The Death of Bees
A NOVEL
Lisa O’Donnell
Dedication
To my children, Max and Christie
Contents
Dedication
Prologue
Winter
Marnie
Nelly
Marnie
Nelly
Marnie
Nelly
Marnie
Lennie
Marnie
Nelly
Marnie
Nelly
Lennie
Marnie
Lennie
Nelly
Lennie
Marnie
Nelly
Lennie
Marnie
Nelly
Lennie
Marnie
Nelly
Marnie
Nelly
Marnie
Lennie
Marnie
Nelly
Marnie
Nelly
Lennie
Marnie
Lennie
Nelly
Marnie
Lennie
Nelly
Marnie
Lennie
Marnie
Nelly
Marnie
Nelly
Marnie
Lennie
Nelly
Marnie
Lennie
Marnie
Nelly
Lennie
Nelly
Spring
Lennie
Nelly
Marnie
Lennie
Nelly
Lennie
Marnie
Nelly
Lennie
Marnie
Nelly
Lennie
Marnie
Lennie
Nelly
Marnie
Lennie
Nelly
Marnie
Nelly
Lennie
Marnie
Nelly
Lennie
Marnie
Nelly
Marnie
Nelly
Marnie
Nelly
Marnie
Lennie
Nelly
Marnie
Nelly
Lennie
Nelly
Summer
Marnie
Nelly
Marnie
Nelly
Marnie
Lennie
Marnie
Lennie
Marnie
Lennie
Marnie
Lennie
Marnie
Nelly
Marnie
Lennie
Marnie
Lennie
Marnie
Nelly
Marnie
Lennie
Nelly
Autumn
Marnie
Lennie
Marnie
Nelly
Marnie
Nelly
Marnie
Nelly
Lennie
Marnie
Nelly
Marnie
Nelly
Marnie
Nelly
Marnie
Nelly
Winter
Marnie
Nelly
Marnie
Nelly
Marnie
Nelly
Marnie
Nelly
Marnie
Nelly
Marnie
Nelly
Marnie
Nelly
Marnie
Nelly
Marnie
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Credits
Copyright
About the Publisher
Prologue
Eugene Doyle. Born 19 June 1972. Died 17 December 2010, aged thirty-eight.
Isabel Ann Macdonald. Born 24 May 1974. Died 18 December 2010, aged thirty-six.
Today is Christmas Eve. Today is my birthday. Today I am fifteen. Today I buried my parents in the backyard.
Neither of them were beloved.
Winter
Marnie
Izzy called me Marnie after her mother. She’s dead now, actually they’re both dead. I’m just saying that’s how I got it, my name. My mum had a boring name, didn’t suit her at all. She was an Isabel called Izzy. She should have been a Charlie, I think of her as a Charlie. My dad had a gay name, Eugene. He never said he hated it, but I bet he did. Everyone called him Gene, but he was a bit of a Frankie, a Tommy, maybe a Mickey. My pal Kimberly gets called Kimbo, she’s always getting into fights and would smack her own shadow if she thought she could catch it. Kimbo’s name evolved from a slagging she got for being a total psycho and it stuck, like a warning. “Here comes Kimbo, run for your life.”
My other pal is Susie. Her real name’s Suzanne and for a long time that’s what we called her, we never felt inclined to shorten it the way people do with long names, but then when we were about eleven years old she told us she didn’t want to be called Suzanne anymore, she wanted to be called Susie. She thought it sounded older and sexier, I suppose it does. Of course her granny still calls her Snoozy, mortifying baby name.
Then there’s my sister, Helen, we call her Nelly, to be honest I don’t think she knows her name is Helen, she’s been Nelly since she was a baby. Nell would have been cooler, but she was like Dumbo when she was born, so Nelly was a perfect fit.
