A world so small, a world so vast...
~~~
The bees’ nest in the compost heap meant that she couldn’t get any compost for the flower beds. She had gone online and asked plenty of people, experts in bees, gardeners, horticulturalists, and they’d all said that she should leave the bees alone. Believe it or not, they said, they only nest somewhere for a year. And then they leave. They won't be back, they said. And of course, she had sympathy for the bees. Bees had it tough enough as it was. Who was she to deprive the bees of somewhere to live?
Ben was in his garden office. Like her, Ben also worked at home. Ben did something online for a company which had won a contract to provide local government support. And she was a translator. She worked odd hours, because people only ever needed things translated into or from Japanese in the middle of the night, while it was daytime in Tokyo. These business-people, perhaps in a limo on the motorway to Narita Airport, or in the rooftop cocktail lounge of a high rise hotel in Akasaka, probably didn’t realise that their documents were being translated by someone in a bungalow in Brixham, Devon.
Becky had her own office. It was in a former bedroom at the front of the bungalow. Ben’s office was a purpose-built prefabricated unit in the backyard. The compost heap, and the bees nest, were around the side of the bungalow, because the bungalow was on a corner. The garden, with all of its flowers and borders and hydrangeas and lavender bushes, wrapped around it. The neighbourhood was all bungalows, and very quiet. That’s why Ben and Becky liked it so much.
The bees, obviously, liked it too.
Becky didn’t want to distract Ben while he was working in his office. His job at the moment involved keeping track of offenders who’d been ordered by the courts to wear ankle tags. He had to look through the data and make sure that the people who were wearing the ankle tags hadn’t broken their curfew, or strayed further from their homes than they should, without permission. He had other things to do, too, but this is what took up most of Ben’s time.
On a sunny day, like today, Becky would spend the morning gardening. She usually got up late, but not too late. She couldn’t sleep when the sun was out. She wore the gardening gloves that her sister had bought for her at Christmas, because her sister knew how much she liked gardening. She was taking weeds out of the lawn, and every now and then she would stand up and she would watch the bees taking pollen from the flowers. The iris, the forget-me-nots, the roses. She was glad that the bees liked the plants that she had grown.
She heard the door of Ben’s office open and his steps on the gravel backyard. The backyard was his domain, it was where he kept his barbecue. She heard his footsteps on the gravel and she heard the back door open. This was her signal for their lunch break.
Ben always dressed smartly while he was at work, because he didn’t know if he’d have to do a video call with one of his bosses. Becky wore a dressing gown most of the time, unless she was going out. A dressing gown, pyjamas and slippers. What else did she need? Often, she would wear this all day.
‘The bees are still there’, she said, as she came in through the back door.
Ben was rummaging in the fridge. He’d turned the kettle on. Becky sat at the kitchen table.
‘They’re not doing you any harm, are they?’
‘No. I’m just worried that the neighbours will complain’.
The neighbouring bungalows were mostly owned by retired couples.
‘Bees are bees’.
Ben took a loaf from the loaf bin, ham and cheese from the fridge.
‘I was chatting to a colleague somewhere up-country’, he said. ‘And I told him that we live in Brixham. And most people say, oh, lovely part of the world. But this chap said, Brixham? That’s where there was a famous UFO-sighting’.
‘OK’.
‘Back in the sixties. So I Googled it’. ‘Yeah?’
‘Apparently it hovered over the town for over an hour, or so they reckon. The people who saw it, that is’.
‘Perhaps they were mistaken’.
‘They seem pretty sure of what they saw, according to some of the reports I was reading’.
‘Shouldn’t you have been working?’
Ben laughed. ‘I had a fifteen minute break’.
‘Perhaps’, Becky said, ‘it was a case of mass hysteria, you know, there’s not much else goes on in this town’.
‘It was all quite convincing’.
He didn’t say anything for a while. He made sandwiches and tea and sat down at the table. He opened a packet of crisps out flat, like they were sharing a table in a pub. She helped herself to a couple.
‘Perhaps we’ll go to a garden centre at the weekend’, he said.
It was so quiet, in Brixham. Not like the city at all. The neighbourhood they lived in had hardly any traffic, nor were there any kids, or parties. The bungalow looked out over the valley in which the town of Brixham was located, with a church across the way and green hills looming beyond. There wasn’t a glimpse of the sea, though, but that didn’t matter. The kitchen was at the back of the building and all you could see from the window was the white walls of the bungalow next door. It reminded Becky of the caravan parks where she used to stay on holiday with her parents as a kid. Everything was so neat and so exactly spaced.
Ben finished his sandwich.
‘Back to work’, he said.
‘Already?’
‘There’s lots going on, today’.
He got up, and paused by the back door.
