Tell it to the Bees (26 page)

‘You turn back around and apologize, or I'm going to wallop you to the back end of tomorrow.'

Charlie shut his eyes. He felt his father's knuckles digging into his neck and his breath against his cheek.

‘Open your bloody eyes,' Robert said. Then Charlie saw his father's face so close to him, it was all flesh and pocks and dark shadows.

‘Apologize,' Robert said again, and Charlie could hear other voices, female voices, imploring, asking Robert to put him down, let him go.

‘I'm waiting,' Robert said, and the room hushed around them.

‘Charlie?' Annie's voice was quiet.

He squinted his eyes round to see her. She stood very still, and even as he was, Charlie could see how pale she was. Then she gave the slightest shake to her head and Charlie took as deep a breath as he could, smelling the cigarettes and perfume, but not his mother's, on his father's shirt and he dug an elbow hard into his father's side.

Robert dropped Charlie with a yelp of pain and before he could grab him again, Charlie was out, pushing past Annie to get to the front door. He yanked it open and was off running up the street. If Robert had chased him, he'd have caught him. But Robert contented himself with yelling from the doorway so once Charlie was a few streets away, he slowed down and walked. He was shaking and cold, but his hunger was lost for now beneath grief.

The room was at sea around her, the wallpaper billowing and the curtains vast breakers. Furniture mounted and toppled and the wind roared. Lydia's skin was scalded with cold and her eyes burned in her head. Let the storm out, someone, open the windows and let it go.

‘Charlie!' She yelled his name, but the wind was so loud he'd never hear. ‘Charlie!'

The moon was above her, round and pale, rising under the ceiling. The moon could swing the tide, quieten the storm. But it only lifted her head, ‘Drink a little,' it said, and it wet her lips while the seas rose again, and again she was plunged under.

The room was silent when Lydia woke. Nothing stirred, nobody called or cried out. She lay still on the bed, listening to the sound of her breathing, staring up at the dark, exhausted, as if she had been running all day long, or carrying something heavy up a steep hill for ever. As her eyes grew accustomed, Lydia glanced around the room, turning her heavy head this way, and then that. Beyond the bedside table, someone sat on the chair, asleep maybe, they were so still. She stared, as if concentration would give her better sight. But the dark wouldn't yield, and eventually she fell into sleep again.

Light was drifting in around the curtains next time, and the figure in the chair was gone. She looked at her alarm
clock. It was nearly half past eight and the house was quiet. She closed her eyes, and then opened them abruptly, panic beating in her chest. She had to get up; she had to get to work. She'd be late, locked out for the morning. What about Charlie? The teacher rapped them on the hand if they were late.

‘Charlie!' she shouted, but her voice was thin and faint. It would never wake him. Ignoring the roll of the walls and her pounding heart, she pulled herself up to sitting and began to get out of bed. Placing her feet on the floor, she put a hand to the table to steady herself. It must have been the fever she'd had in the night, but she felt her head reel. She leaned forward and braced her legs to stand and the thought crossed her mind that it was strange to have to think about how to do this.

She fell hard, bruising her shoulder and catching her forehead on the wardrobe. Lying there with one ear to the ground, fatigue overcame her. She couldn't move, and so she let her worries go and watched them hover a foot above her body, like small bats. She'd have to ask Charlie because she didn't know if bats could hover, they seemed too twitchy for that.

She grew cold on the floor; dozed and then woke. Her worries had kept away, but now they seemed to be multiplying, growing. There was agitation in the air, wings beating. Robert was up there now, hovering too, with a faceless woman on his arm, it might be Pam, it might not be, and there was a building, drab and mean, with a grey front door and three small rooms that she knew were for her and Charlie. Above the building was her father, his mouth pinched and angry, mouthing silently at her.

‘Stay up there,' she implored them, because the floor was hard and her body ached, though she didn't mind that if they would only leave her be.

