She’d asked Liss if she could borrow the bike. The bike. Why hadn’t Liss just said who the bike belonged to? Why hadn’t she spoken to her about it? She could’ve just said … What could she have just said? My ex-husband? My boyfriend? There was no second toothbrush in the bathroom. Or rather there was, the one she was using now, but that had been in its packet. No razor. No men’s deodorant or anything. But there was furniture in the rooms, not much, but still a bed and a desk, and Sally could see that someone else had lived there once. Maybe she’d had a lodger. It was hard to say whether men or women had lived in the other rooms. So she was alone on a farm where more people had once lived. What had happened? And why wouldn’t she talk about it? Sally had the feeling that Liss knew a lot more about her than she did about Liss. The longer she thought about it, the funnier that seemed. She wanted to know more about her. For the first time in ages, she wanted to know more about another person. Maybe this needed a different approach. Liss didn’t seem to like answering questions.
But then she hadn’t felt like staying on the farm, so she’d asked Liss if she could lend her the bike. Liss hadn’t answered and, in the end, Sally had simply taken it and ridden cross-country until she reached a small town where there was an internet café. She’d been without her phone for over a week now and, however much she resisted, she was missing it. The phone had been part of her life for so long … on the farm she’d had the feeling of being completely cut off. Liss did have a laptop, but Sally hadn’t felt any desire to ask if she could use it. And besides, she needed to get out. It was never good when she didn’t move. Maybe she’d already been on the farm for far too long. But then again, it was good there: she didn’t know of any other place like Liss’s farm for not trying to hold on to her.
She didn’t know of anywhere that hadn’t tried in some way to tie her down. Home. School. The clinics. As soon as you walked in, the tethers and chains and strings and nets grew out of the walls and out of the floor and down from the ceiling, and it became increasingly difficult to walk around them, and it became increasingly impossible to move away from home and school and her friends’ houses, and from everywhere in general. They were supple chains and elastic tethers and rubber nets, but the further you wanted to get away, the more they pulled at you, pulled you gently back; at night they grew sticky and heavy, and you had to keep your mouth shut and breathe through your nose to stop them crawling inside you. Or they stuck to food and you accidentally swallowed them down like a hair, a hair that never stopped growing ever thicker and more rigid and then pulled at you from inside till you had to puke. That was why it was sometimes better not to eat.
But as she’d ridden the bike through the fields and villages, through the clear autumn air, she hadn’t felt anything pulling. Liss’s farm didn’t pull on her. She was still free. She’d bought coffee in the town, and checked her groups from the internet café. It felt funny to see that she wasn’t much of a big deal. Someone had written somewhere that she’d run away from the clinic. And Eve – screw Eve – had commented on everything in that ‘wow, seriously man I’m so sorry for her’ tone. Sally had read that and left the group. Then she’d drunk her coffee. Later, when she’d been wheeling her bike through the streets of a strange town in the afternoon sun, she’d bought a scoop of strawberry ice cream from the ice-cream café and sat at a fountain until it was all eaten. She’d got back in the middle of the night and slept in late and read all the next day. She’d been ten the last time she’d done that.
Today, by contrast, she’d woken up early. After all, she hadn’t exactly done anything to tire herself out. She could hear Liss in the bathroom, so it had to be really early. She lay there even though she urgently needed a piss. She waited until she’d heard Liss go downstairs before jumping out of bed and walking over to the bathroom. It was still pretty dark, but she didn’t put the light on. That way, the colours stayed as quiet as the morning. She went to the washbasin, turned on the tap, saw the drops of blood on the rim and thought maybe she’d hurt herself without noticing, in her sleep perhaps; sometimes she scratched the tops off mosquito bites and didn’t notice, but there was nothing on her face. She scooped water with both hands and poured it over the stains; the blood dissolved slowly, washed into the plughole and disappeared. She splashed her face with water, cold water. When cold water touched your forehead, it set off a reflex. The tall doctor had explained that once. Cold water in your nose or on your forehead. Like in babies. The heartrate slowed and the breathing stopped. If babies fell into water, they didn’t drown. Or not right away, anyway. As for her … she always felt her heart slowing when she washed her face with ice-cold water. Her breathing stopping so that, for a moment, she couldn’t breathe even if she wanted too. It was a good feeling.
She got dressed and went down to the kitchen. Liss was sitting at the table, one leg drawn up onto the chair, eating fruit and yogurt, and drinking tea.
Sally mumbled good morning and sat down on the bench. She reached out a hand for the teapot, but Liss moved faster and passed it to her. Liss had a bandage around her left forearm, the blood hadn’t soaked through but she could see it shimmering in three places: reddish, longish marks. It was immediately familiar to Sally because she’d seen that so often on herself.
