Honey-Dew

by Louise Doughty

  Gemma was frozen against the wall, standing straight but giving the hunched, tied-up impression of being in a crouched position. She was wide-eyed, her pupils as fathomless as black holes. Her right eyebrow was matted with blood. Blood was speckled on other parts of her face in tiny artistic dots and a smeared streak of blood ran down her arm. As Gemma turned her body, slowly, it seemed, to face her, Edith saw more blood on the front of Gemma’s lemon-coloured t-shirt. She had one additional slow moment in which to think, my daughter is hurt, and to feel herself tipping towards her.

  At the same time, she felt a slam in the lower chest, as if she had been hit with a wide, flat object which was at once hard and immeasurably soft – and then her daughter was very close to her, almost supporting her as she pitched forward, and she caught a glimpse of Gemma’s ever-widening gaze, a gaze so hollow and frightened that she seemed scarcely human.

  She fell on her side and rolled onto her back, a hand lifted instinctively, for now there could be no mistake. Her daughter had one arm raised high and the black point of the knife was a dark star descending.

  Her thoughts were everything and nothing. She knew she was about to die. At the same time the fear and panic were so all-consuming that there was hardly space in which to be aware of anything. The shock of it condensed thought.

  I am being killed. My daughter is killing me. I am becoming a murder. The fact of my death will be wholly obscured by its manner. I am now a murder victim, devoid of personality or history. I will never have the chance to become anything else.

  There was no time to identify these ideas or separate them from one another before she lost consciousness. She was hardly aware of the second blow. A darkness was gathering over her and only one thought surfaced clearly: how lonely I am.

  9

  The genesis of a moral dilemma lies not in the choice between right or wrong but in the recognition that choice itself is possible.

  Hamlyn Wilkes

  A Murderous Heart

  It’s hell trying to get a parking place in the centre of Oakham on a Saturday. It’s because of the market. By mid-afternoon, the stalls are beginning to pack up and things are quietening down.

  As I drove by that Saturday, I heard the tinkle of bells, a whoop and clatter. The Morris Men were performing by the butter cross. They were touring the county as part of the Independence celebrations – that kind of thing would be happening all summer. Peter, our Chief Sub, was also our Picture Editor and he was supposed to be following them round getting some good stuff for next week. I hoped he had remembered, what with all the excitement about Doug. I nearly stopped to check he was there. I had to remind myself I was on a mission.

  It was such a normal day, that day. I couldn’t believe that I was doing anything out of the ordinary.

  I parked on Stamford Road, a few yards round the bend, pulling onto the verge so that I wouldn’t get clouted by some idiot driver swinging out of town.

  Outside the library a small, tweedy man was handing out leaflets for the Referendum Party. I took one as I passed, folding it and stuffing it in my pocket. I couldn’t get excited about the election. Rutland was as safe as houses for the Tories.

  Oakham library is a modern brick bungalow with large windows and an air of sleepy helpfulness. I used to borrow science fiction from it when I was an adolescent, running my fingers along the metal shelving looking for the familiar yellow hardbacks. I tried other types of novel once or twice but the yellow hardbacks were my favourite. I was guaranteed a story. When I had grazed through all they had, I stopped going. It never occurred to me that I could order more.

  It was always quiet. Even on a Saturday, there were only a few other people around: an elderly lady by the large print books and a couple of kids squeaking softly in the children’s section. The Ordnance Survey maps were on a stand by the information desk. It would have been quicker to ask for help but I didn’t want to draw attention to myself. Eventually, I found the right ones, No. 130 for Grantham and No. 141 for Kettering and Corby.

  Burley Wood was dissected, half on each map. There wasn’t much detail but I could see a series of criss-cross paths coming to a central point in the middle of the wood. There were no other obvious landmarks. Ashpit Spinney was a small stain to the right, as if the printer’s ink had blotted. No paths were marked.

  Altogether, it was the biggest wooded area in Rutland, several hundred acres, but on the map it still looked small – the pale green spread of it dwarfed by the curving blue of Rutland Water. Thirty coppers could cover that in a couple of days, I thought, shaking my head. Ashpit Spinney was tiny. I could cover that myself in under an hour.