Izzy said choosing my name was a nightmare; she wanted something different for me, something sophisticated that made people look twice at me, as if they’d missed something about me the first time they looked, and so she chose her mother’s name. I understand Emma was also a hot favorite, so was Martha, but Gene didn’t like Emma, he said it was a weak name. He didn’t like Sam either because he got dumped by a Sam. He also knew a Siobhan who got smacked by a bus when she bent down to pick up a fag end on the curb side. Gene’s favorite was Elise because of a song by the Cure, but Izzy hated it, she was more of a New Order fan and I understand Elegia was discussed.
Izzy said I was tiny when I was born, a preemie rushed to the intensive care unit where I was kept in a plastic bubble for nine weeks with Gene and Izzy peering at me through Perspex glass. The safest place I’ve ever been. Anyway that’s why I’m Marnie and not Eve or Prudence or Lucretia. I’m Marnie. Too young to smoke, too young to drink, too young to fuck, but who would have stopped me?
People think Nelly’s nicer than me, but only ’cause she’s off her head. She’s twelve. She likes cornflakes with Coke and period dramas. She likes old movies with Bette Davis and Vivien Leigh. She likes documentaries about animals and anything to do with Harry Potter, she’s obsessed with him. She also plays the violin courtesy of Sarah May Pollock, a music teacher who weeded out talent every year by forcing us to listen to recorded notes. I was never selected to play an instrument, although I like to sing and can hold a tune pretty well, but it was Nelly who identified the treble clef necessary to play the piano, an instrument she boked at, drawn instead to a lone violin with a broken string lying flat on a gray Formica table. Obviously she plays brilliantly and within a short period of time Miss Pollock ended up giving her the violin for keeps, a gift last Christmas, that’s how good Nelly is or how good Miss Pollock was who loved to play with her. Unfortunately Miss Pollock left the school, was replaced by Mr. Charker, a trumpet man. Nelly still plays and like a master someone said and of course our school gives her a platform every Christmas mostly to wow the board of governors even though the school is not advancing her in any
way by hiring someone else to teach her. Not that it would make any difference when she can actually play without music. Kimbo and Susie love to hear her play, so do the neighbors and I like it too except when she pulls it out in the middle of nowhere and starts in with the Bach because she does that, on the subway sometimes, in a bookstore on Sauchiehall Street, and on a bus to Wemyss Bay once. No one ever minds, ’cause she’s so good but it sort of embarrasses me, her zipping away and me next to her smoking a fag like a total stranger, as if we don’t belong together.
Another little foible of Nelly’s is how she talks. She sounds like the queen of England most of the time. She doesn’t say mum, she says mother and she doesn’t say dad, she says father. She has sentences in her head like “What the devil’s going on?” and “What on earth’s all this hullabaloo?” I’ve also heard her say “confounded” and “good golly.” Drives me nuts. Constantly having to protect her from head cases who think she’s taking the piss. She also wears spectacles, round ones like Harry Potter; she’s recently developed an obsession with him and wears them like they’re real glasses, except they’re not. Last Christmas Izzy got her a magic cloak, but she only wears it around the house and one time to take out the rubbish.
Truth is Nelly’s a wee bit touched, not retarded or anything, just different. She doesn’t have many friends, she doesn’t laugh much, and when you talk to her about something serious she gets really quiet, like she’s taking it in and then rearranging it in her head. I don’t know how she arranges it, I just know it’s different from how I might arrange it. She also takes things very literally, so you have to be careful what you say. For instance if I said, “You’re fucking mental,” she’d say something like, “I can assure you, Marnie, one is perfectly sane!” I don’t know why she’s not dead to be honest. You can’t talk like that, not in Maryhill.
