Being Bee (8 page)

I wanted to be happy because Dad was happy and Nanna told me to be happy and even I could see that Jazzi had brought some good things into our life. There was the bread she made almost every day so we had fresh stuff, whereas before I always had to check for mould, because Dad forgot sometimes. There was my scarf which Jazzi fixed for me by making some big wool flowers which we sewed to the narrow end bit. They were a design feature. Sally and Lucy liked it so much they had asked me to make them one each.

They liked the way she did my hair too, and they thought my new runners with the glittery laces were
pretty cool. Jazzi was good at organising things and sometimes they came over after school to play.

But there were bad things too. She made me go to bed strictly at bedtime. She made me do my homework every afternoon, and if I didn't have any I had to read aloud to her for at least twenty minutes. I had to make my bed every morning and clean my room up once a week. She even made me vacuum under the bed. She was utterly ruthless when it came to food. I had to eat fish, chops, peas and beans, sweet potato and brown rice. It wasn't any use telling her I couldn't cut chops up. She just sat there and told me to keep trying.

I think it was the skirt she made for me which started the problem. Even that was a good-Jazzi thing. She let me choose the material and then she showed me how to cut it out on a big cardboard cutting board she unfolded on the lounge-room floor.

The problem was that when Dad got home he stepped on one of the pins that must have fallen out of the pin box when I accidentally kicked it over. It went in quite deeply and he said some things he shouldn't have. When we'd all calmed down, he suggested that Jazzi use the spare room for her sewing room.

‘Clear out anything in it,' he said. ‘It's only old stuff that no one wants anymore. I think that will be the best thing. We can move that little table in, the one that's cluttering up the kitchen, and you'll have somewhere
to do this kind of stuff without having to worry about clearing it up until you've actually finished. I think this will bruise. It went in quite deeply.'

‘Nick, I'm so sorry. I thought we'd got all the pins up.'

‘Never mind, these things happen.' Dad limped across the floor. ‘It won't require amputation!'

I had an uneasy feeling about the spare room and halfway through PE it came to me. My box was in the bottom of the built-in wardrobe. But Jazzi wouldn't throw it out, would she? She'd know it was mine, with my things in it, and she'd put it in my room. Jazzi would have to do that; she kept all sorts of old things herself.

I didn't get a chance to ask Jazzi about the box because it was a Harley day, only more special because Harley wanted to visit his and Jazzi's mother, so we drove to Springvale Cemetery. Harley had brought a mug to put at the grave. He said it would last longer than Jazzi's flowers and it was just as pretty. Jazzi said it would get stolen. Harley said people didn't rob graves. Jazzi said they did.

‘I'm afraid they do, Harley,' I said. ‘They did in Egypt, remember? They robbed the pyramids. I saw the movie.'

‘They died,' Harley said. ‘They died from a curse. That's it, then. I'll curse Mum's mug and no one will steal it.'

‘That's ridiculous, Harley, you can't curse it. Don't be silly.'

‘Of course I can curse it. Watch me.' He screwed up his face and put his hands in his hair, the way Jazzi did when she read the morning paper. We waited.

‘Your mother is buried here too, isn't she, Bee? Do you want to...?'

‘Maybe next time. I don't think she's buried, actually, I think she was cremated and then Dad took some of the ashes down to Apollo Bay, where they'd spent their honeymoon.'

‘There's probably a plaque here though,' Jazzi said, looking around her. ‘We could put some flowers there if you like next time.'

‘Ssh,' Harley said, ‘I'm trying to get the last word!'

I thought about my mother, how maybe she'd feel odd that Harley and Jazzi's mother was getting a mug with roses on it and a bunch of yellow flowers and she wasn't getting anything. Would she mind? Or would she understand that I didn't know all this was going to happen and was unprepared? Would she love me anyway? Jazzi fiddled with the yellow flowers and Harley sat down on the ground, his eyes squeezed shut in concentration.

‘Got it!' he said, stumbling to his feet. He put the mug down on the headstone and waved his arms in the air above his mother's grave so that it looked as though
he was trying to shoo away flies or mosquitoes.

‘Fiend, rogue, robber, thief,

linger not by my mother's grave

or the curse of the devil's teeth

will smite you down and nothing save.'

‘That was good,' I said. ‘Did you just think of it then?'

