Honeybee

by Craig Silvey;

  Fella Bitzgerald looked at me and curled my fingers around the piece of paper. She had big sad eyes.

  ‘Sometimes the family we’re born into don’t support who we are. My parents are very devout JWs. They kicked me out when I was fifteen. I moved to the city and lived in a group home for two years. I got very good at fixing up cuts and bruises. It’s why I became a nurse. But I’ve still got scars of my own. See? Right here.’

  She pointed to a raised line next to her right eye, which was coated in foundation.

  ‘And in here.’

  She tapped her chest, just above her heart.

  ‘And here.’

  She showed me her left wrist, which had rows of old cutting marks.

  ‘There would be more if I hadn’t found my new family. You met some of them tonight. They’re my sisters and my mothers. They would fight to the living end for me, and that helps to remind me that I matter. I’m worth something. A lot. And you matter too. You’re strong. You’re beautiful. And you’ve been formally adopted into the House of Bitzgerald, girl. Like it or lump it. And I’m here to tell you that you can heal. You can be who you want to be. And you’ve got a big, bold, meaningful life ahead of you.’

  She kissed my hand, then she stood up.

  ‘Goodnight. Get some sleep.’

  She started to walk out.

  ‘Peter?’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘You’ve got a really nice singing voice.’

  ‘Oh, I know, sweetie.’

  She winked and turned out the light.

  I slept through the next few days. I felt heavy and sore and I didn’t want to do anything. I didn’t shower or brush my teeth. I stayed in bed and flicked through Edie’s diaries or some of the old Women’s Weekly magazines that I found under the bed. They were full of knitwear patterns and bad recipes and pictures of people I didn’t recognise. Edie had done all the crosswords and the word puzzles.

  The only reason I got out of bed was to make sure Vic was okay and that he was eating. I didn’t want to go outside, so I cooked what was left in the house. I made a vegetable soup, and I made damper out of flour and water and milk. Neither of us ate much.

  One afternoon I saw Aggie walking towards the front door in her school uniform. She knocked. I asked Vic to say that I was away visiting my mother for a few days. He didn’t want to do that, so neither of us answered.

  After a week, the swelling and the bruising on my face went down and the dizzy headaches stopped. The stitches on the back of my head were really itchy, and I asked Vic to remove them with tweezers and scissors. He had to wear Edie’s reading glasses because he couldn’t see very well. It hurt, but he got them out.

  I found a drawer full of old DVDs under the television in the lounge room. There was an Alfred Hitchcock collection and a Marilyn Monroe box set and lots of old classic films. There were some Westerns that Edie had bought Vic for his birthday.

  We started watching them at night, sitting on the couch with the lights out. Vic always started snoring within twenty minutes. Most nights I crawled over and leaned against him and put my head on his shoulder. He was warm and I liked the rhythm of his breathing. Sometimes he woke up, but he didn’t mind me being there. He would pat my leg and slowly get up and go to bed, then I would curl into the spot he just left.

  One night we were watching Rear Window. There was an actress called Grace Kelly in it. She was so elegant and beautiful and perfect that it just made me think about how ugly I was. I looked over at Vic. He was asleep. I wondered why he bothered with me, and why he let me stay with him. I touched the watch on my wrist and I thought about the man in the black Audi. Then I thought about all those old men on the webcam sites. I wondered if Vic looked at me the same way, but he was just too polite to say anything.

  I shifted closer on the couch. I rested my hand on his stomach. I watched him sleep. I figured that I owed him, and it was the right thing to do because he was lonely and he had been kind to me. And if Vic did feel that way about me, at least I was worth something.

  I was nervous. I lifted up his shirt, and I slid my hand under the elastic of his shorts. He was really hairy. I moved further down, and I curled my fingers around his penis. The skin was really soft and warm and loose. I gently squeezed.

  Vic woke up. After a moment, he grabbed my wrist. I let him go. Then he took my hand out and held it. He looked me in the eye and he shook his head.

