Hive

by A. J. Betts

  ‘I was hoping to see him too,’ I said.

  ‘Well, you can’t. An aunt’s unwell.’

  ‘Because of a bee?’ I asked.

  Celia’s nose wrinkled. She was hardly listening. ‘Aunt Kate, the seeder. The one with the lump on her knee. She’s sick. What happened here?’

  ‘The octopus got out. They killed it.’

  ‘The beast?’ Celia sniffed again. ‘Do you think it’s a sign?’

  ‘God works in mysterious ways,’ I said, echoing the words of priests and teachers. It was meant to comfort, but it had the opposite effect. The look Celia gave me was sour.

  ‘I don’t want mysterious, Hayley. I want good. I want a good marriage, and a good friend.’

  ‘I am,’ I said. I hadn’t been reliable, but I would be soon, when my worries were erased and I could focus all my attention on her.

  I became aware of the pinpoint pressure behind my left eye; surely it was too soon for another headpain?

  Celia exhaled audibly. ‘You’ve been speaking to that boy again.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Who?’ she imitated tartly. ‘The diarist. People talk, you know. And it’s not even your turn yet, Hayley – it’s mine.’

  I would’ve laughed if her tone wasn’t so bitter. Celia was jealous of me?

  ‘You say you don’t care for marriage,’ she continued, ‘but then you go about . . . flirting with that boy and . . . and scheming –’

  ‘Scheming?’

  ‘Wait your turn, Hayley. This marriage is about me, for once. I’m supposed to feel special.’ Her breathing was ragged. Where had this come from? ‘Can’t you do this one thing for me? After all I’ve done for you?’

  I was stunned. I hadn’t realised how much she’d been hurting. Unable to explain myself, all I could do was apologise.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she mimicked cruelly.

  I noticed two girls watching at the entrance to the garden way. Krystal, two months younger than me, whispered something into Heidi’s ear.

  ‘I’ll be better soon,’ I said, stung by sudden tears. As soon as I see the doctor. ‘I’ll be a better friend.’

  ‘Krystal’s offered to oil my hair, if you won’t.’

  ‘I will,’ I said, though the thought of oily scents made me nauseous. I felt the thump of pain in my head, and it panicked me. I’d never had a headpain so soon after taking feverfew. The intensity of its arrival was frightening. Already, my balance felt off.

  ‘Krystal said she’d help with everything, if you –’

  ‘I will,’ I promised again, more loudly, rubbing my temple. Couldn’t Celia recognise my pain anymore? Couldn’t she see I was doing my best?

  Not wanting to ask Celia for feverfew, I went to pluck some leaves myself, later, when the growlights had turned lavender and gardeners moved to the commons for dinner. I climbed the stepladder at the strawberry hydrostack and pushed my hands through the plants, rubbing at leaves until I felt the familiar slickness of feverfew. I took five leaves, then another three, then, hungry, I picked four strawberries. God would ignore this, I reasoned, just as he’d ignored my other trespasses.

  Pain flared behind my eyes. Foolish, it pulsed as I chewed two leaves. You foolish girl.

  Only then did I remember the bees.

  I left the hydrostacks and crossed the farm, then crawled into the cage surrounding the hive. There, I dialled down the thermostat. Penny hadn’t done it. Perhaps she’d been busy with the other girls who’d come fussing over Celia after we’d argued.

  The bees murmured, confused by the temperature that was too warm for the gentle lavender light of evening.

  ‘It’s okay, you’re safe,’ I told them, hoping they would go into the hive and fall asleep, then dream of pollen and nectar and whatever else their simple heads desired.

  How I envied them. Bees knew nothing of the demands of friendship. Neither did they have to grapple with responsibilities or secrets. To them, every day was the same kind of innocence. There was no threat of madness; no fear of judgment. Did they even think about anything? With their big eyes and tiny brains, did they ever pause to question the purpose of their lives: collecting nectar, making honey and tending brood?

  Did we?