  Outside the library, the Referendum man handed me another leaflet. It joined the first one in my pocket.

  As I turned towards the car, I saw David Poe. He was standing on the kerb at the top of Burley Road, waiting to cross. He hadn’t seen me. I scurried down Stamford Road.

  As I drove out of Oakham, I felt freedom wash over me, a feeling as real and as fresh as a sudden summer rainstorm. I always feel like that as I pull out into the countryside along that road, no matter how many times I’ve done it. I’ve noticed other drivers picking up speed with the same alacrity. Maybe it is the wide swoop of the vista ahead; the fields, the air, the water.

  I had a long chat with Lizzie once, about men. She said the best bit about sleeping with a man was getting up at his place the following morning, getting into your car and leaving – driving away thinking, I’ve done that, now I’m off. At the time I thought, better not to do it in the first place, maybe, and I think I said as much. Later I realised I was envious. I didn’t want to sleep around like her – but that feeling of leaving, that was what appealed to me. I suppose that is why Andrew lives the way he does. He gets the feeling of leaving all the time.

  I wondered whether he would still be there when I got back. I doubted it. I couldn’t think of anything more likely to put him on the highway with his thumb raised than an unexpected visit from our mother.

  As I drove up the hill, I thought about Doug lying on his back in Leicester Royal Infirmary, helpless and ill, on such a lovely sunny day.

  I parked more carefully than on my previous visit, pulling the car up to the five-barred gate where it would be partially hidden by the overgrown bushes that sprouted either side. Drivers coming over the brow of the hill would glimpse it as they passed, but it was much less noticeable than before.

  I’ve never been that interested in exploring. It isn’t in my blood. When you come from generations who have grown up in the countryside you think it is for working, not walking. One of our receptionists is a fully paid-up member of the Ramblers’ Association. What is rambling, precisely? I wanted to ask her when she tried to sign me up. I understand what walking is – it is an action of the legs for the purpose of getting from A to B. But rambling? See you later, dear, I’m just going to ramble down to the post office.

  In the field beyond the Spinney, a sparrowhawk was hovering. I watched as it swooped for a fieldmouse hidden in the undergrowth. Over the rise came the broken ma-are of sheep.

  There was the stillness that the countryside acquires in sunlight. It is most noticeable in high summer but even then I could feel it – a heaviness, a thickness in the air. Einstein said that sunlight hit the earth at two kilograms per second. E = mc2, one of the few things I can remember from General Science. If mass has energy, then I suppose energy must have mass, but it’s still a funny way of putting it. It makes it sound as if Einstein thought that sunlight landed on the earth like a bag of sugar dropped from outer space.

  There was a half-hearted twirl of barbed wire hanging from the top bar of the gate but it was old and loose. I eased it to one side. I glanced around, then clambered over, jumping down clumsily. I stepped round the bushes, out of sight, then paused to look at my hands. Then I set off down the track.

  The edges of the wood were raggedy – the density would come later. For the first fifty yards it was like walking through nature’s
rubbish tip: nettles, dock leaves, dandelions ran wild. Elders twisted towards the sky.

  I have a gardener’s suspicion of elders. They aren’t trees at all really, just big weeds. The seedlings sprout the minute they hit the soil. Their roots spread deep beneath the ground. They will take over, if you let them.

  There were two of them at the back of my garden when I bought the cottage. I had to get some blokes in to deal with them. There is a superstition that you never speak ill of an elder in its presence. ‘So,’ the head bloke said to me quietly, regarding the bigger of the two. ‘Shall we attend to this one first?’ I nodded. ‘Attend’ meant chop down and poison the stump, but neither of us was going to say it out loud.

  Nobody had attended to the elders in Ashpit Spinney. They had taken over. I thought ill of them as I passed.

  It looked as though somebody had made the effort to plant a few conifers. A few yards of polite woodland lined the track, the sort of woodland that ramblers like to ramble in, with a heavy canopy and enough undergrowth to house a few rare invertebrates. I made a small, cynical grimace, remembering that I once bought a pair of earrings from a market in Birmingham which had a label attached reading Genuine Wood.

