The Burying Beetle
Read The Burying Beetle Online
Authors: Ann Kelley
Tags: #Modern & contemporary fiction (post c 1945)
ANN KELLEY is a photographer and prize-winning poet who once nearly played cricket for Cornwall. She has previously published a collection of poetry and photographs, a book of photos of St Ives families and an audio book of cat stories.
She lives with her second husband and cats on the edge of a cliff in Cornwall where they have survived a flood, a landslip, a lightning strike and the roof blowing off. She runs writing courses for medics and has spoken about her work with patients at several medical conferences. She also runs courses for aspiring poets at her home.
The Burying Beetle was shorlisted for Brandford Boase Award and was selected for the WHSmith New Talent Initiative.
The Bower Bird won the 2007 Costa Children's Award and the UK literacy Association Book Award. The Bower Bird also won the 2008 Cornish Literary Guild's Literary Salver.
Other Books in the Gussie Series
Other Books by Ann Kelley, published by Luath Press
ANN KELLEY
Luath
Press Limited
EDINBURGH
First published 2005
eBook 2013
ISBN (print): 978-1-842820-99-5
ISBN (eBook): 978-1-909912-48-9
The publisher acknowledges subsidy from the Scottish Arts Council towards the publication of this volume.
The author’s right to be identified as author of this book under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 has been asserted.
© Ann Kelley 2005
Acknowledgements
Thank you all friends and family members who read early drafts of
The Burying Beetle
: Robert, Lily, Ann, Gaynor, Carolyn, Caroline, Ron, Mark, Helen, Michael B, Michael F, Marion, Jenny Strong, Alan Bleakley and Simon Butler.
Thank you Roger Phillips for checking my nature facts, and a special thank you to Year 10 of St Ives School who kindly allowed me to read it to them during their lunch breaks and made such useful comments.
A big thank you to all at Luath – a great small press – kind, helpful, encouraging, very hard working, and my editor Jennie Renton, whose patience over the phone was little short of miraculous.
IT
WAS
AFTER
I ate King that everything started to go wrong in our entire family, as if someone had put an evil spell onto us, a hex – like a bad fairy godmother had said at my birth, ‘When you are eleven you are going to be struck by a sorrow so big it will be like a lightning bolt. There will be grief like a sharp rock in your throat.’
Silphidae – Necrophorus vespillo
The Burying Beetle has the curious habit of burying dead birds, mice, shrews, voles and other animals by digging the earth away beneath them. This accomplished, the beetle deposits her eggs upon the dead carcase, and when the larvae, or grubs, hatch they find an abundant food-supply near at hand. These insect-scavengers perform useful work, and it’s largely because of their efforts that so few corpses of wild creatures are discovered. These carrion beetles also devour some of the decomposing flesh of the carcase, seeming to relish the bad odour that is given off. The Burying Beetle is rarely seen, unless close watch is kept over a dead rodent, bird, or other animal, and they seem to fly about on their scavenging expeditions in pairs, being attracted to the spot by scent. The commonest species is brownish black with bands and spots of orange-yellow.
British Insects
by W. Percival Westell, FLS
(The Abbey Nature Books)
NOW, WHEN I throw out a dead mouse, I shall note where the body lands, watch for a pair of winged gravediggers to arrive and inhale as if they have just arrived at the seaside. I’ll watch them tuck in to a morsel of meat, have sex on the putrefying flesh, then bury the evidence. Weird, or what!
Today, the eleventh day of August 1999, is my twelfth birthday.
The sun didn’t rise this morning, or if it did it was so cloaked in dark grey cloud that the sky barely lightened. And then it rained. Not the sort of rain that looks like long knives, but a very Cornish drizzle – a sea mist, a mizzle that soaks you through just as thoroughly as a downpour.
We’re staying in this cottage on the edge of a cliff overlooking a long white beach. Today, it’s as if the cottage is in the sky on its own island of dull green, the tall pines hung with glistening cobwebs as if summer has gone and suddenly it’s autumn. Like that feeling you get when it’s time to go back to school after a long hot summer, and you put on your winter uniform for the first time, and can’t remember how to tie the stupid tie, and you remember getting up in the dark, and going home in the dark. I hate that. The thought of a long dark winter ahead. But I do quite like the feeling of the season changing; my school beret snug on my head; knee-socks; lace-up shoes; the warm smell of my own breath under the striped woollen scarf.
