Honeybee

by Craig Silvey;

  My body was changing. I grew taller. Hair started growing in other places. There was no way to stop it. I started having the nightmare about being trapped on the train. I would wake up in the dark feeling like there was somebody sitting on my chest. It was hopeless.

  I hated my body. I stole my mum’s cigarette lighter and at night I would press the hot metal into my skin like the boys at school did. I burned myself in places nobody would see, under my armpits, between my legs, then on the skin of my penis. I would concentrate all my thoughts onto that small area, and it made everything else less noisy. I could get to sleep that way.

  When I woke up in the morning I always had a couple of seconds of emptiness before I remembered who I was and what was wrong and I felt full of dread and shame. It was like I had done something terrible and I was in a lot of trouble, except the trouble never came. I was just stuck waiting to be punished.

  It wasn’t ever going to get better. Every single day I got further and further away from who I was. There was never going to be a happy ending.

  There was no happy ending for Venus Xtravaganza. Before she got her chance to change, a man strangled her to death and left her body under a bed in a motel room, and nobody found her for days.

  Stories

  It was still strange waking up in Vic’s bed. In the morning, I would lie there wondering if anyone was looking for me. It was the longest I had ever gone without seeing my mum. I thought about charging my phone, but I still couldn’t do it.

  Vic kept to himself. He was quiet except for the coughing. He pottered around packing up the garage or fixing parts of the house or napping. It was nice knowing that he was nearby.

  In the afternoons I went to Aggie’s house after she got home from school. I would bring food I had baked. I met her parents and they were really lovely. Her dad was short and balding and he smiled a lot. He wore dress shirts at home. Her mum was tall and loud and had curly red hair. I liked her Scottish accent and the way she said ‘Meemadooma’.

  One day I brought over a plate of madeleines and her mum answered the door.

  ‘Oh my saints! Aren’t you clever? They look incredible!’

  She was always amazed by my cooking.

  ‘They’re madeleines.’

  ‘For us?’

  I nodded and gave her the plate.

  She smelled them and her eyes went wide.

  ‘May I have one now?’

  I smiled and nodded again.

  ‘Aggie’s in her room.’

  I walked down the hall and knocked softly on Aggie’s door. I always felt a bit nervous before she opened it. I had never had a friend before, and I was never sure if Aggie would be happy to see me. But she smiled and hugged me.

  ‘Samwise! Why do you smell like a vanilla bean?’

  ‘I made you madeleines.’

  ‘I don’t even know what they are, but I want them in my face.’

  ‘Your mum has them.’

  ‘That’s an unforced error. They may never come back. Anyway, I’m so glad you’re here. I’m studying for a test on periodic trends and I’m retaining none of it.’

  Aggie collapsed onto her bed. I sat at her desk. Her textbooks were open. It looked like another language. Aggie sat up.

  ‘Oh, hey, has your mum sold your house yet? Do you know where you’re going to live over here?’

  Aggie had been asking a lot of questions about my family and where I came from. I was too scared to tell her the truth, so I made up a story about how my dad was high up in the navy and he was out at sea, and I said that my mum was a consultant, even though I didn’t really know what that meant. We were from Sydney but we were moving to Perth because my mum had just got a big job working for the government. She was still over east because there was a problem selling our house, which meant we hadn’t bought one here yet. I was staying with Vic, who was an old friend of my dad’s. I hadn’t enrolled in school because we didn’t know which suburb we would be living in.

  I felt bad about lying to Aggie, but I liked pretending that I was normal and that my family had money and impressive jobs.

  ‘Mum thought there was a buyer,’ I said, ‘but it fell through, so I’ll be at Vic’s place for a little while longer.’

  ‘Can I selfishly confess that I’m a bit happy about that, because it’s very fun having you live a couple of houses down?’

  That made me blush.

  ‘You’re not going to move too far away are you?’ she asked.

  I shrugged and changed the subject.

  I picked up one of the figurines on her desk.

  ‘What are all these?’

  ‘That’s a half-orc barbarian.’

  ‘Okay.’

  ‘They’re for D&D.’