‘The garden’s looking nice’, he said.
‘Thanks’.
‘See you later’.
She wasn’t due to start work until six, and he finished at half five. She heard his footsteps on the gravel as he walked back to his office. She watched him open the door, sit down at his desk, she saw his silhouette against the glow of the computer screen. She decided to go out and look at the bees. But she couldn’t stop thinking about the UFO.
Her favourite time every day during the summer was that hazy half hour where the sun had finally set and the sky had started to settle into darkness. The lights of the town had come on in the valley below, street lamps and lit windows, and the headlights of cars which wound their way up the tight lanes of the opposite hill. There was a strange magic here, even when she was translating corporate documents sent from Tokyo, and she would wonder just how much more work Brixham would have to do to match Tokyo in all its brash excitement and neon and noise and potential entertainment. And often her eyes would become tired and she would be so into her work that she would think she actually was in Tokyo, that the bustling city was just the other side of the window, and then she would look up and just for that split second, she would think the street lights and car headlights were part of that endless conurbation.
These were the fuzzy hours when worlds collided. She would wear foam earplugs to block out the sounds that Ben made as he went about his evening, though he sneaked around and watched television with headphones so as not to disturb her. She would hear a high-pitched whine which was probably the sound of her own blood compressed through the ear plugs, but it felt like the rhythms of the planet itself, and it reminded her of the noise of the bees’ nest.
And then she would wonder if someone on the opposite side of the valley might be looking at her lit window and wonder what she was doing. When she was younger she had flown to Toronto and woke at two in the morning with jet lag. She had opened the curtains of her hotel room and the steam rising from various vents on top of the skyscrapers and tower blocks, because it had been the dead of winter, and she had seen a student in the building opposite, their face lit by the glow of their computer as she worked, and with a momentary rush and thrill Becky realised that this is what she probably looked at right now. But this wasn’t Toronto, and it wasn’t Tokyo. This was Brixham.
The document she was translating at the moment was a grievance procedure. A company employee had behaved appallingly in the Shinjuku, brought disgrace on the name of the company he had been sent there to work for, but the details were slight and Becky longed to know more. There are mysteries in the world, she reminded herself, pausing for a moment to look out the window in the direction of the church. What could this Aaron Richards have done? She envisaged a young professional in a shirt and tie, unable to hold his drink, running laughing through the narrow streets around Shinjuku station, up to no good, his footsteps clapping back at him from bars and amusement arcades and convenience stores, sarcastic applause honouring his inevitable fall from grace. And now someone on the other side of the world, in a bungalow in a fishing port on the coast of South Devon, was translating the details of his apparent misdemeanours.
Some people, she reminded herself, search for misadventure, and for them, such moments are the embellishment, a fruity detail for later retelling, anecdotes encapsulating the sheer joy of life. For others, there is a sense of shame. She tried to make the translation as clear-cut as she could, understanding that there was no place for nuance, then sent it back. It was her last task of her shift and it was now two o’ clock in the morning.
Ben had gone to bed hours before. She turned off the computer and the light and went to the kitchen, and made herself a mug of tea. She wondered if the bees carried on working at night, or whether the plants, the flowers, like daisies, closed their petals, put up the shutters, very much like the businesses on the Shinjuku at the end of another busy evening, said, that’s it for another day, come back tomorrow.
She went to the living room and sat on the sofa, with her mug of tea. She thought about Aaron Richards in Tokyo, and what the exact manner of his transgression had been. Shinjuku was one of Tokyo’s red light districts and there was plenty of scope for a foreigner to find himself in trouble, particularly if that trouble brought shame on a corporate entity. And then she laughed, because it was all so odd, her being here in the living room of their bungalow in Brixham, and worrying about such things.
The weird thing was that she couldn’t sleep. She had been up for such a long time, and yet her body and her brain both seemed incapable of switching off. She thought about the bees for a little while, and then about Ben, and then about Aaron Richards, and then she thought about the UFO, and everything seemed to meld into one cohesive thought: no, not a thought, more of a sense, that the world was getting smaller and yet at the same time it was trying its best to remain mysterious.
She got up and looked out of the front living room window, kinking the blinds with a finger-pinch. Brixham sat there before here placid and sleepy with street lights creeping up the hills the opposite side of the valley. She wondered if Aaron Richards was at work in an office in Tokyo, she wondered if they had scheduled a meeting for his disciplinary or whether it would have all been conducted by email. She wondered if the bees, too, were still at work. There was no sound from the bedroom where Ben was sleeping.
And then she thought again of the UFO.