  ‘Don’t do that,’ he said.

  He didn’t seem angry or upset with me. He stood up and left the room. I was really embarrassed.

  Vic didn’t say anything about it the next day. But we never watched any movies again after that.

  I thought a lot about going back to the Clayton Road overpass. I thought about going to a train station and stepping onto the tracks. I thought about the knives in the kitchen drawer. I thought about ways to do it all the time. The only thing that stopped me was the promise I made to Vic, even though he didn’t know about it. But I couldn’t figure out how I was going to fulfil it.

  So I went to see Aggie.

  ‘Oh my God! Where have you been?’

  She hugged me. She was warm and soft. I handed her the

  plate of butterfly cakes I had made and she dragged me inside.

  Her mum and dad were in the living room. Mr Meemeduma was reading on a tablet. He looked at me over the top of his glasses and smiled and waved. Mrs Meemeduma was at the table marking schoolwork. She stood up and gave me a hug too.

  ‘We’ve missed you!’ she said.

  ‘I was away visiting my mum.’

  ‘Did she sell your house?’ Aggie asked.

  ‘There’s a couple from overseas who want to buy it, I think.’

  Aggie put the plate of cakes on the kitchen counter. She pointed at Mrs Meemeduma.

  ‘Don’t devour all of these! That goes for both of you.’

  ‘Yes, daughter.’ Mr Meemeduma laughed.

  Aggie’s room was even messier than usual. She had stacks of books and folders on her desk and her chair. She moved them so I could sit down, and she kicked her clothes under the bed.

  ‘Sorry. My life is in a general state of disorder right now.’

  ‘What’s wrong?’

  Aggie sat on her bed and sighed.

  ‘I don’t know. I met with this career counsellor a week ago because I’ve got to select subjects for next year, so I need to establish at least a vague notion of what I want to do with my life, but the truth is I have absolutely no idea. It’s not that I have a lack of interests; I’m just, like, super fucking aware that it’s one of the most critical decisions I’ll ever make, and I’m so not ready to make it. I mean, how do you know? My mum is ridiculously supportive, you know, but she just speaks in fluent Inspirational Quotes, things like, ‘Just follow your passions and you’ll discover who you are,’ which is lovely, of course, but totally unhelpful. And my dad is so sanguine and chill, and, like, rationally I’m aware that he’ll be happy regardless of what I do, but he’s also like this intimidating intellect. He literally reads books about quantum theory and macroeconomic trends and ornithology and fucking biodynamic agricultural practices for fun, and so, like, how do I pursue a vocation that actually earns his admiration, you know? And I know what you’re thinking. Oh, poor Aggie, she has too many career options! I recognise this, hence my shame spiral. It’s such a middle-class problem. Like, did I ever tell you how my dad became a dentist?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘So I once asked him why he chose to look at teeth all day and be a source of dread for most of the population, and he told me this incredible story. Wait, before I tell you, are you actually interested, or are you just being sweet?’

  ‘No. I want to hear it.’

  ‘Okay. So my dad grew up in Colombo, and his whole family lived in a two-bedroom apartment pretty much bordering a slum district. They shared a kitchen and a bathroom with all these other families. There was no money for school or anything. They stole electricity by running cables str
aight from a power line. When he was a kid, my dad worked out how to fix an old radio that he found, and he listened to it all the time. And because he’s a savant, he learned how to speak English by listening to the BBC World Service and cricket commentary and syndicated American Bandstand episodes. He told me he used to think that Americans were crazy because all their songs used the word “baby”. He was like, “Why are they singing all these songs about infants?” It must have been so confusing. Can you imagine how gross and peculiar popular music would be if we took the word “baby” literally in the lyrics? Like, I don’t know, “Baby, I Need Your Loving”.’

  We both laughed. I thought of one.

  ‘“Baby Got Back”,’ I said.

  Aggie screamed with laughter. It made me feel good.

