The Bumblebee Flies Anyway Read online

  Do you want to take photos? I take photos. Do you have any more questions? I don’t. We stand together on the levelled-off lawn, as I take in the forget-me-not and lily of the valley, the rhododendron and the still-there air-raid shelter, holding back thirty years of tears.

  Did I remember it wrongly? Did I dream the loss? Did I peer over the wrong fence all those years ago or did I make the whole thing up? I swear I saw it, standing on the saddle of my bike leaned up against the fence. I swear I saw it.

  But I didn’t. I know that now. This thirty years of pain has been misremembered, wrong. There’s no tennis court, no paving over of a wildness, of me. Instead there are self-sown forget-me-nots and primrose, a healthy elm – I couldn’t wish for a happier outcome. Even the tree stump that we used to slide down as kids is still there. Flowers of my childhood still serving the descendants of the bees that flew around my six-year-old head.

  Of all the gardens I have loved and lost, this one holds a piece of me. This, with my DNA from cut hair and skin from scabbed knees, dust of feathers collected to top mud pies, buried pet rabbits. We’re in the soil and the leaves, the birds, the bees, little pieces of them and me. This garden is still mine.

  It could yet be lost, of course. Like Mum’s childhood garden that’s now houses and driveways, like Tiny the pony’s field that’s now a postage-stamp garden. Neighbours have done it: knocked down a house and built three in its wake, removed a hedge to build an access road. A granny flat here, a garden office there, a fence, a wall, a paving stone, decking. My Spokey Dokeys clatter on wheels navigated through changing roads, a changing land. I still hear them.

  The doctors are playing with her blood pressure to keep her conscious but are mindful of the lasting effects of what they’re doing. At 170/120 she’s bright and perky but high as a kite. She takes her feeding tube and her catheter out, tries to remove the drain from her brain. She wants to get out of bed and she tries to swear at a nurse but she doesn’t have the words. I tell her she’s had a brain haemorrhage. She says, Heaven’s Above and Bloody Hell. I tell her ten minutes later and she says, Blimey. I tell her ten minutes later and she starts to cry.

  At 170/120 I have more than the mum I’ve had for two weeks but it’s not particularly good for her. The doctors bring it down to 140/97 and she sleeps, wakes drowsily. I’m not sure she knows who we are. She takes my hand and kisses it, takes the hand of one of the nurses and kisses her. She sleeps, the only sign of her the constant fidget of her tiny feet.

  Her nails need doing. I ask the nurse if she has clippers and she finds me a set: clippers, emery board and moisturiser. I feel guilty for not bringing Mum’s. The NHS has enough to deal with without supplying the half-dead with manicure packs. I busy myself while Mum sleeps, cutting her nails onto a tissue, filing them smooth before coating them in moisturiser and then pushing her cuticles down.

  I brush her hair now, which clings to her head, unwashed for nearly four weeks. The shaved patch is growing back, stubble around a red-raw hole the stent disappears into. I wonder how far down it goes, how it works. It’s still dripping fluid into that container, behind her. It’s pink, full of blood. Somehow the bleed got through to the other bit of her brain. Best to drain off as much as possible, the nurses say.

  A woman shuffles into view and greets the nurses at the next bed. I just want to say goodbye, she says. The nurses are slow to act and the woman sits down and empties her grief onto the bed of her brain-dead daughter. Great heaving sobs as she tells her she’ll never forget her, how she can’t believe this is happening. Nurses jump to attention and draw curtains around the bed, contain the pain. She could be me, could be any of us. I can’t look at Mum and I stare out of the window at the workmen instead, trying to block out the final goodbyes of a mother and lifeless daughter a metre away. Nurses in tears now. Mum opens her eyes and starts to sing.

  The sap is risen. The climbers are taking their time, the honeysuckle’s still not reached the trellis, ‘Jan Fopma’ dying at the crown – clematis wilt, maybe, or a cat or fox sitting on its emerging stems. I empty a can of water on the soil, place my riddle over it and hope for the best. Above it, ‘Frances E. Lester’ is in fresh green leaf on one side, struggling to reach the trellis on the other. Be patient, say the plants and their reluctant stems. Everything will happen in time.