‘He was always good at English,' Jazzi said. ‘That and art were his best subjects.'

‘They still are,' Harley said. ‘Did I tell you I'm going to be in an exhibition. You'll have to come. We're all loonies but it will be good. Powerful, that's what Tony said, a powerful statement about loonies.' He threw back his head and laughed. It was a strange sound to hear in a cemetery and both Jazzi and I looked around, but there didn't seem to be anyone close to us.

‘You don't think that's too much pressure, do you, Harley? Have you done the work yet? Do you feel okay about it?'

‘I don't like Arthur. He's another one. His work is too dark, too much black. It won't show up well, I keep telling Tony. It's too dark. You can't see what it's about. But Tony said it was strong work. Muscular, he called it. Flabby, I call it. What's muscular about just using black black black. There's no way back. I said, Arthur, stop mucking around in the murk and reach for some stars, man. Show us some glimmers, simmer some
cerise, glow some yellow, gild the darkness with a bit of gilt. He flicked paint on my best shirt, Jasmine. You'll have to wash it for me before the exhibition. You will, won't you? Please?'

‘Of course I will, Harley. When does it open? Do we get invitations?'

‘Yes, yes. Tony's doing all that. He's a bureaucratic bureaucrat. But he's not black. He glimmers with a bit of gold heart now and then. He's all right. Do you want to put your flowers in my cursed mug?'

‘No,' Jazzi said, ‘they don't need water. They're everlasting daisies and they won't fit without me cutting the stems.'

‘You're right, it's probably better this way. She gets two things rather than two-things-made-into-one-thing. Okay, can we go now, Jasmine? We've said hello to Mum and left some flowers, painted and real. Can we go now and eat sticky bun? I'm sick of being surrounded by dead people.'

‘Ssssh,' Jazzi said. ‘You might offend someone, Harley.'

‘They're all dead,' Harley said. ‘How can I offend them? They're not listening, Jasmine, whatever way you look at it.'

‘Not them, the visitors. You might offend a visitor. Come on, then, let's go.'

When we got to Harley's we saw the paintings and
drawings he was going to exhibit. We couldn't help but see them – they were all over the kitchen and the lounge room of the house.

‘How are Bill and Laura coping with all this?' Jazzi asked, hands on her hips surveying the mess.

‘It's art,' Harley said. ‘They do what everyone else does, they simply pretend it doesn't exist.'

‘That's not true,' came a voice from one of the couches, and the lady with the jabbing finger poked her head out from her newspaper. ‘We know it's there. We just try not to sit on it.'

‘Can't you keep these somewhere?' Jazzi said. ‘You'll end up ruining them. It's not just people sitting on them, Harley. They could get food on them.'

Harley shrugged. ‘I don't want to be precious about them, Jasmine. Art belongs to everyone and everything.'

‘Yes, but not the tomato sauce.' Jazzi pointed to the corner of a strange-looking piece that had labels from old jam jars and cigarette packets stuck on it.

‘Oh, well.' Harley took it from her and started ripping it up.

‘Harley!'

‘Well, you're right. It's not fit for anything but mouse consumption now.' He put the pile of torn-up pieces in one corner of the lounge room. ‘They can nest their babies in an original Harley Raddle.'

‘Oh, Harley.' Jazzi looked at him and I thought for a minute she was going to cry but instead she laughed.

Harley gave us a tour of the artworks. Some of it joined Consumer Collage in the mouse corner as we went. They weren't the kind of pictures I was used to seeing. They were ‘abstracted representation', Harley said, like when you have dreams and everything isn't quite real but it's ordinary enough to be familiar. In Harley's drawings, flowers turned into heads which sat on top of dark clouds. Birds became men, fingers stretched into insects which crawled across a desert of television sets and old antennae. I didn't like them much.

‘Surreal,' Jazzi said, tipping her head to one side as she looked at them all. ‘Definitely Dali-esque, Harley. I like this suite particularly.'

‘So do I.' Those three were the ones I
did
like, a series of faces on huge butterfly wings. Each wing had about three or four faces drawn on it. You could have easily mistaken the faces for patterns at first, but when you looked more closely they became wrinkled, beady-eyed and wispy-bearded, or just a detailed eye was visible, the outline of flared nostrils or a section of pouted lips.

