The Burying Beetle (13 page)

I was really worried that Flo would be killed by the big ugly tom if he caught her, but she came back in after about an hour, no damage done. Then the other two appeared and they all walked on tiptoe around the house frightening themselves, thinking each of the others was the ginger tom. I had to groom them all before they would settle down. Flo only lets me brush and comb her head and back. Charlie wants to be groomed all the time. I think she thinks I’m her mother and brushing is like a mother cat licking her young.

It’s impossible to tell where the sea ends and where the sky begins today. It’s the same grey misty haze all over. The crows are grey blurs flying by. A man disappears on the beach, and then only his legs reappear. We can see Godrevy Lighthouse from here. It’s rather friendly – the light going on and off all night; comforting somehow. I imagine I’m a sailor lost at sea and I suddenly catch sight of the beam of the lighthouse. And I’m no longer lost. I can work out my bearings. I can get home.

I’ve found one of the magazines that the Jehovah’s witnesses left. It’s called
The Watchtower
, not
The Lighthouse
, but I was close.

Having the sea outside the window and almost surrounding us is like having a guest in the house who won’t go home, and won’t go and entertain himself. You are aware of the breathing sound it makes, and then you take it for granted and don’t hear it at all. Then it gets angry, or seems to – I know it doesn’t really – and you hear it crashing about and making lots of noise – the sea and the wind, together – a partnership. Does the sea do what the
wind dictates, or is the sea the king of the elements? The sky changes every second. Now it’s totally grey yet still bright enough for me to need sunglasses. Now it’s blue and pink and green and orange, with thick heavy rounded clouds that are dark grey at the base.
And the shadows of the clouds race across the beach. And when a seagull flies overhead, its golden ghost sweeps across the sand.

Perhaps I should take up painting. No point really when so many artists have already done it so well. What can I do that only I, Augusta Stevens, can do? I’m no good at anything. My best subject is English, I suppose. Because I’ve read quite a few books already. And I quite like acting. And cooking. And animals, but that’s not a subject.

Blurt. That’s a wonderful word. That’s exactly how it sounds when you say something quickly that you didn’t know you were going to say but it just comes out
– blurt. You blurt it out. Like projectile vomiting. I used to do that, apparently, when I was three weeks old. I had something called pyloric stenosis – which is a blockage that stops food getting into your stomach and causes you to throw up in a stupendous fashion. I had to have to have an operation. That’s all I needed, what with my heart failure. I couldn’t have a general anaesthetic so they had to tie me down. Mum said the surgeon, who was Australian, said to them, ‘Your baby nearly went to heaven.’ My heart had stopped during the operation and they had to start it again. Luckily, I remember nothing at all about any of it. Seeing as my heart is so badly designed, it does quite well, considering.

EUGENE
HAS
JUST been. He told me he had read all about the hang-glider and said he’s seen the picture of me, and he also delivered a letter from the newspaper editor with a cheque for ten pounds. It’s for my photographs of the hang-gliding accident. Cool! Perhaps I shall be a photographer, like Daddy, only I’ll work really hard at it. I better start right away. Where’s the camera? I shall do landscapes first –
I don’t need to focus for those, just point the camera, turn the distance bit to infinity, and click.

So, I’m standing on the little grassy flat bit just off the coast path and sort of below the garden, with my camera on one shoulder and my binoculars around my neck. I have just taken a few shots of the waves coming right in and over the tops of the rocks. It’s very exciting, and I think I have got one or two good pictures. I’m using black and white film
– Daddy always said everything looks better in black and white, and I agree.

A boy comes down the steps and he’s wearing binoculars too, and just at that moment I stupidly let the camera fall off my shoulder. It sort of bounces and falls down over the edge onto a rocky ledge just below me. I am totally humiliated. Buggering Nora!

I can’t reach it, and this boy, who I think is just going to walk straight past me, says, ‘Can I help?’ And he leans down and plucks my camera from certain death. Death by damp and salt. I’m so grateful I can only stutter thanks, and take it from him.

He’s got a really nice smile. Wide and curly mouthed.

‘Is it broken?’

I take a shot. The shutter works OK.

‘It’s indestructible’ I say proudly.

He starts to walk away but suddenly sees something and looks through his bins. It’s our peregrine, coming right near us. I put my bins to my eyes (after first removing my glasses) and watch too.

I tell him we see it all the time, and as he looks really intelligent and friendly, I tell him where it has a nest. He asks if I’m a birder, and I say no, but I’m willing to learn. That obviously impresses him because he sits on the grass next to me and we watch together.

His name is Brett and he’s from Australia originally, and his parents are teachers. They recently moved here and live up on the main road. He’s got fair floppy hair and he’s sort of relaxed looking and really nice. I show him where we live. Then he says he
’d better get going.

Just as he’s leaving he asks if I want to go birding with him sometime. I want to say yes, but I don’t want him to know about my heart and stuff, and he’ll notice if I walk slowly. I don’t know what to say. In the end I say, maybe – and afterwards feel really really stupid. But he didn’t notice my blushes, I don’t think. I hid my face under my cowboy hat. Oh my God, I must look really nerdy. Glasses, funny hat, binoculars, camera, a complete eccentric.

He says G’day – Yes, Australians really do say that!

Note: Two more wonderful words
– lolloping and hugger-mugger. Lolloping is a badger’s action when it runs away. Herring gulls live hugger-mugger on the roofs. Close together. It sounds like a swear word to me. Like something Grandpop would have said instead of bugger.

