The Burying Beetle (10 page)

I love, (loved) going to the old cockle sheds at Old Leigh. I adore cockles. You have them in a little dish with lots of malt vinegar and pepper and you eat them with your fingers, sitting outside at the long wooden benches, and your hair goes in your eyes and mouth, and that night you can still smell vinegar on your hair. Lots of people go there for shellfish – little brown shrimps that you eat by holding on to their heads and tails and biting the rest, shells and all; langoustines, which are very expensive; jellied eels – Grandma’s favourite – I don’t fancy the grey yukkiness of them; crabsticks – which are totally artificial; proper crabs in their shells, (they are called ‘dressed crab’); big pink prawns; winkles – which you eat with a pin, but I don’t like them much because they taste rather muddy; and cockles – Grandpop’s and my favourites, and Mum’s. I think Daddy eats all of them. Grandma would always tell us about how Mum used to go onto the mud when she was little and collect cockles for them to cook and eat, and she didn’t even try them herself until she was about my age, when she discovered how delicious they were. Sometimes we would go for a Rossi’s ice cream in an ice cream parlour. Grandma said there used to be a prettier parlour on Pier Hill with powder-blue Lloyd Loom chairs and tables, which Mum loved, and the huge rose-tinted mirror behind the counter, which made everybody look very healthy and tanned.

We watched the holidaymakers go by – girls with Kiss-me-quick hats, ‘looking for trouble,’ Grandma said, ‘and usually finding it’. There was a fortune-teller on Pier Hill and I always wanted to have my fortune told, but Mum wouldn’t let me. We Make our Own Fortunes. I think I was allowed to go in an amusement arcade once – on a birthday. But it was so noisy I didn’t like it. I did like Peter Pan’s, but I couldn’t go on many of the rides because I was too little. They measure you and if you aren’t tall enough you can’t go on, in case you fall out and kill yourself.

Once, Mum took me out on the mud to gather cockles, like she used to do at my age. I love the smell of the oil refinery. We took a plastic bucket and Mum told me how she had a silver bucket – that’s what she thought it was, but of course it was galvanised metal. She showed me how to find the cockles. You have to look for little volcanoes with a blue-grey ring around them. The hole is where the cockle breathes. You dig with your hand into the purple mud until you touch the hard shell and just pick it up. It’s so easy. They are bivalves and don’t bite or anything, or trap your fingers like giant clams. They are quite beautiful, cockles, with ridges and mauve stripes. Apparently they jump about and travel a lot when they are young, before settling down in middle age, like people. We gathered half a bucket full in about an hour and took them back to Grandma. She cleaned them in fresh water, then boiled them for a few minute, until they opened. We had them still warm, with vinegar and pepper on, but they didn’t taste as good as the ones you get at Old Leigh. Maybe because we ate them inside the house, instead of outside in the fresh air.

We have mussels here, which are great when Mum cooks them. We collect them from the bottom of our cliff. There are loads of them, in colonies, all stuck together like Grandpop’s boiled sweets. You have to yank them off and tear out the beard – a sort of stringy bit. It makes my fingers sore but it’s worth it. Summer hates all shellfish. She’s allergic.

I remember sometimes Grandma wore a neck brace like a high stiff collar. She suffered from her neck and back. And her knees, and her hips, and her hands. She reckoned whisky was the best painkiller, and she and Grandpop had a ‘tot’ or two of whisky every evening before supper. I hope it helped.

I suffer from poor eyesight. I sometimes see quite ordinary things in an extraordinary way. It makes boring events that much more interesting. Like once I thought I had seen a tiny blue-green fish on a hotel path in Spain. I pointed it out to a maid who was carrying a load of clean sheets. She was totally astonished that I had thought it was a fish. It was an olive leaf. I felt really stupid.

That was before I started to wear glasses. Now I can see everything clearly, more or less.

