by Nick Gifford
She smacked his arm with her free hand.
They came to the gate at the top end of the Hope Springs grounds. Danny opened it and held it for Cassie. Once in the grounds, he didn’t take her hand again.
8 Little Rick
Danny found Oma Schmidt in the long glasshouse behind the Hall. Bustling about, gathering disused pots and sorting them into different sizes. Always cleaning, always tidying – that was Oma Schmidt’s way.
Danny paused in the doorway. There was something in the set of her shoulders, and the jerky way she moved... She seemed upset.
He went in, picking up a terracotta pot. He placed it on the bench where she was working and she clicked her tongue disapprovingly. She snatched it up and reached over to put it in a stack of pots of the same size and then she paused and looked across her shoulder at him.
Instantly she smiled, the tense expression slipping away.
“Ah, Danny, my boy! Good, good. You come to help Oma Schmidt? Everyone, they are on the edge about the open day, you know. They say there has been no village fete for the last four years and the people of the village will be putting up a marquee on the grass and having it here with us.”
Danny knew all this – it had been arranged months before. “That’s good, isn’t it?”
“Ach, yes, but it all seems so disorganised.”
“It’ll be okay.”
“You think?” Oma started to brush off the bench. “He came round again,” she went on. “Richard. Little Rick. Can he not see where he is not wanted?”
Danny was puzzled by that. “But...”
Oma looked at him, briefly. “I do not like him. He make me shiver. Your mother does not like him either. But still he comes.”
Everybody liked Little Rick. He was popular at Severnside Community School, just as he was popular at Hope Springs. “Val seems to like him well enough,” he said. “She needs friends. She needs to start having a life again.”
Oma tensed. She was brushing the same part of the bench over and over, as if trying to get rid of a stubborn mark. “She had a life before,” she said softly. “She had a life before but she made it a mess. Splitting the family up with her friends and with her ‘having a life’.”
Danny turned and headed for the door. Oma had always blamed his mother for what had happened. She had always blamed his mother’s ... friendship with Chris Waller. She seemed to be blind to what her own son had done as a result, though. To her, it would always be Val’s fault that the family had split up.
“Danny? Don’t rush off. Don’t be cross with old Oma Schmidt. I am a foolish old woman, no more. I am only thinking of the family.”
He stopped.
Instead, he went to check the plants he’d potted on a few days earlier. The tomatoes were okay, planted directly in the soil with plastic collars around them, but snails had been after the peppers. He’d need to top up the beer traps.
“I saw you with your freundin,” said Oma, in a playful tone.
His German was patchy, but he was pretty sure that meant ‘girlfriend’. He said nothing.
“Does she have a name?”
“Cassie,” said Danny. It felt awkward, talking about her like this.
“Is she a nice girl?”
He was hardly going to say “no”... He shrugged, said nothing.
“You be good, Danny. You be careful of where she might lead.”
~
“There. That’s it. Just put it there, Danny. That’s right.”
Danny dropped the plywood beehive on an open patch of grass, then shifted it to the left a little so that it was stable.
Little Rick was halfway up a step ladder, wedged into the branches of an apple tree in the Hope Springs orchard. He had his beekeeper’s hat and gloves on, but no other protective clothing, despite the seething mass of honey bees wrapped around the trunk of the tree, little more than a couple of metres away.
“Right,” he said. “Now you need to take the roof and the crown board off.”
Danny lifted the roof and placed it back in the wheelbarrow Rick had used to move the hive from his store. Beneath it was a flat board with some ventilation holes. He removed this too. In the next level down there was some old honeycomb, the cells still capped over with wax.
Rick reached a hand over, close to the swarm, and encouraged some of the bees to crawl onto his glove.
Slowly, he backed down the steps. He held his hand inside the open hive and the two of them watched as some of the bees crawled onto the frames of honeycomb, while one or two lifted heavily from his glove and flew back up into the tree.
“They’re dopey when they’re swarming,” said Rick. “Everyone gets hot and bothered about swarms, but the bees are usually so stuffed full of honey that they can’t actually get themselves into position to sting, even if they wanted to.”
Danny glanced up at the chaotic bundle of bees in the tree. He could understand people getting bothered about something like that.
Once the last bee had left his hand, Rick stepped back and dropped the gloves and then his hat into the barrow. He took the crown board and positioned it on top of the open hive, and then the roof. Then he kneeled down before the hive and adjusted the position slightly.
“We can move the hive once they’re settled in,” he said. “Have you ever seen a swarm moving into its new home? It’s quite a sight to see.”
“Where’s this one going to go?” Danny asked.
“I don’t know yet,” said Rick. “I need to check my spreadsheet. I’ve got it all worked out to the finest detail against a plan of the grounds and the surrounding gardens and fields. I try to get the positioning exactly right, so the hives aren’t competing with each other. You have to pay attention to detail, don’t you?”
One of the bees had found its way down through the brood chambers and out to the entrance block. It sat there in the sunlight for a few seconds, and then lifted into the spring air. Danny watched it fly away, ignoring the swarm altogether.
“It seems so random,” he said. “Uncoordinated.”
