It started off as a great day. Sun was high but not too hot, the birds were making a lot of noise and enough rabbits were running to keep Jip happy as we wove our way closer to the centre of the city.
Birdsong like this was still a new thing to me. On the islands, there were occasional shrieks and caws and the lonely piping of single birds flying across the moor, but the birdlife was too thinly stretched to make anything at all like the constant noise that you get on the mainland. To begin with, I found the songs of the different birds was like a tumble of conflicting sounds, none of them particularly loud on their own, but relentless in the way they pecked at your attention from all sides—a coo here, a tweet there and a warble from somewhere else. And because they were all different noises, I kept twisting around, trying to spot where they were coming from, to see what bird made which noise. And then after a bit the fact the noise was always there seemed to blur those distinctive bits together into a wash of sound, like the sea. It became background and not something I spent any more time trying to unpick into the individual parts it was made of. By the time I met John Dark, the ever-present din of the birdlife all around me had become—like the sea too—a comforting noise. I had also got used to the fact it sounded different at dawn to the way it did as the light left the sky at the end of the day. And although I hadn’t got very far with identifying the various species, I had worked out which birds were pigeons and which were magpies from the small book I’d found in the museum shop.
There was one different-looking bird that had sandy feathers mottled with darker brown ones that flew across our path as we rode down a sloping ramp that took us off the raised M road. I think it was a song thrush. It made a happy piping sound as it flew high above us, and when I looked over at the woman I saw that for a moment she’d lost her stern mask and let the younger face she kept hidden behind it have a moment in the sun as she too watched the bird jink and climb over our heads into the clear blue sky, looking as if it was singing and flying just for the joy of it.
Then her mask came back down and she nudged her horse forward towards a gap in the overgrown ruins ahead of us. She knew where she was going, and my horse just followed her lead. A brick-built building had given up trying to keep standing tall at some time in the recent past and had slumped across the narrow alley, filling the space with an untidy jumble of bricks and glass. John Dark sucked her teeth in disapproval and turned her horse to the side, finding a narrower alley to go down. I don’t think she wanted to risk the horses cutting themselves or stumbling on the new rubble. One thing I had noticed by then was the way you could easily tell what ruin was new and what had fallen down a long time ago by the way the vegetation overgrew it. New rubble shifted under your feet, but as soon as moss and grass and the roots of plants had taken hold, it quickly became stable as the plants and the dirt bound it together.
We emerged from the alley and pushed our way through an area of scrubby bushes that were all about as high as the horses’ shoulders. This had been an open area in the middle of the city, and once there had been light poles to illuminate it. They were corroded into sharp stubs, or had tilted and fallen, pulled down by the weight of the creepers that had overgrown them, but they were regularly spaced, which made it easy to spot them once you had seen the pattern. There were also trees that had grown randomly among them, and after I had ducked beneath one as we passed, imitating John Dark just ahead of me, I straightened up to see the three men standing in front of me.
They had their backs to us, and the one in the middle had his hand raised in greeting so that I instinctively looked beyond him trying to see who might be waving back at them. But there was no one there, not even them really: they were just statues facing a great tangle of wreckage where one end of a huge stadium had collapsed a long time ago, making a hill of massive concrete slabs and twisted metal pipes, all now well bound together by the encroaching plant life. The statues were men and all wore short trousers and had their arms around each other, like brothers. One of them was bald and had a football held against his hip. When I guided my horse around the front of them, I could see they all had expressions that weren’t quite smiles, but more like they were expecting something. Whatever it was, it had either come and gone, or perhaps just had never arrived. All they had to look at was a ruin now. Not that they seemed upset about it. Brambles had grown around the block of stone they stood on, but I could still see one word carved in it. It said “BEST”. So I expect these were the best players in the team. I was looking into their faces, wondering what they had looked like in real life, when John Dark whistled at me.
E. C., she said, and stopped her horse.
She grimaced as she got off, and had to catch hold of the saddle to stop herself stumbling to her knees. She didn’t like that I’d seen the weakness, and made a great show of teaching me how to hang the horse’s reins over its head so they dragged on the ground in front of it so that it wouldn’t walk off, and then took things from her saddlebags and beckoned me to follow her up the hill of debris.
I left my horse and did so. There was broken glass beneath the moss, so we both trod carefully, but the building had been down long enough for nature to have bound it back into the earth and made it stable. And then, following her footsteps, I found myself at the top of the greenish hill the rubble was now turning into, looking down into what had once been a football field. It was now a hidden oasis of deeper green, with a stand of what I now knew were oak trees at one end, and a thicket of flowering hawthorn in the middle. Rabbits darted among the long grass around the trees, turning tails as white as the May blossom when they ran away at the sight of us. Jip immediately set off like an arrow, his mindset on serious business as he plunged into the undergrowth.
