Tell it to the Bees Read online

  ‘She was looking at me so oddly,’ Mrs Bewick said. ‘Her eyes really wide, but not like usual. Her hands so icy and her head so hot. But now she won’t look at all.’

  ‘How long has she been like this? Struggling for breath?’

  ‘You think I bother you. You think I make things up.’

  ‘I think we need to get her to the hospital.’

  Mrs Bewick and Connie had a side room in the hospital while they waited for the penicillin to take effect. Neighbours looked after the boys, who wished their sister could be ill more often, what with the jelly and fruit pastilles.

  When Connie opened her eyes and smiled at her mother, Mrs Bewick looked as though she would break. But then her eyes closed again and though her body continued its struggle for air for two more days, her spirit seemed already to have drifted beyond reach.

  When they trained you for doctoring, they didn’t teach you how to cope with death. Only how to do all you could to rescue men and women from it. But death was a very present fact of life in Jean’s line of work. People were born to die. She’d made her mother very angry once, saying that.

  Despite all her best efforts, despite all medical knowledge and expertise, people would die and there was nothing she could do to prevent them. She knew by now that some, by the time it happened, were glad of it, but that many were not.

  However they stood, Jean was surprised by how many people seemed to know when death was holding out its hand. Even young men and women. But not Connie Bewick. She had been out of the womb too short a time to know she might be going already. The caul still clung to her, soft and mother-smelling. But when her lungs were finally covered and she took her last breath, she seemed to slip into death so easily. Her fingers twitched, her eyelids quivered and then she was gone. There was nothing Jean could have done to hold her there, but when Mrs Bewick turned and looked at her above the small dead body, that made no difference. Despite herself, despite what she knew, Jean railed that night at she knew not what.

  6

  Charlie didn’t keep step with his father on the way to the doctor’s. It was partly his ribs, partly not, and both of them knew it, though Robert didn’t know it as much as Charlie did.

  Robert would go ahead for a bit, then stop and turn. His son walking so slowly, one arm held in to his side, head down, made him scowl. The boy made him angry. He wanted to shake him, tell him to stand up straight, stand up for himself. But he remembered Lydia’s look as they had left, and he lit a cigarette instead and told himself to be patient, to wait it out till tonight.

  Charlie told his mother he had tripped on the steps to the river, where the stone never dried and it was green and slippery. But she didn’t believe him.

  ‘You don’t get ribs that sore by falling on the steps. Not at your age, Charlie.’

  He shrugged and she tried again.

  ‘Will you tell me? What happened?’

  She waited; her eyes on her needle as she stitched at the tear in his shirt. Charlie didn’t reply.

  ‘You’re going to see the doctor tomorrow morning,’ she said.

  ‘But you’ve got to go to work.’

  ‘Your father’s taking you.’

  He looked at her; alarmed or angry, she couldn’t tell.

  ‘Not Dad. Please will you take me?’

  ‘He can take the time. I can’t.’

  ‘Then couldn’t Annie?’

  ‘She’s at work too now. Remember?’

  ‘Please, Mum.’

  She shook her head. Charlie willed her to look at him, but she kept her eyes fixed on the sewing.

  He didn’t blame the boy. Fred Dawson. It was the girls had done it with their skipping. He wouldn’t think about it and he wouldn’t answer his mum, so he might as well keep quiet as make something up for her.

  Dinnertimes, he and Bobby had a place they went to between the boys’ and the girls’ playgrounds, down the side of the school. It was narrow there, and often windy; the sun didn’t get in till nearly summertime. The school seemed to reach to the sky if you looked straight up.

  It made Charlie dizzy, leaning his head that far back, and he’d put a hand to the bricks to steady himself. When it was summer the bricks were warm. But not the day he hurt his ribs and when he lifted his hand, his palm was cold and gritty. A drainpipe dropped the full height of the building down to a gutter channel, and sometimes there’d be foam there, left high and dry, to be flecked up by the wind across your face and arms.

