Fabulous Lives

by Bindy Pritchard

  BEES OF PARIS

  From the rooftop there was little symmetry, unlike the grand Parisian avenues with their mesmerising alignment of chestnut and linden trees. No, from here Louise could see where each apartment abutted and jutted into the other; all the illegal add-ons, the cracked, peeling angles, the dodgy workmanship—the fire traps that would never be allowed in Australia. She didn’t know what was more disappointing, the view from the small terrace or the rented room itself, which was no bigger than a modest laundry back home.

  As Louise stood there contemplating the bleak scene, and trying to imagine living a Thumbelina-like existence for the next month, a flicker of movement in her peripheral vision made her turn. There on the adjacent apartment roof was a white-suited figure, dressed like an astronaut and wildly waving. Louise started to wave back then realised her mistake. The person wasn’t being friendly but flapping in panic at dark specks that dotted the clear blue sky. Bees. Louise watched with interest, for she understood what it was like, that first moment when you remove the top honey frame— the supers—and the assault begins.

  The beekeeper continued to flap and gesticulate, hopping from one leg to the other, smoker puffing aimlessly skyward—seemingly losing the battle—and then without a sound, the person dropped like a stone over the steep ledge.

  Louise felt an ache in her groin, that place where the fear always took hold, and screamed.

  She ran inside and grabbed her mobile, trying to remember what the emergency number in France was. Surely not 911? She abandoned the call and ran down the flights of steps, leaping three at a time, surprising the concierge at the desk.

  ‘Someone’s fallen off the roof,’ she managed to pant out.

  ‘Pardon?’ The old man seemed unable to comprehend her urgency.

  ‘Someone’s fallen next door. Can you call an ambulance?’

  He spoke so fast in French that she felt like he was spitting at her, and for the first time she understood what it was like to be excluded from another culture.

  ‘Forget it,’ Louise shouted as she ran outside, looking up at the building to get her bearings, to work out where her room was located.

  She darted around the side street, recognised the blue doorway with the colourful planter boxes she had seen earlier from her balcony, and knew the other building must be that grey stone one to her left. She sprinted down the back alley, but there was no body lying on the ground, no-one wailing over a loved one. Had she simply imagined everything? She walked back to the front of the building, beginning to doubt her spatial awareness, when a woman dressed in lime and black lycra and wheeling a bicycle came out through the front door.

  ‘Do you speak English?’ Louise asked her.

  ‘A little.’

  ‘I think someone fell off your roof.’

  ‘Who fell?’

  ‘I don’t know. Is someone keeping bees up there?’

  ‘You mean the American?’

  ‘I think so. Yes. Can I... How do I get to the roof?’

  ‘So you’re here about the bees?’

  ‘Yes,’ Louise lied.

  ‘Okay, you can go in.’ The woman rang the bell and a man’s voice came through low and seductive on the intercom and then Louise was buzzed in.

  The interior reminded her of her grandmother’s nursing home: threadbare carpet, and an abrasive smell of disinfectant that seemed only to worsen the odour it was trying to mask. She travelled through the corridor, passing the different rooms, reading the names on placards—Clairaut, Roux, Durand—and then upstairs, climbing three creaking flights until she came to the very top landing. Here there was only one room: ‘Ms Evelyn Parks’. She knocked on the door but there was no reply, and when she tried the handle it remained fast. Then she spied the hatch window in the far corner, opening out onto a large sill about a metre above the roofline. She climbed through, jumped down, and saw the wooden bee boxes stacked high like a filing cabinet, and the abandoned frame of honeycomb, which the bees had settled back on to, a bubbling mass of amber and brown bodies.

  ‘Hello, can you help me?’

  Surprised, Louise turned to see that what she thought was a steep drop to the streets below was in fact another parapet set lower down, and there the beekeeper was sitting, leg stretched out in front.

  ‘I think I’ve sprained my ankle.’ The voice was a woman’s and the twang clearly American.

  ‘I’ll come to you.’

  Louise sat on the edge and then let her body drop down, feeling the ground shudder through her shins.

