The Boy Who Taught the Beekeeper to Read (2 page)

‘You like this?’ He held out the comb. ‘Make your hair curl.’

‘That’s bread crusts. My father won’t come home for at least a year.’

‘He won’t know you then.’

The cloud eyes flickered with alarm.

‘All that bread crust and honey’ll have made your hair gone curlified.’

‘
Curlified
.’

‘That’s it.’

‘How do you spell “curlified”?’

Mart May rested the cleaned comb on the tray. In the lance of sunlight falling between the leaves, the gnats danced.

‘Her ladyship would be your grandmother then?’ he said at last.

‘No, my aunt. Don’t you know?’

‘I do now. You’ve told me.’

‘Not that. Don’t you know how to spell “curlified”?’

‘No,’ Mart May said, walking away, ‘I don’t.’

When he glanced round the boy had gone.

He did not appear again for three days. The weather turned warm and sultry, there was no air, no stirring of the leaves. The bees teemed inside the hives, restless, pent-up, sullen.

Once or twice Mart May caught sight of Lady Burnett walking slowly along the gravel path, pulling off the dead heads of a late rose here and there, probing the dahlias with her stick. She kept aware. Hayes the gardener dealt with her, took the orders, heard the complaints. She never came into the glade, though occasionally when he was doing some job
about the house she came upon him, and always spoke. Polite, haughty.

‘What’s that?’

The boy slipped into sight from behind the old stables. Mart May was sitting astride the old mounting block.

‘A blade. It got warped – see –?’ He held out the bent metal.

‘Can you flatten it?’

‘Should do.’

There had not been horses here for years. The stables were used for storage, but the tack-room was Mart May’s, where he brewed tea, ate his sandwiches, had an old radio.

‘I saw a lot of jaspers, going in and out of a hole.’

‘Where was that?’

‘By the tomato greenhouse.’

‘Right. We’ll go along in a bit and do for ’em.’

‘
Do for ’em
.’

‘And don’t you ever go poking into their nests with a stick or such.’

‘Would they turn nasty?’

‘Mad as mad. You leave them to me. Just report back.’

‘Report back.’

‘Little Sir Echo.’

‘I like the things you say and how you say them. I like to say them as well.’

Mart May held out the blade. ‘Nearly there.’

‘What’s it for?’

‘Hacksaw.’

The boy swung the tack-room door gently to and fro.

‘You see in there – the old cupboard on the wall?’

‘“First Aid”,’ the boy read. ‘The letters are nearly worn off.’

‘The one with the cross on. Open it and you’ll find a tin.’

‘There are quite a few tins.’

‘A tin with some writing.’

‘Does it say “National Dried Milk”?’

‘A silver tin.’

‘Does it?’

‘Open it. If it’s got mints in it does.’

‘Oh –’

‘Have one. Keep your mouth watered.’

‘You must like mints a lot. Mint toffees. Mintoes. Mint humbugs. Mint Imperials. Extra Strong Mints.’ The boy ferreted about amongst the cellophane.

‘You can get me out an Imperial, if you please.’

They sat, Mart May on the block, the boy on the broken-backed chair, turning the sweets around and around in their mouths.

The late swallows skimmed low into the doorway of the end stable and out again.

‘Pity you don’t have a pal to play with. Bit lonely, here with the old people.’

‘I haven’t got a pal.’

‘Must have.’

‘No.’

‘You’d better get looking.’

‘I’m going to a new school.’

‘You’ll get pals there then.’

‘Will I?’

Mart May looked up. The boy’s pale face was troubled.

‘You’ll be bringing ’em here soon enough, plaguing me, going off to their places, plaguing.’

‘Plaguing.’

‘Still, bit of life about the place is a good thing.’

‘Were there horses?’

‘Long before I got here.’

‘When did you get here?’

‘Fifteen-sixteen year. Right.’ He swung himself off the block, holding the blade.

‘Can I have another mint?’

‘And put the tin back after.’

‘Is it your tin?’

‘It is now.’

‘You should have your name on it, then. Mart May. At school you have to have your name on everything, every single thing.’

‘School’s a nest of thieves, then, is it?’

‘“A nest of thieves”. Why a nest?’

Mart May walked off, slowly, carrying the blade. ‘You,’ he said, ‘make my head buzz.’

The boy made a boil in his cheek with the mint and put the tin back in the cupboard.

Mart May was in the toolshed fitting the blade into the hacksaw.

‘If you had a brush and some paint I could do it for you.’

‘Do what?’

‘Paint your name on the tin.’

‘Get on, there’s no thieves here.’

The boy rubbed the toe of his sandal to and fro in the dry earth, making it fly up like sand. Mart May laughed. ‘I suppose if I don’t let you you’ll burst open.’

‘I will paint your name on the tin and on the cupboard and on the door and on this door.’

‘You’ll not, these belong to her ladyship. Just the tin. There’s some old paint back of that shelf if it isn’t all dried up.’

The boy had seemed odd, solemn, quiet, pale, not like any boy he’d ever encountered, but now, clambering down with the paint tin and beetling off across the yard, he was changed, excited, full of what he was doing. Ordinary, Mart May thought. Normal. He wants to be normal. Just wanted the chance, he thought.

He had no children.

He bent his head and back to sawing.

After a couple of minutes the boy was back at his elbow. ‘Is it M-A-Y or M-E-Y?’

The saw froze. Mart May looked at the golden dust in soft heaps at his feet.

‘Mart May? Which is it?’

He looked straight into the boy’s sea-green eyes. Saw a fleck of green, there, like a wand drawn across.

The boy waited.