Lydia didn't know how long she lay there with her ear
to the ground before she felt the front door open and close beneath her, jarring through the floorboards, and then footsteps on the stairs, firm but light-footed. Not Charlie's step, Lydia knew, and not Robert's. She should move, try to get up, but she seemed to have no power to do so. By reflex she put her free hand to her hair, which felt matted and stiff against her head, and then to her nightdress, rucked around her, tugging it weakly. The door opened and the footsteps stopped.

‘I leave you alone for an hour and look what happens.' There were hands beneath her arms, helping her back into bed, firm fingers on her wrist, holding it.

‘Jean,' she said. ‘What are you …'

Jean didn't reply, but counted out Lydia's pulse below her breath, then put a hand to her brow.

‘You're still running a marathon,' she said, ‘and you're still too hot.'

Lydia's thoughts chased through her head.

‘Charlie's late,' she said. ‘His teacher hits them if they're late.'

‘It's OK. He's there already.'

‘I have to get to work.'

‘I've sent in a doctor's note. You won't be going back for a while yet.'

Lydia shook her head impatiently. Jean didn't understand. She didn't have that kind of job. She didn't have a son to look after, or a husband who'd left.

‘I have to go to work,' she began to say, but Jean interrupted.

‘They don't want you there, not with what you've got.'

Lydia shut her eyes and tried to think.

‘But I was fine, I remember I was fine. You were here that night, Friday. We slept.' She smiled at the memory. ‘Then Saturday I went to work. I didn't feel too bright, but I've been working so much. Sunday, I was exhausted, and
my throat was bad. Charlie brought me tea, but I couldn't drink it, and then he went.' She sat up suddenly. ‘Where's Charlie? Where is he?'

‘I told you, he's at school today.'

Lydia tried to remember. Her head burned and her thoughts danced at the edge of her mind like scraps of ash in the heat of a fire.

‘He went out and when he came back, he was upset. I heard him. I heard him crying, Jean, and I tried to get up but the floor was moving away from the bed.'

‘He's fine, Lydia. Dot gave him his tea one night, and his cousin Annie's been here a couple of times.'

‘Why did he cry?'

‘Charlie came to get me on Monday,' Jean said.

‘But he doesn't cry.'

‘He came to the surgery on Monday morning,' Jean said, ‘and he was so pale, I thought something terrible had happened.'

‘Annie was here? Why did Annie come here?'

‘And he said you were ill, that you hadn't gone to work and that he couldn't understand what you were saying. So I knew you had a fever.'

‘I'm glad Annie was here,' Lydia said. ‘She's a lovely girl. Her and Charlie.' She smiled to herself.

‘Lydia, listen to me. You're sick, and you're exhausted. Once the fever is down and you're through the worst, I'm taking you away for a few days. You and Charlie, both.'

Perhaps it was the illness, perhaps it was Jean's air of authority, perhaps it was the clean tide of her delirium, but over the next day, as the rage of fever fell and Lydia could see the bed and the curtains and the floor as just and only those things again, the landscape of her fears seemed changed. Nothing that was there before was gone, but things looked distinct now, clean, with their separate shadows,
as if they'd been tumbled by the fever and washed up, each on their own pitch of beach. Lydia lay too, washed out, washed up, and when Charlie came in from school, he found her sitting up against her pillows, pale and returned.

‘Come here, Charlie boy,' Lydia said, smiling, and she saw his face relax, and she wondered what he had seen.

He climbed on to the bed and sat with his legs swinging, his hands behind him, flat to the counterpane.

‘You've been ill for ever,' he said.

‘What have you been up to?' Lydia said, putting her hand against the small of his back.

He shrugged.

‘Nothing much. Miss Phelps said why didn't I have my homework in.'

‘Did you tell her?'

Charlie gave her the look he gave every time she did something that confirmed that she'd never been a boy and so didn't understand anything.

‘Did you get a punishment?'

Again he didn't answer, but Lydia saw how he bunched his hand to a fist.

‘Can I see?' she said.

He shook his head. ‘Anyhow, Annie put some cream on for me days ago,' he said, the accusation clear.

‘Good,' she said. She'd have a look at it later, once he was asleep.

But she wondered why Annie had come round. Jean had mentioned it too. She'd seen so little of her recently, what with everything. Hadn't stopped to think about her, and she wondered whether everything was all right with George, with Pam.