  ‘Let me see your ankle.’

  It was obviously swollen, the blue and purple discolouration already surfacing through the doughy white flesh.

  ‘Are you a nurse?’

  ‘No,’ Louise replied, and sensed the woman’s disappointment.

  ‘It was the bees. They were too angry.’

  ‘You really need two people to work the boxes. One to remove the supers, the other to quieten them with the smoker.’

  ‘You know about bees?’

  ‘A little. I used to date someone who was...’ she paused for the right words, ‘... into bees.’

  ‘How wonderful!’ The woman removed her round bee hat, and a couple of dead bees fell to the ground. Louise was startled at this sudden revealing of her head; she wasn’t prepared for such a large fleshy face, for overripe lips and grey-blonde hair cut like a man’s.

  ‘You must stay and help me with the bees. I’m a novice.’

  ‘I’m only here for a month, then I’m off to Italy.’

  ‘Where are you staying?’

  ‘La Roxy.’

  ‘Terrible place. Full of whores. No, you can help me here, stay free of charge.’

  Louise wanted to protest but there was something compelling about this woman. Maybe it was the accent that weighted every utterance with a sense of purpose, or the way she sat there motionless, face tilted upwards as if ripening further in the French sun. Really, Louise had no choice. It was a fait accompli.

  * * *

  Evelyn Parks had been an English Major at Stanford University, worked as an intern at Little, Brown and then stayed on for years in the editorial department, until one day at the age of thirty-nine (same age as Louise!) packed it all in (the rent-controlled apartment on the Lower East Side, the inherited cat) and left for Europe.

  ‘I wanted to live the book, not write it,’ she told Louise that first night over a supper of warm lentil salad and stale baguette. ‘And, I am doing just that.’ She took a breath in between bites. ‘Of course, this district has changed a lot since I’ve been here. The markets have become more touristy, the best boulangerie closed down, and ever since that damn Australian journalist wrote that book about Rue Montorgueil, it’s been crawling with Australians.’

  Louise wasn’t sure if she was meant to laugh at this or feign offence. She settled for a weak smile.

  ‘But tourists are good for the honey market,’ the woman continued. ‘A little jar of authentic Parisian honey to take as gifts for the folks back home.’

  ‘Can you make much money?’

  ‘Hell, yes. I’m told bees can produce sixty kilos of honey a hive. At fifteen dollars a jar that’s a tidy sum. At least it will keep the dream alive.’

  By all accounts it looked like Evelyn was only barely doing that. The apartment was in desperate need of a refurbishment, she kept only one light bulb burning at any given time—tonight it was the pendant light hanging over the little table in the kitchen—and five years ago she’d had to partition off half her flat to rent out to a tenant. Louise couldn’t quite determine where the tenant entered the apartment (there was only one door on this floor), but at night as she lay in her lumpy camp bed, she could hear someone moving around on the other side of her wall, as if permanently entombed.

  The next morning they immediately started working with the bees. Evelyn was in charge of the smoker but sat on a stool to rest her ankle, while Louise set to work removing the frames. She was wearing the bee suit (Evely
n wore long-sleeved overalls) and she moved quickly, prising each frame apart, brushing the bees away with the horsehair brush and then bagging each frame in plastic. The hive was in a shocking condition. The brood had got into the supers box, and it was a mess, with some of the comb gnawed and almost black from the larva faeces and cocoons. Louise guessed Evelyn was the type who didn’t believe in using a queen excluder. God, she thought she had forgotten all of that. It was funny how much she still remembered after four years. Bees don’t like dark blue. She had been wearing a dark blue suit the first day they’d met—her work suit—and he stood arms folded, an unbending man, making her feel like a small child. She had been flirty on the phone, normally good at cajoling and convincing people to be interviewed for the local paper, but then, standing in front of him, she had lost all her power.