  ‘Oh my fucking God! That’s too much. My sides hurt. Okay. Anyway, so after he could speak it, he taught himself how to read and write in English too. He would take books home from the back of the city library, because sometimes they threw out these old obscure volumes.’

  ‘He never went to school?’

  ‘Nope. It’s crazy. So when my dad was fourteen, he was working like ten hours a day at this industrial laundry. One night he gets home and his dad, my grandfather, is howling in pain. He’s got a fever, headache, he’s in and out of consciousness. But my dad is super calm. He kneels beside him, checks his temperature, and tries to work out what’s wrong. He takes a look inside his mouth, and he sees that one of his lower teeth has this gnarly abscess, probably because he was addicted to betel nut. Anyway, my dad has this old nineteenth-century medical guidebook that he found at the back of the library, and he finds the right procedure and he turns to the page with diagrams and a method. Then he gets a pair of pliers and a peeling knife, and he literally performs a molar extraction on his own dad.’

  ‘Seriously?’

  ‘I honestly didn’t believe it. But he still has the book. And his dad’s blood is even on that page.’

  ‘Whoa. Did it work?’

  ‘His dad was fine in like two days, and chewing betel nut again like a fucking idiot. Not only that, he’s bragging to everyone with ears that his son fixed his tooth. So two weeks later, some old guy turns up at their house with his cheek the size of a mango and he wants to see this miracle child dentist that everyone is talking about. And my dad pulled his tooth out and sent him on his way. So more people start to show up. Meanwhile, he’s reading everything he can about dentistry, calling up actual dentists to get them to donate supplies. And a month later he’s administering to six people a day and making enough money to provide for the whole family. Then this NGO hears about him, and they sponsor him to go study in the UK, and that’s where he met my mum. Crazy. And literally the most impressive thing I have ever done is finish runner-up in a state spelling bee.’

  ‘That’s still impressive.’

  ‘Want to know what word I got wrong?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Periodontology.’

  ‘I don’t know what that means.’

  ‘It’s like the study of gum diseases and stuff. Like, of all the words to spell wrong, right? My dad thought it was hilarious, but I was devastated about losing.’

  ‘But you came second.’

  ‘I know, but, like, I’ve always had this anxiety about failing and not living up to the legacy of my parents. It would be so much easier if they were complete fuck-ups. You must feel the same way though sometimes?’

  ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘Well, your dad’s like a vice-admiral and your mum is this super-connected consultant. Don’t you feel like you’ve got all this pressure on you to be successful and influential and to live an important life?’

  I shrugged.

  ‘I don’t really think about it.’

  ‘See, that’s because you’re sensible and emotionally stable and I’m a neurotic mess. You’ve probably got everything worked out. Do you know who you want to be?’

  Her question made me blush and look away. I wanted to tell her she was wrong about me. I wanted to confess that everything I had told her about my family had been a lie. The truth was right there in my chest. I took a deep breath.

  ‘How would you rob a bank?’ I asked.

  Aggie laughed really loudly.

  ‘Well, yeah, we’ve always got that up our sleeve. There’s always armed robbery.’

  ‘No. Seriously. How would you do it?’

  ‘How would I rob a bank?’

  ‘Yeah. Say you really had to, but you couldn’t get caught.’

  ‘Oh my God, Sam!’

  Aggie stared at me for such a long time with her mouth open that it made me nervous.

  ‘That’s such a fucking good question,’ she said.

  All Aggie talked about for the next few days was how to rob a bank. She was obsessed. She said it was just like a role-playing game, but I think she wanted a distraction from her other problems.

  We decided that going in with guns and balaclavas would never work. Aggie said we needed a more creative approach. We talked through a lot of ideas. One included dressing up and posing as cash-in-transit security guards and fooling the bank staff into giving us bags of money from the vault. Another was playing a long con by becoming an actual bank employee and clearing out all the till money without anyone knowing. We talked about breaching their security systems by hacking, but neither of us had any skills with computers.

