I woke up to blood. Tiny, tiny drops of it on my pillow. I examined them through my sleep-blurred eyes. Then I felt the sting of a cut in my finger. It was small, like the droplets of blood, but it was there. It took me a few minutes to discover what it was – a discovery that rather pleased me. There was a large stag beetle, the size of a small mouse, climbing up my wall near my bed. I knew they would come. Animals usually sought me out. I think it was because they knew I wasn’t a threat. I was curious rather than predatory.
‘Hello,’ I said to it. ‘What shall we do with you, then?’ I scooped him up in my hands, feeling his pincers trying to cut me again. I let him cut me. I didn’t mind. After all, he was here first. I was the one trespassing on his territory.
I walked down the stairs, giving them some celebratory creaks (maybe more creatures will come, I thought). Dad was in the kitchen, a small, cold place, colder than the rest of the house, which was odd as I’d always thought of the kitchen as being the warmest, filled with stoves and ovens. In spite of the cold, Dad was just in his pants, brandishing a screwdriver over the old toaster from home as he leaned over the rough, stained kitchen table.
‘Dad?’ I said, watching him from the doorway.
‘Morning, Kitty,’ he said, not looking up.
‘How old are you?’ I asked.
He looked up then, clearly surprised by my question. ‘I’m thirty.’
‘How old were you when you stopped crying when you hurt your hand or got a cut or fell over?’
He looked a little irritated now, and turned back to the toaster. ‘Er … I don’t know. Probably your age.’
‘I’ve been bitten by a beetle more than once this morning and I haven’t cried once. I haven’t really felt the need to.’
He gave me one of his confused looks. He often looked confused when I told him things I found interesting.
‘Mum cries all the time though,’ I said, a little quietly.
‘Well, Mum’s different,’ he said. He seemed to be finished with the plug part of the toaster now and went to plug it into the wall. ‘The bread’s stale,’ he nodded towards the loaf. ‘We should have got some on the way last night but I didn’t really think about it. So we’ll toast it. Then it will taste fine.’
‘Will it?’ I asked, rather surprised by this new information.
‘It will. Come and sit down.’
I looked around the kitchen and found what I was looking for. I dragged a small but deepish bowl from the countertop and dropped the beetle into it. ‘What the hell is that?’ he said, looking at the bowl in disgust.
‘The beetle. The one I just told you about.’
‘We don’t want it in here. Throw it out in the garden. You can’t carry on with this weird animal adoption thing, Kitty. You’re getting too old for it now. It may have been, I don’t know, cute or eccentric when you were young. You’re ten years old now … it’s just not normal.’
He stopped, then turned away as if he’d changed his mind.
‘Why?’ I said, folding my arms. He was starting to upset me, but I tried not to show it.
‘It’s just not … something you should be doing.’
I kept my arms folded. ‘Mum used to say my creature curiosity was the sign of a mind that one day would do great things – because I’m interested in things. In animals, in wildlife, in—’
‘OK, OK,’ he said, holding up his hands. ‘I’m sure that’s all very true. But your mum doesn’t like little creatures any more, does she? You’ve seen how she can react to them. Just … just chuck the beetle out, all right?’
‘After the toast,’ I said, sitting down. I could see him deciding whether to argue further or not. He chose not to. It was for the better, I thought.
He left me to my breakfast, muttering about unpacking some clothes and going for a pee. He was right about the toast. It didn’t taste stale, although I had to cut off a little green bit on the side. I accidentally ate some of it before the amputation and it tasted like plants. Strong ones, with a bitter, furry taste. The rest of the two slices was fine, though.
Dad came back quicker than I expected, dressed in a t-shirt and one of his older pairs of jeans with a few holes in them. ‘Where’s Mum?’ I asked immediately.
He let out one of his I-would-prefer-not-to-talk-about-it sighs. ‘She’s still asleep.’
‘Do you need me to wake her?’ I went to stand up.
‘No.’ His hand shot out to stop me. He gripped me – not too hard, but firm. ‘Please, Kitty. Just let her sleep. It’s still very early. It’ll be the only peace and quiet I’ll get all day.’ He looked sad when he said this, and the lines on his face seemed more there than usual. Jemimah Prince at school once described my dad to her mother as ‘a young popstar dad’ compared to her ‘crumbly old git of a dad’. Jemimah’s mum didn’t seem too impressed with this description and told her daughter to keep such rude evaluations about her father to herself. She said her comments about my dad were ‘inappropriate’ and then frowned at me, as if I’d said them. I didn’t really know what to think. I didn’t think my dad looked like a popstar. I suppose his tallish thinness and dark-brown hair made him more noticeable than the chubbier, slightly grey-haired dads I sometimes saw at school plays or Christmas fetes, but to me he was just my dad. Nothing more remarkable than that. But now, I wondered if Jemimah were sitting at this table at this moment and saw those lines on my dad’s face, with his tired, dark eyes and sad expression, whether she’d still describe him in the same way. I thought it unlikely.
‘Let’s go and take your beetle outside,’ he said, sounding kinder now. ‘We’ll say goodbye to him together. OK?’
I nodded and counted the burn marks on the kitchen table while he went to find a jumper from the car. I had already got dressed, but Dad had something draped over his arm and seemed keen for me to take it. ‘You’ll be a bit cold,’ he said. ‘Put your mum’s coat round you.’
I’d worn Mum’s coat before and I had always liked how much it smelled of home – when home was a happy place, a place I liked to remember. A little while ago, probably just over a year back, Mum and I would spend most Saturday mornings going to the shops to buy ingredients for a pie, then spend the afternoon making it. Rolling the pastry together, filling the insides with apple in sugary syrup from a tin, her telling me what a clever girl I was when I made a pattern on the outside that went all the way round the rim. Thinking about this made me a little sad, so I wrapped the coat around me, bunching it up so that it didn’t trail along the ground, and tried to press the thoughts out of my mind. I followed Dad as he carried the bowl with the beetle in and walked away from the house through the trees. Their branches went high – higher than most trees I’ve seen – and although it was autumn, most of them still had their leaves, dark green and spiky, sticking to their branches. ‘Here we go,’ Dad said, kneeling down by one. ‘This is far enough away from the house. Let’s let him out here.’ He handed me the bowl.
I didn’t say anything as I let the beetle go. I would have been sad if I was at home. Friends like a large stag beetle were hard to come by, though perhaps not quite so hard as human friends. One of the nicer teachers at school, Mrs Clifton – she taught another class but helped out at break times – once took me aside at the end of lunchtime play and asked if I’d like it if she helped me make some friends and how she was worried she always saw me on my own. I said I was fine as I was, watching the butterflies on the bushes and the birds nesting in the trees. She went away eventually, but part of me wondered how things would have been if I’d said yes, I would like some human friends. But I missed my chance, and she didn’t ask again.
‘No! No! No!’ I heard the shrieks and dropped the bowl.
Dad jerked around quickly, then immediately started walking towards the little house. ‘Come in, Kitty,’ he said sharply.
‘I will not do it!’ My mother’s shouts echoed around me and I watched my dad go inside the house. Heard him trying to calm her.
I turned back to the beetle. He wasn’t moving. Just standing on the trunk of the tree. Poised. Unsure. Sensing danger.
I know how you feel, I thought. Then I put my cut fingers into my mouth and sucked them gently as I went back inside.