The Beauty

Part Two

‘The men are unhappy,’ says Doctor Ben.

I shake my head. I say, ‘No, they’re not. They’re not able to admit they’re happy. That’s all.’

Thomas keeps a clean kitchen. The fridge and the oven are old, rust-speckled white-slabbed boxes, side by side like grizzled guard dogs, standing to attention on the tiled floor. The house is old too – a small brick building at the entrance of the Valley, where once a warden lived to watch over nature and protect it from humanity. Or so the story goes.

As the cook, Thomas lives in a kind of luxury here. It is warmer at night than in the huts, no doubt. The otherness of this kitchen, powered by windmills and overlooking the tidy walled garden, is the perfect setting for difficult conversations. The kind that should not be overheard.

‘Landers tried to kill himself,’ says Doctor Ben.

Thomas stops chopping green beans and turns to us, knife in hand. ‘Really?’ he says, saucer-eyed.

‘He did a bad job of it. One small cut of the wrist. I bandaged it.’

I lean back against the shelves and feel the first twinge of discomfort. Separating from Bee quickly leads to an ache in my stomach, a queasiness that grows with passing minutes. Bee stands on the other side of the kitchen door waiting, along with the Beauties that belong to Doctor Ben and Thomas. As the first three to find pairings, kept under the earth with them, the feeling is strong that we shouldn’t be in different rooms, not for a moment. It is this that makes me uncomfortable, but I can appreciate it. Discomfort is not a disaster.

‘Landers’ Beauty picked him up and carried him to me,’ says Ben. ‘It refused to let him suffer.’

I say, ‘Then it did a good thing, right? It cares for him. They care for all of us.’ They have taken over the heavy tasks, the unpleasant ones. They farm and they chop without complaint. And now they save our lives.

‘It’s my opinion,’ says Ben, raising his eyebrows, ‘that some of the men will never get over the feeling of revulsion. We can’t live like this.’

‘Give it time. We got over it, didn’t we?’

‘You came round in weeks. So did Thomas. It’s easier on the younger ones. But we’re well into spring now and the older ones are so ashamed still. They don’t want it, but they can’t refuse it.’

‘Is that how you feel?’ I ask him. I’ve seen him struggle to accept the couplings round the fire after my nightly stories, and the way the Beauty simply touch, mould, demand the comfort of our bodies at any time, blocking out all other thoughts. ‘Do you wish you’d never met your own Beauty? That you’d never met Bella?’

‘Every day,’ he says, and I believe him. Ben adds, ‘I wish I’d never gone into the wood that night with Thomas to look at the mushrooms. And yet it’s not that life was better before. It’s that – I can’t explain it.’

‘Let me explain it for you, around the fire. I can give it a voice.’

‘No,’ he says. ‘No.’

I say, ‘Why not? That’s my job. I should make a story about this. It will help us all to face it, overcome it.’

‘That’s just it, Nathan. Your stories, all of them – they aren’t the truth any more. Last night you told the story of the Group, and you made it into… a saga.’

‘It is a saga!’

‘No! It hasn’t all been a journey towards meeting the Beauty. It hasn’t been a straight road leading to a dawn. We didn’t come to the Valley of the Rocks in order to meet and meld with these – walking mushrooms!’

Thomas snorts.

‘It’s not funny!’ I tell him, but it only makes him worse. He laughs out loud, and in between gasps for air he says, ‘Mush… rooms…’

Doctor Ben and I wait for his laughter to subside. When Thomas finally manages to control himself we hear scraping on the kitchen door; our Beauties want in. The urge to go to them is strong, palpable in the room, but none of us move.

Thomas puts down the knife and stares at his fresh spring beans. He has lost weight since joining with Betty. There is a sleekness to his cheekbones, the muscles starting to show through on his shoulders.

‘I’m making goat stew,’ he says. ‘Cooked for hours with green tomatoes from the hothouse, new potatoes fresh from the buckets by the back door and the first green beans plucked from the canes. Topped with griddle bread and melted goat’s cheese. One of my favourites. Before all this I would have put in mushrooms. The earthiness gives it something, deepens the taste of the thyme.’

Thomas rubs his thumb and forefinger together. ‘Delicious. But I can’t. I can’t pick a mushroom. It would be like cannibalism. How crazy is that? Cannibalism.’ He laughs once more: softly, weakly.

Doctor Ben moves to him and pats him on the shoulder. ‘Can you represent this truth in your tales?’ he asks me.

I say, ‘I can make a story about a boy who went off mushrooms.’

He says, ‘That’s not what this is.’

‘Yes,’ I say. ‘Yes, it is.’

‘Then you see, you misrepresent our history. It’s not safe in your hands.’

His words sting me, like bees in my ear. The scratching on the door intensifies. I have to raise my voice to be heard over it.

