Ned Kelly and the City of Bees

  “Don’t fidget,” Nancy Clancy advised me as we sat there. “If you fidget you attract birds. Some birds eat bees, you know. So they’d certainly eat us. Haven’t you heard of birds called honey-eaters? Well, they eat bees as well.”

  Of course I sat very still and didn’t even speak. I looked around the sky for possible winged gobblers of me. A few magpies flew amongst the spotted gum branches and went on their way. Cockatoos went past cackling and making for the river.

  “Well, you don’t have to be absolutely silent,” Nancy Clancy said next.

  Nothing I did seemed to please her. She spoke to me the way schoolchildren speak to the very young.

  “Why do you talk so bossy?” I asked her.

  Her voice softened a little. “I just didn’t want you to think every bird was going to gobble you up.”

  We watched the bees putting their heads in the blossoms, to search out the nectar from deep inside, to suck it up and store it inside themselves. We watched them pack the pollen into their baskets. But after a while, I got drowsy.

  I was nearly asleep when there was a blur in front of my eyes and Romeo, the fat drone, landed with a plop beside us.

  “Hullo,” he said in a shy and squeaky little voice that sounded strange, coming from such a hefty body.

  “Hullo,” I said, but Nancy only nodded.

  “How are you getting on,” he asked, “in beautiful Selma’s hive?”

  “Listen Romeo,” said Nancy, “we all like you. You’re nicer than that fool Basil. But really, it isn’t any use your hanging around Selma. She mated with a drone long ago, and she won’t be mating again. And the place is full of drones as it is …”

  “Oh, I don’t want to mate with her. I want to be her servant. I want to help guard her. I want to wag my wings and make her hive cool. I want to be her knight.”

  Nancy giggled behind her hand at the idea of Sir Romeo.

  “I’m an expert in the area of knights,” said Romeo. “I keep well instructed by listening to the radio. I’ve heard all about knights and ladies and how the knight was faithful to the lady even if she never let him make love to her.” He sighed. “I heard all about it in a radio program called The Knights of Pentagel.”

  “Pentagel?” giggled Nancy. “Sounds like something you take for a sore belly.”

  “I was thinking,” Romeo coughed. “If I got into her hive I could be her knight. Oh she’s beautiful. She’s as beautiful as leather, and her eyes are broad and beautiful, and she has three golden rings round her body …”

  “And her voice is scratchy,” said cruel Nancy Clancy.

  “And her voice is …” went on Romeo in a dream. “No … no, I wouldn’t say that, Miss Clancy, her voice isn’t scratchy. Oh no.” He coughed again, just like someone acting on the radio. “I can never get past those guard bees. They let other drones past. But I suppose I’m the kind of person other people like to push and shove. I thought that if we all had a wrestle together, nothing rough, then I’d get the right smell for the hive and your guards would get confused and let me in.”

  “I don’t know if it’s right for us to do that,” said Nancy Clancy primly. “After all, we’re guests of the hive.”

  “I was wondering too,” Romeo went on, “if I could stay with you and the young gentleman here until I get used to the hive and meet Queen Selma?”

  It was the first time anyone had called me a “young gentleman.” The only gentlemen in our town were bank managers and doctors and teachers. I began to feel kindly towards poor Romeo.

  “We could fit him in,” I said to Miss Nancy Clancy. “He could sleep in the back of the cell.”

  “You forget,” Miss Nancy Clancy sniffed. “It’s my cell. And look at his size.”

  “You can wrestle with me, Romeo,” I told the poor fat drone.

  “Mind you, not rough,” he pleaded.

  “How are you going to be a knight if you’re afraid to wrestle?” the girl asked him. But Romeo and I had already begun, tussling and rolling in the wide fork of that tree. Romeo gave little yelps and grunts whenever I grabbed one of his legs. He was a very gentle fellow, and I was enjoying myself.

  At last, Miss Clancy joined in and she wrestled harder than either of us. It’s always surprising how tough some girls can be, and I could tell even by the way Miss Clancy pulled her sleeves up before diving on top of us that she was one of the tough ones.

  The three of us were struggling and whooping, when we heard Apis land with a plop beside us. In the long hairs of her hind legs she carried lumps of pollen, food for the hive. She wasn’t happy with us.

