Bumblethatch
I saw Barnaby as we sat by the brook. We were dangling our toes in the water and trying to kick empty beer cans as they passed.
He was standing at the gate to the top field, his arms crossed on top of the fence, chin resting on them as he stared in our direction.
When I pointed him out to Shelley, she laughed in my face.
“What you talking about? The Bumble died back in March, didn’t he. Your mam not tell you?”
She was right. Ma had told me. I remembered now. She said he’d thrown himself from a bridge into oncoming traffic, pieces of him spread like mulch from junctions eight to nine. He’d kept the road closed for three hours while they cleaned up.
Still, I knew what I’d seen.
* * *
We called Barnaby ‘the Bumblethatch’ on account of his mop of brown-black hair, always tangled and wild, and the way he stammered whenever us girls were around.
Even his mam called him it one day outside school, which sent us into a day-long giggling fit.
Still, I thought of him as Barnaby, when I thought of him at all.
We’d grown up together, and when he wasn’t facing a crowd, he was sweet and funny.
He’d bought the Fine Young Cannibals tape for my fourteenth, which was more than most of my friends.
Shelley said he fancied me. I told her she was as blind as she was ugly.
What I never said was that I kind of fancied him too. They’d have hung me from the school flagpole if I had.
* * *
I forgot about seeing Barnaby in the top field for two days. Then, on Sunday, I saw him again.
He was farther into the field this time, sitting among the straw stubble.
He lifted his hand and waved. Ma and her cronies were ten paces ahead, so it was easy enough to slip through the gap in the hawthorn.
The straw scratched at my shins as I walked up the slope, and I remembered I was wearing my best dress for church.
We believed in tradition round here. Ma still frowned on technology, and heathenism, and the modern ways of those up in town.
When I reached Barnaby, I didn’t sit down.
“Hello,” he said.
“Hello back at you,” I said. “What you doing here, sitting in Pop Denyer’s field?”
He shrugged. Pulled a stray length of straw from the dirt and stuck it between his lips.
“Just waiting for you,” he said after a few moments. “I knew you’d be along sooner or later.”
“What I mean is,” I said, “we all heard you were dead. They held a special service for you. Said you were off your head on booze and drugs, threw yourself in front of a truck. We all thought you were gone.”
“Nah,” he said, smiling that crooked smile. “I was stone cold sober when I did it. Just didn’t see much point in it all, didn’t want to go on.”
I thought about that. There was no denying he was sat in front of me, his hair all messed up in that way of his. Through a tear in his pants I could see a smear of mud across his knee.
“Why’d you come back then?” I asked, putting on my sassiest voice. “If it’s all so bad here, what you doing planting your arse in our field?”
He smiled.
“For you, Iris Penny. I came back for you.”
* * *
When we were little, Barnaby’s family lived two doors along from mine. We played together in the sandy hollow down the side of Willowshade Farm, or sometimes in the brook, when the water was low. He was the first friend I had.
It’s funny what comes back to you. I remember sitting on the bank, throwing stones at the fish knifing through the shallows. Poking a dead squirrel with sticks ’til its stomach burst. Making corn dollies with my ma from the stray ends at harvest.
Barnaby didn’t speak for almost five years. It got to the point where his mam and pop were worried, talked about sending him to a special doctor in town. Then one autumn day, when we were splashing in puddles, he placed a cold hand on my arm and stared like he was seeing me for the first time.
“Mine,” he said.
* * *
I didn’t tell a soul about meeting Barnaby in the field.
You’ll think I’m a liar, but that’s the truth of it.
Speaking with Bumblethatch wasn’t something you admitted to, not if you wanted any respect in the community.
Even the grown-ups knew he was tainted. I turned it over in my head, though, and after dinner I asked Ma what she’d heard about his passing.
“Young Master Barnaby?” she asked, as if I’d said a dirty word. “It was sad alright, what happened to him. Threw himself off that bridge, he did—but you know all this, lass. You were there at the service. What’s brought all that up again?”
I’d rehearsed my next question as I’d walked back from the top field.
“Might he have survived it after all?”
Ma snorted like a horse.
“Survived it? They had to scrape him off the road, what I heard. There wasn’t enough to put in a coffin so they burned him at the crematorium in town. He’s nothing but smoke and ashes now, girl. We probably breathed him in if the wind was blowing the wrong way.
“That boy’s as dead as your late father, and there’s no coming back from that.”
* * *
I found Barnaby at the crest of the hill the next morning, leaning against the old oak. “Hello again,” he said, the straw, or another like it, still suspended from the corner of his mouth.
“Enough of your nonsense.” I thrust my hands against my hips, a stance I’d learned from Ma, my chin jutting toward him like judge and jury.
“I’ve spoken to folks and there’s no doubt about it, you died two months gone by.
Dived headfirst into traffic, they said.
So what are you doing hanging around here, Barnaby?
You looking to haunt me, put the frights up me?
Because I’m not scared of you, if that’s what you’re thinking.
And, should you ask me, I’d say that’s a pretty bad use of a haunting. ”
He smiled then, and I had no doubt it was him. I’ve known that smile since I was a baby. It was one of the reasons I could never turn on him like the others.
“I’ve come back to see you, Iris,” he said, still smiling, “but not to haunt you. I want your help with something and you’re the only one who can do it. Will you help me?”
Well, I’m no fool. I knew just the sorts of curses he might put on me if I said no. So I nodded, and he nodded back, like that sealed it.
“Good,” he said. “I want you to kill your friends.”
* * *
It made sense when he told it to me, sitting there under the sprawl of the oak.
