The Death of Bees

by Lisa O'Donnell

  Lennie

  Journey back home was long and moody. Marnie barely said two words until Glasgow and then made some small talk about the city being beautiful or something like it. I knew the sulk was over when we threw each other a couple of apologetic smiles. I was so relieved and then less so when we arrived to a business card from Robert T. Macdonald urging us to call him upon our return and in block capitals if you can imagine such a thing. We don’t need him, really we don’t. He knows the girls are in my care until someone other than him says they’re not. They’re certainly in no hurry to shack up with Grandpa and wait for their elusive parents’ return. The man doesn’t have a clue.

  It was Marnie who called him but he didn’t want to talk on the phone and asked to come round. We were all reluctant at first. Marnie has exams to study for, even though I never see her do too much of it and if I’m being honest it’s a worry. No one’s that bright.

  It was an hour after the call when he arrived and in quite a rage.

  “Where the hell have you been?” he demanded.

  “What’s it to you?” says Marnie.

  “What’s it to me? I’m your grandfather for blazes’ sake. You can’t just go off and not tell a person where you’ve been.”

  We all looked to the other and mutually agreed not to tell him.

  “We were in Mull,” said Marnie.

  “Mull?” he repeated. “What’s in Mull?” he snips.

  “Peace and quiet, old boy,” says Nelly in her way.

  Nelly’s manner clearly irritated him but not as much as her evident sarcasm.

  “I was worried sick. I almost called the police.”

  This seemed to shake the girls.

  “And then what?” said Marnie.

  He looked blank. Hadn’t thought of that, had he.

  “And then I’d find you, wouldn’t I?”

  The idea he had a right to find them irked both girls, but Marnie remained calm.

  “Do you understand we’re in Lennie’s care until Izzy and Gene return?” Marnie tells him.

  He nodded, but it was obvious he understood no such thing.

  “And they’re okay with you just going off without a word to anyone?”

  “As a matter of fact they are. This was something we’d planned a long time before you arrived on the scene.”

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “I was just worried, that’s all, one minute you’re here and the next you’re not.”

  “I don’t mean to be rude,” Nelly pipes up. “But you do realize we just met you and not so long ago.”

  “I know that but I’m your grandfather, I have a right to see my own blood and know where they are.”

  “Actually you don’t,” I interrupt. “The girls are in my care and your daughter hadn’t really approved the visitation you believe you are entitled to. Now if you don’t mind Marnie has her studies and I have dinner to make.”

  “You’ve told her I’m here?” he asked, assuming we’d talked to her, and of course the answer is no, but we don’t tell him that and so Marnie and Nelly gave one another “the look” again.

  “She doesn’t like to be bothered when she’s working. Doesn’t even have a mobile,” says Marnie. “Anyway she’d have a fit if she knew you were here, probably come back and stop us even talking to you.”

  He reddened and not with embarrassment but with rage.

  “Perhaps we can have another brunch sometime,” suggested Nelly.

  “I’d like that, maybe with both of you?”

  He looked hopefully to Marnie and she just shrugged, she doesn’t care squat for the fellow. We all made yawning sounds after that and fortunately he knew where he wasn’t wanted and left with his pretend brunch suggestion tucked safely under his hat, at least I hope it was pretend.

  Marnie

  Our trip to Firemore certainly ruffled the feathers of Robert T. Macdonald but we handled it. What does he expect, this guy? We don’t know anything about him, and what we do know about him isn’t that nice. He beat his family and drank like a fish. I know he says he’s changed but what do we really know about him? Of course Nelly’s all over him after a very successful breakfast date. She’s so crazy, that girl. I tried to explain to her why we can’t get too close to him and had to actually remind her Izzy and Gene are dead, they haven’t gone on holiday at all and that they’re under the flower beds. We had to move Izzy again but to the side of the house, we dug her a little grave and put rocks on her, but then we moved the rocks because it looked like an actual grave, which meant getting more and more plants, but to be honest that also looked weird because there’s no light at the side of the house and plants need light, don’t they? We left it though, it was better than the shed. Lennie’s dog just wouldn’t leave it alone.

  Anyway I went and saw Vlado. I need my job back. I can’t pay the rent. I can’t buy anything. People will come. The Social and R. T. Macdonald if we’re not careful. We’ll be evicted and then everyone will find out where Gene and Izzy are. That Vlado’s really fucked things up for me.

