Charlie Mayhew woke to the sound of bees.
Not the comforting hum of his apiary spread over the flatbed truck trailer rusted to its axles. Nor the exploratory fly-by buzz of early morning scouts in the bottlebrush screening the outhouse. This was the sound of a bee storm. A bee hurricane. A swarm was on. Or by the look of things, from the porch of Charlie’s shack where he stood in the mid-morning glare, a multiple of swarms. From soil to sky the air was thick with movement. Alive with vibration stroking all of Charlie’s senses. He balanced the coffee pot on the gas burner and peered into the frenzy. Nothing to do now but wait and watch.
He used to see swarms as a personal failure. No such thing as luck in this game, good or bad. Only hard work and antihistamines. It might be natural for the little buggers, booting out their progenitor when they’re done with her. But it’s tough being on the end of it. When they turn you out, you stay out.
The plume of insects began its transformation, dividing and focusing as though viewed through a pair of misaligned lenses. A signal had gone out, as clear to the bees as a gunshot, and the frantic cloud collapsed into two disparate cells, like flecks of flint to a pair of magnets.
Charlie tossed the coffee grounds and stepped into his boots, then stomped toward the bees gathering on the eastern edge of his clearing. They were clumped to a branch of a young silky oak, the green offshoot flexing under the strain like it bore a strange tropical fruit ripened to hazel. Ripples glistened over the surface, the brush of air enough to set them moving. A low hum resonated. A small collection of bees dangling by a chain of interlocking legs and bodies dropped from beneath the swarm and tangled in the weeds. The main ball bounced minutely on its branch at the changed dynamics and the fallen bees moved as one, crawling back to their queen like penitent subjects.
Charlie positioned a box beneath the shimmering mass and worked at the branch with a pruning saw unhooked from his belt-loop. The teeth caught in the rough bark and a shudder shook the swarm. More breakaway clumps fell. The saw cutting smoothly now, he took the weight of the separating limb with its load and lowered it, swarm-first, into the box. He fitted the lid and turned to deal with the second swarm, still settling across the clearing.
The final winding kilometres of Marilyn Rosewood’s journey left her bedraggled as a puppy swept downriver. Overhead the sun struggled to penetrate the canopy of eucalypts. The gateway she’d at last located was a neglected gap between trees, numberless reflector posts either side of a rough turn-off to the left. Her phone lay useless on the passenger seat, miles from any hint of signal. A lonesome blue dot lost in space.
“I would have a sign,” she thought.
She inspected one final shard of memory from the night before, her remnant hangover partly purged in a roadside rubbish bin along the way.
After all it was Andrew who had talked to her half the night, wasn’t it? And she was certain, all but certain, that the offer of a lift home came from him, the background babble of the Entomology Department Christmas party fading to silence around them.
Perhaps she had gone on a bit about the new grant proposal with Andrew. Possibly had provided more detail about the costings than the situation called for. Thinking back, she blamed the nervous excitement on her award. The same Christmas party prize two years in a row: “Miss Reliable”. Marnie from accounts had made quite the fuss.
Heat flushed her neck now, recalling Andrew’s face when she’d tried to engineer a kiss, reaching across the gearstick, her hand on his steering wheel. She hadn’t seen him move but there he was, holding open her door like a chauffeur. “We don't want anyone getting the wrong idea, right.” He’d laughed like she might be in on the joke.
Now she heard her mother’s voice: “Marilyn. You mustn't tie people up like that. When you’re having one of your conversations. Give them a chance to get away from time to time.” She’d said ‘conversations’ like she meant something else.
She saw it now. Andrew was saving the party from her.
Andrew, who at her mid-semester review had suggested this summer research job. Up in the hills with the Charlie Mayhew. It could make her career, he’d told her.
She peered up the driveway, drowning in cicada din.
“Just a small sign. With a number on it.”
The sound of the car reached Charlie long before he saw it creeping like a lost child from the wall of forest encasing the driveway. It halted by the shack where the gravel ended. This wasn’t Richie, of that he was certain. Different car for starters. Richie was the last visitor up here. Six weeks ago, perhaps more, he had driven up. Come to tell Charlie he was a grandfather. Had been for eight months.
