The Beauty

by Aliya Whiteley

  Men come and stand by me on the edge of the tree line. I look amidst the branches but there is nothing, no yellow, no movement. There are only still, brown branches, bearing the buds of spring.

  I realise it’s only the teenagers who stand with me. Adam, Paul, Oliver and Jason, the ones who used to tease poor Thomas before he became the cook. They always looked like a pack of dogs in my mind, standing together, sleeping in a heap. Now they look like four puppies who have been left behind by their mothers.

  ‘Where are they going?’ says Paul. He is dark blond with a long, curved nose and front teeth that protrude in an attractive way, like a spaniel.

  ‘I don’t know,’ I say.

  ‘What?’ says Oliver, the biggest of the Group, the sheepdog with long tangled hair forever in his eyes. ‘What?’ he repeats.

  I say again, ‘I don’t know.’

  There must be other words than this, but I can’t find them. There is a hole of dread into which my voice has fallen; I can feel my insides being clawed, raked by the nails of my terror.

  ‘When are they coming back?’ says Adam, and Jason echoes, ‘When?’ They are yapping puppies, black and tan, who may grow fierce one day.

  I don’t have any words for this.

  Other men come to us. I can’t explain it; the instinct is strong not to go into the woods. We gather on the edge. Someone calls, ‘Hello?’ and the sound is swallowed by the trees.

  ‘It was Hal and Gareth,’ says a voice behind me that I place as Keith D, the fiddler. ‘They killed one of them. Splattered it to bits. Now the Beauty won’t come back.’

  In the aftershock of these words a feeling is forming – a muttering, a tumult such as I have not felt before. ‘They should be punished,’ says Paul, with a sword of a voice, and others agree. The Group surges back from the woods, towards the hut. I go with them, trailing behind. I know what’s going to happen and although I would like to persuade them from this path, I am dumb.

  ‘It needs a law!’ William is shouting. He stands in the doorway of Hal’s hut, blocking the crowd’s view of the remains of Belinda. ‘It needs due process! We cannot simply decide they’re guilty. Guilty of what?’

  ‘Murder!’ shout the teenagers.

  ‘It’s not murder to slice up a plant,’ says William, but his face betrays him and the crowd sees it.

  Then, from behind him, come Hal and Gareth. They push him to one side and stand, chins up. ‘We deserve to be punished,’ says Hal. ‘We did it. I had to be free. My mother wouldn’t have liked it.’

  ‘Do what you like,’ says Gareth, only his clenching fists giving away his feelings. ‘I’m only sorry I didn’t do my own as well. But I couldn’t. I’d do all the rest, but not my Barbara.’

  ‘It’s murder!’ calls Adam, and Jason repeats, ‘Murder!’ The crowd is building up to something that I do not want to see. It would forever infect my stories.

  The bell rings.

  It is deep and strong. Uncle Ted stands beside it, on the porch of William’s house. The crowd turn to him, fall into silence for him. He looks like a leader.

  ‘A beating,’ he says. ‘That’s the punishment. Ten strokes each with this.’ He holds up the stick that usually sits in his belt. ‘I’ll do it. Then none of you are to blame and it’s all done with. I’ll do it by the fireside, in plain sight, where the Beauty can see it.’

  He walks to the fire, and stands beside it.

  The crowd move towards him, bringing Hal and Gareth with them. I go back to the hut instead, where Doctor Ben is still kneeling over Belinda.

  He glances up at me. ‘Look,’ he says.

  Outside there is a sound, a meaty thud, followed by another, then another. I put my hands over my ears and turn my eyes to where Doctor Ben points. The mess of Belinda’s head is grey, turning black. There is a glimpse of white. Ben moves the grey strands with his forefinger and more white is revealed. It is a jagged piece of bone, curving away. The remains of a skull.

  I take my hands from my ears. The punishment is over. The crowd is making strange noises, like the call of birds at daybreak. I go to the door and see the Beauty returning, with my Bee, lovely Bee, coming for me. My body gets hard for her, even as tears start to form in my eyes.

  All the delicate thoughts are gone. My whimsies, my long lithe strands of seasons and stories. Gone.

