Tell it to the Bees Read online

  He looked around him again. Perhaps he could make as if he was looking out for someone. The skipping girl danced down the hill, her rope alive and curving, and a man appeared above and threw a stick down the hill for a dog. Charlie watched the stick twist above the grass, a thin black line, turning and disappearing in the air, then drop beyond the girl.

  He watched the dog go. It was big, an Alsatian maybe, and it looked lean and hungry, ears back, teeth bared. It ran towards the girl and she just skipped and skipped with eyes only for her feet and the rope turn.

  Things were happening so slowly that Charlie could see it all – the dog hurtling, the girl skipping. He drew in his breath. The dog was nearly on her and at last she must have heard something because she jerked and turned her head around.

  The man was running too now, calling out, arms wide against the pull of the hill.

  The rope dropped dead to the ground and a high scream ran its way down Charlie’s spine. The girl was like a jointed doll, her limbs flung about, the dog a wild rush of fur worrying and tossing this way and that, though whether it was the girl, or the stick, Charlie couldn’t tell.

  He stood; stuck, watching. He couldn’t take his eyes away. The man had reached the girl and was bent and tugging, but still the dog and the girl seemed like one thing. If the dog had bitten the girl, if it had, she might not feel it yet; she’d be in shock.

  He’d seen his father come home from work one day still green at the gills, because a man had got his arm cut through. There’d been a storm the night before and a tree had come down over a big road. Charlie’s dad and the other man had been called in early to go and clear it. Charlie’s dad was bracing the branch when the saw had slipped, or the man had slipped, Charlie wasn’t sure which. But he remembered his dad saying how the man didn’t feel it a bit then, didn’t even know about it, didn’t know how bad it was, till he caught sight of the face on Charlie’s dad.

  His mum had put her hands to her cheeks at the story, her eyes gone like marbles, and then reached and put a hand on his dad’s arm.

  Charlie liked watching. He liked being on the outside. It was something he liked about the bees. So much to watch, and being so far outside. He knew Dr Markham liked that too. They often stood by the hives together, not saying anything, just looking. He supposed she wasn’t able to do much of that usually, not with all the sick people. But he didn’t like watching the dog and the girl, so he turned back to the football game. The players had stopped and all except one were walking slowly, hands on hips, catching breath. All except one, with their heads turned up towards the hill.

  Only one boy was still running as if his life depended on it. He ran past Charlie with feet like thunder, full tilt, his face desperate and his breath fierce. Everything in him was intent, driven, so that it was difficult to believe that only minutes before he’d been in a game of Sunday football, yelling with his mates, nearly ready for the pub. Only his red undershirt gave him away, flap-flapping this way and that behind him like it didn’t give a monkey’s, like it was clowning, fiddling while Rome burned.

  That was what his mum said. Fiddling while Rome burned. Charlie, who had learned about Rome and Caesar, always pictured lots of men in togas sitting around in a Roman temple, white pillars and statues, fiddling with bits of string, or marbles, while outside the temple was a city on fire.

  The boy ran towards the girl and the dog, and though he went by so fast, once he was beyond Charlie and into the middle ground, for an age he seemed to be running to nowhere. Then he reached the hill, and the girl, huddling over her before lifting her in his arms and walking away.

  The footballers washed by Charlie as if he wasn’t there. He knew how this was. That a small boy is next to invisible to the likes of them. He caught snatches of their chat – about the game, ended so suddenly, about the attacking dog and if it had been their sister, about a girlfriend here and a job there.

  For thirty seconds maybe, he stood adrift in their sweat and noise, the gruff note of their male selves. Then he gathered his wits and looked for the curly brown hair and the birthmark.

  At his first sighting of George, he felt his head go hot and his shoulders tighten, so he watched a moment before approaching, to cool himself. If he’d been older, he’d have known that this was jealousy.

  George was slightly built and, Charlie reckoned, only a couple of inches taller than Annie. He had short legs and an abrupt walk. He was wearing a pair of football shorts and an old shirt, like the rest of the players, and his hair was uncombed and messy, but Charlie could tell the curls would be slicked and shiny in a few hours’ time. In fact, he bet that George was what his dad called a sharp dresser.