Her first impulse was to stand up and tip the teapot over, or smash it on the floor. What was that about? Was it a kind of … what was that? How sick was that? Did she want to…
‘Hey!’ she said aloud. ‘Hey, what … what the … what is that shit? Are you playing at…’ She didn’t know what it was. She pointed at Liss’s arm. ‘Do you think that’s funny or what? Is that … what the fuck?’ she repeated when words failed her.
Liss had put the newspaper down. She ran her right hand gently over the bandage.
‘I wanted to know what it was like,’ she said calmly. ‘I couldn’t imagine … I wanted to know how it feels.’
‘And?’ Sally yelled, but it was totally not the fury she was familiar with, it was a different kind of fury. Like … furious sympathy. She hated it. She wanted to be furious. Just furious. ‘And? Does it turn you on, being a psycho, huh? Welcome to the club. Welcome to the cutter club.’
Liss stood up and fetched the honey from the cupboard before answering.
‘It hurts.’
‘Of course it hurts,’ Sally exclaimed. She wanted to yell, but she wasn’t angry enough anymore. She was just raising her voice now. ‘Of course it hurts. What did you expect?’
‘Nothing. That’s why I tried it. Would you like some honey?’
‘No.’
Sally gulped her tea.
‘Yes.’
Liss handed her the jar. Sally unscrewed the lid and dunked her knife, twisting it as she drew it out to stop the honey dripping, and then used the knife to stir it into her tea. Liss looked at her. Sally stared challengingly back. She laid the knife on the plate. Suddenly she grinned:
‘You don’t have to go and copy that too.’
Liss laughed as if she’d been liberated. ‘Would you like to see where it comes from?’
‘What?’
Liss pointed at the honey.
‘You make it yourself?’ Sally asked in surprise, before continuing hastily, with a crooked smile: ‘That was stupid, OK. But have you really got bees?’
Liss stood up. ‘In the garden.’
Sally drank up her tea and followed her outside.
How luminous these September days could be! She couldn’t remember ever having found an autumn this beautiful. OK, when she was little there’d sometimes been days at the end of the holidays that had had a bit of what she was feeling today. But it was as if it were the other way around, as if what she’d sensed back then had been a faint echo of the emotion she was feeling so intensely today. What was in this September glow, this boundless sky, this morning? It was as though the world wanted to show her once more how beautiful it could be, how many colours it had, how fresh it could smell.
Liss walked ahead of her with the calm, casual, long stride of a tall woman who had no problem with her height. Sometimes Sally thought that walk was pretty cool. It was stupid to kid yourself. Nobody would notice either way. Until Liss suddenly stumbled, making Sally laugh. The hens were so stupid; they always managed to run between your legs, so that it was genuinely difficult not to step on them. Liss turned to her with a smile.
‘Most accidents happen in the house or yard … including to chickens.’
‘Yes,’ Sally answered mischievously, ‘it’s a miracle chickens have survived evolution to this point.’
Liss walked round the corner past the machine shed.
‘Here.’
In the corner between the fence and the roughly plastered, windowless wall of the machine shed were a row of boxes stood on legs, standing in the semi-shade of a large bush.
‘Those are the hive entrances.’ Liss pointed to the narrow slit at the bottom of every box. Sally had barely been able to make them out at first because there were so many bees everywhere, coming in to land, taking off, buzzing, closely packed, crowding, crawling over one another and forming a compact cluster outside every hive. Sally crouched down in front of one. It almost looked like a morning on the U-Bahn. Everyone milling out, everyone milling in. She had never seen so many bees so close before. After a while, she could make out some kind of order. At any rate, they managed the take-offs and landings with fewer collisions than the commuters on her rush-hour underground journeys.
‘Can we collect some honey?’ she asked, still watching the bees.
Liss shook her head.
‘Far too late. You harvest honey in July. The bees’ year is almost over. But we still have to have a look inside. Oh, I forgot something. Can you get some icing sugar from the pantry? There’s a packet on the butcher’s block.’
‘For the bees?’ asked Sally.
‘Yes,’ Liss smiled, ‘but not the way you think.’
Sally ran back to the house. I’m part of something right now, she thought. I don’t know exactly what. I’m part of this sunny day now. I’m part of Liss’s work now. I’m part of this house now.
She wasn’t at all sure whether that was a good thing. But at that moment, it felt right.
Icing sugar. She’d only been in the pantry once. Here you could still see that there must have been a much older house on this site. Below the window, the floor bulged – the cellar steps were probably beneath it. It looked kind of archaic. As she took the packet of icing sugar from the butcher’s block, she saw the knives hanging there, with their dark-stained wooden handles. Without thinking, she reached for one and held it in her hand. You could feel from the handle that it had been used ten thousand times before. It felt very good. For a moment, she simply wanted to have it, simply to pocket it, but then she hung it back up. She could always … she could always ask Liss about it.