The other three sides of the stadium were in better shape than the one we were standing on, but on two of them the jutting roof that had once sheltered watchers from the rain or sun had dipped and collapsed in on the endless rows of faded pink plastic seats below. Trying to imagine the number of people this arena must have held, what that looked like, what that must have sounded like, made my head hurt. Does absence have a weight? I think it does, because I stood there feeling crushed by something I couldn’t see. It was a much stronger feeling than the one I had when looking at a landscape full of empty streets. Perhaps it was because so many people had once chosen to come and squeeze in close to each other in this single space. Again, there are no such things as ghosts. It didn’t feel haunted. But it did feel like something. Like it had once been peopled—and very densely peopled—and now it just wasn’t. It was unpeopled, in the same way something can’t be undone unless it has first been done. This was the atmosphere I had been trying to understand ever since I stepped on to the mainland, and it was a very different feeling to just being empty. It was more like loneliness, not mine from finding myself alone in this world, but this world’s loneliness without you. It had known you, and now you’re gone—and maybe this is just for a while, perhaps until the signs of you having been here are worn away and your houses and roads and bridges and football stadiums have been swallowed back into nature—it will miss you.
Or maybe I’m going a bit mad thinking like this and then taking the trouble to write my crazy thoughts down so that a long-dead boy who will never read them will know what my theories are about a world he can never visit. Maybe that’s what happens when you spend so long on your own, like I do now. Maybe I’m just talking to myself.
Anyway, the rest of the afternoon was a very good day. Until it wasn’t.
Once she had got moving, John Dark seemed happier about the pain from her wound and walked much less stiffly. She led me into the middle of what had been the field and closed her eyes, holding her finger to her lips. I listened. And then I heard it, just as she opened them again and looked a question at me.
It was a low humming noise, a gentle sound that filled the background and seemed to stroke the ears. Bees were thriving in the huge walled garden that the stadium had become, and there were a lot of them.
There were two fallen trees that had begun to rot from the middle out, and beside them was a strange kind of wooden shed on wheels. Maybe someone had, at the end of things, decided to come and live here behind the protection of the stadium walls. Maybe she kept the bees. Her shed on wheels had become a kind of huge beehive, and there were bees in the fallen trees too. It was a very protected space, and the meadow that the field had become must have been a ready supply of bee food.
John Dark pointed at a recent campfire and pointed at herself. I understood she had been here not long ago. This was how she knew about the bees. She then pointed to one of the fallen trees and grinned. We were going to get the honey from inside the trunk.
We worked together more or less in silence, and she was able to show me with deliberate movements what we were going to do. I don’t know if the silence was in order not to stir up the bees, or just because in doing something physical it was easier to mime, but it was a strangely calm and intimate way to spend time with another person.
I felt closer to her in those few hours than I had to anyone outside my family, now I look back on it. Even when working with the Lewismen, there was always a distance. Perhaps because we were two tribes—working together but supported by the others in our own family who also shared our difference to them. With one person, all those barriers went away, and we just talked with our hands and eyes.
Like I said. Intimate.
She built a fire on the ruins of her last one, and fed it until it got going. Then she moved the burning coals using her knife and the flat of a small hatchet and held them in front of the opening in the fallen trunk, right against the wood so that it began to scorch and smoulder. She fed that baby fire, indicating that I should keep the mother fire going as she did so. Then she started putting damper material on the smaller fire making it begin to smoke. The trick was to keep the core of the smaller fire hot enough and then to damp it with just enough material to keep it smoking heavily. Then she had me go into the stand to break off a plastic chair bottom. I shattered a couple because the material had become brittle with age, but on the third try I got a rough square and came back. She then had me fan the smoke plume so it entered the rotten hole in the trunk.
I should say that before we did all this we wound some sacking material she had in her saddlebags around our heads, and fastened our clothes so there was little chance of any of the bees getting in and stinging us. She had gloves too. I wound more material around my hands instead. I once read an old comic about an Egyptian god who came back from the dead as a mummy. That’s what we looked like. Half grotesque and half ridiculous. And me waving the seat back and forth, trying to create a breeze that would force the smoke in and the bees out. But of course there was no one to see us or laugh at the spectacle we must have made amid the smoke and the swarm of bees beginning to exit the trunk and buzz around us, out where the air was less thick.
