MJ handles the smoker, puffing the bellows as needed. The smoke comes out thickly, like a theatrical effect, and the clouds keep their shape for longer than normal smoke. Silvia’s eyes have gone small from concentrating. She moves closer to the hive and everyone watches, waiting for the smoke to filter to the bottom.
After a minute, hoping the bees have all descended, drugged, Ibrahim opens the lid.
There are no bees there.
“It worked!”
He goes to pull the first frame out but finds it’s sealed to the hive with something cement-sticky. Propolis. Cynthia said this might happen. JB, standing behind Ibrahim’s elbows, is at the ready with a hive tool that looks like a miniature crowbar and pries away the upper honeycomb. Once JB has removed the frame, Ibrahim lets the lid slam shut. MJ extinguishes the fire in the smoker; Silvia takes the honeycomb and brings it to the crooked table under the birch tree, where a spoon and a bowl have been placed. Every motion is calculated. They work together like cogs in a clock.
Silvia lifts the veil from her face so she can clearly see what she’s doing. Her eyes are narrowed with focus, her skin rubbery with sweat, her pupils constricted to pinpricks against the brightness of the sun, even under the trees. Carefully she peels the waxy hexagons away from the wooden frame and smacks the comb with the spoon. It makes a suctioning sound: suck, pop.
“It’s flowing!” she cries, laughing. She props the honeycomb on top of the bowl to let it drain, then cracks off a corner of comb and brings it to her mouth. The golden taste of it coats her teeth and tongue, and the resin of each capsule cracks softly, pleasantly, every one of her nerves receiving more stimuli than it’s used to.
“The bees don’t seem to be affected by the drought, so?” JB asks, coming over. He lifts his veil and takes a corner of comb too. “Oh, is go-oo-od!” he says, mouth full, surprised.
The honey, as Cynthia had said, is pale, more white than yellow. The colour of a sponge. And it tastes of garden, of greenery, of life and death. It is the best thing Silvia has ever tasted.
Ibrahim watches Silvia, enjoying her pleasure vicariously, then takes a fingerful for himself. If he believed in heaven, this is what it would taste like: sweet and gold, sunshine and love. He wants to kiss her mouth.
After the first frame has drained—it flows slowly, effortlessly, from the comb into the bowl: they don’t even need to whack it—they will extract the other nine from the top box of the hive, down to where the bees have descended. (They’ll leave the lower box full for the bees.) Then they will lower their veils again.
In the morning there will be a pot of the fresh honey for breakfast, and the four of them, the harvesters, will eat it with the particular pleasure of knowing that they had been there, involved, like worker bees proudly assisting their queen.
XXVII
CYNTHIA HAS PREPARED a special dinner to celebrate the success of their first harvest. There’s honey-glazed pheasant, and roast vegetables from the greenhouse, and vanilla ice cream with honey for dessert. Her face is shiny and red with both pride and the heat of the oven.
“This is fucking fantastic,” Monique says, mouth full of bird.
JB, already finished, serves himself seconds. “Anyone else?”
MJ holds out her plate for more, even though she hasn’t finished her first serving yet. “Don’t want you eating it all,” she says, swallowing.
“I’m glad you like it,” Cynthia says delicately; she said she’d already eaten.
Scattered along the length of the table are bottles of Ontario wine, both red and white, and something homemade, unlabelled. Silvia fills up her glass with this one, not for the first time. She spills some over the lip of the glass and brings her mouth to the edge to catch the rest of the overflow, giggling. “What is this? It’s so weird. Delicious weird.”
“Mead,” Hartford says.
“What’s that mean?”
“It’s honey wine,” Cynthia explains. “ ‘Mead’ is an ancient Slavic word for honey. It’s the oldest alcoholic drink in the world.”
“I love it,” Silvia says. “I love old things!” She laughs at herself.
“Hey there.” Ibrahim takes the bottle from Silvia—it’s splashing all over the floor as she’s waving it around.
“I’m fine! I feel nice. Really, really nice!”
Ibrahim smiles.
“What?”