  *

  Uncle Ted seeks me out as night falls. He finds me in the graveyard. His Bonnie and my Bee stand next to each other, humming, while we look at what remains of the graves. The ground is freshly turned over, teeming with worms. If I wasn’t here the nighttime animals would be feasting.

  ‘Are you glad they’re back?’ I ask him.

  He doesn’t reply.

  I ask, ‘How are Hal and Gareth?’

  ‘They’ll heal. I was soft on them. Made it look good for the crowd.’

  ‘You think the younger ones would have…’

  He says, ‘Don’t you?’ Ted shrugs, stamps around the grave of my mother. The sky is clear and it will be a cold night. The pinkish cast of the clouds makes everything soft, hazy, like another world.

  ‘No,’ I say softly. ‘No, I don’t.’

  ‘Maybe I know men better than you do then, for all your stories. I know what they’re capable of.’

  ‘How do you know?’ And then I understand; I can finally put into words what’s been bothering me since that night in the woods. I say, ‘You knew the mushrooms grew only on the graves of women because you buried women there. In the woods, when I was taken. You led me to the place where you had put women in the ground.’

  ‘Yes,’ he says.

  ‘Why didn’t you bring their bodies to the graveyard instead?’

  ‘The idea was to keep them out of this place, Nate. Don’t you get it? I didn’t find them dead. I found them alive. And I killed them.’

  ‘You–’ It makes no sense to me. ‘But why would you…’

  ‘Three of them. They were heading straight for us. We’d just buried Teresa the week before, the last of our own women. I couldn’t risk more of them turning up, making us all feel for them, just to lose them. Just to die.’

  I say, ‘Maybe they weren’t sick!’

  He gives me a pitying smile. ‘All women were sick. Think about it. Why were they wandering through the woods alone if they hadn’t been thrown out of their own town? They’d been sent out there to die by their men.’

  ‘You don’t know that,’ I whisper. Do I want to hear more? No. Yes. ‘How did you…?’ My eyes fall to the stick on his belt and he rests his hand on the knobbed end.

  ‘No, I did it kindly. Took them out one at a time, said they needed to be blindfolded to come to us, that we had a cure and needed to be careful about who knew our location. Then I strangled them, quick. They died with hope, which was a gift, wasn’t it? I told them a good story, made up on the moment. Worthy even of you.’

  ‘Uncle,’ I say. I hold up my hands. ‘No more.’

  He kicks at the worms with his boot. ‘Some of us are born to be free on the wings of imagination and some of us are held down by the chains of reality, isn’t that right? No doubt you’d find a better way of saying that. I do the groundwork so you can have your head in the clouds. I don’t want praise for it. I do it gladly, for you, for the memory of your mother. I told her I’d keep you safe. Keep you happy.’

  ‘I can’t be happy. Not now. Not after today.’

  ‘Melodrama,’ he tells me, not unkindly. He adjusts his belt. ‘You’re proving my point. This will mean something to you and that's fine. Weave the deaths and the beatings into your tales and grow from it. However you want to use it. It means nothing to me.’

  ‘Those women meant nothing to you?’ I ask him. I picture his hands on their soft necks, their eyes covered, their heads thrown back.

  ‘Nothing that I’m going to tell you,’ he says, and stomps away. Outside the gate his Bonnie waits for him, follows along behind him, not touching him. That is how he likes it, at least in view of the oth
ers. Untouchable Uncle Ted.

  *

  I am with Bee, in Bee; it is my only solace, my comfort, my distraction. What did I do before it? How can we need something so badly without knowing that the need exists?

  Time has swept clean the cobwebs of panic that trailed across our faces when the women started falling sick. We thought we would all get sick. Men too. Why wouldn't we? We lived in equality, didn't we? It never occurred to us that the disease would not consider us all equal. There were days of hysteria. Hysteria, the sickness of the womb. And yet somehow William kept us together, even as only the women died.

  He told us, if there is help, we will find it, and he sent down to the town, to the men in suits who came in their cars and struggled up the rocks to us with sombre faces that gave out the message so clearly that it was no shock that night when William repeated it to us.

  ‘Women everywhere are afflicted. So far there's no cure.’