  Further into the Spinney, it looked less genuine but more authentic, an untidy mixture of oak and maple, with one or two pale, feminine ash. The canopy was less dense underneath the ash trees. Einstein’s sugar bags of sunlight broke through and plummeted down onto heaps of sedge and old bracken twisted around the floury tree trunks. There was the musty, broken scent of soil, dead wood, dying insect life. I knew that smell. I had a different version, a more rotten version, in my cottage. This was milder, diluted by the occasional breeze.

  The track ended. Ahead, through the undergrowth, there was a small, scuffed path. The trees became denser, but I could just see that, at the far end of the path, there was a clearing.

  I don’t know how long that walk took. The path was narrow. It seemed to stretch and lengthen itself as I progressed along it. As I neared the clearing, the bushes closed in. Hard twigs poked at me. I ducked and dived as I walked. I began to feel like someone dreaming. The ground was uneven, coated with leaves and pine needles which had fallen, become soggy, then hardened. As I broke through into the clearing, I stumbled.

  The clearing was oblong, with a huge fallen oak on one side which looked as though it had been coppiced once, then left derelict. After a few years, it must have become top heavy, then blown over. The trunk now lay on the ground with new branches sprouting vigorously along its length. I was close to the stool end, which bulged as high as my face, a spaghetti tangle of dead roots in yellow, grey and white. Soil and spiders’ webs hung from the roots, a perfect home for lice and millipedes. It was a whole eco-system, a town like Oakham.

  Beyond the clearing, I could see that the trees began to thin out again. The open fields would not be far away. I had walked the length of the Spinney.

  It was a warm, still day but among the trees there was a movement of air, a shifting. Although the woods were silent, I could sense the scurrying of small things in the undergrowth around me.

  I stood very still. A pigeon cooed precisely; two long calls followed by one short, three times in succession. I wondered what that meant in Morse. Pat and I learnt Morse code at school, during a brief sojourn in the Girl Guides. We also taught ourselves semaphore, a consequence of reading too much Arthur Ransome. We used to stand on opposite sides of the street waving our arms, signing to each other, meet you in five mins outside the chippy.

  Then, I heard the flies. They must have been there all the time, but, as I stood, the noise they were making faded up in the echoey silence which followed the pigeon’s call.

  The sound of a large group of flies is both constant and various – a light buzzing punctuated by drilling noises which melt and move in the same way that the blackness of them weakens and intensifies if you watch them swarm.

  It was only later, much later, that I realised why it took me a moment or two to hear the sound and acknowledge its implications. Over winter, we forget the noise that a swarm of flies can make. It is a summer noise, but one of such ubiquity that when we hear it again, we forget we had forgotten it.

  I remembered, then forgot I was remembering. I thought, it’s too early for flies. The warm weather must have brought them out.

  The sound was making shapes above me. I turned and looked up.

  She must have clambered along the trunk of the fallen oak, then climbed up onto the branches of the other tree from there. It was a lime tree, I think. The leaves were a youthful green.

  One leg of the trousers was tied round a branch in a solid double knot. They were navy blue. She had wrapped the crotch round her neck, then tied the other leg. It was a thorough, determined job. She was still wearing her socks and trainers. A long yellow t-shirt hung down to her hips. It was smeared with brown stains, old blood and dirt. Her legs were bare but scratched and streaked with fluid. Flies clung to the fluid.

  She was in profile. Her long hair covered most of her face but I could just see her half-open mouth.

  The flies were all over her, her arms, her hair. They dripped from one leg, dancing away, returning. The noise of them deepened in my ears with the insistence of a dentist’s implement until it felt as though they were inside my head.

  Then, one of her legs twitched.

  As I parked the car, haphazardly, outside my house, I realised that I was talking to myself, babbling out loud. ‘So if we pull the photofit,’ I was saying, ‘can we bring the picture of the house backwards maybe and run the portrait shots on page one I think the portraits would look good do you know that Skeffington’s are only going to run their ads until the end of July they gave us lots of notice that was nice but they say it’s not economical Linda is going to write to them I think . . .’