“We named her after Mum. Thought you wouldn’t mind. Mum’s stoked. We gave her your last name, my name, so there’s that.”
Richie stayed long enough to share Charlie's last beer, excavated from the bottom of the camping fridge, its label soaked away in the condensation pooled there.
“Well, cheers to Christina,” Charlie said, tilting the half-full glass. “Or do you call her Chrissie?”
“Christina.” Richie had replied and departed without finishing his beer.
The visitor’s car door opened and Charlie saw a form emerge like some giant albino insect stretching from its chrysalis, brilliant white in a pristine bee-suit that caught the dazzle of morning sunlight. Zipping the netted helmet’s final links to the neck of the suit with one hand and bending to slip into boot stirrups with the other, the stranger rushed in a stumble across the clearing toward him. Smoke billowed from a shiny metal smoker that must have been stoked to life inside the car. Charlie was unable to ascertain a single detail of the tall being approaching—neither age, nor sex, nor intention.
He was wiry, noted Marilyn, with skin tanned to blotchiness stretched like leather across sinewed calves. Bleach-white hair jutted from the V of his half-buttoned shirt and blended with his beard. Squinting features hinted at annoyance. He did not seem inclined to speak first.
She plucked at the fingers of her glove, then decided against its removal given the circumstances and stuck out her leather paw.
“Mr Mayhew. Such an honour to meet you. I'm Marilyn Rosewood. From the university. I wrote to you. I’m here to help.”
“The university. Right. Well you can help by leaving your smoker over there for starters.”
“Oh, of course. You don't use smoke with swarms?”
“Marilyn, wasn't it? No, Marilyn. I don't know anyone who uses smoke for swarms. And I don’t use it ever.”
She deposited the incriminating implement ten metres downwind, then returned at a totter. For all that she had read and written and discussed and even dreamt on the subject of bees and their husbandry, Marilyn had never seen a real live bee swarm.
Charlie followed her, scraping from the bark of a scribbly gum a plug of resin that he shoved into the smoking spout. He kicked the empty box underneath the second swarm, this one settled around the lowest branch of a stumpy bush lemon, and passed Marilyn the pruning saw, handle first.
She was happy with her first stroke, just a marking crease, but the second bit deep and jagged teeth jammed hard in the fibrous outer layer. The branch flicked forward with a jerk and when it sprang back, the entire swarm let go. It landed in the dirt and leaves at her feet like the braids of a religious novice, shorn and scattered at the convent gates.
“Shit, shit. I’m so sorry. Oh, shit,” she said. Charlie made way for her flailing arms, then crouched beside the dropped swarm. With cupped hands he scooped the pile of bees from the dirt, his bare arms wrapped in the crawling mesh of insects.
Marilyn watched, entranced by Charlie’s tender handling of the bees, rescuing them from her clumsiness, and how he peeled them delicately from his arms and into the box like he was taking off his best coat.
She could see him reading her thoughts through the veil.
“Stay calm and everyone gets home alive,” he said, with a grimace she took for a smile.
Marilyn wouldn’t stay for a cup of tea and wouldn’t let him tell her the bees would be fine, that it didn’t matter how they got into the box. She drove away picturing a queen bee squashed beneath the weight of thousands of her own children, all victims of a deity that to the bees seemed cruel but really was only uncoordinated.
So much for a summer of research with Charlie Mayhew.
In the early morning after a sleepless night she left the motel room-key on the linoleum tabletop and threw her bag onto the back seat beside the piled-up bee-suit. But her left hand turn out of the village should have been a right, an error she only realised when she recognised Cotter’s Service Station at the bottom of Charlie’s mountain. She felt her mother’s eye-roll at her left-right thing but decided against turning back and starting afresh. Marilyn did not believe in fate, only intersecting probabilities, but she held strong views on people leaving their possessions about for others to deal with later. She might as well retrieve her smoker from Charlie’s place.
Charlie woke late again, this time to the sense of someone wriggling into the tissues of his waking dream. So the sight of the tall girl from the university ducking her head out from his doorway was not a complete surprise. In his dough-headed state, the cleanest solution was to get some clothes on and pretend they hadn’t seen each other.