  I nodded as if I understood, but she could tell that I didn’t know what she was talking about.

  ‘Dungeons and Dragons. It’s a role-playing game.’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘Do you really want to know?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Aggie took a deep breath.

  ‘Alright, but it’s going to require me to nerd out on you, so just stop me when you’re bored. Or, like, just get up and leave, I won’t be offended.’

  ‘No, I want to know. You have so many of them.’

  ‘I painted every single one too. That’s why I kept them.’

  ‘So is it like Monopoly or something?’

  ‘Oh, my sweet child, no. It’s like, more of an epic story that you participate in as a character that you create. You don’t really win or lose, it’s about being part of an adventure. So you might go on a dragon-slaying quest or a treasure hunt or whatever, and the story gets determined by the choices you and the other players make along the way. Plus some luck, because you have to roll a dice to, like, execute those choices. Are you still with me?’

  ‘I think so.’

  ‘So the game gets controlled by a Dungeon Master.’

  I raised my eyebrows.

  ‘I know, it sounds weird,’ she said. ‘But the Dungeon Master is like a cross between a narrator and God, because they describe the events of the story but they can also decide the outcome of the choices you make, depending on how successful your roll is.’

  ‘Okay. I think I understand.’

  ‘I used to play every Sunday with the same five boys. We met at the house of this guy Graham, who insisted on being the Dungeon Master. We were all, like, genuine enthusiasts, but Graham was super into it. He knew the handbook backwards. He spent all week preparing his own campaign for us to play. He constructed stories and mazes and puzzles and riddles and drew up watercolour maps and, like, parchment messages with wax seals and stuff. It was pretty amazing.’

  ‘That sounds fun.’

  ‘Oh my goodness, Sam, stop being so polite.’

  ‘I mean it! Was this orc your character?’

  ‘No. God, no. Ew. I would never be associated with a half-orc. I played a Lawful Good Elf Wizard. She was obstinately righteous and eloquent and widely respected and admired for both her intelligence and her mellifluous brass horn playing. I don’t know if that reminds you of anyone.’

  ‘I think I can guess.’

  ‘That’s the thing about it. Your character can be like an extension of yourself. It can be an expression of who you really are, or the person you wish you could be if you had permission. Like, I know I’m unbearably obnoxious at home, but I’m actually pretty shy out there. I’m like the chubby quiet brown girl who is decent academically, but who never risks venturing an opinion. It’s weird, because, like, in a world full of frost giants and dwarves and demons and spellcasting, my fantasies were really about being a confident, decisive person who had their shit together and was listened to.’

  ‘I know what you mean.’

  ‘Totally, right? And it was the same for the other nerds at our table. Except this one kid called Gabriel who played with us over one summer. His parents were Adventists or something. He was tiny, like, really thin and short and pale, bowl
haircut, and clinically odd. He had been bullied at his school to the point where his parents removed him and homeschooled him. He was insanely book smart. He had a photographic memory, but zero social ability. Our table was literally his only regular interaction with people his own age. But instead of playing a big aggressive paladin or a barbarian like the other boys, Gabriel played a halfling monk with absurdly low stats whose backstory was that he’d been excommunicated from his religious order for apostasy.’

  ‘I don’t know what that means.’

  ‘Oh. For not believing, basically. So Gabriel’s character was this persecuted, lone wolf weakling with no armour or melee abilities, who refused to cast spells and who lost every single battle he was in. It’s like, he wasn’t playing to escape anything, he was reliving the shittiest parts of his life. That’s how he dealt with it. Weird, right?’

  ‘Yeah, but I kind of get it.’

  ‘Gabriel used to borrow Graham’s fantasy novels and sneak them home. But his parents must have found them, because they called Graham’s parents and accused them of promoting the occult, and we never saw Gabriel again.’

  ‘They never let him come back?’

  ‘Nope. They were pretty zealous. Thing is, they didn’t know the half of what we did in there. For eleven-year-olds, we were covering some pretty messed-up territory.’

  ‘Like what?’

  Aggie scrunched up her face.