  Turns out he lives off Byres Road. He doesn’t have a buzzer so I know straightaway it’s a shit hole. There’s some stinking old guy sleeping under a pile of greasy newspapers, well he looked old, he could have been ten for all I knew. Dirt hides a multitude of sins. I heard Bono giving it plenty from the flat at the top, figured I’d start there. Sure enough it was him, Mr. V. Pavlovic as scrawled on a Post-it and then taped to the door.

  I knocked on Vlado’s door for like five minutes. The music was blaring. Eventually he answers but he’s obviously not too happy to see me.

  “What do you want here?” he says.

  “You got Mick to sack me,” I say.

  “You’re too young to sell drugs, to have anything to do with drugs. Go home to your books,” he says.

  “I need the money.”

  “Then get a job,” he yells.

  “I had a job,” I scream.

  “Not anymore, little girl. Go home!”

  “I’m not a little girl. I’m almost sixteen. You go home.”

  Then I burst into tears, which made him uncomfortable. I could see he wanted to close the door in my face, but he also wanted me to stop crying.

  “What kind of things can you do?” he asks.

  “I don’t know,” I say.

  “Everyone can do something. You have to be resourceful in this life.”

  “Like you?”

  “I am in a very different situation from you. My choices are limited in this country. I do what I have to do.”

  “My choices are limited.”

  “Your parents they have jobs?”

  “No.”

  “They have problems?”

  “They’re never around. I need to earn money. Pay the rent.”

  “The government pays the rent, no?”

  He had an answer for everything.

  “To them, not me. They spend all the money. I have to take care of my sister. Keep us from being homeless. I needed that job.”

  Now he feels bad.

  “I see what I can do,” he says.

  “You’ll speak to Mick?”

  “I don’t want you anywhere near Mick, understand?”

  I nod.

  “You come back tomorrow. Seven o’clock. In the morning.”

  “Why?”

  “You want to work?”

  I nod.

  “Then be here in the morning.” He slams the door.

  Next day I show at seven, as instructed. I make myself nice. Summer makeup, best shoes, and a cute bag.

  He answers the door like I’m late. I’m not. Then he looks me up and down and starts to laugh.

  “I have something to match your shoes,” he says. That makes me excited until he hands me a red bucket.

  “Come in,” he says. “But take the silly shoes off.”

  He says his floors are wooden and he doesn’t want me denting them.

  His house is like an IKEA showroom. Everything’s either beech wood o
r black. Don’t get me wrong, he has it nice, I just didn’t expect it. The stairs to his house are a little deceptive because his flat is lovely. He has a beautiful big bay window facing onto the street and a really nice fireplace with lots of pictures on the mantel. I want to take a closer look at the photos, but I know he wouldn’t like that and so I keep my distance.

  “You will clean my house,” he says. “Every week and not looking like little hooker. I have neighbors.”

  “Clean your own fucking house,” I say and throw the bucket at him. He thinks this is hilarious and hands me back the bucket.

  “Take it. Five hours a week every Saturday morning. A hundred pounds.”

  “Five hours. That’s it!” I say.

  “You are on substitute time,” he says, but he was waving his hand around like he wasn’t too sure what he was saying, English being his second language and all that.

  “What do you mean, substitute time?” I know he’s got something wrong and I want to rub his face in it, make him embarrassed.

  “You know, I am testing you.”

  “You mean probationary period.”

  “If it means I will fire you if you can’t clean my house then this is the right word.”

  Then he gave me a list and left. It was a pretty big list if you want to know. I had to do his laundry, change his sheets, wipe down his DVDs and CDs ’cause the guy doesn’t know what a cover is for, they were all over the place, it took ages. Then I checked out his pictures. It was him and a girl my age. They looked like each other and so I knew it was his daughter. Cleaning up I saw lots of other pictures of him and his wife and his daughter or who I supposed to be his daughter. There were also toddler snaps. You can tell tons from pictures. I found out he grew up on a farm with his parents and had an older brother or maybe it was a cousin. On his wall in his bedroom he had a certificate from a university in chemistry and he had lots of soccer trophies and lots of books. He’s a bit of a reader. Also he doesn’t wear aftershave, he wears sandalwood oil and he wears contacts, so I deduced his appearance must be important to him and so is sex because I found a jumbo box of Durex behind the toilet. That’s pretty much all the information I could glean from cleaning his house. All his bills are paid ’cause he has this little board where he sticks the receipts and where my £100 will always be in a little yellow envelope with MISS MARNIE written on the front.

