Through the shed door, her father crossing the bee yard, the sky around him pocked with insects, his slow ambling making him seem incapable of anything Tess might need him for. Today he’ll kill the old queens. After squashing them with his boot he’ll leave their crushed corpses beneath each hive so the bees can smell she’s dead. Queens produce pheromones which exert a great power over the surrounding bees. If they begin to perform poorly they should be replaced.
In The Hive commune, where their mother once lived, they’d kept twenty hives. But they never killed the old queens up there, she said. They’d let nature take its course.
That’s no way to run an apiary, their father said. I couldn’t believe how Jackson Hodgins kept those hives when I saw them, he laughed. Homes for old-lady bees!
The commune was modelled on the bee community and everyone worked for the good of the group, said their mother. Una apis, nulla apis. One bee is no bee. Up there Jackson was hive leader. King Bee, their father sometimes called him, though everyone knew there was no such creature. At other times he called Jack Schwärmer – fanatic – and also something to do with the swarming of bees.
Were you a worker bee up there, Mum? Or a queen? Meg asked once.
It wasn’t like that, their mother replied, blinking fast, a tic that appeared when they spoke of The Hive.
But Lina was my queen, said their father, doing a totally awk dance across the kitchen flagstones, a sideways thing with a shifty hip and snapping fingers, a move Meg called groinal.
Listen, girls, he’d say. When I am first seeing your mother she is in the distance, with such beautiful long hair and skirts. She floats across the bee field like a Phantasie. The vibes I was getting, you chust could not believe!
They’d seen one photo. Mum and Dad in faded Kodak. Posing by the Nursery Cell. Most other pictures from the commune had burned. There’d been no time, in that fire, to save their possessions, only to rescue themselves. In this photo the background looks pale and smouldery, as if The Hive was already ablaze and disappearing.
Vibes, Tess had repeated, back then when she was speaking. Dad, how completely yuck!
And weren’t you the Arcadian Poster Boy? said their mother. Picture your father, girls. Long hair. Tight purple trousers. Busting his moves by the nightly fire pit. In his mind crossing time zones means Australia will still be in the seventies.
She’d never seen such a man at The Hive, she said. His Euro-mullet and slow surfer’s gait, his sun-starved skin and awkward German formality. A man who brought to the mountain the rimy scent of the sea.
But this kind of talk hasn’t happened for ages. Not since their mother started carrying her umbrella, or leaving early for the forest then coming home with stringy hair and muddy clothes. She’d become a person seen from a distance talking to trees, applying an ear to the flank of a horse, lying alone in a paddock with one leg lifted skyward.
Before Pip died the family had the Mood Chart with rainbow colours to map the spirit of your day. They’d had the Wonder Jar filled with paste gems by those who’d witnessed Miracles, Kindnesses, Unsought Praise. When the jar was full the sisters were promised a family excursion, a new game, book or toy. But it’s totally a relief, Tess tells herself, to be done with all that. Explaining these Müller rituals, which had evolved from routines at The Hive, had made visitors smirk and peer as if the sisters were dim, or some quizzical type of human. And in the colourless months of the family’s grief, in days stripped back to survival, hunting out benevolence had become impossible, even offensive to them all. Before Pip died they’d had their mother, mostly present. They had promised visits to the town pool; her strong hands beneath their spines, her face dappled with reflected water, her steady, unbroken gaze. When they were very small, she’d held a mirror over their floating selves, wordlessly showing how on earth they could be as weightless as in the womb.
Tess jumps down from the hayloft. With pelvic muscles clamped, she walks gingerly through the meadow, shoving back her unruly hair, her mind frantically searching the house for what she can use to hide or stop the blood.
Six kangaroos bound from the forest right up to the barbed wire, then bow and billow under. In the high bronze grasses they shake their dark, strokeable ears. Tess hobbles past, stiff-legged. And sees where the roos have caught on the fences; at each barbed interval, the torn-out clumps of their coarse brown fur.
