The Bumblebee Flies Anyway Read online

  I wake up in a panic. It’s dark and silent still. The memory of the dream crashes into me. Is that what happened? Did I go home early? It’s 5 a.m. The Sun rises at 6.45. I lie in bed, staring towards the ceiling. I can hear the fridge kick in from the kitchen. Should I get up? Can I? Yes. I can feel her with me, sitting on the edge of the bed, green dressing-gown over her nightie, curlers in.

  Did she even wear curlers?

  I peel back the duvet. Stumble into the kitchen and boil the kettle, fill a pot with tea. I dress, tracksuit bottoms over pyjamas, a big thick jumper.

  Nautical twilight, two hours earlier than when I last saw it, last solstice, to watch the starlings. It hurts a bit. It’s freezing. I grab my sleeping bag and open the back door as quietly as I can, step outside into a perfect world that doesn’t belong to me. There are no neighbours smoking cigarettes or twitching curtains, no one to avoid saying hello to, to sulk at for watching me; animals have the upper hand now. The garden at night is a different beast.

  Ssssh. I drop my sleeping bag on the deck chair and return for the pot of tea, some milk and a mug, plus a pillow so I can lie back, half-sleeping, listening.

  There’s a herring gull on the roof of the house opposite, where a nest usually sits out of the way between two chimney tops. There’s always another nest among the chimneys of the house next door; probably one on the roof of every house on every street in Brighton and Hove, but it’s these two I see every day, from late spring through summer. I wonder if they’ve started nesting. I’ve watched them raise their babies, seen them grow and become bolder, bite their parents’ legs when they’re hungry, peck at slate tiles when they’re bored. The parents often ignore them, turning the other way, staring moodily at the horizon. They make me laugh. This adult, a future parent no doubt, stands alone, tutting into the twilight, oblivious to me and my nightwear, so out of place in this netherworld hitherto absent of humans.

  I tune into birdsong. The blackbird has already started and there’s a robin, somewhere in the distance. The birds with the biggest eyes rise first, those that can see better in the half-light, the early birds that get the worms. Here I am Here I am Here I am Here I am. That’s all they’re saying, says the ghost of Granny ringing in my ears. Nothing to worry about. I climb into my sleeping bag and draw it up around me, pour tea, lean back against the pillow. A gentle breeze washes over me. The darkness is lifting slightly. I sip tea and close my eyes.

  For a while I manage to block out the sound of the tutting gull with the flutey song of the blackbird, who sings, triumphantly, from the Leyland cypress tree three doors down. The blackbird is the friend you hate, the clown. One minute the Big-I-Am and the next he’s crying into his cornflakes. Loud, bolshie, good-looking, paranoid. Silly thing.

  A wren starts up, somewhere, which I love so much now but was so scared of as a child. I wish I could tell Granny. The wren is your little friend everyone pokes fun at but who doesn’t care because she’s fierce. Who’s dancing on the podium with her belly hanging out at 3 a.m., spilling drinks over her mates. The one you can’t see in a crowded room but you can hear because she has the most infectious laugh you’ve ever come across. That’s the wren, Granny. I wonder where it’s singing from and if it’s ever come into the garden. I caught a glimpse of one in the smoke bush once. Could this be that one?

  What’s next? Blue tit. Like a wren that can’t be arsed. Then my lovely dunnock, who has something to tell you but can’t quite get it out. Breathe, dunnock, breathe, get it out. It’s not the most exhilarating dawn chorus but it’s not bad for a depleted city habitat mostly drowned in cement.

  I stay for ages, refilling my mug with tea from the pot. It’s cosy here, special. The birds sing almost in harmony, competing with the gulls, which now circle and cackle and call above me. I stay until it’s fully light. I see shadows hulking across lit bathroom windows, curtains resentfully pulled open. Friday. Everyone’s knackered, no one wants to go to work. The noise from the road increases as the dawn chorus diminishes, and the magic fades for another day. I watch house sparrows land in little squares of trellis, hear the first bumblebees start up, the low buzz of queens as they zone in on this patch of potential nest or that. I gather my things, return indoors to deadlines and bills: another world, the real world. I say goodbye to the gulls and the blackbird, the robin and the dunnock. I walk back to the flat with a laugh in my eyes. What a way to start the day.

