Honey
Sigrid’s headphones have a buzz in one ear. She’s told the tech several times but he hasn’t replaced them. Well, never mind, she’ll just tell him again. Sweetly, in honeyed tones. A slight smile to show that she doesn’t think it’s his fault, not really.
‘Frank?’ she says into the mic. No reply. ‘Frankie?’ She takes a breath, adds sweetness, unclenches her jaw. They’re all in this together, aren’t they? She’s just like him, her marriage is just as valid as his, she’ll be just as much a parent to her wife’s baby as he is to his children. ‘F-dog?’
‘Yo,’ he replies immediately, and she dies, actually feels a part of her physical self wither to nothing, at the ludicrous 2004 sub-Limp Bizkit nickname he chose himself, actually chose his own self and now gets people to call him. Half the time she can’t even get people to call her Sigrid, which is her actual name – she gets Sarah, Simone, and once, most memorably, Secret – and somehow he gets to be F-dog. Somehow he gets to barely see his kids but still be called a father. Somehow he gets to not do his actual job but still keep his job.
‘I feel like I can still hear a buzz,’ she says, ‘do you think we could –’
‘On it,’ he snaps, which is what he said last time.
She curses her use of feel like . Of we . She should just say: Frank, there’s a buzz in my headphones, get me new ones. Now she listened, it was more than just a buzz. There’s a tapping too. A wire must be loose in there somewhere.
The show is 90s chill, which encompasses everything from late-80s Indigo Girls to early-2000s Scissor Sisters. She makes it as queer as possible, but it just isn’t very queer, is it? Queer as in strange, queer as in ruined, queer as in fuck you.
Instead she’s playing old songs on BBC Radio, taking calls from LGBTQ people who happen to be awake at 1 a.m. on a week night, sharing their wholesome love stories, celebrating everyone’s tolerance and acceptance, raising awareness of … she’s not sure, exactly; carefully avoiding anything sexual or negative or political, keeping it light, keeping it nostalgic. Those good old days where she couldn’t have married Isa or been the legal parent to the baby Isa is carrying. The show is called Our Pride, because of course it is. In her head she calls it Safe Queers, though she could also have gone with A Lesbian Who Won’t Offend Your Gran. A Gay, But Not Like That. She’s pretty sure that behind closed doors she’s referred to as a triple threat – not because anyone thinks she has three skills, or even one, but because she fits into three neat little boxes: LGBTQ+, regional (which meant the entire UK outside London) and working class (which meant her school didn’t have a ‘notable alumni’ section on Wikipedia, or indeed a Wikipedia page at all). The BBC execs can go tick, tick, tick but only pay one salary.
Sigrid is queer, but not scary queer. She sounds Northern, but of no specific region. She’s soon to be a mum, but won’t have to take time off with post-partum depression or require a breastfeeding room. Tick, tick, tick. She tells herself that she’s playing by their rules but still managing to win the game. Well done her. The Queen of the Queers. A double agent with a flannel shirt and pixie cut. Tick tick tick, goes the sound in her headphones.
‘You’re on in five,’ says Frank, and he doesn’t mention the headphones, and neither does she.
‘Sounds great, thanks, Frankie,’ she says, making sure to keep her voice sweet.
Sigrid wonders if she could get a clothes peg. The smell is unbearable. Isa’s the pregnant one; Sigrid can’t go around puking. She knows it would look comical, a big wooden peg clipped to her nose, but that might help. Isa can’t be offended if it’s silly.
Isa’s in her third trimester, but her cravings are still at first-trimester intensity. She’ll get a desire for something – not even a desire, a need, a rage – and want it right this second, and then immediately, sometimes when she hasn’t even finished eating it, it becomes repulsive and has to be disposed of. Not even in the kitchen bin; Sigrid has thrown half-eaten plums and bits of pitta bread out in the garden to get them far enough away. A bit of beautifully cooked pork belly suddenly became so awful to Isa that Sigrid had to bury it.
‘It’s okay that I’m having this, right?’ Isa comes up behind Sigrid and slips her arms around her waist, pressing as close as she can, which isn’t that close with her bump so big. She’s carrying high, which the internet says means a girl. They’ve had a scan – Isa had a scan, Sigrid corrects in her mind; no one scanned Sigrid – but they said they didn’t want to know. Sigrid actually does want to know. She wants to know everything. How does it feel to grow someone inside you? A full complement of toenails and a heart and all the tiny bones of the inner ear right in the deepest parts of yourself. She wishes there was a viewing window in Isa’s belly so she could see it all. She knows it would be horrifying but she wants to see it anyway. She didn’t want to be pregnant, and still doesn’t. But she didn’t know it would feel like this to be the other mother. She feels so distant.