  The garden no longer needs me. Apple blossom’s been and gone; borage, honeywort in flower, kale gone to seed, purple-sprouting broccoli spoiled. At the back, ‘Shropshire Lass’ is a firework of thorny stems and shiny green leaves. I tie some of these into the wires on the broken fence panel. She will cover it yet, her leaves and flowers masking the broken grey. To her left is ‘Bill Mackenzie’, already halfway up his ladder, stems folding into trellis. Before long it will meet ‘Shropshire Lass’ and the two will grow and weave together, one flowering into the other.

  The grass is growing, as I knew it would. New shoots greening the brown of the dead turf. Blades wave in the spring breeze, caterpillars hunker in the thatch. I set camera traps so I can see who my visitors are while I’m with Mum. Cats, mostly. But the odd fox and its babe, my house sparrows, my dunnock, my still-solitary blackbird. Herring gulls and their big white feathers, their big green shits. Collared doves, woodpigeons, feral pigeon, great tit, blue tit. As machines beep and responses are checked, a million worlds still turn.

  A general ward now. Suddenly she looks like Mum again. Her hair greasy and shorn, smudged glasses. But Mum. Oh hello. Hello, sweetie, I’m just having a little nap. OK, Mum, I’m here. I smile, realising there’s a little more of her than there was on my last visit. I acquaint myself with the new surroundings, introduce myself to the nurses, watch Mum sleep with still-fidgety feet. She’s like a baby, all wrapped up in her swaddling of blue, sleeping peacefully now the wires aren’t pulling her skin. She’s eaten a jelly and is drinking through a straw. Feeding tube in only at night – progress finally. By day just the stent and the catheter remain, the latter the nurses have glued to her scalp to stop her trying to pull it out. The blankets are wrapped tightly around her and her little arms are drawn up to her chest. She keeps scratching her nose, touching her face, moving her little feet. She’s a sea otter out on the ocean, on her back with her paws at her face, a little scratch here, a little wave there, bobbing in the deepest NHS blue.

  I watch her sleep. There’s a beauty to her I’ve never seen before, and I realise I’ve never thought of her as beautiful. I’ve never looked at her face and marvelled at her turquoise eyes and gently crooked nose. I’ve never looked at her in such detail. She’s like a child again, my baby. I’m taking in every last piece of her, just in case. Just in case.

  Mummy.

  She opens her eyes as if too excited to sleep. She knows I’m here and she wants to see me. She takes my hand and mumbles deliriously, stuttering. The words have been knocked out of her. I tell her I can’t understand her and she looks frustrated but she’s too tired to try again. She drifts in and out of sleep, mutters about things that happened years ago. I can see every memory, thought and conversation storming through her brain as it starts to sift through the mess made by blood and fluid. Will she ever make sense again? She tells me she can’t see. Darling, help me, she says. Help me. She’s crying now, scared. It’s her left eye, she tells me. She can’t see out of her left eye. I ask her to cover her other eye and tell me what I’m wearing. A black jumper, she says, shazoooziwus. She starts to stutter and falls back onto her pillow. She can clearly see, but can she see clearly? It will be weeks before we know. I try to calm her, soothe her. I give her a cup of water, which she drinks through a straw. I wipe droplets from her chin, stroke her hair, balm her chapped lips. I call the nurse and ask her if she’s mentioned her eye before. He says she hasn’t and he makes a note of it. He asks her about it and she tells him it all started when she took Ellie to the garden centre. And I wonder when that was, and how her broken brain has linked it to her sight loss, and I lose her again for the rest of my visit while she chats
about stuff that happened years ago in a language I don’t understand.

  Back at Mum’s I look up her symptoms online while peregrines fuss over their young in the corner of the screen. One of the eggs has just hatched. The female takes a break from brooding to eat a pigeon the male has brought her, stepping aside to reveal the tiniest ball of nondescript fluff. I can’t make it out, I can’t see where the beak is, the feet are. Just a lump of pure white fluff, like cotton wool. The male sits on the nest and I see nothing again.

  It’s called expressive aphasia. These nonsense words that come out of her. Specifically she can understand what is said to her but can’t make herself understood. Which must be awful for someone who’s obsessed with language and Latin stems and taught English for forty years. What’s the Latin stem of haemorrhage, Mum? Hemo, meaning blood. What about aphasia? Phasia is speech and a means not. She’s speechless.

  When blood lands at the front-left part of the brain it affects personality, behaviour and speech. At least her limbs work. We don’t yet know if she will be able to walk but we don’t see why she wouldn’t, she’s barely stopped moving her legs since she got in. But behaviour? Personality? That’s a long road.