Ibrahim notices Monique and Ben sharing a look at Silvia’s expense. He stares at them, partly curious, partly challenging.
“People live their whole lives doing the same stuff every day,” Silvia continues, “following these rules they say are absolute, being sorry for stuff they don’t need to be sorry for, stuff which for all they know is just stories in a book, when they could be living like this. Free.”
Monique laughs; Ben and Dan smile. Ibrahim glares at them.
“What?” Silvia looks around as if she’s only just become aware of the other people at the table.
Monique stage-whispers to Ben at her side, “See? I told you she escaped from a cult.”
Silvia’s face starts burning.
The air in the room shifts when Cynthia draws a breath. “Monique,” she says, her voice hard, “that’s enough.” Then she speaks perfectly normally to Silvia: “Are you from a religious family, Silvia?”
Silvia nods.
“And are you a believer?”
Silvia murmurs something.
“Sorry?”
“I said I’m working that out.”
Cynthia nods. “Well, I’m very glad you like it here.”
“It’s beautiful,” Silvia says, finishing the glass. “This whole area, so . . . beautiful, yes, that’s the word.”
Ibrahim downs a thimbleful of the honey wine and makes a face: it’s incredibly strong. “Did you set up the farm on your own?” he asks Cynthia, moving the bottle of mead farther away from Silvia.
“No, I was with my partner.”
“What did he do?”
“She. She was a gardener.”
Maybe it’s the alcohol clearing her brain, or maybe it has just allowed her to lose certain inhibitions, but Silvia twigs something. “Hilary?”
Cynthia looks at Silvia and nods. “She set up the vegetable patch and got that side of the farm started, but the bees were mine. And still are. Thankfully.” Cynthia gets up before anyone can say or ask anything else. “Well, good night. I’ll leave you kids to it.”
Ibrahim calls after her, “Good night.”
Once Cynthia has left, Monique opens her eyes wide and looks round the rest of the group.
“Cynthia’s a lesbian!”
“So?” Ibrahim asks.
“Oh, come on!”
Silvia says, “Does it matter?”
“No!” Monique becomes defensive. “I’m not saying it does, I’m just saying . . . well, I hope she doesn’t fall in love with me or something.”
MJ looks at her through her glass of wine. “I wouldn’t flatter yourself, Monique.”
There’s a second of silence as everyone processes this, then Monique stands up and puts her arm around Ben. “I’m gonna head to bed,” she says.
MJ and JB stand up, holding hands. “Good night,” they say as one.
“Me too,” Dan says, knowing he’ll be the only one of the five sleeping alone that night.
Silvia looks across the table at Ibrahim, her eyes unfocused. It’s just the two of them remaining.
“You feeling okay?” Ibrahim asks.
She nods, smiling like a Buddha.
“You’re not used to liquor, are you? That stuff is at least twenty percent.”
“It’s nice.”
“Let me take you up to bed.” He goes to help her out of her seat and takes her hand, but it slips from his grip. He tries to lift her instead, but her body is too wriggly. “Come on, just go limp.”
“What does that mean?”
“Stop trying.”
“I don’t know how to do that!” She hiccups, then laug
hs.
“Here, get onto my back.” He crouches like a linebacker awaiting the snap. She jumps up once, slips down, then jumps again, and this time he catches her. “Now, don’t let go.”
He feels her muscles squirm against his back, each one separate and alive, seemingly unconnected to limbs and ligaments. Behind him, invisible, she is an abstract work of art. He goes up the stairs slowly, as each step up causes a bump-slip-laugh, and shushes her as they shuffle down the corridor shared with JB and MJ and Monique.
“Here you go,” he says, slipping her down and dropping her off at her door. “You gonna be okay?”
“I already am okay, Ibrahim,” she says.
“Okay, well . . . good night,” he says, still standing close enough to feel the heat coming from her mouth.
“You don’t sleep at night though, do you?” she asks, leaning against the wall. “So what are you gonna do?”
“Well, I might paint a little bit, I guess.”
She looks up at him. Her face is so close to his face she can smell his skin, feel his breathing. “Do you still want to paint me?”