  Do you want me to change into something else, she had replied, but it came out dirty and wrong. She couldn’t tell if it was amusement that played on his mouth or disapproval. A quiet queen calms the hive, he’d said in his measured voice. Louise nodded and also wrote that down in her notebook, under the heading ‘Bee-Keeping Fast Facts’, then, doubting his sincerity, glanced up to see him smiling at her. A relationship that lasted only three months and two days, and still she remembered it all. He was her last boyfriend—there was little opportunity to meet men at a workplace filled mainly with women—and she was to unfortunately discover you are only ever defined by your most recent relationship.

  But she had to focus on the job at hand. The lavender smoke wasn’t calming Evelyn’s angry bees. She felt them hitting against her suit like a small army and wondered if they were Africanised (another thing she remembered). She decided to only remove three frames at a time, since Evelyn didn’t have an extractor and harvesting honey manually was an arduous task, best carried out over days. Louise heaved each bagged-up frame back to the apartment and, with Evelyn encouraging her from her chair, started to extract honey from the comb, first slicing the waxy caps off, like scales, then pressing slabs of comb through a sieve and letting the honey ooze out. With so much debris in the honey, she had to re-sieve it using a stocking, before pouring the thick liquid into the settling bucket. The honey was so dark, so unappealing, and she wondered if Evelyn knew that lighter honey commanded a much higher price.

  Suddenly, it occurred to Louise that she hadn’t seen the queen for some time, that she hadn’t taken care to look for her. In her own haste, she wouldn’t have noticed if the queen had crawled to the top frame and then been inadvertently brushed away, onto the ground.

  ‘Evelyn, you have to get a queen excluder. It will keep her in the brood box, stop her from moving to the next level and laying eggs all through the honeycomb.’

  ‘Rubbish, I want my queen to have free rein of the hive. I don’t want to hem her in.’

  ‘But the honey is so dark,’ Louise ventured.

  ‘I’ll market it as tulip and poplar honey. That’s known to be darker in colour. As long as it’s Parisian no-one will care.’

  Evelyn, wedged into her armchair with a pile of weighty books, looked like she wouldn’t budge on anything.

  * * *

  It took a few days for the honey to settle and the impurities to finally float to the top. After that Louise bottled non-stop: sterilising, pouring and pasting home-made labels—‘Authentic Parisian Honey’—onto each jar. Evelyn (still with one eye on her book) supervised everything from her armchair. Louise’s throat burned from the constant sampling. Not that she liked honey, but each time some dripped over the side of the glass jar, she wiped it away with her finger, sucking it off and questioning the strangeness of its musky aftertaste. Everything affected the taste of honey: the way it was processed, the type of flowers. That was something else she remembered.

  The weekend after the interview, she’d accompanied him on the long drive to check his hives, scattered across the South West, and strategically positioned to follow the jarrah blooms. After kilometres of muted grey bush, she exclaimed loudly when it transformed into fields of vivid yellow. Canola has a higher glucose level, he remarked. Lacks the smooth floral notes of jarrah. She didn’t write that down; she knew she was being judged. When they arrived at his hives set back in the bush, all she could see was the stack of drab boxes in the distance and the bees buzzing around them as if they were circling a decomposing body.

  Louise couldn’t fault their sexual compatibility. When they finally slept together at his house, their bodies matched perfectly in a quiet, satisfying rhythm, so that it felt as if she had arrived home. Patterns in leaves, the symmetry of ant trails, puffs of pale blossoms on paperbarks, a joyous chorus of birdsong that burst across a city skyline... all were guiding her as lights do on a runway... to him, to them, to a foreseeable future of children—their little faces peering out from secret hideaways in trees. Everything seemed so right, and yet Louise couldn’t explain that feeling of suffocation whenever he cupped her face to kiss her.

  Years later, whenever she felt the despair of being alone, of leaving a man for no real reason, it was that image she clung to: the struggle to catch her breath while they kissed. And also the memory of him marking his newly acquired queen with an orange dot, holding her down firmly under the fluorescent light while he inked her small abdomen.

  * * *

  If Louise felt any resentment about the time she was wasting on the honey, her outrage only deepened when Evelyn suggested that she should also be the one to do the selling.

  ‘But I can’t speak French,’ she protested.

