by Mick Jackson
It wasn’t long before they were allowed to handle the frames and shown how to turn them so that any uncapped honey didn’t come pouring out. Hector was holding up a frame one day and studying the dimpled quilt which covered the pupae when the Bee King reached in, scratched away at the comb’s surface and dragged out a small white worm between his fingernails.
“Wax moth,” he said. “Not welcome,” and rubbed it away between his finger and thumb.
The Bee King was surprisingly nimble fingered. Could nip a bee by its wings and turn it upside down, with its little legs wriggling, and point out its antennae, proboscis, sting and wax glands.
The ends of the Bee King’s fingers were stained black, and Hector asked if it was the bees that caused it.
The Bee King shook his head and looked at them. “They’re printer’s fingers,” he said. “Stained for life.”
He once sneezed into his handkerchief, and as he was putting it back in his pocket a bewildered bee crept out of the folds and flew away. The Boys watched, openmouthed. There might have been a quite rational explanation. The whole thing might have been some elaborate trick. But as far as the Boys were concerned the Bee King was able to sneeze bees into being and had his own small colony living inside him.
In the evenings they would sometimes sit out in the garden and listen to the steady hum of the bees’ industry and breathe in the honey in full flow. The Boys learned how the different sounds from the hive denoted different moods, different activities, and that each worker, far from being a mere gatherer of nectar or builder of comb, carried out a whole host of duties at various points in her short life—a nursemaid to the larvae, a sentry to keep out robber bees, a carpet sweeper to keep the hive tidy, a punkah-wallah when it got too hot.
According to the Bee King, people used the hive as a model for whatever system or philosophy they happened to favor. A monarchist would see it as the epitome of royal patronage, a communist as the embodiment of the individual’s willingness to devote himself to the state. But very few of these people, the Bee King said, had ever been anywhere near an apiary—wouldn’t know one bee from another—and only an experienced beekeeper could tell you whether the queen actually gave the orders or was just a prisoner in her own castle, carrying out the colony’s commands.
When Lewis asked the Bee King what he made of the hive he said that, if anything, he preferred to see it as a numbers machine and the bees not as tiny bankers or foundry workers but as cogs in a vast arithmetical mill. “Each frame is a living abacus,” he said. “Eggs are constantly added and subtracted.” The colony was continually carrying out its own checks and balances. If a hive grew too crowded the queen swarmed, dividing the colony, to continue her arithmetic somewhere else.
The business of the hive, the Bee King said, was that of conversion: wax into comb … nectar into honey … eggs into larvae … pupae into bees. The colony’s only concern was its own continuity. If they lost their queen the workers would take an ordinary egg, feed it regally and rear an heir to the throne. But whatever system one imagined operating in it, whatever philosophy one imagined motivated it, the hive was an entity in itself. To deal in individual bees was to miss the point. Left alone, the hive would regulate itself quite happily. Whatever questions arose were constantly answered, its problems constantly solved.
Whenever Lewis Bream raised his hand in Mrs. Fog’s classroom he was either bursting to go to the toilet or just plain stumped at what was on the board. He was not, by any stretch of the imagination, what Mrs. Fog considered to be one of her brighter pupils, and when she saw his hand go up one afternoon during that summer of bees, with him in no evident hurry to leave his seat, she naturally assumed that she was about to be called upon to go back over the problem she had just set.
“Would you say …” Lewis said, then stopped and decided to come at it another way. “Are you a monarchist, Miss, or a communist?”
Mrs. Fog’s blood ran cold. Her ears burned; her faculties failed her. The fact that such bile should come spouting out of a boy who was, ordinarily, little more than mute, only doubled its impact. It was as if Lewis Bream, one of the most timid, unexceptional children ever to stare up at her, had climbed onto his desk, yanked down his trousers and proceeded to toy violently with himself.