She took her hatchet and began to hack efficiently at the rotten wood, enlarging the opening and exposing the honeycomb. The bee’s nest was formed in great rounded lobes of beeswax that looked fleshy and a little unearthly. I think it was the organic shape of the lobes that were in contrast with the geometric regularity of the honeycomb from which they were made. There were still big clumps of bees crawling over the fat lobes, which made them seem alive. We moved the fire closer and fanned the smoke until most were gone or just drowsing. And then, without warning me, she reached in with one hand and chopped a couple of the lobes free. The bees got angrier and less drowsy at that point, and some flew into the slit in my face covering that I’d left to see out of.
One of them stung me on the eyelid. I tried to keep fanning but the pain was like a hot needle had been stabbed into my eyeball. I gasped and staggered away, dropping the seat.
I heard her laughing and stumbled after her. The bees were buzzing louder as we emerged from the protective haze of the woodsmoke, but amazingly we weren’t followed by a large cloud of them trying to sting us in revenge for our theft. We stopped and sat on the crumbling cement steps at the far side of the field.
She looked elated, and carefully put the stolen honeycombs on the grass at our feet. Then she looked at the smoking tree trunk in the distance.
Mared! she said.
And then she took her largest water bottle and walked back into the smoke and the circling bee cloud. I thought it was a heroic thing to do. And it was the right thing too. I liked her for doing it. She kicked the fire away from the entrance to the trunk and poured water to douse the smouldering end. Having stolen some of their honey, she made sure that their home was not burned down at the same time. She even picked up the seat and put it on top of the hole she’d widened, giving them a new roof. Then she half ran, half danced out of range of the bees, laughing as she came. Once more, she looked younger than the face she normally wore. She sat next to me and unwound the sacking strips, using them to wrap the first piece of honeycomb which was about the size of her head in circumference, though flatter from the side. Then she clicked her fingers at me to take my bandages off to wrap the second piece. My eye had swollen alarmingly so that I could only see out of the other one, and she looked surprised when she saw it—though whether at what it looked like or at the fact I had not made more fuss about it I never knew.
Because at that point, the other—unsuspected—bee that had got inside my layers began to vibrate angrily against my neck, and everything began to go wrong fast. As I tore open the fastenings at the neck of my shirt, she saw something and her eyes widened. I saw it and thought for a moment that she had seen my secret, but then I checked and she looked away, and I knew it was not that but something else, something she was hiding. And because I was relieved it was not the one thing, and because my eye was really hurting quite badly, I did not take time to think too much about what the other thing she was reacting to might have been.
She rummaged in her bag, and took something out which she shoved in her pocket before turning back to me. She leant down and broke off a piece of honeycomb, squeezing the gold honey on to the finger of her other hand.
Then she pointed at my eye and held up the honeyed finger.
Bon, she said. La me-ay say bon poor sa.
I let her reach over and daub the honey on my bulging eyelid. It felt sticky and warm and then things suddenly got confusing and fast and then shockingly painful. Not the eye, but my neck, because on what was, because of the eye, my blind side she pulled the thing that she had shoved into her pocket out again and looped it quickly over my head and tugged it tight.
The thin copper wire of one of her rabbit snares bit into my neck as she leapt behind me and yanked my knife from my belt. It happened so fast I was frozen in confusion for a second, and then I was choking and trying to get my fingers under the noose so I could free myself. And then she hissed in my ear and jabbed the tip of my knife into the base of my skull, not hard, not enough to break the skin, but enough to warn me to be still.
She said a lot, very quickly, spitting and hissing the words out in a long stream of anger. I don’t know what she was saying, but it was not good. And then the knife hooked under the silver steel ball chain of my pendant. She worked it round until she could hold the pendant and look at the lucky eight in its circle of arrows.
She went quiet. I didn’t move. I was sure I could feel blood dripping from the wire around my neck. It could have been sweat.
All I could hear was the hum of the bees in the distance, that and my heart thumping away in my chest, like a panicked secret trying to punch its way out into the open air.
Pew-tan, she spat. There was wonder and disappointment in the way it came out. And anger. A lot of anger.
She yanked the chain so that it snapped. She hefted my pendant in her hand, staring at the symbol pressed into it.
My lucky eight, at the centre of all those arrows going everywhere.
But like I said, not good luck.
And with the wire round my neck, and the very angry woman keeping it cinched tight—not going anywhere either.
What? I said. My voice sounded ragged. What?
She held the pendant in front of my good eye and unleashed a torrent of words, only three of which I got as she showed me the symbol, too close to my eye to really focus on.
Ooh ate eel? she said. Ooh ate eel?