  ‘Only women?’ asked Miriam. I got the feeling she and William had already discussed the matter; the question had been planted to focus the Group's attention on the problem.

  ‘Only women,’ said William. Someone moaned, long and deep. A terrible sound.

  How I hate the sounds of pain.

  Bee hums, and I am soothed. Bee never makes sounds that wound me. Even if I beat out its brains with a rock it would not scream or cry out. None of the Beauty would. They would simply leave, and that is why they are stronger than us. Because they do not have to fight at all. It is my job to make the men understand this. We are weaker than them.

  After William's announcement that night, after the Group had wept and railed and attempted to accept the end of half the world, the fireside became a terrible place. Landers and Keith D refused to play, and nobody would have sung anyway. Silence. It is worse than pain. It is my mortal enemy. It kills me, cuts me up, that dread silence of despair. Even back then I couldn't bear it. I was sixteen years old and already an enemy of silence.

  And so I stood up and started to talk. Nothing important. Nothing real. What surprised me, as I retold the plot of the book I had just finished reading, in which a boy wizard defeated a great evil, was that nobody stopped me. I talked for hours, and people listened because they hated the silence too. They were happy to create it, and then terrified by what they made. And so I came to understand the split at the root of the soul of all men.

  When I ran out of voice, William said ‘That sounds exciting, Nate. Tell us more tomorrow’.

  And so I did.

  For the first time, tonight, in Bee's arms, I worry that I am running out of stories. What will come out of my mouth? What can I say, in the face of what I have learned today?

  Why does it even matter any more? Why, in the face of such suffering, do stories matter?

  That is the worst thought of all, the thought I want to claw out of my head, wrap in a sack and throw into the sea.

  Bee hums louder in my ear. My skin is pressed so close against its clammy yellow breasts that we are almost one.

  ‘Mother,’ I say. ‘Mother.’

  *

  ‘It disgusts me,’ says William. ‘It should disgust us all.’

  Nobody replies. Uncle Ted faces away from us and Eamon and Doctor Ben sit on the floor of the rough wooden lookout platform. I enjoy the view from the treehouse. The weather is warming up. The nettles are young and sweet for soup, and the birds only think of the need to nest. We have all settled into a pattern; we tessellate. It's all I ever wanted, and yet it's not everything. The pattern stretches only so far. I tell my stories every night with increasing desperation.

  I preferred speaking about the past. There is so much to say about a past. It is a vein of gold through a mountain, leading to an incontrovertible stone heart of truth. But the future is a horizon – a faintly visible line that may promise much, and always remains too far away to touch. My eyes hurt from trying to see it clearly. And so much depends on me now.

  I found some dark glasses of my mother's amongst her old clothes and have taken to wearing them, much to William's disapproval. The teenagers have gone one step further. They wear skirts, and cite the ease of joining with their Beauties – no more zips to undo, simply lift the material! – and the coolness that will benefit their packets as the summer approaches.

  If it were only teenagers I don't suppose William would be too offended. But it's also Thomas, who spends all his time in a pink dress with puffed sleeves, a row of white buttons down the front as delicate as daisies. I burst out laughing the first time I saw him in it and he smiled, his cheeks reddening.

  ‘I know,’ he said, ‘don't laugh. Honestly. Trousers have been cutting into my stomach.’

  It was a feeble excuse, given that he has been losing so much weight recently. I raised an eyebrow at him, and he added, ‘Betty likes it too.’

  ‘How can you tell?’

  ‘Can't you?’ he said, and I had to admit he was right. Betty stood in the corner of the kitchen and hummed with a contentment that sounded like a cat's purr.

  Since then, two weeks ago, I haven't seen Thomas out of that dress. Perhaps that's the reason William called this emergency meeting. What I don't understand is why I've been invited.

  ‘It's not right to wear them,’ says William, when nobody rushes to agree with him. ‘It's disrespectful.’

  ‘There's nobody left to disrespect,' says Eamon. ‘Look at us. We're shagging mushrooms. Do you really think respect is an issue any more?’

  Below us, at the bottom of the tree, the Beauty wait. As usual. They stand so still. They are expecting me to speak for them.