Pop came as usual this morning, for his breakfast. He made a perfect landing on the rail, balancing with his huge white wings out. I saw him land out of the corner of my eyes. He looked like an angel. Perhaps he’s my guardian angel. Not like Clarence, the angel in
It’s a Wonderful Life
– ‘No man is a failure who has friends.’ Like Jonathan Livingston Seagull’s guardian angel gull, who was all for being a loner, and not joining the crowd.

This
Roget’s Thesaurus
book is very useful. I looked up guardian angel and found: familiar spirit, familiar, genius, good genius, daemon, demon, numen, totem, guardian, guardian spirit, guardian angel, angel, good angel, ministering angel, fairy godmother, guide, control, attendant godling or spirit, invisible helper, special providence, tutelary or tutelary god or genius or spirit, household gods, plus some foreign words
–
and then ancestral spirits.

Ancestral spirits. Like Grandpop. Maybe Mum’s right about Pop the gull.

Why bother sending kids to school when there are books like this? The government could just make sure every child can read, then give every family a  lot of good novels and reference books. I don’t suppose people can learn maths from books
, though. I’m hopeless at maths. Maybe I’ll get some extra tuition at my next school, as I’ve missed rather a lot.

I don’t understand why some of the words in the
Thesaurus
are in heavy type and some not.

This is so sad, this bit in the badger book:

Badgers live together in pairs, and are very kind to each other. Two Frenchmen during a walk killed one, which they drew towards the next village. Presently they heard the cry of an animal in distress, and saw another badger approaching. They threw stones at it. But still the creature came up, and began licking the dead one. The men now left it alone, and drew the dead one along as before, when the living badger lay down on it, taking it gently by the ear; and in this sorry way it was drawn into the village, and, I am sorry to say, was killed. (A few badgers are still to be found in this country, but it is not a common animal anywhere. The Chinese consider it a great treat, but in this country no one would eat its flesh.)

Note:
A kafuffle on the cliff edge below the cottage this morning. Two blackbirds and several smaller birds all making a terrible fuss. I thought there was a pigeon sitting on the tree next to them, but when I looked through the binoculars I could see it was the peregrine sitting there right next to the angry little birds, staring them out. There must be nests down there. He is a dark grey on the back with a very light chest and black markings on his face. Wonderful sighting! He flew off without attacking any birds or getting away with their young. He has sharp wings. I am so happy the hang-gliding accident and the noise of the helicopter hasn’t frightened them off. They are so brave.

KAFUFFLE
IS
A
GOOD
word. It sounds as if it might come from India or somewhere foreign. Like bamboozle.

I phoned Ginnie and told her about the peregrine. She reckons the one I saw might be the young one, trying its hand at hunting on its own, and she’s promised to come out when she can.

The tide is out and there is a large shallow pool at the foot of the cliffs with tiny ripples that look like Grandma’s skin. Mum says her skin is getting old. Well, she is over fifty, so what does she expect? She had me when she was forty-one, which is too old to start being a mother, I think. And she will lie in the sun, which is very bad for the skin.

I am an only child, and so was she. I sometimes wish I came from a large family, and had brothers and sisters to do things with but on the other hand I do enjoy my own company and peace and quiet. What am I saying? I don’t want just my own company and Mum’s. I’m bloody bored with my own company. I want to be with people, lots of people
– I’m a townie for Christ’s sake, not a bloody countryside freak.

Mum just ignores me most of the time – which is cool. I don’t want to be fussed over and organised. One of my favourite things is mooching. Just doing nothing much, daydreaming, thinking silly thoughts that sometimes take me to strange places, letting my imagination go wild, and reading, of course.

One of my favourite times is when I just wake up in the morning – that half sleep half awake state, where you aren’t sure whether your dream is reality or not, and even when you realise it’s only a dream, you try to hang on to it, finish the story, actually they are usually more like films. I hate it when I wake suddenly and the dream disappears from my memory. Like the very end of
Jennie
, when the little boy who has been a cat all through the book wakes and immediately forgets his friend Jennie, who saved his life and taught him how to be a cat.

That bit always makes me cry.

I would have to give it a different ending if I was the writer.