‘Sig? It’s okay?’ Isa presses closer and Sigrid knows it’s not out of affection, but so she can better smell the kidneys frying in the pan. The repulsive, faintly piss-smelling kidneys in their purple-marbled sac. This is love, she thinks. Frying up a pan of pissy organ meat and not puking – that’s love.
‘Of course it’s okay,’ she says, tilting her head back so it rests on Isa’s shoulder. Her hair is soft and smells of sandalwood. ‘It’s liver you can’t have. Something about vitamin A. But kidneys are a good source of iron. My sister had low iron when she was pregnant.’
‘See? My body knows what it needs,’ says Isa, sliding her body around Sigrid’s, front to front, peppering kisses along her jaw. When they met, Isa had a face full of piercings; so many that people didn’t see her face, just the piercings. Sigrid later realised that it was a sign of extreme shyness. Over the years, the piercings disappeared, along with Isa’s nerves. Now she’s barefaced and brash. Sigrid can still feel a tiny knot of scar under the curve of Isa’s lip, catching with each kiss.
At the kitchen table, Sigrid dishes up the kidneys and Isa manages six bites before her expression changes. Sigrid doesn’t even wait for her to speak; she whisks the kidneys away, opening all the windows to get rid of the smell. She knows that Isa won’t want her to put the kidneys in the bin; she’ll say she can still smell them, even through three closed doors and all the way up the stairs. Sigrid takes the dish of kidneys outside. She pauses before locking the back door behind her.
The shed is the size of two couches, but it doesn’t have any couches in it. It has a shelf made of a rotting scaffolding board, a rusting tin toolbox, a roll of mouldy carpet, a broken plastic slide, a bowl of dusty seashells, a snapped mop.
And the nest.
Isa was the one who first knew about it. She noticed one or two wasps crawling on the cobwebbed window of the shed. Then ten or twelve wasps. Then she realised the wasps weren’t on the outside of the glass, but the inside. She dispatched Sigrid to the hardware shop for something to kill the wasps, and hasn’t gone within six feet of the shed since. Who knew what those wasp-killing chemicals could do to the baby? Sigrid returned with a plastic-wrapped ball called Wasp Destroyer covered in warning symbols that promised to KILL ALL WASPS DEAD. Surely not all of them, she thinks. If one little thing could kill every wasp, then there wouldn’t be any left, and there are absolutely loads of them.
Sigrid stands in the open doorway of the shed. It smells of leaf mould and dust and something else, something she can’t name, something almost alien. The wasps’ nest is tucked into the back corner of the shed. Papery, heavy, layered with shadow. Hundreds of wasps, small bodies crawling. The scraping sound of them drones, low and metallic. Sigrid feels it in her throat.
She hadn’t been able to use the ball of chemicals. The thing about wasps is that they live in any space they can find, spaces that no one else uses or needs. They make a home and a life from what everyone else has discarded. And that’s what she and Isa are doing. They’d taken something some man had sold to a fertility clinic without a backward glance, something easily given, something that gets thrown away every day in condoms and tissues and down the toilet – they took it and made something real and true and precious with it. No one wanted Sigrid’s radio slot, midnight to 2 a.m., the overnight, the dead hours, the ones no advertisers would buy and no presenters scrambled for, the only one she was offered, the one she immediately took.
She doesn’t go any closer in case she accidentally steps on a wasp in the dark. She’s read that if a wasp stings or dies, the smell of it makes other wasps swarm. That’s why you shouldn’t kill a wasp, unless you want its whole family to rally round the corpse of their kin in revenge.
She puts the dish of kidneys on the gritty floor of the shed, then with her foot pushes it closer to the corner. She thinks she hears the buzzing intensify. Can they smell the meat? Do they need the iron? She pushes the dish closer, and this time she’s sure the noise changes. She closes her eyes and imagines the feel of the tiny feet on her wrists, her throat, her lips. She imagines the papery mound of the nest against her belly, the rustle and pulse of it as she moves. They’re so small. So defenceless. They need a mother.
But they have one, don’t they? Somewhere there, in the deepest layer of shadow. Someone, something in there birthed these wasps. Did its body know what it needed? Would it find a way to communicate that to Sigrid? She was doing her best, but it was hard to know what was going on in there. She wishes there was a viewing window in the nest. She feels so distant. She backs out and shuts the door tight.
‘I checked the ingredients,’ says Frank, handing her a hamper containing fancy chocolates, alcohol-free fizz, something bright pink to put in the bath which looked guaranteed to give you thrush. ‘No nuts, so the choccies are safe for Isa to eat.’ Sigrid goes to thank him, but then he adds: ‘So do you think the baby will call you Dad? It’s a great feeling the first time your kid calls you Dad.’ And she doesn’t know what to say.
