Tell it to the Bees (6 page)

With women she did things differently, shutting the door more carefully and then perhaps pouring herself some stewed tea. She'd listen with her head on one side, and when the consultation was finished, she'd ask them about somebody else, their children or their mother. She might even remark on their hairdo, and put a rueful hand to her own.

That Monday morning she saw a knee injury, back pain, haemorrhoids, a possibly tumorous lump and a duodenal ulcer. She saw a man with a bad heart and a young woman who stroked the arms of the buttoned chair and said the problem was that she couldn't breathe. Five minutes a life was the rule, and Jean was proud of her ability to give
people the time they needed, and to keep to the schedule. Still, she allowed some slack to those who couldn't fit their pain into the minutes provided and, by the time she arrived on her first house call, she was, as usual, running behind.

It was gone four o'clock when she got to the Bewick home. She'd heard nothing, no message left, which was a good sign. A scurry of fingers opened the front door to her and she smiled wearily at the small, grave boy in underthings who stood back against the wall, his face still riddled with rash.

‘You feeling a bit better?' Jean said, and he nodded. ‘Good. Upstairs?'

He nodded again.

Last time Jean had seen Connie had been only three days ago. She'd stood at the front door scuffled in her mother's skirts, bright-eyed and shy. Jean remembered her apple-round face solemn at the threshold, and then wide in a smile as Jean bent to pick her up.

‘Let me have a hold of you, you little sugar plum,' she'd said as she swung the small chunk of girl up level with her eyes and then turned her round and carried her up the stairs before her.

Today Jean found Mrs Bewick sitting on her bed with Connie a swaddled bundle in her tight arms. She looked unkempt, her lank hair bundled up roughly, a grubby beige cardigan pulled over a thin cotton shift dress. Jean could see that she was shivering.

‘Mrs Bewick?' Jean said. ‘It's Dr Markham. Can I come in?'

She didn't lift her head, didn't reply. Jean could hear the child's breathing, laboured and rough. The room was stuffy and the bed unmade. A bedside lamp cast a brackish light into the room, as though it were underwater. A bucket of
dirty nappies stood by the chest of drawers, and a baby's bottle lay beside it. The bottle rocked slightly as Jean walked across the floorboards to the bed.

Crouching beside mother and child, Jean put a hand to the woman's elbow.

‘Let me see her,' she said softly.

Mrs Bewick made no reply, only held her child closer to her.

Jean put a hand to the small brow. She was burning with fever.

‘Has she been like this for long?'

Mrs Bewick turned the cradled child away.

‘I need to see her, Mrs Bewick. I'll only be a minute.'

Jean could smell the little girl's hair, that sweet, milky smell. She could hear her struggle for air.

‘A couple of things. I must check a couple of things.'

‘I didn't call you.'

‘I know.'

‘You said not to call you.'

‘Let me examine her, please.'

She tried to keep the panic from her voice, and maybe that persuaded Mrs Bewick and she placed Connie on her lap and allowed Jean to loosen the swaddling.

The three brothers were crowded in the doorway, shoving for a better view, but silently, as though they knew that something in this visit was very different from the last, and so they met it with their own, childish gravitas.

Jean turned to them. They looked like the three wise monkeys there, one tousled head below another, below another. She wanted to close the door against them. She didn't want them to see their sister like this. She didn't want them to see their mother's fear. She didn't want them to see her own. Forcing a smile, she waved her arms as if they were some quizzy pups.

‘Go on, you lot. Git.'

Even in the silty light Jean could see the blue shadow at the girl's lips, and when she lifted a small hand free of the blanket, the same chilly shadow at the fingertips.

‘She was looking at me so oddly,' Mrs Bewick said. ‘Her eyes really wide, but not like usual. Her hands so icy and her head so hot. But now she won't look at all.'

‘How long has she been like this? Struggling for breath?'

‘You think I bother you. You think I make things up.'

‘I think we need to get her to the hospital.'