They’d hounded him since he was a toddler, made his life a misery.
Threw stones at him when I wasn’t about.
Spat in his hair. Once they pinned him down and put dogshit up his shirt.
These people who I called my friends were friends to no one, he explained.
They were vile bullies, cut from the very worst cloth.
Me and him—we could put that right. We could make the world safe for other people.
I saw that, as he said it. I think I already knew.
You don’t always get to choose who your friends are.
Not in a village as small as ours. You get what you’re given, and you either survive them or you don’t.
I’d bought my own survival when I threw my lot in with Shelley, but the cost was my friendship with Barnaby.
Silently I’d always hated her for that. Gavin and Arnie, too.
Barnaby spelled out the misery they’d caused him, the madness that made him take his own life. I might have shed a tear or two.
“Do you know what this is?” he said. Reaching up, he pulled down a branch so I could see the round swelling, like a ball on its bark.
“Course I do,” I said. “Oak Apple Day is three months gone, though. What you wanting with it now?”
“They’re wasps that build them,” he told me, as if I hadn’t just said that I knew. “They plant their young inside a bud, and the bud changes into this, a home for their babies. When the time is right, the wasps will hatch from a hole in the side, having lived off the oak all that time.
“You can be my oak apple,” he said, reaching his arm around my waist. “You’ll feed me, won’t you, Iris?”
I felt a scratch on my belly then, and pulled away. Lifting up my shirt there was nothing to see. Still, it stung, like he’d drawn a cracked fingernail across the skin.
“When do we begin?” I asked.
* * *
When you live this close to the land, you learn to use what’s around you.
The drooping blue flowers of monkshood. Poison hemlock, hidden among the creamy blooms of cow parsley.
There’s death aplenty in the fields. Disguising the taste was the hard part.
No one eats poison when it’s bitter and vile.
You have to dress it up, sweeten the brew.
You have to make them want to eat it, so it fills them up.
Everyone likes a brownie. Shelley had baked some funny brownies for her party last year, and we’d gorged on them until our tummies were full and our heads were in the clouds. Sickly sweet and impossible to resist.
“What’re we celebrating?” Gavin asked as I handed them round. “You preggers or something?”
He pointed at my belly and you could see it there, just. The swelling. A bump beneath the fabric like a giant gall.
“Don’t be daft,” Shelley said, taking two, one in each fist. “She’s just been eating these all week, hasn’t she? Unless one of you boys has gone near our Iris without me knowing?”
Sniggers all round, knowing glances.
Well I wouldn’t touch you either , I thought. Don’t need to.
Barnaby looks out for me now.
* * *
Shelley was the first to fall sick. She had five brownies, I think, maybe six, although the poison may not have been spread equally through them.
Breathing problems, excruciating pain. Vomiting.
Diarrhea. By the time an ambulance made it out to us she was already pale as a corpse.
She couldn’t even speak as they loaded her onto a stretcher, curled up like a baby rat as her innards struggled to break free of her body.
She was dead before they got to the hospital.
They had to turn back to pick up Gavin and Arnie, squeezing them in alongside her still-warm body.
When it was clear what was happening they sent another two ambulances from county, but they took two hours to reach us.
By then it was all over. None of them made it to the hospital ward.
They thought I was hysterical, but inside I was laughing. I could see Barnaby waving from the hilltop. I dropped the last few brownies into the brook.
* * *
Ma noticed the swelling a few days later.
The police wanted to talk with me, to ask where the brownies had come from, but she held them off for a day.
They never liked coming to our village if they could help it.
When two of them turned up at our door she pointed to the dome blooming beneath my T-shirt and said, “A girl in her condition? You must be having a laugh. Away with you, we’ve got trouble enough without you helping, thank you very much.
” I watched them limping back up the path to their car, tails between their legs.
“Now,” Ma said, once they had driven away and she’d made us both a brew. “What are we going to do with you, girl? I always said those boys were trouble, but you wouldn’t listen. I don’t want to know who the father is, but we’ve some decisions to make.”
“I want to keep it,” I said, without thinking. “It’s mine.”
Ma just shook her head and tutted. Didn’t look at me as she sipped her tea.
Some nights I’d sit up in bed, when the moon was heavy enough to send light through my window.
You could see it easy now, the bump. I ran my hand over it.
The skin was rough in places, like willow bark.
I’d stolen some butter that I rubbed into it with my fingertips.
They traced the line where Barnaby’s fingernail had scratched me, invisible but still tender to touch.
I remembered that cold hand on my skin, back when we’d played as children.
I placed my hand on it, hoping to feel something move inside. But I felt nothing but hollowness, the rise and fall of my breath. An unnamed ache that was something like hunger.
* * *
A few times I thought I spotted Barnaby again, stood among the trees.
But it was never him. Only a shadow, or a funny-shaped elm, its branches cracked and twisted like it was waving.
Once I saw him in the clouds, drifting above us like an untethered god.
The swelling in my belly grew and grew, until finally I climbed Pop Denyer’s field again to find him.
The straw stubble was rotten and slimy underfoot as I walked.
Of Barnaby there was no sign, just the chatter of crows as they picked over the dirt.
My breath was short, and I had to stop a couple of times, but eventually I reached our oak.
I had a pain in my side like a stitch. Slumping to the ground, I looked up through the branches.
He’d left me a gift there, tied where he’d found the oak apple. Two rough corn dollies twisting and dancing in the breeze. A boy and a girl.
“Oh Barnaby,” I said. “Oh Bumblethatch. What have you done to me?”
And as I felt the wetness gush between my legs, I heard a buzzing like a thousand wasps hankering for the world.