  Nelly

  While Marnie goes to Lochgilphead with her wayward girlfriends I take the opportunity to get to know our grandfather Robert T. Macdonald at his workshop situated in the Barrowland, a marketplace selling fish and bread and all kinds of bric-a-brac.

  He shows us around his studio softened by woodchip and hardened by oak. He is working on a headboard. The headboard is for me. It is beautifully carved with stars. I can’t help but adore it.

  “What do you think, love?” he asks with a familiarity not quite earned yet but I don’t seem to mind.

  “Many thanks, Robert,” I say, although my gratitude does seem to startle him.

  He has a young apprentice with him. Robert greets him warmly.

  “This is Sandy,” he says. “My apprentice.”

  He was a very pleasant lad and strangely familiar to me, not that I got a chance to quiz the fellow for he ran off and with the greatest of haste to fetch some milk, which was a rather pointless feat given we hadn’t even been offered a cup of tea. Thank goodness for Lennie’s cake in the oven for I was suddenly very tired of the workshop and very keen to return home, but not wishing to offend anyone we invite Robert T. Macdonald to sup with us. He was overwhelmed with gratitude and so I knew immediately we had done the right thing.

  Lennie

  It was a few minutes before he recognized me. I was quicker. It was his eyes that gave him away, violet. I remember them from the back of the police car, the mascara trickling over his cheeks and his red hair, scooped into a ponytail. It was cut short now and washed. He was a handsome lad but he was a boy. I could see it then. He was wearing a black cotton T-shirt with words I couldn’t read. I can’t read much these days. Suddenly his eyes pass across my shoes, I always wear these shoes, they’re white rimmed with red laces, they’re your shoes, and we were always the same size. His eyes scan the rest of me until they reach my own eyes. He staggers a little, thinks of staying, faking, pretending and when he can’t he runs under the pretense of a forgotten errand. I am frozen to the spot and no one has noticed. In haste I announce, “I have a cake in the oven.” Robert T. Macdonald is quietly furious and knowing I must appease him I invite him to dinner. It does the trick nicely and within fifteen minutes we are in the car and on our way home. On arrival it is noted there is no cake; I go to the bathroom and I am sick to my stomach. When I return to the kitchen Nelly and Robert T. Macdonald are thrown together at the sink, peeling potatoes; there is laughter and closeness. It makes me nervous for her, it makes me scared for us all.

  Marnie

  In Lochgilphead all the houses are painted white and it’s full of old people, like a lot of old people, they’re everywhere, mowing around like Daleks, carrying their shopping in giant canvas bags. Old people never use plastic bags. I don’t know why that is.

  It’s a small town and has a clean freshness about it and pure. My senses welcomed it. The house is reeking right now even though I’ve washed it like a thousand times. Nelly says she can’t smell anything, that it’s all in my head, but I don’t care what she says, it’s my hands chapped from the bleach.

  It’s good to leave Glasgow every now and then, sometimes I go to an island called Rothesay, I take a train to Wemyss Bay and the ferry over to Bute. To be honest I’ve only been a few times. Once with Nana Lou, once with Gene and Izzy, but they got pissed on the boat over and went straight to a bar, leaving Nelly and me on the Esplanade with money for chips, and once with Susie and Kim. We had a right laugh and got totally pished. We went for a walk in this wood overlooking the sea. It was nice and had an amazing view. We watched the boat leaving the harbor and then coming back again. Then we carved our names into a couple of trees, scratched would be more accurate. We met a couple of guys arsing around on a swing, they were the same age as us, but they didn’t hang about long. One of them was really nice-looking and Susie was all over him, but you could see he wasn’t into it. He wouldn’t even snog her and said he had to go home for his tea. Then she got nasty and called him a fag, that’s when his mate threw a clump of dirt at her, Kim went mad at that and was right after him, she pinned him to the ground and smacked him in the gob. The Looker comes to his mate’s rescue, almost in tears and said they wanted to go home. I felt bad for them then, even though guys shouldn’t act like that, all weepy and scared, a couple of pussies they were. Anyway we let them go. Told them not to come back to the wood or we’d kill them. Then they ran away like deer do when they hear a twig snap in a wood. When they were gone we found their soccer cards, they must have been trading them, imagine that, fourteen-year-old guys collecting cards. Wouldn’t last five minutes in the Urban Kingdom.

  Kim totally hated Lochgilphead, she’s a Glaswegian through and through, she said it was like a Scottish Stepford and couldn’t wait to get away from the place. Lorna loved it and bought a ton of rock, I love that stuff. Makes your tongue pink and your breath minty, but we weren’t there for the rock we were there for Susie. She wanted to see her mum; she was in the local psychiatric unit.