  The building stepped in behind the gutter so there was a space where the boys could be hidden, and mostly they were left alone. They played marbles, heads squinting in concentration over cat’s-eyes and bombsies in the dust, and Charlie would tell himself that if he could just roll his marble the closest to the lag line, or win Bobby’s favourite cat’s-eye, then he’d get home without any trouble, or there’d be treacle pudding for tea.

  Sometimes they hunched back against the school wall and made up stories. Bobby’s about war or cowboys, and Charlie’s about masterful criminals outwitted by masterful detectives, always in fedoras and smoking Pall Malls.

  Yesterday they’d been playing for keeps, and Bobby had been winning.

  He didn’t listen to the girls. They weren’t singing at him. They were skipping, the rope swinging high and hard, with a whoosh and then a whip across the ground with a tight, neat crack. Whoosh crack – whoosh crack – and the girls beating out the rhythm with dancing feet.

  Down in the valley where the green grass grows,

  There sat Biddy pretty as a rose.

  Up came Johnny and kissed her on the cheek,

  How many kisses did she get this week?

  One, two, three, four …

  Bobby was hunched forward, his attention focused on the colours in the dust.

  ‘I’ve got you on the run, Charlie. Four that was, out of the ring.’

  The girls’ rhymes, swung with the rope, were as familiar a drone of girl-sound to Charlie as the small, shrill shouts thrown out by the boys playing football. They stopped and then started again.

  Down in the valley where the green grass grows,

  There sat Irene pretty as a rose.

  Up came Robert and kissed her on the cheek,

  How many kisses did she get this week?

  Charlie looked down at the circle. The marbles waited in their pools of dust. Bobby waited. The girls started again, but it was different this time. Their voices were sneery and knowing. This time they sang it for him to hear, not for the rope. They sang his father’s name again. They sang the other name again. The name he’d heard between his parents. The name he knew but didn’t know why.

  Down by the river where the green weeds grow,

  There sat Irene giving him a blow.

  Up came Robert and kissed her on the bum,

  How many babies did he put in her tum?

  One, two, three, four …

  Charlie stood up, his bare knees gritty. Something was drumming inside him, drumming along with the rope turn.

  ‘Charlie? It’s your turn.’

  Bobby was pointing. Charlie looked down, and the marbles stared up like so many eyes watching, waiting.

  Still the rope hit the ground and still the girls sang.

  Later, Charlie couldn’t remember how the fight had started, or how it had gone on. He remembered running to stop the rope swinging, to stop the girls singing, away from the marble eyes, away from his wondering friend. He remembered crossing the white line and a teacher’s voice shouting. He remembered the girls’ faces grinning as he ran at them, then shocked and surprised.

  But after that it was fragments, like a picture cut into pieces. He didn’t know how come he’d fought with this boy. The white skin of Fred’s hairline, the skew of his tie, a scab beneath his chin, bleeding from one of Charlie’s blows.

  He didn’t know he’d been hurt until the teacher stopped them. But standing in the corridor, waiting to see the headmaster, then he knew, and he moved gingerly, guarding his body
against any sudden moves, anything that might take it by surprise.

  ‘Took that like a man,’ Fred said and, to his surprise, Charlie could hear respect in his voice. ‘Your first time, seeing Mr Wilks?’

  Charlie nodded.

  ‘He’ll go on a bit, but he doesn’t like hitting us.’ The bigger boy rubbed at his jaw. ‘Got me good and proper. You were pretty angry.’

  Charlie put a hand to his own mouth. His top lip was swollen and his mouth tasted of metal. One ear was hot, as if somebody was holding a glowing coal close up. But it was his chest and his back that felt the strangest. He put a finger to his ribcage and pressed. The pain was sharp. It made pinpricks in his scalp; it made him dizzy and he shut his eyes.

  ‘You all right?’ Fred’s voice sounded as if it were in another room.

  Fred was right and the headmaster didn’t hit them. He was disappointed, he said, and he looked at Charlie with eyes that reminded the boy of an old dog.

  Charlie’s body ached. It hurt if he breathed in too much, and it hurt if he moved too quickly. But he didn’t want to go straight home. Fred would leave him alone, but the girls wouldn’t. They’d be looking out for him after school, so he decided to risk it and slip through the kitchen and then out past the bins. You could do it without being noticed if you were quick enough. Then he went with Bobby to the old pipe factory that lay back from the river.

