The Beauty

by Aliya Whiteley

  Until the coming of the Beauty.

  They grew from the soil and understood without needing words or guidance. They took a form pleasing to man's eye and came amongst him, walking into his garden. And there was much fear at first. Man trembled at the new, the unknown. They couldn't recognise the gift they had been given, even though they took it in their arms and pressed it to their hearts. They were no longer alone, and it was a hard thing to understand.

  But then they began to see. Spring came and the birds nested. The hares boxed and the feelings rose up strong in man again. Feelings of love. They began to look at the Beauty and see wealth. Riches.

  And then man divided into men. Some men saw their fortune and rejoiced in it. But other men felt their fear grow stronger – fear of what they were being given, what they would have to pay for it and what might be lost. And they looked out at the innocent Beauty and brought violence and pain into their gardens, not through deliberate murderous intent, but through the sickness in their souls.

  The sickness led to further division. Should they banish the Beauty and be lonely just so violence could not find them? Or should they face their fear and overcome their instincts? It was too big a question to answer.

  But the men had an ally. They had reason. Reason, the greatest gift ever given to them. They could think and think again, and in the thinking there lay solace from simply feeling. If they were at war with their emotions, thinking was the best weapon they possessed.

  We are reasonable men. We can think of a path that may, one day, lead to a solution that eases us all.

  Here is the path:

  We will not kill the Beauty.

  We will not hurt the Beauty deliberately.

  We will not steal another man's Beauty.

  We will attempt to be honest in all dealings with the Beauty.

  We will not speak ill of another man because of how he chooses to deal with his Beauty.

  We will hold true to these tenets, for the good of the Group, for now and forever, and on, and on, until the end.

  *

  ‘I told them,’ I say to Bee, from deep within its embrace. ‘And now Ted wants to see me.’ Am I to be punished? The thought of it won’t leave me.

  It feels like three o’clock in the morning. My mother used to say that whenever you wake in the dead of night it’s bound to be three o’clock, it’s just the way it is, and the hands of the clock move slower at that time than at any other. We never had a clock so I couldn’t say, but it is a three-o’clock feeling for sure. More and more of what my mother used to say is returning to me.

  My tent hut is warm, my blankets piled high. Bee’s skin is clammy, but I’m used to that. I am comfortable, surrounded by the things I love, the books I have been allowed to take from the school over the years, because nobody else was interested. Some are stolen, I admit; a blind eye was turned by my old teacher Miriam, no doubt. I miss her knack of knowing me and looking like all the answers of life belonged to her, even the impossible ones. I am an adult now and I feel no such surety; I hope I fake confidence as well as she did.

  Perhaps that is the role of a responsible person – to fake the confidence he doesn’t feel so that the young can believe in something. Except there are no young ones any more. I’m not sure who I’m faking for.

  ‘Is it for you?’ I ask Bee, and it strokes my face, putting visions in my head of a masterwork of flesh and yellow, a tower built of our bodies, extending out of our arms and legs to form fresh joints, bones, limbs and even mouths that hum to make a symphony of such beauty that it hurts to hear it. The tower reaches to the sky where all is clear, and down below, under the soil, there are roots that stretch as deep as the tower is tall. Deeper, even, to the great heart of our beating planet. Between us all we make the base and pinnacle of Man and Beauty.

  ‘How?’ I say to Bee.

  It shows me clouds speeding by, days and nights, the movement of the earth, years and years, wrapped and folded like a gift.

  ‘Men age,’ I whisper. ‘Men die.’ How can we unite in this way, build to harmony? The Beauty will outlive us, but we have only this generation. There will be no more.

  I receive in my mind’s eye a picture of Thomas. He cooks in his kitchen kneading bread, his cheeks reddened with the effort, wearing his mother’s dress. He looks – I can’t describe it. There is an aura that surrounds him. I feel the expectation of the Beauty has settled on him. He will do something of phenomenal importance.

  ‘What?’

