The Burying Beetle (16 page)

I remember Grandma calling me Sweetie-Pie or Sweetheart. My heart is not sweet. It’s bloody rotten, actually.

No one really knows why it grew that way
– maybe an infection when Mum was first pregnant. I was born with heart failure. My pulmonary artery is only vestigial; which means it’s not properly formed. My blood is oxygenated by way of the bronchial arteries, and there are other defects in the heart and circulation too, which actually help the blood get round the system other ways, luckily. So my brain is getting about 75 per cent oxygenated. As it is such a rare condition – babies born with these problems usually die within a few days or weeks – they don’t really know what to do with me, or they haven’t, so far. They’ve been making it up as they go along. They admit that. And I’m still here, after all. But now they reckon a transplant might be the answer. A heart–lung transplant.

Last time I went to the hospital I met a boy who’s had the transplant. He’s eighteen, from London, a terrific athlete, apparently. Marlon. He had become ill very suddenly with a virus that knocks off the muscles surrounding the heart, and had to have an immediate transplant to save his life. He’s doing really well, running now, and says he’ll keep in touch. ‘See you, man,’ is what he actually said, but he is eighteen and I am only just twelve, so…

I haven’t run since I was… what? Nine? Eight, probably. Who needs to run, anyway?

There is possibly someone just going about their life – eating chips, doing a really difficult maths exam, reading Shakespeare, or listening to a rap record; skipping, washing their hair, playing piano; cuddling their Daddy; writing a poem; just being whoever they were born to be, who will one day soon run out in front of a car, or fall off a bike, or die of some horrible disease, or have a fatal bungie jump. That person – or that person’s mother and father – are going to give their heart and lungs to me. What an amazing gift.

My new heart and lungs. A life. A few more years, anyway. Time.

Perhaps I could have had Grandpop’s heart and lungs, being as he was closely related. But I suppose they were too worn out by smoking to be of use to a young person; but I like the idea of having his heart beating inside my chest. In a way, I suppose it already is. His genes are part of my make-up. He encouraged me to climb and be adventurous like him, not that I needed to be encouraged.

It was great being with them.

Mum is always – has always been – ultra protective, but Grandpop cheered me on when I did crazy stuff like jumping from roof to roof of the beach huts, and walking along the railings above the beach at Shoeburyness as if I was tightrope walking. I didn’t get dizzy in those days. I remember Grandma saying, ‘Do you want to kill her?’ and Grandpop saying, ‘Better she dies doing something she really wants to do rather than dying in bed. Dying in bed is for old people.’

He lives on in my head, Grandpop does, and if I use expressions he used, and if I have picked up his mannerisms, maybe then he’ll live on as long as I live – which, of course, might not be long. But maybe whatever I say will be noticed and used in someone else’s life, and so my mind, my thoughts, my imagination, his sayings and philosophy, could continue on and on, maybe forever. Maybe. Who knows? We just have to do the best we can while we’re here. Otherwise, what’s the point?

Poor Rambo is flea-ridden and has an allergy to his fleas. He scratches and has scabs and bald patches. Poor Rambo. Mum grooms all the cats most days. They go to her if she bangs the comb on the outside table. She is quite fierce with them, firmly combing them, head to tail, belly and back, under the chin, on their hard little heads, but they love it. I suppose it’s like a really good massage. And she gets rid of some of the fleas. Cat fleas are really hard-skinned – shelled. I find it almost impossible to squash them dead. You have to get them between the backs of two fingernails and press hard until they go pop. And they are so small, they easily escape.

I’m lucky. They don’t bite me.

Summer, of course, is allergic. She doesn’t come round much – she
didn’t
come round much – in the summer holidays, because that’s when they are at their worst.

Mum tries to put that stuff on the backs of the cats’ necks – to kill the fleas, or make them impotent or infertile or something, but they sense when she is going to do it, and leap off her lap before she can even open the sachet. She’s threatening to get the vet in to give them all an injection against fleas.