  The factory had been bombed in the war, and now the low lengths of brick building stood chopped up and open to the sky. Here and there corrugated iron sheets stretched across and the wind would string itself over their ridges with a low whistling croon.

  Chunks of concrete pipe lay flung about in the weeds, some wide enough to crawl inside, and Charlie used to hope that they might find a grass snake basking in one some day.

  When darkness fell, the place belonged to courting couples. Sometimes somebody would clear a corner under a corrugated strip and sleep there for a while. There’d be the remnants of a fire, some newspaper and empty cans. But mostly, after school, the boys had it all to themselves.

  Bobby chinked the marbles in his pockets.

  ‘I’ll give you back your best ones if you tell what happened.’

  Charlie shook his head. Bobby kicked a can against the bricks.

  ‘If you won’t tell, I get to choose the game.’

  Charlie shrugged.

  ‘Right then,’ Bobby said. He leaned back against a wall and stared across the scrubby ground.

  ‘It’s the Blitz. I’m going to be the air-raid warden, and you be the wounded man.’

  Charlie nodded.

  ‘And you wouldn’t go into the shelter.’

  ‘Long as I don’t have to run,’ Charlie said.

  ‘And I rescue you, and then I have to go and rescue these other people.’

  So they played in the rubble for a while. Bobby found a vast sink, the enamel gone green with mould.

  ‘We might find a snake here soon,’ Charlie said. ‘It’s getting warmer. They’ll be waking up end of March time. We could put it in here, make a place for it.’

  ‘What are you going to tell your mum? About your shirt? And why you’re walking funny?’

  Charlie ran his fingers over the sink. The enamel was slippery and smooth.

  ‘Don’t know. That I tripped by the river. Something.’

  He rubbed his green fingers over the tear in his shirt, and then across his trousers. Eventually the boys grew cold and went home.

  Charlie and his father had to wait a while at the doctor’s, so Robert stood at the magazine table and flipped the pages. Charlie sat and listened to the gas hiss and wondered whether, if he gave him his favourite shooter, Bobby would look for a snake with him.

  Then the door to the consulting room opened and they were called in, and it was a lady doctor sitting behind the desk. She had green eyes and dark, curly hair, but not like Auntie Pam’s. The doctor’s curls looked like they had just grown like that. Auntie Pam made hers on curlers. He’d seen her in them, like big worms all over her head. The doctor didn’t smile much and she asked Charlie, not Robert, to sit down in the chair. Charlie hesitated and looked up.

  ‘It’s Charlie that’s here to see me. Isn’t it?’ she said.

  The doctor’s voice was firm, and she sounded serious. Charlie nodded.

  ‘Then you’re the one the chair is for. I don’t expect your father will mind standing?’

  ‘Sit down,’ Robert said, and so Charlie sat, carefully, into the deep chair.

  The lady doctor asked him to tell her what was wrong. He explained about falling near the river and hurting his ribs.

  ‘And your lip? Did you hurt that in the fall too?’

  He nodded. He knew she didn’t think it was a fall, but she didn’t ask him any more.

  ‘But it’s the ribs that are causing you some pain?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I’d better have a look then,’ she said.

  When she stood up, Charlie saw that she was tall, as tall as his dad. She was wearing a skirt and a jacket made out of rough brown material with green and red checks. His teacher sometimes wore clothes like this. They made him feel itchy, just to look at. Although she wasn’t smiling, she didn’t look unfriendly and he didn’t feel nervous. He noticed that she barely looked at his dad.

  She had him stand up and take off his sweater, unbutton his shirt and then lift his vest, so his chest and back were bare. She rubbed her hands together.

  ‘They’re not very warm, I’m afraid.’

  Charlie could feel the blush across his face as she went to touch his ribs. He looked across towards the fireplace. There were some china figures on the mantelpiece and a glass vase, and something that looked like a piece of honeycomb except it was much bigger than the real thing and in an odd shape.