  But I don’t understand the images I am being shown. The speed of them, the blurs of browns and reds and yellows, the streams of these colours running together. The patterns take me down and Bee hums on. I can feel its pleasure as it lulls me, like a baby, to sleep.

  *

  ‘We’re very disappointed in you,’ says Uncle Ted.

  I don’t know who he means with his we. He stands alone, his hand resting on the stick in his belt.

  I remember a story my mother told me about my uncle, set back in the time when they were children, living in a suburb with a mother and a father of their own, like in the creased pages of the picture books on the back shelf of the classroom. ‘A suburb was like a village,’ she said, ‘but with spidering roads through it that took people in and out of the nearby city, like blood to a heart.’

  Cities are pumps, in my head. They beat with vibrant life, but nobody can stop flowing around its complex chambers and ventricles. There must always be movement or there is death. I imagine they must all be as still and brittle as skeletons now – those great cities of the past.

  My mother said Uncle Ted ran away to the city. She never told me why; she made it sound like a whim, but I wonder now what kind of pressure could have made him move inwards to that heart. She said he came back three months later, thinner and older. Time had moved in a different way for him in the city. It speeds and slows depending on where you are, and who you are with.

  This morning, time has stopped.

  Why is Uncle Ted in this house? Usually I would ask the questions that come to me: Are you living here? Where is Thomas going to live? I want to speak of the importance of Thomas, of the need to protect him, cherish him. And I also want to ask – why must my Bee wait outside, on the other side of the door, while his Beauty stands here in this room, behind him?

  But I say nothing. Because this room, this table, the way the chairs are set and the look on Ted's face, make it impossible to speak.

  I'm wrong. Time has not stopped. It has reversed. My uncle is a man and I am a boy again, and everything about this room makes me feel it.

  He says, ‘It was made clear to you to speak only of the rules. To make the rules plain for all.’

  Uncle Ted flicks his fingers from his stick. Am I meant to speak? Is this time that is allotted to me? All the reasons I had in my head for what I did have vanished. I am a dandelion clock. One breath from Ted and I am scattered.

  ‘Dandelion,’ I say.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Thoughts fly if you breathe too hard. The rules are a shout, but the story is a sigh. This way they do not scatter. They keep their shape, and only bend in the breeze.’

  ‘Is that right?’ says Ted.

  This is not what I wanted to say. I wanted to make it clear that I have very little power over the story. It must come out as it does. I have been unfaithful to my gift by suggesting that it is under my control. If it can be controlled by me, then I can be controlled by others. I know my uncle is too clever to miss this. I can see from the way he cocks his head that he has not.

  ‘You know this business of stories better than me,’ he says. ‘I never had much use for them. Perhaps you're right. But I'm sure you realise how much relies on you in this difficult time.’

  I nod. He places manacles on me, weighing me down with responsibilities he usurped, and all I do is nod. My cowardice shames me, and yet, even as I berate myself, I hear in my head the sound of his stick on flesh and I cringe away from that memory.

  �
��Let me tell you what's happening, Nate,’ he says. ‘For your own good. A council has been formed. William, Eamon, Ben and I will steer our Group through this, keep violence under control and help make a new way to live. You brought the Beauty among us and I don't blame you. Nobody blames you. But you must understand that there are those among us who want to tread them back down into the mushrooms they sprang from.

  ‘So we must find a way to control ourselves and the Beauty. And when you remake the past and take potshots at the future in your stories, you play with a delicate balance. You could tip us into chaos. Now, I know that isn't your intention, and that is why we've had this talk privately. Next time you tell a story and I don't like the meaning, you'll be up in front of the Council and there will be punishment.’

  ‘So the Council agrees with you about this?’ I ask. Council. That's a word that belongs in books of civic duty and from a world we wanted no part in. I can't believe William would sit on a council, let alone use the word. This is a temporary peace at best, no matter what Ted might want.

  He says, ‘They do.’

  I say, ‘You are a judge now?’ He frowns at me, and the familiar expression frees my tongue. I am no slave of his. ‘You need a curly wig. You need a black flapping robe, like a crow. You are more than one man?’