  Worries lashed in my mind like angry, thorny vines, so I ate two more feverfew leaves for good measure. They scratched my dry throat on the way down.

  In the commons right now, everyone in the world would be listening to a sermon then the children’s new song. Soon, almost three hundred people would be selecting their plates of sweet potato mash, beans and rice, which they’d eat with the cutlery they’d owned since birth; cutlery used by hundreds of people before them, handed down as a birth gift along with their names. Right now, they’d be complaining about the mash and wishing for meat, as they always did – always had; always would – not questioning the point of it.

  Bees hummed, butting soft heads. They peeped into the cool hive, then went in.

  Only that morning, I’d hoped for forgetting. Now? I wasn’t so sure. Now I knew of a brown boy caught up in a net. Now I’d found an unexpected friend in Luka, a boy not afraid of strangeness. Now I had someone, perhaps, I could talk to.

  Then why did I feel so alone?

  My stomach growled, ravenous, and I swallowed another leaf. Closed my eyes.

  Foolish girl, my head pounded. Foolish, foolish girl.

  A flash of light.

  Morning?

  No. It was too soon. Too dim. Too early. Too far away.

  A murmur. A laugh.

  The air felt thick and slow like honey.

  An impossible click.

  Night.

  Night?

  I reached for Celia but my fingers found dirt.

  It was too dark for the sleeper. Darker with my eyes open than closed.

  Past dirt, my fingers scraped mesh.

  Dreaming?

  Dreaming of mesh and dirt and honey?

  Then my chest burned hot and I was vomiting wet sickness and leaves. How many had I taken? Too many for an empty stomach?

  In the impossible dark, my fingers found the wires of the cage.

  It was no dream. It was night.

  Everyone else was in the sleepers.

  And I was locked out.

  Chapter 10

  How strange was the garden in the night. How unsteady the soil.

  Stakes knocked against my legs as I crept. Garlic bulbs butted me with their papery heads. Vines raked at my hair with thin sticky fingers.

  This wasn’t a sin: only the mad would think to roam the night, which was why their bunks were always checked before curfew. Clearly mine hadn’t been, though it should’ve.

  Celia mustn’t have been worried by my absence. Or maybe she’d just assumed I’d crawled in with an aunt, as girls sometimes did. Perhaps she herself had crawled in with another girl who merited her friendship.

  I mustn’t have been missed in the sleeper at all.

  Every smell sickened me – garlic, sweet peas, camellias. The garden was offensive in the dark, its florals too sweet, its soil too fetid. I vomited again.

  Hand over hand, I followed the perimeter wall, tapping at teaberries, youngberries, pockets of verticals. Even without sight, I knew the walls and where they led.

  The doors to the baths and the sleepers were locked, of course, just as all the house doors were locked on the final curfew click. The only open doors were the ones to the three ways which led to the kitchen house, the seeder house and the commons.

  I chose to go to the commons. There would be fewer smells there, and fewer shapes to frighten me. The commons, I knew, would be empty, its dinner tables packed away by the kitcheners. It would be bare of everything but the vines at the walls and the source in its centre, and if I had to spend the dark hours alone, I’d prefer to do it be
side the water trickling down from God. I hoped He might even watch over me. He would know, wouldn’t He, that I hadn’t meant for this to happen? He must know it was an accident – that I’d fallen under too quickly, too deeply, from too much feverfew inside a hungry stomach. Perhaps he would take pity on my foolishness and let me sleep peacefully by the well.

  In the way, damp climbers released musty smells of warning. My palms pressed at thorns until, relieved, I stepped onto a cool clean floor.

  The commons was big and I moved through it blindly, arms outstretched, towards the burbling cadence of water. I was almost there when my foot pressed into something unexpected.

  I paused. Listened. Pressed again.

  It was soft but solid. Something that didn’t belong on the floor of the commons in the night-time.

  When I nudged it, the thing gave a little. Then pushed back.

  Fear forked through me.

  I’d prodded a monster.

