The Burying Beetle

by Ann Kelley

  I tell him we see it all the time, and as he looks really intelligent and friendly, I tell him where it has a nest. He asks if I’m a birder, and I say no, but I’m willing to learn. That obviously impresses him because he sits on the grass next to me and we watch together.

  His name is Brett and he’s from Australia originally, and his parents are teachers. They recently moved here and live up on the main road. He’s got fair floppy hair and he’s sort of relaxed looking and really nice. I show him where we live. Then he says he’d better get going.

  Just as he’s leaving he asks if I want to go birding with him sometime. I want to say yes, but I don’t want him to know about my heart and stuff, and he’ll notice if I walk slowly. I don’t know what to say. In the end I say, maybe – and afterwards feel really really stupid. But he didn’t notice my blushes, I don’t think. I hid my face under my cowboy hat. Oh my God, I must look really nerdy. Glasses, funny hat, binoculars, camera, a complete eccentric.

  He says G’day – Yes, Australians really do say that!

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  Note: Two more wonderful words – lolloping and hugger-mugger. Lolloping is a badger’s action when it runs away. Herring gulls live hugger-mugger on the roofs. Close together. It sounds like a swear word to me. Like something Grandpop would have said instead of bugger.

  THE GARDENER, MR LORN, has reappeared. He gave Mum a nasty shock. She was sunbathing ‘in the nuddie’ – as Grandma used to say – when he suddenly came through the bottom gate into the garden. She only just had time to cover up her rude bits before he was next to her. He has been laid up with a bad back, apparently. He pottered about, and was quite pleased that Mum had done some weeding and stuff. He’s rather old for a gardener and seems rather shy. I tried to have a conversation with him but he must be a bit deaf, I think. It is nice to have someone else around. I followed him for a while, asking him about the names of plants, but he doesn’t seem to know any more than I do. Grown-ups are remarkably ignorant about the world around them, I find. Mum is, anyway. And Mr Lorn. He has the most wonderful hands – they are gnarled and horny and look as if he is part rhino.

  I’ve just noticed this thing about my hands – not the clubbed fingers, something else.

  The lines on the palms. If I place my hands next to each other, little finger to little finger, the lines on the palms match, almost echo each other, except that on my left hand the life line – I think it’s the life line – stops half way down, or rather, it is broken at that point and then starts again but in a fractured state, like broken bones, or pick-up sticks thrown down higgledy piggledy.

  Higgledly-piggledy my fat hen, she laid eggs for gentlemen. Where did that come from? Probably Grandma.

  I think I’ll write a story about this palm-reader who notices that everyone’s life lines end at the same time or point, except for one or two people, perhaps, maybe even her own life line ends then, and she assumes the end of the world is nigh, so she gets to know the other would-be survivors so they can be together when it happens. It could be a great sci-fi movie. I could make a fortune and leave it to Mum. What could I call it? Life Line.

  She could buy herself some great clothes and maybe a facelift, except there’s no point in a facelift because you have to take off your clothes at some point and then your husband/boyfriend would see your soft and wrinkly belly. I suppose you could wear something flattering that covered all the wrinkly and saggy bits, but bloody hell, what an effort. Perhaps it would be a good idea to marry a blind man. Just keep rubbing in the baby oil and he would think you were young forever. Hope for the best. Whatever. God, the complications of being a woman!

  We are putting out badger food regularly now. Peanuts, fish and chips, old bread, anything but salad stuff. They don’t eat their greens. They love leftover cat food.

  I cannot believe how quiet this lovely beach is in the height of the summer. I suppose it’s because you can’t get to it by car. You have to walk a long way over dunes through a golf links or along the coast path and down over rocks. It makes it like our own private secret beach, almost.

  One of the palms in the garden has leaned over so far it’s almost – it is – touching the window and when the window is open the scent is overpowering. Lovely. Exotic. Like East Africa.

  I think those days… months… spent in Kenya were the best ever in my entire life. I was very well there. I could breathe. Run, even. Swim – well, snorkel – and it was great. So much wilderness and excitement. Paradise.