  On clear dry nights over flat land, the air stills. It’s called a temperature inversion, something to do with the earth losing the heat from the day. It creates a sort of echo chamber, an acoustic miracle, and the most perfect stage for a little brown bird to sing.

  The nightingale has found a niche that suits it to sing only at night, a funny quirk of evolution perhaps, when most other birds sing at dawn. But it works. There’s no one to compete with at night, no one to drown out the sound of you. And on a clear dry night over flat land, your song rises into the heavens so everyone for miles can hear you. On a clear dry night over flat land, if you’re a nightingale, the world is your oyster.

  It flies from tropical Africa and reaches our shores in April. Males set up a territory in the middle of a bush or a thicket and then sing each night to protect it. As they sing they might catch the attention of passing females, who fly overhead as they, too, return from Africa under the cover of darkness. And that is why the nightingale sings.

  Scientists will tell you the part of the brain that controls singing is enlarged in a nightingale. They’ll tell you the male has a repertoire of around 180 different song types, which he can pick and choose at will. That, if its song is broken down into syllables, the nightingale is some sort of god. The flutey blackbird ‘makes do’ with 108 syllables for his song, the skylark 341. The nightingale? 1,160.

  His singing accomplishments also demonstrate how good a father he will be – the better the song the better the dad, the more musical notes the more often he will feed his hatchlings and the more he’ll defend the territory against marauding males and predators. The nightingale song is nothing more than a manifesto: pick me and I’ll do this.

  Ignore all of that.

  They used to be woodland birds, when woodland was coppiced for fuel and, as well as tall trees, in a wood you would find thick, low-lying scrub, patches of bare land, a bit of water and dense vegetation. You don’t get that so much these days. So they’ve moved from woodland to areas of scrub on the field edge. Patches of land on public walkways and bridle paths. A bit of this, a bit of that: voila! Nightingales. You can’t find them in Brighton, as far as I know, but there’s a perfect patch of habitat just a twenty-minute drive along the A27.

  I drive here on my way back from visiting Mum. On my way back from five days of watching her sleep and holding her hand, of trying to calm her, of trying to stop her crying. Of chopping food into manageable chunks and feeding her: just eat the chicken, Mum, just one more, please. On my way back from the M42, the M40, the M25, the M23.

  It’s a clear dry night over flat land and it’s getting dark already. I park up at the side of the road. The long grass is dewy, despite the day, and my feet wet as they sink into it. I stretch my motorway legs and clamber over the stile onto the bridleway. Instantly miles away. To my right are thickets of scrub, to my left a little stream. I’m all alone. The dusk chorus is still apace, a song thrush belts out his tune from a tree while reed and Cetti’s warblers call from the water. Wrens in the scrub. I walk for a while. The road is just a few metres from the stile but the remoteness, the darkness, the all-aloneness, is unnerving suddenly. The rusting ghost of the sun lingers in the distance and the night hangs and becomes closer. Birds shift among the trees. Where are the nightingales? I try to make out familiar shapes. The silhouette of a robin, unmistakable as it stands stock-still on its bandy stick legs, occasionally dipping down as if curtseying. It makes an alarm call and I wonder if it’s me it doesn’t like or if the encroaching night hides a darker force: a fox or badger perhaps. Rustling is unsettling. A sudden noise and I jump out of my skin: three turtle doves charge out from the scrub and disappear again. Again: what are they flying from? I pretend not to hear the shuffling behind me. The hedgehog or the . . . wolf. Eventually the blackness sets in and the dusk chorus fades. A tawny owl hoots in the distance.

  Now the low burble of the nightingale rises.

  It starts softly, hesitantly. Mosquitoes dance around me as the darkness takes the trees, the hedge, the architecture of the bridleway, and melts them into something ‘other’ and unknown. I can just about still see but I’m anxious now. I stand as quietly as I can, creep closer to the source. There are rich sounds, bubbly warbles, a few choppy calls, some gurgly frog noises and see-saws. But that’s not what I’m here for. I’m here for the song that makes you want to melt, that makes you want to fall to earth and be swallowed whole. That makes you want to do air punches and cry, that makes you want to fly. That lifts you and floors you, fills you, reinforces you. And it comes, it comes, here it comes.

