Hive

  Fire, he said, unlike the one that burned in the oven of the kitchen house. Fire, he described, like a monster. Fire that grew and growled and split into many monsters with greedy arms and tongues that chased the servicers who’d lived there in the first days. There was chaos, he said, as they all tried to get out but couldn’t, for all three of their way doors had melted shut, the levers liquefying in their hands.

  ‘The doors sealed. The servicers were trapped. Fire gobbled every single one of them.’

  Darryl was sobbing. Was this still a lesson? Or had it become a story? It sounded like a dreadful story, but weren’t stories supposed to begin with ‘once upon a time’?

  I turned to Teacher Sarah for confirmation. She was slumped against the doorframe. I wanted her to tell us this was just a story, but she didn’t. With a voice that didn’t soothe, she only said, ‘It was long, long ago. Long before me.’

  The fire was true? This really was a lesson?

  ‘You children need to know what happens when you’re not good boys and girls,’ the enginer elect chided, ‘when you don’t say your prayers or follow instructions or do your chores. It’s what happens when people get complacent –’

  ‘Enough,’ Teacher Sarah cried. Her hands clapped swiftly, interrupting the enginer and breaking his spell. ‘Children, follow me.’

  We followed her gladly, wishing to return to the nursery where stories had happy endings.

  For weeks, Celia had nightmares. She would wail herself awake with promises to be good.

  But when I lay in my bunk and recalled all I could of that lesson, it wasn’t fear that returned to me, or even sadness. There was something else. A stranger kind of feeling, and not so terrible at all. A lightness. For as the enginer elect had issued his fiery words, I’d become aware of an untethering at the base of my skull. A shrinking in my head. A kind of floating. Before then, I hadn’t even noticed the pressure inside my mind, but there in that unused engine-service way, I’d felt a kind of ease. I’d felt truly well.

  The second time I went there, I was twelve, newly assigned the job of junior beekeeper. Llewellyn had been mentor to me – it was two years before she’d be voted the gardener elect – and she’d brought me to the engine house to capture a rogue. It had been a real rogue then, a honeybee that had slipped through a hole in the garden filters, got lost inside the ceiling vents, then wriggled out into the engine house. Llewellyn and I were called and so we sought it, following it along a perimeter wall until the thing wriggled under the door to the way. We went in as the sign indicated – with masks and gloves – then shut the door behind us. I felt it almost instantly. The constant pain in my head simply unloosened and wafted up, like smoke. Like magic.

  ‘Do you feel that?’ I’d asked Llewellyn after we’d caught the rogue and clapped it inside the collection box. Back then, when she was just a gardener, I could trust her.

  ‘Feel what?’

  ‘Clarity.’

  The bee’s high-pitched hum reverberated in the darkness.

  I tried to explain. ‘I mean, a lightness. Do you feel it?’

  ‘Are you well?’ Llewellyn asked. I couldn’t see her face, but I heard her concern. ‘Do you have . . . headpains, Hayley?’

  ‘No. I’m just hungry,’ I lied, for hunger was a feeling we all knew.

  ‘Come on,’ she said, opening the door. ‘This way gives me the creeps.’

  I knew not to mention my headpains to Llewellyn again. I never told anyone but Celia.

  Clutching the box with one hand, I used the other to feel along the wall of the dark way. There, at the right place, I sat on a metal box and leaned over my knees. ‘It’s just a headpain,’ I told myself as I sucked in stale air. ‘It’s not . . . it’s not that.’

  Madness. I couldn’t even think the word for fear of it coming true.

  Everyone got headpains from time to time. We’d been taught they were usual and nothing to be ashamed of. Headpains, we’d learned, could come and go, just like an ache in the knee or stomach. Teachers said we should visit the doctor and ask for the medicinals which were grown in the sickroom.

  But I’d also come to learn that, occasionally, headpains weren’t usual at all. Sometimes an unfortunate person would suffer headpains that were too frequent, too fierce, too disorienting to be treated by leaves alone. These weren’t just headpains but the start of something worse: a maddening illness of strange behaviours, the likes of which we’d observed, as children, through the gaps in the sickroom walls. How we’d mocked the mad ones who saw and heard things the rest of us couldn’t. How we’d imitated their strange cries and moans as they imagined things that weren’t there.

