Being Bee

by Bateson, Catherine

‘I might have OCD. That is a neurotic disorder, but it’s not commonly thought of as being neurotic. The t-shirt isn’t a label. I just liked the look of it.’

  ‘We didn’t think it was a label,’ Jazzi said. ‘No one thought that.’ Her voice was very soft, as though she was talking to a child. ‘Can I get you a glass of lemonade?’

  ‘I’ll have what you’re having,’ Harley said, pointing to her glass. ‘That looks nice.’

  ‘It won’t go with your tablets,’ Jazzi said. ‘Lemonade would be nicer.’

  ‘You’re always trying to keep the best things for yourself,’ Harley said. ‘I want some of what you’ve got.’

  I waited for Jazzi to give him a lecture, but she just smiled a tight smile and poured a little wine into one of the red glasses.

  ‘We’re having a toast,’ she said to him, ‘to Nick and me.’

  ‘Toast with what? Jam? I hope it’s not strawberry. I can’t eat strawberries. Or raspberries. I don’t eat red, Jazzi. Pink’s okay if it’s on the top but not if it’s inside.’

  ‘She didn’t mean toast,’ I said, putting my hand over Harley’s hand which was busy drawing the flower pattern of the tablecloth over and over again. He jumped when I touched him but his hand stayed still under mine. ‘We’re not having toast. It’s a toast, when you congratulate people on something they’ve done. Then we’ll have dinner and there’s vegetarian for you. Jazzi made it specially.’

  ‘Specially for me?’

  I nodded.

  ‘So, no red?’

  ‘No, it’s orange. It’s roast pumpkin and sweet potato cannelloni.’

  ‘Orange is good.’ Harley nodded. ‘I like orange, even when it’s inside. So now we congratulate?’

  ‘Yes,’ Uncle Rob said quickly, ‘now is a good time to congratulate Jazzi and Nick on their good fortune in finding each other. To Jazzi and Nick!’

  Everyone raised their glasses and murmured, ‘To Jazzi and Nick.’

  ‘Nick the worrier,’ Harley said. ‘I can see which one he is. Hello, Nick the someone, not the everyone.’

  I was scared that Dad would be confused and say the wrong thing, but he was paying attention for once.

  ‘Hello, Harley, I am pleased to meet you,’ he said and smiled one of his best smiles that went right from his eyes down practically to his chin.

  ‘It isn’t often I meet Jasmine’s friends,’ Harley said. ‘We should have toasts to that, too.’

  ‘To meeting friends,’ Dad said, raising his glass again.

  ‘Oh yes,’ Stan said, ‘and another toast, to Patreecia and me. Patreecia has consented to come with me on a ... what do you call it?’

  ‘A holiday, Stan,’ Nanna said. ‘That’s what we’re calling it.’

  ‘No, no. There is a better word. It is on the tip of my tongue. Yes – a road trip. We are going on a road trip of nostalgia, back to Lake Jindabyne and Eucumbene where I worked when I was a young man new to this country.’

  ‘A road trip?’ Dad looked at Nanna.

  ‘A holiday,’ Nanna said firmly. ‘Stan and I are going on a holiday.’

  ‘Together?’

  ‘A romantic road trip.’ Stan beamed at us all. ‘Romantic and nostalgic.’

  ‘To Stan and Patreecia!’ Harley said, sounding out Nanna’s name the same way Stan had.

  ‘You don’t need to say it like that,’ I told him quietly, after we’d all had more sips. I didn’t want Stan thinking Harley was having a go at him. ‘It’s just Patricia really.’

  ‘I like Patreecia,’ Harley said.

  Really, I couldn’t see why Jazzi had made such a fuss over Harley coming. Apart from the Patreecia-thing, and rearranging everything on the table to show Uncle Rob and Dad just how he’d walked from his house to our place – not far at all and I thought it was pretty neat the way the salt shaker became the postbox at the corner and the salad bowl became the playground – and apart from calling Jazzi’s beautiful profiterole tower ‘profit rolls’ and refusing to eat them because they were part of the conspiracy, Harley seemed fine.

  I suppose Jazzi was put out when he lay down on the couch without taking his shoes off, but he did explain that his feet ponged. I know she felt it wasn’t particularly polite the way he went to sleep and, yes, he did snore very loudly, but she said herself it was the tablets he had to take. We couldn’t wake him up, so he stayed there all night. Jazzi threw a blanket over him and tucked a pillow under his head.