  ‘We have to be more than men now, Nate, and you have only yourself to thank for that responsibility. Did you really think this way would be better? Fucking plants that bear the shape of the dead; this is what you bring us to. And then you ask us to be happy about it. Well, I'll try to make it stick, for the sake of your mother. She was just like you. She didn't understand about consequences. It was always my duty to keep her safe and now I'll keep you safe too, whether you like it or not.’

  I walk up to the long table; I feel it under my hands, so smooth, this new mark of power. I wish for the strength to take it up, to break it with a sudden snap as clean as the breaking of bone.

  I say, ‘She didn't understand because you were always there to do it for her, is that it? Did you bring her here because you saw the cities out there and found them lacking? And now you want to do the same for us all – protect us from what could be terrible and beautiful and all the things in between, the things that live on and live on. But maybe we want to live on with the Beauty. Maybe we don't want your protection.’

  Uncle Ted smiles at me. He is not in the least angry.

  ‘Nate,’ he says. ‘You're not more than a man after all. You're less than one. You always will be. It's not about what people want. It's about what they need to survive. For us all to survive. You're all so weak that you'll pine away if the Beauty leave, so I'll find a way to make this sorry remains of life work. And in return you'll do as you're told and be grateful for it. You'll start by telling a story of the past tonight and you won't meddle with it: Tell the story of how the Group started. And you won't mention this conversation, or the Beauty.’

  ‘I don't–’

  He walks around the table and puts an arm around my shoulder, holding tightly, steering me to the door. ‘Enough.’

  I want to say more. I want to. I want to. But his words are strong. Want has nothing to do with it. If I am to be a man I must give up on want. I must be more.

  It comes to me that maybe I don't want to be a man.

  On the other side of the door, Bee is waiting with Doctor Ben and his Bella. Ben wears an expression that makes me forget my thoughts.

  ‘How is he?’ says Uncle Ted.

  ‘He's up and about,’ says Ben. ‘In the kitchen, of course. He said he had to make soup for lunch.’

  ‘You're sure it's a tumour?’ he asks Ben.

  Ben nods.

  Time, that slippery fish, has shot past my guard once more and my hands are empty, clutching at meaning. ‘Thomas?’ I ask.

  ‘It's bad news,’ says Doctor Ben. Ted's grip on my shoulder tightens. It is painful. ‘A fast-growing cancer of the bowel.’

  I say, ‘No.’

  ‘He collapsed late last night, after your story. Thomas says there's no pain. But it's eating up his strength. Still, you can't stop him cooking.’

  I wrestle free of Uncle Ted's grip; in his eyes I see surprise at my sudden strength. I say, ‘You didn't tell me.’

  Ted says, ‘You've just been told now.’

  ‘He's my friend,’ I say. Doesn't Ted even understand the word?

  ‘Go see him,’ says Ben. He stands aside and I walk past to Bee, who stands waiting for me without concern. I don't hear it, but I know it’s following me down the hall to the kitchen where I find Thomas chopping an onion with a speed that amazes me. The noise of the knife is like a woodpecker, white flakes of onion flying up from the blade.

  My Bee goes to his Betty by the sink and they hum together, complacent, a soothing sound. Thomas uses the flat of his knife to scrape the onions into his pot on the heat and they sizzle; the smell hits me, an instant panacea. What can be wrong in the world when onions fry?

  Then he turns to me, and I see how his face has shrunk in on itself overnight, the skin pulling back, giving him a beaky nose, a stretched forehead. And he is bending to one side, as if a force pulls at him. Under his apron, on his left hip, there is a bulge and is it as if his entire body is curving to it, favouring it, making him into a question mark.

  ‘Don't worry,’ he says. He takes up a wooden spoon from the drawer and turns back to the onions. The Beauty hums on. The room is hot and pleasant, with the wooden surfaces and the gleaming dip of the sink. I have never seen death. I have spent time in the graveyard and felt the desiccated remains of death – the dry, cold taste of it as it travels through your veins in shreds, blocking you up, slowing you down. Death is not lurking in this room. This is life. The yellow glow of the leaves through the window is life.