“Now?” he asks.
She nods, eyes half closed and hungry, and they tumble, each pushing and pulling, into his room.
XXVIII
IBRAHIM PUTS DOWN his paintbrush and takes a sip from his sweat-salty bottle of water. “You want some?” he asks Silvia. “You should probably hydrate.”
She reaches out her hand to take the bottle, but instead of sipping from its neck, as he did, she pours a little into her cupped palm and flicks it onto her face, neck, and shoulders. She draws a line along her forehead from temple to temple, making a halo of water. It dries in an instant. “That feels good,” she says, smiling to herself.
With a slick of pink paint on the bristles, he pulls his brush across the canvas in one broad stroke, adding large leaflike wings to her body. They connect to her shoulders and he outlines them in red.
He’s not used to painting from life. He doesn’t like the idea that he has to follow what’s before him instead of what’s in his mind. The face he’s painted on the canvas is only a shape so far. At least he’s got the fresh peach-pink of her skin. Her body, her body . . .
Let this be clear: lying there before Ibrahim, stretched out on a tartan blanket, Silvia is naked as they come.
“How’s it going?” she asks.
“Fine.” Ibrahim’s mouth puckers around an imaginary cigarette.
She closes her eyes. She feels so unshy. It doesn’t even feel like she’s not wearing clothes. She’s not aware of his eyes on her, not in a way that feels invasive—she can feel him looking at her, creating her for himself, admiring the creation that she already is. It feels as though she is being seen for her true self. She is loving lying there, calm and purposeful, doing nothing and yet doing so much. Her nothingness is being elevated into art. She trusts him completely. This is so much easier, so much better, than making art herself. “I’m fine too,” she says. “I feel so good, so . . . myself.”
Ibrahim smiles. “Good.” But after a few minutes he puts down his brush again. “I can’t concentrate,” he complains.
“Want me to switch positions?” She’s wriggling, not unlike a cat, on the blanket.
He stands up and goes over to where she is lying. He crouches next to her. The light is making her skin look purple, sweet, edible. From up close he can see the goosebumps dotting her shoulders, down her chest, between her—
“Maybe if you could move . . . Can I?” he asks before touching. She nods, and so he places his hand gently around her elbow and pushes it back. She had been propped up on her right elbow, her legs curled underneath her. Like a mermaid, or a cat. The same way Ibrahim’s little brother was tucked up when he woke him before leaving. But Silvia looks—she doesn’t look like his brother. Her hair is growing out, nearly at her shoulders now. No longer propped, she’s lying on her back, fingers spinning circles round her navel. She lifts her legs and pulls her knees towards her so the soles of her feet press into the floor. This creates a barrier between him and her.
“I can’t concentrate because—” He opens his mouth, his little teeth spread apart in his big mouth. He leans his head on her shinbones, feels their warmth. “Because you’re just so beautiful, lying there looking at me, and it’s so stupid—” He stops there because it’s not his style to eulogize a moment, but he so wants to be tender.
The alcohol is wearing off and she has in an instant become very aware of her nakedness. She is naked. In a bedroom. With a man. It’s an interesting in-between feeling she has now, with this belated, obvious realisation. She still wants to be here, just . . . Licking her top lip, she finds it salty. She turns her face away, pressing her cheek to the blanket and covering her (small, she thinks; perfect, he thinks) breasts with her other arm, bent in a V to hug her shoulder. He turns his face away too, red, shamed.
“Sorry,” he says, reading the change in her body language. “I didn’t mean—”
“No, not like—no.” She reaches to him. “I don’t mean—you have an unfair advantage, is all.” She fingers the ragged collar of his shirt, then lifts it over his head.
They still haven’t kissed.
Silvia dresses herself as she undresses him. Shirt, pants, socks. The same order, backwards and forwards.
When he’s naked and she’s fully dressed, they stand facing each other. His body is so unfamiliar without the cover of clothes, a new composition of muscles, flesh, hair, bone.
“Now we can start again,” she says, chin up, jaw hard.
