I am with Bee, in Bee; it is my only solace, my comfort, my distraction. What did I do before it? How can we need something so badly without knowing that the need exists?
Time has swept clean the cobwebs of panic that trailed across our faces when the women started falling sick. We thought we would all get sick. Men too. Why wouldn’t we? We lived in equality, didn’t we? It never occurred to us that the disease would not consider us all equal. There were days of hysteria. Hysteria, the sickness of the womb. And yet somehow William kept us together, even as only the women died.
He told us, if there is help, we will find it, and he sent down to the town, to the men in suits who came in their cars and struggled up the rocks to us with sombre faces that gave out the message so clearly that it was no shock that night when William repeated it to us.
‘Women everywhere are afflicted. So far there’s no cure.’
‘Only women?’ asked Miriam. I got the feeling she and William had already discussed the matter; the question had been planted to focus the Group’s attention on the problem.
‘Only women,’ said William. Someone moaned, long and deep. A terrible sound.
How I hate the sounds of pain.
Bee hums, and I am soothed. Bee never makes sounds that wound me. Even if I beat out its brains with a rock it would not scream or cry out. None of the Beauty would. They would simply leave, and that is why they are stronger than us. Because they do not have to fight at all. It is my job to make the men understand this. We are weaker than them.
After William’s announcement that night, after the Group had wept and railed and attempted to accept the end of half the world, the fireside became a terrible place. Landers and Keith D refused to play, and nobody would have sung anyway. Silence. It is worse than pain. It is my mortal enemy. It kills me, cuts me up, that dread silence of despair. Even back then I couldn’t bear it. I was sixteen years old and already an enemy of silence.
And so I stood up and started to talk. Nothing important. Nothing real. What surprised me, as I retold the plot of the book I had just finished reading, in which a boy wizard defeated a great evil, was that nobody stopped me. I talked for hours, and people listened because they hated the silence too. They were happy to create it, and then terrified by what they made. And so I came to understand the split at the root of the soul of all men.
When I ran out of voice, William said ‘That sounds exciting, Nate. Tell us more tomorrow’.
And so I did.
For the first time, tonight, in Bee’s arms, I worry that I am running out of stories. What will come out of my mouth? What can I say, in the face of what I have learned today?
Why does it even matter any more? Why, in the face of such suffering, do stories matter?
That is the worst thought of all, the thought I want to claw out of my head, wrap in a sack and throw into the sea.
Bee hums louder in my ear. My skin is pressed so close against its clammy yellow breasts that we are almost one.
‘Mother,’ I say. ‘Mother.’
‘It disgusts me,’ says William. ‘It should disgust us all.’
Nobody replies. Uncle Ted faces away from us and Eamon and Doctor Ben sit on the floor of the rough wooden lookout platform. I enjoy the view from the treehouse. The weather is warming up. The nettles are young and sweet for soup, and the birds only think of the need to nest. We have all settled into a pattern; we tessellate. It’s all I ever wanted, and yet it’s not everything. The pattern stretches only so far. I tell my stories every night with increasing desperation.
I preferred speaking about the past. There is so much to say about a past. It is a vein of gold through a mountain, leading to an incontrovertible stone heart of truth. But the future is a horizon – a faintly visible line that may promise much, and always remains too far away to touch. My eyes hurt from trying to see it clearly. And so much depends on me now.
I found some dark glasses of my mother’s amongst her old clothes and have taken to wearing them, much to William’s disapproval. The teenagers have gone one step further. They wear skirts, and cite the ease of joining with their Beauties – no more zips to undo, simply lift the material! – and the coolness that will benefit their packets as the summer approaches.
If it were only teenagers I don’t suppose William would be too offended. But it’s also Thomas, who spends all his time in a pink dress with puffed sleeves, a row of white buttons down the front as delicate as daisies. I burst out laughing the first time I saw him in it and he smiled, his cheeks reddening.
‘I know,’ he said, ‘don’t laugh. Honestly. Trousers have been cutting into my stomach.’
It was a feeble excuse, given that he has been losing so much weight recently. I raised an eyebrow at him, and he added, ‘Betty likes it too.’
‘How can you tell?’
‘Can’t you?’ he said, and I had to admit he was right. Betty stood in the corner of the kitchen and hummed with a contentment that sounded like a cat’s purr.
Since then, two weeks ago, I haven’t seen Thomas out of that dress. Perhaps that’s the reason William called this emergency meeting. What I don’t understand is why I’ve been invited.
‘It’s not right to wear them,’ says William, when nobody rushes to agree with him. ‘It’s disrespectful.’
‘There’s nobody left to disrespect,’ says Eamon. ‘Look at us. We’re shagging mushrooms. Do you really think respect is an issue any more?’
Below us, at the bottom of the tree, the Beauty wait. As usual. They stand so still. They are expecting me to speak for them.
‘They’re not mushrooms,’ I say.
William raises his head and glares at me. ‘Don’t even start,’ he says.
‘Don’t I have the right to speak any more?’ I ask him.
‘We all know where you stand. You’ve spent enough time trying to persuade us that this is part of some grand plan.’
‘I don’t want to speak on that matter,’ I say. ‘This is about something else.’
‘We’re not here to jump to your–’
‘Let him speak,’ says Ted, from where he leans against the trunk of the tree.
William opens his mouth and then closes it.
‘The Beauty are intelligent,’ I say. ‘They communicate with each other. They communicate with us too, although we pretend not to hear. They are – they are our women reborn.’
‘They are not,’ says Eamon. ‘That’s a lie.’
I say, ‘I don’t lie.’
‘That’s all you do!’ he says.
‘Wait,’ says Doctor Ben. ‘He’s not lying. Not exactly.’ He clears his throat and hugs his knees. ‘After the incident involving Hal and Gareth, investigation of the… remains suggested that some of the bones of the deceased have been incorporated into the, err, the Beauty. Most notably the skull and the spine. I don’t know if they’re all the same. Maybe it was a random occurrence with that one.’
‘Belinda,’ I supply. Its name was Belinda, before its head was smacked into pieces.
Nobody speaks. Eamon stretches out his legs, stands and begins to descend the ladder. At the bottom his Beauty – Bree – comes to him, arms open, and he pushes it away with a great shove so strong that it falls backwards and sprawls on the ground. I didn’t know Eamon was so strong. He walks away and Bree picks itself up and follows after him.
‘So they’ve used some old bones,’ says William, and his voice shakes. ‘That changes nothing.’
‘They sprang from women,’ I say. ‘We use them like women. They are women.’
‘They are not, and we will not call them such.’
‘They’re not women, Nate,’ says Uncle Ted. He turns to me and I see a great weariness in his face. ‘You had a mother, but not a wife. You don’t understand the difference between it. I don’t say this to take anything away from you. You must trust those who remember all of womanhood, not just the hugs of a mother.’