  Perhaps we all choose our own heaven and hell. That has to be my heaven.

  When you see news on the telly of earthquakes and floods and drought and starvation you realise just how privileged you are to be free, living in a boringly calm country where there’s no violent politics, no shortage of food or water. You can go out and just do your own thing. There aren’t even any malarial mosquitoes here, or poisonous snakes, (except for adders), or poisonous spiders. Or bombs dropping on us. Or lions, or any really fierce animals waiting in the bushes. Perhaps if we had a guaranteed five months of sunshine, England would be a prototype for heaven.

  God – or whoever – made it when he was practising. He thought, ‘Let’s put a green hill here and there, a few white sand beaches, sand dunes, oak trees for shade, bluebells and primroses, foxgloves and buttercups and daisies, but let’s have rain and thunder and lightning and dark moors for drama, and birds singing, and a few nonviolent animals. And then let’s throw in a few human beings to make things more complicated.’

  And the night sky. A bit of terror to make you feel that there’s something more out there than you understand, something beyond. A whole universe. And then more.

  There certainly isn’t time even in an ordinary healthy human’s lifetime to learn enough of this world and this life to be satisfied. If I get another chance, I do hope I come back as a healthy intelligent person, who loves knowledge and has the ability to learn quickly about nature and science and literature and astronomy and geology and – everything. That sounds so mushy.

  Why are we here, anyway, and why do we want to learn stuff? What good is it if we die just as we are beginning to understand a little of what’s going on around us? What is the point?

  Here, I mean here at Peregrine Cottage, there is never real silence. Always there’s the hush shush of waves, and if the wind is blowing, its sound overwhelms even the waves.

  I am frightened of the wind. You can’t see it or smell it, but it’s there, all around you, moving your bit of world, tearing it apart, shifting the roof, pulling up trees, making the sea angry so it gets bigger and bigger and washes you away. The cold east wind I hate. The destructive north wind I hate. The totally devastating south wind – which we hardly ever get – I hate most of all. There were a few horrible storms when we first came here and I was very scared, but I must be sensible about this. I have more chance of dying of a heart attack or stroke than being swept away by the wind, or being in a landslide, or being struck by lightning, or being washed in a tide of mud into the sea, over the cliff, onto the rocks.

  Mum isn’t working today and we sit outside together and she is peaceful and happy because the heat of the sun is seeping into her skin and bones and relaxing her. Mr Lorn won’t be back until next week, so she doesn’t have to worry about being caught again without her clothes. I sit close by in the shade, reading an ancient book by Ernest Neal, called The Badger, with an illustration of a badger on the cover by Paxton Chadwick – there’s another weird name! Where do they get them? The author talks of having to walks for miles in the Cotswolds to find badgers. We have them come to us, literally on our doorstep.

  This bit of folklore is a bit worrying though:

  Should a badger cross the path

  Which thou hast taken, then

  Good luck is thine, so it be said

  Beyond the luck of men.

  But if it cross in front of thee,

  Beyond here thou shalt tread,

  And if by chance doth turn the mould,


  Thou art numbered with the dead.

  Does that mean that when the badgers crossed in front of me, it was an omen of my death? But the old man at the poetry reading made it sound like a blessing. Something wonderful is going to happen to you, he said.

  I take Mum a cup of peppermint tea and she has stripped off, but no one can see from the path, so she’s safe. She’s rather uninhibited, my Mum. Her body is still good even though she’s fifty-two, but she Hates the ageing process. Her eyes don’t work properly, and her knees are Giving Up on her, and her Skin Sags. Her bent leg – the skin at the knee bit is stretched and taut, but the skin sort of slips down and gathers at the lowest part of her leg near her thigh. The skin is puckered like beach sand when the tide has left it and little waves are echoed in it. I rather like it. But Mum says, ‘Gravity is a Bummer.’

  I think having young flesh gives you a false sense of immortality. I don’t have that, of course – a false sense of my own immortality. Facing facts, I have probably got another ten or twelve years, maybe a few more if I get a transplant. It seems like a long time to me. Twice the age I am now. Ancient. Actually, the only thing that really bothers me is not being able to breathe very well. Anyway, I suppose I do believe in my own immortality, in a way. I know that I won’t be aware of being dead, so I’ll only know about being alive. No one remembers before they were born, do they.

