The Burying Beetle

by Ann Kelley

  While I was unwell, Mum has been feeding the little birds even without me reminding her. They have quite taken to my birdbath and the new feeder on the whale harpoon.

  Before breakfast – a five-minute egg and granary toast soldiers and fresh-squeezed orange juice – we rescued a live mouse. Flo’s, presumably. It had got into the large wooden bowl from Africa that we keep magazines in on the floor. Mum took out nearly all the magazines, so the bowl was light enough to carry outside. The mouse made a great leap for mouse-kind, running up the curved side of the bowl like he was skateboarding and launched himself into the great unknown, over the deck, into the bamboos, with his little legs outstretched, spreadeagled like wings. I think he was OK. The cats don’t understand when they’ve got a mouse in the house one moment, and then it’s gone. They carry on sniffing under the furniture for ages, hoping it’s still there.

  There’s a huge circle of brown water near the estuary mouth, like a milky coffee stain on the otherwise pale carpet of green sea. It rained heavily in the night – maybe that’s got something to do with it, the sand getting churned up.

  The rain woke me and I read for a while and stared at a fly, which was holding the ceiling up. (That’s what I used to think they were doing when I was little.)

  A daddy-long-legs came in my window and tickled my face and I had to get out of bed to rescue it and put it outside. It’s that time of year, apparently, and Mum will have to ask me to pick up large spiders and throw them out. We’ve got this brilliant spider rescue device that sort of sucks them in when you press the lever and doesn’t squash them. They are caught inside a gentle cage of soft bristles until you let them go. She can’t even bear having a spider at the end of a long stick, though.

  I’ve missed blackberrying. They were all along the railway line at the end of August and Mum made a blackberry and apple crumble. She says when I’m stronger we can go looking for mushrooms.

  There’s no one on the beach. Everyone’s gone back to school or work. Brett too. He came to see me three times, but I was too sick to see him. He left me the Australian books he talked about. I haven’t started them yet. He’s left a phone number. I’ll see him again.

  The mirror of the sea is splintering on the rocks beneath the house.

  There’s a gathering of young gulls on the beach. A hundred or more herring gulls and a few black-backed gulls standing looking away from the sea towards two or three mature herring gulls, who are in charge. It’s a school for gulls. The teachers are telling them stuff – how to chase hawks away, how to behave towards their elders and betters, how to scavenge successfully.

  There’s no chance of me starting the autumn term at the local school. I have to rest up for a good while longer, get up my strength, so I can be fit enough for a transplant, when a donor is found. I’m on the official list now and have been given a mobile phone thingy – a Life-Call it’s called. Daddy says Mum must go and stay with him when I have to go to hospital for the transplant. He’s sent me lots of letters and flowers and he’s phoned me twice. TLE (The Lovely Eloise) is no more. Done a runner. He’s feeling old, he says.

  Dr Dobbs comes to see me lots. I think he comes to see Mum too. She loses her frown when he’s here and laughs more. He’s old – at least forty – but then, she’s even older. She’s given up her Saturdays at the estate agents. Or they’ve given her up. He came to supper the other day. We had French onion soup, which is thick and gooey with lots of Gruyere cheese and bread, and I was allowed to pour a little red wine into it, and then we had cranachan because Dr Dobbs is from Scotland.

  You roast porridge oats in the Rayburn until they are just going brown.

  You melt honey with whisky and stir in the toasted oats.

  Let the mixture cool down, stir in double cream.

  Let it set in the fridge.

  ‘Heaven in a dish,’ Dr Dobbs said.

  His name is Alistair and he surfs – even wins prizes.

  Mum’s dusted the books and put up a new watercolour painting in my room in place of the broken mirror, which she has put in a cupboard. It shows the harbour of St Ives with bright coloured boats and silver gulls sitting on the orange roofs and flying over the little beach.

  Ginnie has been to see me several times. She says she has two nieces in St Ives who are Stevens. She’ll take me to visit them when I’m stronger.