  Susie was nervous as fuck on the bus. She’d asked her granny if she could go, but her granny said no and forbade Susie to ever mention it again, but none of us thought that was fair. She can’t keep Susie away from her own flesh and blood and she hasn’t seen her mother since she was three years old. She keeps a picture of her though, in her purse.

  Susie didn’t want us to go to the hospital with her, she wanted to do it alone, and so we waited for her in town.

  We tried to get into a pub and have something to eat, but the barman wouldn’t serve us. Kim went mental. We only wanted a sandwich, maybe a beer if he was up for
it, but he wasn’t. Kim called him a prick. A bloke at the bar chipped in, “Away and get yourself an ice cream.” Kim went nuts. “Come here and say that, ya wanker” and actually wanted to fight a grown man, take him outside and give him a kicking. The barman burst his hole. “No need for that, Zorro. Away you go.” The bloke in the bar was killing himself, thought Kim was the funniest person he’d ever met in his life and let’s face it she’d made a bit of a tit of herself. We had to drag her away in the end.

  Eventually we found an off license, a grubby wee place, selling everything from kids’ toys to sliced ham. Lorna had a fake ID on her, also she paid with a debit card, so he was willing to suspend disbelief and sell us a bottle of vodka. We also got six cans of Coke and took it to the nearest toilet, poured half the juice out the can and filled the rest with booze.

  It should have been a good laugh, but it wasn’t. Kim’s been off her meds for about a fortnight now and she’s been a nightmare. A total head case. Slightest thing can cause offense. Her and Lorna have been fighting like cat and dog. Lorna says she can’t handle it. She’s also going on about being bisexual, she’s driving Kim mad. At one point I thought we were going to get chucked off the bus, especially when Kim shouts, “If you eat pussy you’re a lezzy in my book.”

  Lorna was mortified. “It’s more complicated than that.”

  Kim goes, “Is it fuck.”

  “Sexuality, politics, and religion, these are not things a polite person debates with another.”

  “Religion,” says Kim. “Don’t make me laugh. Bible is a lot of bull.”

  I suppose it should be awkward two folk fighting about pussy and the word of God, but I’m used to it, people tearing lumps out of each other. Susie told them both to shut up. She probably didn’t want the rest of the bus thinking she was a lezzy too. I know I didn’t.

  We thought we’d have to wait ages for Susie but she was back in about an hour looking kind of blank with absolutely nothing in her face to show how it went. Eventually we asked how her mum was, but she said she didn’t want to talk about it. Lorna suggested we go get something to eat. We were starving and the bus back to Glasgow was still a couple of hours away, but Kim said it was inappropriate to eat. Lorna told her to piss off and stomped off to the nearest tearoom. I stayed with Kim, but I really wanted to go with Lorna. Susie just sat there, not saying a word, but after about ten minutes she starts to breathe funny and then she starts to cry. Kim gave Susie a big hug and held her for a long time. Something horrible had happened, that much we had worked out. At first I thought her mum was dead, but she wasn’t. Turns out she’s not even in the psychiatric unit. They didn’t know who Ivy Murphy was and when Susie got home to her granny, her granny had to tell her the truth. Her mum lives in Croydon and has a new family. She has two boys, one called Noah and the other one Peter. She also has a husband called Mike. Her granny had wedding pictures and pictures of her mum with her kids and on holidays with her kids and on beaches with her kids. And there were letters, a ton of letters, but her granny didn’t want Susie to read them. Susie went mental over that and so her granny gave in. I suppose they were nice letters really, the kind of letters a mother should get from a daughter. Her mum was obviously doing well in life. Talked about her kids and the house her husband had built, talked about the places they’d been and the places they were going to. Her worries about the future, about getting her kids into good schools and bird flu. She was really worried about bird flu. And there were loads of thank-you notes for gifts her granny had sent to her grandchildren. There wasn’t a single word about Susie in any of the letters. Nothing, like she didn’t even exist, and if that wasn’t bad enough, there was one letter written last year about how brilliant it had been to see Susie’s granny after such a long time, how the boys missed her, and how she hoped Susie’s granny would visit them again. Susie went demented. Her granny told her she’d gone to Butlins. Susie started tearing the house apart, and her granny just sat there, letting her kick the shit out of walls, doors, and windows. It was a neighbor who called the police. Her granny was in a right state. Susie had to be pinned to the floor by Kim.