The Burying Beetle

by Ann Kelley

  I have written a poem about Charlie, called ‘A Cat is a Poem’.

  A Cat is a Poem

  My black and white cat is a poem

  Purring, leaning to my arm,

  Butting her head on mine,

  Her arsehole a pursed mouth,

  Her antennae in touch with my head,

  Her pink toes stretch in ecstasy,

  Her fur smells of leaf mould, bonfires,

  Damp sphagnum moss, and green tea.

  I don’t actually know what green tea smells like but I needed a word to rhyme with leaf and ecstasy. It can’t be very good because it was too easy. Mind you, I did have to use the dictionary a lot for the difficult words, like sphagnum and ecstasy and antennae.

  I have the feeling that even simple poems are difficult to get right. And am I allowed to use arsehole in a poem? There’s a book here by a poet who uses fuck in a poem, so it must be OK. They fuck you up, your mum and dad. His words, not mine.

  The more I read, the more I realise how little I know, and the more I want to learn it all, or as much as I have time for. It’s quite exciting, really, knowing you are probably going to die before you grow old. It means there is no time to waste.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  THE BLUE HANG-GLIDER is back, and it’s hanging right over the spot where the peregrine falcons have their nest. I’ve looked through the binoculars but I can see no sign of the birds at the nest, or in the sky. I can’t see the nest from here anyway. I have to go onto the coast path to see it. The man is wearing goggles and a black and orange wetsuit sort of thing. He’s looking down. He’s trying to hover like a kestrel. These binoculars are brilliant. They make me feel as if I am there with him, hanging over the edge of the cliff. But he’s much too close to the peregrine nest. They must be frightened by this huge bird thing like a pterodactyl hovering over them. It would serve him right if he fell and hurt himself. I get the camera and take some pictures of him, showing where he is in relation to the nesting ledge. Ginnie will be interested.

  Oh my God! What’s he doing? He’s gone onto the cliff. I can’t see him. Is he after the young bird? No, he’s dropped! He’s lost control and fallen like a stone, his glider like a broken kite crumpled on a ledge on the cliff. He’s half hidden under the billowing blue fabric. He’s not moving. There’s no one else in sight. I’ll have to call for help.

  ‘Hello, an accident – ambulance please, air ambulance. Me? Augusta Stevens, Peregrine Cottage, Peregrine Point, near St Ives. Yes, an accident. A hang-glider. He’s fallen and is on a cliff edge. On the cliff below the railway track at Peregrine Point, near St Ives. It’s difficult to find. No, there’s no road. Just the railway line. The branch line. You can see him from here though, yes, Peregrine Cottage. OK, OK. Yes, I’ll be here. OK. Thanks, goodbye.’

  The hang-glider wing is torn and flapping in the wind. It’s blowing over the cliff edge, but the man’s not moving. What can I do to help? Maybe he wasn’t trying to harm the peregrine at all, maybe he was just curious. The wing is tearing more and now some of it has ripped off completely and is being whisked away by the wind. Should I do something? What? I can’t get to him, even if I walk along the railway track. And I said I’d wait here, anyway. And the trains are running. God, I wonder if he’s dead.

  It’s terrible not being able to do anything. Ten minutes go by very slowly. Still no bird. I am taking photographs of the torn sail as it drifts down the cliff. It has snagged on a bush and is stuck there. There are several men in orange jackets on the railway line. They are hurrying towards where the man fell. And here comes a helicopter. It’s huge. It’s the Navy rescue helicopter. The noise is tremendous. The house is shaking. The men are signalling. The noise is awful. The helicopter is hovering right next to the cliff, our cliff, just behind our trees. Now there are coastguards, firemen, police, paramedics, ambulance people, all sorts of people running along the railway line. They must have stopped the train. They are climbing down to the hurt man, carrying something. There’s two people, I think. They’re scrambling down by rope to get to him and now they’re trying to get him onto a stretcher. That’s what they were carrying. The helicopter is dropping a line to them. The wind is very gusty and the helicopter has to get in extremely close to the cliff. It looks so dangerous. Here’s another helicopter, the small air ambulance. It has gone over the top of the cliff, the hilltop above us, where the farm land is and has settled there. The paramedics are attaching the stretcher to the line. The man is wrapped up like a mummy and strapped onto the stretcher and he’s being lifted into the air. One of the paramedics is hoisted up with the injured man. They are safely in the helicopter and it speeds away over the bay towards Truro and the hospital. I’m still taking pictures.