Mrs Bewick and Connie had a side room in the hospital while they waited for the penicillin to take effect. Neighbours looked after the boys, who wished their sister could be ill more often, what with the jelly and fruit pastilles.

When Connie opened her eyes and smiled at her mother, Mrs Bewick looked as though she would break. But then her eyes closed again and though her body continued its struggle for air for two more days, her spirit seemed already to have drifted beyond reach.

When they trained you for doctoring, they didn't teach you how to cope with death. Only how to do all you could to rescue men and women from it. But death was a very present fact of life in Jean's line of work. People were born to die. She'd made her mother very angry once, saying that.

Despite all her best efforts, despite all medical knowledge and expertise, people would die and there was nothing she could do to prevent them. She knew by now that some, by the time it happened, were glad of it, but that many were not.

However they stood, Jean was surprised by how many people seemed to know when death was holding out its hand. Even young men and women. But not Connie Bewick. She had been out of the womb too short a time to know she might be going already. The caul still clung to her, soft
and mother-smelling. But when her lungs were finally covered and she took her last breath, she seemed to slip into death so easily. Her fingers twitched, her eyelids quivered and then she was gone. There was nothing Jean could have done to hold her there, but when Mrs Bewick turned and looked at her above the small dead body, that made no difference. Despite herself, despite what she knew, Jean railed that night at she knew not what.

Charlie didn't keep step with his father on the way to the doctor's. It was partly his ribs, partly not, and both of them knew it, though Robert didn't know it as much as Charlie did.

Robert would go ahead for a bit, then stop and turn. His son walking so slowly, one arm held in to his side, head down, made him scowl. The boy made him angry. He wanted to shake him, tell him to stand up straight, stand up for himself. But he remembered Lydia's look as they had left, and he lit a cigarette instead and told himself to be patient, to wait it out till tonight.

Charlie told his mother he had tripped on the steps to the river, where the stone never dried and it was green and slippery. But she didn't believe him.

‘You don't get ribs that sore by falling on the steps. Not at your age, Charlie.'

He shrugged and she tried again.

‘Will you tell me? What happened?'

She waited; her eyes on her needle as she stitched at the tear in his shirt. Charlie didn't reply.

‘You're going to see the doctor tomorrow morning,' she said.

‘But you've got to go to work.'

‘Your father's taking you.'

He looked at her; alarmed or angry, she couldn't tell.

‘Not Dad. Please will you take me?'

‘He can take the time. I can't.'

‘Then couldn't Annie?'

‘She's at work too now. Remember?'

‘Please, Mum.'

She shook her head. Charlie willed her to look at him, but she kept her eyes fixed on the sewing.

He didn't blame the boy. Fred Dawson. It was the girls had done it with their skipping. He wouldn't think about it and he wouldn't answer his mum, so he might as well keep quiet as make something up for her.

Dinnertimes, he and Bobby had a place they went to between the boys' and the girls' playgrounds, down the side of the school. It was narrow there, and often windy; the sun didn't get in till nearly summertime. The school seemed to reach to the sky if you looked straight up.

It made Charlie dizzy, leaning his head that far back, and he'd put a hand to the bricks to steady himself. When it was summer the bricks were warm. But not the day he hurt his ribs and when he lifted his hand, his palm was cold and gritty. A drainpipe dropped the full height of the building down to a gutter channel, and sometimes there'd be foam there, left high and dry, to be flecked up by the wind across your face and arms.

The building stepped in behind the gutter so there was a space where the boys could be hidden, and mostly they were left alone. They played marbles, heads squinting in concentration over cat's-eyes and bombsies in the dust, and Charlie would tell himself that if he could just roll his marble the closest to the lag line, or win Bobby's favourite cat's-eye, then he'd get home without any trouble, or there'd be treacle pudding for tea.

Sometimes they hunched back against the school wall and made up stories. Bobby's about war or cowboys, and
Charlie's about masterful criminals outwitted by masterful detectives, always in fedoras and smoking Pall Malls.

Yesterday they'd been playing for keeps, and Bobby had been winning.