She was torn between fetching her cane and shaking the boy by the shoulders, but managed to recover herself, grab him by the ear and drag him over to Dunce’s Corner, if only to give herself some time to come up with a more appropriate punishment. For the rest of the day she was badly flustered, and kept snapping her chalk on the board and losing her place in her usually seamless delivery. Lewis, meanwhile, stared into his little corner with all the dignity of a saint and when the end of the day came around, with Mrs. Fog still no clearer and Lewis still not the least bit contrite, all she could think to do was write a note and send the burden of determining his punishment home with him.
“Lewis spent the afternoon in Dunce’s Corner,” the note said, “after casting political aspersions on his teacher.”
As she tidied the classroom, her words kept coming back to her—not least the way she had referred to herself in the third person, as if this alone might provide her with some badly needed perspective on the afternoon’s events.
Back home, the note went back and forth between Lewis’s parents, succeeding in confusing and upsetting them almost as much as Lewis had confused and upset Mrs. Fog. Neither wanted a conversation with their son about politics, neither knew for certain what “aspersions” were and in the end Lewis was summoned by his father, given a general dressing-down and sent to his room, where he lay on his bed and listened to the summer’s evening going on beyond the curtains.
He could hear the birds fussing in the gutters and the mumble of the wireless coming up through the floor. He closed his eyes—he wasn’t sure how long for—but was vaguely aware of the evening’s shadows filling the lanes and when he heard his mother talking to a neighbor in the front garden he got up from his bed and opened the window a couple of inches to hear what she had to say.
She was at her wits’ end, apparently. The end of her tether. She had a son with a head full of bees. Who talked earnestly about all sorts of nonsense. Who had even begun to walk in a peculiar way. And now, to cap it all, he had somehow managed to get that rock of a woman, that beacon of reason, Mrs. Fog, in a flap.
The more she talked, the more she seemed to upset herself. Seemed to have not the least inclination to stop. She began to ramble. Started ranting—slurring. But plowed on, getting louder and louder, until every last house in the street knew all her troubles and any remaining sense rolled back and forth, like a bottle on the deck of a pitching ship.
Lewis lay on his bed, wondering how much longer she could keep it up, when he heard a terrible shriek followed by the sound of splintering wood. There was a period of blessed silence, and Lewis pulled back the curtain to find his mother with one arm around Mrs. Heaney’s shoulder and her foot caught in the broken bars of the garden gate, like a rabbit in a trap.
A Cuckoo in the Nest
THE INTRUDER came at the Bee King’s garden by an unconventional route, negotiating the beans, sweet peas and chrysanthemums of the allotments, where the bees had been foraging only hours before.
He stopped at the fence, up to his knees in stinging nettles, and surveyed the cottage’s silhouette—a solid block of stone, with the Bee King sleeping somewhere in it and the moon high above its chimney pots—then fed a leg through the fence, found his footing and eased the rest of him after it.
He inched along the wall of the shed until he felt the lawn firm beneath his feet, then went straight over to the nearest hive. Stooped beside it. Listened. Nothing but a low, perfunctory hum. Checked over both shoulders. Whispered a few words, as if at confessional. Took a deep breath to steady himself. Then raised his hand and brought it down hard onto the hive.
The bees stirred. Roared up like an engine, but just as quickly died away. The intruder looked at the hive.
Muttered a few more words to himself, shifted position. Leaned against the hive, embraced it and began to rock it from side to side.
He was still shaking it when the bees burst out into the garden. Within seconds the night was flushed with them.And their excitement spread from hive to hive like a contagion, rattling all the other bees into action, until the apiary was madness manifest.
He got to his feet, made for the gate, but wasn’t halfway there before the first wave of bees was on him. He stumbled on for another yard or two before he fell. And as each bee landed and unloaded its sting, it released a joyful pheromone, which spoke profoundly to all the other bees. So that in a matter of seconds the intruder had a shawl of bees on him. Then a blanket. Then was utterly enthralled by them.
