Bill takes it hard, this loss of natural help. It fascinates him, why the bond of millennia should have sheared. Why this interest in bees? Partly it’s because he’s being taught about them in school. Partly it’s because he has an eye for living things. Mostly, though, it’s because his dad, my brother, armed with a chicken feather dipped in pollen mix, fell out of an apple tree on our estate and broke his neck. Survived, but lives in pain. Poor Dan: the closest of my fifty kin.
“We spray for pests, and no one spray did for the bees, but combinations we could not predict or model with our science.” True. The world is rich and vast and monstrously fed back into itself. Science works well enough in a lab, but it is so small, so very vulnerable, the day you lay it open to the world.
The towns slip by. Hands on the wheel. An eye to the mirrors. Waterlooville. Havant. Home. Dad’s wives at the farmhouse windows wave, and Dad himself comes to the door. Retired now, the farm all passed to Dan. But Dad is still our centre and our figurehead.
I ask after my brother.
Dad smiles his sorry little smile, “It’s been good for him, I think, today. The rest. Reading in the sun.”
“I’m glad.”
The old man leans and spits a benediction on my forehead. “And you?”
IN AN EMPTY cinema, seats lower themselves in readiness for their customers. An orchestra sits, frozen, the musicians as poised as shop dummies, freighted with uncanny intent.
Two needles approach each other. Light sparks and blooms between their points, filling the screen.
A cameraman lies across a railway track, filming the approach of a locomotive. The man rolls out the way of the train at the last second but one foot still lies across the rail. Carriages whizz and rock and intersect at all angles: violent, slicing motions fill the screen.
A young woman starts out of nightmare, slides from her bed and begins to dress.
I paused the video (this was years ago, and we were deep in the toil of our country’s many changes) and I went into the hall to answer the phone. My brother, Dan (all hale and hearty back then, with no taste for apples and no anxiety about bees), had picked up an earlier train; he was already at Portsmouth Harbour station.
“I’ll be twenty minutes,” I said.
Back in those days, Portsmouth Harbour station was all wood and glass and dilapidated almost beyond saving. “Like something out of Brief Encounter,” Dan joked, hugging me.
1945. Trevor Howard holds Celia Johnson by the waist, says goodbye to her on just such a platform as this.
We watched many old films back then, and for the obvious reason. Old appetites being slow to die, Dan and I craved them for their women. Their vulnerable eyes, and well-turned calves and all the tragedy in their pretty words. A new breed of state censor, grown up to this new, virtually womanless world, and aggressive in its defence, was robbing us of female imagery wherever it could. But even the BBFC would not touch David Lean.
Southsea’s vast shingle beach was a short walk away. The rip-tides were immense here, heaving the stones eastwards, and impressive wooden groynes split the beach into great high-sided boxes to conserve it.
In his donkey jacket and cracked DMs, Dan might have tumbled out of the old Russian film I’d been watching. (A woman slides from her bed, naked, and begins, unselfconsciously, to dress.) “We’re digging a villa,” he told me, as we slid and staggered over the shingle. Dan was the bright one, the one who’d gone away to study. “A bloody joke, it is.” He had a way of describing the niceties of archaeological excavation – which features to explore, which to record, which to dig away – that made it sound as if he was jobbing on a building site. And it is true that his experiences had weathered and roughened him.
I wondered if this modest but telling transformation was typical. We rarely saw our other brothers, many as they were. The three eldest held down jobs in the construction of the London Britannia airport; back then just ‘Boris Island’, and a series of towers connected by gantries, rising out of the unpromisingly named Shivering Sands. Robert had moved to Scarborough and worked for the coast guard. The rest had found work out of the country, in Jakarta and Kuala Lumpur and poor Liam in Dubai. The money they sent back paid for Dan’s education, Dad’s plan being to line up our family’s youngest for careers in government service. I imagined my brothers all sunburnished and toughened by their work. Me? Back then I was a very minor observations man, flying recycled plastic drones out of Portsmouth Airport on the Hampshire coast. This was a government job in name only. It was locally run; more of a vigilante effort, truth be told. This made me, at best, a very minor second string in Dad’s meticulously orchestrated family.
It did, though – after money sent home – earn me enough to rent a conversion flat in one of those wedding cake-white Georgian terraces that look out over Southsea’s esplanade. The inside was ordinary, all white emulsion and wheatmeal carpeting, until spring came, and sunlight came blazing through the bay window, turning the whole of my front room to candy and icing sugar.
“Beautiful.”
It was the last thing I expected Dan to say.
“It’s bloody beautiful.”
“It’s not bad.”
“You should see my shithole,” Dan said, with a brutal satisfaction.
At the time I thought he was just being pretentious. I realise now – and of course far too late – that brute nil-rhetoric was his way of expressing what was, in the millennial atmosphere of those post-feminine days, becoming inexpressible: their horror.
I do not think this word is too strong. Uncovering the graves of little girls, hundreds and hundreds, was a hazard of Dan’s occupation. Babies mostly; a few grown children though. The business was not so much hidden as ignored. That winter I’d gone to Newcastle for a film festival; the nunneries there had erected towers in the public parks for people to leave a child. Babies survived at least a couple of days, exposed to the rain and cold. Nobody paid any attention.
Dan’s job was to enter construction sites during the phase of demolition, and see what was to be gleaned of the nation’s past before the construction crews moved in, turfing it over with rebar and cement. Of course the past is invented, more than uncovered. You see what you are primed to see. No-one wants to find a boat, because boats are the very devil to conserve and take an age to dig, delaying everyone. Graves are a minor problem in comparison, there are so many of them. The whole of London Bridge rises above the level of the Thames on human bones.
Whenever his digs struck recent graves, Dan’s job was to obliterate them. Hence, his pose: corporation worker. Glorified refuse man. Hence his government career: since power accretes to those who know – in this case, quite literally – where the bodies are buried.
Why should it have been women, and women alone, that succumbed to the apian plague – this dying breed’s quite literal sting in the tail? A thousand conspiracy theories, even now, shield us from the obvious and unpalatable truth: that the world is vast, and monstrously infolded, and we cannot, will not, will not ever know.
And while the rest of us were taken up with our great social transformation, it fell to such men as Dan – gardeners, builders, miners, archaeologists – to deal with the sloughed-off stuff. The bones and skin.
Not secret; and at the same time, not spoken of: the way we turned misfortune into social practice, and practice, at last, into technology. The apian plague is gone long since, dead with the bees that carried it. But, growing used to this dispensation, we have made analogues for it, so girls stay rare. Resources shrinking as they do, there’s not a place on earth now does not harbour infanticides. In England in medieval times we waited till the sun was set then lay across our newborn girls to smother them. Then, too, food was short, and dowries dear.