Some sufferings must go unheeded, her father says. The day he put their Kelpie down, the night the old mare died with its head in their mother’s hands. The time he shot the poisoned wombat. But Tess, very alert, very loyal to any living thing, has sworn she’ll never grow impervious. She’s stayed awake to hear her sister breathe; her parents far down the hall, the morning even further off as Pip exhaled and sometimes in sleep made animal noises, pawed the bed and sang in new languages. It was the antibiotics, it was the low blood count, it was the painkillers or the constant fevers. Who would witness it all if Tess did not?
By the time she reaches the house there’s a red line down her inside thigh, a blood blotch on her sock. She turns back and runs an eager eye over the mountain for the mother who cannot say any more what a person ought to do.
3
Stefan tugs off the lid of a hive, peers in, then straightens, schiesse, schiesse, his cinching bones. He looks at the blank, unanswering sky, at the Ghost Mountains and the sheen of river through the forest. He gives each element his deliberate attention, trying not to let yesterday’s facts hew everything up, trying not to picture what he’d found by the western boundary in a swathe of bramble and gorse. He’s told no one about his discovery – there’s always a cost to unburdening. Well, no one but Nora Roberts. And how will that sound to his wife?
Evangeline had already vanished when he woke to the verdammte birds. Kookaburras, hysterical on the wires. Their chortling drilled into his ears and jabbed the headache, which lay in wait every morning. He turned in bed and flung out an arm, then a leg, calling, Lina? No one there. No ministrations as there once might have been – the frosted glass of water, the cool palm on his brow. Her bending over was medicine itself. There’d been a time when he opened his eyes in this new country, stood up, did fifty vinyasas and had no thought before amaranth and almond milk but: holy holy holy, I’ve arrived in Paradies.
Fifteen years since he’d left Germany and floated into Bidgalong with a backpack and a copy of Maurice Maeterlinck’s The Life of the Bee. This had become his personal bible and so, after a dope-hazed, partying spring in Thailand, he headed for the lands to find what that Belgian writer had so loved in the bees: passion for work, perseverance, devotion to the future. After a week of surfing, he’d trekked up to the commune because he’d heard it was modelled on bee communities. Instead he found an eco-Puritanism diluted with Buddhist mantras, a commune leader whose ideals had been whittled into zealotry. Jackson Hodgins was lazy by then, and had run to fat. Never mind, Stefan had played along. Your youthful convictions can fade in the blaze of other inducements – the lush, paradisiacal forest, the unworldly young women. He’d been full of ridiculous, half-formed dreams, even – watching Hodgins at the podium – the brief dream of succession, and yet he’s still a bit fond of the young man he was then, each morning swollen with hope.
As he kicked back the rucked sheets, bare-chested, arms bisected by tan-lines, he’d tried invoking peace, recalling childhood bodies of water. Schlachtensee, Krumme Lanke, the Hundekehlesee. Thought of his grandfather tending bees. Henrik Müller had built his first Berlin hive after the war. It sat on his Pariser Strasse balcony with tubs of Tomaten. High above the bombed courtyard, he’d watch his drones hurtle in from reconnaissance, alighting on the hive landing strip loaded with pollen. So heartening, that flowers could be found in a city of ruin! Later, he’d grown all his food on a Neukölln allotment. Now you can buy Stadtbienenhonig from bees foraging in Berlin yards; now the countryside with its aerial spraying and GM crops can no longer spruik its purity.
The cold needling shower. T
he breakfast bespoked for migraine. And Stefan picturing everyone gone, draining the short black to the grit before his thoughts hovered on Pip, his youngest, his little house bee. Pip, who’d looked most like his mother, Gretchen. He’d not been able to bury one, because the other was so ill. Both had died in the same month, in different hemispheres. Acute lymphoblastic leukaemia. Stroke. He was not a believer, but would sometimes dream of them in some alternate atmosphere, helping each other blow balloons. When they loosened their grip those balloons drifted off, carrying their mingled breath. In these dreams his mother and daughter exhaled, but kept quiet, which turned his thoughts to his eldest, Tess, silent for how long?