  ‘I’m sorry about this, Nick,’ she kept saying, but Dad didn’t mind and everyone else just stayed sitting around the table talking. After all, people go to sleep on couches all the time. What else is a couch for?

  In the morning, we all walked Harley home and Jazzi seemed happier somehow. She smiled more and even laughed at a long, not very funny joke Harley told. She held Dad’s hand and every so often I’d see them look at each other and it made me feel as though I’d overheard a secret whispered by someone – a nice secret, though, not a nasty one.

  Harley’s butterflies

  I wanted to be happy because Dad was happy and Nanna told me to be happy and even I could see that Jazzi had brought some good things into our life. There was the bread she made almost every day so we had fresh stuff, whereas before I always had to check for mould, because Dad forgot sometimes. There was my scarf which Jazzi fixed for me by making some big wool flowers which we sewed to the narrow end bit. They were a design feature. Sally and Lucy liked it so much they had asked me to make them one each.

  They liked the way she did my hair too, and they thought my new runners with the glittery laces were pretty cool. Jazzi was good at organising things and sometimes they came over after school to play.

  But there were bad things too. She made me go to bed strictly at bedtime. She made me do my homework every afternoon, and if I didn’t have any I had to read aloud to her for at least twenty minutes. I had to make my bed every morning and clean my room up once a week. She even made me vacuum under the bed. She was utterly ruthless when it came to food. I had to eat fish, chops, peas and beans, sweet potato and brown rice. It wasn’t any use telling her I couldn’t cut chops up. She just sat there and told me to keep trying.

  I think it was the skirt she made for me which started the problem. Even that was a good-Jazzi thing. She let me choose the material and then she showed me how to cut it out on a big cardboard cutting board she unfolded on the lounge-room floor.

  The problem was that when Dad got home he stepped on one of the pins that must have fallen out of the pin box when I accidentally kicked it over. It went in quite deeply and he said some things he shouldn’t have. When we’d all calmed down, he suggested that Jazzi use the spare room for her sewing room.

  ‘Clear out anything in it,’ he said. ‘It’s only old stuff that no one wants anymore. I think that will be the best thing. We can move that little table in, the one that’s cluttering up the kitchen, and you’ll have somewhere to do this kind of stuff without having to worry about clearing it up until you’ve actually finished. I think this will bruise. It went in quite deeply.’

  ‘Nick, I’m so sorry. I thought we’d got all the pins up.’

  ‘Never mind, these things happen.’ Dad limped across the floor. ‘It won’t require amputation!’

  I had an uneasy feeling about the spare room and halfway through PE it came to me. My box was in the bottom of the built-in wardrobe. But Jazzi wouldn’t throw it out, would she? She’d know it was mine, with my things in it, and she’d put it in my room. Jazzi would have to do that; she kept all sorts of old things herself.

  I didn’t get a chance to ask Jazzi about the box because it was a Harley day, only more special because Harley wanted to visit his and Jazzi’s mother, so we drove to Springvale Cemetery. Harley had brought a mug to put at the grave. He said it would last longer than Jazzi’s flowers and it was just as pretty. Jazzi said it would get stolen. Harley said people didn’t rob graves. Jazzi said they did.

  ‘I’m afraid they do, Harley,’ I said. ‘
They did in Egypt, remember? They robbed the pyramids. I saw the movie.’

  ‘They died,’ Harley said. ‘They died from a curse. That’s it, then. I’ll curse Mum’s mug and no one will steal it.’

  ‘That’s ridiculous, Harley, you can’t curse it. Don’t be silly.’

  ‘Of course I can curse it. Watch me.’ He screwed up his face and put his hands in his hair, the way Jazzi did when she read the morning paper. We waited.

  ‘Your mother is buried here too, isn’t she, Bee? Do you want to...?’

  ‘Maybe next time. I don’t think she’s buried, actually, I think she was cremated and then Dad took some of the ashes down to Apollo Bay, where they’d spent their honeymoon.’

  ‘There’s probably a plaque here though,’ Jazzi said, looking around her. ‘We could put some flowers there if you like next time.’

  ‘Ssh,’ Harley said, ‘I’m trying to get the last word!’

