by Sarah Till
Honeybees collect nectar and pollen from flowers, but only nectar is used to make honey. Nectar is a “reward” given by the plant to attract bees. Pollen is transported back to the hive in the pollen baskets on the hind legs whereas the nectar is transported in the stomach. Nectar is mostly water with dissolved sugar. The amount of sugar varies greatly but is usually 25-50%. Back in the hive the nectar is placed into wax honeycomb cells and the excess water evaporates until the honey is approximately 83% sugar and 17% water. This takes a few days. The cell is then covered over with a layer of wax which is later removed when the bees need to eat the honey. When large amounts of nectar are being collected the bees speed up evaporation by using their wings to ventilate the hive. It is widely considered that in order to alleviate the symptoms of hay fever or pollen allergies, the honey of local bees can be eaten.
The pollination of the moor by birds, bees, animals and people is vital for its survival. In this way, the moorland community is often sacrificed in pollination through its own food chain, for the greater good.
Chapter Ten
I wake up and rush to the window. It’s already light and I’ve missed the sunrise, missed Sarah and probably Gabriel. Her car isn’t there so I expect she’s gone out again, leaving him in the house. The windows are closed now, so I can’t be bothered ringing his phone.
I feel a little bit calmer this morning, and I take a long shower and scrub my hair. It’s peaceful, sunny and cloudless, and I walk around in bare feet. I still feel desperate, but not as desperate as yesterday. I haven’t been downstairs long when there’s a tapping on the door. I open it and it’s Polly. Today she’s wearing a headscarf with bright blue peacocks, and an emerald green border. Her cheeks are rosy and she looks brighter than yesterday. She walks past me and into the house.
‘Not here again, eh? Oh well. He’ll be back when he’s hungry.’ We stand looking at each other for a while, and then she tuts. ‘Are you ready then? Unless you’ve got something better to do?’ She leans and looks past me to the immaculately tidy, empty room. Her eyebrows raise and I go upstairs and fetch my boots and a backpack, and I stuff in some notes from my study, the incomplete sheets for the last couple of months. Better late than never, I suppose. In a few minutes we’re scrambling over the wall, my legs stiff from yesterday’s walking. I expect it to be a rerun of yesterday: Polly walks in front, we stop for a cup of tea, then we follow the map silently. But today there’s no screeching wind and our hair isn’t stuck to our faces. She’s waiting for me and telling me what the plants are, and I try to scribble the names down on a piece of scrap paper. The walk to the outcrop is shorter today, and in no time we’re having a steaming cup of sweet tea and suddenly I’m enjoying myself. Polly is studying the map, looking for today’s easiest path. I see she’s shaded yesterday’s route in and the strip has narrowed. I lean over.
‘You’ve nearly done it all. What are you going to do when it’s finished?’
She laughs. The she is very serious.
‘I’ll have a rest, lovey, a big rest. Did you sort it out with your husband, lovey?’
I shake my head.
‘He’s not my husband.’ I’m sure I told her this yesterday. ‘No. We’re not going to sort it out. He’s staying in a hotel, somewhere in town. And Gabriel’s not back yet.’
‘You look bit better today, love, less drained. Did you sleep all right?’
I feel the tears come.
‘Yes. Yes, thanks. Sorry. I don’t know what’s wrong with me, Polly.’
She puts her arm around me, and sighs.
‘It’s all right. Come on now, shh. It’s all right. Where’s your mother, love? I expect you’ve moved away, haven’t you, like all these youngsters? Can you give her a call? She’ll know what to do.’
‘She’s dead, Polly. She died a while ago.’
I couldn’t stand to explain the circumstances. I’d run away. I’d disappeared from under my parent’s gaze for nearly two years. After my undergraduate degree, I’d registered for a master’s degree but never turned up for the first module. Instead, I’d holed myself up in a flat with Sparky and two other girls who worked for him. I spent the next two years going to gigs and sleeping with our friends, as we liked to call the men who visited us at the club.