‘I don’t hold our past in my hands and I’m not responsible for it. I’m a storyteller. I speak of the deeper truth of our morality; our history should reflect that.’

‘No,’ he says. ‘You represent your own morality, and expect us all to agree with it.’

‘Please don’t fight,’ says Thomas. He is crying. He goes to the door, throws it open and lets in the Beauty. Betty is first. It backs him up against the counter and takes Thomas into itself, wrapping its arms around him. He slumps into its embrace. His trousers work their way down his legs and he thrusts and shudders. Then my Bee is upon me and I don’t think about Thomas or Ben any more.

To start–

There will be love. The word was dead. Then it rose from under the earth, took form, came to us and demanded our attention anew, even though we were not willing to give it. For it is easier to be loveless, to dismiss that tender stretching. The heart is a muscle; when we love, we exercise – we must breathe hard, we must feel the burning of our legs and lungs, we must grow dizzy with it. We must run with this new love until we feel an exhaustion of our souls.

There will be change. The word can move from myth to material. We shall weave cloth from it, add squares to the patchwork blanket of our Group. Older squares are fraying and torn; this fresh, clean cloth will comfort us, even if our fingers are pricked in the act of stitching.

There will be beauty. The word can be reclaimed from the wasteland of women, from thoughts of the crawling disease that infested wombs. Beauty is here, fresh and willing to hold our hands once more, like a child in a garden.

So let us hold hands. Let us join in these final days of our fate. Let us walk together in love, in change, in beauty, on and on until the end.

It is early morning and I am looking upon Belinda, lying on the floor of the hut it shared with Hal. Its head is stamped open, its arms and legs ripped off. The stumps drizzle black. The body has been opened with something sharp like a knife, and inside there are grey strings and shapes with the rich smell of the compost heap.

This death is your fault, Nathan, the older men will say. It’s on your conscience.

It’s not that I don’t have reservations. Perhaps they all think that I am impregnable to their misgivings, but I see it, I see it! We must give up so much of ourselves to the Beauty, and not just our semen. We surrender our independence that was ever the strength of our Group; we make ourselves reliant on their soft sponginess, those blank faces. I feel the same repulsion to this but the truth is – what are we keeping our independence for?

Once upon a time we idolised the past because that was all we had. Now we must look to the future and sacrifice the sacred cow of our glorious Group. We are being made anew. We change, or we die. Or, it seems, we kill.

Once such thoughts have come to me I can’t forget them and I know they will work themselves into my stories whether I like it or not. So, instead of waiting for it to trickle out of me, I decided to spurt out my ideas in a new kind of story. A story of the future.

After I finished my new story I was met with a profound silence. My stories normally provoke feelings of friendliness or appreciation. The good will, the gratitude of the Group, has been my reward. But this story did not provoke such feelings. I couldn’t say what they thought. But I was sure that they did listen; I felt the disturbance my words caused like the ripples on the surface of a pond after the falling of a stone.

Is this death my fault? Is it on my conscience?

Hal sits in the corner of the hut, eyes closed, face calm, hands clenching and opening. Gareth stands by him, holding a scythe. Of course – not a knife. A scythe. The black liquid coats its edge.

‘Why?’ says William.

Gareth jerks his head to Hal. ‘He asked me to.’

There is a scratching at the door.

‘Don’t let them in,’ says Hal. His hands work against the material of his trousers, picking, picking, picking.

‘What can we do?’ William asks Uncle Ted. They exchange long looks.

‘We have to let them see,’ I say. ‘What other option is there?’

‘Hide it,’ says Gareth.

The men, apart from Hal, look around the room as if there is a rug under which this crime could be swept. Hal looks only at me. I think he knows what I am about to do, and his eyes contain a pleading.

I walk over to the door and open it.

Our Beauties do not enter. They sway on the threshold and I wonder – how can they tell? With no eyes, how can they know so quickly that one of their number lies mutilated on the floor?

They make no sound, and neither do we.

I see my Bee, feel my need for it rise up in me. When it does not come to me, I remember the old coldness of my life, and I know I do not want that again, not ever. How could Hal bear to watch his only comfort be destroyed? How could he give that command? There is something at work here that I do not understand and for the first time I am scared. Not of the Beauty, but of my own kind.

Gareth leans the scythe against the wall, then clears his throat. Perhaps he’s considering an apology, and I wonder how that would be phrased, but before he can speak the Beauty move backwards as one and walk, at speed, away from us. I step out into the bright sunlight and follow them as they cross the camp, past the huts, past the campfire, their numbers growing, pulling together until every Beauty has collected together and they are retreating past the boundaries of the forest faster than I can run. Then they are gone from sight.

Men come and stand by me on the edge of the tree line. I look amidst the branches but there is nothing, no yellow, no movement. There are only still, brown branches, bearing the buds of spring.