  PART TWO

  A phoenix

  Spring

  It’s the robin that sings first. A full hour before the others. Then the blackbird starts up in a huff and a puff, like it’s been disturbed somehow, like its alarm has gone off and it’s pressed the snooze button and rolled over back to sleep. OK, I’m here, says the blackbird, just give me five more minutes. And then the wren, the full song but with hardly any puff. Five more minutes for me too, says the wren. It’s the school register and some of the students at the back aren’t paying attention. Robin goody-two-shoes is making them all look bad.

  Silence for a bit. In the distance then more robins and other blackbirds, less sleepy ones. Then the great tit and woodpigeon, chaffinch. The wren starts up, better this time, louder, more air in his lungs. The blackbird is still snoring. Five more minutes, he mumbles.

  I lie awake, listening to birds through the open window. I’m not so scared of them now, Granny. Of these birds, these Birmingham birds. Mum’s birds.

  It had been such a happy day. Despite the dream about Granny, and the anxiety of those initial, waking moments, I had a special time listening to birds in my hidey hole, wrapped in a sleeping bag, hidden from view in the grainy light. I had planned to spend the day working but it wasn’t to be – Helen called, some emergency with the twins and would I look after one of them, little Hester? I arrived at breakfast time, where I managed to feed and dress a tiny human and pack her things for the day she would spend with ‘Kate Flower’. I strapped her into her pushchair and walked her back to my flat, where we played hide and seek, ate yoghurt and watched, possibly, one too many episodes of Peppa Pig. We looked around the garden but there’s so little to see, still, at this time of year. Instead, I took her to a friend’s allotment, where we found newts, a frog and a slow worm. Hester helped with some watering.

  Later, after clearing up the toddler tornado that had stormed through my flat, Trudi and I made pizza, topped with the first, precious salad leaves of the year. Friday night. We drank one beer each. Luckily, just one beer.

  Ellie called at 10.30 p.m. I answered, as I always do when family members call at the wrong time of day: What’s wrong? I knew, instantly. Her voice had lost its bounce. It’s Mum, she said.

  She’d had a brain haemorrhage. A grade-4 subarachnoid bleed. Not Friday but the day before, Thursday. She’d just finished tutoring, had a bite to eat, that borscht I found in the fridge two days later, I think. She, Anna and Anna’s boyfriend Ryan were getting ready to go and meet Pete and Ellie for a drink. She sat down suddenly, her head in her hands, said she felt funny. She became hot and Anna took her outside to cool down. Then she said she felt sick and so she ran, blood haemorrhaging into her brain, up the stairs to evacuate every last drop of everything that was in her.

  Everyone thought it was food poisoning. The borscht or the sauerkraut maybe. She was up all night with it, blood spilling unnoticed, water on the brain. Eventually she stopped and she crawled into bed, to sleep. No one could move her. She slept like that for hours. Until the following afternoon, around the time I was getting ready to drop little Hester back to Helen’s, when, finally, an ambulance was called.

  From A&E she was transferred in another ambulance to Birmingham’s Queen Elizabeth Hospital, to one of the best neurology departments in the country. It’s where they send the war veterans, where little Malala was treated for her gun wound. The surgeons fitted a stent to ease the pressure from her brain, put her in a coma. By then I was tearing up the M40, tearing up everything.

  Trudi and I arrive at Mum’s, let ourselve
s in using the key hidden in the garden. Everything is as it always is, except there are sheets in the washing machine and stains on the carpet. I hang the sheets on the clothes horse, tidy up a bit, clean the bathroom. There’s Mum everywhere: the book she’s reading, the crossword she didn’t finish. I find what looks like a shopping list written on the back of an envelope. I trace my finger over her words, written in green pen. Ingredients for a meal she would cook for someone with an allergy, maybe. No nuts!!! it says, underlined twice, and with three exclamation marks. I take the list, sneak it into my pocket. It makes me feel close to her, somehow.

  Back from hospital at 4.30 a.m., Pete and Ellie sit with me around the coffee table. She’s stable, they tell me. There’s nothing else to say. Visiting hours don’t start until 11 a.m. and so we go to bed, try to sleep. I lie awake, listening to the dawn chorus, as I had done just twenty-four hours before.

  Ellie greets me at the door to the ward. Tells me to take deep breaths, prepare myself for what I’m about to see. I shrug her off. I can handle it, I tell her. I walk through, rub my hands in antibiotic gel, greet the nurses, turn the corner, see Mum, collapse on the floor. She’s all swollen up. Huge, like a seal. Partially shaved head, tubes from her skull, her neck, both her wrists. She’s not alive in the truest sense. The life-support machine is keeping her breathing, monitors are displaying her blood pressure and heart rate. I feel sick.