He found her frozen with her hand on the car door like she might just jump in and leave once more. “Looking for this?” He held her smoker out to her. “Have you had breakfast?”
Marilyn agreed to stay only after he showed her the swarm safely stacked with the other hives on the flatbed trailer. Convincing her he wasn’t upset about the spilled bees almost cost his patience but he liked her straight talking, how she looked him in the eye. Also the way she had chewed her lip behind the veil when she was sawing the tree-branch. That stayed with him. And he needed help for the summer. He’d seen the last of Richie for a while. The local kids wouldn’t come near, scared away years before by his grumpy old man ways.
Still, he almost changed his mind when she brought up the subject of money—the university would insist on paying him. For her. Her education. Her research.
“And it’s in the charter,” she announced.
He looked away from her gaze and knew it was safest to come clean early.
“It’s from the cataract surgery, that sparkle,” he said.
“I knew that,” she said. “It’s the brown and blue flecks I was looking at.”
Over coffee he announced: “Alright, Marilyn. Forget about the money. You can sing to me.”
“Sing? I can’t sing.”
“Everyone can sing.”
“I won’t sing,” she said reluctantly. She knew an opening gambit when she heard one, when she was being bargained down and couldn’t tell where the next bid might go.
“Then help me fix up the hives.”
Her mouth hung at an unformed word. Did she have to explain her deficiencies? That she could barely tie her own shoelaces?
“And just let me know if you plan to leave again,” he said.
They spent the mornings at the hives. Marilyn arrived smelling of motel shampoo. Charlie poured coffee. He levered frames from their neglected tangle of propolis and honeycomb while she took notes. She counted frames, she counted drones, she counted larvae. She stayed in her bee-suit but eventually threw off the glove from her cramping right hand, just to keep up.
In the afternoons they stripped crumbling paint from weathered hive boxes and Charlie strained wire, guitar-string tight, into patched-up frames.
Marilyn followed Charlie’s movements but in her hands the pliers slipped and snapped at the fiddly materials, and the wire stayed slack. Frames split when she hammered home the anchors. Charlie would look up from his work and glance away without a word. She returned to scraping remnant wax, black with age, from the edges of broken frames until ready to try the pliers again, grateful at Charlie’s encouraging nod.
Charlie watched her struggle and stopped himself from moving beside her, from placing his hands over her hands, from guiding her fingers around the implements and the fragile pine struts. He had made that mistake before. First with Chrissie when they moved here from the city, then much later with young Richie. Both of them had stormed off—a little distance at the time and after a while gone for good. Better if Marilyn figures it out for herself, he had learned. Better for us both. It was easier to look away.
Evenings she followed the winding string of reflector posts to the bottom of Charlie’s mountain and took the bitumen highway to the motel in the village. There she dreamt of pheromones and wild hives swarming across the valley in a race against winter to reproduce and to survive.
Charlie dug the alarm clock from his pile of possessions and vowed to rise with the sun.
December rolled on. It was time to rob the bees. Charlie lent her his ute and she promised an early start, shoving her swag into the passenger seat, packing up her belongings. Who knew how long these things could take?
Approaching Cotter’s Servo at the bottom of Charlie’s mountain through the shadowless grey before dawn, her headlights picked out two figures waiting, just as Charlie had promised. Blind Cotter and his niece, Lucy. Charlie said they would be expecting her, though it remained a mystery by what means he communicated with the world outside his patch of scrub.
Lucy unfolded herself from atop the picnic table and began unhooking the tarpaulin from Charlie’s ute even before Marilyn had rolled to a halt. Three sealed buckets, the end of last season’s honey, were roped against the cab like hostages delivered for ransom.
Lucy grabbed the nearest of these and swung it up and out of the ute like it held fairy floss and not thirty kilos of Charlie Mayhew’s best honey.
Cotter, in sunglasses, addressed Marilyn. “So, things going well up there, then? You’re staying on? As Charlie’s assistant?”
“Just here for the summer. Doing some research with Charlie. For the university.”