I realise it’s only the teenagers who stand with me. Adam, Paul, Oliver and Jason, the ones who used to tease poor Thomas before he became the cook. They always looked like a pack of dogs in my mind, standing together, sleeping in a heap. Now they look like four puppies who have been left behind by their mothers.

‘Where are they going?’ says Paul. He is dark blond with a long, curved nose and front teeth that protrude in an attractive way, like a spaniel.

‘I don’t know,’ I say.

‘What?’ says Oliver, the biggest of the Group, the sheepdog with long tangled hair forever in his eyes. ‘What?’ he repeats.

I say again, ‘I don’t know.’

There must be other words than this, but I can’t find them. There is a hole of dread into which my voice has fallen; I can feel my insides being clawed, raked by the nails of my terror.

‘When are they coming back?’ says Adam, and Jason echoes, ‘When?’ They are yapping puppies, black and tan, who may grow fierce one day.

I don’t have any words for this.

Other men come to us. I can’t explain it; the instinct is strong not to go into the woods. We gather on the edge. Someone calls, ‘Hello?’ and the sound is swallowed by the trees.

‘It was Hal and Gareth,’ says a voice behind me that I place as Keith D, the fiddler. ‘They killed one of them. Splattered it to bits. Now the Beauty won’t come back.’

In the aftershock of these words a feeling is forming – a muttering, a tumult such as I have not felt before. ‘They should be punished,’ says Paul, with a sword of a voice, and others agree. The Group surges back from the woods, towards the hut. I go with them, trailing behind. I know what’s going to happen and although I would like to persuade them from this path, I am dumb.

‘It needs a law!’ William is shouting. He stands in the doorway of Hal’s hut, blocking the crowd’s view of the remains of Belinda. ‘It needs due process! We cannot simply decide they’re guilty. Guilty of what?’

‘Murder!’ shout the teenagers.

‘It’s not murder to slice up a plant,’ says William, but his face betrays him and the crowd sees it.

Then, from behind him, come Hal and Gareth. They push him to one side and stand, chins up. ‘We deserve to be punished,’ says Hal. ‘We did it. I had to be free. My mother wouldn’t have liked it.’

‘Do what you like,’ says Gareth, only his clenching fists giving away his feelings. ‘I’m only sorry I didn’t do my own as well. But I couldn’t. I’d do all the rest, but not my Barbara.’

‘It’s murder!’ calls Adam, and Jason repeats, ‘Murder!’ The crowd is building up to something that I do not want to see. It would forever infect my stories.

The bell rings.

It is deep and strong. Uncle Ted stands beside it, on the porch of William’s house. The crowd turn to him, fall into silence for him. He looks like a leader.

‘A beating,’ he says. ‘That’s the punishment. Ten strokes each with this.’ He holds up the stick that usually sits in his belt. ‘I’ll do it. Then none of you are to blame and it’s all done with. I’ll do it by the fireside, in plain sight, where the Beauty can see it.’

He walks to the fire, and stands beside it.

The crowd move towards him, bringing Hal and Gareth with them. I go back to the hut instead, where Doctor Ben is still kneeling over Belinda.

He glances up at me. ‘Look,’ he says.

Outside there is a sound, a meaty thud, followed by another, then another. I put my hands over my ears and turn my eyes to where Doctor Ben points. The mess of Belinda’s head is grey, turning black. There is a glimpse of white. Ben moves the grey strands with his forefinger and more white is revealed. It is a jagged piece of bone, curving away. The remains of a skull.

I take my hands from my ears. The punishment is over. The crowd is making strange noises, like the call of birds at daybreak. I go to the door and see the Beauty returning, with my Bee, lovely Bee, coming for me. My body gets hard for her, even as tears start to form in my eyes.

All the delicate thoughts are gone. My whimsies, my long lithe strands of seasons and stories. Gone.

Uncle Ted seeks me out as night falls. He finds me in the graveyard. His Bonnie and my Bee stand next to each other, humming, while we look at what remains of the graves. The ground is freshly turned over, teeming with worms. If I wasn’t here the nighttime animals would be feasting.

‘Are you glad they’re back?’ I ask him.

He doesn’t reply.

I ask, ‘How are Hal and Gareth?’

‘They’ll heal. I was soft on them. Made it look good for the crowd.’

‘You think the younger ones would have…’

He says, ‘Don’t you?’ Ted shrugs, stamps around the grave of my mother. The sky is clear and it will be a cold night. The pinkish cast of the clouds makes everything soft, hazy, like another world.

‘No,’ I say softly. ‘No, I don’t.’

‘Maybe I know men better than you do then, for all your stories. I know what they’re capable of.’

