The Boy Who Taught the Beekeeper to Read (11 page)

‘We ought to put the light on,’ Lizzie said.

But they did not move, and now the others seemed to press in upon them with the gathering dark, the grandmother they had never been allowed to see or so much as mention, the Aunt Kath who sent them their joint birthday card, without any word of greeting written, just that name ‘Aunt Kath’, the grandfather, saint and martyr, and the telepathic dogs.

Listening now in the cold front room, they might have heard the winding of the pocket watch.

They could barely see one another’s faces.

‘Do you remember the handkerchief?’ Clara said and her voice in the silent room among the ghosts, made them start and glance around. They did not put the light on, but, lent courage by the darkness, by each other’s presence and the growing acceptance that she was dead, they allowed themselves then to be drawn on a few steps into the tunnel mouth of memory.

‘The boy,’ Clara said.

They would not go to the beach. Then, after all, they might. They would. Might not. Perhaps. And so it had gone on, their hopes swung violently about, and
though they were quite used to it, still they had never built up any defences against such disappointments. The truth, which they had never understood, was that their mother was unwilling to make herself uncomfortable for them, resenting as she did what they had already and inevitably cost her.

She did not like the beach, which they were not allowed to call ‘the sands’. It would be too hot there, or too cold or too windy, or else a mist would roll in off the sea, or it was the weekend and too crowded, or a weekday and too bleak. But they did not learn because they could not, only continued to hope and have their hopes extinguished, only went on and on in spite of it, clamoured to go.

But then, quite suddenly, though it was a Saturday and would be crowded and August and quite hot, the moment after they had given up hope and spilled a dull game with counters onto this same carpet in this same front room, she had got up and said they would go, now, they were to hurry up, hurry up, if they wanted to come at all, and they had hurried, never daring to catch one another’s eye, for fear it might not be true and they would wake and find themselves still here with the game of counters after all.

Of course it had been hopeless. The only deckchair left had been at the wrong end of the beach, too near the shellfish stalls, and a wind had got up, a hot wind, which was the most unhealthy and there had been a plague of flies. They had rushed through the creaming browny-coloured foam at the water’s edge and on into the sea, and then, on some unspoken signal, like the signal obeyed by the grandfather’s telepathic dogs, they had turned their backs on her, though they could not quite forget, not immediately, or ever properly turn their backs on, her discontent. They were already old enough now to feel guilty, as if what made her discontented were their fault; and at the same time to be resentful, knowing they were not, could not possibly be guilty, though that was never to leave them for the rest of their lives and did not end with her death – nor had they expected that it would.

They were forbidden to talk to other children, ‘people we don’t know’, but there were some girls and one small boy and they began to jump through the waves and shriek with them and after a while they all splashed one another, though not a word was spoken by Lizzie or Clara, so that they were able to believe that none of it counted.

And then, racing along the water’s edge, away and away, with their backs to the fish stalls and the deckchair, suddenly they forgot her, and a great and wonderful brightness entered them and lifted them up and the brilliance of the day and the expanse of silver sea dazzled them and the whole feeling somehow entered deep into them, it went into their eyes and was absorbed by their skin, it became part of them and their memories and even, somehow, of their souls, so that now, kneeling across the open leather hat box in the darkness, the feeling washed up over them and through them, transfiguring them again.

As soon as they had turned to go back of course they had seen her, standing up and waving and waving them to come in. She was too hot or blown about, there would be too many flies or the wrong sort of people, she was restless or bored or all those things, but they did not care which, it did not matter to them. It was over, that was all, and long, long before they were ready, though not before they expected.

They had trailed as slowly as they dared back up the beach, to the misery of having damp feet, grainy with sand, pushed into their shoes. Perhaps it was
sand she hated most, sand other people had walked over and delved into and dug about and buried things in. Sand was not only ground-up rocks and the pounded bones of thousand-year-old fish; sand might be anything. She rubbed them with the hard little sandy towel and sand scraped their skin – ‘Like sandpaper,’ Clara said, with a flash of understanding.

It was because of sand that they had met the boy, as they walked slowly back, up the narrow slope from the foreshore. Old dry sand always collected along the gutters and even they could see that this sand was not clean and would never in a thousand years have touched it. It was mixed with black grit and people trod in it with their shoes on, dogs peed and did their dirt into it. It was this sand now that came swirling down the slope, wrapped around chip paper and cigarette butts on a funnel of hot wind, and in the middle of trying to dodge it and not drop their buckets and spades and cardigans, they saw the boy.

The sand had been blown into his eyes, he was howling, his nose was running, and they had made to do what they always must and hurry past, heads bent and looking the other way, whatever they felt about his crying and pain and misery from the blown sand,
however they might think about it later, in bed after their light had been switched out, and be ashamed. But their mother had hesitated and then, striking them to stone, gone over to the boy, who wore plimsolls without laces.

‘It hurts . . . me eyes hurt.’

They had watched as she had behaved towards him in a way so entirely new to them they could not meet one another’s glances for the strangeness of it. She had got him to stop rubbing the sand deeper into his eyes before tipping his head back with her hand beneath his chin.

‘Mam, Mam.’

‘Where is your mother?’

‘At the bus. I has to go there.’

He had roared again, dragging his arm across his nose.

‘Where is your handkerchief?’

She spoke to him like a teacher, they thought, raising her voice as if he were very stupid.

‘Ain’t got handkerchief.’

Nothing more astonishing could happen, but then it did. She had opened her bag and from the special compartment at the back where it was always kept,
she had taken the sacred relic. Clara had reached for Lizzie’s hand in a sort of terror.

