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sometimes.’
    She tilted her head to one side. ‘I’ve never met someone with a harelip. May I touch it?’
    ‘Well, I guess so. It’s been fixed though.’
    Audrey reached up and ran her fingers gently over his top lip. ‘There’s a bump,’ she said, concentrating.
    He waited for her to lower her hand. ‘I could have had another operation – you know, plastic surgery? – but I chickened out.’
    ‘Would that have fixed the way you talk?’
    ‘Probably.’ He shrugged. ‘I don’t know. But after my second time in hospital I didn’t want to go back there. I was only three.’
    ‘Poor Wolfgang,’ Audrey said.
    ‘Hey, I’m all right,’ he said cheerily, an echo of the Furniture King in his tone. Which should have warned him not to say anything further. But the words just came tumbling out: ‘At least I’m not blind.’

9
    Sylvia Mulqueen had turned sixty in early December, and one of her birthday presents to herself, she’d announced to Wolfgang and his father that evening three weeks ago, was a release from the annual obligation of cooking them a roast dinner at Christmas. They had cold ham and salad instead. For dessert there was tinned fruit and ice-cream in place of the usual boiled Christmas pudding with custard. Wolfgang enjoyed the break from tradition. It meant far fewer dishes to wash and dry afterwards, and he didn’t have to spend the remainder of the afternoon lying round feeling bloated and sleepy. He went for a ride instead.
    His parents had bought him a new mountain bike for Christmas. It had front and rear suspension and disc brakes – the same model (probably the same bike) he had seen in the window of Gleeson’s Cycles a month earlier and mentioned, perhaps more than once, to his mother. As soon as the dishes were finished, Wolfgang strapped on his collecting bag and helmet, and pedalled out into the back lane.
    Since finding the black wing, he’d had five days to think about the road to Maryborough and the most likely butterfly habitats between the two towns. There were at least five stretches of unfarmed bush and scrubland that he could remember. The most likely of these was Sheepwash Creek, about twelve kilometres from New Lourdes. Stretches of the narrow waterway were heavily overgrown. Wolfgang knew this from experience – he’d gone collecting there with his father two or three years earlier. If the black butterfly was indeed a new species, it must have come from an extremely localised colony to have remained undetected for so long. The key to finding it was to discover its host plants – the specialised diet of its caterpillars – and the overgrown banks of Sheepwash Creek seemed a good place to start looking.
    It wasn’t a particularly hot day for that time of year; a brisk south-westerly wind kept the temperature down to a comfortable twenty-six or twenty-seven degrees. But Wolfgang cursed the wind. Not only did it make the ride slow and tiring – it was blowing directly into his face – but it would inhibit his chances of finding anything. Butterflies are shy of the wind, more likely to be sheltering on a day such as this than going about their normal butterfly business. Too bad. Today was Wolfgang’s first opportunity to go looking for the black butterfly and he didn’t have another day off until next Tuesday or Wednesday.
    He hid the bicycle in a mallee thicket and spent two sweaty, unproductive hours pushing through the scratchy understorey along the banks of the creek. He had been right about the wind – there were no butterflies about. There were plenty of flies though; they kept up a constant assault on his eyes and nostrils and mouth. By five o’clock he’d had enough. He was hot, scratched and extremely thirsty, having carelessly left his water bottle clipped to his bicycle. Packing away his collapsible butterfly net, Wolfgang began making his way back towards the road.
    Rather than follow the overgrown creek bank, where progress was slow and often