas. Everywhere things were ripening. Coconut palms staggered drunkenly together, as if their milk had turned to toddy in the nut. It was raining, and the earth dripped a deep, bleeding red where the forest had been torn out to make room for oil-palm plantations.
Arno's second trip had taken him to the Philippines, where he surveyed damage caused to reefs caused by dynamiting them to provide western aquarists with corals and fish. Here too cubists and fauvists had been at work and their vivid creations, stunned by the detonations, or disabled by quick squirts of cyanide, floated up to be bagged in brine and shipped abroad like consignments of Greek vine leaves. At least half the fish were dead on arrival; the rest led short, perplexed lives in the chemical ecologies of the tanks. Arno spent an age waiting in the outer offices of minor government officials who had no intention of helping him or his organisation. At night he sat in his cheap hotel room and, sweat pooling on the keys beneath his fingers, tapped out his report on an old laptop. Neon signs from neighbouring bars lit up his ceiling as he lay awake at night. He poured out his frustration to Sara in letters to which she did not reply.
***
But it was butterflies that were Arno's obsession. His work took him to jungles where wild butterflies still flew, but he could never see enough. He paid for extra trips, going back in his holidays with his camera. Sara didn't join him. Odd that she in their home had created a steamy climate full of rainforest plants, whereas it was in sweltering jungles thousands of miles away that Arno now felt at home.
When he was in London, Arno would pore over the butterfly cases in museums. He visited dealers and spent hours sliding open the slim drawers of teak and mahogany butterfly chests. At first he bought individual specimens, but it was only a matter of time before he acquired a case, a cabinet, then a small collection. Sara raged. They could not afford it. What had got into him? He was a conservationist—how could he reconcile this with this lust for bodies? But Arno would never harm a living butterfly. He collected only old ones: cases of specimens so aged that the colours had bleached from their wings, so fragile that sunlight fell on them like hammer blows. Beneath each dessicated insect was pinned a browned and folded chit which recorded its name, and the place and date of its capture.
Arno loved studying these slips, many written in slanting Victorian scrawls—probably by paraffin light—in African and Indian jungles. A poignant note attached to a Bhutanitis lidderdalii revealed that it had been netted at Simla in February 1857 by a Cawnpore doctor. Arno owned four butterflies taken by this collector, none dated later than April of that year—the year of the Indian mutiny: their captor had almost certainly suffered the fate of most Europeans in Cawnpore. The insect, which had once been scarlet, was faded to the colour of a bloodstain. When Arno detached it from its neatly creased death certificate, his fingers faltered in the knowledge that the slender, precious body might at any instant snap and crumble to dust.
At moments like this, imagination aglow, Arno would try to enthuse Sara about his collecting.
"Look at this," he said to her once, pointing to a flying-flower on its pin. "Lake Tanganyika, 1875. Just after Livingstone discovered it."
"Arno, it's disgusting."
Once, in an effort to unite their interests, he proposed that they raise butterflies in Sara's hothouse. Why not? They could start with Atlas moths and saturnids that would spin cocoons of wild silk, Madagascan moon moths whose long tails glowed a faint, putrescent green. They could even try to breed a birdwing, hatch out the eggs, stand in loco parentis to the caterpillars. When he said this tactless thing, his wife's face, furious and hurt, shut him up.
She had never got pregnant. It was the tragedy of their marriage, Arno so fond of children, Sara desperate for a baby before she was too old. They had tried hard, but because lovemaking practised for biological purposes ceases to be joyful, theirs became a polite ritual—ritual fumblings followed by ritual cleansings—premeditated and passionless. Sara kept her eyes closed. Perhaps these couplings were too anaemic to conceive. What's needed to create new life is passion rampaging through the body, banging up and down the spine, vandalising finer feelings, widening eyes and causing little hairs to stand on end. But it was a long time since they had experienced anything of that sort.
***
Off to the right, a car's width of potholed tarmac ran into the forest. On an impulse, Arno turned on to it. The oil palms and rubber trees were soon left behind, replaced by groves of teak and bamboo. He found himself driving by a creek, where mangroves and coconuts pored over the water, which parted like green silk as a boat came upriver from the sea. Arno stopped and sat for a while. He blew his nose on a large white handkerchief.
He and Sara had lost something, something that had fled from them, as if damaged. This—what could you call it?—spirit of past affection, shadow of love, had hidden itself from them in a wilderness. Perhaps it was what each of them was seeking, she in her jungle, he in his. It was an insecure, tender thing that needed coaxing out into the sunlight again, like the brookiana into its forest clearing.
"Please! Show yourself." A cry, not just to his favourite butterfly, but to his wife.
The tarmac petered out at a bridge, wooden and painted white, for some reason reminding him of faraway England. Beyond the bridge, the track became grass and led past a colonial-style building with a veranda and a pitched, tiled roof. His wheels spun on the wet grass, but still Arno followed it, his imagination taking a new direction. He could hole up somewhere like this and disappear.