  The birthmark was like a small, red leaf, its tip towards his temple. It was an odd thing, and Charlie wondered what it would feel like to touch. Like ordinary skin, or different? He thought that maybe Annie could tell him, and he blushed at the thought.

  The footballers had gathered up their things and were walking towards the road. If he didn’t give George the note now, he’d lose his nerve. He tightened his fingers round the pocket stone, smooth and warm, and ran to catch up. Then he nubbed George on the back with a finger.

  The back turned with a jerk and an ‘Oy’, and there was the face that Annie dreamed of in the factory, the face she thought of before she went to sleep. Charlie fished down his sock for the note, and George waited, arms crossed, weight leaned back, head cocked slightly.

  ‘It’s from Annie,’ Charlie said, importantly. George pocketed the piece of paper with a nod and turned away, a yell in the air for his friends to wait and the messenger boy forgotten already.

  Charlie knew about lots of things. He knew that his aunt would be very angry if she found out about Annie and George. He knew his father wasn’t always in the pub like he said. He knew that his mother was sad. Charlie knew about animals, and the names of mountain ranges. He knew less about older girls and boys than he did about insects, but it was enough. He could tot it up on his fingers. That they went around in groups, like zebras or giraffes, boys in one group, girls in another. That at the weekend they would get dressed up to the nines, including the boys. He knew that the boys liked to swagger and the girls to preen. They used shop windows to check their faces in. He knew that in the evening, once darkness fell, you could glimpse them kissing in alleys, girl up against the wall and boy with legs planted either side of her, hands flat on the bricks at her head. It didn’t look like fun to Charlie, especially if you were the girl. But he supposed that this was what Annie did with George, and he supposed that she must want to.

  The footballers were tiny figures already, their strut and noise swallowed by big blocks of sky and grass. Charlie shut one eye and held his hand up in front of him. He could frame George inside his thumb and index finger, keep him there, and squash him in a second if he wanted to.

  He closed his hand to a fist and swung his arm down and round, so that it tugged at his shoulder; he shook his head and stamped his feet on the grass. If he went to the pond now, maybe Bobby would still be there and they could play a game of wars and villains before it grew dark.

  14

  Lydia thought her life would stop right there and then. Collapse in and in till there was nothing beyond, no one outside. Even Charlie seemed somewhere very far off, swimming in another sea. After Dr Markham had gone, Lydia put the package of books safe behind the preserving pan. She went upstairs to the bedroom, took off her shoes and got in under the covers. As she dug down, her clothes dragged and caught against the sheets, rucking and bundling around her, so she felt awkward and encumbered. The soft fabrics dug at her hips and her ribs, and soon she would be too hot.

  She hoped for sleep, but it wouldn’t happen. So she picked up a book from the bedside.

  Latimer stared at the corpse. So this was Dimitrios. This was the man who had, perhaps, slit the throat of Sholem, the Jew turned Moslem. This was the man who had connived at assassinations, who had spied for France. This was the man who had traffic
ked in drugs, who had given a gun to a Croat terrorist and who, in the end, had himself died by violence. This putty-coloured bulk was the end of an Odyssey …

  From inside the thick of her grief, Lydia read. She read without lifting her eyes. She pinned her thoughts to Latimer and Dimitrios, Madam Preveza and Marukakis, only pausing when the ache in her shoulder or the pins and needles in her foot forced her to lift her eyes from the page, shift the pillows and turn the other way. Then her gaze would fall on the wallpaper with its pattern of roses and she would blink and wonder where in the world she was. Then, as she started to remember, thank God, there was the book, and she would slip under again, a sigh in her throat.

  The terrible certainty Lydia had come to that Sunday sat like a bruise behind her eyes, invisible and absolute, so that although the form of life continued much as before, for Lydia the spirit in her marriage was dead.

