The wrongness sweeps over me, obliterates the butterflies, leaves only black insect legs, squirming and scrabbling in my mind. This time I push away for good, retreat, wrap my arms around my body and shake my head at it, no, no, until it moves back and leaves me alone.
It drops into the hole, and is gone.
Did my mother hum to me when I was little? Did she touch me, hold me, fill me with her noise and her thoughts? This loneliness I feel is of the womb, borne by women. I was sixteen when they all died and I thought I understood this loss, but it comes to me that I didn’t know what women gave to the world. It wasn’t about their lips, their eyes or the gentle quality of their voices. It was about the way that all men are a part of them. And now we are part of nothing.
There are no more stories. I can make no words. There are only sounds from deep within my chest, from a cavity that has been lurking inside me, unnoticed, for years. It is a pain so deep, so black, and I cannot bear it. I must fill it, find a way to stop it up. It will devour me.
The thing returns. I watch it crawl up to me, as it takes hold of me in its cold yellow arms and rocks me, all the while humming. Its joy at the knowledge that we are together overwhelms everything, and keeps me quiet.
My mother was not a beautiful woman in her own eyes. Once, when I was a young boy, I found a magazine under her sleeping bag. It was slippery, glossy, smooth to the touch. Inside were collections of thoughts on how to be thinner, better, happier, as if these things were part of a pattern, like honeycomb. And the women were strange, elongated creatures with diamond faces, their bodies held at odd, difficult angles. I found them disturbing and I asked my mother that night – before I realised that not all thoughts were suitable for mothers – why they made me feel that way.
She told me it was a sign that I was beginning to grow up. ‘All men want to look at beautiful women. Especially your father,’ she said, with such envy and sadness and disgust in her voice. I could see she wanted to be like those women, although I couldn’t understand why. And so beauty became something unobtainable, something to be admired and feared, beyond my reach, even my understanding.
Now, in the thing’s embrace, I spend longer there every day, never wanting to be apart from it. I find a name for it. I call it Bee. Bee for Beauty. It is not inaccessible or frightening. Everything it thinks, feels, wants and needs is open to my discernment. Beauty is a word that has a different meaning for me now and I am delighted to have reclaimed it.
Bee is so cool, so soft, like a sponge wrapping itself around me in the midst of a terrible fever. It moulds itself to me, sits astride my lap and takes my cock inside it. I sink into it like pressing into mud and Bee gives, gives, gives until I am fully inside. I feel our pleasure, our amazement, our amplified, doubled joy. We are drawn into ourselves, completely without the world.
Afterwards, when I feel sick at what I have done, Bee hums and soothes me, assures me that it is not unnatural or wrong. It implants strange images in me of earthy darkness, of waiting, growing, moving to sunlight, opening, learning and expanding. Like being a baby in a womb, deep in the mother and unaware of anything but that sharp, tingling and delicious edge of potential.
I know Bee is not alone. It shows me images of others growing from the bodies of women, mingling with their cells, learning about us and themselves. Bee shows me many of them close by, connected in thought, hoping for men to learn to love them and take them into their own.
In my mind I gently show Bee my own initial repulsion once more. Can that be overcome? And yet, why shouldn’t it be? If I can overcome this repulsion, so can the others. And my optimism spreads into Bee, infects it too. It stands, lifts me up, and holds me in its arms. Bee is so strong. It drops into the hole and carries me through the darkness, out of a sloping tunnel to where there is sharp sunlight. The frost is sweet like the crunch of apples. And everywhere there are Beauties, yellow Beauties like my love, soft and cold, wanting nothing but to be warmed by men.
Music. I have missed it. There is more than one way to make a long tale in mind and memory; Landers is playing the guitar and singing while Keith D fiddles. They sing of soul cakes, a winter song, and I realise I have been under the ground for too long. My famous sense of time and place has left me; this is the wrong song for late autumn but it is a good song, one of my favourites. The humanity in me jumps up and begs to draw closer.
But I keep my distance, just out of the light of the flames, and let my eyes play over the familiar faces: William, Eamon, the lads, even Uncle Ted, who looks unchanged except for the sadness that sits on his shoulders.
Why is he here, by the fire? To mourn me? Is that why they play my favourite song and yet nobody dances? I am dead to them. If I do not act now somebody will get up at the end of the song and tell stories of me; I remember when and Wasn’t he and I’ll miss his and other things that a living person should never hear about themselves in case it changes the way they choose to carry on living.
So I come into the circle.
The music stops. Fingers and mouths are frozen. Even William is without comment. His face is a picture of surprise. Uncle Ted is the first to move. He gets up, takes long strides until he is putting his arms around me so I am pressed to his leather coat.
He is saying, ‘Where have you been? Where have you been?’ over and over with no pause, no drawing of breath. It brings the Group to life. They rush to me and surround me, talking to themselves, to each other, Who would have believed, We thought he was, How can he be. I let their words be a blanket for me, wrapping me in their joy and concern.
Then William is there, pushing his way through to stand toe to toe with me. Uncle Ted lets me go. The others step back.
‘Ted said you disappeared. We searched. No signs, no trail. Nothing. Ben and Thomas are gone too.’
‘I was kept safe,’ I tell him.
William assesses me with his straight gaze, the one he keeps only for important judgements. ‘You were kept?’
‘Unharmed. All is well. All is good.’
‘There are… people in the wood? Another Group? Will they have Ben and Thomas?’
‘Not a Group.’
Uncle Ted says, ‘Let him get warm, for Heaven’s sake,’ and pushes William out of the way. He leads me forward to the glow of the fire which is bright against my face. It is an unpleasant sensation after so long in the dampness of the earth; I feel my skin tightening, the hairs on my body lying flat and sleek in response and my pupils contracting.
‘I have a story,’ I say. ‘The story of what happened to me out there.’
‘Time for that later,’ says Uncle Ted, but the younger ones are already buzzing, settling themselves down, and I know they have missed this. Nobody could take my place. I am given the confidence to tell the story I have been shaping, and they will listen to the end. They will understand what I have to tell them.
In the beginning there was a lonely orphan boy. His father was only known to him as a figment of his own imagination and his mother went the way of all women. He mourned them, but not excessively so for he was only as lonely as every other man he knew and it would have been selfish to weep when others must work.
So he worked too. He was lucky, he had a talent for tales: long tales, short tales, tales of reality, of mystery and of imagination. The other men recognised his talent and encouraged it. All men should be so lucky, but the truth is – talent does not touch us all. The orphan appreciated this and did not squander his talent or waste his words. He worked very hard to entertain and delight his listeners around the fireside, and his talent and his tales grew a little more every day.