  This badger book, which was published in 1958, says that there are loads of badgers in Cornwall, and they have sets that go for maybe a mile underground, and that the badgers often make use of deserted mine shafts. Tin was mined in Cornwall in the nineteenth century.

  The male badger is called a boar and the female a sow, but they don’t have piglets – the babies are called cubs.

  There is an account of someone witnessing the funeral of a badger.

  A sow had lost her mate. She came to the set entrance and let out a weird unearthly cry; then she departed for a rabbit warren not far distant. There she excavated a large hole in preparation for the body of her mate. She worked at this over a long period, the time being broken up at intervals by journeyings between warren and set. After some hours a second badger appeared, a male. The sow stood still with head lowered and back ruffling agitatedly, and the male slowly approached with head also lowered. Then the female, moving her head quickly up and down, uttered a whistling sound, as though the wind had been expelled through the nostrils; at the same time she moved forward with two tiny jerky steps. When she stopped the male went through a similar motion, his nose to the ground like the sow’s. This was repeated. The ritual over, they both retired down the set. After some time they reappeared, the male dragging the dead badger by a hind leg and the sow somehow helping from behind. They reached the warren, interred the body, and covered it with earth. Then the male departed and the sow returned to her set and disappeared.

  We look out always onto a watercolour. Each time it’s a different painting of the same scene. Now it’s a robin’s-egg-blue sea with two small scratches – red boats – to the left of the left trunk of the main tree. Now they’ve met – the boats – merged. And below them, a blue tit on the tip of a hazel branch looks bigger than they do. Every moment the scene changes itself in an effort to produce the perfect painting, yet each moment is, in its own way, perfect and unrepeatable.

  There is absolutely no wind, not even the hint of a breeze on the water’s surface. It’s as if time is standing still.

  If only.

  You can almost hear the snails sliding up the trunks of the palms to shelter for the night under the dead spears. Tiny goldcrests with their neon orange caps are feeding upside-down on the main tree trunk of the Monterey. I wonder what insects they are eating?

  I walk around the garden with the magnifier and look at the lichens on the trees. It’s like snorkelling. Lichens have fruits and flowers and look like miniature coral heads. Brilliant.

  I find our large toad – a fine yellow warty toad, cool to the touch. He’s always to be found in the same place, under a porcelain sink on bricks. It’s cool and damp there and he likes it. But if it rains he goes out hunting. There’s a tiny pond, very overgrown with weed and water lilies and full of old leaves.

  ‘We must Clean It Out,’ Mum says, but I like it just the way it is, all covered over and mysterious. The toad’s eyes are tiny golden oranges. If I kiss him, perhaps he’ll turn into a prince, or is it only frogs that do that?

  Grandpop and Grandma took turn to read me stories, not only when I went to bed but daytime stories too. I loved sitting on Grandpop’s lap on his dull green rocking chair, just rocking away gently with his scratchy chin on my face, his cranky old voice in my ear. I can’t remember what he read me, really, just the smell of his tobaccoey clothes and the yellow nicotine-stained fingers. Come to think of it, he had clubbed fingers like mine. I never thought of that before. I wonder if he had heart problems too? He died of lung cancer though, I think. All that smoking, I suppose.

  Their little bungalow was packed with furniture. A solid and immoveable dining table and heavy armchairs, and rugs over carpets, and a funny old leather cloth on the table before the tablecloth went on. Layer upon layer of stuff. I used to climb onto a stool and then up onto the top of the door to search in the cupboard for treasures – jam-jars of buttons, photos, old clothes for me to dress up in. I was good at climbing when I was six or seven.

  ‘Mum, what’s happened to Grandma and Grandpop’s stuff?’

  ‘It’s in store with our things, Gussie, in London. We’ll send for it one day, when I’ve found a house.’