Marjory Pye couldn’t think whom to turn to. She’d contemplated running down the hill to Lillian Minter’s and jumping on a train to go and stay with her sister, Flo. What got in the way was the fact that she couldn’t muster the courage to open the lavatory door, in case the demon that had kept her cowering there since three in the morning came stumbling after her, waving its bandaged hands in the air.
She’d never considered the vicarage to be much of a sanctuary but it was one of the few houses visible through the hole in the lavatory door. The fellow in it, after all, was meant to have the whole weight of the church behind him.
She’d spent half the night cooped up in that wooden hut with nothing but a handful of chocolate limes she found in her overcoat pocket to keep some sugar in her blood. Had perched on the lavatory seat with her foot jammed against the door, and got up every five or ten minutes and peeked through the spy hole to see if the coast was clear, but no matter how many times she looked it was never quite clear enough.
The day eventually broke, but with none of the fanfares with which daybreaks are often credited. It was, in Miss Pye’s opinion, an almost painful procedure, in which the dead of night was slowly superceded by the dead of day. There was too much cloud for the sun to make any kind of entrance and there was not much birdsong to be heard, but when her path to the vicarage was finally bathed in a pale gray light she told herself that she simply refused to spend the rest of her life in an outside lavatory, pulled her coat around her and charged out into the day.
When the Reverend Bentley opened his front door he looked about as disheveled to Miss Pye as she did to him. His quilted dressing gown might have cut quite a dash on a different fellow, but as far as Miss Pye was concerned he looked as if he had just jumped out of a window and brought the curtains along with him. She couldn’t help noticing the couple of inches of rumpled long johns tucked into his stockings and the fact that he wasn’t wearing any slippers, but could hardly berate a man for his lack of decorum when she’d just hauled him out of his bed, and she’d bundled past him and was halfway down the hallway before he’d finished asking if there was anything wrong.
There were tears before and tears after, with great waves of emotion in between. But through all the upheaval, and the handkerchief clamped to her face, Miss Pye finally got around to articulating what it was she’d seen stalking the streets of the village and had kept her locked in her outside lav for hours on end.
“It was … a mummy,” she said, and buried her face back in her handkerchief.
She sobbed deeply for a while and when she finally managed to pull her hands down from her face it was only to thrust them out before her.
“Coming down the road,” she whimpered, “with his arms out …”
She shuddered.
“… like mummies do,” she said.
She told the reverend how she had woken in the middle of the night with a bit of an “upset” and had decided that a visit to the WC might set her straight. How she had crept downstairs, got her coat, tramped out into the garden and locked the door behind her, only to spend the next five minutes watching the moths flit about her lamp. She had given up, she said, and was about to open the door when, out of nothing but modesty’s habit, she peeped through the spy hole and beheld a mummy limping down the lane.
The reverend shifted in his armchair.
“And what was he up to?” he asked.
Miss Pye stared out of the reverend’s bay window. “Walking,” she said, as if she could still see him. “Walking about as if he owned the place.”
The reverend nodded. Picked a speck of lint from his sleeve and examined it. “And did you happen to see where he was headed?” he said.
Miss Pye raised an arm and pointed it feebly toward the window. Her finger followed the mummy’s journey around the vicarage walls, step by monstrous step, until the Reverend Bentley himself swung into her sights and a look of even greater horror filled her face.
“Good God,” she said and started choking. “The graveyard … He must have been going back to his tomb.”
As she wept, the reverend considered his options. He was well aware that he was meant to be a comfort to his parishioners rather than the cause of their distress, but there was simply no knowing into whose parlor the woman might next be spilling her tears.
“Miss Pye,” he said, “I have a confidence I should like to share with you.”
She looked up at him from behind her crumpled handkerchief.
It was possible, the reverend informed her, that a man in his position might make a behind-the-scenes representation.
Miss Pye wanted to know what a “representation” was.