When she got back to the beehives, Liss had spread a piece of canvas on the ground. Standing beside it were a white plastic bowl full of water and two see-through measuring cups, one of which had a sieve for a lid. Sally hadn’t a clue what all this was for.
‘You’re not afraid of being stung, I presume.’
Liss glanced over at Sally, who shook her head.
‘But we’ll put these on anyway,’ said Liss as she reached for the two hats in the grass beside her. Sally put one on. The veil fell softly over her face. Liss handed her a pair of gloves too.
‘In case you accidentally put your hand into the bees.’
Now she was intrigued.
‘We have to work fast now,’ explained Liss. ‘We’re going to sugar the bees, you see.’
What? Was Liss winding her up? Was this some kind of secret language? But then she saw that one corner of Liss’s mouth was twitching half mockingly.
‘Yes. Seriously. You’ll see. Watch out, I need you to hold the measuring cup – not the big one, that one there’ – she pointed at the container without the lid – ‘right under the tarp so I can shake the bees into it. We need a hundred mills precisely.’
‘For real?’ Sally looked up suspiciously. ‘We need a hundred millilitres of bees?’
‘Yes,’ said Liss briefly. ‘That’ll be five hundred of them, give or take a few.’
‘Whatever you say,’ said Sally, picking up the cup. It measured exactly a hundred millilitres. ‘And then what do I do?’
‘You tip them into the big jug and put the lid on. Ready?’
Liss didn’t even wait for her to answer. All at once she was moving very fluidly, confidently and as if every handhold was exactly where it should be. She opened one of the hives, pulled out a panel that was covered all over with bees, layer upon layer of bees, and banged one edge hard onto the canvas. The bees rained down onto it. Liss put the panel away, picked up the cloth and folded it, enclosing the bees in a kind of bundle.
‘Now,’ Liss ordered, and Sally held the jug under one corner of the folded tarpaulin, Liss tipped it and poured bees into Sally’s container.
‘Stop,’ said Sally when the cup was full; she was already holding the other one when she felt a sharp pain in her forearm. A bee had stung her. She resisted the temptation to brush it off, tipped the contents of the small jug into the big one, dropped the little one and put the lid on. Liss dropped the rest of the bees from the tarpaulin almost carelessly back into the hive. Sally rubbed her arm. It was … It hurt, but it was a strangely good feeling. Liss took the cup from her hand.
‘Now the sugar. Quick. If the bees are in there too long, it’ll get damp.’
Sally handed her the sugar. Liss dusted a little – maybe a spoonful – onto the sieve and shook. The sugar fell down onto the bees in the container, made them dusty; they were all powdered white with icing sugar.
‘What … why are you doing that?’ She was no longer suspicious, just fascinated.
‘Hang on,’ answered Liss, looking at the watch on her wrist. It was a man’s watch. It suited her. She shook the jug hard, waited quite a while, shook it again while keeping her eyes on her watch, and then again.
‘The bowl,’ she said.
Sally reached for the white plastic water bowl and was about to hand it to her, but Liss waved her away, upended the measuring cup over the bowl and dusted the water. The sugar instantly dissolved. A few black dots were floating in the water.
‘Shall I pour it away?’ asked Sally.
‘No!’ cried Liss, almost alarmed. ‘No. Wait a moment.’
She took off the lid, went over to the hive and shook the bees cautiously out again. Then she took the bowl from Sally’s hand and put it on the next hive along.
‘The black dots,’ she explained, ‘are mites. Varroa mites. They can destroy a colony of bees within a year. And they’re everywhere. I need to know how bad the infestation is to know whether the bees need treating. Count them.’
Sally leant over the bowl.
‘Fifteen,’ she said. ‘No, sixteen. What’s the sugar for?’
‘The mites cling to the worker bees. The icing sugar makes them lose their grip. And because it dissolves immediately in water, you can make out the mites.’
Sally wondered how anyone had come up with such a bizarre idea as dusting bees with icing sugar so you could see mites. The weirdest thing of all was that it seemed to work.
‘What now?’
Liss counted again.
‘Yes. Sixteen. That’s right on the limit. We’ll have to treat them, but not necessarily today. And we’ll have to check the others too.’
‘OK,’ said Sally. She rubbed the sting. It had already stopped hurting. She looked into the hive. That was awesome. That was so awesome! The sugared bees were being cleaned by the others. She began to understand why Liss had bees. Maybe it wasn’t just about the honey. Maybe it was about … discovering something. The way she’d done just now.
‘Ready?’ asked Liss. She’d spread the tarpaulin in front of the other hive. Sally picked up the cup.
‘Ready,’ she said.
For the first time in months, she was happy for a moment.
Your parents aren’t that shit.
You have no idea.
No. They’re nice.
Yes. Exactly.