  Madness, I’d believed as a child, was a shameful sickness that happened to other people.

  But now, at fifteen, madness was my greatest fear, and so I had to convince myself my pain was normal, even though it throbbed and rocked and sparked colours at the edges of my vision. Even though it turned my stomach sick.

  From beyond the way door, I could hear the softened clicks and rhythms of the engine house working as it should. I rocked myself, willing the pain to fade.

  You’re well, Hayley. Breathe.

  Other people suffered like this, didn’t they? In private? Hadn’t I once noticed a kitchener squint as he rubbed at his forehead? Hadn’t I seen a teacher screw her eyes shut and swear under her breath?

  It’s only a headpain. It’s only . . .

  I stopped my rocking. Listened.

  There’d been a sound, not from beyond the door, but inside, close to me in the unused way. It had sounded like water. Like a drip falling from the ceiling.

  Again.

  A drip?

  My ears heard it – it was full and clear – but my mind knew better. Water didn’t drip from a ceiling. Water only came from the source in the commons; from God. I knew the lesson of water – we all did. It was God’s gift which filtered down from heaven. Water was precious and sacred. It didn’t simply appear somewhere else, for no reason.

  And yet I heard it. Another drip.

  I stood to my full height. I gazed upwards, though I could hardly see.

  The ceiling was too high to touch, but I reached out in the dark, stretching up to follow its curve with my hand. Like that I waited, my hand shaking, until I felt a cold prick, like a thorn at my fingertip.

  I put it to my tongue. It tasted salty, like meat. Not like the source at all.

  I swallowed it down, then heard another. It made no sense. I was nowhere near the source. How could water drip from the ceiling?

  It couldn’t. Unless . . . it was imagined.

  ‘God. Please, God.’ I prayed with the whole of my being. ‘Please, God, don’t let me be imagining.’

  It dripped again, this time with a small splash on my toes, real but impossible.

  Was this how it began? I wondered. Was this what it was like for the other mad ones? For the woman we’d teased through the gaps in the bamboo? For the man who’d died during treatment? And for Fiona, the gardener girl who’d lost her mind? Had they, too, first imagined drips of water from a ceiling?

  I fled. In the brightness of the engine house, I rushed along a perimeter wall, holding the collection box close. The sounds of engines were harsh and everywhere. Scrapes and whirrs and chatter.

  Among the voices I heard the judge’s, and looked up to find her beside the enginer elect. I couldn’t risk either of them seeing me, so I turned and took a corridor through interior rooms, the layout of which seemed to change each time I visited. With my head down, I hurried around corners, one then another, heading for the threshold and Geoffrey, until an enginer stepped out in front me and we collided. In the shock of it, I dropped the collection box. It tumbled along the floor but didn’t break.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ said the enginer boy, who was faster than me to reach for the box whose lid, I saw, had unclip
ped. The drowsy bee had come tumbling out. The boy brushed it back inside.

  ‘I wasn’t looking,’ I muttered in apology. ‘It’s just a rogue. I came to catch it.’

  ‘You caught it. Well done.’

  He held out the box. Only then did I see that he wasn’t an enginer at all, but the son of the judge.

  I flinched – did he notice? – and grabbed the box from him. I pressed my lips shut. Tried to smooth out my frown. Could he see the heat in my face? The fear of madness in my eyes? The son couldn’t know – none of the council could – of the throbbing pain that was my secret. My shameful fear.

  ‘I’m supposed to be here. It’s my job,’ I told him, too quickly, my fingers gripping the box edges. ‘Enginers hate bees.’

  ‘They don’t really hate bees, you know,’ he said. ‘They just don’t . . . understand them.’

  ‘Okay,’ I said swiftly, adding a ‘thank you’, as I hurried away to the threshold through which I’d leave this awful house and return to the garden.

  Geoffrey’s slow fumbling was agony so I unclasped the net myself and stooped beneath it.

  ‘Hayley,’ he stammered, neck twisting as I passed. ‘Once I am shared . . .’