  Monsters were for children, yet I felt it to be true. A monster lay at my feet.

  Fright held me there in the breathless silence as I recalled the stories of the hairy monsters that would jump up and lash out with furious, blustery rage.

  But the thing remained still. Even as I bent and reached out with timid fingers, it didn’t howl or thrash. It let me touch its hair, then skin. Cool and smooth.

  A curve of a breast. Stomach. Hip. Thigh. A knee with a lump on one side.

  Aunt Kate.

  I knew her. She was the seeder aunt who’d limped as she walked. She was the one the doctor had been tending when Celia went to visit him.

  God, I uttered. Had Aunt Kate really died during the day?

  My fingers skimmed along the body, coming back up to the shoulder, neck, lips, nose, eyelashes. Was it really her? Was she dead?

  Oh, God.

  He must have heard His name in my thoughts, for that’s when He came. His footsteps arrived from another place, stepping, one stair at a time, down, down to the commons. To Aunt Kate. To me.

  God!

  Oh, God!

  If I’d known the aunt had died I would’ve remained in the garden, safe in the honey-sweet cage. I would never have come to the source where God collects the dead left out for Him.

  On hands and knees I crawled away, wanting to put space between myself and the body. Around the other side of the source, I pushed myself against its cool wall. Water misted the back of my neck. God sees all, the priest had often told us. God hears every thought. But the more I tried to quieten my mind, the louder it called to him.

  Oh, God.

  God.

  God came with a candle that hovered, flickered, moving closer as He did.

  I should never have been there. God wasn’t supposed to be seen by the living for the sight of Him would surely turn us blind or mad, if we weren’t so already.

  Yet I saw Him. Not all of Him, but the outlines of His arms, lit by the candle held out in front. I watched him stop and bend to pick up Aunt Kate. He lifted her effortlessly, then carried her in a manner that was kind and comforting and familiar. When he turned, waxy smoke trailed behind, following Him as He moved away, shrinking into the darkness that welcomed them both.

  Death, I understood then, was not to be afraid of. It was a vision of loveliness. A tender dance of two.

  I exhaled. God. His name was no longer a plea but a knowing. God works in gentle ways.

  Ways?

  The candlelight had gone into a way, I realised. God had taken Aunt Kate to a way.

  But in all our lessons of funerals, we’d been taught that God carried the body up the stairs to the council house. God never took the dead into one of our houses. Why would He?

  I strained my ears, wanting to hear what was left of the footsteps, wanting to know where they’d gone. Through the way of the seeder house? No. The garden? I didn’t think so.

  It was the way, it seemed, in between those.

  I followed, pursuing the hint of beeswax smoke.

  I crossed the commons then crept into the way where the footsteps had gone.

  It wasn’t faith that made me go. It was stronger than that. Stronger also than fear.

  It was my body that led me, while my mind shouted reasons to stay. It was my body urging me forwards, to follow, to know.

  Vines crinkled beneath my palms. Dusted with salt, they told me where I was and where I was going. I was moving to the netter house in the night-time, towards God.

  The darkness was incomplete. My sight played tricks. Ahead, there appeared a tendril dangling. Then suddenly it wasn’t there at all. A leaf flickered to my right for a moment, then vanished. Shapes were forming at the edges of my seeing before shifting, repositioning. On-off. On-off. Deceptions of the night, or of my mind.

  At the threshold to the netter house, I stopped. That’s where fear caught up with me. I felt my body tremble, wishing to dissolve like the light.

  You shouldn’t be here, my head throbbed. You shouldn’t be unlocked in the night when God walks through the world. You shouldn’t be so close to Him.

  It was against all rules and logic. There was no punishment for this, for no-one would choose to be so foolish, not even the mad ones. My stomach roiled.

  I could’ve turned. I could’ve left. I could’ve crept back to the garden to sleep through this horrible night.

  But I didn’t. My body, despite the fear, led me in.