‘I can’t say I know,’ the man said quietly, rubbing his finger up and down on the flat of the jaw.

‘You have to know.’

‘Well, I haven’t, because I don’t.’

The sea-green eyes widened. ‘Mart May?’ There was a strange awe in the boy’s voice. ‘Can you not spell?’

‘I cannot.’

‘Can you not write?’

‘I cannot.’

The boy struggled for several seconds with this astonishing, unprecedented truth.

‘Can you not –
read
?’

Mart May stood his ground and held his gaze. ‘No,’ he said calmly, ‘I cannot.’

The boy let out a soft slow breath, a sigh of wonder through pursed lips. ‘I think it would be good,’ he said at last, ‘if you learned.’

Mart May laughed, discomforted. ‘You think I should go back to school, then?’

‘Oh no.’ The boy did not laugh. ‘I shall teach you.’
A week passed. Every day, the boy waited, carrying two books and two pencils, and every day Mart May was busy. Seeing the books and pencils made him sweat. The old anxieties which he had thought long dead pulsed in the pit of his stomach. He hid, found jobs in distant outbuildings and fields, but always the boy discovered him, as if by some magic sense, and materialised behind or beside him with the two books, the two pencils.

The sullen weather pressed in. The sun was sulphurous. The leaves hung heavy. The bees fumed.

‘We should start,’ the boy said, sliding into the tack room. Behind his small pale figure the clouds were gathering, curdled, inky. Mart May had switched on the light, a single bulb strung to the beam above.

He was plaiting onions.

‘Your aunt doesn’t pay me to look at picture books.’

The boy had pulled a stool up to the workbench under the dirty window. The two books and two pencils were set between them.

Panic flustered the man. Words bubbled up, excuses, fears, but remained foaming in his mouth.

Thunder rumbled in the distance. The boy opened
the books. At once, black letters danced malignly before Mart May’s eyes, evil, spiked, terrifying marks, blurring together, separating, making his head sore. He began to breathe too quickly.

‘First we find the letters of your name. M.’ The boy pointed. Mart May stared as the marks swerved, leaned, straightened themselves again.

‘M.’

Under the boy’s small finger, the marks became still. The nail was like a shell, the blood flushed rose-pink beneath it.

‘Now you find “M”.’

The rain began, single drops plashing fatly onto the roof. Thunder grumbled.

The boy’s neck and ears were like doeskin.

Slowly Mart May set his own thick, dirty forefinger on the page and moved it along between the forest of letters. The boy watched.

‘M.’ The finger swatted the fly-black letter, crushing it.

‘Good.’

Mart May felt a flush of pleasure swell in him.

‘A is the next. “M-A”,’ and the small finger set off
again moving confidently over the paper. It rested on a letter like a tripod.

The shed was livid with lightning, and the roof erupted under the battering of the rain.

Every day he returned, carrying the two books, the two pencils and every day Mart May could do no other than sit down somewhere – up to the bench, in the attic, on the window ledge, on the mounting block – and follow the small finger, stumbling his way along the black trails. After that the boy made him write the letters he had read. His small pale face was intent, his body willing Mart May on.

The summer days flamed into one another without rain after the single storm which had not lightened the air. In the still clammy nights the black letters took on life, crackled and became barbed wire, sharp with some terrible inner electricity zapping through Mart May’s dreams.

Relentlessly each morning and afternoon, the boy slid up beside him.

‘M-A-R-T M-A-Y.’

The man wrote line after line of penance, detained in the shed, the tack room, the hot attic.

‘M-A-R-T M-A-Y. M-A-R-T M-A-Y.’

‘You can do it. You can. Tomorrow I’m going to teach you my name.’

But on that next day, for the first time in nine years, the man did not go to work. His head was stabbed with black spikes. For a week he did not go. He was exhausted by a fear within him which formed itself into a dread of seeing the boy.

He sat in the dim kitchen. The light from the small panes filtered through the plants that filled the window ledge and clambered up from the flower bed outside. The room smelled permanently, faintly, of cat. He slept half the day, but the dreams had eased. The black letters became velvet and fur, blurred and softened at the edges.

At last, he woke to rain, soft veils of it blotting out the colour from the sky. He took his bicycle from the lean-to and rode to the bees.

It was as though he had slept for a year and woken in shame to see what he had neglected. For the four days he worked until late into the evening, as if to do penance. He felt changed, older, was uncomfortable
inside his own skin, uncertain where he had always known certainty.

Late on the fourth afternoon, coming into the tack room, he saw that the catch was off on the door of the wall cupboard. It swung open to his touch. The silver tin with the worn blue letters was at the front. He lifted it down, opened it, took out a mint, and, as the fumes of it caught his throat, he had a sudden sharp sense of loss and emptiness. The boy had not appeared once since his return.

Three more days passed, during which Mart May felt restless, missing the quiet, pale figure at his elbow. He wanted to ask about him, but did not, only worked on at this job or that, until gradually he was no longer so alert for the sudden appearances. Days were like the old days again and beginning to shorten. The bees were still and close. The evenings and nights were cool.

He should have been settled in himself as the year slipped down, his old self, but he lacked something and there was always an edge to his mood, a frustration. He had unfinished business.

He spoke sometimes to the bees.

In the middle of an afternoon he finished repairing the hinge on the gate into the sunken garden, swung it to and fro to see that it ran smooth, and then, as if hearing a click in his head, at the same time as the latch clicked shut he knew what he should do.

In the shed, at the back of the shelf, he found the tin of paint and the brush. In the tack-room cupboard, he found the tin. He emptied the sweets onto the bench.