The Bumblebee Flies Anyway Read online

  I barely sleep, thinking of her in her new ward. In her, now, third hospital. Is she sleeping? Is she scared? Is she crying? Has she been sedated again? I almost hope she has. Knocked out, unable to feel what she can’t quite understand. She’s allowed to walk now the catheter and stent are out but she charges about on unsteady feet, crying and shouting. The first time she stood up she collapsed back in the chair again. The second time she made a few steps with one nurse on either side of her. The third time she ran and she hasn’t stopped running. But she’s unsteady. She shouldn’t be running around like this. The nurses sedate her to keep her from charging about, to keep her safe. And to stop her waking the old ladies she shares the ward with.

  We visit her and she doesn’t remember anything from one minute to the next. I wear a shiny red coat like the one I had when I was three and she knows it, instantly. But she doesn’t know my name. It’s like seeing her through a steamed-up window. I wipe it and water streaks the pane, then steams up again. Her eyes, her crooked nose, there; gone. Each time she blinks it’s a new day, a new visit. Where’s Pete? Why isn’t he here? He just left; he’s been with you all day. She claims not to have seen him for weeks, her poor new husband keeping vigil by her bed for hours and hours at a time, unnoticed, unremembered. I thought seeing her in a coma was hard, thought the life-support machine and the wires and tubes and swollen arm and brain scans were hard. Now, suddenly, I’m dealing with the crazy, the fighter, the tearaway. The one the nurses are briefed on at each change of shift. The one who refuses food and medication, who has decided the consultant isn’t kind and refuses even to look at him. The one who says No like an angry three-year-old. The one who sobs her way to the shower because she used to do this without two people helping her. The one who packs her bags and stands, defiantly, by the door until her husband comes to calm her. The one who has worked out how to use her phone and calls us every night to demand we get her out, crying and begging, Darling, why are you doing this to me?

  She’s aware enough now to tell us she hates it, to beg us to set her free. We tell her we’re trying but it’s difficult to know where to start, and besides, she’s not ready. I call the hospital and ask when she’s starting her speech-and-language therapy, if someone will be sent to look at her eye. As far as I can see now she’s just being kept alive and safe. Three meals a day, very little medication. But she’s miserable. They keep telling me she’s on the waiting list for the rehab unit but they don’t know when a bed will become available. I’m fighting to get her out of hospital but I don’t know how any of us will cope if they send her home. Darling, why are you doing this to me? Darling, why are you doing this to me? Ringing around my head a thousand times a day.

  In the woods I walk, slowly, tentatively, tuning into this song and that. There’s a chaffinch and a blue tit overhead, a nuthatch in the distance. No people but me. Yet scrubby bits of bramble hide a thousand watching eyes. We are never alone, really.

  It’s late May but the bluebells are still in flower, rubbing shoulders with the last of the wild garlic and the first, bright-green unfurling fronds of bracken. The canopy is already starting to close above me but the leaves are still fresh and new. Sycamore flowers dangle from the heavens.

  It’s been seven weeks.

  She hasn’t called me today and I’m glad. She’s someone else’s problem today, I need to be in the woods today. Already I feel guilty.

  I walk along my little wooded path, with each step a little more me, a little more free. A little less hospital than there was in the last step, a little less nondescript pie and mash, blood-thinning injections. Coal tits pass through branches like little gusts of wind and there’s a low gentle hum of unseen bees. All around me, from the ground to the canopy, is green.