Gets to you after a while, even the teachers, they can’t deal with her at all. When she started secondary school they put her in a class for total fannies, but halfway through the school year they had to take her out ’cause she’s totally brainy at science. Pure Einstein stuff and then of course there’s the violin. I feel sorry for her. I mean she can’t help it, being how she is, it’s not like she wants to say everything in her head. She can’t help it, like telling the toughest girl in her year, Sharon Henry, she should wash her “down theres” ’cause Nelly could smell her “foulness.” Seriously. No censor. Lucky for her Shaz thought it was funny, which meant everyone else was permitted to say it was funny, even luckier, it wasn’t said in front of any guys. Apparently Shaz grabbed a bar of soap and told everyone she was off to wash her “down theres” and then simulated cleaning aforementioned unmentionables. Hysterical laughter ensued interrupted by an irate Miss Moray, who wants everyone to fuck off so she can have her lunch. Now whenever any of the girls from Nelly’s class walk past her they simulate washing their vaginas or ask her if she can smell fanny. Nelly doesn’t get it. Tells them not to worry—“They’re perfectly sanitary.”
There’s other stuff of course, like the rabid chitchat and usually about something totally random. I remember when Steve Irwin died, the reptile guy, for about a month it was the only thing she’d talk about. Steve Irwin’s widow, his daughter, and of course stingrays. Where stingrays live. What stingrays look like. How to get poisoned by a stingray. You want to thump her when she gets like that.
I prefer the Harry obsession, it’s quieter. When Nelly’s reading, nothing exists, not even me, I love it when she’s reading, I like not existing, even for an hour. I think the Harry Potter thing reminds her of Nana Lou. She read a couple of the books to her when she took care of us that time but those days are well over. We’re on our own now. Izzy and Gene are dead and no one can know what we’ve done with them. We’d get separated for sure, they’d put me in a home and God knows what they’d do to Nelly. Anyway I’ll be sixteen in a year. They can’t touch me then. I could have a baby at sixteen and get married, I’m considered an adult and legally able to take care of both of us.
I suppose I’ve always taken care of us really. I was changing nappies at five years old and shopping at seven, cleaning and doing laundry as soon as I knew my way to the launderette and pushing Nelly about in her wee buggy when I was six. They used to call me wee Maw around the towers, that’s how useless Gene and Izzy were. They just never showed up for anything and it was always left to me and left to Nelly when she got old enough. They were never there for us, they were absent, at least now we know where they are.
Nelly
Good God, Mother, you scared the dickens out of me.”
She kissed my forehead and went to the garden.
“Where the devil do you think you’re going? It’s freezing out.”
“I’m fine, hen. Just need some air.”
“Well, at least take a cardigan. You’ll catch your death out there.”
Marnie
Izzy’s reaction to Gene’s death was totally unexpected. She wouldn’t let us call an ambulance and lay there cuddling his dead body, stroking his hair and kissing at his cheeks like she really loved him. It made me sick watching her like that.
The next day when I woke to silence I thought she might have left in the night and done a runner like she always does. Instead I found Nelly in the kitchen sucking on cornflakes and Coke. When I asked where Izzy was she nodded toward the garden. I only had a T-shirt on and it was freezing outside so I grabbed a cardigan. We have a pervert living next door and the less he sees the better, but Izzy wasn’t in the garden and the shed door was open so I make a barefoot run and that’s where I found her, or where Nelly must have found her before returning to her fizzy cereal. Izzy had hung herself.
When I went back to the house Nelly was still eating. I told her Izzy was dead.
“Well, that’s torn it,” she said.
I explained what would happen to us if Welfare found out. She nodded. I told her we had to bury them in the garden.
“You think that’s wise?” she said.
“Course it’s wise, ya fucking balloon.”
Before we buried them I checked their belongings for money. Gene had half a tab and some receipts. I don’t know why he kept receipts. He also had a banker’s card with his PIN, 4321, written on a label stuck to the inside of his wallet. Seriously.
Izzy had a handful of change and some fags, a telephone number, some sleeping pills, and some jellies, or benzos. I kept the fags and tossed the pills, but then I thought I might make money from the pills so I fished them back out of the trash and sold them on. I also kept her purse. I was there when she bought it. Calvin Clone. She also had forty quid. Thank God. We would have starved otherwise ’cause there was fuck all in Gene’s account.