“A representation,” he went on, “which would put an end to these little … walkabouts.”
There was a moment’s baffled silence.
“How?” she said. “How can you do that?” Her face suddenly slackened. “You know him?” she said. “You know the mummy?”
The Reverend Bentley nodded, which only conjured up in Miss Pye’s mind a vision of the vicar and the mummy, side by side, at the bar of the Malsters’ Arms.
“But you must promise,” the reverend insisted, “not to mention this incident to a soul. Or we’ll have the whole village in a state.”
Whatever state the village threatened to get itself into was, Miss Pye felt, never going to amount to more than a fraction of the mortal terror she had recently endured, and nothing would have given her more satisfaction than having some of her horror spread about the place. Besides, secret-keeping went against everything she stood for. Her village post office was the clearinghouse for every scrap of tittle-tattle worth the name. How on earth was she meant to keep a mummy to herself? It was enough to make a woman burst.
She looked up. The reverend’s eyes were on her.
“No more mummies?” she insisted.
“You have my word,” he said.
Over the years the reverend had noticed that, when troubled parishioners were offered a way out of an apparently inextricable predicament, they would often experience, at the very brink of release, an irresistible urge to turn and remind themselves of the torment which was about to draw to a close. So it was with Miss Pye. As the Reverend Bentley escorted her to the front door she stopped and looked him in the eye.
“The mummy …” she said, before the words snagged on her emotions. “He had flies buzzing all around him.”
The reverend rested a hand on her shoulder and gently encouraged her toward the door. “I know,” he said. “I know.”
The Reverend Bentley had managed to keep a great tide of pain at bay by solemnly promising to return his attention to it just as soon as his caller was out of the way, and as he crept back up to his bedroom it suddenly took him at his word. A nauseous heat flooded through his body. He felt feverish, pestilent. The teaks and mahoganies of the banisters and the hall’s grand paneling were a jungle, and by the time he slumped onto his bed and peeled away his socks and long johns he was halfway toward delirium.
His hips, usually as skinny as a monkey’s, looked as if they’d been packed with marbles. His knees were so tautly bloated they were almost elephantine. The flesh around both wrists was solid and senseless and his ankles looked like old Mrs. Mornay�
�s, which spilled over the tops of her shoes.
When he held the palm of one hand over his misshapen shoulder he could feel the heat coming off all the stings which were buried there. He had been invaded—hardly recognized himself. And during that first malarial morning there were times when it was possible for him to observe his own unfamiliar body and witness some of its sensations without being wholly involved in them. Then all at once the cadaver was returned to him, the pains and rages re-erupted and all the nerves and senses crackled back to life; agonies which could last for minutes or even hours—certainly long enough for him to imagine that they might have no end.
When Aldred had first mentioned the curative property of bee stings he had dismissed it, but the idea must have taken root for, a week or two later, the reverend turned up what appeared to be confirmation in a book from the library by a fellow called Lippincott. If he had known how much pain he would have to endure from the bee stings in the hope of relieving some of the pain of his arthritis he might have thought twice, but planning his raid on the hives the previous evening his only worry had been how to expose his joints for the bees’ attention while protecting the rest of him.
He considered cutting holes in an old pair of overalls, but the only pair he could find were so baggy that they would have filled up with bees in no time at all. He thought he might scoop up a couple of pints in a jug and administer them in the privacy of his own backyard, but the possible hitches in this and, indeed, every other scheme easily out-numbered the points in their favor and vexation was setting in when he had a rush of blood to the head.
He found a couple of old bedsheets in the linen cupboard and began ripping them into strips. Took off his trousers and wound them around his legs. Did the same with his arms and torso, taking care to leave a slight crack in the binding at his hips and knees and wrists. For a man who had trouble with his knife and fork, all the tearing and the fiddling with the scissors and safety pins was a fuss he could have done without. His only comfort came from the fact that he had had the foresight to go to the lavatory before he began.