  I close my eyes and wobble on two legs as something inside me lets go, as a chunk of hospital and motorway, wires and machines breaks off and flies away. Other males start up and there’s now an orchestra of nightingales all along the bridleway. There’s nothing now but me and them. The darkness, the stillness, the tears rolling down my laughing face. What is this? What is it that the nightingale does to the human heart?

  We have evolved with it, certainly. Many of our ancestors will have grown up with it; those who lived or worked in woodland or its outskirts. The nightingale has sung for coppicers and charcoal burners, iron-ore miners, travellers. I imagine Robin Hood and his band of merry men being kept awake by singing nightingales, spring-born babes being breast-fed to the sound of nightingales, the old and sick dying to the sound of nightingales. Singing just from April to June it heralds summer, like the cuckoo. And the people would have taken its song as a sign of easier times ahead, of abundant harvests and good weather, of a heart-soaring celebration of still being alive after the cold, hard winter. Is that it? Is that all it is? Is the nightingale merely post-winter relief hard-wired into a haunting song?

  Perhaps.

  Nightingale song is a part of us, a part of what makes us. Yet, as we have moved from the trees to the cities, as we have changed the landscape and ourselves, we have lost that bit of us that connects us so completely with its song, and so too we have nearly lost the nightingale. It likes scrub and there’s so little left of it. It should be so easy to just bring it back but we don’t because so few of us connect with it now, so few of us are prepared to fight for it. It has sung through two World Wars, the Industrial Revolution, the beginning and end of whaling, of slavery. It’s lived through it all, flying to and from Africa year in, year out, while we chipped away at its habitat. Between 1967 and 2007, the nightingale declined by 91 per cent according to the British Trust for Ornithology. It’s suffered the second-biggest fall in numbers of UK breeding birds since records began. That’s nine out of every ten nightingales vanished from our scrubland, nine out of every ten not calming anxious babes, waking highwaymen in ditches, soothing the dying or lifting the spirits of the hospital-weary. Nine out of every ten. They used to sing in gardens in London. Will the
y again? Most of us will never hear its song, most of us will never fight for it. But you would, if you heard it, you would. You’d die to protect the nightingale. To have that feeling rise up inside you, to be moved so completely. The very thing they inspire in us is what’s needed to save them and that’s the saddest thing. We lose them and we lose a central part of us. We already have.

  If the dead could rise and make us see.

  The darkness has taken everything. I think of folklore and fairy tales, of enchanted woods and sprites and goblins. Of this corner of Sussex and highwaymen and nightingales. Of what lies beneath these cushions of dewy grass, of If These Trees Could Speak. I wonder if I could sleep in this ditch as a nod to my ancestors and history and deep human connections with the natural world. But I’m terrified, suddenly, terrified of being alive. For the first time since I arrived I turn on my torch and scramble back, tripping over the cushions of grass, away from the rustling in the scrub. I reach the stile, the car, the streetlights, the safety and comfort of civilisation. I leave the nightingales for another time, another hospital visit, another year, and I’m grateful to have heard them this spring.

  Mum calls me and it’s almost her. A little confused, words still back to front, but she says things she used to say. She calls me darling, tells me she loves me, she just wanted to hear my voice. My heart melts and my brain struggles to understand her. But it’s late, Mum. It’s 10 p.m., the ward is full, I think of the old ladies she’s disturbing. I ask if I can make a suggestion and she says yes, yes, and I say mightn’t it be a good idea to go to sleep, with it being late and you being on a full ward? And she says, Hang on, I need to write this down because I forget everything these days. But she doesn’t have a pen. She jumps out of bed and takes me, on the other end of the phone, through the ward, waking the sleeping old ladies: Do you have a pine? And I say pen, Mum, say pen, and she says what and asks another sleeping old lady for a pine, and the ward wakes and she descends into garbage and becomes agitated looking for this pen that she calls a pine, and she puts the phone down but still with me hanging on the other end, and heads out to the nurses’ desk. I hear distant shouting. It’s Mum. It’s Mum shouting at the nurses. Mum who needs a pen to write down the instruction: Go to Sleep. Mum who can’t be understood, with her lost mind and her half-speech, who is now ranting at nurses and little old ladies, who has clean forgotten she ever called me and why she got out of bed. I wait a few minutes as the shouting comes and goes, the moves of the nurses to restrain her. She called me because she wanted to hear my voice and I answered because I wanted to hear hers. But I’ve made everything worse as I knew I would. I put the phone down and cry.