  ‘Let me think. Oh, okay, so I remember this one scenario that Graham invented. We came to the outskirts of a village that was being ravaged by a virulent flesh-eating plague. There we encountered a witch, who told us that she could concoct a healing potion which we could pour into the village aqueduct and save everyone. However, in order to make the potion, the witch required the beating heart of a single uncontaminated infant.’

  ‘What did you do?’

  ‘Oh my God, it was so awful. We spent an hour debating the right course of action. Is it the moral thing to sacrifice one innocent to save thousands of lives? And by what authority do we intervene and make that choice? I mean, what would you do?’

  ‘I don’t know. There doesn’t seem to be a right answer. I guess you just do the thing that does the least wrong.’

  ‘Exactly. That’s what we concluded. In the end, we stole a baby and gave it to the witch to be sacrificed. But here’s the thing: the witch tricked us. She made a potion like she promised, but she drank it all herself. It was an elixir that ensured her immortal youth. And everybody in the village died. How fucked up is that?’

  ‘That’s really dark. Did you kill the witch?’

  ‘We didn’t. She got away. It was actually genuinely upsetting, and I was really angry at Graham. When my turn came, I cast a spell of reincarnation, to see if I could bring the baby back to life in some form.’

  ‘You could do that?’

  ‘Yeah, well, I tried. I ended up rolling a critical fail though, which was catastrophically unhelpful. So Graham, as the Dungeon Master, brought the baby back to life, but it was reincarnated as an angry badger that was hell-bent on vengeance. So every other week there would be this surprise fucking badger attack we had to contend with.’

  ‘I don’t really blame the badger though.’

  Aggie laughed.

  ‘You have a point. Anyway, we had this amazing collective imagination. We built a whole world together and got totally lost in it. And then it all went gross.’

  ‘Why? What happened?’

  ‘Puberty.’

  ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘I mean their nefarious little dicks suddenly periscoped up from under the table and became five extra participants. Every campaign involved some big-titted succubus or a seductive priestess or a lonely water siren or a comely peasant girl or something equally lame. Worst of all, Graham kept putting my character in these creepy situations. Like, I’d be lashed to some torture device or imprisoned as a sex slave and would require their rescue. I don’t know, the whole mood just changed, and it wasn’t fun or clever or unpredictable anymore. It was just icky, so I stopped going, and I haven’t played since.’

  ‘Maybe they’ll grow out of it.’

  ‘I doubt it. That’s the shitty thing about being a girl sometimes. Things get contaminated. Like, this is going to sound ridiculous, but I would hate to be an objectively stunningly beautiful woman.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Seriously. It must fuck you up. You’d be constantly fending off romantic approaches and weird infatuations from men who want to win you like some sort of prize, and dealing with a whole bunch of envious bitchiness from women. Like, no wonder the pretty girls at my school are a bit guarded and hostile. I used to think they were really imperious and up themselves, but now I just feel sorry for them. It must be so isolating and exhausting. And it’s so unfair, because there’s literally no downside at all to being a conspicuously attractive boy, no offence. But doors just open for you. You’re playing life on the lowest difficulty setting, Sam Watson. You’re lucky.’

  I sat there and nodded, but my heart was breaking, because I knew I could never tell Aggie the truth about myself.

  There was a knock on the door. Mrs Meemeduma opened it. She was hiding something behind her back.

  ‘What have you got?’ Aggie asked.

  Mrs Meemeduma showed us the empty plate that the madeleines had been on.

  Aggie sat up, shocked.

  ‘You didn’t.’

  Mrs Meemeduma nodded. Her face was red with embarrassment. Aggie was outraged.

  ‘You ate them all? Just then?’

  ‘They were so good! I couldn’t help it.’

  ‘Oh my God!’

  Aggie threw a pillow at her, and I got anxious because I thought they were going to have a fight, but they both started laughing. Mrs Meemeduma gave me the plate back.

  ‘I’m so sorry, Sam.’

  ‘Why are you apologising to him? They were for me!’

  ‘It’s okay,’ I said. ‘I can make more.’

