The Bee Sting

by Paul Murray

He twinkles down at him like God, infinitely able to do everything except understand what you need from him.

If they’d given it some thought they’d have figured out what was really going on but people will only go so far to understand you

You spend so long wanting them gone she says then they leave and you’re worse off than ever It’s like the menopause Exactly Maisie says It’s only when they’re gone you realize they’re never coming back

That is the mercy of this part of the world The roads have that many twists and turns You never have to go far to disappear

Being good, he discovered, was no good. No one loved you for being good, except God, presumably, and even there he was beginning to have his doubts.

But you spoke so passionately, he said. It felt like you really believed. Willie, lying beside him, grinned satanically up at the ceiling. That’s how you win, he said.

I’m here to talk to you about climate change, he says, which is another something that really irritates people. It irritates us because it makes us feel guilty. It makes us feel like everything we do is bad, that we are bad. And that’s a real problem. 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?

So we seem to be faced with an impossible dilemma: if we don’t want to be killed by climate change, we have to stop being ourselves. You can see why people aren’t exactly rushing to man the barricades. The thought of addressing it actually seems in some ways worse to us than being killed by it. Or put it another way, the thought of no longer being ourselves is harder for us to get our head around than the thought of being dead.

Maybe every era has an atrocity woven into its fabric. Maybe every society is complicit in terrible things and only afterwards gets around to pretending they didn’t know. When the kids ask, tell them that no one meant any harm.

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