“Each swarm is a single family unit,” said Rick. “It’s like a finely-tuned machine, despite appearances. Once the bees in the hive have investigated and approved it, you just watch.”
Just then, a loud yelping cry came from deeper into the orchard.
“Hear that? A spotted woodpecker,” said Rick.
“Green woodpecker,” corrected Danny automatically.
“Of course it is,” said Rick. “You know your birds, don’t you?”
“My father,” said Danny. “He used to take me birdwatching.” Up to the Lea Valley Country Park to see the bitterns, or maybe down to Dungeness on a twitch with Chris Waller.
“You miss him?”
Danny nodded.
“See him much?”
“When I can. We talk on the phone. It’s not the same, though.”
“Of course not,” said Rick. “It’s difficult.”
Danny looked at him, wondering how much he knew, how much Val had given away.
“Listen, Danny: if you ever need someone to talk to, you know I’m here, don’t you? Not as a teacher. As a friend.”
“Thanks,” said Danny. More than three years in a family where no-one would talk and now twice in two days... Yesterday Cassie, and now Rick. Both of them offering listening services, trying to get him to open up and talk.
Was it that obvious? Were the conflicts in his head so obvious that everyone was going to take him on as a sympathy case? He remembered the social worker, earnestly trying to get him to expose his thoughts in a diary.
He didn’t need their help. He was coping.
“Know what I think?” asked Rick.
Danny shrugged.
“You’re a funny lot, the four of you. There’s you, Val and Josh, and then you’ve got Omaschmidt clinging on. She’s not Val’s mum, is she? Your dad’s gone, but his mother stays with you... Very peculiar.”
So Val hadn’t told him much.
“Om
a’s always been close to us. We’re all she has.”
Rick nodded. “It’s like a swarm without the queen,” he said. “That’s what I think. You have a man-shaped space in your family. That’s what I mean when I say, you know, if you need someone to talk to...”
“Are you and Val ... seeing each other?”
Rick narrowed his eyes, still staring up at the swarm.
“You’d better ask Val that,” he said. “Your mother... she’s a hard person to get to know. She keeps herself well-guarded. Most people that defensive, they have their own good reasons.”
Danny nodded. She had good reason, all right.
“Must be something bad,” Rick continued. Probing, teasing out his own conclusions. “Your father, I’d guess.”
It was that obvious, despite all their efforts to make a new start.
“It’s okay,” said Rick. “I won’t say anything. I won’t give your secrets away.”
Rick laughed, suddenly.
“What?” said Danny. What was so funny about all this?
“Sorry. It’s true what they say, though, isn’t it? You choose your friends but you can’t choose your family. Were you close to your father?”
Danny shook his head. “We’re closer now, if anything,” he said. “At a distance.”
And then he added, “It’s just... I try very hard not to be like him.” It was a struggle he fought every minute of every day. Any little sign, any slight indication that he was like his father had to be squashed.
“We’re all scared of turning out like our parents,” said Rick. “Look at David! God, how I’d hate to be like him and live his life. Sad little headmaster of a failing school, too blind to see that it was all unravelling around him. So obsessed with the fine detail of his life that he couldn’t see what was really going on. He drove my mother away with his obsessiveness. He couldn’t see what he was doing to her. She couldn’t stand it.”
“You’re a teacher,” said Danny. Fairly obsessive, too, judging by the way he looked after his bees as if it was a military campaign. “You’re following in his footsteps whether you want to or not.”
“But I’m not him,” said Rick. “I’m different. We all are. Okay, so we share some of our genes: I’m half of my father. But humans share something like ninety-nine per cent of their genes with chimpanzees, yet you don’t see us jumping around in trees and scratching our hairy backsides. Not most of us, anyway. It’s like Mozart and Robbie Williams: they use all the same musical notes, but it’s how they mix them up that matters. You and your father may have some of the same genes, but you’re not the same people.”
“But what if I’ve got the genes that made him... act the way he did?”
“It doesn’t work like that,” said Rick. “People keep coming out with claims that they’ve discovered genes for violence and genes for intelligence and so on, but it just doesn’t work like that. The genes are the raw materials, but we’re all shaped by our environment as we grow up. We learn by experience, we learn to exercise self-control and judgement, we learn from those around us.”
And Danny had been brought up by a mass murderer. What lessons about life had he learnt from his father, during all those years together? How had his father’s influence moulded his own development in subtle ways, ways that no-one would spot until maybe, that one day, when it’s all too late to change?
“Hey look,” said Rick softly, nodding towards the swarm.
Bees were starting to peel away from the mass, buzzing around for a short time and then heading down to near ground level. A cluster of them were gathered on the hive’s entrance block, and were starting to crawl inside.
“The ones we put into the old honeycomb have passed judgement,” said Rick. “They’ve given the thumbs up, and now they’re sending out scent signals to their swarm to tell them they’ve found a nice new home.”
More bees spiralled down to the hive, and Danny and Rick stepped back a short distance.