  ‘Agnes, you should marry this boy and make him my son.’

  Aggie rolled her eyes.

  ‘Oh my God, out!’

  Mrs Meemeduma winked at me and closed the door.

  ‘Let’s just pretend that exchange never happened,’ Aggie said.

  I just smiled and blushed.

  Every night I cooked one of Vic’s favourite meals, like shepherd’s pie or lamb casserole or apricot chicken. He never ate much, even though he said he liked what I made.

  I got braver about what I wore inside the house. I would pick something from Edie’s wardrobe and ask Vic if it was alright to wear it. He would look at the outfit and smile to himself, and then shrug and say I could wear whatever I liked. I started with jumpers and t-shirts over leggings, then I tried on her blouses, then I wore skirts over tights with camisoles or wrap tops, and finally I put on her dresses. I wore some make-up too. Not too noticeable, just some foundation with a bit of eyeshadow and dabs of lipstick.

  Every time I put on a new outfit, I felt nervous walking down the hall, but Vic never got angry with me again. He didn’t really react at all. But for me it was exciting for someone else to see me dressed up, to see me as I was.

  After dinner I would ask Vic questions about his life.

  He had left school early and started an apprenticeship as a mechanic at a shop owned by two brothers, Frankie and Dougie Byrne. They paid him cash and offered extra if he helped bring in new customers on slow days. They did it by running scams, which they called setting traps.

  I wanted to know how the traps worked, so Vic explained. Frankie and Dougie would send Vic out to the supermarket or a grocery store, and he would hide and wait for a wealthy-looking woman to park her car. Once she went inside, Vic snuck over and popped the hood of her car just enough to get his hands inside. He loosened the cable clamps from the terminal posts of the car battery, then he wiped his hands with a rag and waited for the woman to return.

  If she knew anything about engines, she would
open the hood and tighten the clamps and drive away. If she didn’t, Vic approached and said his uncle had a shop around the corner who could probably fix it.

  Dougie towed the car in, then Frankie looked over the engine and told the lady she needed a replacement battery, but all he did was wipe down the old one and put a new sticker on it. If it was a really slow week, Frankie squeezed them for a new alternator or a timing belt.

  Vic said he felt so guilty that he resigned as soon as he got his apprenticeship. A few months later the shop burned down. Frankie and Dougie were arrested for starting the fire.

  One night I asked Vic where he and Edie met.

  He took a big breath, held it in, then sighed.

  ‘Fremantle.’

  I thought that was all he was going to say, but after a minute he kept going.

  ‘I’d just finished my tour. Couple hundred of us army boys hitched a ride back with the RAN. We docked at the wharf and there was a good-sized crowd. Thousands down there. The boys thought they were there to cheer us in. We swaggered down the gangplank all smiles, straight into the gauntlet. They weren’t there to welcome us; it was an anti-war demonstration. People yelling and screaming, pandemonium. Never seen anything like it. Mounted coppers beating them back, barricades, the whole works. I just kept my head down. But as soon as my boots hit the ground, some bastard threw a chunk of limestone and hit me square in the ear. Eighteen months dodging bullets, and I got hit the moment I set foot on home soil. I went down like a sack of spuds, and out the corner of my eye I saw someone break through the police line and take a run at me. So I held my hand out and gave them the don’t argue. Then I hear a voice say, “Pull your head in. If you get blood over my new dress I’ll give you a knock worth worrying about!”’

  ‘Was it Edie?’

  Vic nodded and smiled.

  ‘I looked up and I saw the most beautiful girl I’d ever seen in my life. She put her handkerchief over my ear, and got me to my feet She pulled me through the crowd. People spitting on me, calling out. Terrible stuff. She walked me all the way to Fremantle Hospital. They put me on a gurney and started to wheel me away, but I hopped off and legged it after her. I tried to give her hanky back, which was a sorry-looking rag by that time. She looked at me like I was a lunatic and told me to keep it. I still have it too. I think she felt a bit sorry for me, because then she said, “If you survive the day, you can take me to the pictures and a sit-down meal.” I was so giddy I didn’t even feel the stitches.’