THE GARDENER, MR LORN, has reappeared. He gave Mum a nasty shock. She was sunbathing ‘in the nuddie’
– as Grandma used to say – when he suddenly came through the bottom gate into the garden. She only just had time to cover up her rude bits before he was next to her. He has been laid up with a bad back, apparently. He pottered about, and was quite pleased that Mum had done some weeding and stuff. He’s rather old for a gardener and seems rather shy. I tried to have a conversation with him but he must be a bit deaf, I think. It is nice to have someone else around. I followed him for a while, asking him about the names of plants, but he doesn’t seem to know any more than I do. Grown-ups are remarkably ignorant about the world around them, I find. Mum is, anyway. And Mr Lorn. He has the most wonderful hands –
they are gnarled and horny and look as if he is part rhino.

I’ve just noticed this thing about my hands
– not the clubbed fingers, something else.

The lines on the palms. If I place my hands next to each other, little finger to little finger, the lines on the palms match, almost echo each other, except that on my left hand the life line – I think it’s the life line – stops half way down, or rather, it is broken at that point and then starts again but in a fractured state, like broken bones, or pick-up sticks thrown down higgledy piggledy.

Higgledly-piggledy my fat hen, she laid eggs for gentlemen.
Where did that come from? Probably Grandma.

I think I’ll write a story about this palm-reader who notices that everyone’s life lines end at the same time or point, except for one or two people, perhaps, maybe even her own life line ends then, and she assumes the end of the world is nigh, so she gets to know the other would-be survivors so they can be together when it happens. It could be a great sci-fi movie. I could make a fortune and leave it to Mum. What could I call it?
Life Line
.

She could buy herself some great clothes and maybe a facelift, except there’s no point in a facelift because you have to take off your clothes at some point and then your husband/boyfriend would see your soft and wrinkly belly. I suppose you could wear something flattering that covered all the wrinkly and saggy bits, but bloody hell, what an effort. Perhaps it would be a good idea to marry a blind man. Just keep rubbing in the baby oil and he would think you were young forever. Hope for the best. Whatever. God, the complications of being a woman!

We are putting out badger food regularly now. Peanuts, fish and chips, old bread, anything but salad stuff. They don’t eat their greens. They love leftover cat food.

I cannot believe how quiet this lovely beach is in the height of the summer. I suppose it’s because you can’t get to it by car. You have to walk a long way over dunes through a golf links or along the coast path and down over rocks. It makes it like our own private secret beach, almost.

One of the palms in the garden has leaned over so far it’s almost
– it is – touching the window and when the window is open the scent is overpowering. Lovely. Exotic. Like East Africa.

I think those days… months… spent in Kenya were the best ever in my entire life. I was very well there. I could breathe. Run, even. Swim – well, snorkel – and it was great. So much wilderness and excitement. Paradise.

Perhaps we all choose our own heaven and hell. That has to be my heaven.

When you see news on the telly of earthquakes and floods and drought and starvation you realise just how privileged you are to be free, living in a boringly calm country where there’s no violent politics, no shortage of food or water. You can go out and just do your own thing. There aren’t even any malarial mosquitoes here, or poisonous snakes, (except for adders), or poisonous spiders. Or bombs dropping on us. Or lions, or any really fierce animals waiting in the bushes. Perhaps if we had a guaranteed five months of sunshine, England would be a prototype for heaven.

God – or whoever – made it when he was practising. He thought, ‘Let’s put a green hill here and there, a few white sand beaches, sand dunes, oak trees for shade, bluebells and primroses, foxgloves and buttercups and daisies, but let’s have rain and thunder and lightning and dark moors for drama, and birds singing, and a few nonviolent animals. And then let’s throw in a few human beings to make things more complicated.’

And the night sky. A bit of terror to make you feel that there’s something more out there than you understand, something beyond. A whole universe. And then more.

There certainly isn’t time even in an ordinary healthy human’s lifetime to learn enough of this world and this life to be satisfied. If I get another chance, I do hope I come back as a healthy  intelligent person, who loves knowledge and has the ability to learn quickly about nature and science and literature and astronomy and geology and – everything. That sounds so mushy.

Why are we here, anyway, and why do we want to learn stuff? What good is it if we die just as we are beginning to understand a little of what’s going on around us? What is the point?

Here, I mean here at Peregrine Cottage, there is never real silence. Always there’s the
hush shush
of waves, and if the wind is blowing, its sound overwhelms even the waves.

I am frightened of the wind. You can’t see it or smell it, but it’s there, all around you, moving your bit of world, tearing it apart, shifting the roof, pulling up trees, making the sea angry so it gets bigger and bigger and washes you away. The cold east wind I hate. The destructive north wind I hate. The totally devastating south wind – which we hardly ever get –
I hate most of all. There were a few horrible storms when we first came here and I was very scared, but I must be sensible about this. I have more chance of dying of a heart attack or stroke than being swept away by the wind, or being in a landslide, or being struck by lightning, or being washed in a tide of mud into the sea, over the cliff, onto the rocks.

Mum isn’t working today and we sit outside together and she is peaceful and happy because the heat of the sun is seeping into her skin and bones and relaxing her. Mr Lorn won’t be back until next week, so she doesn’t have to worry about being caught again without her clothes. I sit close by in the shade, reading an ancient book by Ernest Neal, called
The Badger
, with an illustration of a badger on the cover by Paxton Chadwick –
there’s another weird name! Where do they get them? The author talks of having to walks for miles in the Cotswolds to find badgers. We have them come to us, literally on our doorstep.

This bit of folklore is a bit worrying though: 

Should a badger cross the path

Which thou hast taken, then

Good luck is thine, so it be said

Beyond the luck of men.

But if it cross in front of thee,

Beyond here thou shalt tread,

And if by chance doth turn the mould,

Thou art numbered with the dead.

Does that mean that when the badgers crossed in front of me, it was an omen of my death? But the old man at the poetry reading made it sound like a blessing.
Something wonderful is going to happen to you
, he said.