The Bumblebee Flies Anyway Read online

  Sometimes they warm up on the journey home and by the time you lay the sugar solution down they’re halfway up your arm. You can see their antennae going, crazed as they are for their sugary hit. These are the best ones, the ones that want to be saved. They drink and drink, and within an hour they’re flying around your home, trying to escape. But others, they can smell the sugar but it’s as if they don’t know what to do with it. They walk in circles, step in it, get covered in it. They limp around, sticky sugar on their wings. For years I put this down to parasites. That there was something messing with the wiring of the bee’s brain. That it wouldn’t, couldn’t feed, a helpless, hopeless thing. What do I do with you now? Turf you out? I’ve made the situation worse. I’ve tried to wash the sugar off you, tried to warm you up. I’ve kept you for days encouraging you to feed. But it would result in only one thing: putting her outside on a mahonia flower, persuading myself that she wouldn’t just die of exhaustion, that somehow she would be saved.

  I’ve since learned that if you stroke her thorax she will drink. It can take a while, but gentle, soothing whispers and a little coaxing can work wonders. There, girl, suck it up. There you are, ssssh. They take longer to recover than the bee halfway up your arm, but they get there, eventually.

  I check the box. She’s drinking. Her proboscis is out, her tongue sweeping the bottle top from side to side, like a mop. Half an hour later and she’s still drinking, still mopping from side to side. Oh Adrienne, my heart.

  It’s raining outside, still, but she doesn’t want to stay. With a bellyful of sugar she’s warming up, shivering her wing muscles, making low, deep buzzes. She’ll have enough energy to find somewhere to rest for the night. But what about the morning? What if she can’t find food then? I look forward to the days when there’s a twelve-month supply of nectar in my garden. But now: what? I wrack my brains for the location of the nearest mahonia, winter clematis. Nothing. It’s early evening, a good fourteen hours until the sun rises and she can start her search for flowers, or return to her hibernaculum. She’ll have to stay, my reluctant buzzy guest.

  I find the lid of the takeaway box and pierce holes in it. I remove the sugar water in case she knocks it over, add shredded paper. She raises her leg to tell me to back off. With the lid on she’s cocooned in a dry space until morning. I pop her on the porch, where it’s cool but dry. She’ll be safe there.

  Inside it’s sad again. Unfamiliar, unhomely. I shuffle through my home, turning out lights. I cocoon myself in my little room. Like Miss Haversham. Like Adrienne.

  In the morning I fetch her, growling and grumpy, a sulky teenager still. I pop her on the kitchen worktop for a cup of sugar – sit there, now, while I make this. I place the sugar water into the box and she takes a drink, not like last night but enough to see her on her way. I look her over as she feeds. She’s in good nick, not like some queens you see after hibernation, all broken wings and worn coat, determined still to found her nest. However will you do it?

  If bees could scowl. OK, Adrienne, OK. I stroke her thorax with my little finger, say goodbye. She raises a back leg. Pop her little box back on the porch, this time with the lid off and the sugar solution still there, just in case she wants to come back. And then I watch her go. She flies immediately, doesn’t hesitate. Sometimes you see them orientate themselves, fly around in circles a few times to work out where they are and how they will return. But she doesn’t do that. I saved her life but she will have seen me as her captor. No matter; she’s on her own now and she has a chance.

  Back inside and then out again into the garden. Funny how I didn’t release her here, an unconscious decision but understandable I suppose – it’s not good enough for bees yet, the first should come of their own accord. And will they ever? The state of it, really, a huge, muddy mess. It’s not so bad at the back, now the soil is dug over, now there’s an apple tree stick and climbing rose sticks. Now there are dishevelled, unwilling teasels. It will be spring again, it will be spring again.

  Spring

  It’s a cool clear day. A Monday. Two leaves have burst from the stick stems of ‘Frances E. Lester’, two red-green flags waving in the breeze. The other rose, ‘Shropshire Lass’, is still in bud. The apple looks dead. I scrape a fingernail gently along a stem: green, I’m just being impatient. My nine teasels and a few hellebores are still driftwood floating in a mud sea.