  “What’s this?” she said. “You look like a choice ball of caterpillar all tangled up. It’s a wonder some large bird hasn’t eaten you.”

  We all became still as we thought of the savage beaks of magpies. And then I began to tell her what we had been doing for Romeo.

  “It’s nonsense,” she said. She seemed only ever to be really angry with drones. “Romeo, I don’t know who’s a bigger lunatic, that Basil or you.” “Please,” said fat Romeo in his tiny voice. “I’m sick of being thrown out by those guards. It isn’t the bruises. It’s the way I’ve become a public joke that upsets me.”

  Apis raised her voice. “Do you expect me, a worker, loaded down with nectar and pollen, to care whether you’re a public joke or not?”

  “The boy said I could go with you.”

  Apis stared at me. I was frightened of her for the first time, for there was no softness in her eye any more. “Did you? Well, I don’t care what happens either way. But since you invited him, Ned, you can ride home to the hive on his back. You may have noticed, I have enough to carry as it is. Oh yes, you’ll get past the guards now. You have the right smell. But remember that I said no good will come of it. Remember that. Come, Miss Clancy.”

  Nancy Clancy climbed primly aboard Apis’s back.

  “The experts say it’s good for health,” she sang, “to have the whole bee’s back to oneself.”

  They flew away. I climbed slowly onto Romeo’s back, he gathered himself and lunged forward into free air. It wasn’t like flying with Apis. Romeo wheezed and bumped up and down in the summer air like one of those old airplanes they brought to the valley for the Agricultural Show. It was a long journey home. The smallest draught of wind would blow the drone off course. I imagined myself falling off Romeo’s plump back and being snatched up by a hungry cow and slowly chewed.

  At last I saw the door of the hive and the guard bees pacing. “I go forward for my lady queen,” Romeo called grandly to me over his shoulder. “Without hesitation, without turning back.”

  And so we landed right amongst the strong young guard bees. Three ran straight at us. You could see they almost remembered Romeo as a person who should be thrown out of the hive, but when they felt him they found he had the right smell, the right passport, the same one I had. And so they stood back and let us through. Romeo waddled into the hive, laughing with joy.

  Beyond the guards, Apis and Miss Clancy were waiting for us. “Well! said Apis. But before she could say anything else, six young bees marching in two lines of three each came out from deep inside the hive. Between them they carried the body of a dead worker, its legs crossed crookedly over its body. Everyone was silent while the funeral procession went past. When the carriers of the dead bee got to the mouth of the hive, they let go of it. It was carried away by the breeze.

  “I knew her,” said Apis, looking at Romeo. “That’s what happens to workers. They slave and they die slaving. They have no time for sentimental nonsense.”

  Romeo shrugged. “It isn’t my fault,” he said.

  “Anyhow,” Apis continued, “I have to do another load if I want to be up at Mrs Abey’s in time for When a Girl Marries”

  We all began to laugh at her then, even Romeo, at the idea of her saying she was a slave when she had time to listen to radio programs.

  “All right,” she said, a smile in her voice, “you can all come too.”

&nbs
p; 8

  Maurie Abey Hates Insects

  Apis fetched another load of pollen and nectar back to the hive, and then, a little before eleven o’clock, we all flew uphill to Mrs Abey’s old wood-frame house and sat just inside her window sill. It was pleasant there. A jacaranda tree threw its shade over us, and we were pleased about that, for it was a hot morning and, back at the hive, the fanning bees had been fanning madly to keep the bee-city cool.

  From our perch at the kitchen window we saw Mrs Abey come into the room, fill a kettle and put it on the wood stove. She was a sad-looking woman with brown hair. I thought I knew why she looked sad—she had a monster of a son, called Maurie Abey. Once he’d tried to run me down with his bicycle. Another time he broke the headmaster’s window with an air-gun. He was always being sent home from school with notes from his teachers saying something like “Dear Mrs Abey, Your son happens to be a monster. Yours sincerely, the Teacher.”

  Mrs Abey turned on the radio. There was an advertisement for Valley Ice Cream and then the slow, sugary music that introduced the valley’s favorite morning program—When A Girl Marries. When Mrs Abey was a girl and got married, she didn’t know she’d give birth to something like Maurie!

