Miss Benson's Beetle

by Rachel Joyce

  “Don’t you love babies?” Enid might say. (Babies were her number one subject.)

  And Margery would groan, “No. Not really, Enid, no.”

  “Don’t you just want to hold them?”

  “No. I can’t say I do.”

  “Oh, Marge! You’re so funny!”

  It was hard enough, Margery thought, looking after herself. In the past, she’d even wondered why you’d want to bring a child into the world.

  “Touch wood, I’ll have lots of babies one day!”

  That was another thing: Enid was spectacularly superstitious.

  She said you should always try to do a good turn. It created a good feeling, and anyway you never knew when you might need help yourself. She was forever telling complicated stories about people in which lovely things happened that Margery was certain could not have happened. The widower they’d spoken to at dinner was a case in point.

  “Guess what, Marge?”

  “I haven’t a clue, Enid.”

  He’d met a nice woman on the ship with a little boy. They were going to get married. Enid was so happy.

  The only person she said almost nothing about was her husband. She called him Perce, but made no mention of where he’d gone or when he’d be back. Once she let slip she’d “got the shock of my life” because she’d seen a bald man who looked just like him, so Margery assumed he must be older than Enid was.

  “I could have sworn he was following me,” she said.

  “Who was following you?”

  “That feller. That feller with no hair.”

  “Why would a man with no hair be following you?”

  Enid rummaged through her bag for a small bootee she was knitting: it seemed a colossal amount of wool for something so miniature.

  “Did he say anything to you, Enid?”

  “Why would he say anything to me, Marge?”

  “About the beetle?”

  “The beetle? Why would he ask about a beetle?”

  They were going round in circles. There might have been an awkward pause, but Margery was stuck in a very small space with the world’s most talkative woman: the chances of Enid falling silent were slimmer than bumping into an undiscovered gold insect. At that point, the liner jammed against something solid and Margery only just made it to the bucket. Enid didn’t mention the man with no hair again. And the more she thought about it, the more certain Margery was that if a man was trailing Enid it was for the same reason every man trailed Enid, and that was for a better look.

  They were well past the Bay of Biscay when another storm struck. Margery was woken by the alarming sensation of everything Enid owned dropping on her, like coconuts. She hadn’t thought the sickness could get worse, but her body seemed not to belong to her anymore. It just emitted without warning. Enid washed Margery’s nightdress, she broke into the laundry room to get fresh sheets, she borrowed a bunch of flowers from first class, but the stink of vomit had become part of the cabin. Not even Enid’s scent could kill it.

  * * *

  —

  Portugal. Spain. The ship entered the Strait of Gibraltar and docked for the night. Naples came next. Margery said nothing about dismissing Enid. Instead, Enid took a boat ashore and bought her first watermelon. The Strait of Messina, Stromboli, Navarino. At Port Said, they docked again. Still Margery said nothing. Enid went ashore to try her hand at riding a camel and told Margery afterward how she’d been pointed at because of her yellow hair. It took sixteen hours in convoy to cover only fifty miles down the Suez Canal, but once they reached the Red Sea the weather was glorious. Enid sunbathed every day and turned the color of a toasted nut. The ship docked at Aden, where Enid bought a battery radio, though she came back appalled by all she’d seen: the smells and poverty were even worse than they were at home. They’d had to beat their way back to the ship through a sea of begging hands, she said.

  But something else was upsetting her even more. Did Margery know what had happened to the murderer Norman Skinner? Margery didn’t. For the past few weeks, her world had been confined to sweaty sheets and a bucket. She barely knew what had happened to herself; she certainly hadn’t been following international news. Well, Enid knew. She’d seen a British paper. Apparently, the hangman had made a botch of his execution. Broke his neck but failed to kill him. They had to get another rope and do it all over again. “They wrote about it like it was a joke!” She dragged at the contours of her face, looking desperate. And on the subject of terrible things she’d learned, here was another. They had the guillotine in New Caledonia. They actually chopped off people’s heads. “It’s wrong!” She kept pacing the tiny cabin. “It’s wrong!”