  The netter house wasn’t dark. Not entirely. There was a glow from further inside that gave soft edges to the tanks and ladders.

  I moved as in a dream, salt crunching quietly beneath my feet. I sidled between tanks, stopping beside each one to breathe and test my resolve, before moving again.

  At the widest tank, I pressed myself into the curve and remained there for several moments, watching shadow-shapes leap across surfaces and slither into the gaps between tanks. They were slippery illusions – ghostly silhouettes made by something which was real. Someone. God. I summoned the courage to lean out, step out, and see.

  There was no longer one candle, but two. Neither of them danced. They were stationary on the floor, beside the open hub. The hub? I had to ignore the dazzle of flames and stare instead at the dark shapes lying behind them. I recognised the round lid of the hub. It had been slid aside, revealing the black circle of the hole beneath.

  A candle flickered with the passing of a silhouette. I looked for God but what I saw was a man. Parts of him were illuminated by the fire as he worked. Metal glistened gold in his hands.

  Below him was a woman on her back. I saw a hip. The shimmer of curves. A breast. Her face.

  Aunt Kate.

  She was supposed to be taken to heaven by trusted, benevolent hands. Instead, she’d been brought here, for this . . .

  I don’t have the words for what happened next.

  I don’t have the courage.

  I couldn’t believe it then, as I gripped the ladder. I wished it was the feverfew playing tricks. I even wished it was the madness after all.

  But not even madness could conjure such horrors.

  All I will say is this: that night, there was no heaven or God. There was a man worse than a monster. There was an aunt butchered as meat is butchered. There were pieces of her lowered in nets, bit by bit, into the hole where the hub should have been.

  When all of her had gone, the ropes were pegged down and spools wound in. The floor was cleaned and the hub was secured back into place. It was like a catch done backwards. An unthinkable obscenity.

  Had I breathed? Could I ever breathe again and be the same person? Even then I wondered if I would ever look upon the day-lit world and be grateful for flowers and bees and water and God? God? Where had He gone? How could He do this to an aunt who’d lived a good, long life?

  In a stupor I retreated. Vines scratched me as I passed. The way reverberated
with its silence, distorting my senses until I staggered out to the commons, then into the way that I thought would take me to the garden, even though the air felt too cold and too clean.

  It was the seeder house I’d stumbled to.

  Hand over hand, I went into the house where fans were whirring as they blew dry air into open cupboards. I moved towards a soft light; not a candle but four green growlights shining above a tub of seedlings.

  I squatted at the base of a tall cupboard. That’s where I spent the night, balled hard and cold as a seed.

  Chapter 11

  Just as every other morning, gardeners emerged from the sleepers. They toileted, bathed, and stretched. They went into the way with empty jars and returned from the commons with them filled, along with a bowl of porridge of their choosing.

  From a high bough of the blackwood, I sat and watched them. I’d climbed up there in the first blush of morning-pink. What else could I do?

  Gardeners settled around the hub then Llewellyn began the morning meeting. She was soon joined by the son, who announced that Aunt Kate, a seeder, had died the previous day. He said she’d been collected by God in the night. He said she’d been taken to heaven.

  I observed the gardeners mourn as they remembered Aunt Kate, consoling themselves that she’d had a good life, and a good death.

  But they hadn’t seen what I had seen.

  What had I seen?

  Hips. Arms. Breasts. Legs. Separated with a knife then shoved into nets, piece by bloody piece.

  Looking down upon the gardeners, I located Celia. She sat hand in hand with Krystal. How I wished it was me beside her so I could sign into her palm what I’d seen. Not God. Not heaven. Hub. Pieces.

  Would she think I was mad then? Would she look at me with pity? Or disgust? Celia was a girl with the ring on her finger and camellias in her hair. She was a girl enthralled wholly by marriage and the delights it would bring.

  No. I couldn’t tell Celia.

  Then who? Luka? He knew of strange things, like a brown boy brought up in a net, but surely he wouldn’t know of this. Would he believe me if I told him what happens to the dead?