  Dead as a sap with a bullet in his neck, she told herself in a stab at Bogart, but it didn’t raise a smile.

  She was famished and hollow, heavy with the sadness of what had gone. And some nights she cried, her desire lost to itself, running her own fingers over her breasts, sliding her fingers high across the soft skin of her thigh, longing for someone else to touch her.

  Lydia went through the motions. She went to work, she looked after Charlie; she shopped, visited the library, cleaned and cooked. She made excuses to her friends on the Friday, and then on the Saturday. Whenever she could, she took off her shoes and climbed inside the thrillers beside her bed. She took Dr Markham’s books out from behind the preserving pan and read those too, then wrapped them back up in their brown paper and put them safe in a cupboard to return.

  Robert came and went by degrees. A few days at a time at first, then for a week, then longer. After dinner that Sunday he didn’t come home for three days. Not a word, not a glimpse; then on Wednesday, at the usual time, there was the sound of his key and he was coming through the front door, making the sounds he always made. And Lydia, despite her despair, was waiting. The grate of the latch, the jar of metal on the hall tiles as he dropped his lunchbox from his shoulder: these caught her pulse, making her jolt, so that she danced like a figure on strings in the middle of the kitchen, her feet rooted to the floor, her joints twitching, tugged by the ordinary, unseen sounds of her husband. For a moment she was paralysed and then, not thinking, she moved quickly.

  She opened the fridge and took out a bottle of dark beer and a jar of cockles. She listened for his pause at the living-room door as he checked the hall for post, ran his fingers over his hair in front of the glass. These sounds, and gaps in sound, were as familiar to her as the creak of the fifth stair or the small animal noises Charlie made when sleeping. They were part of her life; and her body, carrying the beer and cockles, rose up to meet them.

  Robert was sitting at the table, a holdall in one hand. He turned at Lydia’s entry, and his face was a rage of emotion, so that she thought he would hit her, and then that he would wrap his arms around her, though it might be to smother or it might be to caress.

  ‘What?’ he said, and Lydia nearly wanted to laugh at him for pretending not to care.

  She shrugged and put the jar and bottle on the table.

  ‘How are you?’ she said.

  He looked what he was right then: a man on the run. Lydia knew it immediately. She’d read of enough such men in thrillers and they always looked like this: beads of sweat on the forehead, sitting on the edge of the chair, a large bag to fill fast, eyes darting, waiting for the bullet in the back, the cord around the neck, the cosh.

  ‘Need to pick up some things,’ he said.

  ‘You’re not staying then,’ she said, fighting to keep her voice even, fighting not to plead, because he was too long gone and she didn’t want him any more. It wasn’t this last, short absence that was his going, but all the months, years of departure that had already been.

  He looked at her as if she were a stranger. Her legs had started shaking, a quivery feeling she couldn’t overcome, and she sat down. She took a cockle from the jar. It was rubbery and resistant, but the vinegar brought her up sharp. She picked up the beer bottle and the cockle jar and went into the kitchen. The one she emptied into the bin and the other she poured down the sink.

  He still stood as if waiting for something.

  She couldn’t imagine touching him, couldn’t imagine her fingers unbuttoning his shirt, or pulling at his belt buckle. She didn’t want to lie with him, didn’t want his caress. But this was still hard to bear.

  ‘Charlie will be pleased to see you. He’s upstairs.’

  ‘Will he?’ Robert said, and he turned away so quickly that Lydia didn’t know what he meant. But when he went upstairs she heard him open Charlie’s door.

  Twenty minutes later and he had gone, leaving behind what she hadn’t noticed during the time he was there, which was the smell of somewhere else.

  During those next dark weeks, for the first time in Charlie’s life, Lydia didn’t see her boy. Or rather, with her eyes turned so much in, she saw only the outside form of him. She still had his food on the table and his clothes washed. She still chivvied him about his homework, made sure he washed behind his ears and she kissed him goodnight. But she no more saw how he was than she did the child across the street.