‘You can have them, Jazzi and To Be, when the exhibition is over. I'll get Tony to mark sold on them as soon as they are hung up. You'll have to get them
framed, Jazzi. You can have two and To Be can have one, because she's smaller. Worrier Nick will have to share yours, Jazzi, because I can't do any more. I've moved away from such dependence on reality, such narrative.'

‘Harley, you can't just give them away like that. What if these are the three that would sell? Then you've missed a sale.'

‘I can do what I want,' Harley said and yawned loudly. ‘After all, they are mine, Jasmine. Anyway, you gave me one of your little angel guardian dolls. I painted a face on it, did I tell you? I couldn't bear the blank.'

‘That's good, Harley, you were supposed to paint a face on it. That's how it becomes your guardian doll. Or whatever kind it is. Well, thank you very much, Harley. We really do appreciate it.'

‘Yes, thank you, Harley. I've never owned a proper painting or drawing before.'

Of course, when we got home Harley's paintings and the exhibition were the only thing that was talked about and we all examined the invitation which had one of Harley's butterfly drawings on it and Jazzi told Dad how he'd given us that suite.

I forgot all about my box and its precious things, which may or may not have been at the bottom of the wardrobe in Jazzi's sewing room.

I didn't get to look for my box for days after visiting Jazzi and Harley's mum, because there was an afternoon trip to the movies with Sally and an afternoon at the pool with Lucy and then Jazzi decided to enrol me for tennis lessons and when I finally got to see the room it was Friday afternoon.

You would expect a sewing room to be a plain, useful room. Jazzi's sewing room was like something out of the Arabian Nights stories. She'd hung this lovely mirrored quilt on one wall and a big piece of rainbow-coloured material billowed from the roof. There was a small white-painted chest of drawers with bright blue flower handles near Jazzi's table, and a white bookcase held a collection of books about quilts and knitting and artists. A tall lamp stood in one corner of the room and there was a wall shelf on which perched some of Jazzi's dolls. A rocking chair in the other corner was covered with cushions and a big knitted throw. It was quite beautiful and I would have sat down and looked at some of the books, but I was on a mission.

When I opened the wardrobe, I was nearly suffocated by a pile of fabric that fell out. I stuffed it quickly back. I opened the other side of the wardrobe. More fabric was hung on coat hangers, a hanging rainbow. But my box was nowhere to be seen.

I raised the issue with Jazzi. That's what we did in our house now. We didn't just talk about things. We raised issues.

‘You know that box of my stuff,' I said. Jazzi was stuffing a chicken. The stuffing was green with chopped parsley. I don't know why we bother to eat parsley, really. It just tastes green – and not even a nice green. A dull, stodgy kind of green.

‘No. What box?'

‘The box at the bottom of the wardrobe in your sewing room.'

‘There wasn't a box of your stuff, Beatrice. If there had been, I would have put it in your room.'

‘It's not there. It's not in the bottom of the
wardrobe either. There was a box of stuff in the bottom of the wardrobe. I know, because I put it there ages ago.'

‘There wasn't a box of your stuff, Beatrice.'

‘Yes, there was, Jazzi, honestly. It was a little cardboard box of stuff.'

‘There was a carton, I remember. Is that what you mean?'

‘It had my stuff in it.' I was trying to stay patient, but it was hard.

‘Well, the carton I found had some weird old things in it, some of which I threw out and some of which I op-shopped.'

‘You didn't!'

‘I did, Beatrice, yes.'

‘But that was my stuff.'

‘Well, it wasn't particular stuff. It was just a bunch of rubbish. That's all.'

‘There was my old bee bowl I used when I was a baby.'

‘There may have been something like that.'

‘It had flowers on the side and a bee on the inside.'

‘I don't remember,' Jazzi said.

‘It was important,' I said. ‘It was the bowl my mother used to feed me from. And there was a skirt she made. It was moss green and had a bee flying to a flower appliquéd on it.'

‘Oh yes, I remember that,' Jazzi said. ‘I thought it was very pretty. I left that at the op-shop for some
other little girl to wear.'

‘That was my skirt,' I wailed. ‘My mother made that skirt for me.'

‘Well, I didn't know that,' Jazzi said. ‘Your father said to clear out anything that was in the room, so that's what I did.'

‘There was a little pincushion, too.'

‘It was torn,' Jazzi said. ‘I just...'