Lucy made a noise in her throat that might have come from the effort of swinging buckets.
In Cotter’s left hand was a paper bag he held out toward Marilyn. She heard the gentle hum before she took it and the bag buzzed in her fingers like a battery had been left on inside. Replacement queens in their matchbox cages. Another bee thing she had only seen on YouTube. She scrunched the bag shut.
“Was going to be our last trade,” said Cotter.
“Oh. Are you selling up?”
“Not me sweetheart. Charlie. He was going to pull the pin. Perhaps having all this company has made him change his mind.” Cotter’s unfocused gaze aimed somewhere over her left shoulder.
“You make it sound like it’s a bad thing,” said Marilyn.
“Bad for Charlie,” said Cotter. “He needs to get off that mountain. Ever since his boy Richie left him up there, he’s not been the same. Place going to shit. Half his hives swarming every year.” He waved at the ute. “Honey’s dropped right off, too. It’s all a numbers game, see.”
Marilyn pictured Charlie dancing amongst the hives on the flatbed tray, bees bouncing off him in his shorts and torn t-shirt like he was made of glass. She felt the strength of his grip hauling her to her feet when she’d tripped in the shed the previous day. The box she was stacking had splintered at the impact, spilling a tangle of timber and frayed coils of wire.
“And now he’s getting new queens,” Cotter continued, eyebrows raised above the rim of his sunglasses.
For the instant it had taken to tabulate the damage of the dropped box, she didn’t want to look at Charlie, didn’t want to acknowledge her shame. The afternoon they’d spent fixing the frames. Her sense that she was finally mastering the fiddly work. Time all wasted. Thanks to her.
“Everyone gets tired in the end,” said Lucy. “So if you’re really thinking of moving in on him.”
“What?” retorted Marilyn. “Don’t be ridiculous. I’m from the university. Just here for the summer.” Was the sun high enough to show her burning face?
Lucy laughed. “You might be from the university, sweetheart, but he still has functioning tackle. And I dare say you do too.”
Marilyn fussed with the clips attaching the tarpaulin. She pictured Charlie’s flashing eyes and his shouted laugh, a noise he seemed to be rediscovering like a neglected mother tongue. That shared moment, both of them collapsed on the floor surrounded by the mess of broken equipment, had stilled her mother’s voice complaining about her clumsiness.
Lucy squeezed a load of clean buckets beneath Marilyn’s tarp and disappeared inside the store.
Marilyn watched her go and felt a strange confidence settle like a peaceful sigh within her chest.
Cotter said, “If he stays up there because of you, you might just find you can’t leave. Because of him.”
All morning and into the afternoon she ran from the apiary to the spinning house and back again, carting boxes of frames swollen with honey. Charlie worked the hives, brushing frames free of bees and loading them into boxes for Marilyn to collect. The sun was unrelenting.
At last he followed her from the beehives, lugging the final box across the clearing.
“That’s it. Better leave them something for dessert,” Charlie announced.
Head spinning with the heat, she lowered herself to the ground and leaned against the stacked boxes. She heard the rising pitch of buzzing before she felt it and saw the stray passenger bee sticky from a fallen droplet of honey tangled in the fine hairs of her forearm. Stilled by curiosity and dizziness, she watched the bee’s slow-motion progress over her freckles. Charlie took hold of her wrist even as the pain of the sting reached her, before she had time to shout. Flicking the bee aside he came at her with his open pocketknife and dislodged the sting still buried there, scraping it sideways. A patch of skin shaved bare surrounded the fresh welt. He lifted her arm for a closer look. Concern and time ridged his forehead.
“We should put ice on that,” he said.
She blinked twice and swallowed.
“Charlie, if you had ice up here, I wouldn’t waste it on bee stings.”
“Fair enough,” he said. “Smoko, then.”
From the hammock on the porch she heard the hand pump squeak to life, pictured it spurting into the disused horse trough behind the shack. Then a splash and a shout and she couldn’t resist a peek. Charlie’s face was all that was visible above water, his clothes scattered about the place like abandoned beliefs.