‘How do you know?’ And then I understand; I can finally put into words what’s been bothering me since that night in the woods. I say, ‘You knew the mushrooms grew only on the graves of women because you buried women there. In the woods, when I was taken. You led me to the place where you had put women in the ground.’

‘Yes,’ he says.

‘Why didn’t you bring their bodies to the graveyard instead?’

‘The idea was to keep them out of this place, Nate. Don’t you get it? I didn’t find them dead. I found them alive. And I killed them.’

‘You–’ It makes no sense to me. ‘But why would you…’

‘Three of them. They were heading straight for us. We’d just buried Teresa the week before, the last of our own women. I couldn’t risk more of them turning up, making us all feel for them, just to lose them. Just to die.’

I say, ‘Maybe they weren’t sick!’

He gives me a pitying smile. ‘All women were sick. Think about it. Why were they wandering through the woods alone if they hadn’t been thrown out of their own town? They’d been sent out there to die by their men.’

‘You don’t know that,’ I whisper. Do I want to hear more? No. Yes. ‘How did you…?’ My eyes fall to the stick on his belt and he rests his hand on the knobbed end.

‘No, I did it kindly. Took them out one at a time, said they needed to be blindfolded to come to us, that we had a cure and needed to be careful about who knew our location. Then I strangled them, quick. They died with hope, which was a gift, wasn’t it? I told them a good story, made up on the moment. Worthy even of you.’

‘Uncle,’ I say. I hold up my hands. ‘No more.’

He kicks at the worms with his boot. ‘Some of us are born to be free on the wings of imagination and some of us are held down by the chains of reality, isn’t that right? No doubt you’d find a better way of saying that. I do the groundwork so you can have your head in the clouds. I don’t want praise for it. I do it gladly, for you, for the memory of your mother. I told her I’d keep you safe. Keep you happy.’

‘I can’t be happy. Not now. Not after today.’

‘Melodrama,’ he tells me, not unkindly. He adjusts his belt. ‘You’re proving my point. This will mean something to you and that’s fine. Weave the deaths and the beatings into your tales and grow from it. However you want to use it. It means nothing to me.’

‘Those women meant nothing to you?’ I ask him. I picture his hands on their soft necks, their eyes covered, their heads thrown back.

‘Nothing that I’m going to tell you,’ he says, and stomps away. Outside the gate his Bonnie waits for him, follows along behind him, not touching him. That is how he likes it, at least in view of the others. Untouchable Uncle Ted.

I am with Bee, in Bee; it is my only solace, my comfort, my distraction. What did I do before it? How can we need something so badly without knowing that the need exists?

Time has swept clean the cobwebs of panic that trailed across our faces when the women started falling sick. We thought we would all get sick. Men too. Why wouldn’t we? We lived in equality, didn’t we? It never occurred to us that the disease would not consider us all equal. There were days of hysteria. Hysteria, the sickness of the womb. And yet somehow William kept us together, even as only the women died.

He told us, if there is help, we will find it, and he sent down to the town, to the men in suits who came in their cars and struggled up the rocks to us with sombre faces that gave out the message so clearly that it was no shock that night when William repeated it to us.

‘Women everywhere are afflicted. So far there’s no cure.’

‘Only women?’ asked Miriam. I got the feeling she and William had already discussed the matter; the question had been planted to focus the Group’s attention on the problem.

‘Only women,’ said William. Someone moaned, long and deep. A terrible sound.

How I hate the sounds of pain.

Bee hums, and I am soothed. Bee never makes sounds that wound me. Even if I beat out its brains with a rock it would not scream or cry out. None of the Beauty would. They would simply leave, and that is why they are stronger than us. Because they do not have to fight at all. It is my job to make the men understand this. We are weaker than them.

After William’s announcement that night, after the Group had wept and railed and attempted to accept the end of half the world, the fireside became a terrible place. Landers and Keith D refused to play, and nobody would have sung anyway. Silence. It is worse than pain. It is my mortal enemy. It kills me, cuts me up, that dread silence of despair. Even back then I couldn’t bear it. I was sixteen years old and already an enemy of silence.

And so I stood up and started to talk. Nothing important. Nothing real. What surprised me, as I retold the plot of the book I had just finished reading, in which a boy wizard defeated a great evil, was that nobody stopped me. I talked for hours, and people listened because they hated the silence too. They were happy to create it, and then terrified by what they made. And so I came to understand the split at the root of the soul of all men.

When I ran out of voice, William said ‘That sounds exciting, Nate. Tell us more tomorrow’.

And so I did.

For the first time, tonight, in Bee’s arms, I worry that I am running out of stories. What will come out of my mouth? What can I say, in the face of what I have learned today?

Why does it even matter any more? Why, in the face of such suffering, do stories matter?