Mum read
Jennie
to me when I was little and I have read it to myself since. It’s quite a difficult read with many long words and sentences but it’s a wonderful story, one of my favourites.

Dreams are like films, I think, that come out of nowhere, like switching on a television film. They are inhabited by strangers, sometimes. Where do they come from? Maybe they are really there on another level of the universe, a bit like ghosts, who meet us on crossroads of time and space and, just as suddenly, disappear. Maybe that’s what happens to us when we die. We simply get onto another dimension, a parallel universe. Some people who are alive in the present are good at seeing beings from another world or time. And some people never see them at all, or even imagine them.

Mum doesn’t dream, ever. She says she’s still catching up on all the sleep she missed when I was a baby. I never stopped crying, apparently.

Pop has had breakfast, had a small through-the-glass argument with Flo and Rambo, and has flown off. He’ll be back at teatime. I’ve filled the bird feeders and there are the usual little birds feeding – blue tits, great tits, greenfinches.

I put out bits of old bread and cheese and pasta last night for the badger, but didn’t get to see him. The food went, though, so we think he had it.

There was a notice in the local paper for homes wanted for hedgehogs – they’ve got some at Newquay Zoo. I would love a hedgehog in the garden, but Mum reckons we have too many steps here for a hedgehog to negotiate. This garden is all steps and terraces, like a mountainside farm, except the little dry stonewalls are collapsing and the terraces are becoming slopes. Mum is out there every day now, battling with the brambles, but there’s not much she can do really. Everything grows so fast. She’s just about Keeping the Jungle from the Door. She looks so furious when she’s pulling up the weeds. She says she pretends she’s pulling out The Lovely Eloise’s hair.

It reminds me of when we were in Kenya and the undergrowth was always cleared around the house, to keep snakes away. I saw an enormous monitor lizard once, on the path between the house and the beach. I was only little and I thought it was a dragon. Mum missed it that time and didn’t believe me. But when we were there again another winter we saw one together. It was about five or six feet long – a big one, very close to the house.

I loved the vervet monkeys best. They used to leap from the sausage tree into the scrub, babies clinging to their tummies, making the most awful racket. And I loved the weaverbirds’ nests: carefully woven little balls at the ends of palm tree fronds, like green Christmas tree decorations. When the nests became old and torn and yellow, they would rebuild them.

Zakariah – who cleaned and cooked for us – made the best curries, and used to climb the coconut palms and gather nuts for me. He was probably about Mum’s age, fiftyish, but he had white hair and seemed very old to me. He lived in a village several miles away from our rented beach house, and had to walk back there in the evening in the dark. It got dark at seven o’clock. He was frightened of losing his trousers to robbers, he said, so Mum said he must go home earlier, while it was still light. One time we had an ayah to look after me, for when Mum wanted to go out on her own. I don’t remember her name – and she and Zakariah had a big argument and he beat her, apparently. We weren’t there when it happened. The police came and took him away and Mum had to pay lots of money to get him out of jail. The girl kept telling us, ‘He bit me. He bit me.’

Zakariah told Mum that the girl was his niece and she was lazy and flirting with another young man who worked close by, so he beat her. Mum looked after me on her own after that.

Mum took me snorkelling every day. I couldn’t swim very well but the mask and flippers helped. Luckily, we didn’t know what we now know – that some of the fish, the lionfish and moray eels, were dangerous. We had no fear, so it was like floating in underwater heaven surrounded by fish of every possible colour and shape and pattern. Little orange and white striped clownfish that live inside the poisonous tentacles of sea anemones, protected by the anemone from bigger fish. Yellow and bright blue fish, striped, spotted, zigzag patterned. Imagine all the colours and patterns and shapes of fish that could possibly exist – well, they actually do. They had lovely names too – Picasso fish, surgeon fish, angler fish – that one had what looked like a fishing line and hook hanging from its face.

We were like fish too, just hanging there in the warm clear water. If you trod on a coral head by mistake, a little fish would peck you on the leg to make you get off their territory.