A few seconds later, a great block of bees split away from the mass, like ice calving from an iceberg. They descended on the hive, landing all over the front, and on the grass at its base. Steadily, more and more bees came down, until the swarm had re-formed itself over the entrance to the hive.
As a demonstration of the relentless power of nature, it was impressive indeed.
9 Normal
He walked to school with Tim and Won’t and sexy, sophisticated Jade – who seemed somehow just a little less beautiful this drizzly Monday morning. Little Rick had gone in David’s ancient Mini today.
Danny walked in silence, his mind elsewhere.
There was no sign of Cassie and her friends from the other side of the village ahead of them on the track, or following behind, either.
That solved his immediate problem. How was he going to deal with her? How were they going to behave in front of everyone?
His little freundin.
Or was she, even? His girlfriend. He didn’t know.
They had kissed, but then she had turned that into one of her games: a fairytale kiss to break a spell.
They had held hands, but not for long.
Was he meant to do something? Make some kind of move? He had lived for so long by keeping everything in check, under control, but now this was a situation for which he did not know the rules.
He had enjoyed being with her, but now it was as if Saturday had happened to someone else. It was as if it was someone else entirely who had relaxed with Cassie Lomax by the stream on the hill above Hope Springs. Someone else entirely who had started to talk, to open up.
It wasn’t the kind of thing Danny did. It broke all the rules he lived by.
“Hey, dreamer, I said see you later.”
He blinked. It was Jade. They were at school already. He nodded. “Yes. See you later.”
~
He saw Cassie in maths, but she barely glanced in his direction. She was playing it cool, he thought. Or maybe she had been having second thoughts. There was, after all, no reason why she should be interested in him, when she was sharing a desk with Scott Davies and Jase Lorrimer.
He wandered round at lunchtime deliberately not looking for her. If he had looked and not found it would have been so much more disappointing than simply not looking in the first place.
A lane ran along the far side of the playing fields, and he followed this down to the river, past groups of smokers and a couple of older teenagers on motorbikes. Sand martins skimmed the surface of the river, darting up to holes in the far bank. Just above the holes an old woman walked a spaniel, unaware of the life beneath her feet.
A strange vibration jolted Danny out of his daydreams. His phone. He’d forgotten it was even turned on.
Val had bought it for him ages ago, to take with him when he and Oma went to visit his father. He hardly ever used it. He didn’t have the kind of friends to make much use of it, really. He never let people that close.
He had swapped numbers with Cassie on Saturday, though.
He fumbled for it in his pocket. It had stopped vibrating. He pressed OK, then remembered the keypad was locked. By the time he had unlocked it he knew he had missed the call.
He stared at the small LCD screen. An envelope was blinking: he had a message.
He okayed it.
Wlk hom 2gtha? ...C
He pressed OK to answer the message. What to say? Best to keep it simple.
Ok. Danny schmidt.
The surname thing was an afterthought, a shared secret. He hoped it would make her think of Saturday.
Moments after he had sent the message, she replied.
W8 by D gates. CU L8R....C
He decided not to answer. It was clear enough. He would see her outside the main school gates after school.
The afternoon dragged.
~
She was there before him leaning against a wall, her bag strap looped round her hand, bag on the ground. She gave him a quick smile. “Hi, Schmidty,” she said. “Going my way?”
&
nbsp; They walked up Morses Lane, part of a steady flow of children tipping out of Severnside. This was the main route back to the New Meade Estate, where a lot of the Grafton-on-Severn kids lived.
“What did you make of that maths homework?” Cassie asked.
“I haven’t got a clue,” said Danny. “It’s all way over my head.”
“I thought as much. Want to come back to mine? You pick my brains if I pick yours.”
“You can try if you like.”
They turned onto the track to Wishbourne.
Danny took out his phone. “Let them know I’ll be late,” he said.
Val answered.
“Hi,” he said. “Me. I’m going to be late, okay? I’m going to a friend’s to do homework.”
“Okay,” said Val. Then she added, “That’s good. I’ll see you when you get in.”
“A ‘friend’, am I?” said Cassie.
“Could be worse,” said Danny. He realised he was grinning a stupid grin. He stopped himself, and looked down at the track. As he walked, he was aware of not just his own feet, but two more feet in the corner of his vision, walking faster to match his own long strides.
~
Cassie lived in one of the wooden chalets on Swiss Lane. From the way people talked of “the other side of the village”, he had always had the image of these houses as being little better than tumbledown allotment sheds, held together by string and paint.
Cassie’s house was immaculate. The garden was neat and trim, everything geometric and evenly laid out. The house was painted a vibrant yellow, with white window frames – all so clean as if it had been painted only that day. A neat little silver saloon car was parked in the drive.
They went round to the back.
“Hi, Mum,” said Cassie, pulling the back door open and going into the kitchen.
Danny followed. Cassie’s mother was a plump woman, probably in her early forties, with the same unruly black hair as her daughter. “Hi, Cass,” she said. Then she looked up at Danny.
“This is Danny,” said Cassie quickly. “I’m helping him with his homework. He’s like, really sloooow.”
Her mother rolled her eyes at Danny. “Tell me she’s not like this at school, too,” she said.