That is the worst thought of all, the thought I want to claw out of my head, wrap in a sack and throw into the sea.

Bee hums louder in my ear. My skin is pressed so close against its clammy yellow breasts that we are almost one.

‘Mother,’ I say. ‘Mother.’

‘It disgusts me,’ says William. ‘It should disgust us all.’

Nobody replies. Uncle Ted faces away from us and Eamon and Doctor Ben sit on the floor of the rough wooden lookout platform. I enjoy the view from the treehouse. The weather is warming up. The nettles are young and sweet for soup, and the birds only think of the need to nest. We have all settled into a pattern; we tessellate. It’s all I ever wanted, and yet it’s not everything. The pattern stretches only so far. I tell my stories every night with increasing desperation.

I preferred speaking about the past. There is so much to say about a past. It is a vein of gold through a mountain, leading to an incontrovertible stone heart of truth. But the future is a horizon – a faintly visible line that may promise much, and always remains too far away to touch. My eyes hurt from trying to see it clearly. And so much depends on me now.

I found some dark glasses of my mother’s amongst her old clothes and have taken to wearing them, much to William’s disapproval. The teenagers have gone one step further. They wear skirts, and cite the ease of joining with their Beauties – no more zips to undo, simply lift the material! – and the coolness that will benefit their packets as the summer approaches.

If it were only teenagers I don’t suppose William would be too offended. But it’s also Thomas, who spends all his time in a pink dress with puffed sleeves, a row of white buttons down the front as delicate as daisies. I burst out laughing the first time I saw him in it and he smiled, his cheeks reddening.

‘I know,’ he said, ‘don’t laugh. Honestly. Trousers have been cutting into my stomach.’

It was a feeble excuse, given that he has been losing so much weight recently. I raised an eyebrow at him, and he added, ‘Betty likes it too.’

‘How can you tell?’

‘Can’t you?’ he said, and I had to admit he was right. Betty stood in the corner of the kitchen and hummed with a contentment that sounded like a cat’s purr.

Since then, two weeks ago, I haven’t seen Thomas out of that dress. Perhaps that’s the reason William called this emergency meeting. What I don’t understand is why I’ve been invited.

‘It’s not right to wear them,’ says William, when nobody rushes to agree with him. ‘It’s disrespectful.’

‘There’s nobody left to disrespect,’ says Eamon. ‘Look at us. We’re shagging mushrooms. Do you really think respect is an issue any more?’

Below us, at the bottom of the tree, the Beauty wait. As usual. They stand so still. They are expecting me to speak for them.

‘They’re not mushrooms,’ I say.

William raises his head and glares at me. ‘Don’t even start,’ he says.

‘Don’t I have the right to speak any more?’ I ask him.

‘We all know where you stand. You’ve spent enough time trying to persuade us that this is part of some grand plan.’

‘I don’t want to speak on that matter,’ I say. ‘This is about something else.’

‘We’re not here to jump to your–’

‘Let him speak,’ says Ted, from where he leans against the trunk of the tree.

William opens his mouth and then closes it.

‘The Beauty are intelligent,’ I say. ‘They communicate with each other. They communicate with us too, although we pretend not to hear. They are – they are our women reborn.’

‘They are not,’ says Eamon. ‘That’s a lie.’

I say, ‘I don’t lie.’

‘That’s all you do!’ he says.

‘Wait,’ says Doctor Ben. ‘He’s not lying. Not exactly.’ He clears his throat and hugs his knees. ‘After the incident involving Hal and Gareth, investigation of the… remains suggested that some of the bones of the deceased have been incorporated into the, err, the Beauty. Most notably the skull and the spine. I don’t know if they’re all the same. Maybe it was a random occurrence with that one.’

‘Belinda,’ I supply. Its name was Belinda, before its head was smacked into pieces.

Nobody speaks. Eamon stretches out his legs, stands and begins to descend the ladder. At the bottom his Beauty – Bree – comes to him, arms open, and he pushes it away with a great shove so strong that it falls backwards and sprawls on the ground. I didn’t know Eamon was so strong. He walks away and Bree picks itself up and follows after him.

‘So they’ve used some old bones,’ says William, and his voice shakes. ‘That changes nothing.’

‘They sprang from women,’ I say. ‘We use them like women. They are women.’

‘They are not, and we will not call them such.’

‘They’re not women, Nate,’ says Uncle Ted. He turns to me and I see a great weariness in his face. ‘You had a mother, but not a wife. You don’t understand the difference between it. I don’t say this to take anything away from you. You must trust those who remember all of womanhood, not just the hugs of a mother.’

Am I missing some element of love? The Beauty offer comfort, sex and softness. What else is there? And how can Uncle Ted say he knows these things and I don’t? There are things he has seen, times he has experienced, that I never will – I give him that. But his capacity to hurt, to kill – is that what he thinks makes him a real man? If so, I will never be a real man and I am glad of it.