How would Sara react if he didn't return? If three months, or six, went by without a word? Would she try to find him? How could she? How could she ever guess, even if standing at this very spot, that at the end of this track, in a falling-down shack or half-afloat sampan, her husband was hiding? No, if he chose to lose himself, Sara never would find him. The grass track turned away from the creek, re-entered the forest and petered out to a footpath. Arno, bewildered and sad, slid to a halt. He and Sara were lost. The jungle obscured all ways out. There was nowhere to go.
***
Arno found no brookiana. He drove into Melaka and, on the advice of his guidebook, decided to dine in the Portuguese colony. A taxi took him and waited outide the restaurant while he ate. He was the only customer. A fat waitress in a dirty dress served him fish steamed in banana leaves, rice, fish sauce, then sat and stared at him. Arno drank a bottle of warm beer while a rat explored the floor. Afterwards, in Jonkers Street, a row of Chinese houses with ornate stucco fronts, he searched for a gift to take home to Sara. The antique shops were full of dark, over-ornamented furniture and hand puppets. Then, hanging on a nail in a dark corner of a handicrafts shop, he saw a charm of monkey bones strung on leather thongs: an unlikely necklace, at the heart of which dangled a tiny phial of black powder.
"Makes wish come true," the Chinese dealer told him. "Guarantee."
Arno found a hotel and turned on the television set in his room. CNN reporting a mass grave discovered in one of the Indonesian islands. He switched off. Why was it not possible to look at the world and be oblivious to the horrors that lay beneath its surface, to see but never notice the skull beneath decomposing skin, upon which green butterflies perched and probed, uncoiling the long question marks of their tongues?
Cursing the heat, he began to labour over his laptop, fingers competing for space on the dwarfish keyboard. He composed in the phrases expected of him, the language of contrived outrage: "We must force the authorities to act." He despised the tired words. No one would act. No one understood how hard it was to make people see the danger. His reports would do no good, because their readers would either not care or else believe that nothing could be done. He wished he could find words that would burn through the pages, that would shout, this is not a game, it's not a fucking game.
The magic necklace of monkey bones stared up at him from the table top. Arno picked it up and shook it. The black powder skittered in its tiny phial. He realised that he had no idea what Sara would wish for. If it were his, he knew what he'd ask. For a moment, as he held the necklace, Arno was tempted. A wish formed in his mind. He bit back the words. The necklace was Sara's. However much he craved a certain outcome, the wish had to come from her. She must be free.
It was midnight in Malaysia, teatime at home. Arno picked up the phone. It rang a long time before Sara answered.
Arno had carefully rehearsed his speech, but on hearing his wife's "Hello? Hello?" at the other end, could not utter a word.
After a while Sara said, "Arno, when are you coming home?"
***
The girl who tapped at his hotel room door was brown as oiled teak, wearing a black off-the-shoulder dress that revealed a small décolletage and a tiny waist, probably encirclable by his hands. She couldn't have been more than eighteen.
"You businessman?"
"No, a conservationist."
"Excuse me?"
"I search for butterflies."
"Butterfly?" She looked at him with real amazement. "You catch butterfly?"
"No, never."
"A man who search butterfly but doesn't catch? How is this?"
She took off her dress. Under it she wore a scrap of lace. Her breasts had no need of support.
"I take pictures." He pointed to his camera, beside the bed.
"You take my picture. Send to me. I give my address."
"No."
Arno poured himself a whisky. His neck was on fire, a band of pain across the back of the neck.
The girl giggled. "You take my picture now."
She lifted her arms, pushed her hair up and struck a pose with one foot on the bed. She was young enough to be the daughter he'd never had.
"Oh no, I don't think . . ."
She laughed at his discomfort and started to dance on the bed.
"You are unhappy?"
"I have a lot of pain."
"Where pain?"
She took the glass from his hand. "Lie down," she said, pushing him on to the bed.
When she had removed all his clothes, the girl began rubbing his back.
"You married?"
He nodded.
"Wife body good as mine?"
"You're a lot younger than she is."
"Hah, sleep with young girl, you stay young."
Arno thought of the lines on Sara's face. The girl's fingers dug into his back and released his pain. It came out of him like a cloud of green butterflies lifting off a corpse. The girl lay down beside him and put her head on his shoulder. He did not like it. Sara laid her head there when he pulled her to him and tried to be close.
The girl sat up.
"Now something you like."
She bent over him, dark hair brushing his belly. Produced from her purse a packet and slit it with a practised fingernail. Arno felt a clammy touch on his body.
"Oh, won't fit."
Arno reached down and took the thing away, its smell bitter on his fingers, like machine oil.
"I'm sorry, I don't want to do this."
"You don't like me?"
"No no, I mean yes, I like you. But I don't want sex. I don't want to make love."
"Then why you call agency?"
"It was a mistake. I do not want to sleep with you."
"I'm not good for sex?"
"Very good. But not for me." Arno paused. "You see, I am in love with my wife."
She considered this. Then she smiled and said, "No need for that thing."
When he had finished, she rose from the bed and pulled on her flimsy underwear, then her dress. She smoothed its seams and straightened its straps. She sat at the mirror, opened her handbag, took out a lipstick and repaired her face.
Then she picked up his camera. There was a film still in it, a film on which was no image of a birdwing. She handed Arno the camera. "Now you take my picture," she said.
After she had gone, he found a slip of paper on which she had written her name, the date and the place.