  “Enid, just because they have the guillotine doesn’t mean we can’t go there. They have the electric chair in America. We have the noose. That doesn’t stop people traveling.”

  It took another five days to get from Aden to Colombo. There were games to celebrate reaching the meridian and fancy dress; Enid made a tail to fit both her legs and then bounced along as a mermaid. Afterward she won her heat in the Miss Lovely Legs competition—presumably having removed her tail—for which she received a trophy decorated with the ship’s logo. Meanwhile, Margery remained in the cabin, surviving on dried biscuits and water and trying to read her beetle books, though there were still things about Enid that didn’t properly add up.

  She kept making tiny woolen things that would fit a fairy. When Margery asked why she didn’t do anything normal sized, Enid said she lacked the knitting skills.

  For all her talk about finding the beetle, she didn’t seem very interested in actually doing it. When Margery described the gold beetle, Enid yawned. “How hard can it be to spot a gold insect?” she said. Followed by “Would you say I’m getting fat?” And so far, she hadn’t spoken a single word in French, beyond bon shoor.

  There were two initials on the mystery valise, but they weren’t Enid’s: they were N.C. Margery noticed them once, though the next time she looked, they’d been hidden with a Band-Aid.

  Enid didn’t always come back to the cabin at night. She stayed up dancing. But there was a plus side: Margery was spared her snoring.

  And this was more worrying: Enid had a thing about killing.

  “So what’s this for?” she said one day, reaching into Margery’s Gladstone bag and pulling out the bottle of ethanol.

  “It’s highly poisonous. Please put it back.”

  But Enid didn’t put it back. She studied the label in a myopic way. “What does this stuff do exactly?”

  “It kills the beetle.”

  “Kills it?”

  “You put the beetle in the killing jar with a few drops of ethanol.” Margery felt tense suddenly. “Please be careful, Enid. It’s all I have. And it’s very powerful.”

  Enid put the bottle back into the bag as if it had changed shape in the short time they’d been talking. “I didn’t know you had to kill the beetle.”

  “Of course you have to kill it. How else could we identify it?”

  “You could keep it in a little matchbox.”

  “Enid, it would not survive in a little matchbox. And the whole point is that the specimen is dead. You can’t identify it unless it’s dead.”

  “Why not? A beetle is supposed to be alive. That’s the whole point.”

  “But we don’t know what they are until we identify them. And the differences are tiny. You need a microscope to see. It can come down to a few tiny hairs on a leg. Even the genitalia.”

  “You look at their willies? Do they even have them?”

  “They do, actually. They’re all different. And the males keep them inside their bodies.”

  “Well, good for them,” said Enid. “All the more reason to let them live.”

  “Enid, think. If every animal in the Natural History Museum was alive
, there’d be chaos. It would be like a zoo. They’d be running everywhere. And no one would know what anything was. So no one would know whether or not they’d lost it.”

  “Actually, I like the zoo. I took Perce once. We saw some chimps and they were having a tea party. Then the chimps got on the table and they threw the food all over the place. Perce laughed and laughed. Yes. That was a happy day.” Personally, Margery couldn’t think of anything worse, but Enid paused for a moment, staring into nothing as if she’d got stuck. Then she said, “So the beetle suffocates in the killing jar? Cos of the ethanol? Is that how it works? I mean, does it hurt?”

  “What?”

  “Does it pain the beetle? Does it feel like it’s burning? Suffocating?”

  “It’s quick. It’s the most humane way of killing.”

  “What? Quicker than hanging?” Enid gave a shiver she couldn’t hide. “Well, I’m not doing it. If you ask me, it’s wrong.”

  * * *

  —

  Already it was mid-November. They had been at sea for three weeks. With only two left to go, Margery woke one morning with the knowledge that something had changed. She felt thirsty, and not a polite kind of thirsty, but as parched as a hole in the desert. Enid was still flat out in her bunk after a late night, so Margery stuck her head beneath the tap and drank in guzzles. She didn’t bother with a glass. Then: hunger. It hit like a freight train. She couldn’t dress fast enough.