Now he stands by his fifty hives, bathed in the cold shadows of the Ghost Mountains. He watches his cows in the adjacent paddock circle the round of hay. He’s in overdraft because of it, but won’t let his animals suffer through winter. Steve Johnson had his backfield mounds of killed beasts, Paul Betts the pet-food company visit in the plainclothes car. Both very po-faced when you tried asking them about it at the pub, both keen to buy another, drowning round. Strange, how they’re all capable of sectioning off the different kinds of death on their land. Time to check the price for Charolais. Some year-old steers are ready for sale. But for now, the bees.
Stefan eases the hive tool into the chambers, prises the combs apart. He ought to stop tampering – bees don’t like it – but after losing fifty colonies in the past season, he’s determined to work out if it’s pests or disease. He holds the combs up to the sun – scattered cappings over the honey; checks the hive floor – the cleaner bees still hard at work. No silk-filled wax-moth tunnels. No disquieting slime of hive beetle. Nothing. He’s almost disappointed.
Just last week Duke Hany’s bees had swarmed, and then were found, flightless as worms, three fields away. José Torres was a hundred colonies down. The beeks were talking like doomers now, calling it the Bee Rapture, discussing Colony Collapse Disorder, electromagnetic fields, radiation, fracking. In Germany, die Bienenzüchters had registered their perishing colonies, blaming Bayer’s clothianidin. Some locals accuse the Birkenstockers, inept hobbyists whose designer hives are merely a badge of righteous living.
In the fifth hive, confettied pollen in purple, orange, gold, pink.
In the town, someone’s pasted WANTED posters for bee rustlers. Which is pointless, Stefan thinks; after all, bees are just cows without fences. Bees are cows with wings. The most you could hope, say the pub soothsayers – the thief gets multiply stung mid-heist and ends up sooking at A&E. You’d rarely recover your insects.
Stefan locates the ailing queen, isolates her, then scans the mountain. Where is his wife? And what will his news do to her – the wreck of that particular vehicle, the bones he’s found?
As he hammers the resinous propolis off a frame, he makes a jaunty song of his loves: the green arcades of macadamias at dusk, the machinic stuttering frog. The other day, a filigreed snakeskin wound through the wisteria arbour like a snagged bridal veil. The whickering of the mare in the back paddock, a horse that for a time stood in for the horses in his wife’s paintings. She’d sketched old Lucie for months, trying to master the proportions. Coaxing that creature with sugared palms and a conspiring tone. The results were confounding. Abstract, his wife said, which was code for a horse doesn’t look like a horse in this variety of art. A horse might seem to say freedom, or if it were tethered, restraint. If he peered long enough he could make them out, horse parts, rearranged.
He loves the place, even though it’s failing. The new bees taking a long time to settle, the older colonies unproductive. Some cattle grazing only in balding sections, getting bogged in a quagmire searching for salt. This too was abstract – creatures where they oughtn’t be, things obeying no natural order. Yet, Evangeline has always said he’s a man not easily put off. Perseverance, devotion to the fucking future – he’s tried sticking to Maeterlinck’s tenets. A man who’d had enough vim mid-breakdown to rollerskate around his rented French abbey. But the Belgian’s optimism had waned – his Life of the Bee was the work of a hopeful youth, not a neurasthenic.
Stefan can’t imagine leaving the farm, even if it’s making a loss. The land, more valuable to industry groups now than any private buyer.
In the distance, by the house, the hazy tableau of his daughters doing gymnastics, still interacting, though Tess has locked something up inside. His throat feels barbed thinking of Pip – two years tomorrow since her death – and of his wife, who he’s crazy in love with in spite of her being mostly gone, and him not knowing exactly where or when to expect her. Had he won her on false pretences? Maybe taken advantage after the fire, of her amnesia, her trauma, though they hadn’t had such terms back then. They’d simply named what was evident on the body – third-degree burns, head injury, missing tooth. He’d sat with her while she lodged the complaint but later, fearing repercussions, she withdrew it. He’d taught himself patience, as he waited for her to piece it together; he was steadfast, dog-loyal, abiding.