The handkerchief had belonged to the saint and martyr, it was sacred, never used, never so much as touched, though sometimes spoken of. ‘It is all I have of my father.’

It was white with a monogram and a blue border, folded and pressed into a perfect square.

Now, their mother took one corner of the sacred relic, screwed it round into a twist and then began to probe at the blown sand and grit in the corners of the boy’s eyes, and when she had finished, they saw that he was staring at the white cloth, no longer blinded, as if the handkerchief had worked a miracle. They had already felt peculiar, almost as if they might faint, but after that, nothing could ever surprise them again, so that it seemed quite unremarkable that she should be giving him the handkerchief.

‘Tell your mother to send it back laundered.’

He was holding the cool, healing piece of linen not just to his smarting eyes now but spread out over his whole face.

‘Do you hear me?’

He nodded.

‘What is your name?’

‘Lenny.’

‘What are you to do, Lenny?’

‘Mam’s to send it back.’

‘Mrs Murgatroyd. 35 Victoria Avenue. Say it.’

He said it. They heard their own address spoken aloud but it did not seem to have any meaning for them, the words made sounds that were not language at all.

And then he had gone, racing away down the steep path, the handkerchief still held close to his filthy face, and they went on clutching one another’s hands for fear everything else would change entirely and that they might find themselves transformed or even dead.

‘Well? Hurry up.’ She was ahead of them, almost at the top of the slope, before their own legs would unlock and move as they told them.

No word was spoken until they were in their beds.

‘What else might happen?’ Clara said.

There was silence again, in which each tried to imagine some unimaginable change in their mother, brought about by the boy.

‘I touched it once,’ Lizzie said. And straight away they could feel the relic between their fingertips in the
darkness, the softness and smoothness of the sacred cotton.

They tried to picture it, wherever it was with the boy, but the place was dark and quite undeterminable, they failed entirely and so almost at once they slept, exhausted by the strain of imagining, like mediums drained by the demands of the other world.

None of it had been referred to again. Things were just as they had been, there were no more surprises and by this they were quite unsurprised. After a month the incident came to seem quite unreal to them and more unlikely than a dream.

The room was not dark because the orange street-light had come on and showed them one another’s faces, but it was very quiet and in a different way now, as if the ghosts had retreated. The space between them was quite empty.

‘I found the handkerchief,’ Clara said at last. ‘After they took her away. I went to put her clean bed jacket in the drawer.’

Neither could sense the other breathing.

‘It was at the back. I left it there.’

And at once their minds leapt to the sacred relic again and found it, at once their hands went out to touch it.

Months had gone by, it had been after Christmas, they had quite forgotten the summer or that it had ever been possible to run in sunshine on the beach. Then it had come, a smeared brown envelope dropped through the letterbox onto the mat. Their mother had bent over it, staring down, before lifting it carefully by one corner.

It was the same envelope in the drawer now. They pictured the thick, unformed lettering: ‘Mrs. 35 Victoria Ave’ and the town. No surname. He must not have remembered.

There was nothing else, no note. Nothing except the handkerchief, laundered and folded.

She had turned her head. ‘What are you doing there?’

They had fled.

When they got back from school it had gone and was never referred to, might never have been at all, and afterwards they almost came to believe that that was so, that the handkerchief did not exist any more than the boy had existed, any more than their mother had, for a few minutes, been utterly transformed.

Every day, as soon as they got in, they had to put their wet things on the rack above the stove, and their boots upside down on newspaper, to drain. But this summer was dry, and so already marked out to them as different.

‘The sun has shone for nine days,’ Milo said, and there was suspicion, as well as wonder, in his voice.

He scuffed at the dust that lay along the gutter.

Minchy Fagin was standing at the corner of the green, by the petrol pump; the canvas bag over his shoulder heaved slightly.

‘Don’t you get near,’ Elizabeth said, and pulled at her brother’s arm. She could sense his passionate interest, concealed, but to her keen and clear as a whistle, directed towards Minchy Fagin. (Though it was she who had the ferrety dreams, of chiselled yellow teeth and red eyes.)

‘Your Da and Ma came by,’ Minchy Fagin said.

Elizabeth pulled again at Milo’s arm.

‘You’re hurting me, Elizabeth.’

‘You keep walking on.’

‘Your Da and Ma in the truck. On their way to town, weren’t they?’

Fatally then, she hesitated. ‘On their way to see the doctor. Mary Hennessy said. She was there, in the waiting room.’

She had heard it now.

‘Elizabeth . . .’

She began to walk away very quickly, head up, staring straight ahead, and he was stumbling to keep up, and hold his school bag, and rub his arm where she had gripped him like pincers. He knew his sister’s strength and authority, could see them now in the set of her shoulders.

It was almost a mile home, from where the bus dropped them. The village straggled out along the road.

‘Elizabeth!’

She did pause then, hearing the fear in his voice.

‘Will everything be all right at home?’

‘Oh yes.’

‘How do you know? It might not be. How do you know?’

The sweet had paper and fluff matted to it. It had been for weeks in her pocket.

‘Yes!’

His face went bland and soft with pleasure, as his tongue folded round the sweet. She had not been ready for his questioning. Her own anxiety was too much upon her, like a shadow fallen. No one in their family went sixteen miles to see Doctor Hennessy, for just nothing. The last time she had been taken, it was to have him lance a boil between her shoulderblades, that would not be drawn even with the hottest poultice, and had kept her sitting up, and crying with pain, for three nights. Even then, they had gone there on the bus, with every jolt and jar an agony. Da would not take time off to drive them in the truck.