The Bee Sting

by Paul Murray

After class Elaine told Cass she had decided that instead of a brand ambassador she now wanted to be a poet. Cass said that was crazy because she had just been thinking the exact same thing. They ran after the teacher in the corridor and asked her what to do.

A house needs a woman he said We’ll see Rose told him But when they got home to the cottage she shook her head and said to Imelda What woman needs a house like that

Talking and talking Drinking and drinking Though he loved to talk and he loved to drink it took its toll All the love All the hands slapping his back

But she was not a girl and she knew well that someone that pretty has their eye out for one person Themselves Especially if it’s a man

How can a drought cause a flood? PJ whispers. How can everything that happens just make something worse happen?

But in life, he discovered, parenthood was like – it was – living with a person. A new person, with strong opinions, strong tastes, arbitrary swings of emotion, all of them addressed at you. You were the passive one: the work of care was primarily to endure, to weather the endless, buffeting storms of unmediated will.

Dickie takes out his own phone, wanders around the clearing till he can find a signal. This will be fatherhood from hereon in, he thinks: just another anonymous consumer of her brand.

so the force and brilliance of them hit you only gradually; it was like drinking lightning, very slowly, from a wine glass. In this setting, even his ugliness took on a new light; it gave him a kind of aristocratic bearing, a seriousness and authority, as if beauty and such fripperies were beneath him.

Alas, rights are – as indeed people say of children themselves – only ever on loan to us. Where they become sufficiently inconvenient to the powerful, those rights can be revoked in an instant.

Even if you won’t tell me, you should go to the police, Willie said; it’s important to have it on the record. To that Dickie just laughed.

You couldn’t protect the people you loved – that was the lesson of history, and it struck him therefore that to love someone meant to be opened up to a radically heightened level of suffering. He said I love you to his wife and it felt like a curse, an invitation to Fate to swerve a fuel truck head-on into her, to send a stray spark shooting from the fireplace to her dressing gown.

Then he said, I suppose that’s what everybody wants, isn’t it. To be like everybody else. But nobody is like everybody else. That’s the one thing we have in common.

But these moments were anomalies, outliers. It was the best time, that season of the self; for the most part he was happy, happier than he had ever been. Perhaps that was what made it hard to accept. He had always assumed happiness was for other people, for the plodders, the norms, the sleepwalkers, as the reward for their blinkered conformism. He felt like he’d been initiated into a secret cult – a group of people who outwardly looked like everybody else, but who concealed a miraculous secret: they were in love.

This must be what it feels like to be dying, he thinks; the world remains around you, like a lover who does not want to hurt you by leaving, but in spirit it’s already gone, taking with it the meaning of everything you shared.

Nevertheless, my bravery was built on a foundation of fear. Because what really scared me wasn’t that people would see I was gay. It was that they would see I was me. Even if they hated me as a gay man – or a Trinity type, or a Protestant, or whatever it might be – that was far, far better than that they should see the real me, who I believed was repulsive, shameful, unlovable.

But you are moving the deckchairs on a sinking ship, diversity deckchairs. Global apocalypse is not interested in your identity politics or who you pray to or what side of the border you live on. Cis, trans, black, white, scientist, artist, basketball player, priest – every stripe of person, every colour and creed, we are all going to be hit by this hammer. And that is another fact that unites us.

You had never found anything anyway Probably the glass all melted when the car burned And his blood that you’d imagined went into the soil to feed the trees and grass It probably didn’t It probably turned straight to steam But the plastic that’ll be there on that pole when you’re all dead and gone Isn’t that what the kids are always telling you Use it once then it’s hanging around for a thousand years

It’s your third night out in a row, part of your ongoing mission to prove you’re not lugubrious. You have followed her to the legendary places and the brand-new pop-up places literally no one knows about, though when you got there it seemed pretty clear lots of people did know, and you drank your Diet Coke and laughed at the jokes you couldn’t hear and feigned interest in the boys who came to chat you up.

Why did you come here? you ask him. If diversity bothers you so much? Someone told me they’re doing free mojitos, he says.

It’s funny, she seems like a loser, but she acts like she doesn’t know or care she’s a loser, which makes you wonder whether she is, in fact, a loser. And for a moment a part of you wishes you could go with her.

Sometimes he feels like a house that no one has ever lived in. Shiny and enticing but not quite finished. Trees waiting under the floor to take over the off-white rooms.