The Butterfly Effect
Flash fiction you haven't read before, and some background to the writing of it
After last week’s round-up of reviews touching on Nature and the outdoors, when I left you with a fairly bleak prose poem, it occurred to me to share something lighter that came out of the same set of workshops. So here’s a story called The Butterfly Effect, which would take me a little over 3 minutes to read aloud (which I did, last summer at The Purple Room. It even got a few laughs). And if you’re interested in how it came about, read on for the Making Of…
The Butterfly Effect by JY Saville
The June I was fifteen, the only green hairstreak I knew about was the one that got Tanya suspended when she sprayed it in for non-uniform day. It meant she missed the biology field-trip so when we paired up to survey a square metre of scrub, I got Amber the class swot. Use the handouts to identify common plants and insects. Try not to get scratched, stung or bitten. Don't disturb any ground-nesting birds, or the three teachers with flasks and deckchairs beside the minibus. Well, being forbidden was all the prompting I ever needed, back then.
Miss! Miss! What are these butterflies called? I waved my arms like I was dead excited and Mrs Harris stomped over with a half-full plastic cup. She was ready to give me lines, I could see it in the set of her shoulders. Very funny, Deborah, she said, but I must have looked confused enough for her to give me the benefit of the doubt. No, of course you wouldn't know these are called green hairstreaks, would you?
Butterflies were Mrs Harris's thing. She told me how localised this particular variety were. I got to abandon Amber to our alloted quadrant and trot round the whole site being shown where the butterflies weren't. I pretended to be interested, then after a bit I didn't have to pretend. They're terribly vulnerable to the weather, she said. She used words like 'terribly'; I don't think she was from round our way. Tanya laughed when my Nan bought me the Observer's Book of British Butterflies for my birthday. It had all sorts of stuff about food-plants, life cycles, common predators. It didn't mention climate change.
The greenhouse effect, they used to call it. Everywhere'll be warmer in twenty years. I'll have some of that, my dad would say. Imagine if Brid was like St Tropez. I don't know that he knew where St Tropez was, but he'd seen a photo of Audrey Hepburn there or thereabouts and it looked like the place to be. The northern butterfly enthusiasts were the same, though. They reckon they'll all migrate north, Deb. When I started at Woolies there was a lad called Ian there who read nature magazines and he'd seen it in a special issue. We'll be able to see them purple ones you only get down South. While we were all topless in Brid, presumably.
Turned out it was a lot more complicated than that. There was another 'effect' everyone talked about back then: the butterfly effect. A butterfly beats its wings in Wakefield and half an hour later it's raining in Peru. And vice versa, presumably, and there's a lot of big butterflies in South America. So it might be warmer up here now but it's wetter with it, and we all know how terribly vulnerable to the weather the green hairstreak can be. Even my husband Paul, and he knows nowt about butterflies.
Tanya and him used to laugh at me. There'd be me on spare afternoons in summer, notebook and binoculars in hand, roaming the back lanes counting Painted Ladies. Harmless eccentricity, like supporting Bradford Park Avenue. Only one night when she'd had too much Prosecco, Tanya told Paul it was all a charade, deliberately dull to stop anyone wanting to come with me. She reckoned me and Ian were having an affair. I thought it was too daft to need denying, but when I looked at Paul I knew he didn't see it the same. I tried, but all he heard was the initial hesitation.
Every tiny thing has consequences. Knock-ons upon knock-ons, and before you know it, everything's chaos and you can't predict the next move. Me and my binoculars got slung into the garden, so I picked them up and migrated South.
The back windows in this flat overlook the train line. All that buddleia along the edges is butterfly heaven. When the London train rushes past on a summer afternoon there's a flurry of colour as they rise and then settle again. I wonder if it's them that's causing the worsening storms that nibble away at the coast.
