The Death of Bees: A Novel

by Lisa O'Donnell

  Vlado didn’t realize how Marnie’s been living or what the girl’s story was. He didn’t even know who Nelly was, or me. Not half as sad as his story though. A daughter shot down by a sniper going to school, a wife in Switzerland who wants a divorce, and parents who died before the war. All alone he is now, but thank God he was in the park. He carried Marnie all the way home.

  It turns out she’s been cleaning his house, although he doesn’t strike me as the type needing a cleaner. Marnie probably reminds him of his daughter and he wants to help her, she’s certainly in need of it.

  And what a rapport he has with Nelly. Every time she spoke he smiled. She knows how to be a child that one and in the funniest of ways. I think he enjoyed it. I know she did.

  Robert T. Macdonald is at his workshop right now and keeping a very low profile. The girls are so angry at him. It’s hard to say where they’ll find forgiveness. I couldn’t believe it when they told me what he’d done, that he’d found his daughter already or rather she had found him many years ago and he’d turned her away and with two little babies to care for. Shame on him. What he wants now I can’t begin to imagine.

  I don’t know what’s coming for us all now. Sadness keeps me awake. It feels like there’s rotten fruit inside my head.

  Hope Marnie comes down soon. She’s still upstairs listening to her iPod and very loudly. An awful buzzing of words at her ears, stinging songs about people who never die. It’s not healthy for a girl. It’s not healthy at all.

  Nelly

  Who is Kirkland Milligan anyway? A blaggard is who!

  My goodness the strangers she knows. The mind boggles with it.

  I have tended her needs well over a week now. A broken heart is no laughing matter I expect. I have fed her soup, chicken procured by my own hand I may add. How she dribbles. I combed her hair later. Washed her face. All from her little bed.

  Then I sang to her a Nana Lou song. Not so much as a paltry smile. Ungrateful wretch. I was done then, especially when she reached for the maudlin music she so loves.

  “Oh pull yourself together, would you? I think I’ve killed Lennie’s dog.”

  That certainly ruffled her feathers. Threw her beloved iPod at me, but what could I do, the dog was eating our mother and father. Intolerable fellow.

  Marnie

  She said she’d killed Lennie’s dog but she’d done no such thing. She’d accidentally hit him with a small plank. She said he had been messing around at the flower beds again and she was trying to shoo him away. Luckily Lennie thought it was the thugs who graffiti his walls. Poor Bobby had a bandage around his head for days.

  “I picked up a small plank of wood with the intention of waving him away with it, but he jumped up on me and I unintentionally smacked the top of his head. He really is a bothersome mutt, Marnie. Whatever shall we do about him?”

  “Well, we can’t murder him, can we. Lennie loves him,” I remind her.

  “Then what are we supposed to do? The matter is pressing.” She moans.

  “I don’t know!” I yell.

  “Hardly a solution, is it?” she says.

  “Then, well, we’ll have to figure it out, won’t we?”

  I underline we because I’m sick of being Wonder Woman for her. I’m too tired to save the day and it wouldn’t hurt her to step up to the plate once in a while. It can’t always be me. I don’t want it to be me.

  Nelly

  How cross Marnie was with me and how relieved she looked when Bobby returned through the dog flap in the kitchen.

  “Where have you been?” asked Lennie, hugging and patting him. “Oh my, what happened to your head?”

  The dog just wagged his tail, his face dark with dirt. I knew exactly where the little devil had been and it was making me sick with worry. He gave me a look then and I truly felt and feel the little blighter knows exactly what’s going on and means to get us caught. I’m thinking poison now. I have to do something to be rid of him or discovery is a matter of time. We’ve been through so much, Marnie and me, and to have it suddenly sabotaged by a mutt named Bobby would be altogether tragic. I can’t have it. I won’t have it. Our life must play on, our life must be protected and if Marnie won’t step up then I suppose it falls to me.

  Lennie

  I was glad Marnie came to me and I’m glad I could be of some use to her. We went to the garden and drank tea and I made sure not to flinch too much when she had her cigarette, though I wish she wouldn’t, they’re very bad for the lungs, aren’t they?