He didn't listen to the girls. They weren't singing at him. They were skipping, the rope swinging high and hard, with a
whoosh
and then a whip across the ground with a tight, neat crack.
Whoosh
crack –
whoosh
crack – and the girls beating out the rhythm with dancing feet.

Down in the valley where the green grass grows,

There sat Biddy pretty as a rose
.

Up came Johnny and kissed her on the cheek,

How many kisses did she get this week?

One, two, three, four …

Bobby was hunched forward, his attention focused on the colours in the dust.

‘I've got you on the run, Charlie. Four that was, out of the ring.'

The girls' rhymes, swung with the rope, were as familiar a drone of girl-sound to Charlie as the small, shrill shouts thrown out by the boys playing football. They stopped and then started again.

Down in the valley where the green grass grows,

There sat Irene pretty as a rose
.

Up came Robert and kissed her on the cheek,

How many kisses did she get this week?

Charlie looked down at the circle. The marbles waited in their pools of dust. Bobby waited. The girls started again, but it was different this time. Their voices were sneery and knowing. This time they sang it for him to hear, not for the
rope. They sang his father's name again. They sang the other name again. The name he'd heard between his parents. The name he knew but didn't know why.

Down by the river where the green weeds grow,

There sat Irene giving him a blow
.

Up came Robert and kissed her on the bum,

How many babies did he put in her tum?

One, two, three, four …

Charlie stood up, his bare knees gritty. Something was drumming inside him, drumming along with the rope turn.

‘Charlie? It's your turn.'

Bobby was pointing. Charlie looked down, and the marbles stared up like so many eyes watching, waiting.

Still the rope hit the ground and still the girls sang.

Later, Charlie couldn't remember how the fight had started, or how it had gone on. He remembered running to stop the rope swinging, to stop the girls singing, away from the marble eyes, away from his wondering friend. He remembered crossing the white line and a teacher's voice shouting. He remembered the girls' faces grinning as he ran at them, then shocked and surprised.

But after that it was fragments, like a picture cut into pieces. He didn't know how come he'd fought with this boy. The white skin of Fred's hairline, the skew of his tie, a scab beneath his chin, bleeding from one of Charlie's blows.

He didn't know he'd been hurt until the teacher stopped them. But standing in the corridor, waiting to see the headmaster, then he knew, and he moved gingerly, guarding his body against any sudden moves, anything that might take it by surprise.

‘Took that like a man,' Fred said and, to his surprise, Charlie could hear respect in his voice. ‘Your first time, seeing Mr Wilks?'

Charlie nodded.

‘He'll go on a bit, but he doesn't like hitting us.' The bigger boy rubbed at his jaw. ‘Got me good and proper. You were pretty angry.'

Charlie put a hand to his own mouth. His top lip was swollen and his mouth tasted of metal. One ear was hot, as if somebody was holding a glowing coal close up. But it was his chest and his back that felt the strangest. He put a finger to his ribcage and pressed. The pain was sharp. It made pinpricks in his scalp; it made him dizzy and he shut his eyes.

‘You all right?' Fred's voice sounded as if it were in another room.

Fred was right and the headmaster didn't hit them. He was disappointed, he said, and he looked at Charlie with eyes that reminded the boy of an old dog.

Charlie's body ached. It hurt if he breathed in too much, and it hurt if he moved too quickly. But he didn't want to go straight home. Fred would leave him alone, but the girls wouldn't. They'd be looking out for him after school, so he decided to risk it and slip through the kitchen and then out past the bins. You could do it without being noticed if you were quick enough. Then he went with Bobby to the old pipe factory that lay back from the river.

The factory had been bombed in the war, and now the low lengths of brick building stood chopped up and open to the sky. Here and there corrugated iron sheets stretched across and the wind would string itself over their ridges with a low whistling croon.

Chunks of concrete pipe lay flung about in the weeds, some wide enough to crawl inside, and Charlie used to hope that they might find a grass snake basking in one some day.