“Whoops, sorry,” she said under her breath and returned to the hammock. He reappeared dripping in his shorts, singlet slung over one shoulder. He picked two Sao biscuits from a packet on the table, nodded once at Marilyn and lay down on the camp stretcher in the corner.
He was snoring before she had time to look away.
Marilyn rose. The morning’s heat radiated through her shirt. The ache of the bee sting was worse if she rubbed at it. She expected the trough to have a slimy green layer and unpleasant smell, but she found it deep and clear. The flow of water when she pumped the handle caught her breath. Climbing in, it was all she could do not to shout. She had never been outdoors without clothes in her life.
The water lapped at her throat until the delicious cool turned to a tide of exhaustion. She stood, water streaming from her, then dressed and returned to the hammock.
“Righto,” said Charlie once she’d opened her eyes, still groggy from the depths of daytime sleep. The sun was dipping below the eaves. “Back to it. Job’s only half done.”
Keeping the knives hot was Marilyn’s job, as was cranking the spinner. Charlie lifted a frame from a box. He pulled the steaming knife from water near boiling and sawed down the face of the honeycomb, sloughing away the softened caps of wax. Tiny pockets of gold winked at him from the open cells and he slotted the frame into the spinner’s wire bracket.
Specks of honey splattered the barrel’s whirring inner wall, thrown there from the basket of frames spinning to a blur with a turn of the handle. It slid down the walls, a pool of gold gathering at the base. Marilyn held the sieve below the exit valve and swapped full buckets for empties.
Charlie caught a flash of reflection in the squared rim of the pot heating on the gas burner. Silver hair and scraggly beard, cheeks hanging loose from their skeleton. The cataract twinkle lost in the fading light. When they turn you out, you stay out, he reminded himself. No second chances when you look like this.
The aroma of beeswax and honey mingled with woodsmoke around Charlie and Marilyn, the day’s warmth remembered in the boulders they leaned on beside the fire. Leftover stew was smeared around the insides of the pot, discarded beside unused kindling. Trunks of giant eucalypts at the farthest reaches of the firelight flickered all shades of orange. Charlie poked at the fire, sparks shooting upward to blend with the stars. Stray bees disorientated by the fallen curtain of darkness and lured by the false sun of the flames were carried away with the smoke.
He watched her over the firepit. She was transfixed by the progress of a beetle across a yellow box log in the woodpile. It was a bejewelled thing of green and gold, and its firelight sparkle echoed in her eyeshine. He could see her counting the seconds the beetle spent negotiating small objects she placed in its path: a twig, a stone.
He said, “You love numbers, don’t you, Marilyn. Counting things.”
She could barely look at him.
“Me too. You can trust numbers.” He had already turned away. “G’night.”
“Night,” she said and hugged her legs tight to herself.
Out for a 2 am pee, Charlie passed the rumpled form of Marilyn in her swag. The fire was almost dead. Broken chunks of charcoal smouldered alone, scattered through the firepit, separated by mounds of cold grey ash.
Returning, still blurry eyed, he blinked twice. Marilyn was standing, risen from the blankets, and when he stepped to pass she reached out and took his hand and pulled him to her.
He sensed her bend at the knees, felt the charge of her lips on his lips. As one they lowered themselves to the swag, canvas rough and warm against their hips.
Without a word they made love, tender and magnificent.
Her first observation, lying beneath the glimmer of dawn and the reverberating laugh of the day’s first kookaburra, was that hair age-bleached of colour doesn’t hang the way it does on a younger person’s head. She followed the leathery tracks of his neck and examined the splotches on the back of a hand slid up beside his face, a face lined by her pillow’s creases. She remembered the heat of that hand on her breast, her hip. She had instigated things, true, but it was Charlie who had waited patiently for her.
Marilyn rolled away, collected her clothes and moved swiftly behind the shack to douse beneath the freezing pump. When she returned, Charlie had the kettle on. Warmth stirred into the morning like honey in tea. The rising tide of bee buzz reached them from the spinning house, an army in search of its stolen loot.
“Better get those stickies back in the hives. Going to get messy over there pretty soon,” said Charlie.
“Time for a coffee?” said Marilyn.
“Always takes me a while to get going. As you know.” He looked away, shy at his joke.