It costs loads of money for a call out, but it’s a lot easier than carrying them all up the hill to the car on her own.

I’m useless when it comes to carrying stuff anywhere, of course. I don’t know what I am good for, really. Oh, Buggering Nora! as Grandpop would have said.

Ginnie has been to see me. At last! She rang the doorbell. Mum was at work. I was lounging around in my pyjamas – very embarrassing, but I asked her in for a cup of coffee and while the kettle boiled I got dressed. The cats were all over her. They instinctively know a cat-lover. She asked if I had been watching the peregrine and I said yes. I told her about the badgers and the seals. We went outside and looked through our binoculars at the peregrine nest. No peregrines though. I have arranged to go with Ginnie bird-watching tomorrow at Hayle estuary, if Mum allows me to go. There is a special hut there where birders go to watch all the waders in the river. It’s called a hide. She’ll pick me up if Mum doesn’t want to go. I’ll persuade Mum to come, though. I’d like her to come too.

Mum had a good day at work. She’s seen a cottage that might be right for us. The right sort of price. She’ll take me to see it next Saturday. It’s occupied by holidaymakers until changeover day. I’m so excited!

Note:
There are two incredibly foreign looking birds on the feeder this evening – red, black and white heads, small, like finches. Goldfinches. They are so exotic they look like they should be in a zoo. Except I don’t believe in zoos.

SUNDAY
MORNING
,
MUM gave up going to the car boot sale and came bird-watching with Ginnie and me instead. There were all these old people, except for me, and Ginnie, of course. Wrinklies, like Mum, and a few Crumblies. But they were very friendly and welcoming to us. Our GP was there, he was the leader I think, and let me look through his telescope. He had to lower the tripod it was on so I could reach. I pretended I could see what it was we were supposed to be looking at – some unusual wading bird – but I can’t honestly say I did see it. That was in the hide. Then we all walked a little way along a footpath, crossed the road and leaned on a wall and looked over towards the estuary. And who was there leaning over the wall with his d
ad? Brett! His dad is keen on birding too. They joined us as we walked along by the estuary.

I had a good time, and so did Mum, who looked cool in her khaki shirt and camouflage pants. She was wearing red lip-gloss and a khaki baseball cap. (I wore my cowboy hat
, of course.) She smiled a lot.

Ginnie is obviously well known to the bird-watchers and knows all about the bird life. She introduced me to everyone, though I can’t remember the names.

When she said our name – Stevens – someone asked if we were Cornish, because, apparently, Stevens is a local name. Mum said that Daddy’s family was from St Ives. I had no idea. Cool. I might have cousins or something here. Why didn’t she tell me before? I need family for goodness sake. I shall look into it.

In the heat of the day the wind’s dropped to nothing. No bamboo leaf quivers, no branch of the tall silver tree shivers. It looks like a painting, not alive. The only movement is a spiral of midges: a little cluster of juggled miniature insects in chaotic constant motion, the shimmering cloud staying more or less in one place, hanging above a certain part of the garden in the sun’s slanting rays. When I walk along the path where the annoying flock, (that’s what it looks like – but not like starlings who all more or less go in the same direction) hangs, my head divides them and they come together behind me. They are in an ecstasy of perpetual motion. Is it a mating dance, an orgy, perpetual emotion? What is their life? How long do they live? Perhaps they are a little treat in the diet of a certain bird or bat. A small amount would have to be very tasty. Like caviar. (Not that I’ve ever had it, but I’ve heard about it. Smells fishy, I think. Surgeons’ eggs, or something.)

There’s never complete silence here, even in the still of this overheated day. The calm sea has dribbled sneakily up the beach and is now racing towards the black cliff, slapping and smacking and spanking the rocks. A hurrying sound. More perpetual motion.