She and Ben were sitting on the bike racks outside the shopping centre. Everyone went there. They listened to music. They watched YouTube videos of dancing cats and ones where little kids on tricycles were put on low diving boards by their parents and then pedalled to the end of the boards and fell in the water. It was kind of mean, but it still made them laugh every time.
Why do we laugh at it?
Because it’s funny.
Ben was right. It was kind of funny. And kind of not.
It’s like my parents, she said.
What?
What you said. Them being nice. It’s kind of true and kind of not at all.
All parents are like that. Mine too.
No, she said, you don’t understand. Your family’s different.
Want an ice cream? I’ll get you one.
No. Hey, are you even listening?
Ben was already heading to the kiosk to get ice cream. Over the road was the bus station. The waiting buses sometimes seemed to Sally like large, sleeping animals, breathing slowly. But she never said that kind of stuff. Not even to Ben.
The other girls glanced fleetingly over to her. When Ben wasn’t there, their expressions were different. They went back to normal. When he was around, they meant: how did she bag him? She didn’t even know herself. Ben actually played tennis. She’d never wanted a boyfriend who played tennis. But maybe she just had to take what she could get, she thought mockingly, and found herself grinning.
How’s it going with you guys?
Eve strolled past. I’m-playing-grown-ups pretty. She even had a clutch bag, which had probably contained the same condom for months, nestled beside her pink mobile. Eve wanted Ben, and she probably still didn’t understand what he was doing with Sally.
Hey guys, what’s up?
Nothing.
I can tell.
Get lost, Eve. Is bugging me your only goal in life? What will you do when I’m dead?
Eve grinned.
Console Ben.
Fuck you, bitch.
Fuck yourself. Oh no, actually don’t. Nobody wants to do you. So why should you have to bother?
She strolled on. Arse waggling. Sooo casual. Sooo pseudo-sexy. Sally jumped down from the bike rack. She longed to throw something at her, but there weren’t even any stones around here. Such a nice, clean city.
Ben came back. He was licking an ice cream and holding the other one out to her.
I brought you one anyway. Want it?
Give it to Eve, she spat.
Why? What’s wrong?
Why not check with my parents?
I don’t know what this is all about, said Ben.
No, you don’t.
She ran between the buses to the footbridge that led over the ridiculous stream and to the cemetery. Ben followed her.
Sal, wait! Wait a minute.
She ran on, down the cycle path. Tall poplars on either side. At the cemetery entrance was a bench she liked. She liked to watch the people going to the cemetery. When you came here, everything was clear. On both sides. One lot were dead. The other lot came to visit. There was no more room for misunderstanding.
Sheesh, gasped Ben, what did you run like that for?
I don’t feel at home.
Sally said it abruptly, almost pleadingly. She wanted Ben to understand her. She climbed onto the bench and sat on the back.
Do you know what that’s like? I’m not at home when I’m at home.
I get that.
He didn’t get it; Sally could see that. But she wanted him to understand her. There was nobody else.
I’m like … like a guest. My parents are nice to me like I’m a guest. I don’t know what to do with what they do. None of it. It’s not just … it’s not just because they listen to different music and do other stuff and that. They don’t understand what goes on inside me. They don’t understand…
She hesitated.
Sometimes I listen to a song and it’s like if a back door opens a tiny crack, somewhere right on the other side of the house, and I hear it from my room and start running because I know that it’s there behind the door, my real home. But before I’ve even got down the stairs, it’s shut again.
But you’ve only got the front door.
Aren’t you listening?
Sally was almost screaming with despair.
It’s just … doesn’t that ever happen to you? Sometimes music does that and sometimes a picture and sometimes it’s just some place, like here among the tall trees. Then you know that your real life is there somewhere, and not this one here. Then you suddenly know that all this here is like a … a film or a play or something. That none of it’s real. Don’t you ever get that?
Sometimes.
You never get that.
Sally felt empty.
Yes I do. But not the way you do, I don’t think.
No. I don’t think so either. Can you … Do you want to sit here? With me? I like it when people go to the cemetery. They all have a particular face. Shall we watch people?
Why don’t we go back to the others?
Sally looked into the young leaves on the poplars. Above them the sky was still bright. The long spring evenings were the worst. Then it tugged at her, from deep within, and she thought that one day, if she didn’t follow the tug, it would pull her insides out. Maybe that was what homesickness was like. She’d never been homesick when she’d been on a school trip or a residential or a summer camp. It was probably homesickness for the place you actually ought to be. For a home that you didn’t even know yet, but which was waiting for you. Sally was afraid that it wouldn’t wait forever and that she’d end up broken because it tugged at her too hard, that she’d end up inside out, with all her delicate innards on the outside, and then it would be too late because you couldn’t live inside out.
OK. Let’s go back to the others.