  Hunger is the ultimate expression of hope, and Margery ate in the dining room that morning as if eating were her new job. Eggs, bacon, bread and butter, beans, pot after pot of tea, mopping her mouth with a napkin, only to stick her fork into another sausage. Seconds. Thirds. Sated at last, she staggered to the deck and collapsed into a chair where she sat, warmed by the sun, watching the sea. Never had she seen such blues that fanned out from the bow of the ship, each furrow divided from the next by a frill of white foam, slick and rutted and wreathing together. An entire school of silver fish leaped out of the waves as if it belonged to the sky. Back at home, people would be in coats, queuing for rations of tea and sugar. Margery dozed and came to with the feeling someone was watching, but when she looked, there was no one. Later she found Enid by the pool in her bikini, surrounded by new friends, so she went back to the dining room, where she wolfed lunch, shortly followed by full afternoon tea, then dinner.

  She returned to the deck to watch the sun set until only a segment was left above the horizon, followed by the smallest clipping, and then, just as it disappeared altogether, the sky gave an explosion of green, like a blazing emerald. It came and went. If she hadn’t seen it with her own eyes, she wouldn’t have believed it.

  “Oh!” she gasped.

  “I know,” agreed a woman in a hat. “Isn’t life wonderful?”

  Margery had survived a month with Enid Pretty. She had managed no more than a few pages in her journal and been sicker than she’d ever been in her life, but she was almost on the other side of the world, and that was more than anyone had said she could do. Already she had seen things she’d never heard of, let alone imagined. Things might work with her assistant after all.

  But Enid had one more surprise up her sleeve.

  It was the blonde he didn’t like. He didn’t trust her.

  It wasn’t just because she’d got the job instead of him. It was something else: he knew a trickster when he saw one. He followed her on the ship, but she swung round sometimes, sharp, as if she knew he was on her trail. And she didn’t drop clues, like Miss Benson did. He had a special page for her in his notebook and, so far, all it said was Enid Pretty. He wasn’t even convinced that was her real name.

  Mundic had managed to stay a few days in his hiding place on the RMS Orion. No food, but he was used to that—in Burma, he’d survived weeks on a bit of rice, and not white rice but yellow stuff that was crawling with weevils. On the Orion, if he’d needed water, he’d crept out from the tarp and taken it from a tap. But then a couple of boilermen found him, and he’d thought it was over.

  “Hey! Hey!” He’d tried to run, but he hadn’t a chance. He was still weak, even after five years of freedom. They’d come after him and pulled him back. “You could go to prison for this.”

  There was no point in fighting. He’d thrown a punch but it barely landed. He reckoned one of the chaps had been a POW. It was a thing that had happened since the war: you knew who’d been one, and who hadn’t. And the chaps who hadn’t got caught looked down on the ones who had, like they weren’t real men. That was another thing that had happened since the war.

  The two boilermen had walked away to talk it over. He’d heard them arguing about what to do. One said they’d have to turn him in. But the older chap said, “No. I’m not going to do that. Look at him. You’ve heard about the camps. Haven’t you? You’ve heard how many of them died? It’s a crime the way they’ve been left to fend for themselves.” The one who wanted to turn him in had left, and the other had come over and said Mundic would be okay, no one would rat on him, but he’d need to keep his head down and stay out of trouble. And he held out his hands as he said it, like Mundic was a cornered dog.

  After that, the boilerman left him bits of food, and when Mundic asked for soap and a razor, he fetched those as well so Mundic could shave his head. A clean shirt. Leftovers from the galley. Some nights they’d played cards. They didn’t talk. Then the boilerman said he knew of an empty cabin, and why didn’t Mundic sleep there? If he was careful, no one would know. So Mundic moved into the free cabin and it had a little bed and a desk, and he put his notebook and the map of New Caledonia on the desk. When the cleaners came, he said he was a private detective working undercover, so he didn’t want any trouble, and the man with the mop said, “Yes, sir,” like he was important.