“No hurry here,” she said.
Honeycomb frames robbed of honey are light as empty cash-tills. Marilyn carried them two boxes at a time from the spinning house to the flatbed tray where Charlie slotted them home, back into their hives. This task would be done before long and at each interchange they swapped a glance that wondered what would happen next. And when.
He was waiting for her, perched on the edge of the tray, the previous load already sorted. Her view was screened by the boxes stacked in her arms. She heaved up as he reached down and the corner of the box caught him beneath his chin, a perfect uppercut. She felt the bump, the sideward slide of the top box, and the sound of Charlie’s strangled “Hoi.” Then the shape of him falling. The muffled thud of his body spilling to the ground.
“Oh shit,” she said, turning to see. “Oh Charlie. Oh shit. I’m so sorry.”
The shock of pain pinned him to the dirt like a stake driven through his hip. Bee buzz and currawong calls focused to a magnified point of light and sound buried behind his eyes. A hollowed-out voice sounding much like his own was saying it’s all going to be okay. “You just have to call an ambulance,” said the voice.
“My phone’s in the car,” she replied.
“Never mind your phone. Get yourself to the servo. You can call from there.”
Cotter handed the receiver to her and stood listening while she made the call. When she handed it back, he hung it in the cradle and turned his head in her direction. “Pity,” he said. “Charlie deserved better.”
She declined his offer to send Lucy up to help. Not like this, she thought. You can’t see us like this.
The ambulance trolley buckle gouged Charlie’s hip with each jolt and twist coming off the mountain. He sensed Marilyn following, could hear the driver swearing about her tailgating. He focused on the image of her eyes and her mouth as he had since waking that morning, kicked naked from her swag by the long-forgotten pulse of elation bubbling just beneath his skin.
Trolley wheels rattling across door tracks jarred open his eyes to the shelves, tubing, and lights of the ambulance bay. Marilyn spoke in lowered tones with a person wielding a clipboard.
Charlie heard the question, “Date of birth?” and Marilyn’s hesitation.
“Next of kin?”
Marilyn pausing again. “I think there’s a son. Look, can this wait?”
“And you are?”
Like the birdsong earlier, Marilyn’s voice amplified inside his head, focused somewhere behind his eyes.
“I’m his... He’s my teacher.”
The two faces, Marilyn’s and the clerk’s, turned to Charlie and he screwed his eyes shut against the pain.
Marilyn moved alongside him, looking from Charlie to the bag of fluid hanging above, counting the drips, calculating the diminishing volume and the time until it would run dry.
A nurse in green scrubs appeared and added some clear liquid to the bag from a syringe she took from her pocket. At Marilyn’s questioning look she said: “Something to protect his heart. The shock of the fall, you know.”
Marilyn stroked Charlie’s hair, felt the papery skin of his cheek. He opened his eyes and reached for her hand, patting it in a way that suggested sad finality.
“Reckon I’ll be gone a while, Marilyn. You’ll be wanting to get going yourself. Back to your university.”
“Oh. But don’t you think... I just thought...”
“I don’t know what to think,” said Charlie. “Fate. Strange sense of humour it has. Just when things are looking up. But you’ll do well, whatever it is you decide on. Wherever you end up.”
Her shoulders slumped beneath the weight of it, Charlie’s offered farewell, her impulse to take his suggestion and leave. Hanging around, she’d only cause more harm. She heard her mother’s confirming tone. But when she looked at Charlie, she caught the sparkle in his flecked eyes, moistened with tears and pictured him again on the flatbed tray, dancing amongst the beehives.
“Charlie, I’m not going anywhere.”
The nurse returned to wrap a blood pressure cuff around Charlie’s arm. More numbers ticking down.
She said, “By the look of that leg we’ll have to get him to the Base Hospital. Poor old thing.”
She looked at Marilyn a second time. “You’re a relative?”
Marilyn took Charlie’s hand from the pillow. Peering into his eyes she stroked his arm from his elbow to his fingertips.
“We live together.”
“Oh. Okay. Well aren’t you a lucky fellow?” The nurse flashed them both a smile and was gone.