  “When A Girl Marries,” said the voice of the radio announcer. “For those who are in love and for those who remember.” Romeo sighed and settled himself even more comfortably.

  “When we last saw Beth,” the radio went on, “she was sobbing in her room after hearing from her friend Sally that her boyfriend Kevin had invited Cathy, a newcomer to town, to the Farmers’ Ball …”

  And so the program went on. Beth sobbed a great deal because she really liked Kevin, in fact even loved him, and she never thought that he’d ask a strange girl called Cathy to the Farmers’ Ball.

  Through all the weeping and screaming of the serial, Mrs Abey just drank her tea and listened. We could have danced on the window sill and she wouldn’t have noticed. Once she muttered, “That’s men for you.”

  As the episode continued, we began to find out that the stranger Cathy was Kevin’s cousin and he’d only asked her because he’d got his dates mixed and thought that his beloved Beth would be in Sydney at the time of the Ball. Just then Beth’s uncle Robert was knocked down by a truck and seriously injured, and all thought of Kevin was driven from her mind. She ran into the street just as the episode ended. And as the final music played … there in the doorway was the terrible Maurie Abey with a note in his hand.

  “Ma,” he said, “they sent me home again.”

  “Oh no,” said Mrs Abey. “Not again, Maurie.”

  “That Mrs Sayle. She picks on me.”

  Mrs Abey switched off the radio and, taking the note, read it. “Oh Maurie,” she said, “Mrs Sayle says you gave her horse poisonous weed to eat.”

  “It won’t kill it,” said Maurie. “Not that old horse.”

  He crossed the room, grabbed a glass and began to pour himself water. We all watched him closely. The drama of poor Mrs Abey and her frightful son interested us as much as any radio serial.

  But as Maurie stood up to drink, he saw us. “There are bloody insects all over this window sill,” he said.

  “Don’t talk like that, son.”

  “Well there are!”

  He picked up a copy of the Valley News, rolled it up to make a good insect squasher, and advanced on us.

  “Quick!” called Miss Nancy Clancy and Apis, both at once. Nancy jumped on Apis’s back and I on Romeo’s just as he was raising his fat self to his feet. Nancy and Apis had already flown out of the window before Romeo was even properly on his legs. I saw the great roll of newspaper raised above us. “Ah—ah—ah!” was all I could say. Maurie Abey’s newspaper squasher came down and hit the sill so close to us that the sound filled my head and knocked me crooked on the drone’s back. I think though that the breeze it made was what lifted Romeo off the window sill and got him airborne. In a second we were flying bumpily over Mrs Abey’s washing line. “Oh—oh—oh,” Romeo was groaning. “That noise! Did you ever hear such a noise?”

  I couldn’t answer him. I saw that above us flew Apis and Miss Clancy, and Miss Clancy waved at us. Without meaning to, I began crying.

  “What’s the matter?” puffed Romeo in sympathy as he flapped homeward.

  “I want to send a message to my mother and father. They won’t know where I am.”

  “Oh,” said Romeo gently. “Oh, of course. Don’t cry, Ned.”

  I suppose it was the shock of being swatted by a Maurie Abey grown to a giant size that kept the tears rolling down my face and made me wonder why I had taken so long to think of home.

  9

  Miss Such’s Typewriter

  “We could send a telegram,” said Romeo.

  We were all crowded—Apis, Miss Nancy Clancy, Romeo and I—into Miss Nancy Clancy’s cell, and everyone was discussing my problem. “You do want to stay with us a little longer?” Apis asked.

  I nodded. “But I don’t think I’ll go to Abey’s again.”

  “Neither will I,” said Romeo.

  “I don’t like that Maurie Abey,” I explained. “He’s … he’s never been any better than that.”

  “We could send a telegram,” Romeo repeated. He had probably heard of telegrams only on the radio. But I knew we couldn’t walk into a Post Office and ask the postal clerk to take down a telegram. If he saw us he wouldn’t believe us, and we had nothing to pay him with. Telegrams were luxuries in that town and cost a lot. “Miss Such,” I said, half to myself.

  “I beg your pardon?” said Romeo.

  “Miss Such is a teacher at the school. She’s young, no more than about twenty-one.”