  ‘They're not mushrooms,’ I say.

  William raises his head and glares at me. ‘Don't even start,’ he says.

  ‘Don't I have the right to speak any more?’ I ask him.

  ‘We all know where you stand. You've spent enough time trying to persuade us that this is part of some grand plan.’

  ‘I don't want to speak on that matter,’ I say. ‘This is about something else.’

  ‘We're not here to jump to your–’

  ‘Let him speak,’ says Ted, from where he leans against the trunk of the tree.

  William opens his mouth and then closes it.

  ‘The Beauty are intelligent,’ I say. ‘They communicate with each other. They communicate with us too, although we pretend not to hear. They are – they are our women reborn.’

  ‘They are not,’ says Eamon. ‘That's a lie.’

  I say, ‘I don't lie.’

  ‘That's all you do!’ he says.

  ‘Wait,’ says Doctor Ben. ‘He's not lying. Not exactly.’ He clears his throat and hugs his knees. ‘After the incident involving Hal and Gareth, investigation of the... remains suggested that some of the bones of the deceased have been incorporated into the, err, the Beauty. Most notably the skull and the spine. I don't know if they're all the same. Maybe it was a random occurrence with that one.’

  ‘Belinda,’ I supply. Its name was Belinda, before its head was smacked into pieces.

  Nobody speaks. Eamon stretches out his legs, stands and begins to descend the ladder. At the bottom his Beauty – Bree – comes to him, arms open, and he pushes it away with a great shove so strong that it falls backwards and sprawls on the ground. I didn't know Eamon was so strong. He walks away and Bree picks itself up and follows after him.

  ‘So they've used some old bones,’ says William, and his voice shakes. ‘That changes nothing.’

  ‘They sprang from women,’ I say. ‘We use them like women. They are women.’

  ‘They are not, and we will not call them such.’

  ‘They're not women, Nate,’ says Uncle Ted. He turns to me and I see a great weariness in his face. ‘You had a mother, but not a wife. You don't understand the difference between it. I don't say this to take anything away from you. You must trust those who remember all of womanhood, not just the hugs of a mother.’

  Am I missing some element of love? The Beauty offer comfort, sex and softness. W
hat else is there? And how can Uncle Ted say he knows these things and I don't? There are things he has seen, times he has experienced, that I never will – I give him that. But his capacity to hurt, to kill – is that what he thinks makes him a real man? If so, I will never be a real man and I am glad of it.

  ‘Regardless of what they are,’ says Doctor Ben, ‘we must draw up rules of conduct. The mark of humanity is how it treats the world and those who share it with us – and the Beauty are alive. Whatever they are, they're alive.

  ‘We started this Group to live by a set of principles. We grow our own food. We replace what we use. We protect what we rear. Now we have taken the Beauty into us. The Beauty deserve to be treated with respect for our sake, if not for theirs.’

  William turns on him, his yellowed teeth bared. ‘You didn't start this Group at all,’ he says. And that is when I know he has forgotten how to be a leader.

  I look at Uncle Ted, and he returns my gaze. Then he says, ‘William, that remark is unworthy of you.’

  William does not reply. He shrinks down into himself, getting smaller and smaller, and I know he feels it inside. He is not fit to lead us any more. When Ted says, ‘Right then, let's draw up a list of rules and Nate can read it out tonight, exactly as it's written down,’ William does not object, and as smoothly as that power changes hands.

  I feel the inspiration of it. Glorious revolution. The schoolbooks talked of it, heads chopped off and crowds baying, and yet all the stability of my world only needed a few words to be wiped away. It didn't even need a story.

  And I am at this meeting to witness it. Ted wanted me here, not William. He wanted me to see the change in power and to understand that I am now his mouthpiece.

  My freedom is gone and we are being led by a killer.

  *

  To start–

  There were no rules. Rules were not necessary. There was man, and there was work and there was plenty. Plenty does not mean riches. There was simply enough. Abundance would have created inequality.

  But there was loneliness too. Deep in the bones and brain there was loneliness, in a world of seed and egg, of bee and flower, of pairs. To be a man was to find a hole inside and know it could never be filled.