The Burying Beetle (17 page)

‘Well, it’s a start. Can’t we meet them?’

‘No. Yes, I suppose so, if you must. Though I don’t suppose they’ll be too pleased to see me.’

‘Why not?’

‘I’m your father’s Past, that’s why. Not his Now or his Future.’

I am still my father’s daughter. I don’t say that to her, but I am. I have Cornish blood in me.
Celtic, like the Spanish – passionate. With a drop of black blood in their hearts.

‘When can we see them?’

‘I don’t know. I can’t even remember where they lived. You’ll have to wait until your father gets back from wherever he is.’

I look in the local telephone book and there are about three hundred and fifty Stevens in Cornwall, ninety of them in St Ives. Ninety possible relations! I’m going to phone Daddy when he gets back from his trip with The Lovely Eloise.

I’ve made a birdbath out of an old dustbin lid and dug a shallow hole in the earth to place it in. In the shed I found an old iron rod like a harpoon, with a fish tail on one end and an arrowhead on the other, and stuck that in the ground next to it, and I’ve hung one of the bird feeders from it, with peanuts in. I’m hoping to attract birds into the garden outside my bedroom window. I expect they’ll take a while to get used to it being there. Most of the little birds we see in the garden are outside the dining room where the copper beech tree is. That’s because Mum hangs several feeders from its branches and makes sure there’s always some sunflower seeds and peanuts for them. We also have a rather ugly but very useful bird table with a pitched roof. Not much bird food goes on that – leftover porridge, rice, apples and stuff for blackbirds – they love apples. You have to cut them in half or anyway open them up so they can smell the sweetness of the flesh.

Rambo, Flo and Charlie have expressed an immediate interest in the birdbath. They probably think it’s another water bowl for them, as they have no concept of a human doing something for any another creature. It’s all Me Me Me.

The tide has gone out a long way today – that’s because the moon is full. It’ll be a very high tide later. I don’t really understand all that tides and moon stuff.

Mum says she feels the tides pulling her. Does she mean the water is calling to her to have a swim? Or is it hormones? Female stuff. She is Feeling her Age.

Sometimes I come across her in the garden and she’s digging or yanking out weeds and her eyes are full of tears.

‘It’s hay-fever,’ she says.

There’s often a cat with her when she’s crying. They are very sympathetic. I think she’s crying about the same things that I’m unhappy about – Daddy leaving, Grandpop and Grandma dying. And her age – she pretends not to care about getting old and being alone (apart from me, that is) but I know she does care.

She’s angry with Daddy for going off with a younger woman – well, of course she’s angry – but it’s not only anger she feels. I think she feels abandoned. And then there’s having me to look after. Not even her parents to turn to. It makes me feel guilty, that I’m not strong enough to look after myself, or her.

I suppose I should feel angry with Daddy too. Yes, I suppose I should. I suppose Mum feels as sad as I do about Grandpop and Grandma dying. But your parents are supposed to die before you,
aren’t they. It’s normal and natural. I wish she wouldn’t cry. I wish
Grandpop and Grandma were here. They’d know what to do.

I remember Grandma’s hands
– square, red, hardworking hands, the palms lumpy and bony. Her soul was beautiful though. She once said to me, after reading about boys stoning a swan, ‘Is there anything more sad than the sight of a dead swan, alone in a field?’

Note: I have just read in the
Independent
that snail shells – or any other mollusc shells – can be repaired in a few days. The shell is formed by the mantle, a thin sheet of tissue covering the body of the snail. Specific cells in the mantle produce a matrix that quickly becomes mineralised with calcium carbonate. This is what makes the shell hard. The mantle will continue to secrete matrix until the mollusc and its shell are fully-grown.

(Matrix
– when I was young I thought that was how you spelt mattress. And sandwiches –
I thought they were sand witches and I was a bit scared of them.)

You know how often you half step on a snail and break its shell a bit? I have never known whether to step on it harder to put it out of its misery. Now I think I’ll leave them to heal themselves.

