The Bee Sting

by Paul Murray

In the next town over, a man had killed his family. He’d nailed the doors shut so they couldn’t get out; the neighbours heard them running through the rooms, screaming for mercy. When he had finished he turned the gun on himself. Everyone was talking about it – about what kind of man could do such a thing, about the secrets he must have had. Rumours swirled about affairs, addiction, hidden files on his computer.

A fall as dizzying as the Barneses’ couldn’t come from simple economics. There had to be a moral element.

The wind was in their hair; their heads were full of hash and supermarket beer; they ran so fast they became immemorial, amnesiac. They were racing above the town, away from their own stories, away from everyone who wanted to remember them; they were no one, they were together, and they were alive alive alive alive.

But she kept remembering what Mammy said The badness inside her If she was touched would it come out

The days cascading sleeplessly into each other Empty in roaring silence She didn’t notice herself either Didn’t notice the days disappear and the world with them so quiet so calm that it didn’t feel like madness

You see Dickie still wants to be the boy that everyone likes He wants to be a local hero like his brother was Stepping up Saving the day But that is not who he is And I fear he will end up making himself and the people around him very unhappy

Frank adored Dickie, that was the kicker. Frank was probably the only person in the world who looked up to Dickie; he would have done anything for him.

His brother’s life often reminded him of a soap opera written in crayon.

As a student, after his accident, he would wake up screaming, imagining boots were kicking down the door. That went on for months. It came back even worse when Imelda was pregnant with Cass. Now he had something to lose. He couldn’t just climb out the window and run. He couldn’t take an overdose or put a plastic bag over his head, couldn’t simply let himself be annihilated. He would have to fight, he would have to try to protect them, even though he knew it was impossible to win.

In the face of a natural disaster, for instance, your own situation becomes insignificant. Your responsibility to act, your being as a person even, all of that is lifted from you. That’s an attractive idea for some people. Hence these fantasies.

That’s when it had come to him, what he had to do. He had wanted Frank to take his place: now he would take Frank’s. It was the best, the only way to atone. Not only would he be Frank – he would be the Frank that Frank himself was not. Once he had decided that, everything was easy.

Probably the worst aspect of the slow, agonizing death of the family business was finding out just how many of the townsfolk were enjoying it – how many of them, for all these years, had hated the Barneses in silence.

She spent money furiously, compulsively. It was as if she didn’t quite believe in it and had to spend it to prove to herself it was real – which in turn made her worry that it was all gone, so she had to spend more to prove that it wasn’t. They were rich now, but she never seemed able to accept it, that this was her life. Instead, wealth was a disguise that had to be continually renewed.

He liked that he could give her what she wanted. She in turn provided him with an endless supply of fresh wants. It was a new way of communicating that satisfied both without necessitating closeness. Every situation presented itself in terms of something they needed to buy. Spending became the fuel that powered the illusion, the great machine that carried them, all of them, away from the past.

There are days that simply don’t happen, even when you’re in them. The buildings are papier mâché, the people are extras, you feel like you’re trapped in a filler episode. Throw coffee in someone’s face, wave your tits at the lecturer, jump in front of a car – by tomorrow it will all be forgotten. But in the moment it is endless, like crawling through the desert.

If there’s one thing I’ve discovered in my time as a campaigner, it’s that blaming people is absolutely the worst way to motivate them. Make someone ashamed to their core, tell them that their very being is inimical to life and the best thing they could do for the planet is die, then ask if they want to make a donation?

Today, in the developed world, the great threat to political order is that people will pay attention to their surroundings. Thus, even slaves have access to entertainment. You could even say we are paid in entertainment. The novel was the first instance of what in the twenty-first century has become a vast and proliferating entertainment industry, an almost infinite machine designed to distract us and disempower us. We are presented with a virtual world powered, literally, by the incineration of the real.

Here’s a fact about the universe, maybe the number one fact: it’s impossible to comprehend how much it doesn’t care about us.

Loneliness can make people do terrible things, he says. When you set out on this road, you never thought for an instant you would be this lonely, did you?

Yes his princess his angel his untouched beauty He hit you with the can of beer Your head snapped sideways It felt like your eye had burst But from the other eye you saw him twist his belly round in the seat so he could get at you properly His hands came at you shovelling the lacy veil aside so he could reach your throat I’ll kill you by Christ You knew he’d do it You would die here among the flowers

Your mother begged you not to do it this way. Why not have something small, she’d said. Why all this show? But you had insisted. It had to be grand, it had to be at the same scale as Frank’s. You didn’t want it to feel like a consolation prize. We are going to find joy in this tragedy – that’s what you told her. We owe it to Frank.

And that was the vow you realize Then There That long moment We’re in it Two people that had ought to be dead and buried Now here you were in a room in a town together alive That’s what the baby was telling you as she thumped around in your womb Alive she was saying This is a miracle I will keep kicking until you get it

People get so hung up on are they this kind of person or that. But if you have ten times more not-human cells than human cells, then, in a way, you’re not even you.