  It was the first time he’d ever had a room of his own. As a kid he’d shared with his mother, just sleeping on the other side of the bed, though when he got too big, she’d moved to the chair. Sometimes in the camp, he’d see a man huddled in a corner, not moving, and he’d say to himself the man wasn’t dead, it was his mother, curled up in the chair, and it would be daytime soon, and she’d be passing him a lit cigarette, saying, “Wake up, sonny. It’s another day.” It got easier, if he cut off from things like that.

  After a couple of weeks on the ship, Mundic felt stronger. He left the cabin when it was safe and stole a haversack, and another time he took a yellow towel, just as a souvenir, and a Panama hat and a pair of sunglasses, and he began to collect things to take with him to New Caledonia. He wrote about it in his notebook, and he listed what he ate, too, and when the ship stopped at Aden, he took a boat ashore to keep his eye on the blonde. She made her way straight to the Royal Hotel and rushed up the steps, as if she were a proper guest, and he watched her taking up a bundle of British newspapers and skimming through them, page by page, like she was hunting for something. After that, she sat for a while deep in thought until the headwaiter asked if she would care to come this way and escorted her off the premises. Then she made her way to a market and bought a cheap radio, and he thought, Something fishy’s going on here, but he didn’t know what, so he got out his notebook. But she must have given him the slip because he didn’t know where he was: he was just in this alley all on his own, and hundreds of faces were staring out at him, and hands were poking through curtains, and he began to run but he couldn’t get away, because all he could see in his mind were the faces of the men in the camp at Songkurai, and he couldn’t tell anymore. He couldn’t tell if he was still in the camp, or if he was free, until he took out his passport and looked and looked at it and said to himself he was a free man. He was free.

  But today was a good day. He went on deck and he couldn’t believe his luck because Miss Benson was asleep in a deck chair, and there wasn’t a sign of the blonde. He watched from the shadows where she couldn’t see him. It was like he was so empty there wasn’t a thought or feeling inside
him, and a strange peace came over him, and he wished he could have spent his whole life like that.

  He stayed, for a long time, just watching.

  There was banging. Loud, frenzied banging in her head. Margery groaned and rolled over, trying to get back to sleep.

  “Marge, help! Help!”

  The banging was not in her head. It was coming from the door. She got up. She opened it. Enid stood on the other side, doubled over. Her face was like flint.

  At the sight of her, Margery screamed.

  “Ohnoohnoohno,” wailed Enid, the words all stitched together. She pushed past Margery and staggered to the sink.

  Perhaps it wasn’t really as bad as it looked, but the mere sight of blood streaked down the lace skirt of Enid’s frock made Margery’s head swing. She felt incredibly light and incredibly heavy at the same time. She needed air. She needed it fast. She could kill a beetle and pin it, but when it came to blood, she was still unbelievably squeamish. At the sight of her first monthly, she’d screamed—she’d actually believed she was dying. It was Barbara who’d fetched a knitted rag, and told her what to do. So, instead of asking Enid if she was hurt, or even if she needed help, Margery grabbed her frock and put it on—inside out, as she later discovered—and threw herself from the cabin.

  “Marge?” called Enid, but Margery couldn’t stop. She lumbered down the corridor, practically trampling another passenger, until she reached the staircase. The steps were narrow and steep, with corrugated rubber treads, and she hauled her feet up them, one after another, telling herself not to think of Enid or her frock, or even what might have happened, but only nice things like blue sky and flowers, until at last the door to the deck loomed into focus. She reached for the handle and noticed her frock was the wrong way round and was so mortified she missed the door handle but still pulled, thereby successfully pitching herself back down the stairs, only this time without the benefit of being upright, and now she was falling, falling so hard, she couldn’t remember which way was up and which was down, let alone inside out, but whatever it was, it seemed to be lasting forever. She hit her head on something sharp, and at that point things went a bit sideways.