The thing with Brixham, she thought, is that it feels like the end of the world, because the town was on a peninsula that juts out into the sea, and there’s only one way in and there’s only one way out. And if you kept on driving in the wrong direction then you’d get to Berry Head, where the land stopped and the sea began with a very high cliff. So if there were to be an alien invasion, then the inhabitants of the town would be sitting ducks. Oh, such a silly thought! Alien invasion? She couldn’t reconcile the image she had of Brixham as a placid seaside fishing port full of narrow lanes and tiny cottages, with the concept of an alien invasion. She laughed, but then she shivered.
She looked at the sky. There were stars out, and some of them were brighter than some of the others. You might easily mistake one or two of them for being spacecraft, if you didn’t know any better. Were these the same stars looking down on Aaron Richards as he went about his Shinjuku rampage? How would the bees react in an alien invasion? She was so tired that the tiredness was making her alert, which didn’t make much sense. She looked at the lights of Brixham and imagined that they were a constellation of stars forming her own private horoscope meaningless from any angle other than that of her own front window. The church, the square, the holiday camp all mapped out as a jumble of street lights throwing out their sodium glow on quiet lanes and empty roads, terraced cottages, closed and shuttered shops. She felt kind of comforted by this thought. She imagined a power station somewhere distant pulsing out electricity fed along lines held by pylons to this small town where residents slumbered uncaring. It made her feel warm inside, and she thought of the thousands of bedrooms and all of those people, sleeping away.
But what was this? One of the street lights appeared to be moving. At first she thought it might have been the headlights of a motor car, but it moved slowly and without any of the smoothness that she might have expected from a vehicle driving along a road. In fact she felt that there was something sneaky about the way it was moving, as if it were hoping not to be seen. Nothing about it made any sense to her and she wondered if she should wake Ben to tell him, but Ben would probably complain, and quite rightly so, that this light was almost certainly of no consequence.
And yet . . .
It clearly moved of its own accord, and in an area of the town that Becky calculated to be right at the very outskirts, where the fields of the surrounding farms bordered the bungalows and gardens further up the hill, an area of woods, bushes, fields. The more she watched it, the more uncanny it seemed to her. She assumed that there had to be some kind of logical explanation for the light, but why would someone be out there, right now, with a bright torch, while everyone else was asleep? To her tired mind it could only be the one thing and that was a flying saucer. A UFO.
Her car keys were on the coffee table. It wouldn’t take long, she told herself. She could be back here in twenty minutes, and there would hardly be any traffic. And Ben wouldn’t know. She would tell him about it in the morning, if there was something to tell, and if there wasn’t, then she wouldn’t even mention it. She took a deep breath, grabbed her car keys and a jacket, and went out the front door.
She drove down the hill to the main road and then immediately off on to another road which led up the other side of the valley. She didn’t exactly know where she was driving to, because she wasn’t completely familiar with the road layout this side of the town, and became increasingly less so as the car pulled up the steep hill and up the valley. She passed the church and the church yard, and a small parade of shops, and then turned left again, into a lane which snaked through the outer suburbs of the town and off into the countryside. She did all of this without thinking, but it all felt like she was not doing it at all. She was driving the car and feeling the familiarity of the steering wheel in her hand and the seat below her, and the smell of the air freshener, and the glow from the dashboard, but the reason for doing this, for driving in the first place, seemed utterly dissociated from anything else. She didn’t pass another vehicle the whole time.
It reminded her of a couple of years previously. She had been at work, back in the days when she worked in an office, and she had had a phone call that her mother had been taken ill, and was in the hospital. And she had jumped in the car, this very same car, and driven forty miles to the city where her mother lived, all the time operating the car and listening to its familiar engine and feeling the steering wheel in her hand, not knowing what she would find when she got to the city, or how her life would change, or how she would be emotionally just an hour or so later. This, she understood, was different, but the sense of a journey out of the ordinary was just the same. And all the time she kept looking around, peering in every direction, to try and see the strange light that she had seen from her front window.
Her mother had been fine on that occasion. The emergency room receptionist at the hospital had let her in and directed her to the bed in casualty where her mother was, sitting propped with pillows. ‘What are you doing here?’, she had asked.
Becky had replied, ‘As it happens, I was in the neighbourhood . . .’.
It had all been pleasant and Becky had kept her mother company until the doctor had assessed her x-rays and decided that she had not suffered a concussion from falling and hitting her head. Then she had driven her mother home and made sure that she was comfortable, by which time it had been quite late at night.
Becky slowed the car. The road had narrowed down until it was a single track with tall hedgerows on either side, fields beyond. To the left was a farmer’s metal gate and behind it, what looked in the gloom like the back of a barn or a farm outbuilding. She pulled the car into the area in front of the gate and turned off the engine.