‘Regardless of what they are,’ says Doctor Ben, ‘we must draw up rules of conduct. The mark of humanity is how it treats the world and those who share it with us – and the Beauty are alive. Whatever they are, they’re alive.

‘We started this Group to live by a set of principles. We grow our own food. We replace what we use. We protect what we rear. Now we have taken the Beauty into us. The Beauty deserve to be treated with respect for our sake, if not for theirs.’

William turns on him, his yellowed teeth bared. ‘You didn’t start this Group at all,’ he says. And that is when I know he has forgotten how to be a leader.

I look at Uncle Ted, and he returns my gaze. Then he says, ‘William, that remark is unworthy of you.’

William does not reply. He shrinks down into himself, getting smaller and smaller, and I know he feels it inside. He is not fit to lead us any more. When Ted says, ‘Right then, let’s draw up a list of rules and Nate can read it out tonight, exactly as it’s written down,’ William does not object, and as smoothly as that power changes hands.

I feel the inspiration of it. Glorious revolution. The schoolbooks talked of it, heads chopped off and crowds baying, and yet all the stability of my world only needed a few words to be wiped away. It didn’t even need a story.

And I am at this meeting to witness it. Ted wanted me here, not William. He wanted me to see the change in power and to understand that I am now his mouthpiece.

My freedom is gone and we are being led by a killer.

To start–

There were no rules. Rules were not necessary. There was man, and there was work and there was plenty. Plenty does not mean riches. There was simply enough. Abundance would have created inequality.

But there was loneliness too. Deep in the bones and brain there was loneliness, in a world of seed and egg, of bee and flower, of pairs. To be a man was to find a hole inside and know it could never be filled.

Until the coming of the Beauty.

They grew from the soil and understood without needing words or guidance. They took a form pleasing to man’s eye and came amongst him, walking into his garden. And there was much fear at first. Man trembled at the new, the unknown. They couldn’t recognise the gift they had been given, even though they took it in their arms and pressed it to their hearts. They were no longer alone, and it was a hard thing to understand.

But then they began to see. Spring came and the birds nested. The hares boxed and the feelings rose up strong in man again. Feelings of love. They began to look at the Beauty and see wealth. Riches.

And then man divided into men. Some men saw their fortune and rejoiced in it. But other men felt their fear grow stronger – fear of what they were being given, what they would have to pay for it and what might be lost. And they looked out at the innocent Beauty and brought violence and pain into their gardens, not through deliberate murderous intent, but through the sickness in their souls.

The sickness led to further division. Should they banish the Beauty and be lonely just so violence could not find them? Or should they face their fear and overcome their instincts? It was too big a question to answer.

But the men had an ally. They had reason. Reason, the greatest gift ever given to them. They could think and think again, and in the thinking there lay solace from simply feeling. If they were at war with their emotions, thinking was the best weapon they possessed.

We are reasonable men. We can think of a path that may, one day, lead to a solution that eases us all.

Here is the path:

We will not kill the Beauty.

We will not hurt the Beauty deliberately.

We will not steal another man’s Beauty.

We will attempt to be honest in all dealings with the Beauty.

We will not speak ill of another man because of how he chooses to deal with his Beauty.

We will hold true to these tenets, for the good of the Group, for now and forever, and on, and on, until the end.

‘I told them,’ I say to Bee, from deep within its embrace. ‘And now Ted wants to see me.’ Am I to be punished? The thought of it won’t leave me.

It feels like three o’clock in the morning. My mother used to say that whenever you wake in the dead of night it’s bound to be three o’clock, it’s just the way it is, and the hands of the clock move slower at that time than at any other. We never had a clock so I couldn’t say, but it is a three-o’clock feeling for sure. More and more of what my mother used to say is returning to me.

My tent hut is warm, my blankets piled high. Bee’s skin is clammy, but I’m used to that. I am comfortable, surrounded by the things I love, the books I have been allowed to take from the school over the years, because nobody else was interested. Some are stolen, I admit; a blind eye was turned by my old teacher Miriam, no doubt. I miss her knack of knowing me and looking like all the answers of life belonged to her, even the impossible ones. I am an adult now and I feel no such surety; I hope I fake confidence as well as she did.

Perhaps that is the role of a responsible person – to fake the confidence he doesn’t feel so that the young can believe in something. Except there are no young ones any more. I’m not sure who I’m faking for.

‘Is it for you?’ I ask Bee, and it strokes my face, putting visions in my head of a masterwork of flesh and yellow, a tower built of our bodies, extending out of our arms and legs to form fresh joints, bones, limbs and even mouths that hum to make a symphony of such beauty that it hurts to hear it. The tower reaches to the sky where all is clear, and down below, under the soil, there are roots that stretch as deep as the tower is tall. Deeper, even, to the great heart of our beating planet. Between us all we make the base and pinnacle of Man and Beauty.