Inspecting the new bird feeder. Seeds still there, no birds in sight. The creatures all follow me around the garden; even Pop has appeared and stands on the roof looking down on me. Maybe he really is Grandpop come back to watch over me.

The sand dunes on the other side of the bay are bright pink and so are the waves breaking on our beach. Huge numbers of gulls rise from the sea like a shoal of silver fish. It’s very peaceful here. Only the sound of the small waves.

Perhaps Mum will find peace of heart here. Not yet, maybe. She’s too stressed out, what with me being ill, Dad leaving us, our London house sold, all our belongings in store and we haven’t found a home here yet.

That cottage in St Ives we were going to look at next Saturday
– it’s been sold. I quite like it
here
, actually.

FLO
WAKES
ME in the night with the sound she makes when she has brought in a mouse. A loud and victorious
Mrow!
I put on the light and find a dead vole. She doesn’t like the taste of those, so she doesn’t crunch them up and eat them. I thank her very kindly and stroke her head and she purrs with pride. I then pick it up by its tiny pale brown tail and throw it out into the night. No hope of seeing where it’s landed. I shall never see a burying beetle at this rate.

I saw the funniest thing the other day in the porch. I saw a mouse eating from the cat plate. Not with the cats there
– that would be pushing his luck – but he was helping himself to their leftover wet food. He looked so sweet. When he saw me he ran behind the chest. We also get other people’s cats coming in through the cat flap to have midnight feasts. I never see these cats in daylight – only in the dead of night. (The dead of night. Who thought of that expression, I wonder? It’s beautiful.)

A ginger tom often comes in. Ginger cats are always toms, apparently.

Grandpop and Grandma’s ginger tom was called Tiddles, and Grandpop rescued him from a watery grave – he was a ship’s cat’s kitten, about to be thrown overboard in a sack with his brothers and sisters. I wonder if the rest drowned? Tiddles was older than Mum, and when he died he was twenty and she was eighteen. She was his pet rather than the other way round, except that he ignored her mostly, she said, and wouldn’t let anyone pick him up or stroke him. A loner. I never met him.

What’s the point of a cat like that?

‘They’re allowed to live with people because they let us get comfort from stroking and grooming them.’ So Daddy said.

I don’t know if I agree. If they are freethinking creatures they should be able to do what they want, like me.

When we first came to this house there were mice everywhere. We didn’t know that until this happened: Mum and I had gathered a load of hazelnuts and put them in a lovely big wooden bowl she had brought back from East Africa. She put the bowl under the bed for some strange reason – she was moving stuff around. About a month later she remembered the bowl was under the bed and found it was empty. There were hazelnut shells all over the house – in a wellington boot and in other places but I can’t remember where else. And the mice had made a lovely nest inside a duvet – or rather, an eiderdown – in the feathers. They had eaten their way into it, through the pretty flower design. Mum threw it away and bought another. (Car boot, natch.) She’ll leave a note for Mr Writer to explain where his eiderdown has gone.

Our cats had a wonderful first couple of weeks hunting. Cat heaven.

The porch-mouse has been here every day, eating the leftovers. Every time he sees me he runs to hide behind the chest. There’s a nasty smell coming from the porch, even with the door open. We pull out the chest and find a nest made of bits of chewed up newspaper – well-read mice, anyway – and there’s a little hole in the floorboards. Mum throws out the nest, vacuums and scrubs the floor and blocks the hole with a piece of tile. Mr Mouse will find his way out to the garden, I hope. You’d think, with three cats in the house, mice would stay away. But no… cat food is too good to miss. And maybe they like the excitement and danger. Who knows?

I’m sitting on the deck with the cats. They all sit around in quite their own fashion. Flo sits in the smallest possible space. She takes up no room, just her four paws and bottom, tail curled; she sits up straight, watching, always watching.