  I climb up, off the path, find a little spot to sit down behind a tree, unseen. It’s an oak tree, a great old thing with a big hole in its bottom. I’m free here. I’m an unfurling bracken frond, a gust of coal-tit wind. I lean back and rest my head against the trunk, let peace sink into me. The humming is louder here. A bumblebee nest in the bank perhaps, or honeybees in the canopy. I look up and down, try to locate the sound. I tune into different hums – it’s not one thing but many, not one bee but an orchestra of flies, beetles and bees, zipping between flowers that meet a million different needs. I can’t see anything. I scour the canopy but find only dangling tits picking insects from the outermost branches, a grey squirrel looking down at me. I search for too long and the sky moves above me, my stomach lurches and I feel the earth turning. I’m dizzy. I close my eyes and lose myself in the hum and thrum of the wood, the hum and thrum of decades and centuries past and future. The hum and thrum that soothed people who are dead now, will soothe people yet to live. Highwaymen and time-travellers, the living and the dying, the long gone, the not yet born. Ashes and dust. All around me, little unseen insects work from one bloom to the next. I want to curl into a ball and sleep here for ever.

  I told Mum I was gay around the time Granny died. She’s never forgiven me for it. All that going on and now this, she said. She told me I was going through a phase, said she didn’t want a gay daughter. For years afterwards. And now she’s in hospital and I’m feeding her, moisturising her hands and chapped lips, and I’m thinking of all the things I could have said to her, all the things she should have said to me. I could have timed it better, yes, but I was fourteen.

  Yesterday she took my hand. She was crying, we both were. She told me she wanted to die. She told me to get on with my life, to stop wasting my time visiting her, sitting with her, feeding her. You should be out being brilliant, she said. She held my face and forced out the choked words, Don’t Ever Think I Wasn’t In Love With You Don’t You Ever Think That. Because she thinks she’s dying and she wanted to say the unsaid, because she nearly died and I need to hear it.

  Hold her close. Tell her you love her. So says everyone who knows what it’s like to lose their mum. Even if she can’t hear you, just tell her, they say. Those who never got to say what they needed to say, who remind me that hope and love are the two greatest things, the only things, because they no longer have them. Hold her close. Just hold her close.

  The things we push back and refuse to deal with, they all come to bite us in the end.

  Three more days of hospital. Three more days of my mum not knowing my name. But she knows who I am. She asks me to tell her how Granny died, makes me relive my break-up three times. She sobs suddenly, irrationally, endlessly. I try to imagine having my memory wiped and then having it all forced back in a storm. A brief few weeks at peace because there’s nothing there but then everything all at once. She has nightmares and I’m not surprised. How to even begin to get through this?

  Sometimes it’s the 1990s, sometimes the 1980s – she’s rarely in the present. I sit with her as her brain churns through everything that’s ever happened to her. She mumbles constantly but I can’t understand her. Conver­sations she had twenty years ago, sifting through endless painful memories. She still tells me she wants to die, tells me to make plans. But she doesn’t have the words or the memory to take the conversation further. Small mercies. She’s not going to die, she’s had her chance. She’ll have, and is having, a recovery. No one knows how much of her will return but it’s barely been eight weeks.

  There’s still no bed in the rehab unit but it’s clear she can’t stay here for long. It’s not doing her any good. The nurses are trying their best but she’s lost her mind and she’s angry, confused. She blames us for her still being here, shouts and scowls at the doctors and nurses. At least if she were home she’d have her things, her memories. It might give her context, help her find her place in the world. But the thought of looking after her like this fills me with dread.

  We spend my visits in the hospital garden, a hexagonal patch of green at the centre of the wards. She’s not had sun for eight weeks and she soaks it up, dangerously refusing lotion or shade. Shall we sit out of the sun, Mum? No. You’re looking a little pink, shal
l we go inside again? No. I try out speech and language techniques the therapist taught me, to help her relearn her language. Where’s the bird bath? She points. Where’s the aquilegia? She points. Where’s the fuchsia, the buddleia, the lavender. Points. Nothing bloody wrong with her. What’s my name? Jo. Oh. I show her photographs from home. The cat, the garden. Sometimes she refuses to look at them, sometimes she bursts into tears. The cat’s missing her. Like us she’s lost without her. Sleeps on her bed with her ears cocked, the faintest noise that might be Mum. We walk in and she turns away, disappointed.