He holds her face as one would hold a breakable vase and goes for her neck, licking, thirsty; like a horse, he finds not water but salt. He stitches kisses up her neck, and when he finds her face again her mouth is open and damp and finally their lips touch.
“You can start taking my clothes off now,” she says after a moment. Her voice is changed by the kiss: deeper, more steady in itself. Like he put something inside her.
So then Ibrahim unwraps her. One layer at a time.
Shirt. Buttoned, collared, blue. First he flips the collar back down, smoothes it over her shoulders. He unbuttons from the bottom up, ending again with the goosebumps on her neck. Each bump an uncharted topography; each dot a star. Her ribs, just visible, are the same size and width as piano keys. He can see her heart beating behind them, her skin, so thin, pulsing like the skin of a drum. Her nipples. Her nipples he takes into his mouth whole, feeling them turn on, like light switches, against his tongue.
Pants. Levi’s, tight in an unconsidered way (she’s had them since she was sixteen). A little tear here at the pocket, another there at the knee. With his teeth he tugs the tufts of heavy cotton unthreading from the holes and, moving up, unzipping the fly, he kisses the thin cotton underneath.
Underpants. Before he pulls them down her legs—pipes, branches, he is running out of metaphors—he touches his hand to the dip, damp, between her legs. He makes mental notes of her sounds and motions as if he’s a scientist, aiming to understand wholly so as to better the experiment in the future.
Socks. Her feet are hardly bigger than his hands. The intricate boning on the tops is opposed to the smooth, marbled arches on the bottoms. It is only when looking at her feet that he realises how small she is, how compact and complete.
Now she is naked. Newly unveiled.
“Are you sure you want to do this? We don’t have to, we can wait.”
“No,” she says. “I’m sure.”
He starts kissing her all over, trying to find the heart of her.
Starfished on the bed, she keeps her eyes open and looks at the ceiling, out the window, at the top of his soft, dark head. His skin tastes of salt, and his body—his body is taut, hard in the right places. His muscles still hold the memory of school sports; his legs are slim from long walks.
He touches her with hands that feel gentle and strong. His body glows with heat. His kisses feel intentional, each one planted specifically in its place, each one spec
ially for her. He lifts her body and kisses the side of her upper thigh, the back of her knee. “You’re perfect.” She smiles, but he can’t see. “Shall I . . . ?” He pulls a square foil packet from somewhere she can’t see. She nods; he opens it. She is not afraid, not self-conscious, just hypersensitive, with tuning forks for bones, as he makes his way up and kisses her belly button, her chin, her cheek, then looks her in the eyes. Then a feeling she’s never felt before. She’s not thinking about anything, not a single thing, except what is happening moment to moment. It’s different from the freedom she proclaimed, drunk at dinner: it’s similar, but different. That feeling was like a dependent clause, but this is self-contained. Later she will have the expected waves of confusion and guilt, but for now it is pure, embodied pleasure, the delight of being seen.
XXIX
THE NEXT MORNING, bruised with her first hangover, Silvia wakes up with a panicky start to the sun blazing through the window. Which window? Not her window. She sits up quickly and looks around, piecing the night together. Ibrahim is still next to her, his body starting to groan with movement too.
His window.
“Hey.” He pokes his face out of the sheet and squints into the sunlight.
“Hey,” Silvia says, pulling the sheet up to cover herself.
“How’s it going?” He puts his arms behind his head.
Silvia rolls her head and lets out a low sound. “Everything hurts.”
Ibrahim smiles. “Everything in moderation.”
She’s not sure what he means, whether he’s trying to tell her that she did too much, that she indulged and should have been more moderate. She must have done it all wrong. She looks at him, ready to offer an ambiguous apology, but his face is full of warmth—there’s no judgment there.
“We’ll have to lay off the mead next time,” he adds, and brings his head close to her thigh to find a crook in which he can nest.
Her chest puffs with the words “we” and “next time.” Then the panic returns. She looks around the room for a clock, then out the window, trying to see where the sun is. “What time is it?”
The Honey Farm Page 10