‘Did Annie cook you tea?' she said.

‘Sausages,' he said, ‘and next night she made an omelette, which I ate.'

‘Did you tell her?' Lydia said, and Charlie looked at her
in panic, and she didn't know what it could be that she'd said.

‘Did you tell her you don't like omelettes?' she said gently, and he shook his head again as he slipped down from the bed.

‘It's one of the things I like best now,' he said as he left the room. ‘One of them.'

Dr Markham always did the things she said she would. She'd said she'd show Charlie her bees. She'd said she'd get him a bee suit. Charlie knew, when she promised to take them away in her motor car to the seaside once his mother was better, that she would do it. Charlie didn't really know why she had promised, but she had, and when he handed her letter to his teacher, he knew, even before she had opened it, that she would have to let him go.

So while everybody else was sitting behind their desks, two on two, dipping their pens in the blue ink and scratscratting over the long hours, Charlie had Dr Markham's promise in his eyes as they travelled right across the day to a beach full of sand and stones.

He fidgeted in his seat, stretching his legs, shifting his fingers under the seatbelt across his lap. He wasn't used to sitting in the front and now the novelty had worn off, he'd rather have been in the back, with all the seat to himself and the back of his mother's head securely in his view.

‘Tell me again how long the beach is,' he said, looking over at Jean.

‘As far as you can run, and then further, and then further still,' she said.

‘And how much longer have we got in the car?'

He watched Jean slip a glance back to Lydia on the back seat. Dr Markham looked at his mother, and he looked at
her. She wasn't like Dot, or any of his mother's friends. She looked at his mother in a different way. He was glad she minded about her, because his dad had stopped, but it was strange.

‘Have you got a husband?' Charlie said, and he felt his stomach jolt, but he didn't know if it was the car, or if it was something inside him that swerved. He didn't know why he'd asked the question since he knew the answer.

He stared out of the side window, not looking, not thinking, eyes burning, ears hot with embarrassment. Hedges and gates and buildings, the black and white of cows, the black and white of empty trees, a man and a dog, a church, more hedges – things went past his eyes, and he couldn't hold on to anything. Dizzy-headed, he shut his eyes and pressed his forehead against the cold glass.

‘If you keep your eyes skinned, you'll see a ruined windmill soon,' Jean said, as though he hadn't asked his last question. ‘And a big tree right by it. It's half an hour more from there.'

Charlie turned and looked at his mother. Lydia lay across the back seat, covered with a blanket. She looked asleep. She looked very white, except for two points in her cheeks, as if she'd put her lipstick there by mistake. He turned back and stared out of the window again. He hated his dad. He'd kill his dad when he was older.

Lydia had slept for most of the journey, but Jean had told Charlie it was fine, it was what she needed to get well. Besides, he'd rather have anything than how she was before, shouting and not seeing him. Shouting about his dad, and the bits of songs she kept singing, then asleep so deep he couldn't wake her.

‘Tell me again what you did when you were young,' he said, his head turned to the window again, searching for the windmill, so he didn't see Jean's smile. ‘Tell me about camping out and running away.'

So Jean told him the stories she remembered, and about the time there was a storm and lightning and the vow she made not to go inside the house though she felt scared enough to die.

And after a few minutes they passed the tree and the ruined windmill, ivy climbing from its eyes.

‘Half an hour,' Charlie said. ‘Will we wake Mum up when we get there?'

‘We will.'

They drove on into the flat, clear autumn sky and across the deep marshes where clouds of birds circled and rose and circled and fell and it smelled of earth and water. Charlie's chest was tight with excitement because Dr Markham had promised, if his mother allowed and if the weather held, he could sleep in the tent and make a fire to cook his tea on.

The flint-faced cottage was all on its own, a mile beyond a village, down a track with grass up the middle and sand at the edges. The dunes hid the cottage from the sea, but when they stopped the car and opened the doors, Charlie could smell the sea so strongly that it made his mouth water. He looked back at his mother, still sleeping, and over at Jean. She caught his glance and ever so slightly tilted her head.