‘How?’ I say to Bee.

It shows me clouds speeding by, days and nights, the movement of the earth, years and years, wrapped and folded like a gift.

‘Men age,’ I whisper. ‘Men die.’ How can we unite in this way, build to harmony? The Beauty will outlive us, but we have only this generation. There will be no more.

I receive in my mind’s eye a picture of Thomas. He cooks in his kitchen kneading bread, his cheeks reddened with the effort, wearing his mother’s dress. He looks – I can’t describe it. There is an aura that surrounds him. I feel the expectation of the Beauty has settled on him. He will do something of phenomenal importance.

‘What?’

But I don’t understand the images I am being shown. The speed of them, the blurs of browns and reds and yellows, the streams of these colours running together. The patterns take me down and Bee hums on. I can feel its pleasure as it lulls me, like a baby, to sleep.

‘We’re very disappointed in you,’ says Uncle Ted.

I don’t know who he means with his we. He stands alone, his hand resting on the stick in his belt.

I remember a story my mother told me about my uncle, set back in the time when they were children, living in a suburb with a mother and a father of their own, like in the creased pages of the picture books on the back shelf of the classroom. ‘A suburb was like a village,’ she said, ‘but with spidering roads through it that took people in and out of the nearby city, like blood to a heart.’

Cities are pumps, in my head. They beat with vibrant life, but nobody can stop flowing around its complex chambers and ventricles. There must always be movement or there is death. I imagine they must all be as still and brittle as skeletons now – those great cities of the past.

My mother said Uncle Ted ran away to the city. She never told me why; she made it sound like a whim, but I wonder now what kind of pressure could have made him move inwards to that heart. She said he came back three months later, thinner and older. Time had moved in a different way for him in the city. It speeds and slows depending on where you are, and who you are with.

This morning, time has stopped.

Why is Uncle Ted in this house? Usually I would ask the questions that come to me: Are you living here? Where is Thomas going to live? I want to speak of the importance of Thomas, of the need to protect him, cherish him. And I also want to ask – why must my Bee wait outside, on the other side of the door, while his Beauty stands here in this room, behind him?

But I say nothing. Because this room, this table, the way the chairs are set and the look on Ted’s face, make it impossible to speak.

I’m wrong. Time has not stopped. It has reversed. My uncle is a man and I am a boy again, and everything about this room makes me feel it.

He says, ‘It was made clear to you to speak only of the rules. To make the rules plain for all.’

Uncle Ted flicks his fingers from his stick. Am I meant to speak? Is this time that is allotted to me? All the reasons I had in my head for what I did have vanished. I am a dandelion clock. One breath from Ted and I am scattered.

‘Dandelion,’ I say.

‘What?’

‘Thoughts fly if you breathe too hard. The rules are a shout, but the story is a sigh. This way they do not scatter. They keep their shape, and only bend in the breeze.’

‘Is that right?’ says Ted.

This is not what I wanted to say. I wanted to make it clear that I have very little power over the story. It must come out as it does. I have been unfaithful to my gift by suggesting that it is under my control. If it can be controlled by me, then I can be controlled by others. I know my uncle is too clever to miss this. I can see from the way he cocks his head that he has not.

‘You know this business of stories better than me,’ he says. ‘I never had much use for them. Perhaps you’re right. But I’m sure you realise how much relies on you in this difficult time.’

I nod. He places manacles on me, weighing me down with responsibilities he usurped, and all I do is nod. My cowardice shames me, and yet, even as I berate myself, I hear in my head the sound of his stick on flesh and I cringe away from that memory.

‘Let me tell you what’s happening, Nate,’ he says. ‘For your own good. A council has been formed. William, Eamon, Ben and I will steer our Group through this, keep violence under control and help make a new way to live. You brought the Beauty among us and I don’t blame you. Nobody blames you. But you must understand that there are those among us who want to tread them back down into the mushrooms they sprang from.

‘So we must find a way to control ourselves and the Beauty. And when you remake the past and take potshots at the future in your stories, you play with a delicate balance. You could tip us into chaos. Now, I know that isn’t your intention, and that is why we’ve had this talk privately. Next time you tell a story and I don’t like the meaning, you’ll be up in front of the Council and there will be punishment.’

‘So the Council agrees with you about this?’ I ask. Council. That’s a word that belongs in books of civic duty and from a world we wanted no part in. I can’t believe William would sit on a council, let alone use the word. This is a temporary peace at best, no matter what Ted might want.

He says, ‘They do.’