  I went shopping with Mum to a sort of pet supermarket in Truro to buy cat food and litter. It’s only Rambo that uses a litter tray as a loo. We call it Rambo’s dunny. (That’s Australian for lavatory, loo, bog, whatever. We never say toilet. I don’t know why. Most of the girls at school said toilet or loo. Mum corrects me immediately if she hears me say toilet.) It sits outside near the back door. He’s scared to go too far into the garden in case a tree frightens him or a blue tit attacks him.

  He’s such a wuss. All the cats follow me around the garden when I go for a walk. The females fight each other and Rambo follows very slowly, as he has to stop every two steps to look round and make sure the bogey man isn’t going to get him.

  In the store there was a huge section of aquariums with fresh water fish – not marine tropicals, unfortunately, which are much more colourful and interesting.

  There was a bird section too. In one cage, a cherry finch kept trying to escape, flying to the top of the cage, banging its beak or head on the wire mesh and falling back. It was terrible. I told the girl at the checkout desk but she didn’t seem to care. Probably working in a pet store makes you callous about animals’ suffering. They become merchandise, not living creatures. I keep thinking about it, can’t get it out of my head, the poor little bird desperate for freedom.

  Also, I can’t help thinking about Grandma dying of a broken heart. She and Grandpop had known each other since she was fourteen. All her life. He was her only love. And I was her only grandchild and I told her I hated her.

  I have been miserable all day.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  Note: I have decided it isn’t like a zoo here – more like a circus! Something exciting happens every day. This morning a racing pigeon with red bands around its ankles walked in the dining room door and made itself at home. The three cats slept on, totally unaware of a bird in their territory – meals on wheels, whatever. Mum was also totally amazed to see it under the table. She put it outside on the deck but it showed no signs of wanting to fly away. She gave it sunflower seeds and peanuts but they were too chunky for it to manage. Eventually she got me out of bed to lend a hand. I suggested putting it in a cat basket with a bowl of water and a saucer of crushed seeds, and then put a towel over the basket so the bird would go to sleep. I remember that’s what Grandpop did with their parrot when it made too much noise. Birds go quiet when it’s dark – like the gulls did at the ec
lipse.

  Then, after breakfast – porridge and honey – another weird thing happened. I saw what I thought was a seal, quite a long way out. But it was swimming along with its head out of the water, and seals don’t do that. So I got the bins and saw that it was a dog swimming – much too far out for a dog – then an actual seal appeared just in front of it, popped his head out, and I saw that the dog was following the seal. The dog’s tail was wagging in the water like a rudder. The seal dived and the dog swam in circles looking for it, then it emerged and the dog followed it again. It looked like the seal was leading the dog to a watery grave. I was very worried. There was no sign of an owner. Mum suggested we phone someone – get the lifeboat or something to rescue the dog. I thought of Ginnie and Mum said, ‘Yes, a good idea, though the dog isn’t exactly wild-life, but never mind.’

  So I phoned the police station and spoke to Ginnie. She laughed and said that the inshore lifeboat had been out the day before and rescued the same dog but that it had jumped straight back into the water. It’s a Water Spaniel and has a thing about seals.

  ‘Its owner has given up worrying about it,’ Ginnie said, ‘so you mustn’t worry.’

  OK. Cool. A dog that thinks it’s a seal.

  She asked me if I had been watching the peregrine and I said yes and I hadn’t seen any hang-gliders or anyone disturbing it. She said she would pop out here sometime and see how the young one was getting on. Cool. I like Ginnie.

  The dog eventually gave up on the seal and swam ashore. His man appeared out of the dunes and put him on a lead. The dog looked very pleased with himself – kept shaking himself and wagging his tail.

  Life is fascinating here at Peregrine Point. A slow-worm suddenly appeared in the bathroom next to the lavatory. Did it get there under its own steam or did a cat bring it in? It had an old tail-tip amputation scar. I picked it up and put it out. It was much smaller than the last slow-worm victim. It didn’t squirm and fight to be set free. It just sat quietly between my fingers. I wonder if it hurts them to be held. Like when you touch a butterfly wing and take off the protective dust. I do hope not.