  Mr Lorn brought me a big box of chocolates and Daddy has sent me another bunch of white chrysanthemums. Mummy gave them to Mr Lorn, for Mrs Lorn, because neither of us likes the smell of them. Mrs Lorn has sat with me a couple of times when Mum has had to go out and leave me. She is Cornish too, small and skinny with a sharp nose, like a witch, but she’s really kind – brings me little treats – chocolates and biscuits, fairings, she calls them. And she’s teaching me to whistle. She can do that really loud whistle where you put your fingers in your mouth – like in American movies when someone in New York calls a cab.

  It suddenly occurred to me that Mr and Mrs Lorn would know all about Mr Writer, and be able to tell me what he writes – if he writes. But I haven’t asked them. Why haven’t I? Perhaps I will one day, but at the moment I want to keep Mr Writer safe in my imagination. Sometimes the truth isn’t as interesting as what goes on in your imagination.

  Mum’s been reading to me lots. I love being read to, it’s such a luxury, my favourite treat. Like being a little girl again. It’s almost worth being ill for. King Solomon’s Mines by Rider Haggard – lovely names, both the title and the author. It’s a terrific adventure story, like an Indiana Jones movie, and tonight we’re watching the old film that was made of it, starring Stewart Grainger, Grandma’s heart-throb.

  Mum’s going to read me White Fang next. Jack London wrote it and it’s about a dog that’s half wolf.

  She’s fixed it with Mr Writer’s agent to stay here another three months.

  The best news is, she’s found us a house in St Ives through the estate agent she used to work for. She made an offer the first time she saw it. I’ve got the details in front of me. It’s a little Victorian terraced house with a small front garden and views over the harbour and town, like in my new painting, and from the attic room you can see the sun set over Porthmeor. There are families with children living next door each side. She’s taking me to see it as soon as I’m strong enough.

  We’ll be able to get all our stuff from London – all our own books and things, and Grandma and Grandpop’s belongings. It sounds almost too good to be true. But Mum says it will really happen this time: she has paid a deposit. I can’t wait to go and see it. Mum says I can choose my own room.

  I had horrid dreams when I was ill and kept crying out, apparently. Burnt birds, black birds dying horribly, a scalded featherless gull screaming; snow and ice surrounding me, lost – my usual nightmare, with variations. I wrote them down when I was feeling better and that helped me to stop them happening again, I think. My fever has gone now and so have the nightmares.

  Last night I dreamed that Grandpop and Grandma were in my room, smiling at me. Both of their cheerful faces above me, smiling. And then I heard Grandpop say clearly, ‘Safe journey, Princess. God bless.’

  Before dawn the curlews and oyster-catchers were calling to each other as they flew towards the estuary – I’m here, I’m here, they called, don’t get lost, this way, this way, this way.

  The Summer Day

  Who made the world?

  Who made the swan, and the black bear?

  Who made the grasshopper?

  This grasshopper, I mean –

  the one who has flung herself out of the grass,

  the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,

  who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down –

  who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.

  Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.

  Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.

  I don’t know exactly what a prayer is.

&nbs
p; I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down

  into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,

  how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,

  which is what I have been doing all day.

  Tell me, what else should I have done?

  Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon?

  Tell me, what is it you plan to do

  with your one and precious life?

  Mary Oliver

  Enjoyed The Burying Beetle?

  Continue the journey with Gussie in:

  The Bower Bird

  Here is a taster of the first three chapters.

  PROLOGUE

  I’m not dead yet.

  CHAPTER ONE

  WE’VE BEEN HERE for two weeks. I’m still not well enough to start at the local school. But the weather has been barmy – or is it balmy? Yes, it probably is balmy. Barmy means daft. The sun has shone on us most days since we moved, and I feel that my heart is going to mend enough to have the operation that could give me a few more years of life.

  It’s a cold night and the sky is clear. Stars are appearing one by one. I wear my distance specs to see them otherwise it’s all a beautiful blur. I sit in my window on a stripy cushion and feel… happy.

  The lights of the little town are twinkling below me, and there is a nearly full moon – its blue-white wedding veil draped across the bay. The lighthouse winks its bright eye every ten seconds.