  Spring and there’s so much to do, so much to be finished. And now it’s cold, horribly cold, winter cold. But, March, the clock is ticking. I need to sow seeds, create and fill borders or I don’t have a garden. But the space isn’t ready, I’ve already failed.

  The long winter is giving me time. But it’s borrowed time, the other seasons will be shorter. It will be borrowed from spring or summer; I can only dream these weeks belong to autumn. Spring, when it eventually comes, will be a nightmare. Because it will overlap with summer and then –

  Breathe.

  Everywhere I go I’m on the scrounge. At Dad’s allotment I dig up clover and comfrey. From Mum’s I take bits of globe thistle and pulsatilla, two lady’s mantle seedlings from a crack in the paving, a bit of bugle and granny’s bonnet, a sliver of lemon thyme. I bag up a long stem of honeysuckle in water and treat it like a cut flower. With birthday vouchers I buy three-for-two oriental poppies, a mountain cornflower and a job lot of foxgloves. In a corner I find a forgotten pot of crammed-in sticks: common bistort and Japanese anemone, I think, which I gathered in a rush when I moved. And among the sticks a brown sodden leaf, a little scrap of lamb’s ears. It’s not much but I have things to plant among the teasels and apple, in front of the climbing roses. I have ingredients for a border.

  I cut my honeysuckle stem into 10cm lengths and plunge them into a pot of soil. Everything else I arrange on the muddy surface and then plant in cold, useless earth, the globe thistle marked with a stick, the cornflower and poppies in front of it, foxgloves dotted variously. I try to ignore how pathetic it looks. I try to imagine them grown.

  The sun at last has reached the back bit of soil and the plants sit in their mud baths, photosynthesising with little leaves. I lean against the wall and drink tea. While they grow I can set to work with the rest of the mess, the piles of stones, the litter, and by the time the sun fills that space maybe, just maybe, it will be ready for planting. But planting what? There’s no plan. There’s no design. There’s no money. All I know is there will be plants in soil, plants grown from root and stem cuttings at the wrong time of year. Plants raised from seed during the coldest spring. Plants that might grow but could well die. Will there be a lawn? Maybe. I’ve some spare seed somewhere, no money for turf. Trellis, to add height, create privacy? Can’t afford it. All I can do is sow seed and take cuttings, beg for little bits of this and that. See what happens. I have my teasels. There are always teasels.

  But it doesn’t matter. It’s a garden. Plants grow and die, can be moved. Others will seed in, now there’s earth for them to find. You can’t have everything at once.

  I return, half-heartedly, to the shade, to clearing stones, raking them here and there to reveal more soil. The rake scratches the stones and the ringing burns into my brain. I work like this for hours, until the sky starts to pink around the chimneys, the starlings gather and bounce their way to the pier, the herring gulls glide out to sea with the sun reflected on their bellies. In a distant tree the robin sings. I stop raking, bag up litter and rubble, take it down the steps, through the flat, up the steps and to the giant communal bin at the end of the road. I empty the bags into the bin so I can use them again. I make three journeys, carry six bags.

  I take one final look at the garden. I need a shed. So much of my life is scattered here, pots, garden tools, bits of pond liner, slate and wood and an old piece of doormat I kept for a ‘project’. If I could ever throw things away. With darkness waiting to pounce I drag the hose to the tap outside the back door. Connect it up. I turn on the tap and hear the water spit into the rubber, kicking it to life as I rush up the stai
rs to catch the end before it spurts everywhere. I stand, exhausted, watering plants into their new homes, giving them a life I wish I could give myself. I enjoy ten minutes of standing still, listening to the robin’s dusk chorus and the clack-clacking of distant gulls. Darkness. The plants sated I turn in, turn off the hose, close the back door, run a bath.