  I stopped. I tried to breathe calmly. My chest rose and fell at a normal rate but the air inside it felt thin, as if I was at altitude.

  My legs shook as I walked the few feet to the front door. I almost fell upon it. I had forgotten that my mother might be there. I just wanted Andrew.

  My brother was sitting on the bottom step of my stairs, smoking. Next to him was his Guatemalan bag. He was wearing a hat with matching embroidery. He had changed his t-shirt.

  I stopped in the doorway. He twisted the stub of his cigarette against my banister, looked at me and said. ‘Relax. She’s gone.’

  I moved into the room and folded down onto the sofa.

  He stood and picked up his bag. ‘I’m off,’ he said. ‘I need some money. Have you got any?’

  I looked at him, unable to translate the expression on his face. I waved a hand over my bag, beside me on the sofa. He had never asked to borrow money from me before.

  He strode over to the bag and picked it up.

  ‘Andrew . . .’ I said. My voice was weak and strained.

  He wasn’t looking at me. He was picking through my purse.

  ‘There’s forty pounds in here. I’m taking twenty. Fair enough, don’t you think? After all, you owe me fifteen hundred. More, counting interest.’

  I looked up at him. ‘What are you talking about?’ It was a shout but my voice was feeble. It came out hoarsely.

  He looked down at me. ‘Gran’s money,’ he said calmly. ‘Mum told me about it. She told me a lot of other things as well. Mostly rubbish, of course – you know what she’s like.’

  ‘What did she say?’ A sense of unreality had come over me. I couldn’t believe we were discussing our mother.

  ‘After I left. Gran’s money. It had been in the building society all those years and we were going to get half each when you turned eighteen. I’d gone. Mum gave it all to you, to help you buy this place. Her latest idea is that you persuaded me to leave so that you would get all the money.’

  ‘She’s mad.’

  ‘I know she’s mad. I told her. That’s not the point.’

  I pushed myself up until I was facing him. My voice was broken. �
�Andrew, please, for God’s sake. I don’t know what you’re going on about.’

  He had two ten-pound notes in his hand. He held them up, close to my face. ‘In all these years, all the times I’ve come here, it never occurred to you to mention it? You didn’t think maybe you could’ve asked if it was all right, just once?’

  I lifted a hand, then dropped it. ‘Oh, for God’s sake you’ve always . . . You don’t . . .’

  He reached out and grabbed me. His fingers dug into my upper arms, the banknotes crumpled in his grasp. ‘Don’t what?’ he spat, his voice harsh and bitter. ‘Don’t need money? Don’t need to eat, maybe? Don’t like clothes or CDs or buying a pint occasionally?’ He gave me a single shake, a short, hard gesture of fury. His face was twisted. His voice became low, sibilant. ‘I wouldn’t mind, Alison, but it’s bloody typical. You don’t care about anyone. You’re worse than Mum. At least she’s bloody mad. You don’t have any excuse. You just live here in this stupid little house because you’re too bloody lazy and self-satisfied to do anything else. You think you’re the big shot and you’ve no bloody idea. No ambition, nothing. You’re worse. You’ve never asked me anything about what happened. Haven’t you got any fucking curiosity?’

  He released me. I sank back down on the sofa. He turned and picked up his bag.

  At the door, he hesitated. I thought he was finally going to ask me if I was all right. Instead he said, ‘Hope you had fun shopping.’

  After a while, I ran a bath, filling it so full that I had to ease myself down gently in case the water overflowed. Lumps of foam as big as brains swung on the surface as I sank.

  Steam filled the room. The window was open and the air that drifted in was a pleasant contrast to the sauna hovering over me. I lay with my head tipped back against the hard enamel, vaguely aware of the novelty of bathing mid-day. The sunlight made calming golden shapes against the wall.

  My phone rang but I didn’t move. My answer machine had broken down a month before and I hadn’t got round to replacing it. Once I had realised I could manage without one, I found it liberating. The phone stopped, then rang again – obviously somebody found it difficult to believe that in this day and age some people don’t have answer machines.