  At first Charlie tried to make her see him. He told her stories from school, even made ones up that had him as the hero of the playground. He offered to read to her, downstairs, in the kitchen, where she ought to be, with her book propped open with the two-pound weight, like it ought to be. He ran willing errands to the corner shop to buy margarine or sardines from the fearful Mrs Edwards, and reorganized his shelf of curios, writing careful labels for each shell and lump of metal:

  Venus shell. Found by Charles Weekes, Frampton

  beach, August 24th, 1953

  Bit of bombed fireplace. Found by Charles Weekes,

  October 1954

  Brittle star starfish. Found by Charles Weekes,

  Frampton beach, August 17th, 1953

  Though he knew exactly where he had found things, Charlie had made up some of the dates. He took Lydia to his room to show her, holding her hand as if she were the child.

  ‘Dad told me how the starfish would grow a new leg if it lost one. The shell was in the high tideline and you didn’t like the smell because the seaweed was hot with the sun,’ he said. ‘And there were millions of sand-hoppers jumping, every step you took.’ He looked up to see if his mother remembered, but he couldn’t tell.

  In that early summertime, with his mother as she was and his father not there, the balance of Charlie’s life shifted too, and he spent longer in the park, and longer in the doctor’s garden, sometimes coming home only when the light was almost gone from the day. He told himself that his mother knew where he was and that she’d said he could be out this late. But he knew that she hadn’t, and that she hadn’t noticed him gone.

  In the garden Charlie was mostly on his own. He was happy like this. With the bees he was sure and clear in his actions and they were always calm with him. He wore his bee suit and veil, but after a while he left off the gauntlets. They made him clumsy and somehow he could see more clearly when his hands had their proper touch. He was stung a few more times, but he took it for a badge of honour, like Roger Race in his Boys’ Book of the World.

  Charlie told the bees what he was doing at home – the shelf with his precious things – and he told them that his mother wasn’t happy. He didn’t say very much about it. But it was important that he let them know. He didn’t want them flying off because he had kept silent.

  The bees were busy. Charlie watched them return to the hives heavy and slow with nectar, their wings beating a lower note, and so many in the air, even in the late afternoon, that it carried a low drone he could hear almost down to the pond.

  ‘If the weather stays sweet, there’ll be a strong honey-flow now,’ Dr Markham had told him. ‘Good for all our jam jars, Charlie.’

&nbs
p; So he took pride in the bees’ labour, encouraging them in whispers as they returned with their pockets full.

  Mostly Dr Markham wasn’t there. She was doctoring people, he supposed. But occasionally she’d come down the garden to look at the hives. One time she stood close up and sniffed like a dog, nose held high.

  ‘They’re still bringing in clover,’ she said, and he’d sniffed to see what she meant.

  A week later she’d done the same again. ‘Smell, Charlie. They’re getting in the lime now.’ He’d sniffed and nodded, because if you stood near the hives in the evening, you could smell the honey, and it changed week by week as the bees found different flowers to suck. When early evening came, he’d stand close to hear the bees fanning the combs, and he’d wrinkle his nose to sniff the honey air.

  Some afternoons Dr Markham would call down the garden to him to come and have tea and then they’d sit on the terrace steps on big, faded cushions that smelled old and drink perfumed tea from mugs.

  At first, Charlie felt awkward. It was odd to see a grown-up sitting on the steps, not on a chair. Aunt Pam would never dream of it, or his mother much, unless they were at the seaside maybe. But he became used to it and then enjoyed telling her what he’d noticed. Sometimes they talked about the seaside, or the war.

  She usually asked after his mother at these times, and he usually said she was a bit under the weather, which seemed to make Dr Markham smile. Sometimes she had Mrs Sandringham wrap up a piece of cake for him to take home, or she would cut some flowers. But she didn’t ask him more questions, which he was glad of.

  He knew she had called on his mother, but then she was a doctor and though his mother didn’t seem to be ill exactly, she didn’t seem well either. Not her usual self. That’s what she would say if it was one of their neighbours. He understood why Dr Markham would visit her; he simply couldn’t imagine what they’d find to talk about.