  The surgeons decide there’s no need to sedate her as much and so she’s brought round to a level of consciousness just below awake. It’s awful. Her eyes are shut and she doesn’t speak, but she claws around, tries to take the tubes out, tries to sit up. Fighting back tears, I soothe her. Kate’s here. Ssssh. It’s OK, Mum. Mum? Kate’s here. A mother and child in reverse. She hears everything.

  We leave at 8 p.m. Return to her home, to the borscht in the fridge, the stains on the carpet. Again I can’t sleep, the birds and the church bell marking each hour. Robin at four o’clock, blackbird and wren at five, greenfinch and blue tit at six. At 10.30 I walk around the lake, as she does every morning, while surgeons send a camera and apparatus into her groin and up her arteries to fix the burst aneurysm in her brain. I take the binoculars but I can’t concentrate.

  I deadhead her daffodils, use sticks to prop up her flower-heavy hyacinths. I water her pots, prune her espaliers. I take photos of the garden to show her: pulsatilla, pear blossom, narcissus, the cat. I don’t know if she will see them.

  The operation is a success and we sail in to greet her but she looks worse than ever. Swollen neck, more tubes, beeping machines. We cry as the nurses tell us how pleased the surgeons are. Every other person in the ward is in a coma. There’s no window but it’s a beautiful spring day. Chiffchaffs and coal tits sing from hospital trees.

  They start weaning her off the drugs at 2 p.m. to bring her around by three. We take it in turns, two at a time, only ever two at a time. Nothing for ages. Be patient, say the nurses, she’s been sedated for two days. Eventually she stirs, first her legs and then her arms. Mum? Mummy? She opens her eyes and turns to look at me. Mum? Can you hear me? Mum? I love you, Mummy. I love you. She doesn’t speak or smile but I see love in her eyes. A smile in her eyes.

  How’s she doing? I ask all the questions. The nurse shows me scans of her brain, draws me diagrams, explains the risk of vaso-spasms, which can cause a stroke. I see her aneurysm and a map of the blood that burst from it. I wonder, in all that mass of brain and blood, where Shakespeare is – she loves Shakespeare. The nurse checks her eyes every hour, measures her blood pressure, her temperature. The machine beeps and my stomach churns. What’s it doing, what’s happening? These machines have a life of their own, she says.

  Let her sleep, say the doctors. She doesn’t need you now. Let her sleep.

  I have no choice but to come home again.

  The garden is parched and I water it. I hold the hose here for a few minutes, there for a few minutes. Everything is greening up without me. Clematis weaving into trellis, roses coming into leaf. If I stand here for long enough the plants will knit around me, above me and over me. Envelop me, hide me. No one will find me and yet everyone will know where I am. Like a long-forgotten bicycle trapped within a tree trunk. Loved, hidden, enveloped, smothered. Killed. By plants.

  One of the sealed mud cells in the fancy bee hotel has a hole in it. A bee woke up and emerged from its muddy prison while I sat in Critical Care. Was it when she was being operated on or when she briefly woke up? When she clawed at her tubes or when she started drifting into a coma? When I took the borscht out of the fridge or moved furniture for the carpet cleaner? I tease out the internal wooden block and see more bees emerged from their cocoons, waiting for others in front of them to wake so they can fly out. A queue of bees. I unscrew the Perspex and set them free: two males and a female. The closed cocoons I lift out, gently, with the end of a teaspoon and transfer into the release chamber – I should have done this in autumn, a teaspoon is a better tool than a flat-headed screwdriver. One cocoon is half-open and I stand with it in my hand, a new life hatching on me, wiping its eyes on me, flying off me.

  I don’t know what to do. I feel so helpless here but at Mum’s I’m just in the way, competing with everyone else’s grief. But what am I supposed to do? I can’t do anything.