Mum is soaking up the last rays of sun. Her whole body is in the shade except for her face and head. She looks relaxed. The sun wrinkles her blue-grey eyelids and silvers her hair. I can see all the cracks and creases of her skin – especially her neck. It’s rippled and crinkled like our beach at low tide. But of course, I say nothing. She prefers to be backlit in public, she tells me. But as it’s only me seeing her, she Doesn’t Give A Damn. I know where she got that from – poor Scarlett O’Hara! What an absolute turd her husband (or was it her lover) was! Can’t remember his name. Ask Mum. Dark, moustache.

Mum says, ‘A charming brute, Clark Gable.’

Mum says she wants a bulldog-clip job on her neck and chin, just stretch it all back and tie it under her hair, behind her ears, a ponytail of loose skin. Yuk!

The young herring gulls’ voices are breaking. They have a sort of long quivering quaver and their only cry is a simple sound – not complicated speech like the adult gulls have. The adolescents don’t chatter or mutter or gossip or complain or laugh raucously. They just yell loudly –
eeeyh, eeeyh, eeeyh
. Like a rusty creaky gate. Like me I suppose, on a bad day.

I had no idea that herring gulls took so much time to mature. They are big like their parents, but naïve and ignorant, lacking the right expression for their feelings. Whatever they are feeling they only have one word for it –
eeeyh
.

I think the adult herring gulls are very intelligent. Pop is anyway. He looks me in the eye. Not many people do that.

Talking of which – Pop has just appeared, as if by magic, silently, on the deck rail next to me. It’s tea time of course, and I’ve fed the cats but not Pop.

He folds his pure white angel wings neatly. They are a pale cloudy grey on top. He has pink legs, with knobbly knees and webbed feet. His left foot is slightly damaged – or the soft web is, or was – but now has mended.

His toenails are black curved claws.

I love his head – he has no eyelashes or eyebrows, but his yellow eyes have an orange line drawn around them – the same orange as the spot on his beak. When a young one wants food he pecks at the orange spot on the beak and the parent regurgitates mashed up food. Pasties, chips, herring, ice cream, whatever. But I have a feeling that Pop is a bachelor. A lonely old widower bird. He does this thing with his legs and wings, he stands on one leg and stretches his other leg and wing out behind him. When he stands side on to me, I can see the hole through his beak at the nostril – I suppose it’s his nostril. He is so royal-looking and solitary, just like Jonathan Livingston Seagull.

I wonder if he thinks about me? I wonder if he really is the ghost of my Grandpop?

There are raspberries ripening in the far corner of the garden. They are hidden in a scramble of overgrown pink campion, forget-me-not, white and red valerian, bramble, and another plant, which is tall and pink and hairy. It must be a weed, because it is growing so well. Hemp agrimony. What a wonderful name.

Mum says she wishes she had written down all the silly things I used to say when I was little. Like – we were hurrying through the streets in a rainstorm once, and I said, ‘Don’t worry Mum, it’s only a passing shower.’

And in London Mum had a friend called Isabel. I could never get her name right and called her Bluebell; and I called Grandma’s forget-me-nots, do-not-forget-me’s.

Aren’t little children cool? Perhaps I should have died after I said that.

I’m in bed now and Rambo is snoring next to me. He’s dreaming. I know he’s dreaming because his ears are twitching, and his whiskers. Is he dreaming of all the mice he nearly caught? My animals all have their own lives that I know nothing about.

I know very little about anything.

Note: Those swarms of tiny midges are a sort of crane fly
– don’t know their name
–
but I was sort of right, it’s a marriage dance: a stag party, males only, dancing above a particular object which they use to take their bearing. Sometimes they choose a clump of coloured flowers, or a brightly coloured plastic bowl. Ours were hovering over the blue chair on the deck. They dance together to attract females. When a female reaches the fringe of the clustering males she is greeted by a male who whisks her off on honeymoon.

‘
MUM
– WHY DIDN’T you tell me Daddy
has family in St Ives?’

‘I forgot.’

‘Forgot? How could you forget something like that? I need family. You’re not enough, you know.’

‘Gussie, they’re your father’s relations, not mine.’

‘But they’re part of my family.’

‘
Don’t bite my head off, Christ! There’s only your father’s cousins.’