  It’s like a very noisy action movie. Mum will be so cross she’s missed it all.

  The doorbell rings and it’s Ginnie.

  ‘Have you come to see if the peregrine’s OK?’ I ask her. I feel guilty that I hadn’t thought to phone her and tell her what was happening.

  ‘Yes, I’m going to climb up the cliff and see that the nest is still there. Are you all right? Was it you who phoned for the ambulance?’

  ‘Yes, it was. I’ve been keeping an eye on the nest, but I haven’t seen the birds today at all.’

  ‘If they survive that racket, they’ll survive anything,’ says Ginnie.

  I quickly take a picture of her, before she can complain. I’ve covered the whole event from start to finish and need her portrait to complete the story. She laughs.

  ‘You better give me the film when you’ve finished it and I’ll get it processed for you.’

  ‘It’s finished now.’ I rewind the film and take it out of its sprockets and give it to her.

  She says, ‘I’m going to climb up the cliff to get to the nest.’

  ‘It looks very dangerous,’ I say.

  ‘I’m a mountaineer, don’t worry.’

  ‘Cool,’ I say, and she leaves.

  Then a policeman calls and thanks me for telephoning so promptly. He says the man has two broken legs and rib damage, but his spine seems to be undamaged.

  ‘He was lucky. If you hadn’t seen the accident happen he could have been there all night, or until someone noticed he was missing. He could have died of exposure or something. Well done, Miss.’

  I feel my head swelling as he speaks.

  Another man comes to the door. It’s a journalist from the local newspaper. The policeman knows him. He asks me tell the story of what happened, and what I saw. I tell him I took pictures and that Ginnie has the film. He even takes a photo of me, standing on the deck with the cliff in the background. I don’t even notice the height, much. It’s so exciting, all this coming and going. I love it.

  Ginnie climbs the steep and rocky cliff and has a good look. She is coming down again, safe, onto the beach.

  Now, she has gone and so have all the coastguards, policemen, firemen, paramedics, the journalist, everyone.

  Back to silence, apart from the sea and the wind, of course.

  When Mum comes home, she is totally amazed at the story I give her. She thinks I’m inventing it.

  Then on Friday, when the local paper is printed and Mum has collected it from the shop, we see my photographs on the front page, the ‘before and after’ photos, the hang-glider soaring and hovering, then the broken wing. There’s even a picture of me and some of the story as I told it. Mum goes straight back to the shop and buys several more copies. One for Daddy, one for Summer and two for us.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Note: A badger came to visit last night. Mum woke me at about midnight to tell me to come very quietly to the back door. There was a big badger eating the cats’ leftover food and some old cheese. He was eating very carefully from the metal dish, nibbling neatly and slowly, not like a dog eats – wolfing the food – but eating politely. We had the light on in the kitchen so we could see the badger just outside the door. When he had finished he turned round and went bustling off, his big bu
m wobbling like a spaniel’s. It was so exciting. I’ve only ever seen a dead one before, squashed on the road. It was much bigger than I expected, but its head was narrow and small, with lovely black and white stripes. I hope he comes again tonight. It could have been a female, of course. I wonder if they look different. I’ll look them up.

  Another sunny night. Lots of stars – don’t have the faintest idea what stars are up there.

  DADDY USED TO drive us to see Grandpop and Grandma on Sundays sometimes. He always liked Grandpop and Grandma. Probably because he was an orphan. He was quite old when his parents died, so he wasn’t a child orphan. I think he was about twenty. I wish I could have met them. He used to tell me about them, though. His dad sold cars and smoked cigars and his mother wore corsets with bones in them. He says it was like cuddling a tree. And her hair was tight white curls, but sometimes they were mauve, sometimes pink. She used to iron his dad’s shirts and take half an hour over each one. A perfectionist. How boring. Mum doesn’t ever iron anything. Life’s Too Short. Grandpop ironed his own shirts. Grandma, like Mum, was always too busy to iron things.