I’d survived solely in cash terms, not using my credit card or bank account. I’d done it on purpose, gone underground, disappeared from the face of the earth for a long time. The way that I was living was untraceable. I felt free, cool, anonymous. So free that I could do whatever I wanted to do, with whoever, and have no fear of any disapproval from mum and dad.
David had been right about my parents the other day, and how I laughed when I saw a missing person poster, then my face, cropped from a family portrait when I was sixteen, on a cardboard laminated milk carton. I’d cut it out and stuck it on the wall. After two years I was bored again. I’d begun to hate the sex, the grimy sleaziness of it. I still worked in the club dancing, but I’d rented a flat with another girl and re-registered for my course. I’d never forgotten about the bumble bees that had formed part of my early research, and somehow they always featured in my drunken dreams or my manic drug fuelled chatter. I had an address again. I used my bank account for the first time in ages and I eventually surfaced in the world. I’d also met David, and he’d tried to persuade me to get in touch with my parents, at least so that I could stop looking over my shoulder.
It hadn’t been easy, avoiding them for so long; they’d gone out of their way to find me and it became a game of cat and mouse, every day another battle to avoid private investigators and to dodge the letters from agencies, all asking me to contact them. I may have smiled slightly, thinking that I had forever. Thinking that they’d always be there for me to run back to when I’d had enough of the booze and the drugs and the sex and I was back to me. Unfortunately I didn’t run the full circle back to myself in time, and they were gone. The police arrived at my door one drizzly morning. My hangover had been burning a hole in my skull and I opened the door intending to shout at anyone who would dare to knock so hard.
The officers had come in and told me that my parents had been killed in a car crash. Dad had died instantly, but mum had lived long enough to tell someone about me. Her last words had been about me, that someone should let me know, and that she loved me. Even after what I had done, she still loved me. I didn’t cry at first, but I did marvel at the fact that their lives were still full of me even though they hadn’t seen me for three years.
David came with me to their house. There were two unwashed cups in the sink, green with mould and a plate with a half-eaten piece of toast on the table, all hard now, but I could still see the imprint of teeth. The house was exactly how I remembered it, even my room, with my teenage posters and the few clothes I had left there. All with a dust veneer covering it. For the police hadn’t been able to find me for two months. The decision to have the funerals had been taken by Aunty Jean, who thought that I was dead because of the lack of contact. They’d both been cremated a week after the crash and I collected their ashes from her. The air of disappointment when they saw me was palpable, because up until then they had been next of kin. I think they hoped that I was dead, too.
Of course, all this would belong to me now. This, and the money my father had amassed from his business. David and I had been living in the cramped flat for over a year now with my friend, Andrea. So we moved into my parent’s house until I couldn’t live there a moment longer. I’d explored each room little by little until it drove me mad with grief. The final straw was when I found a letter from my mother, dated a year and a half after I disappeared and tucked inside a birthday card. It read:
Dear Patricia,
I don’t know if you will ever read this letter, as it’s been a long time since I last heard from you, but I just wanted you to know that I have thought about you every day. Your father and I didn’t know you had moved, and I blame myself for not visiting more often. I should have looked after you be
tter, but there’s a thin line between childhood and adulthood, and I never knew where that was with you.
You seemed so grown up and able to live apart from us, but I worry every day that you are warm enough, have enough food to eat, and that you are loved. Not by me, as I am sure of my love for you, but by someone else who can care about you and how you are when I am not there. When you are ill, someone who will help you, when you are upset, someone who will wipe your tears.
No matter where you are, you are my child, and I love you. If you walk back into our lives tomorrow, or I never see you again, that will never change. If you are reading this letter now, the chances are something has happened to me, and I have not seen you since I wrote it. If that is so, please don’t punish yourself for being absent, instead translate that into love for yourself and your children, because all I ever wanted for you is happiness. If you are happy without me, then my task is complete.
With love
Your mother.