How the story came about
The Butterfly Effect was another thing I wrote during the New Writing North How to Start Writing the Climate workshops in the summer of 2021. They were facilitated by the poet Linda France, and she encouraged us to write in a way that was outside our comfort zone — hence the prose poem I shared last week. However, she also encouraged us to think about our audience and how to connect, and one of my recurrent styles is dry humour and particularly what you might call comedy drama — making a reader think about something serious while (hopefully) laughing. Like the dementia stories Sugar Free or Viv’s 64th, or when I tried to get people thinking about key workers in Twelve Weeks’ Rest. I knew at some point I would write a short story played for laughs, that would aim to get some serious points across.
When we began, in May 2021, we did a mind map. In case you’ve never been subjected to them on a managerial whim, mind maps are essentially word association, intended to take you away from the obvious and dig deeper or have you riff on a theme1. Among the things I wrote down were:
The Greenhouse Effect
Wildlife moving north — will nightingales sing in Park Square2?
ecosystem collapse
wetter — storms
coastal change
Not like it was when I was a child
I chose that last one as the one I wanted to start work on — could I look up weather, bird migration or butterfly populations in, say, 1983 and 2020 to quantify the differences? I also noted that I wanted to ground it in the here and now, not elsewhere in some nebulous future, and I asked myself the question, ‘Should I pick a particular species to pin it on?’
About a dozen years ago my other half and I went for a walk on the bit of Ilkley Moor that might technically be Burley Moor and as we brushed past a bilberry bush we disturbed what we thought were a handful of moths. When we got home and looked them up online, they turned out to be Green Hairstreak butterflies. I have never seen them anywhere else but that tiny area of the moor, though as I understand it they do live in a variety of places all over the UK, but they tend to be quite small and localised colonies. When I was in sixth form somebody gave me a can of green hairspray, which somebody else later used to give me a skunk stripe down my ponytail. The two memories collided with a play on words, and Tanya arrived in my head.
I’m conscious of nature-writing often being the preserve of posh blokes, and that somehow seems to extend to nature-spotting as well. Or at a pinch in the realms of the ordinary, there’s the nerdy lad who’s into newts. So I liked the idea of this a) working class, b) female, c) too-cool-for-school rebel ending up being really into butterflies. And the only way she’d ever get to realise that is if she was compelled to study them.
For GCSE Biology thirty years ago we had a school trip to Bretton, as I recall. It must have been somewhere in the Yorkshire Sculpture Park — they have a lake or two — and memory insists we spent a day or two inspecting pond water and leaning over one-metre-square patches of grass counting bugs. I remember a couple of science teachers setting themselves up in deckchairs, and I remember doing as much mucking about and as little bug-counting as we thought we could get away with. I was not a fan of GCSE Biology.
And yet, three years ago I was interested enough to read Defra reports on long-term trends in UK bird and butterfly populations. I downloaded reports from butterfly conservation groups and I actually read the things. Obviously I haven’t retained their contents, and to be honest I didn’t use much of what I read there in The Butterfly Effect, but I did read them with the intention of learning stuff. It seems I wasn’t put off the natural world by GCSE Biology any more than I was put off reading by GCSE English Literature .
So there you have it, possibly more insight than you wanted into why I wrote 600-odd words about a butterfly-fancier. Thanks for reading.
They work very nicely for preparing a short story too. If you know you want to write about dogs and the seaside, you do your word association for each one and then maybe you come up with slavering, barking, sand, ice cream, and hey presto you’ve got a steer on the vibe/plot/vocabulary of your story.
The one in Leeds, I mean. West Yorkshire. Obviously a reference to the song about nightingales and Berkeley Square, wherever that may be.
Very nice story. Lots of things that resonated with me. I smiled at the mention of the Observer's Book of British Butterflies. Confession time, a long time ago (c1970) I was into collecting butterflies, albeit mostly just close to home in Lancaster. It didn't take me long to turn away from the idea of killing things and later I tried capturing them with a camera instead - but wildlife/macro photography is hard and needs more patience than I possess.