She opened the door. Everything was quiet. The night was warm and smelled of so many different scents : jasmine, cut grass, manure, salt from the sea. She stepped out and leaned against the car door, listening to the engine tick as it cooled from the drive up the hill. The hedgerow was so high that she could not see across to the other side of the valley, or the part of the town where she and Ben lived. She wondered if the bees that had nested in their garden ever made it this far. How far did bees fly?
With the headlights off, the world was an inky black and it took a minute or so for her eyes to adjust. She remembered how the doctor had asked her mother a series of questions to determine whether she had concussion, such as the name of the prime minister and the year that she had been born. Becky had not wanted to appear intrusive so she turned away while the doctor was there, and let him chat with her mother without her input. Her memory of that evening now began to mix with the interrogation that Aaron Richards must have had from his Human Resources manager. The questions wouldn’t have been quite so easy-going.
Not a single car had come past the whole time that Becky was standing there. She crossed over the road and tried to look through the hedgerow, but the foliage was thick and she didn’t want to put her hands in too deeply in case there were sharp thorns, brambles or stinging nettles. She could just make out some of the street lights the other side of the valley. This had been a very silly place to park, she thought, if she had wanted to see the mysterious lights, but there hadn’t been anywhere else, and she could see no sign of them.
Her mother would probably fall over more often, now that she was getting older. Her knees were bad and she was very unsteady on her feet particularly if she was on uneven ground. Her sister lived too far away to help with such emergencies. It’s what happens to people, she thought, and to people’s lives, that these occurrences change things, create new realities which look very scary until they actually arrive. Aaron would easily find another job, if the worst came to the worst, and he would recall his life in Tokyo as an adventure, and here would laugh about things, the same way that Becky had laughed when she had walked into the hospital room and said, ‘As it happens, I was in the neighbourhood’.
She had started to feel tired. She looked up at the night sky, and she saw the stars, and the stars had multiplied since her eyes had adjusted to the dark. Thousands, millions of stars, and it was not inconceivable that some of them harboured intelligent life. She had amazed herself at how bold she had been in driving out here, only to satisfy herself that nothing spooky was going on. It was time now, she thought. Time to go home, to go to bed, rest easy for the night.
She heard footsteps. Her heart rate accelerated. She looked up and down the lane but could see nobody. She walked back to the car but lingered next to the driver’s door, not wanting to look too suspicious to whoever was approaching. The footsteps were coming from the direction of the barn, and then she saw with a gasp that there was a light bobbing up and down. But it was a torch, just a battery-operated torch being held by an approaching figure, the torch now trained down at his feet so as not to blind her in the dark. A young man in a dressing gown, shorts, slip-on shoes with no socks as if he had put them on in a hurry. She immediately felt guilty.
‘Can I help you?’, he asked.
‘Oh, sorry, I was just . . ‘.
‘I saw your car from the house and I wondered . . ‘.
‘I was just parking up for a second’.
‘Wondered if . . .’.
‘I’m fine, honesty. Sorry, I’ll be off, now’.
She opened the car door and sat down. She put on her seat belt and just before she closed the door, she heard the young farmer yell, ‘It’s the lights, isn’t it? You came here to see the lights’.
She started the engine, turned the car around, and drove back home.
When Becky woke the next morning, Ben was already at work in his office. A bright sunshine flooded the front room. She sat for a while with a coffee and she wondered if there would be any further work today concerning Aaron Richards, or whether she would never hear about him again. From where she was sitting she could see the lavender bush in the front garden. The bees were already at work, collecting the pollen and moving from flower to flower in their busy little way. She felt a little bit guilty because everyone was already at work apart from herself.
Of course, she couldn't help wondering what the young farmer had meant when he had said, It’s the lights, isn’t it?
Ben came in for a break halfway through the morning. He didn’t say anything about her driving off in the middle of the night. He probably hadn’t even realised.
‘We’ll have to trim the front hedge at the weekend’, he said.
‘You can do the tall bits’, she said. ‘We didn’t get it level, last time’.
She wanted to tell him that she had been thinking about her mother, and whether or not they ought to go and visit her, too, at the weekend. Brixham was a town at the end of things, surrounded on three sides by the sea. It would be nice to go somewhere different for a day or two. On waking that morning, she had thought that there really wasn’t much for her to be scared about.
It’s the lights, isn’t it? is what the young farmer had said.
‘I’m sure the neighbours saw the fun side’, Ben said, remembering how the hedge the year before had sagged in the middle once he and Becky had attacked it with their clippers, because he had done the ends and Becky had done the middle, and the two of them, Ben and Becky, had stood back to admire their handiwork and they had laughed and laughed.
It had been an overcast day, muggy and warm, and they’d both been perspiring. This was before the bees came.
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