The Bees in the Chimney – Moving on

Penny was dozing on her unmade bed, her head still heavy with yesterday’s cabernet sauvignon and the Cointreau she had known would be a mistake. It was eight days since the funeral and a day since she’d last seen Max Westerham. He‘d popped in to see how the colony was settling in. Fellow travellers he had said. Someone had said. Penny lay motionless, lost in dusky light as unreliable pictures flitted across her mind. The buzzing and the dozing conspired to present a curious picture.?

The image was of a tall man, with a rangey build and eyes she feared to look too deeply into. Something hard, impenetrable, with a veneer of invitation. The buzzing sound was intermittent and as she slowly sat up Penny recognised that it was something other than a swarm of bees. She opened her eyes and saw the shadow boxing of what looked like a giant wasp thumping against the glass behind the sun soaked curtain. The creature was stuck and it was loud, but it was just one insect and not a swarm. She could not call on Mr Westerham to come and clear away just one insect.

Penny watched the shadow fling itself in violent strikes against the window. The noise, the insistence, was too much to take. Shutting the door behind her, Penny went downstairs to the kitchen and got herself a glass of wine. It was three o’clock in the afternoon; ever since Roger had died, time seemed to be sliding about all over the place. Five o’clock somewhere some echo whispered. Penny was a slow moving pinball. She rolled across hours and habits bound in by walls that Roger had left, although he did not build them. Walls Penny could sometimes see through, but could not pass.

Roger’s death had been uneventful in the end. He had slid slowly sideways into a netherworld, unseen except by his devoted wife who couldn’t show any sign of understanding what was happening to them. She looked but she did not see, the glass walls that held her were unreliable. And in the last few days before Roger softly smiled his feeble last, Penny pretended it was all someone else’s story, someone else’s drama.

At the funeral, embracing one of their children she had even whispered “this isn’t happening”. But it was. Roger had known that it was and sitting on the back terrace, watching birds taking flight, as his wife wittered on about spaniels and Border terriers, Roger had daily tried to tell Penny it was truly real. He told her that she should remember every time she looked at his picture that he wanted her to understand. It was all about what happened next and nothing about him being gone. He would be dead and she would be living. That must be the focus, not grief. He had said it so many times. An echo Penny kept hearing getting louder, like the buzzing of the trapped creature. “You need to think about yourself love, not about me, because I won’t be here. You know that. You’ll be the one living, you’ll be the one to carry on. I’ll just be dead.”

But Penny hadn’t really heard the low murmuring voice. She responded to his slow then rapid decline with efficient bustle, busy-ness, purposeless purpose punctuated with a silly high pitched little laugh. She hoovered the floor a lot. Polished the framed photographs and knick knacks, did the washing up almost before there was anything to wash up. The dishwasher was not used, nor the microwave. The machines took too little time, provided too little distraction for Penny. They left her just with Roger alone, and waiting for a ping to say that the food was ready or that the dishes were clean left just too much empty space. The machines were intolerably modern and convenient and belonged not to the time of Roger and Penny as lovers, parents, partners, friends. The machines belonged to this new house, to a cynical promise of happy retirements with dog; and to the promise of death.

Roger would sit in his chair close by the kitchen table watching his wife cutting, chopping, measuring, mixing, at first in benign indulgence and as his disease progressed, with increased irritation. Roger tried to explain that the incessant motion, the tension and the elaborate meals were exhausting, unnecessary. They were superfluous to his very personal process of meeting his maker quite soon. But Penny would not hear him. When she spoke, she spoke to his photograph not to his shrinking, faded face. Roger understood that Penny was holding on, clutching at the rotting fabric of their old, shared life. He had seen that in that space there was no room for his disease, his decaying life, his incapacity, his death. Their new life’s rules meant that she was simply too busy for such foolishness, so Penny cooked and cleaned. Penny forced her wasting husband to have conversations about dogs and shopping and meals, meals he soon couldn’t eat. But she still cooked them, scraping leftovers daily into the bin as Roger moved gently away towards another realm.

With a passing glance at the clock and at Roger’s picture, Penny tipped the wine into the sink and went back upstairs to finish her aimless nap. Standing at the foot of her bed, she listened to the angry buzzing of the insect on the window. She moved to the window and pulled back the curtain just enough to see a very large, brown and yellow striped thing bristling with angry, frustrated menace. A hornet. But the window was shut and the phone was ringing. Penny stood, dazed and numb watching the hornet. The hornet continued to bump and grind against the window, angry, defying the glass and set on breaking free to the outside. The hornet had places to go, prey to capture, a nest to return to where she would deliver captured bees to her hungry babies.

As he left the message, Penny heard the answering machine tell her that Mr Westerham would be in the garden tomorrow to check her honeybee colony for queen cells. Penny had no idea what he was talking about and went closer to the window to get a closer look at the furious blur of brown and gold. Reaching carefully and slowly up to the window catch she lifted it and stood still hearing the continued bumping and buzzing. Still hearing the hornet’s fury, Penny picked up the phone and dialled Mr Westerham’s number. She heard the window go suddenly silent; she heard her voice leave a message on Mr Westerham’s answering machine. “I got your message and that’s fine.” From across the room Roger’s picture smiled at her, no longer his fellow traveller. Penny remembered what he said once, long ago mortui viventes docent. The dead teach the living.

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? Laurel Lindstr?m 2024