  I did have a bedside lamp on but moths kept coming in the window to commit suicide. Why do insects that choose to fly around in total darkness have a fatal attraction for hot light bulbs? They must be barmy. Or maybe a hot bulb gives off a smell like female moths and the male moths are attracted to it for that reason.

  Even in the middle of the night seagulls are flying all around us, calling to each other in the dark. The wind has got up and the gulls are lifting on invisible currents and then swoop fast like shooting stars.

  Our young gull is crouched on the ridge of the roof, his head poking out over the top, watching the adults and whining pathetically. There must be some juvenile gulls up there learning how to fly and land cleanly on the rooftops and chimneys, just as if they are alighting on cliff ledges.

  I scrunch up under a warm woolly blanket with my feet up, and Charlie keeps trying to get comfortable but there’s no horizontal bit. She prefers me to be flat in bed so she can warm herself on my tummy, or my chest. She shouldn’t really sit on my chest as I have trouble breathing at the best of times and anyway, I had open-heart surgery last year, when I was eleven, and the healing process hasn’t finished yet. The operation was a waste of time. It was supposed to be one of three procedures to repair the various heart defects. When I was opened up they could see that I had no pulmonary artery, not even an excuse for one, and there was nothing to build on. So the surgeon just closed me up again. I now have an amazing scar that cuts me in half almost, as if I have survived a shark attack.

  Poor Charlie, she doesn’t understand why I don’t want her on my chest.

  I reluctantly leave the starlit night and get into my bed. I’m reading a really good book by Mary Webb called Gone to Earth. It’s about a girl who has a pet fox. Mary Webb has written several other books. I’ll have to look out for them at car boot sales or in the second-hand bookshop, as they are so old they are probably out of print.

  As usual, the three cats wake me. Charlie is the noisiest and the most demanding. As soon as there’s a glimmer of daylight she starts on at me to get up and feed her. She meows loudly and jumps on the bed and marches up and down on one spot, as if I am her mother and she is trying to make the milk come. She sound quite cross. If I pretend to sleep she gets really irate. The other two are more patient but they stare, accusingly. I can feel their eyes on me. Flo sits on the chest of drawers and Rambo on the window seat.

  I wake to a completely pink dawn. Outside everything is saturated with an intense rosy glow. Pink sky, sea and bay. Pink roofs, candy sand. I yearned for a party dress when I was five or six, of exactly this shade – to match my Barbie doll’s outfit.

  By the time I find my specs, put on a dressing gown and flip-flops, load a film into my camera and lean out the window, the pink has paled and silvered, but the sun now hangs heavily above the dunes, like a red balloon full of liquid. One small boat chugs out of the harbour dragging a pink wake and gulls are following in a raucous rush.

  I am surrounded by hungry cats. I better give in. Charlie is jubilant, running ahead down the stairs, calling me to hurry up. The others follow behind me.

  I have to go to the bathroom first, and this really makes Charlie cross. She never knows whether to come in with me at this point, because she usually spends bath-time with me, but now she can only think about her rumbling stomach.

  Mum is in the bathroom for longer and longer every morning. What does she do in there? She told me once that she hadn’t had a decent crap since I was born. First I screamed all the time, then as I got bigger I banged on the door and yelled. When I was a baby I screamed for twenty-one hours once – she wasn’t in the bathroom all that time, of course. She says I’m lucky to be alive as she nearly strangled me several times. Sleep deprivation makes you go barmy apparently.

  ‘Mum, I have to wee, I’m desperate.’

  She’s looking into a magnifying mirror and doing some- thing disgusting with scissors up her nose.

  ‘Ohmygod, Mum, that’s gross. You’ll slice through your mucus membranes.’

  ‘They’re blunt-ended, Gussie. You wait until you get hairy nostrils. See how you like it.’

  Hopefully I won’t live that long.

  She does all this other stuff, too, to her face, plucking and scraping and applying various very expensive unguents. What a lovely word – unguents.

  ‘Is it worth it, Mum?’

  ‘Probably not, but I’m not giving up just yet.’