  But then it all comes crashing back: the loneliness, the What Am I Doing Here. This new home and city, this unfamiliar life, my things in wrong places. I feel sad, suddenly. Hopeless and useless. Without the garden there’s no point to me. Without sunshine there’s no life. The bath will be fifteen minutes. I’m a crumpled heap in the kitchen but I can’t stop – not yet. I’m driving myself mad. My muscles are screaming but so is my heart and my heart is screaming louder. I retrieve the large oak dining table from behind my wardrobe, its legs from under my bed. It was Mum’s, she wanted to throw it out, I wouldn’t let her. It was the table that sat in the kitchen of the house I grew up in. That I had eaten my first dinners on, free from the constraints of the high chair. That I poured cereal over, and under, when I first tried to fill my own breakfast bowl. That I had been forced to remain seated at until I’d eaten every last morsel of food, night after night. The table which, as a teenager, I carved swear words into, while revising for my GSCEs. The table which I have no room for. The table which is now my temporary potting bench. My greenhouse staging. My me.

  It’s half the size of my living room. I move the sofa and other bits out of the way and assemble it beneath the south-facing window. It looks ridiculous but I don’t care. I find a bag of compost, empty a kitchen drawer of seed packets and washed plastic containers, trays and yoghurt pots – any and all vessels. I assemble and turn on two heated propagators. My seed drawer is a mixed bag of packets stuck on the cover of magazines, seeds I’d saved from plants over the years, seeds bought from Gilbert White’s garden five years ago but sadly, horribly, never sown. Most special of all, seeds given to me by Michael Blencowe of Butterfly Conservation. A packet each of caterpillar food plants for a couple of rare migrant butterflies: everlasting pea and fennel, to welcome me to my new home, with the scribbled note: If you believe, they will come. Butterflies. I screw up my face in excitement.

  I turn off the bath and sow the seeds of my new garden. I sow my butterfly seeds first, and some other bits and pieces for various insects: sweet rocket for orange-tip butterflies, love-in-a-mist and cornflower from Gilbert White’s garden, plus echinacea, Eryngium ‘Miss Wilmott’s Ghost’ and a job lot of sunflowers and cosmos. Plus tomatoes, aubergines, basil and winter squash. I don’t label anything – a final act of rebellion at the table I’d been forced to eat at as a child. I will regret this, of course.

  Compost in seed trays is a happy sight and I feel better. I fire up the news on my laptop and watch it in the bath. I can’t get the mud from beneath my fingernails, from the wrinkles in my skin. When I’m old seeds will sprout in my folds.

  I dream that my grandparents’ garden is turned into a car park and wake up crying. I’ve not been there for twenty years: 1996, the year after my granny died, when we moved in with Grandad because he couldn’t live by himself. I was fifteen.

  It was a house without a number, simply called ‘Driftwood’. Granny grew red geraniums in pots at the front, which she crammed into the porch for winter. They had a mad old Labrador called Sheba. Grandad manned the vegetable patch at the back, grew onions, marrows and stringy runner beans. Ellie and I would sneak behind the borders to hide; we played croquet, stole biscuits from the tin. The dog pissed great yellow medallions on the lawn and Grandad chased after her with a watering can.

  Driftwood was a large, cold house with threadbare carpets and single-glazed windows. Heating was never allowed. I would come here on Inset days and make rock cakes with Granny or play In My Shopping Basket through the dumb-waiter hatch leading from the kitchen to the living room. She taught me about the dawn chorus here, one magical morning where she terrified me with birdsong. We walked Sheba down country lanes where, once, we heard a cuckoo. We ate panda-bear-shaped meringues from the local bakery, watched The Six Million Dollar Man and Fifteen to One on the telly. Granny would feed the birds and we would watch from the kitchen as house sparrows and tits battled it out for stale bread and bacon fat. Sometimes she would treat me to a tumbler of boiled sweets.

  I wish I had known her better. About ten years ago I started grieving for her – she died in 1995 but it wasn’t until much later that I appreciated the loss. Appreciated the relationship I could have had with this woman who had lived through the Second World War and lost a brother, who married late and raised four children, nearly lost everything when Grandad, a wine merchant, lost his shop during the recession in the 1970s. Who muddled through and built a life back again, cooked dinner and ironed shirts for her husband, who drank gin every day and had regular blackouts. Who I knew only as the woman who knitted me jumpers and made me rock cakes, taught me about birds and came to school plays when my parents were too busy. How wonderful it would be if I’d been able to talk to her about her life, if she had been there to guide me into adulthood, if we had got to know each other beyond rock cakes and jumpers and the cuckoo and dawn chorus.