  ‘All you have to do is be charming,’ said Evelyn, her large face expanding into a Southern belle grin.

  So Louise found herself dressed up, at Evelyn’s suggestion, in a tight skirt and high heels and lugging one of the cartons down to the market street. But as she wobbled along the cobbled streets she felt uncomfortable; so gawky and large—like those tall girls in the primary school photos, the netballers who matured too early.

  At the first couple of shops, she was rudely waved away before she even had a chance to deliver her rehearsed spiel. The next grocer took one look at her honey, showed her a stack of his own on the shelves and shrugged. There was no need for words. Everywhere she went there was plenty of honey, all lightly coloured, with hand-drawn labels beautifully sketched and etched in black ink. The Bees of Paris, one pâttisier explained to her as she admired the cabinet full of glistening chocolate bees, which oozed centres of honey when bitten. From the rooftops of the Opéra national de Paris and swank city hotels, to the small terrace home gardens—everyone it seemed was keeping bees. Louise was told that due to the widespread use of pesticides, bee populations in the countryside had dwindled to dangerously low numbers. But here in the city, the bees of Paris were thriving, lilting from cherry blossom to chestnut blossom and across all the window boxes, gardens and trees of the spiralling twelve arrondissements. A beautiful tale of survival at all odds—but not for poor Evelyn, who had failed to see what was happening outside her own front door.

  Louise had had enough. Her back was aching from wearing heels, and she needed to constantly set down the box to rest her arms. She decided to take the metro back to the apartment. Evelyn had given her instructions to get out at Strasbourg–Saint-Denis and walk up the second rue, to the left of the arch. However, as Louise struggled up the staircase from the platform she realised there was more than one exit. Emerging from the metro she saw two arches, made a wild guess and immediately found herself in a street that had a different vibe to the area she was staying in, more downbeat, and seedier. She averted her eyes from a shop selling porn DVDs and a prostitute ‘giving it a go’ in daylight. She hugged her box as she passed shop fronts selling garments, which even in a culture she didn’t understand stood out as cheap and tacky. As she forced herself to keep going, a dark-skinned man dressed like a pimp sauntered towards her with arms outstretched and a mock smile on his face. And Louise knew he was taking the piss out of her, that at her age and in her clumsy shoes she could never
be one of his girls. She wanted to shout at him, but instead did the only thing that women in this situation could do: pursed her lips and deliberately blanked him. By the time she found her way back to Evelyn’s apartment, the carton had weakened and split so much that she had to abandon all the jars in the nearby alleyway.

  As she was climbing the stairs, she bumped into the cyclist she’d met the previous week.

  ‘What’s happening with the bees?’ the woman demanded.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘They are swarming and stinging the children. Where are your permits?’

  ‘I’ll speak to Evelyn.’

  ‘She shouldn’t be keeping bees,’ she hissed. Louise nodded, and quickly made her escape.

  Evelyn greeted her at the door with a kiss.

  ‘How did you go?’

  ‘Great. All gone,’ Louise said, taking out the money she’d been refunded from La Roxy and placing it on the kitchen table.

  ‘I knew it!’ Evelyn did a victory hop around the room, and then sank down onto a chair, exhausted.

  Louise smiled, then excused herself to pack. Tomorrow, she would leave Paris behind, take the first train out to the French countryside and follow the fields of furrowed gold. On a whim, she knocked on the wall behind her bed, and gave a laugh when she heard the three knocks sound in reply.

  IN TRANSIT

  Everything about my mother’s side of the family is half- arsed. Uncle Maurie’s unfinished carport extension, my grandfather who stops shaving at his chin so that his neck looks like a white woolly llama’s, and the way my mother tries to kill herself. This time, the half-emptied bottle of diazepam on the bedside table and my plastic Tinker Bell tumbler next to it, Tink’s face disintegrating and blurry from too many dishwasher cycles. It’s easier to focus on that cup than Mum, who lies on the gurney with an oxygen mask cupped over her mouth and her cheeks slackened pouches, falling gracelessly to one side.