Only Bees and Birdsong 🐝

Today I wanted to share a short story I wrote last year, titled Bees and Birdsong. It's my optimistic imagining of what might happen if the world collapsed - a dystopian New Zealand vignette, if you will. I hope you enjoy it.

Happy reading!

...

It’s bizarre to think about how we used to live. The things I thought were important. I used to get so angry at school pickup. I remember shouting in the car when the Tucson in front of me didn’t move fast enough, like an absolute psychopath.

I can’t imagine being in a hurry now. We have all this endless time. It’s like imagining winter in February, when you’re wearing a summer dress, slapping sunscreen on to avoid the baking sun. Trying to imagine your breath frosting in a cloud of vapour in front of your face, the glittering sheen of ice across your car window.

You can’t. Not really. But as the planet turns, it comes back again. Winter, boundless cold.

Dependable.

We’ve had a winter, and we’re back to summer. Nearly a year that we’ve been living like this.

This morning I’m in the garden, like always. Like I used to be, occasionally. When I felt like some green-thumb time and I’d pop my earbuds in pretentiously, ponytail swinging. Back then I could hear the drone of traffic on the road, hear the rescue chopper going to pick up some poor mountain biker, and my phone sat jauntily on the back deck, playing music by young, attractive Americans.

Now there is silence, except for nature herself. The bees drone. So many of them, more than ever. And the birds are deafening, perched way up in the trees behind us. I know what many of those birds taste like now.

My phone is slung in a drawer, useless, a heavy square of space age metal and glass.

Ten months since the world collapsed. Not the real world that we live in. The fake world. The world that existed in our phones and on the news, the radio waves in our cars, the fussy letters from school.

It was quick - we had no time to react. There was talk of some huge nuclear attack on the States, but no one knew the details.

Then things just stopped working. Half the apps on our phones wouldn’t open.

We were lucky. Ed’s sister’s friend worked in government, and forwarded us a list of what was closing, how to prepare. I think about that list now and I laugh. It was so optimistic. As though we were headed into another Covid-style lockdown, safe in our homes, chatted to compassionately through our televisions by a benevolent Prime Minister. Able to go to the supermarket. God, what cosseted lives we lived.

But that text helped us. We got enormous bags of rice and flour, sugar, bottled water, even though we have the lake right there. The sugar’s long gone, much to Freddy’s dismay. There’s still a bag of rice though, and some flour. We were there before the tills stopped working, some days later. Apparently they didn’t sell anything for days, a vast warehouse full of rotting fruit and vegetables, all the staples that people needed, not letting anything pass the doors because of some stupid electronic system that had stopped. They had such faith that it would start working again, that some manager would be along with a key fob to blip something, to fix it all. It never worked again.

The supermarket’s long looted now. I go down sometimes with Harriet. It reminds me of the old hay barn on my childhood farm, the front wall open to the silent paddocks. The vast bank of windows is long smashed out and glass litters the floor, crunching beneath your shoes like glittering gravel. There’s bird shit everywhere, and birds swoop in and out of their nests up on the ducting. There’s nothing left on the shelves, but occasionally we find something in the boxes up top. It’s usually something weird that no one wants, but once Harriet found an entire box of TimTams. I was at the bottom of the ladder and she was up top, hunting through like an eager puppy, and her face when she lifted a packet up was like the sun had come out.

That was a delight. We passed them around our neighbourhood like Willy Wonka. I still remember little Izzy’s face when she saw them.

If I had envisaged this situation before it happened - a governmental collapse, society continuing without all the money we have locked behind some numbers on a faraway screen, I would imagine life to become fearful. Insular, a dog-eat-dog world where we barricaded ourselves in our houses, with guns.

But it’s nothing like that. At the start it was scary, when we didn’t know how we would feed our kids. Now we are more open than ever. Bunches of celery get passed over back fences, and expired tubes of ointment are borrowed and returned for assorted maladies.

At the beginning, it looked as though the gangs might take over. The raiding started with the nicest houses nearest the lake. They were terrifying, patched up, guns with the safety off, marauding through town the way they always have, now with no threat of the law to stifle them.

Until people started standing up to them. Especially the farmers, since they had guns too, and weren’t afraid of getting their hands dirty.

After the farmers killed those three guys up in the gardens, things quietened down a bit. They were like our unofficial peacekeepers, patrolling the town on their motorbikes before petrol got so scarce. They’re mostly on horses now, clopping down the centre of our wide open streets that used to be so important but now aren’t good for anything. No growing, no grass, nothing.

It feels safe. We’re living with the challenge of no power, no shops, but we’ve settled into it, like shrugging on an old warm coat. The primal nature of our human being has awakened, and it feels like we were always meant to be this way.

Hence why I’m in the garden this morning. Food.

Harriet is sitting on the deck, reading a borrowed book. Freddy is stalking the trees over the fence - I can hear his quiet footfalls - hoping to bring down a bird with his slingshot. He’s got good these past months. And we’re better at eating native birds. It helps that there are hundreds of them now: they’re almost like rats. Although they taste a lot better than rats.

The tomatoes are fruiting, and the courgettes too. I watch them like a hawk, checking hourly to ensure nothing is rotting or being eaten. I pluck snails off and throw them into the trees.

It’s funny to think that I used to be scared of things like snails. What a luxury it was to choose things at random and fear them. The further I get from our bizarre life, the weirder it seems.

Dinner tonight is in next door’s back garden. They’ve managed to get a lamb and Ralph is tending the fire, shirtless and smudged with the effort. It reminds me of the barbecues we used to have, where the women would carry in salads on beautiful platters made with brie and pomegranate seeds, that the other women would gush over and the children wouldn’t eat.

Rather than to impress, these salads are made with the intention of getting as much food into everyone as possible. My bowl is piled with courgette and tomatoes, flavoured with some old dried dill and olive oil that I’ve been rationing.

I place it on the wooden table, alongside some plums, and - I double take - a bag of Maltesers. Shirley grins.

‘We found them in one of Izzy’s old backpacks. Score!’

The lamb crackles and the delicious aroma winds through the trees and the candle stubs. More people arrive with food, and when we sit cross-legged on the damp grass to eat the chat is quiet and easy, and the kids wolf as many veggies as they can get.

There’s no alcohol, that all ran out in the early days when people thought we were only in this for a couple of weeks.

The fire burns down, a pit in the centre of the lawn, grass that used to be so perfect given way to a more useful purpose. That’s the big difference between then and now. Our life was filled with so many things that didn’t matter. For looks, or expectations. Now everything has a purpose. If it doesn’t, it gets repurposed.

The flames are orange against the dark trees, sending sparks up into the black sky. Darkness settles around us, and Shirley tugs the shiny red bag of chocolate open. We pass it reverently around the group.

Maybe we were always meant to live like this. We’re just cave-dwellers, after all. We’re so far now from school pick up, that racing life of full calendars and protein shakes drank through metal straws, and being offended about everything.

As we’ve had to transform, become stronger, less squeamish, more resourceful - there’s one huge thing that has changed within us.

We’ve all got over ourselves.

And I like that.

But God, I miss Maltesers.