‘I bought that for my mum. I bought it for her on the last Mother's Day we ever had.'

‘Oh, Bee, I didn't know that. No one told me.'

‘They were my precious things. There was a spoon with a daisy on top.'

‘The daisy was chipped.'

‘And a glass with painted flowers on it.'

‘I didn't think. The flowers looked, I don't know, kind of...'

‘I painted those flowers. It went with the pincushion.' I was crying properly now. I'd rescued those things from Dad's big clean out. They weren't precious to anyone else, I knew that when Dad tried to throw them out, and they weren't things like photographs that you could display anywhere, but they were special all the same.

‘Oh, Bee.' Jazzi turned away from the chicken and tried to hug me without touching me with her stuffing fingers. I tensed all my muscles so she couldn't, and we
stood there awkwardly until she gave up. When she pulled away we were both crying, but I pretended not to see her tears.

‘I hate you,' I told her. ‘I really do. You've ruined my life, Jasmine.'

I wouldn't come out for dinner that night. Even the roast chicken smell wasn't enough to coax me out. I pulled out all my photos of my mother and me and I started a gallery on my wall. I snuck out later, when they were watching TV, and stole the photograph of Dad and Mum on their wedding day from where Dad kept it in the top drawer of the side dresser, and I took the big one of Mum and me as a baby, for good measure. He didn't deserve them.

I stuck them in my school bag. I couldn't live with Dad and Jazzi any longer. I wasn't sure where I was going to go but I certainly didn't want to live with her. If you saw the old things
she
kept! A set of old jars with Flour, Sugar and Tea on them, some little spoons – too little to even eat ice-cream with – that had windmills on top, an old teapot with a cracked lid, and some hats no one would dream of wearing that Dad had to hang on a hook thing he had to put up in our entrance hall. Anyone who loved me, anyone who even liked me a little bit, would have seen the bees on my stuff and known.

I put my favourite jeans, a couple of tops, my best skirt, my five-year diary which had three years to go,
my best glitter pens, my wombat cap Uncle Rob brought me back from Wilson's Promontory and all my knickers and my frog pyjamas in my school bag. I took out my old lunch box but left a couple of fruit bars that were right at the bottom.

I wrote a note for Lulu and Fifi:

Dear Lulu and Fifi

I'm sorry I can't take you with me but I don't know whether I'll end up anywhere guinea pig friendly, so you'll have to stay here for the time being. I hope Dad remembers to feed you. Don't accept anything from the woman. It might be poison. She's the reason I'm running away. She threw away my bee box and I hate her. I will always hate her because she's hateful and she doesn't even understand who I am and she doesn't care.

Love

Bee-who-is-never-Beatrice-except-on-the-school-roll.

I didn't run away that night. I don't like the dark much. Running away was scary enough without it being dark.

I ran away early the next morning. It was pretty easy. Jazzi and Dad were still asleep. I put the ten dollars I'd been saving in my pocket, picked up my bag, put the note
in Lulu and Fifi's mail box, made myself a sandwich, and took the rest of the box of fruit bars, a huge piece of carrot cake and three green apples. I had three pieces of toast for breakfast even though I normally have only two and drank a glass and a half of milk. Then I cleaned my teeth, packed my toothbrush and simply walked out the door, up the driveway and on to the road.

It wasn't until I got past the shops – looking into the aquarium shop because I always do – that I realised I couldn't go to Nanna's because she wouldn't be there and I couldn't go to Stan's because he was with Nanna and they were paddling in Lake Jindabyne and eating trout Stan caught from his boat. I couldn't go to Uncle Rob's because I wasn't really sure how to get there. I certainly couldn't go to Lucy's or Sally's because their mothers would send me straight home again.

There was really only one place I could go.

I went back to the shops and used some of my ten dollars on two sticky buns – one with pink icing and one with apple – and then headed for Harley's house.

The lounge chairs had been moved. At first I thought I might have the wrong house, but I knocked at the door anyway and Harley opened it. He had streaks of grey all over his face and there were blobs of paint in his hair.

‘To Be!' he said and peered around me. ‘It's not Wednesday, is it? Have they taken some days away?'

‘Jazzi's not here,' I said. ‘And no, it's Saturday. I was wondering if I could use your phone, please. I'm running away.'