  “How charming,” Miss Nancy Clancy said bitingly. “How disarming. What has it got to do with tele … with what Romeo says?”

  “She owns a typewriter,” I told them.

  They looked blankly at me. I explained. “You make letters by pressing the keys down. You can write to people that way. Each key has a different letter on it.” I sighed. “The only trouble is, we need lots of weight to press the keys down.”

  Again Romeo coughed in his shy way. “Would two of us be heavy enough? Or three of us? Or four? If I sat on a key and Apis sat on top of me—now don’t toss your head, Miss Apis, I won’t give you a disease—and the two of you sat on Apis’s back, would that work, would that make a letter, would it?”

  I remembered that one afternoon Miss Such had asked me to help her carry some music books to her house in Elbow Street. As a reward she let me play with the typewriter for a few minutes. I remembered it was a heavy machine and you really had to press the keys. I remembered too that there was a bar you had to press to make a space between words, and a lever to push for a new line.

  “I think we’d need more weight than that. I think we’d need more bees—more people—than just the four of us.”

  “Basil!” said Apis. “Let’s ask Basil. He’s fat and ugly enough for a job like that.”

  From the doorway of Miss Nancy Clancy’s apartment, we could see Basil and some of the other drones still bunched together inside the hive entrance.

  “Come on,” said Apis. Romeo rose with a sigh and we all began climbing slantwise down the walls of cells and apartments. Close to where Basil stood there was a place where the wall met the floor. Our feet touched the bottom of the hive there, and the sound made Basil turn.

  “Good afternoon,” said Apis. I was surprised how sweet she sounded, because I knew she didn’t like Basil. “I’d like to introduce Romeo to you. He might be of some use to your organization.”

  Romeo looked shy but Basil shook him heartily by the feelers. “What can I do for you, mate?” he asked.

  “Well,” said Romeo, “we have our young friend here, Ned, and he’s just had a nasty experience. I mean, someone tried to swat us. Missed by a whisker, so to speak. Now he needs some help so that he can send a message to his hive, I mean his family. He needs a dozen sturdy drones to help him make the message on
a typewriter.”

  Basil said nothing.

  “It isn’t hard work,” Romeo rushed to say. “We need your weight, that’s all.”

  “That’s very well, sport,” said Basil, man to man. “What do our friends here offer us in return? I mean, will they promise not to throw us out of the hive when the autumn rains come?”

  “How can I promise that?” said Apis. “I’m just one humble worker.”

  “We’ll talk to the Queen,” Nancy Clancy suddenly promised. “Ned and I—if you help us—we’ll talk to the Queen about not throwing you out in the autumn.”

  Basil shrugged. “I suppose that’s fair enough. Let me talk to the boys.” He turned to the other drones and buzzed and fluttered at them, giving them orders. One very plump drone began tiptoeing away and Basil dragged him back by the hind legs.

  “All right,” Basil said to us at last. “I can lend you a half dozen of my best lads. And myself.”

  “Thank you so much,” said Apis sweetly.

  Basil giggled. “Lead the way,” he said.

  The sun was only a little way above the mountains as we flew down Elbow Street. “Here, here!” I yelled when we came to the trellis gate of Miss Such’s place, and we all turned left and settled on the frame of the partly opened window of the school teacher’s living room.

  “Sshh!” Miss Nancy Clancy told Basil and the other drones as they too landed. For Miss Such was in the room and so was young Doctor Morgan, who had treated me in the hospital so long ago. Or had it been only yesterday? Anyhow I lay flat on the window frame. Doctor Morgan was sitting in an armchair looking pale, as if he himself might be sick.

  Miss Such said, “I can’t face it, Ben. I can’t face being a doctor’s wife in a little town for the rest of my life. It doesn’t mean I don’t like you. You’re a fine person, a much better person than I am. But Ben, I want to write books, I want to travel. Here I am, twenty-one years old, and I haven’t even been to Queensland. I want to climb the Andes in South America and sail down the Nile in Egypt and see England and Ireland and travel in Japan and China. If I marry you I know I won’t do any of those things, I’ll have children. I know it’s selfish to say that. If I had any man’s children, I’d like to have yours. But that’s it. Please don’t, please don’t ask me again.”