  I understand what Bee showed to me last night.

  I leave the kitchen and find Uncle Ted and Doctor Ben in the hall, deep in quiet conversation. They stop talking as I approach. I know I must look strange to them with my happiness shining out of me, as bright and hopeful as sunrise.

  ‘It's not a tumour,’ I tell them.

  Ben shakes his head. ‘Nate, there's no escaping the fact that there's a growth in the bowel that will, in a matter of months–’

  I repeat, ‘It's not a tumour.’ I can't contain the words any longer. They are the best words I've ever spoken. ‘It's a baby.’

  Part Three

  I lie in a proper bed, blankets piled high against the cold, Bee beside me, and I think of the line.

  The line is invisible, but it exists. It runs from the edge of the wood, through the centre of the campfire, to the graveyard. On one side there is William’s hut, the communal huts, the school hut and the fields, and on the other side there is the big house where Ted now lives with Thomas. And where I spend all my time, waiting for a miracle.

  For the birth of this baby will be the miracle that will unite us once more. The line draws its strength from its invisibility. Nobody wants to talk about it and I am forbidden to mention it, so the line grows longer and stronger. William, Eamon, the farmers, the older men: they all think there will be no baby and they hate the idea that there could be hope. Because hope takes the form of a joining rather than a continuation.

  We will meld to grow. Part human, part Beauty. Could anything be more wonderful, more terrifying? The offer of salvation in the form of a baby who is not a baby. I can finally begin to understand why men kill.

  And yet Uncle Ted, the killer, stands firmly with us as a protector of Thomas, never leaving him, grim-faced whenever one of the others approaches. I don’t understand this change in Ted. But then, his motives have never been up for untangling. For all his calmness, I feel there is a mess of man underneath. He loves, he hates, he hides the emotions where he thinks nobody can see. And then his eyes burn and his lips draw up, like a threatened dog.

  It has occurred to me that my mother was afraid of Ted, of what he might do to others if he thought they were drawing too close to s
omething. To what?

  It has been a long six months of consideration and revelation for me; and in that time Thomas has swelled, not to the front like the pictures of pregnant women in the books, but to the side, low on his hip, then pushing out his stomach and distorting his chest. He wears the dresses that once belonged to Miriam – she was a large woman – and still he cooks on, with no perturbation on his face. Thomas emits a serenity that affects all who spend moments with him.

  It sneaks into my bland stories of the past, stories that have become more and more fantastical. I tell stories of fairies and goblins, and tea parties for trolls, while the real meanings pretend to be invisible. The goblins go to war or the fairies squabble over a golden crown, hidden deep in the woods. And meanwhile the meanings squat low, so low in the words, that Ted cannot complain.

  William and Eamon sit on one side of the fire and we sit on the other, and everyone listens to my stories, long serials that go on night after night. They all wear the expression of hearing pleasant diversions.

  We have become excellent liars all round.

  Sleep is a truth that will not come readily to those who fill their minds with pretence, so I sit up and watch my breath billow out into the December cold. Then I get up, wrap myself in one of my blankets and think of hot milk in the kitchen, the warm froth of it. One of the delights of living in the big house is the ease of raiding supplies.

  Bee sits up and I send it an image of milk. It lies back down with a low hum. In the past months it has become less interested in staying beside me at all times. We can spend a few minutes apart; we no longer even meld every day. That flush of first need has mellowed into a companionship that brings its own pleasures. I could never be without my Bee, but physical presence is not always necessary. I've noticed the same with some of the other Beauties, such as Ted's Bonnie, but by no means all.

  As I tiptoe down the stairs it occurs to me that the Beauty are showing differences between themselves. Could it be that this has always been the case and I simply didn't know them well enough to see it? I don't think so. Maybe they are no longer of one mind. Like the Group, there are fresh divisions. We grow and change – all of us. Will we all grow together?