  His mother had bought a jar of comb honey once when someone told her it would help his father’s hay fever. It was expensive and Charlie hadn’t been allowed more than a taste. But the comb had fascinated him. He’d turned the jar around and around at the table, staring through the glass at the impeccable hexagons, until he was ordered on with his porridge.

  The honeycomb on the mantelpiece looked as if it was made of wood. Polished, smooth. If he could only get a bit closer.

  ‘You’ve got some nasty bruising, Charlie. Now, this might hurt a bit.’

  Charlie wondered about the wooden comb. He wondered whether he could touch it. It would be a bit like touching the real thing, only he could fit his finger in these wooden cells. The man who made this, he’d have chisels and sandpaper, and tools to measure with. But the bees did it with their mouths. They made the wax out of their own bodies and then built their perfect shapes. That’s what his mum had told him.

  ‘It might hurt a bit, Charlie,’ the doctor’s voice said, and then a pain scorched its way through his chest, so that his sight went blue and silver and he cried out.

  Her voice was soft in its wake.

  ‘Must have been quite a fall.’

  And in the quiet, his father’s voice.

  ‘Least it’s not another one with measles.’

  Charlie heard his father’s rough laugh, and after it silence. Then the doctor’s voice, very low, and sounding like the word had been dragged out of her.

  ‘No.’

  Charlie opened his eyes.

  ‘That hurt a lot, didn’t it?’

  The doctor was still crouched beside him. He wouldn’t look at her. He looked across the room at the burnished comb.

  ‘You looking at the honeycomb?’ she said.

  He nodded.

  ‘Stop staring.’ His father’s voice was impatient. ‘Come on and get dressed. You’re wasting the doctor’s time.’

  ‘It’s all right, Mr Weekes. Go and take a closer look, Charlie, if you want to.’

  Charlie took a step, and then paused. How did she know what he was looking at?

  ‘If you pick it up, you’ll feel it’s quite heavy. Very different from the real thing.’
>
  Charlie walked across and picked it up. He heard the doctor say something to his father, and his father reply. He counted the cells – seven wide and five deep. Behind him, they went on talking, but he didn’t hear. He wasn’t listening. He traced the contours with his finger, then the doctor’s voice cut in.

  ‘It’s modelled on a piece of comb from wild bees,’ she said.

  ‘So, do they make wild honey?’ he said.

  ‘Charlie, will you tell me how you got these hurt ribs?’ she said.

  He put the comb back on the mantelpiece and began to button up his shirt. He didn’t turn and he didn’t reply.

  ‘Answer the doctor,’ Robert said, and Charlie turned then, his face tight, and picked up his sweater.

  ‘You’ll be in more trouble once you’re out of here if you don’t answer,’ his father said, but Charlie knew he only said it to sound proper to the doctor, not because he really cared how Charlie had got hurt.

  The doctor was leaning back against her big desk, arms folded.

  ‘A friend made it for me, because I keep bees,’ she said, nodding towards the mantelpiece.

  Despite himself, Charlie turned to her, his eyes alive with questions. The doctor smiled, not at him, quite, but more as if she understood something.

  ‘Have you ever seen a hive?’ she said, her face serious again.

  Charlie shook his head.

  ‘The bees wake up about now, with the weather getting warmer. I’ll be doing a first inspection soon. You could come and have a look.’

  Charlie looked from the doctor to his father, his face a shock of anticipation.

  She turned to Robert. ‘With your father’s permission.’

  Robert stared at Jean, his expression shifting like water. Charlie knew better than to say anything, or make any move. He stood where he was, his sweater still in his hands, waiting.

  Robert got to his feet and shook down his jacket, adjusted his scarf, put on his hat. Motioning to Charlie to follow, he walked to the door.

  ‘All right then. About the bees.’

  7

  The doctor’s house was huge. Big as a ship. Big as a castle. All on its own, with its own hedge around and a driveway with gravel that wouldn’t last a minute if it was on his street. Butterflies kicked up a storm in Charlie’s stomach. What if she didn’t remember him? What if she didn’t really mean it?