  She wanted to know all about you, didn’t she.

  “How did you meet him?” she asks.

  “With the greatest of difficulty. I was a music teacher. He taught English. He also had a girlfriend called Sadie. A right bag.”

  “What happened to Sadie?” She laughed.

  “I couldn’t care less,” I said, the jealousy still ripe in my voice.

  “So he was bi?”

  “No, he was scared. We’d been caught kissing or rather I was caught kissing him. It’s how we played it, no point in us both losing our jobs. Anyway the rumors about us were rife and he couldn’t handle it and so he reached for Sadie. He almost married her, but she bottled out. Even Sadie knew he was gay.”

  “Doesn’t matter, you ended up together anyway.”

  “Or I ended up with him.” I laughed. “But it wasn’t easy. Loving him was hard. Doors had to be locked and the lies had to be told, but still, it was a beautiful torment.”

  “I wish I’d never met Kirkland. I wish I’d followed my instincts and told him to fuck off, but he was so nice to me.”

  “Like Mick?”

  “Not like Mick, different from Mick.”

  “Marnie, you don’t have to love everyone who’s nice to you. People should be nice to each other.”

  We played a little Scrabble after that. She’s very good at Scrabble, but she kept chewing on her hair and when I told her to stop she twirled it around her finger instead. A very fidgety girl, always scratching at her knees or rubbing at her nose. Nerves most like, but when she won, oh my goodness. She jumped from the chair, and raised her hands up in the air and yelled, “Champion!” It made me laugh out loud, and so we played again. How she loves to play, but then her face fell, a shadow sweeping across it and I wondered what was wrong. She was looking at the floor and as I chased her gaze I saw what she saw. I was surrounded in a puddle of urine.

  I’d pissed myself.

  Nelly

  I miss my sister. I miss her strength. There is something lacking in her of late and I am rather forced to take the lead in our lives, which I’m not at all comfortable about. It’s simply not my place and occupies a great deal of one’s time.

  Robert T. Macdonald is a man who’s not going to go away by himself. He is a phone call we won’t take and a letter we won’t read but he is persistent. We need to send a clearer message to him, but you try telling Marnie that, she’s simply burying her head in the sand. I have seen him linger outside our home and outside our school looking for a way back. He is incorrigible. I wonder often why he hasn’t just contacted the authorities and forced us to come and live with him in his daughter’s absence. Perhaps he has fears of his own.

  Vlado is an interesting character; one might even describe him as dashing. He certainly came to Marnie’s rescue. It seems he is a teacher and has been giving Marnie support in her studies. Regardless, she needs to pep up and look lively. She has exams to be getting on with and our backs to watch, for Robert T. Macdonald isn’t leaving any day soon. He wants much from us. I have seen it in his eyes and he won’t rest until we are caught in the web he calls home. We must have a plan for all eventualities and if need be we must be ready to run.

  Summer

  Marnie

  Exams. Three thousand of them and Kirkland sitting in my head the whole time, a sort of gothic cupid with a joint in his hand instead of a bow.

  Talk about a stressful start to the summer. Robert T. Macdonald is a pebble throw away from fucking ever
ything up and I don’t know why he’s not calling my bluff. Maybe he likes his fish caught without a rod. I don’t know, but it’s freaking me out. And poor Lennie. Aging before my eyes. I couldn’t believe it when he pissed himself. He didn’t even feel it. It makes me worried for him. I told him to go and see a doctor, but this seemed to irritate him. He was obviously embarrassed. I know I was.

  Thank God Lorna and Kim are done with, that’s one duet I can live without, they’re a nightmare together, but poor Kim, she’s devastated. I could do without her leaning on Susie though. I’ve had a thousand texts from Susie begging forgiveness. I ignore her. We’re done. I don’t want to look at her ever again. Kim keeps saying she doesn’t want to get in the middle of it all, as if we had a fight about lipstick or something.

  “She was shagging my dad for fuck sake.”