The letter sent me completely over the edge and I insisted that we sold the house and moved to somewhere I could get on with my research. And have children, so I could look after them and tell them about my mother. I couldn’t tell Polly this, how I’d stepped out of my parent’s life on purpose, not with Jimmy missing. I couldn’t burden her further.
She’s stroking my hair as I cry, and she doesn’t ask me to explain anything. She just rocks in the sunshine and murmurs ‘Shh.’ Eventually she speaks again.
‘Is that better, love? You’ve been through the mill, haven’t you? First your mum, then your partner. It’s no wonder you’re so upset. Come on. Let’s carry on.’ she let’s go of me and stands up, looking me in the eye. ‘We have to carry on, lovey. We have no choice.’
I can tell she doesn’t believe that this is upsetting me, but I still can’t tell her about Gabriel. We tramp up the moor and over the peat, up into some huge rocks. Polly jokes that they were giant’s dice, and she looks at the ground, all the time scanning for disturbed earth or anything out of place. We’d stayed longer than usual and she brings some sandwiches out of her backpack. She sits on a rock shaped like a chair.
‘Very convenient.’ She shuffles onto it and makes a show of getting comfortable. It makes me laugh out loud, the first time in days. ‘Cheese and tomato?’ She passes a sandwich to me, wrapped in clingfilm. She produces a packet of crisps and I look at her hands. On the whole she doesn’t look elderly. Her hair is grey, but she’s not frail, rather, she’s stocky and solid. Her feet are small and trainer clad, and her gold rimmed glasses are modern and trendy. It’s her hands that give her away. They’re brown and claw-like, her nails discoloured. I know she still smokes heavily because she lights up regularly as she’s walking the moor. She’s careful to put the cigarettes out and doesn’t throw them on the ground but stores them in a little pocket in her backpack. I imagine her going home and emptying them into her dustbin, the acrid smell not registering. I could smell them from here and it was worse downwind. If the rest of her is crippled with arthritis, she hides it well. But her hands are twisted and she has large bulbous nodules on all her joints. She moves them in a particular way, so as to avoid bending her fingers.
That’s why I’m so surprised when she produces a drawing pad and some pencils from her bag. She flips the pages over and finds a blank page, carefully choosing the right medium and sketching quickly. I start to ask her about it but she shushes me.
‘Just a minute love. I want to catch it before it moves. We’re high up here, and I thought we might see him.’ I turn my head slowly and there’s a large bird pecking a piece of bread. She giggles a bit. ‘He’s eating me butty. Look at him.’
She draws fast and she tells me what I already know; he’s a Peregrine Falcon, and he’s about four years old. She knows everything about him and he sits there for a while as she scribbles away. Suddenly he hops up onto the top of the rocks and flies off. We watch him circle and he’s gone. Polly turns the drawing pad around and I gasp. Her drawing in lifelike, a perfect capture of the bird of prey, exact.
‘Oh my God! How did you learn to do that?’
She beams with pride.
‘Good, isn’t it? Years of practice. I started years ago.’
‘Did you have lessons?’
She puts the pad down and is quiet for a minute.
‘Not to start off with. I started by accident really. I never really thought about anything like that, a woman in my day didn’t, it was for the la-de-da’s who had money. But it started really when Jim went. I went a bit funny, in that first year, a bit desperate. I can see it now and I can see why. You see, when he’d gone, we hadn’t taken any photographs for about a year. Not since he started going over there to work. In the first couple of days I realised that I couldn’t see his face, I couldn’t picture him. I got out the old photos, the ones from before, but I wanted to remember exactly how he looked that morning when he went, the last time I saw him. Because I was afraid I would forget what his face looked like.’ She wrings her hands and sorts through the pencils. ‘So I tried to draw him. I spent hours drawing his face, but I couldn’t get it right. It was near, but not quite right. So the next day, and the day after that, I drew Jim. After about ten months I signed up for a course at the community centre, and my doctor was pleased, because he thought I was coming out of myself. Really, though, I wasn’t. Not at all. It was a means to an end. I just wanted to learn how to draw better, so I could draw Jimmy.’