  Every morning I call the hospital. The nurse on night shift finishes at 8 a.m. so if we speak before then they can tell me how she spent the night. I call at 5.30, 6.00; sometimes earlier, sometimes I call at 3.00. How’s she doing? She’s stable. How’s her blood pressure? It’s fine. How long will she be like this? We can’t predict that. What’s she doing now? She’s sleeping. Look, there’s not much more we can tell you. She’s sleeping and she just needs to sleep. I feel bad for wasting nurses’ time when they’re already so overworked and I try to stop calling but I can’t. I want to be with Mum. I want to be the woman opposite Mum who sits at the end of her partner’s bed all day even though he has no idea she’s there. I’ve never been in Critical Care before and I never want to again. People no longer people but machines. Nurses stationed at the end of each bed tasked with keeping one person alive, one machine from beeping. Purgatory – most people are in a coma or nearly. Opposite Mum are two men in a coma. To the left of them is a woman who looks like she’ll never recover from whatever horrendous thing happened to her. She stares, blankly, at the wall, cabbage-like. Is that Mum’s future? Mum sleeps. I’m better off here.

  But what am I supposed to do? When I cross the road I’m nearly run over; when I ride my bike I fall off. I’ve already scraped the car. So I stand, at the top of the steps, drinking tea or crouched down in my little hidey hole, watching the garden.

  The sparrows, at least, seem happy. They’re nesting somewhere but I don’t know where, in the eaves of these neglected roofs, I think, not in the boxes I put up for them. When I’m still for long enough they come in, line themselves up on the trellis and sail down for a drink and a bath in the pond. I love them so much they make me cry. They take the nesting material I left for them in the robin nest box, pulling it out in great chunks and cheeping all the while. They venture into the border now. That’s new. Hidden from view all of us.

  The nurses tell me less and less and, eventually, I call the hospital and Ellie answers the phone. What’s this? Mum’s deteriorating. Should I come up? There’s nothing you can do, we’ll tell you when there’s news. But wait, tell me more, tell me anything. Her arm is swollen. What? Her arm, it’s perfectly normal, it’s just swollen. But why? Because she’s been lying in bed for a week. Is she still snoring? No, she’s quiet now. Is she . . . stable? Yes. Is she . . . in a coma? A pause, as her voice falters. No. But? Look the doctors came round and she’s not very responsive. Not very responsive. Her GCS has dropped a bit. Dropped a bit. To what? Four. From what? Nine, I think. You think? Yes. Nine? Yes. I repeat everything she says as if I’ve any clue what it means. I tell her I love her and to stay strong but I’m mad. I feel cut off, shut out.

  I stay in m
y tiny flat with my tiny garden. Neighbours all around me. I sit outside as they prepare food, wash dishes, smoke out of the window. A knife scrapes food from a plate into a bin, a thumb clicks a lighter and is held, for a few seconds, beneath a cigarette, before being placed down as the first few puffs are inhaled. Lives carrying on while mine is on hold. I need space, I need to be alone but I never am. Yet there is earth, a spade. I can’t sleep I can’t think I can’t eat I can’t write. But I can dig. Each day my mum lies in her hospital bed, not living but not dying, I dig, transplant, weed. I don’t eat. I drink.

  I’m sitting in my hidey hole drinking beer. Monday morning, no one’s here. I watch red mason bees go in and out of the bee hotels; they’re using the fancy wooden ones now I finally removed the old box filled with hollow stems. Mid-spring and the birds are busy. Sparrows gather nest material, great tits burp from unseen trees. We’re joined by a robin, who sits in on the trellis and sings of unresolved misery, of loss, maybe, of being misunderstood. All day. The thing is, says the robin. But you don’t understand, says the robin. Let me tell you one more time, says the robin.

  Mid-spring and there’s plenty to do. I dig and weed and dig and weed. Prune a bit, plant a bit. Sometimes the grief catches me and I sink into my chair and wail with the robin.

  The last time I spoke to her I was trying to get her off the phone. Imagine. If that’s the last conversation I had with her then I don’t know how I’ll live. I was walking to the cinema and she called me. She was going on and on about this book I got her for Christmas. Shakespeare’s Gardens. She was being sweet, really, but I don’t know, I was busy I suppose, mind on other things. I got her the book as a stocking-filler. I thought she might leaf through it and keep it on the coffee table. But she read it from cover to cover and when she finished she wanted to redesign her garden as a nod to the great Bard himself. How I’ve walked into this one, I laughed. What are those trees, she asked, that grow as sort of lollipops? Lollipop trees, Mum? Great, I want a lollipop tree for my Shakespeare garden. What would you recommend? Saturday afternoon walking around Seven Dials. Bay? She doesn’t want a bay. Box? Yew? Ooh no, not a yew, she says. Plenty of yew here already. And on it went. I’ll have a think and get back to you, I say. And that was that. I went to the cinema and now she’s nearly dead.