Nelly
Marnie makes me do things I don’t care for. Says all kinds of ghastly things. Dead, buried, over, but must she go on? Beastly girl.
Marnie
Getting Gene off the bed and into the garden was a living nightmare. His face was swollen, as if someone had beaten the crap out of him, and he was sticky, like he was leaking venom. It was coming out his eyes, his nose, and his mouth. And the smell, I was gagging.
We decided to wrap him in the sheet he was lying on, we couldn’t stomach the idea of touching him again, but it was soaked right through with this syrupy fluid and so we had to get another sheet and that did mean touching him again. Rubber gloves would have been useful, but we didn’t have any. All we had were woolen ones, so we used them instead.
Gene’s flesh was literally falling off him and ripping like paper in some places. Every time we moved him he made a noise, like a fart, except wet and by the time we’d reached the top of the stairs we’d had enough and couldn’t bear to hold him any longer. At one point his arm escaped, limp as a rope, Nelly tried to cover it, but she accidentally caught his hand and his fingernail came away and got stuck in the knit of her glove. She boked then and couldn’t take it anymore. Neither could I, so we mutually agreed to push him off the top landing and let hi
m roll to the bottom. It was the worst thing we could have done. He burst at the seams, body fluid everywhere, on the carpet, on the walls, a swamp of poison.
“You beastly, beastly man,” says Nelly.
We had to get a wheelbarrow in the end, stole it from the next-door neighbor, then we spooned Gene off the floor and took him out back.
Izzy was already in the shed, her eyes sinking into her head and her tongue hanging out, but still, she didn’t look half as bad as Gene, more bloated and less green, a sort of damp blue color. When Nelly saw Izzy she burst into tears, then she threw up, I mean really threw up. I was on autopilot. I wanted them buried and gone. I didn’t have time for tears, I knew we had a job to do and mostly I was wishing we’d got rid of them sooner and, to be honest, I don’t know why we didn’t.
We spent all night digging, the ground was practically frozen. It was tough to get the earth to move. We also realized there wouldn’t be enough room for both of them in the grave, we’d forgotten about the earth we had to put back in the hole to actually bury them and since Gene was the smelliest of the two we decided he was to be buried first and Izzy we squashed into the coal bunker knowing she’d decompose but be accessible for the pouring of disinfectant when necessary. But a week later we had to scoop her into a bin bag and shove her under the shed because she was leaking across the cement.
Last thing we did was pour bleach over them; a lame attempt to disguise the stink they’d left behind, though Nelly insisted the cold would be enough to keep the stench at bay. Then we went inside to purge what remained of Gene from the stairs, but no matter how we scrubbed we couldn’t remove his stain, though we scoured until the color left the carpet and the skin on our knuckles burned blood. That’s when we decided to pull the carpet up and got a knife and ripped every inch of it from the stairs. But even with the carpet in the bin the scent of their death remained in the house.
When all was done we covered Izzy with two sacks of coal and planted lavender on top of Gene, not out of sentiment you understand, but to better hide what was buried in the earth. The saleswoman at the Garden Centre said lavender grows fastest and has a strong smell but worried about the weather being so cold, suggested we wait till spring. She said we only needed a few bushes, but they were so small we bought more. We needed to cover the grave. She also said that lavender attracts bees and not to plant it next to a door. Then she went on about how the honeybees were becoming extinct and how sad it was for the environment. Nelly was freaked by that and talked of nothing else for about a week. Eventually I had to tell her to shut the fuck up about the bees, which I felt bad about afterward, but she was really getting on my nerves and was constantly asking questions I didn’t know the answers to. I mean I was making up all kinds of shit at first, the bees have migrated, the bees are evolving into another species, but then it got too hard and my answers were scaring her, I might have said something about global warming coupled with a nonsensical end-of-the-world theory, I don’t know. She just makes you feel like you have to know the answer to every fucking question she has. In the end she gets me in a corner, goes right up to my face, not even asking anymore but demanding an answer, so I gave her one.
The Death of Bees: A Novel Page 1