  She’s actually quite cool looking, I think, but because she had me when she was forty-one she is quite old now. It doesn’t bother me much, but it bothers her. She’s shaving her armpits now. What a palaver. I don’t have any pubic hair yet, as I am small for my age – my heart wants me to be small, so it doesn’t have to work too hard.

  ‘Mum, can I help unpack something today?’

  ‘Yeah, why not? We’ll have a look in some of the smaller boxes from Grandma’s.’

  Grandma was small and plump and she knitted and sewed, tatted, smocked and embroidered. You never saw her without something in her hands that she was working on. Their garden was a fruit bowl of gooseberries and blackcurrants, redcurrants and raspberries, loganberries and strawberries. I used to throw a tennis ball up onto the roof of their bungalow and catch it when it bounced off the gutter. Another game with the ball was to roll it along the wavy low brick wall, which went around the front garden, and see how far it would go before it fell off. I got quite good at that.

  They lived in Shoeburyness, quite close to London, where we lived when we were still a family, before Daddy left.

  Like me, he’s an only child. His parents, who I never met, came from this town.

  Mum doesn’t have any brothers or sisters either, so I have no aunts, uncles or cousins on her side of the family. There’s only Mum now. Except that we are called Stevens and there are at least a hundred Stevenses in St Ives. I am determined to find my lost Cornish family, somehow.

  Daddy isn’t being at all helpful. He keeps saying he’ll let me have his family tree, but he hasn’t even given me a leaf yet. Mum is being positively obstructive: she doesn’t want anything to do with Daddy’s family and assumes they won’t want anything to do with us. Anything Daddy related is a no-no. She has the screaming abdabs if I even mention him.

  There’s a wildlife warden we met out at Peregrine Cottage – the house we rented on the cliff – who said she has some relations called Stevens, but I’ve sort of lost touch with her since we moved. Ginnie.

  It’s sad how people drift in and out of our lives. Like
my London friend Summer. I call her my friend, but I haven’t seen her since we came to Cornwall. Maybe now we’re settled in our own house, she will come and stay during school holidays. Or maybe I’ll never see her again.

  I don’t suppose I’ll ever see Shoeburyness again. Or smell the smell of it: cockle shells and seaweed and mud. The tide comes in very fast from a long way out, where the longest pier in the world ends. The water is a muddy brown colour though, not like the clear blue-green of St Ives. But there were wooden breakwaters to climb and balance on and I liked the pebbly beach, and finding white quartz stones to rub together to make a spark. Illuminations and neon lights shone all along the Golden Mile at Southend, where we bought fish and chips. Under the arches of a bridge there’s a row of cafés with striped awnings and plastic tables and chairs set out on the pavement. Cafés with nautical names like The Mermaid, The Barge, Captain’s Table. That was where I had my first experiences of eating out: sausage and mash or egg and chips, always with a cup of tea.

  Grandpop and Grandma would take me to the pebbly beach and they’d hire deckchairs and we’d have fish-paste sandwiches and apples for tea. I could still run and climb then, and I would jump from roof to roof of the beach huts. (The beach huts had names too: Sunny Days, Happy Days, Cosy Corner, Chez Nous. That’s French for Our House.)

  Grandma was scandalised and tried to stop me, but Grandpop would cheer me on.

  ‘You can do it, princess.’

  I don’t look like a princess. I am small for my age and skinny and my skin is rather mauvish, I think. My hair Mum calls dark blonde, but to be honest it’s mouse. ‘Nothing Wrong with Mouse.’

  ‘Oh, the elephants!’ I unpack a troupe of elephants, three of them, each one a bit bigger than the one before, all with turned up ivory tusks and mother of pearl toes. I remember them standing on a window ledge. They are made of some heavy black wood, and carved. Looking closely, I see that they are slightly damaged – a piece of ear gone here, a tusk there. I remember them as being perfect, and Grandma saying, ‘Be careful, my love.’ I used to invent journeys for them across Africa, searching for greener pastures. I imagined them as a family – father, mother and baby. That was before I learned that the bull elephant doesn’t hang around to bring up his baby. The mother has to do that on her own.