Peter May - Coffin Road

Through an open door that led into the lean-to, she saw dirty dishes piled around an old Belfast sink. A gas cooker caked in grease. She heard the hum of a refrigerator. The air was thick with the odour of stale cooking and woodsmoke.

‘Can I help you?’

The voice startled her, and she wheeled around to find herself faced by a tall figure wearing a white circular hat. Netting that hung from its wide brim obscured the face, like an alien from the same horror movie as the door with the sound effect. She let out a small, involuntary scream.

A hand shot up to whip away the hat and reveal the grinning, bearded face of the young man whose photographs she had seen on the Billy Carr Facebook page. His hair was longer. The beard, too. And it tangled around a tanned face that was more handsome in life than captured on a screen. He wore a grubby white T-shirt and jeans tucked into mud-caked boots. He said, ‘That’s the trouble with this country practice of leaving your doors open. Sometimes folk wander in uninvited.’

Karen recaptured a little of her composure. ‘I’m sorry. As you say, the door was open. I’m looking for Billy Carr.’

He looked at her appraisingly. ‘Oh, are you? And I suppose you’ll be the Karen who told my maw that I knew her from the Geddes.’ He chucked his hat on to the table and swung a pack from his back to set down on the floor at his feet. ‘She was pretty pissed off at you stealing my postcard and running off without so much as a thank you or goodbye. Good thing my email address was in her mailer, or she’d never have been able to get in touch with me.’ His smile had long gone. ‘So you want to tell me what the fuck your game is?’

Karen took a half-step back. ‘I’ve come a long way to see you, Billy.’

The grin returned, although there was no humour in it that Karen could see. ‘All the way from Glasgow, no doubt. I’m flattered. There’s not many lassies would travel that far just to see me. Must be my irresistible charm, eh?’ The grin vanished again. ‘Or maybe not. What are you after, Karen?’ And he put a heavily sarcastic emphasis on her name.

She was determined not to be intimidated and stuck out a defiant jaw. ‘I was hoping you could tell me whether or not my father is still alive.’

It was as if a light had been switched out behind his face. Darkness fell across it like a shadow, and his black eyes widened. ‘Jesus Christ! Karen Fleming?’

Karen sat at the space Billy had cleared for them on the table and smoked nervously as she waited for him to come back out from the kitchen. He had already broken the seal on a bottle of Australian shiraz and poured them each a glass of the dark purple wine. She didn’t much like the taste of it, and left it untouched after the first sip.

Now he arrived with a wooden chopping board laden with chunks of cheese and glistening, freshly washed grapes, and half a French loaf, which he cut into pieces on the table and dropped into a basket with a hand engrained by grime and punctuated by the odd bee sting.

‘Not really hungry,’ Karen said.

Billy sat down opposite her and shrugged. ‘Suit yourself.’ He cut some slices of cheese to lay along a piece of bread, which he wolfed down hungrily, washing it over with a mouthful of wine. As he picked a couple of grapes from the bunch, he said, ‘You know as well as I do that your father’s dead.’

‘I know as well as you do that he’s not.’

He eyed her suspiciously. ‘And just how exactly would you know that?’

‘He left me a letter, which I wasn’t supposed to get for another year.’

Billy paused, with a grape at his lips. ‘What, and he told you in this letter that he was still alive?’

‘As good as.’

‘Fuck!’ He popped the grape past his waiting lips and bit down on it to release its sweet juices into his mouth. ‘Why would he do that?’

‘Because he figured that, by the time I read it, he wouldn’t have to pretend any longer that he had committed suicide.’ Billy gazed at her thoughtfully while he took another mouthful of bread and cheese. ‘Aye, well, since he didn’t mean you to get it for another year, maybe he still wants people to go on thinking that. Does it not occur to you that by blowing his secret you could maybe be putting his life at risk?’

She drew on her cigarette and blew smoke into the thick, fetid air of the cottage. ‘Funny. You’re the second person to suggest that in the last couple of days.’

He frowned. ‘Oh, yeah? Who else?’

‘Richard Deloit.’

Billy’s eyes opened wide. ‘Deloit spoke to you?’

‘Well, no. I spoke to him, and he as good as told me to fuck off.’

He breathed consternation through his nose. ‘So why are you pursuing this?’

‘Maybe if you’d ever lost your father, only to find out that he was still alive, you wouldn’t have to ask.’

He took a large gulp of wine. ‘Aye, well, I know what it’s like to lose a father, right enough. It’s tough. Especially when you’re still a kid. Different for a girl, maybe, but for someone like me, suddenly it brings responsibilities.’

‘Your mother.’

He nodded. ‘I’d fucking do anything for her, you know? She and my old man both. Sacrificed almost everything to send me to a good school. I mean, there’s not many kids from Balornock get to go to Hutcheson’s Grammar, do they? A working-class boy among all the toffs. School fees, university. I owe them everything. And my dad goes and dies just when she needs him most. So it’s down to me now. Payback. Not that I resent it. I love that woman.’

And Karen wondered how it must feel to love your mother.

‘So what are you doing here?’ she said.

He placed his glass carefully on the table and thought about it. Then he stood up. ‘Come with me,’ he said. ‘I’ll show you.’ He lifted his beekeeper’s hat and walked out from the gloom of the cottage into the dusky pink twilight of the clearing. Karen stubbed out her cigarette and followed. He led her then along a well-worn path that wound its way through the trees. A startled fawn bounded away into the darkness of the woods, crashing through the undergrowth and sending birds screeching and cawing into the high branches.

After just a few minutes they emerged into a natural clearing where trees had been brought down by rockfall from the hill above, and eighteen beehives stood secured to wooden pallets set among the rocks and the tangling remains of fallen tree trunks.

They cast shadows there in the dying light, among the trees, like sentinels standing guard over the future of mankind. A few bees were still making their return to the hives at the end of a long day of foraging for pollen. Billy went to the nearest of them and removed the lid and the crown board, setting them carefully on the ground beside it. He turned to see that Karen had not moved from her place on the clearing’s edge. ‘Come and see,’ he said. ‘They’ll not sting you unless they think you present a threat.’ He grinned. ‘Though they like to crawl into tight, dark spaces, like nostrils and ears. That’s why the hat.’ And he put it on, letting the netting drape itself over his shoulders, before reaching in to slide out one of eleven frames containing honeycomb and crawling with bees. Karen approached cautiously, nervous of the bees that buzzed around the hive, and the netted figure of Billy Carr as he held up the frame. They were crawling all over his hands, but he didn’t seem troubled by them. ‘Look,’ he said. ‘Aren’t they beautiful? A perfect matriarchal society, behaviour elaborately preordained for perpetuation of the species. The honey and the beeswax and the propolis are just side products that we have learned to harvest. If there is some kind of intelligent design to this world, Karen, then bees are the key to the survival of Man. Even if it was only a random process of evolution, we can’t do without them.’