  We always had fun on those journeys to see them in Essex. Mum used to say that we weren’t allowed to use swear words when we were at their house, because they were of a Shockable Generation, so we used to get rid of all our day’s worth of swear words on the way there. Mum would say, ‘fuck and shit, fuck and shit’ about a hundred times, and we would fall about laughing.

  I love, (loved) going to the old cockle sheds at Old Leigh. I adore cockles. You have them in a little dish with lots of malt vinegar and pepper and you eat them with your fingers, sitting outside at the long wooden benches, and your hair goes in your eyes and mouth, and that night you can still smell vinegar on your hair. Lots of people go there for shellfish – little brown shrimps that you eat by holding on to their heads and tails and biting the rest, shells and all; langoustines, which are very expensive; jellied eels – Grandma’s favourite – I don’t fancy the grey yukkiness of them; crabsticks – which are totally artificial; proper crabs in their shells, (they are called ‘dressed crab’); big pink prawns; winkles – which you eat with a pin, but I don’t like them much because they taste rather muddy; and cockles – Grandpop’s and my favourites, and Mum’s. I think Daddy eats all of them. Grandma would always tell us about how Mum used to go onto the mud when she was little and collect cockles for them to cook and eat, and she didn’t even try them herself until she was about my age, when she discovered how delicious they were. Sometimes we would go for a Rossi’s ice cream in an ice cream parlour. Grandma said there used to be a prettier parlour on Pier Hill with powder-blue Lloyd Loom chairs and tables, which Mum loved, and the huge rose-tinted mirror behind the counter, which made everybody look very healthy and tanned.

  We watched the holidaymakers go by – girls with Kiss-me-quick hats, ‘looking for trouble,’ Grandma said, ‘and usually finding it’. There was a fortune-teller on Pier Hill and I always wanted to have my fortune told, but Mum wouldn’t let me. We Make our Own Fortunes. I think I was allowed to go in an amusement arcade once – on a birthday. But it was so noisy I didn’t like it. I did like Peter Pan’s, but I couldn’t go on many of the rides because I was too little. They measure you and if you aren’t tall enough you can’t go on, in case you fall out and kill yourself.

  Once, Mum took me out on the mud to gather cockles, like she used to do at my age. I love the smell of the oil refinery. We took a plastic bucket and Mum told me how she had a silver bucket – that’s what she thought it was, but of course it was galvanised metal. She showed me how to find the cockles. You have to look for little volcanoes with a blue-grey ring around them. The hole is where the cockle breathes. You dig with your hand into the purple mud until you touch the hard shell and just pick it up. It’s so easy. They are bivalves and don’t bite or anything, or trap your fingers like giant clams. They are quite beautiful, cockles, with ridges and mauve stripes. Apparently they jump about and travel a lot when they are young, before settling down in middle age, like people. We gathered half a bucket full in about an hour and took them back to Grandma. She cleaned them in fresh water, then boiled them for a few minute, until they opened. We had them still warm, with vinegar and pepper on, but they didn’t taste as good as the ones you get at Old Leigh. Maybe because we ate them inside the house, instead of outside in the fresh air.

  We have mussels here, which are great when Mum cooks them. We collect them from the bottom of our cliff. There are loads of them, in colonies, all stuck together like Grandpop’s boiled sweets. You have to yank them off and tear out the beard – a sort of stringy bit. It makes my fingers sore but it’s worth it. Summer hates all shellfish. She’s allergic.

  I remember sometimes Grandma wore a neck brace like a high stiff collar. She suffered from her neck and back. And her knees, and her hips, and her hands. She reckoned whisky was the best painkiller, and she and Grandpop had a ‘tot’ or two of whisky every evening before supper. I hope it helped.