  I thought about my mother, how maybe she’d feel odd that Harley and Jazzi’s mother was getting a mug with roses on it and a bunch of yellow flowers and she wasn’t getting anything. Would she mind? Or would she understand that I didn’t know all this was going to happen and was unprepared? Would she love me anyway? Jazzi fiddled with the yellow flowers and Harley sat down on the ground, his eyes squeezed shut in concentration.

  ‘Got it!’ he said, stumbling to his feet. He put the mug down on the headstone and waved his arms in the air above his mother’s grave so that it looked as though he was trying to shoo away flies or mosquitoes.

  ‘Fiend, rogue, robber, thief,

  linger not by my mother’s grave

  or the curse of the devil’s teeth

  will smite you down and nothing save.’

  ‘That was good,’ I said. ‘Did you just think of it then?’

  ‘He was always good at English,’ Jazzi said. ‘That and art were his best subjects.’

  ‘They still are,’ Harley said. ‘Did I tell you I’m going to be in an exhibition. You’ll have to come. We’re all loonies but it will be good. Powerful, that’s what Tony said, a powerful statement about loonies.’ He threw back his head and laughed. It was a strange sound to hear in a cemetery and both Jazzi and I looked around, but there didn’t seem to be anyone close to us.

  ‘You don’t think that’s too much pressure, do you, Harley? Have you done the work yet? Do you feel okay about it?’

  ‘I don’t like Arthur. He’s another one. His work is too dark, too much black. It won’t show up well, I keep telling Tony. It’s too dark. You can’t see what it’s about. But Tony said it was strong work. Muscular, he called it. Flabby, I call it. What’s muscular about just using black black black. There’s no way back. I said, Arthur, stop mucking around in the murk and reach for some stars, man. Show us some glimmers, simmer some cerise, glow some yellow, gild the darkness with a bit of gilt. He flicked paint on my best shirt, Jasmine. You’ll have to wash it for me before the exhibition. You will, won’t you? Please?’

  ‘Of course I will, Harley. When does it open? Do we get invitations?’

  ‘Yes, yes. Tony’s doing all that. He’s a bureaucratic bureaucrat. But he’s not black. He glimmers with a bit of gold heart now and then. He’s all right. Do you want to put your flowers in my cursed mug?’

  ‘No,’ Jazzi said, ‘they don’t need water. They’re everlasting daisies and they won’t fit without me cutting the stems.’

  ‘You’re right, it’s probably better this way. She gets two things rather than two-things-made-into-one-thing. Okay, can we go now, Jasmine? We’ve said hello to Mum and left some flowers, painted and real. Can we go now and eat sticky bun? I’m sick of being surrounded by dead people.’

  ‘Ssssh,’ Jazzi said. ‘You might offend someone, Harley.’

  ‘They’re all dead,’ Harley said. ‘How can I offend them? They’re not listening, Jasmine, whatever way you look at it.’

  ‘Not them, the visitors. You might offend a visitor. Come on, then, let’s go.’

  When we got to Harley’s we saw the paintings and drawings he was going to exhibit. We couldn’t help but see them – they were all over the kitchen and the lounge room of the house.

  ‘How are Bill and Laura coping with all this?’ Jazzi asked, hands on her hips surveying the mess.

  ‘It’s art,’ Harley said. ‘They do what everyone else does, they simply pretend it doesn’t exist.’

  ‘That’s not true,’ came a voice from one of the couches, and the lady with the jabbing finger poked her head out from her newspaper. ‘We know it’s there. We just try not to sit on it.’

  ‘Can’t you keep these somewhere?’ Jazzi said. ‘You’ll end up ruining them. It’s not just people sitting on them, Harley. They could get food on them.’

  Harley shrugged. ‘I don’t want to be precious about them, Jasmine. Art belongs to everyone and everything.’

  ‘Yes, but not the tomato sauce.’ Jazzi pointed to the corner of a strange-looking piece that had labels from old jam jars and cigarette packets stuck on it.

  ‘Oh, well.’ Harley took it from her and started ripping it up.

  ‘Harley!’

  ‘Well, you’re right. It’s not fit for anything but mouse consumption now.’ He put the pile of torn-up pieces in one corner of the lounge room. ‘They can nest their babies in an original Harley Raddle.’

  ‘Oh, Harley.’ Jazzi looked at him and I thought for a minute she was going to cry but instead she laughed.