I say, ‘You are a judge now?’ He frowns at me, and the familiar expression frees my tongue. I am no slave of his. ‘You need a curly wig. You need a black flapping robe, like a crow. You are more than one man?’

‘We have to be more than men now, Nate, and you have only yourself to thank for that responsibility. Did you really think this way would be better? Fucking plants that bear the shape of the dead; this is what you bring us to. And then you ask us to be happy about it. Well, I’ll try to make it stick, for the sake of your mother. She was just like you. She didn’t understand about consequences. It was always my duty to keep her safe and now I’ll keep you safe too, whether you like it or not.’

I walk up to the long table; I feel it under my hands, so smooth, this new mark of power. I wish for the strength to take it up, to break it with a sudden snap as clean as the breaking of bone.

I say, ‘She didn’t understand because you were always there to do it for her, is that it? Did you bring her here because you saw the cities out there and found them lacking? And now you want to do the same for us all – protect us from what could be terrible and beautiful and all the things in between, the things that live on and live on. But maybe we want to live on with the Beauty. Maybe we don’t want your protection.’

Uncle Ted smiles at me. He is not in the least angry.

‘Nate,’ he says. ‘You’re not more than a man after all. You’re less than one. You always will be. It’s not about what people want. It’s about what they need to survive. For us all to survive. You’re all so weak that you’ll pine away if the Beauty leave, so I’ll find a way to make this sorry remains of life work. And in return you’ll do as you’re told and be grateful for it. You’ll start by telling a story of the past tonight and you won’t meddle with it: Tell the story of how the Group started. And you won’t mention this conversation, or the Beauty.’

‘I don’t–’

He walks around the table and puts an arm around my shoulder, holding tightly, steering me to the door. ‘Enough.’

I want to say more. I want to. I want to. But his words are strong. Want has nothing to do with it. If I am to be a man I must give up on want. I must be more.

It comes to me that maybe I don’t want to be a man.

On the other side of the door, Bee is waiting with Doctor Ben and his Bella. Ben wears an expression that makes me forget my thoughts.

‘How is he?’ says Uncle Ted.

‘He’s up and about,’ says Ben. ‘In the kitchen, of course. He said he had to make soup for lunch.’

‘You’re sure it’s a tumour?’ he asks Ben.

Ben nods.

Time, that slippery fish, has shot past my guard once more and my hands are empty, clutching at meaning. ‘Thomas?’ I ask.

‘It’s bad news,’ says Doctor Ben. Ted’s grip on my shoulder tightens. It is painful. ‘A fast-growing cancer of the bowel.’

I say, ‘No.’

‘He collapsed late last night, after your story. Thomas says there’s no pain. But it’s eating up his strength. Still, you can’t stop him cooking.’

I wrestle free of Uncle Ted’s grip; in his eyes I see surprise at my sudden strength. I say, ‘You didn’t tell me.’

Ted says, ‘You’ve just been told now.’

‘He’s my friend,’ I say. Doesn’t Ted even understand the word?

‘Go see him,’ says Ben. He stands aside and I walk past to Bee, who stands waiting for me without concern. I don’t hear it, but I know it’s following me down the hall to the kitchen where I find Thomas chopping an onion with a speed that amazes me. The noise of the knife is like a woodpecker, white flakes of onion flying up from the blade.

My Bee goes to his Betty by the sink and they hum together, complacent, a soothing sound. Thomas uses the flat of his knife to scrape the onions into his pot on the heat and they sizzle; the smell hits me, an instant panacea. What can be wrong in the world when onions fry?

Then he turns to me, and I see how his face has shrunk in on itself overnight, the skin pulling back, giving him a beaky nose, a stretched forehead. And he is bending to one side, as if a force pulls at him. Under his apron, on his left hip, there is a bulge and is it as if his entire body is curving to it, favouring it, making him into a question mark.

‘Don’t worry,’ he says. He takes up a wooden spoon from the drawer and turns back to the onions. The Beauty hums on. The room is hot and pleasant, with the wooden surfaces and the gleaming dip of the sink. I have never seen death. I have spent time in the graveyard and felt the desiccated remains of death – the dry, cold taste of it as it travels through your veins in shreds, blocking you up, slowing you down. Death is not lurking in this room. This is life. The yellow glow of the leaves through the window is life.

I understand what Bee showed to me last night.

I leave the kitchen and find Uncle Ted and Doctor Ben in the hall, deep in quiet conversation. They stop talking as I approach. I know I must look strange to them with my happiness shining out of me, as bright and hopeful as sunrise.

‘It’s not a tumour,’ I tell them.

Ben shakes his head. ‘Nate, there’s no escaping the fact that there’s a growth in the bowel that will, in a matter of months–’

I repeat, ‘It’s not a tumour.’ I can’t contain the words any longer. They are the best words I’ve ever spoken. ‘It’s a baby.’