Only once, during the last rainy months of Pip’s illness, had he gladly stepped out of his life. He’d been heading home up the access road when he found the creek flooded. He’d forded it so often he’d outgrown all caution, but this time the ute lost traction halfway. He drifted from the farmhouse – lamps burning, curtains drawn – and had a curious sense of peace as Chopin soared from the radio. A lizard paddled by, its head propped above the water like a matron saving her do at the town pool. He rocked gently in the cabin. He could float for miles, a journeying away, accidental, for which he might be forgiven. But as darkness fell, he’d reluctantly bailed out, tethering the ute to a stump. Walking back up the road to the house, he noticed for the first time the many toads flattened against the gravel as if they’d been trying to paddle upstream. There are ways and ways of being gone. Apart from that one, unmoored moment he’d never been more present than in the final months of Pip’s life.
He ranks his problems. His wife, her suffering. The farm, how to make it prosper. The letter from the gas-mining company, with all its inducements, its dodgy corporate vibe among the bee books on his desk. Tess’s silence, which he’s almost used to. When the cows have Bovine Ephemeral Fever their ears droop, their eyes water, their snouts are strung with viscid mucous. They’re almost comically morose. But three days in the fever breaks, the lameness passes. It’s not the same, Evangeline once pointed out, with humans. He thanked her politely, then drained the Côtes-du-Rhône.
He tends his animals, ploughs the fields, resists disease with natural embrocations. He makes his Preparation 500, stuffing cow horns with shit, burying them, then striding counterclockwise to spray the stuff under a waning moon. More warlock in this midnight rite, than farmer. Is it his failures that make him feel phoney, or maybe he wasn’t invented for life on the land? He’s followed the instructions to the letter. And yet. He loses a child; his wife stops painting and turns in bed; the bees, disappearing.
Then yesterday, after tractoring up to the property’s furthest reaches, a creek giving on to a steep embankment bounded by the Lower Mountain Road, he found the first bone, and then another. Tibia, femur, scapula, clavicle.
Seconds later, Nora Roberts, her slim legs scissoring the broken fence, then leaping the green water, her purple hair aglow, a new thigh tattoo drawing the eye to where it didn’t actually want to go. Nora, with her sleepy hazel eyes and the scent, his daughters tell him, of bananas ready for cake.
Because of their past, when she appears the air around him starts shimmering intensely. He’ll fix his eye elsewhere, on a leaning angophora, or a rocky outcrop, while she strolls around. She’d visited more after Pip’s death, with the meals by the door, and the regular bag of dope. She’d come inside, protesting feebly, for cups of tea and after midday was a welcome joiner for something harder. She liked her whisky straight, no ice. She liked to chase it with a glass of red, or two, depending. One afternoon, the cold Fino, hay-coloured, very sweet.
There was a
lways some agenda in Nora’s eyes. She admired Stefan’s land and cursed him – she wished she’d bought it first! Like Evangeline she’d been raised at The Hive, and had left with nothing after the fire. Her acres by Lunar Lake were deeply shadowed for most of the day – depressing, she said, not to mention the eerie human sounds that whorled from the water on dry afternoons.
So what was she doing on the Lower Mountain Road, late on a Thursday? Someone had mentioned a wild swarm. She’d come to take a gander. But as she headed up the Mountain Road she’d spied his tractor. An odd place for Stefan Müller, she’d thought – the cow pasture way off, nothing round here but blackberry, wombat and rabbit. And so she’d pulled over.
She glanced down at the bone in his hands. He was some distance from where he’d found them and she could not see the wreck of the vehicle, metres back, its white paint flaking into the scrub.
What you got there, Stefan? she asked. Foxes been at the roos again?
And then, she’d looked a bit closer. A skull.
He’d seen plenty of bones in his life. The bones of cows, the bones of cats poached from the pansy yards of old ladies. He’d seen bird bones; the chewed-out hulls of cow and sheep; the delicate rungwork of snake and lizard, ant-clean, weather-scoured. And of course, back home, the documentaries.
Stefan raked his hands through his hair, coursing with shame and guilt. Holding such a relic put him in need of an answering gratitude. Life, teeming all about him. He felt the skull’s weight; heavier, it seemed, than when clothed with sinew, muscle, flesh.
The World Without Us Page 2