  ‘I’ll think on it, Uncle.’

  But all I could think of was Celia.

  Chapter 2

  Celia was in the garden.

  Amid the hydrostacks, between layers of kale and silverbeet, she was standing on a stepladder, almost hidden. Far above us the growlights hung green, the shade of avocado. It was the time for quiet tending.

  Celia was careful with the strawberries. I watched her lean into the topmost trays where heavy fruit dipped on their stalks. The back of her left wrist brushed aside leaves while her right hand clipped at runners. When a banded bee came drifting between white flowers, she didn’t even notice. I envied this in Celia: she could absorb herself in just one task, shutting out everything else. As if fat strawberries were the only things that mattered.

  They weren’t. My headpain throbbed. It sickened me. Worse than that was the memory of what I’d seen – what I thought I’d seen. Water that dripped from a ceiling. How could that be?

  I interrupted her. ‘Celia?’

  She turned and smiled, then propped a finger under a large strawberry which she lifted like a chin. ‘Look, Hayley. An everest.’

  Everest, seascape, tristar, tribute: they all looked and tasted the same to me. I didn’t share her attention to detail, for strawberries at least.

  ‘It’s perfect,’ she said admiringly, ‘don’t you think?’ She lowered the fruit, cushioning it among leaves, where it would remain until the next feast, in three days’ time.

  Celia took the five steps down, tendrils brushing at her legs. Only then, when she was level with my eyes, did she understand. Only Celia knew how my pain looked.

  She slipped the scissors into her apron pocket, brushed her hands, then reached to push strands of hair behind my ear. Her own hair was parted in the middle. Two clips held her neat braids in place.

  She leaned in close. ‘Didn’t you go . . . there?’ Her whisper was concerned.

  Nearby, a woman was tending to the peppers. Around the other side, a boy pinched heads of basil. Past the hydrostacks, other gardeners were bent over in the farm, while some were at walls, climbing ladders to reach trellises. At any moment, a gardener or someone else might come walking between hydrostacks, into the range of hearing. It might be an enginer testing nitrogen. It could be an elect, the judge or her son. None of them knew about my headpains. Only Celia could know.

  She took my hand, not for comfort but to ask me the questions that couldn’t be spoken aloud.

  Okay? she signed into my hand.

  No, I replied, using the shared private language of our touch.

  Our language had begun on my first night of housing when, as a ten-year-old, I’d come to the female sleeper to join twenty-seven gardener girls, women and aunts. Celia’s bunk was the one I’d been assigned to share. I’d cried in the dark, sad to have left behind the nursery with its mothers and teachers and my special friend Edith, but Celia, a year older than me, took my hand and traced a circle in it, round and round. Okay, it seemed to tell me in the quiet when silence was the rule after curfew. That small repeated circle gave me comfort, a kind of reassurance that my new life in the garden house was going to be all right.

  We had other words now, and other concerns. Celia was sixteen, and the next female gardener to marry. I was fifteen and troubled by headpains.

  Pain? Celia signed.

  Yes. More. Strange . . .

  My fingers hovered – we had no sign for drip – but even then, as I considered how to explain it, the memory quivered. Had it truly happened? Drips of water from the ceiling of a way? My hand fell still, muted by uncertainty.

  Celia’s fingers were rapid. Trouble? she asked. Bee? Enginer?

  I shook my head, details falling loose like dirt. When I looked at Celia’s earnest face, I saw that was real. Her strawberry scent: real. The basil and peppers and hydrostacks and growlights: all real. But a drip from above in the dark? It had seemed real, at the time, but now it felt impossible. Ridiculous.

  Dizzily, I leaned in and whispered, ‘Have you ever known water to drip from a ceiling?’

  ‘A ceiling?’

  ‘The ceiling of a way.’

  Celia’s eyes narrowed. She blinked, paused, then whispered even softer. ‘Water only comes from the source, Hayley. From God.’

  ‘I know. But I saw it.’

  She said nothing. Didn’t need to. Her eyes seemed to appraise me, assessing me as she so often assessed the strawberries. How I wished Celia would lift my chin and tell me I was perfect.