  “I know but she’s really sorry about it. Hates him like anything now. Where do you think he’s gone by the way?” she asks.

  “Who wants to know?” I scream.

  “I was just asking.”

  I shouldn’t have yelled at her like that, but I’m getting really sick of that question. It’s not like anyone gave a flying fuck when we were stuck at home without electricity waiting for Tom and Jerry to waltz in with a couple of fish suppers. We could spend days without knowing where they were. No questions asked then, but now, it’s like they’re being head-hunted for a fucking job.

  I’ve been through so much these last few weeks and everyone’s been really good to me I know that. Nelly pours me baths and at night she comes into bed with me when I’m half asleep and strokes my hair. Vlado comes every night to go over my answers in the exams. He says I’ve done well, maybe a B in chemistry, which pissed me off a little. He reckons I “whipped the ass” in biology and that art history was a waste of time. He says with good grades anything is possible, but with my attitude Vlado reckons opportunity might be snatched from me.

  “Everything must shift in here, or life will eat you up,” he says and thumps his heart.

  He should know, grieving for a dead daughter, missing a wife he will love forever, a wife who doesn’t want him anymore and who’s living with a heart surgeon in Zurich while he’s stuck here supplying. In a way he’s been the bane of my life. Drugs deadened Kirkland and tore us apart. I should blame Vlado but I don’t. I should hate him but I don’t. Truth is I don’t hate anyone. Just me. Only me.

  Nelly

  Outrageous the cad should approach her at all given what he’s put her through, but approach her he did and in a shabby black jacket. Quite the tom. They took a seat on the swings while I was exiled to the roundabout. Not a keeper this one, I can tell.

  He takes her hand, she holds it. He reaches across and finds her lips. I don’t know how she can, but it seems they’ll never stop. She plays with his hair. They move from the swings. They hold one another and kiss again. He whispers to her. She stops in her tracks. She shakes her head and pushes him away. He swears at her. She walks away, he pulls her back. She runs to me and trips, she falls. I run to her, reach for her, the cut is bad. He comes toward us.

  “Oh God, Marnie, I’m sorry.”

  He’s on the ground next to her, the blood pouring from her knee seeming worse because of the confounded rain and not a brolly between us. It’s always raining here. Raining and pouring.

  A blaggard he is. A blaggard.

  He grabs her face. “The jellies aren’t about you. I’ll get better, I just need a few. Speak to Mick.”

  She pulls away. “Leave me alone,” she whispers.

  We limp home in the rain, it didn’t stop for almost a week if memory serves.

  Silly boy. All this over a few sweets.

  Marnie

  I wanted Kirkland to mean it and when I knew he didn’t I still wanted to give in to it, I thought if I had five more minutes with him it would be enough to change everything, but nothing would have changed and if Izzy and Gene taught me anything it was to recognize poison when you see it, but still, I was drawn to the weakness in him and kissed him. It was the last kiss, I didn’t know that then, no one knows when it’s their last kiss with someone who wants to leave them and if you asked them now, years later, they probably wouldn’t even remember, unless they were one of those saddos who asked for one. Watching Nelly on the roundabout made me feel stupid for wanting to taste him again but he seemed stronger than before, although it was a lie. When he finally asked for his prescription I felt bad for letting Nelly’s chicken soup down. She’d tried so hard to protect me from this. Of course every girl wishes she could be one of those pop star babes who wave their hands in the air yelling about being survivors but when love sits on one side of you and loneliness on the other, it’s hard to stop the touching and the kissing. I suppose this is what it means when it’s over, when you don’t want it to be and when you want to start from the beginning and make it all right again.

  At least I walked away. Don’t know how, but I did, maybe because Nelly was waiting for me, I couldn’t exactly leave her in the park, could I? Of course maybe she was the one who couldn’t leave me in the park. She’s become quite the grown-up recently. I’m glad for it.

  Despite the rain we were home in no time. I had a scraped knee and wet hair. I also had Lennie asking where the hell we’d been.

  “It’s movie night,” he says. And it was. He’d made popcorn.