  While Mum sleeps I steal glimpses of the peregrines on my phone. The fourth egg has been pushed out of the nest but the lump of fluff has been joined by two others. I can make out all their faces, now, their barely open eyes, their beaks set like a downwards smile. The three of them shuffle into each other as if still in eggs, lifting their long necks only for food. Parents gently tear little scraps of pigeon for them to gobble down.

  At first they come in twos and threes, distant shadows slowly wheeling. I watch them from my hidey hole, flat on my back in unmown grass: cloud-streaked blue dotted with circling, screaming home-again swifts. Finally, some Good News.

  Like the cuckoo and nightingale they come from Africa in spring. They dive and tumble and scream us into summer, relentless and unyielding. Here only for three months but three months of fun, three months of tumbling through skies, racing around rooftops, three months of parties, of screaming.

  I’m not sure where they nest; I’ve not seen them enter buildings. They choose holes in roofs and walls, ledges; few and far between these days as we renovate our homes, fill gaps to save energy. But in the neighbourhood, somewhere, in old schools, churches and homes, holes in the brickwork, neglected roofs, bespoke nest boxes if they’re lucky. One day I’ll live in a house with stairs and a roof and swift boxes, and I’ll cluck around my nesting babes like an excited mother hen.

  I shouldn’t allow myself time for swifts but it’s relaxing here, sinking into long grass, staring up at blue. Hospital-weary, my neck hurts, my body aches, my eyes are drowning in shadows. I close them and take in the sounds: bees, house sparrows, gulls, swifts. I’ll get up in a minute. Ants furrow in the sward next to me; bees buzz in the blooms. There are butterflies and leafhoppers and centurion flies and things I can’t identify. When I’m still, house sparrows line up, each one in its own square of bare trellis, waiting for the first one brave enough to sail into the pond, opening the floodgates for a flurry, a splash, of little brown birds having a wash.

  Out of Critical Care but not yet fixed, the garden survives but grows the wrong way: the grass is long, wayward stems and gone-over flowers dance, unfettered, in the breeze. Plants grow into each other, over each other. Yet the trellis is still bare. But I feel safe and alive here, pleased to be here, the motorway etched onto my brain, the hospital tattooed on my skin. My hands flake from antibacterial gel. They need soil and thorn scratches, leaf juice. My nostrils need the nectar of a thousand blooms, my eyes and ears need these swifts.

  Historically swifts aren’t associated with fun. They’ve been called Devil’s bitches, their screams the calls not of partying groups but of lost souls. How little our forefathers knew. They’ve got funny little faces and wide, gaping mouths. They fly so well they come to earth only to breed, but to a high vantage point rather than the ground, from where they can launch themselves back into the air, drop down and sail into the wind. They don’t have the leg power to launch themselves from the earth. If they crash-land they can’t fly off again, they require a human to cricket-bowl them back to the sky or drop them out of a first-floor window. I suppose, in less enlightened times, it would have been easy to mistrust a swift, a bird that turns up from nowhere in spring, flies around constantly but becomes grounded if it falls to earth, that screams in great piercing summer gangs before disappearing entirely. Before we knew about migration we thought they hibernated in mud. Imagine those large, sickle-shaped wings digging them out of the earth to lie, helpless and grounded while the others wheel about in the noisy sky. Devil’s bitches indeed.

  The swifts leave my patch of sky and I get up, weed out herb robert and sycamore samaras, which have seeded in every crack in the soil. I leave dandelions for the bees, manage the expectations of the green alkanet, make room for white deadnettle. I tidy, set this right and put that back. I’ve planted things too closely together but there’s nothing I can do now. Lifting and dividing is an autumn job, for when the swifts have buried themselves back in the mud. I Chelsea-chop alternate plants so they flower later in the season, let some things bloom before others.