  Embarrassed, I dropped my gaze. My feet were dirty. When had I last scrubbed them?

  ‘Is this a . . . kind of a story?’ she asked.

  I shook my head. She knew I cared little for stories.

  ‘I heard it,’ I admitted. I’d felt it. Tasted it, too, but I dared not tell her this. A salty drip from a ceiling? It was unthinkable.

  Celia was gentle with my hand as she smoothed it out then signed: Imagine?

  An awful word, in our world. A terrifying symptom of madness. But wasn’t I too young to be mad? Too normal? I didn’t feel mad – not yet – but maybe mad people never did. Perhaps it crept up on them, tricking one sense after the other until they couldn’t tell the difference between what was real and what wasn’t.

  Madness had a method. We all knew this. It would begin with the headpains – more frequent and painful than usual – that would lead eventually to imagining, blurring the lines between real and not, until the mind was a stupid confusion that couldn’t be trusted. Madness meant being treated by doctors in the sickroom until you were ‘better’. It meant never getting married or never having children, so the affliction couldn’t be passed on. Madness meant aloneness – for who would want to share your bunk or brush your hair? It meant losing your friends; losing your job. Your purpose. Madness was grotesque and it was the greatest shame.

  ‘I don’t know,’ I whispered. ‘I thought it was real . . .’

  Celia squeezed my hand, signing nothing more. I felt her strength, and her fear.

  Poor Celia. She was too sweet, too kind for this. As the girl next in line to marry, she should have been thinking about boys and perfumes and cocoa, not this: a shared, unspeakable secret.

  A thin tear slid down her cheek. Her small, brave smile offered friendship, but no false reassurance. There were no words that would comfort.

  I freed my hand and let it drop. ‘Don’t tell Krystal or the other girls,’ I reminded her.

  ‘I won’t.’

  ‘Or anyone. Especially not them.’

  Them: the judge, her son, the elects, doctors and priest. The members of the council.

  ‘Never.’
She swiped beneath her chicory-blue eyes and shook her head. ‘You know it’s our secret.’

  ‘A secret,’ I repeated, only then recalling the riddle Geoffrey had set for me. Once I am shared I no longer exist. Of course! The answer was ‘a secret’. I’d tell Geoffrey the next time I saw him, whenever my headpain returned.

  ‘What if I come with you?’ Celia said.

  ‘Come where?’

  ‘You know where.’ She lifted both my hands and held them tight. ‘We’ll go to the engine-service way tomorrow, straight after breakfast. We’ll see if it’s true.’

  Thank you, I mouthed, grateful for her, the truest friend in the entire world.

  Despite our petty arguments in the past – about other girls, or cleaning chores – I knew I could trust Celia more than anyone. Which other friend would think of trespassing into the sickroom, as she had done two years ago, to steal cuttings of feverfew? She’d done that and more. She’d planted them in a tray up among her strawberries, hidden to everyone but us: a secret supply; a secret relief, for me.

  She turned and stepped up to the fourth rung of the ladder where she leaned in, past the tributes and everests and whatever other strawberries were growing there. Fat scarlet heads nodded with knowing as she snipped with scissors, but not at the fruit. Instead she cut three wide leaves of feverfew. When she stepped back down, she pushed them into my palm. A crackly gift. The promise of temporary relief.

  I slid them into my pocket.

  We both smiled.

  Our secret.

  I went to the forest.

  I slipped through the border of bamboos – runners, nandinas and Robert Youngs – and into the sticky thickets of dwarf fruit trees. I pushed between compact clumps of gooseberries, quince, currant brambles and crabapples. My skin snagged on avocado branches and native ginger.

  Further in, tree trunks wrestled each other up to the growlights. Most of these were nameless, but familiar to me by scent. I could navigate by their smells – always strongest when my pain was bad – as I bent and squeezed myself between trees, aiming for the blackwood, the tallest tree in the world, with lumpy fungi and rope-like creepers inching forever upwards. The blackwood was the tree that children had once been allowed to climb, so the teachers told us, until a girl had fallen and her head split open like a melon.