She rustles about in her bag and brings out lots of sheets of paper.
‘So have you drawn anything else?’
I know full well she has, but she doesn’t know I’ve read her story. She hands the sheets to me. There are a few landscapes, horizons that I recognise, some tiny plants in wonderful detail, and a picture of my house.
‘You can keep that one if you want.’ Her yellow nail taps the picture with the house on it. I turn the sheets one by one, each scene as finely drawn as the last, until I reach a face. A young man’s face, smiling and handsome. ‘That’s him. That’s my Jimmy.’ She beams with pride, and I picture my own mother showing people carefully selected pictures of me in a nice dress with my hair done when I was missing.
‘I don’t know what to say, Polly. That’s an amazing talent you’ve got there.’
‘There’s some coloured ones at home. I’ll bring them to show you.’ She suddenly looks sad. ‘Maybe.’
‘I’d like that. I’d like to see more of them.’
She starts to tidy up, putting the pictures away carefully, lingering on Jimmy’s face.
‘Well, it keeps me busy. And I haven’t been remembering things properly lately. I’ve been in hospital, you know, and since then it’s all been a bit wishy washy. But them are me memories, all I have to do is get those out, and I’m back up here, with Jim. He’s somewhere out here, you know. Or I think he is.’
She starts to walk and I follow her to the top of the ridge. As we step over the rocks, we’re right on top of another valley. We both stand there, staring down at the expanse of water that runs through it, the streams falling through the steep drop on the other side, fast and rough after the rain yesterday. It’s breath-taking and neither of us move. I sigh heavily and she brushes my hand.
‘It’ll be all right, lovey. It really will. You’ll find a way out of it all, but it might not be the way you expect.’
We start back, another day without a cross on her chart. I know she’s been looking here for years, because all crosses have dates on them. She’s been here for the last five years without finding anything. From time to time she tells me, ‘He’s here somewhere and I’m going to find him’ or ‘Where are you? Where are you? Polly’s here.’ She’s told me that she sometimes comes across strange things in the middle of the moor, things that there’s no explanation for. She said that she found a suitcase full of holiday clothes, a mobile phone charger and plastic hen coop. I know that people fly tip on the moor where they can because of its remote location, but Polly’s theory is t
hat they’ve fallen out of a plane or helicopter. She’s also told me that people will probably come to dig here again, private inquiry teams, paid for by private donations, looking for lost relatives from the crash. She’s not the only person who comes up here with a map and a bag of sandwiches; the families of the other victims walk the moor, as do the death tourists, those who want to see how it feels. Now I’ve tried it, it doesn’t feel so bad, and I don’t know what I was afraid of.
We eventually reach the road and she leans on her car, pulling off her boots and rubbing her feet. She slips on some carpet slippers and squints through the sunshine. She looks grey and tired, but happy. She could be any tourist on any day, out for a walk. But she’s Jimmy’s girl, and my heart suddenly feels for her.
‘Now, lovey, go inside and get some work done. All that mithering about men, don’t let it hold you up. And when that bloody Gabriel comes back, give him this and tell him I want an update on how that books doing.’
She hands me anther instalment of her story and I hold it close, my hands hot. I nod and she gets in the car and drives off. I go inside and check the house for Gabriel or David. It appears neither of them have been here, so I get my files out and start to work. I leave Polly’s writing on top of the mantelpiece, a reward for later on, for staying sane and working; for not collapsing into my grief. It takes me a while to remember where I was and what I was doing, but soon the incompleteness of my research starts to become apparent, and I make notes. I work all afternoon and stop at six for a sandwich. As soon as my mind isn’t full of the moor, I’m distracted and bitter, looking out of the window towards Sarah’s house. Her car still isn’t there, and I think now that they’ve gone away, to escape me and my ranting.
I check the phone and there’s no return call from him. My finger hovers above the call button and I eventually press it. It goes to answer phone and I hear his voice – it’s like a sudden stab of reality, forcing me back into my pain. I stutter over my words.