  Nelly

  One feels quite at home wandering across the marble flooring of the Mitchell Library. If you didn’t know where you were going you could get quite lost in such an ornate building, but I do know where I am going, I am going everywhere and can spend hours waltzing from one place to another. I have no particular destination in mind, I may pick up a newspaper in one room, I may seek out the past in another. I feel at ease in the library.

  Except today.

  I smelled him first, a souring odor of sneaky cigarettes amidst woodchip and oak. I couldn’t believe he’d found me and in the most precious of places. Obviously there was no running to be done, not here and most certainly no shouting. There was just Robert T. Macdonald and myself.

  “What are you doing here, you scoundrel?”

  I closed my book while a fellow reader looked up from his paper, annoyance in his eyes.

  “I want to go and find her,” he said suddenly. “And I want you to come with me.”

  “Outside,” I whispered.

  My heart was beating fast. He was closing in on us. I could feel it.

  “I will do no such thing,” I told him.

  “Why?” he asked.

  I had to find an answer. Any answer.

  “Because I don’t care where she is,” I spluttered.

  “Speak to Marnie. I think the both of you should come. We’ll find her together. I know we will.”

  He seemed desperate.

  “I’m going home,” I told him. I had to escape him.

  “Home? To Lennie the Queer. I don’t know how you can. The Bible says it’s wrong.”

  “I will thank you to keep such remarks to oneself,” I whisper.

  “If I can’t find my daughter then things are going to change around here. So you better get your suitcase handy. I’m done chasing you around the block, and that goes for your sister too.”

  He walked away, leaving me alone on the staircase, and I must admit I was rather afraid.

  Marnie

  Vlado suggests a bike run. “It will keep you fit and focused,” he says.

  In other words it will take my mind off Kirkland. I say okay and take Gene’s bike. Hard to imagine he had a bike, but not hard to imagine he stole it.

  It’s a hot summer’s day so no one’s out looking for trouble, just some sunshine, maybe a wee tan, which usually turns red and reaches the front cover of the Daily Record with a shocker headline about burned skin, sometimes cancer. Riding past on your bike boys will give you the once-over and someone might whistle, but mostly no one cares about a girl riding her bike, it’s too hot, they just want to be still and b
ask a little. They want to stretch out on the grass and listen to some music. They want to pull out the paddling pools for the weans and sit with their babies and their girlfriends and some want to do their washing, but mostly they want to love. Snogging and sunshine go hand in hand in good weather, so does shagging under a blanket and come winter there will be a lot of lassies with big bellies. Glaswegians don’t need the darkness of a nightclub to live it up or get it up; consequences are words for teachers and lawyers, sometimes judges.

  Fish suppers and ice cream do well on a day like this and if you’re really posh a barbecue. Gene tried to do it once and almost burned the house down. I’ve never had a real one but I hear they’re fantastic. Lennie is doing one tonight. I can’t wait.

  Eventually we reach the pub and Vlado gets me a Coke. He gets himself a Guinness of which he knows an abundance of facts having traveled as far as Dublin.

  He wants to talk to me about something serious I can tell, but he stops himself and instead talks of his daughter.

  “Sabina liked to cycle, you know this?”

  “All girls like to. It’s good for the bum.”

  He laughs.

  Sitting on the grass the women around me stare. They assume we are father and daughter. I feel proud and want it to be so.

  “She cycled all over the place,” he continues. “Even when she was small, I remember her little legs pushing fast the pedals and all over the house, scraping on the floors, bumping into walls. She would yell for me to push her sometimes, she would want to be pushed fast all day long, but it was too much and I would say, ‘No, Sabina. Enough,’ and she would cry. When a child dies it takes a long time to remember all the good things you did for them. Sometimes I think if she had cycled to school that day she would have been too fast for the bullet, but I walked to appease my wife, to assure her it was safe when it wasn’t.”

  I don’t say anything. It was a lot to take in.

  “You have no words of comfort?”

  “I don’t know what to say.”

  “Then this I take.”

  “Is there anything about me that reminds you of Sabina?”

  I redden.

  “You would be the same age.”