‘There's no phone here,' Harley said, ‘so I'm afraid you can't.' I thought he might shut the door on me, so I put my foot firmly against it.

‘I brought some sticky buns,' I said.

‘Do you want to come in?' Harley asked but he didn't actually open the door any wider.

‘Yes, please.' I squeezed in under Harley's arm. He smelt a little. Painting is obviously hard work.

‘Would you like a cup of tea?'

Harley was obviously ignoring the running away bit. It was a shame about the phone. I wasn't sure how I was going to contact Uncle Rob. I had decided, walking to Harley's, that living with Uncle Rob and Aunty Maree would be the best thing I could do. They were my family, after all. Maybe when Nanna came back I would go and live with her. Then Dad could walk over and see me whenever he wanted to.

‘No, thank you. I wouldn't mind a glass of water, though.'

Harley looked around wildly. All the glasses I could see had paint water in them, or paintbrushes soaking.

‘I could wash one,' I offered. I was very thirsty.

‘A cup of water, perhaps?'

‘That would be fine, thanks. Shall I cut up the buns?'

We sat eating buns. Harley didn't seem to mind which one he ate today. Perhaps that was only a Wednesday thing.

‘How's the painting going?' I asked.

‘The painting is fine. Arthur is a thorn in my side. No rose, he, but thorns all the way down. He intends to sabotage my work. He has decided he is the chief loony. Why? Because his work is madder than the rest of ours. I should be running away, not you, To Be. Why are you running, anyway?'

‘Jazzi threw away my Bee box.'

‘Your Bee box?'

‘You know, a box with things in it that were mine. She didn't really know but she should have. Anyone who called me Bee all the time would know they were Bee things.'

‘Oh dear.' Harley's face crumpled up. ‘What were the Bee things?'

‘Things from when I was little and my mother was alive.'

‘That's terrible.' Harley pushed a big piece of bun on to my plate. ‘But Jazzi can be like that. She likes clean and her own way. She made me run away, too.'

‘What?'

‘Oh, yes. When I was younger, of course, and we lived with our mother. Jazzi didn't believe the things I told her. She said I was making up stories to get out of
looking after things. I said she was the looker-afterer but she said I should be too.'

‘Hang on, Harley.' He was talking so fast I could hardly catch up. ‘Why didn't your mum look after things?'

‘Some things she looked after, but she worked very hard, so Jasmine was the next looker-afterer. That's how it worked. Jasmine shouted at me because I did things wrongly. So Pepi and I ran away.'

‘The dog, Pepi?'

‘Yes. That was a very wrong wrong thing to do and I was punished – everyone punished me.'

‘What happened?'

Harley shook his head and stuffed his mouth full of sticky bun.

‘Oh, come on, Harley, tell me. As a fellow runner-away.'

‘It was horrible.' Harley spat out bits of icing as he spoke. I pretended not to see, even though it didn't seem to worry Harley.

‘Why? What happened?'

‘Bad bad bad, dark, rain – too cold, too windy. Couldn't see. The voices were trying to help me but they couldn't get through. Problems in the wires in my head. The rain. It made it too hard to hear them. I tried, in the phone box, but the numbers wouldn't work.'

Harley's fingers were drumming on the table, both hands, all of his fingers. He started smacking the table as though it were a bongo drum. He kept chewing his bun, even though I could have sworn he'd swallowed it all.

‘Harley,' I said as quietly as I could while still being heard above the bongo drum. ‘Harley, it's okay. That happened years ago, right?'

‘It was the beginning,' Harley said, ‘and in the beginning there is always mud and coldness and you never know if you'll be one of the saved or one of the damned. Someone or something dies. I didn't know. I was in the phone box and I didn't know. I was scared, Little Bee, I was too scared to go out of the phone box. I knew I had to stay there until they came to get me – they couldn't hear me because of the rain. So I had to stay there. But I couldn't breathe because there were no windows.'

‘There aren't windows in phone boxes,' I said, ‘but there aren't doors either.'

‘There were then. There aren't now but there were then. There were doors and no windows and the door was shut and there was no air coming in and I couldn't make them speak to me through the rain. So I took off my shoe. My good school shoe. The one Jasmine had helped me buy and I tried to make a window myself so I could breathe. They came but the wrong ones came.
That was the beginning and it was dark and cold and the dog died.'