  Aggie read online that most suburban banks were accessible through the ceiling space, and she made up a plan to enter at night through the roof cavity and drop explosives to open the vault. We both agreed that was too complicated.

  We talked about stealing a whole ATM. We watched security footage on YouTube of people chaining a cash machine to a big ute and ripping it out of a wall. It was the most promising idea so far, but Aggie still wasn’t convinced.

  Then one Friday afternoon, I came over with a plate of dark chocolate and cherry muffins. Aggie was at her desk with her laptop open.

  ‘Holy shit, I’ve fucking got it!’

  I sat on the bed. Aggie didn’t even look at the muffins.

  ‘Here’s the thing. We’ve been going about this all wrong. We’ve been thinking all Ocean’s Eleven, but it should be as simple as possible. It’s not a heist, it’s a robbery, right?’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘So I’ve been reading about all these successful bank robberies, and they all have one thing in common.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘It’s just one person.’

  ‘I like that.’

  ‘Oh my God, I’ve read way too much about this, but I’ve worked it out. Do you want to hear my plan? It’s diabolical and literally foolproof.’

  My heart started beating fast.

  ‘I really do.’

  ‘Okay, so, here’s how you do it. You just walk into the bank. You want to be smartly dressed, like you’re some normal desk-job professional. But some kind of disguise is critical, obviously, because there are cameras everywhere; so you’ve got to obscure your face, but not in a way that draws any attention. Now, you’re also carrying a bag, like a backpack or a gym bag. Something unassuming, but it has to look like it’s got some weight to it.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I’ll get to that. It’s genius, I promise. So you wait your turn, like you’re there to make a deposit or whatever, but it’s okay if you start to look a bit nervous at this point, because when it’s your turn, you walk straight up to the teller. You don’t say a word, you just slide a letter across the counter. You’ve written this letter on generic printer paper. And you wrote it out with your left hand, or you’ve copied a different style of handwriting so they can’t do an accurate analysis.’

  ‘What does it say?’

  ‘Okay, so, bear with me, because it gets a bit complicated here. The letter says that you’re just a courier who is being ordered against their will, because the author of the letter, who is the mastermind behind the robbery, is holding a member of your family hostag
e or something, and you’ve just been sent out to collect the money. Get it?’

  I nodded.

  ‘See, this scenario gives you plausible deniability if you get caught, right? I told you it’s genius. Anyway, so the letter says that you, the courier, have a remotely controlled bomb in your bag, and it instructs the teller to give you all the cash in their drawer, but only the large denominations, because the twenties might have a tracer or a dye pack.’

  ‘What’s a dye pack?’

  ‘They’re amazing. Basically, they’re these small explosives that they conceal in wads of cash, and they’re designed to detonate once the thief is a certain radius from the bank. But it’s not this huge atomic blast; what happens is the thief gets sprayed with a bright-coloured dye, so the police can identify them easily.’

  ‘Seriously? They use them in banks here?’

  ‘They seriously do. But they’re mostly in the twenties, from what I read, so you have to specifically demand the hundreds and the fifties. The teller will just give you the money, too, because complying with demands is their standard procedure.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Yeah, well, think about it. These corporations are huge. It’s going to cost them less for a single branch to give up a few thousand dollars than it would to refuse and have a customer get injured in a shootout or something. Even so, you want to maximise your chances of getting away safely. So once the teller gives you the money, what you need to do is put the backpack down and leave it in the bank. The letter will explain that if they press a panic button, or if they lock the doors or call the police, the bomb will be remotely triggered. Once the money is delivered safely to the mastermind, the bomb will be disarmed. That allows you to walk outside to your getaway car or whatever. Now, I know what you’re going to ask me.’

  ‘What am I going to ask?’

  ‘You’re going to ask, Agnes, why would I be so fucking gormless as to leave a bag full of evidence for detectives to analyse? to which I would reply, Listen kid, when you’ve been in the game as long as I have, you pick up some tricks, so show me some goddamn respect.’