Today, no birds come to the feeder hanging from the copper beech.
There’s no sound of sea, even. A heavy grey blanket muffles the waves’ collapsing sound on the sand. Ghost gulls moan and whine. There’s not a hope in hell of seeing the eclipse, even though Totality is immediately over this part of Cornwall. But at 10.30am we put on waterproofs and walk through the gate onto the coast path. We push through sodden bracken, our shoes and jeans’ hems soaked immediately, and walk to the railway bridge. All along the coast path there are little groups of people. A man with a small child on his shoulder. A family huddled under a golf umbrella. The sky a solid grey. No light bits, no fluffy bits or streaky bits, just a dead greyness, heavy with moisture. It’s like being in the middle of a cloud. We
are
in the middle of a cloud.
People line the path at the highest point where there’s a panoramic view of the bay and its beaches. Even the beach below us is crowded with people. Not loaded down with buckets and spades, ice creams, windbreaks, and with gritty sand in their private parts, but carrying umbrellas and wearing wellies and waterproofs. And we have all come together to share this moment. And just before 11
am, as promised, we can see an even darker darkness spreading from the west over towards Clodgy, coming towards us, enveloping us in a cold clamminess. The gulls are silent.
And at the Moment of Totality, cameras flash on every beach on this side of the bay – Carbis, Porthminster, the Island, and over towards Newquay, Gwithian, Phillack, and Hayle. The sky is dark and all the bright stars have fallen and are twinkling among us.
Brilliant! Today at this very minute, I am twelve, and I feel in my bones that something momentous will happen to me. (Anyway, being eleven was so shitty, it’s got to be better this year.)
‘Jack! You are aware it’s your Daughter’s Birthday? No card or present! You could at
least Phone her.’ Mum slams down the phone. ‘Where is he, Damn h
im?’
‘Mum?’
‘Sorry Sweetie, I just thought I’d try your father. He’s Not There.’
‘Oh!
’ I try to look disappointed. Mum thinks I must be upset that Daddy didn’t remember my birthday. I forgive him. He’s got some good reason, I’m sure. Men aren’t any good at stuff like birthdays and anniversaries. I read somewhere that it’s because they have more important things to think about, like earning money and fighting wars – or anyway, they think they’re more important things. I think the female of the species have far more important things to think about – like looking after their babies and caring for their families, cooking healthy food for them and hugging them a lot.
Perhaps there’ll be a second post.
I hated it when we first came here. There’s a farm above us on the top of the hill and you could hear the cows calling for their calves all day long. I know they have to take them away from the mothers so the cows will carry on producing milk for people, but it’s so cruel. I don’t drink cow’s milk and I don’t think many people would if they only knew how cruel it is to produce the stuff. Soys don’t have babies.
The countryside is so much scarier than the city. It’s all life or death here.
Our townie cats have practically gone wild. They spend all day hunting and bring in half dead creatures – voles, which they don’t even eat, just leave them on the floor for us to tread on. Harvest mice – which are so pretty – golden honey coloured with the longest whiskers – are carried in and let go, so the three cats have sport all day, trying to recapture the terrified little things. They work together, like a pack of lions or a pride or whatever. They take turns – one keeps guard while the others sleep.
We even get slow-worms, which are grey-pink, with a silvery stripe. Sometimes the cats chew them a bit and let them go. I have decided that slow-worms are the best thing about living here. They suddenly appear on the floor in the sitting room and the cats are a little scared of them. It’s the fear of serpents thingy, I expect. Inbuilt sensible fears that keep you from being stung or poisoned or bitten.
I’m not frightened to pick slow-worms up, though I read in one of the trillion books here (I love books) that they can bite. But their jaws are so tiny that they couldn’t manage anything but a nip anyway. They feel very cool and not slippery or slimy at all, just cool and smooth. But they don’t like to be handled, they squirm like mad, so I usually just throw them out into the garden and hope the cats don’t see where they’ve gone.
It’s a bit like a zoo in this house. Apart from the slow-worms and mice and voles, we have crickets. There’s a plague of them at the moment, on the curtains, on the wooden ceiling, leaping around the carpet and confounding (I think that’s the word) the cats’ attempts to catch them.