Rambo is a sloucher. He sprawls with his front legs out straight like a lion and he’s getting that square-jawed look that lions have. He has sort of spurs growing on his legs, just above and behind his sooty paws. He’s the only one of the cats that positively enjoys having his tummy brushed and stroked. He has got the most beautiful pinky-brown-spotted tummy.

Charlie barely tolerates it and Flo just won’t have a hand anywhere near her underneath bits. Her head and back, fine, but no tummy rubs, thank you. Charlie is the most uninhibited of the cats. She lies everywhere, any old how, on her back, on her tummy, on her side. Her coat is particularly thick and soft. I think she would love to peel it off in this hot weather, take it off like a wetsuit. She practically got into the bath with me this morning, lapping at the warm water, tapping my head when I washed my hair. I think she thinks I’ve taken off my fur (my cowboy hat) when I’m in the bath. Usually, she gets her head between my glasses and the brim of the hat and knocks both off in an ecstasy of love.

My scar is improving. It’s very itchy still but it has healed very well. It does look like a shark attack scar.

There are basking sharks here. We haven’t seen one yet. They are very big but don’t hurt people – they might give you a nasty suck, if you made them cross. They are plankton eaters.

This morning Eugene rang the bell, even though the door was open. Mum thought it might be a recorded delivery letter or an early Jehovah’s Witness.

Eugene said, ‘There’s a parrot in one of your trees.’

He was right. A huge green macaw in a pine tree, looking down at the top deck where we sit and have breakfast. The cats hadn’t noticed – I think they must be colour-blind. The pigeons were nowhere to be seen, or the peregrine or the crows.

‘He must be from Paradise Park,’ said Mum.

Eugene had to finish his round, so couldn’t stay to help. Mum phoned Paradise Park and told them about the bird. They had lost a pair of green macaws who had been free-flying the day before. We waited for them to come and get the bird, who was perfectly happy peering down at the banana trees, the tree ferns and bamboos. He must have been flying over the beach, seen the exotic trees and thought he was at home in the tropics.

I talked to him, making a chittering noise with my tongue curled to the roof of my mouth, like Grandpop taught me to do to talk to Viv. The macaw cocked his head and listened to me intently. I wonder what I was saying to him? It must have been interesting, because he kept on listening. I took lots of photographs of him too and phoned the
Times
and
Echo
and told them about the macaw. The reporter is coming straight away. I told him not to bother coming out as I had already shot some pictures he could have, and the Paradise Park people were going to be here in a minute. He said he would come and pick up the film, anyway.

Two men arrived with a large cage and a bag of sunflower seeds and called to the macaw, but it couldn’t fly straight down to the deck, it was too steep a flight path or something, so one of them went into another part of the garden higher up next to the house and called again. The macaw eventually flew across to the hand that held the sunflower seeds and the Paradise man had him. They were delighted to have found him – he was called Harry. Mavis, his mate, was still out there somewhere. Not in our garden, though.

The reporter arrived as they were leaving. He took my film to get it processed and said I would hear from the paper if they used the bird pictures. Later, I was walking round the garden with the cats and I found a tiny perfect bright green feather on the ground under the pine. I have put it in a glass in my room, with other feathers I have found. One of Pop’s pure white feathers, a brown female blackbird’s, a crow’s blue-black feather and a yellowy greenfinch feather.

I had a dizzy spell this afternoon. I’m not good at heights, and when we first came here I couldn’t even go out on the deck and look down over the edge at the beach, because it’s about forty metres down. But I’ve got used to it now. I don’t know why I felt dizzy. Probably because of looking up for a long time.

When I see Brett I’ll tell him about the macaw. He’ll be dead impressed.

Note: Two badgers last night
– a young one and another. They ate our takeaway fish and chips leftovers. They are coming later every night. Perhaps they’ve found another good café.

GRANDPOP
TOLD
ME once about when Grandma fed a hedgehog on their back step, put down a saucer of bread and milk, and in the morning it was still there, and the hedgehog was a scrubbing brush.