  Harley gave us a tour of the artworks. Some of it joined Consumer Collage in the mouse corner as we went. They weren’t the kind of pictures I was used to seeing. They were ‘abstracted representation’, Harley said, like when you have dreams and everything isn’t quite real but it’s ordinary enough to be familiar. In Harley’s drawings, flowers turned into heads which sat on top of dark clouds. Birds became men, fingers stretched into insects which crawled across a desert of television sets and old antennae. I didn’t like them much.

  ‘Surreal,’ Jazzi said, tipping her head to one side as she looked at them all. ‘Definitely Dali-esque, Harley. I like this suite particularly.’

  ‘So do I.’ Those three were the ones I did like, a series of faces on huge butterfly wings. Each wing had about three or four faces drawn on it. You could have easily mistaken the faces for patterns at first, but when you looked more closely they became wrinkled, beady-eyed and wispy-bearded, or just a detailed eye was visible, the outline of flared nostrils or a section of pouted lips.

  ‘You can have them, Jazzi and To Be, when the exhibition is over. I’ll get Tony to mark sold on them as soon as they are hung up. You’ll have to get them framed, Jazzi. You can have two and To Be can have one, because she’s smaller. Worrier Nick will have to share yours, Jazzi, because I can’t do any more. I’ve moved away from such dependence on reality, such narrative.’

  ‘Harley, you can’t just give them away like that. What if these are the three that would sell? Then you’ve missed a sale.’

  ‘I can do what I want,’ Harley said and yawned loudly. ‘After all, they are mine, Jasmine. Anyway, you gave me one of your little angel guardian dolls. I painted a face on it, did I tell you? I couldn’t bear the blank.’

  ‘That’s good, Harley, you were supposed to paint a face on it. That’s how it becomes your guardian doll. Or whatever kind it is. Well, thank you very much, Harley. We really do appreciate it.’

  ‘Yes, thank you, Harley. I’ve never owned a proper painting or drawing before.’

  Of course, when we got home Harley’s paintings and the exhibition were the only thing that was talked about and we all examined the invitation which had one of Harley’s butterfly drawings on it and Jazzi told Dad how he’d given us that suite.

  I forgot all about my box and its precious things, which may or may not have been at the bottom of the wardrobe in Jazzi’s sewing room.

  Running away

  I didn’t get to look for my box for days after visiting Jazzi and Harley’s mum, because th
ere was an afternoon trip to the movies with Sally and an afternoon at the pool with Lucy and then Jazzi decided to enrol me for tennis lessons and when I finally got to see the room it was Friday afternoon.

  You would expect a sewing room to be a plain, useful room. Jazzi’s sewing room was like something out of the Arabian Nights stories. She’d hung this lovely mirrored quilt on one wall and a big piece of rainbow-coloured material billowed from the roof. There was a small white-painted chest of drawers with bright blue flower handles near Jazzi’s table, and a white bookcase held a collection of books about quilts and knitting and artists. A tall lamp stood in one corner of the room and there was a wall shelf on which perched some of Jazzi’s dolls. A rocking chair in the other corner was covered with cushions and a big knitted throw. It was quite beautiful and I would have sat down and looked at some of the books, but I was on a mission.

  When I opened the wardrobe, I was nearly suffocated by a pile of fabric that fell out. I stuffed it quickly back. I opened the other side of the wardrobe. More fabric was hung on coat hangers, a hanging rainbow. But my box was nowhere to be seen.

  I raised the issue with Jazzi. That’s what we did in our house now. We didn’t just talk about things. We raised issues.

  ‘You know that box of my stuff,’ I said. Jazzi was stuffing a chicken. The stuffing was green with chopped parsley. I don’t know why we bother to eat parsley, really. It just tastes green – and not even a nice green. A dull, stodgy kind of green.

  ‘No. What box?’

  ‘The box at the bottom of the wardrobe in your sewing room.’

  ‘There wasn’t a box of your stuff, Beatrice. If there had been, I would have put it in your room.’

  ‘It’s not there. It’s not in the bottom of the wardrobe either. There was a box of stuff in the bottom of the wardrobe. I know, because I put it there ages ago.’

  ‘There wasn’t a box of your stuff, Beatrice.’

  ‘Yes, there was, Jazzi, honestly. It was a little cardboard box of stuff.’