  The honeysuckle still has not put on growth. It’s yellowing at the leaves, stubbornly refusing to throw out a stem. It’s barely any bigger than when I took it as a cutting from Mum’s garden a year ago. Does it know she’s in hospital? I water and feed it and make a note to do so weekly. It will be focusing its energy on root production, no doubt; next year it will climb. But it’s painful, waiting like this, when I could have spent £15 on something that would be ten times the size now. We gardeners are such fools sometimes.

  She’s home and it’s good for her. She’s weak and confused but she’s got some of her mind back, she’s less mad. I drive her to visit Great-aunt Mary and she directs the way. We take a new route, a far cry from the same journey she’s made weekly over the last thirty years. She tells me to go down this road or that, straight over at the roundabout. I’m learning to translate her new words: do you mean turn right? Yes. Do you mean take the middle lane? Yes. Eight weeks in hospital and she knows a better way. How? If the dead would return they could find their way home. Skeletons in the passenger seat – take this turn, get in that lane. Except you could go back only so far. Resurrect those for whom the land is unrecognisable and everyone is lost. For whom horses, not cars, got them from A to B, for whom the stars and moon, not street lights, guided their way. What would they say about what we have done? What would they do? The people and the bees too, the hedgehogs and birds, skeletons all. Look what you’ve done! Look what you’ve done! Too late. It’s all too late.

  We can reverse this. Some of it. We can rewild our parcels of land, grow things for bees, build new routes for hedgehogs. We can dig tiny ponds for dragonflies and frogs to breed in, we can plant trees that will serve birds for a hundred years. We can give back what we’ve taken away, rewild our land as well as ourselves. We could yet make mud pies and climb trees, we could yet gather moth cocoons. But how, says the child in the driveway playing with a toy car. How do we even begin?

  I imagine the gardens along my road all linked together, all designed as mine, all wild. Each one full of house sparrows, bees. Each one with a bee block housing tiny solitary wasps, a pond with dragonfly larvae, a compost heap with centipedes and rove beetles. A fruit tree in every plot would make an orchard – enough for us to share with neighbours and birds. A long hedge at the back would make a route, a corridor that small mammals and amphibians could travel along. Imagine how many birds would nest in the hedge that replaced fence panels all the way from one end of the road to another? Each garden home to a dunnock and a blackbird that would serenade every last one of us each morning.

  Between my flat and the Co-op there are three people who feed pigeons. The old lady at number 43 stands on the doorstep in her nicotine-stained dressing-gown, fag in drooped mouth, throwing stale bread into the road from her pocket. The man at number 92 half-heartedly arranges crumbs on his windowsill, the window open slightly so he might hear them coo-cooing from within his flat. Someone else feeds them in the most spectacular way. From the second floor they open a sash window as wide as it will go, where the birds queue for their daily treat. I imagine this person has a signal to call them with, an alarm going off, the dinging of a bell: dinner’s ready. I walk past and see wiggling pigeon bums crowding the windowsill, jostling for space, as the shadow of a person behind them controls them like the conductor of an orchestra.

  I watch the pigeons from
my living-room window. They fly from one end of the street to another, a mass of grey bodies gliding against grey houses, from one pile of grey, stale bread to the next. I think about the starlings and the sparrows and the other birds that live on this street that my neighbours don’t feed and I wonder why.

  Others might think they’re mad, might pour scorn on them. But these three people, who live between my flat and the Co-op, are nature lovers. I think about the green spaces they are exposed to, can get to. Few front gardens in my road have plants; these have long since been grubbed out to increase light to basement flats. The back gardens – who knows? It’s easier to pave and deck than mow or tend herbaceous borders. The nearest park is a mile away. And who says if our three pigeon fanciers have access to them? Would they know what to do if they did? Do they know, even, that they like nature, are drawn to helpless creatures in the road? Do they see themselves as naturalists? I sometimes meet the old lady shuffling along the pavement. I doubt her journeys take her much further than the Co-op.