  I suffer from poor eyesight. I sometimes see quite ordinary things in an extraordinary way. It makes boring events that much more interesting. Like once I thought I had seen a tiny blue-green fish on a hotel path in Spain. I pointed it out to a maid who was carrying a load of clean sheets. She was totally astonished that I had thought it was a fish. It was an olive leaf. I felt really stupid.

  That was before I started to wear glasses. Now I can see everything clearly, more or less.

  Pop came as usual this morning, for his breakfast. He made a perfect landing on the rail, balancing with his huge white wings out. I saw him land out of the corner of my eyes. He looked like an angel. Perhaps he’s my guardian angel. Not like Clarence, the angel in It’s a Wonderful Life – ‘No man is a failure who has friends.’ Like Jonathan Livingston Seagull’s guardian angel gull, who was all for being a loner, and not joining the crowd.

  This Roget’s Thesaurus book is very useful. I looked up guardian angel and found: familiar spirit, familiar, genius, good genius, daemon, demon, numen, totem, guardian, guardian spirit, guardian angel, angel, good angel, ministering angel, fairy godmother, guide, control, attendant godling or spirit, invisible helper, special providence, tutelary or tutelary god or genius or spirit, household gods, plus some foreign words – and then ancestral spirits.

  Ancestral spirits. Like Grandpop. Maybe Mum’s right about Pop the gull.

  Why bother sending kids to school when there are books like this? The government could just make sure every child can read, then give every family a lot of good novels and reference books. I don’t suppose people can learn maths from books, though. I’m hopeless at maths. Maybe I’ll get some extra tuition at my next school, as I’ve missed rather a lot.

  I don’t understand why some of the words in the Thesaurus are in heavy type and some not.

  This is so sad, this bit in the badger book:

  Badgers live together in pairs, and are very kind to each other. Two Frenchmen during a walk killed one, which they drew towards the next village. Presently they heard the cry of an animal in distress, and saw another badger approaching. They threw stones at it. But still the creature came up, and began licking the dead one. The men now left it alone, and drew the dead one along as before, when the living badger lay down on it, taking it gently by the ear; and in this sorry way it was drawn into the village, and, I am sorry to say, was killed. (A few badgers are still to be found in this country, but it is not a common animal anywhere. The Chinese consider it a great treat, but in this country no one would eat its flesh.)

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Note: A kafuffle on the cliff edge below the cottage this morning. Two blackbirds and several smaller birds all making a terrible fuss. I thought there was a pigeon sitting on the tree next to them, but when I looked through the binoculars I could see it was the peregrine sitting there right next to the angry little birds, staring them out. There must be nests down there. He is a dark grey on the back with a very light chest and black m
arkings on his face. Wonderful sighting! He flew off without attacking any birds or getting away with their young. He has sharp wings. I am so happy the hang-gliding accident and the noise of the helicopter hasn’t frightened them off. They are so brave.

  KAFUFFLE IS A GOOD word. It sounds as if it might come from India or somewhere foreign. Like bamboozle.

  I phoned Ginnie and told her about the peregrine. She reckons the one I saw might be the young one, trying its hand at hunting on its own, and she’s promised to come out when she can.

  The tide is out and there is a large shallow pool at the foot of the cliffs with tiny ripples that look like Grandma’s skin. Mum says her skin is getting old. Well, she is over fifty, so what does she expect? She had me when she was forty-one, which is too old to start being a mother, I think. And she will lie in the sun, which is very bad for the skin.

  I am an only child, and so was she. I sometimes wish I came from a large family, and had brothers and sisters to do things with but on the other hand I do enjoy my own company and peace and quiet. What am I saying? I don’t want just my own company and Mum’s. I’m bloody bored with my own company. I want to be with people, lots of people – I’m a townie for Christ’s sake, not a bloody countryside freak.

  Mum just ignores me most of the time – which is cool. I don’t want to be fussed over and organised. One of my favourite things is mooching. Just doing nothing much, daydreaming, thinking silly thoughts that sometimes take me to strange places, letting my imagination go wild, and reading, of course.