  She died around the same time I realised I was gay, and in her last moments I distanced myself from her because I feared she would reject me. A little old lady in a fireside bed, me awkward and ashamed beside her. The last thing she said to me was be quiet, close the door, stop making so much noise. We moved to Driftwood after she died. But it wasn’t the same. She wasn’t there, for a start, and neither, really, was Grandad. I would come home from school to find washing- machine parts in the bread bin, food for the evening meal mysteriously disappeared. He would answer the phone to my friends and tell them he’d never heard of me. The setting was more rural than I was used to, the last train to Birmingham was at 6 p.m. – you had to put your arm out to make the train stop – and I would head out to the bright lights of the big queer city, blissfully underage, knowing I would not be able to get home until Monday. I don’t know how long we lived there for – six months, a year maybe. I slept in the bed Granny died in.

  I never gardened at Driftwood but I harvested runner beans, played on the lawn with my cousins, terrorised the dog, watched birds. There were so many birds. As I grew I would be tasked with jobs: raking up leaves, clearing windfall crab apples so Granny could make jelly. Jobs that involved getting cold wet sleeves that would creep up to your elbow and never dry.

  In my dream, the driveway snakes around the house, taking up both the front and back gardens. I cry for the birds Granny made me listen to and which scared me so much in 1989. I wonder if they are still as noisy now. I drink tea in bed and open the laptop, find the house online, last listed for sale five years ago but unsold. The front garden and drive are much the same, the crab-apple tree still standing, the huge bank of conifers separating the house from next door. The little piece of wood, on which ‘Driftwood’ is carved, still pokes out unevenly from the lawn.

  The back garden is not a driveway either but the patio has been extended and the right-hand border is gone. Most of the shrubbery remains but there’s no vegetable patch at the back, no tired shed, no compost heap. There’s no bird feeder; there are no piss medallions. I see the ghost of Grandad asleep in his shorts in a deckchair, skin raging pink from the sun. Croquet balls litter the lawn, Granny’s washing on the line.

  Leggings and shoes, base layer and jacket, ear muffs and woolly hat. Temperatures are well above freezing now and there’s been rain. Brighton and Hove’s amphibians are on the move.

  I wait until after sunset, after the starlings and herring gulls have left the rooftops for the pier. After the sky has flashed and died, after the stars and the moon have risen. As I head into darkness, spots of rain hit my face. I bunch my hands into my sleeves, feel for the zip of my jacket in case I can tweak it up a bit, kid myself I can be warmer. My headphones are in, dance music to pump the blood, to ease me into the slog of run
ning in cold rain, the hills, the night. Haloed streetlights guide the way as I reluctantly start, weaving past commuters heading home from London, up past the chippy and Hove station, the sorting office and Tesco Express. Down again and left onto Cromwell Road, dogs on leads, buses splashing puddles as the heavens open to refill them. Good for frogs, I suppose. I run faster to keep warm, left again at the lights and up into the rain-soaked hills to join the Droveway, an ancient route that used to link the parishes of Lewes and Portslade but now connects the parks of Hove and Preston. In times gone by farmers would drove cattle along here, to or from market or between summer and winter pastures – maybe frogs and toads would have used it, too, to find their mating grounds in spring; there must have been dew ponds here where houses, another chippy, another Tesco Express now stand. Garden ponds now home to the descendants of simpler times, perhaps. If there are any. A dairy still stands, its buildings once part of Preston Farm. These, and a few old houses on South Road, are the only hint of the Droveway’s past.

  I come out at the bottom of South Road by the petrol station, turn right along Preston Road until I reach the Rockery. It’s always open, closes only for Pride. Right on the main road but a world away from it, it used to be part of a wood called the Rookery, where rooks nested. It’s a magical little place, three and a half acres of pathways, pond, stream and waterfall, all surrounded by wonderful plants. It’s managed by one staff member and volunteers by day, used by teenagers at night – sometimes, on morning runs, I clear away empty beer cans and crisp packets so the park volunteers don’t have to. There are goldcrests and firecrests here, song thrushes that drown out the sound of traffic on spring evenings, a wren that nests in the gunnera. On hot summer days terrapins bathe.