What she wants to say is: no, you fucking toolbag, why would the baby call me Dad when I’m not its dad? When I am literally a woman? Is it really so inconceivable that a person can be a mother without a child exiting their body?
She’s got her headphones around her neck, and she can hear that they’re still buzzing. She opens her mouth to tell him, but he pushes the hamper at her, so what she actually says is: ‘Thanks, Frankie. Isa’s been craving these.’
That was the problem with Frank: he could be so nice . She wanted to put him in a box marked ‘homophobe’ or ‘misogynist’, make a complaint about him to HR, even – but how could she when he was giving her thoughtful gifts and enquiring with wide eyes about Isa’s morning sickness or whether they’d like Yassine’s old pram, it was a good one, they’d barely even used it? All right, he did ask her several times about her husband even after she clearly said the name Isa and the word wife – she’d joked about it with Isa later, like did he think Sigrid meant herself as a wife, but in third person? And all right, she did see him do a little floppy wrist motion when she played Elton John, but perhaps she misunderstood that and he just had a sore wrist.
Her headphones are buzzing louder now. It seems more layered: the buzzing, the ticking, the rustle of small bodies crawling.
If she makes a complaint, she’ll be the one labelled difficult. He hadn’t even made a joke about lesbians and nuts, even though she’s sure he was tempted. That’s got to count for something.
‘Ayesha told me to tell you she’s got recommendations for the best nappies and nipple cream. Speaking of, let me tell you, it’s no picnic having to share boobs with a baby. Never thought I’d be jealous of my own son!’
Sigrid smiles and motions at her show notes, a soft head tilt meaning got to get back to this . Frank was harmless; just one of those men who don’t know how to talk to a queer woman. They either talk to her like they would a straight woman – meaning like a landmine who could explode into inexplicable emotion at any second – or like a man, meaning all blokey nudges and cheeky Nandos and tits. In her mind, she still puts him in the misogynist box, but can’t quite bring herself to close the lid.
An hour into the show, the buzzing is so loud she can barely focus. Can’t Frank hear it? It’s buzzing so loud it’s shaking her desk. It’s buzzing so loud it’s rattling her teeth. She’s told Frank so many fucking times about the headphones and still he hasn’t changed them, there must be a dozen pairs of fucking headphones in the cupboard and he can’t even do that, useless fucking manbaby, can’t even change his own child’s nappy, doesn’t know how to work the dishwasher, asks her what she thinks about the football even though she has zero fucking interest in football but apparently lesbian means man means football, she can see him through the window, he’s texting right now, ignoring her even as he’s meant to be cueing her in, she has to do half of his job as well as all of her own, she’s jumped through every fucking hoop they’ve put in front of her, even the ones that were on fucking fire, and still, and still this.
The buzzing is in her head, in her wrists and her throat and her lips, the feel of tiny feet, the cloy of decay, of things sprouting, and it comes out, all of it comes out, a swarm of words stinging up out of her.
Her boss calls her in. She’s never been called in. He doesn’t say that Frank made a complaint, but Frank doesn’t need to have made a complaint. He’s got her recorded, agitated and aggressive. Some of it surely got broadcast before Frank cut to the song.
It’s her fault, she knows it’s her fault. She should have stayed sweet. Ignored the buzzing. Just sat back and let it happen. Tick, tick, tick. She’s valuable because she’s Other, but only a little bit. Other-adjacent. Palatable Other. What good is she if they can’t fit her into the box?
‘Got a beekeeper for you,’ says her boss.
It’s so far from what she expected him to say that she wonders for a moment if she’s having a stroke.
‘For me?’ she replies, as if receiving a gift, as if he’s about to hand her a hamper containing fancy chocolates, alcohol-free fizz and a beekeeper.
‘To interview on the show. Reckon it could turn into a six-part piece, if it goes well. Not just the love-story stuff like usual, but the bees. People like bees. And she’s trans. He, I mean. So I figured right up your street.’
‘But I’m not trans,’ says Sigrid.
‘You know what I mean. LGBTQLMNOP. Figured you could talk about that.’
About the alphabet? Sigrid wants to say. Instead she says: ‘I’ve got wasps. We can talk about –’
For a moment her boss looks at her with concern. She feels like this might be the first time he’s actually looked her fully in the face. ‘I said bees, Sigrid, not wasps. Totally different. Wasps don’t make anything useful, they’re not a functional part of the world. Bees make things and work together. They know their place. Wasps, they’re just stinging little bastards that never did anything for anyone.’
She wants the buzzing back. She wants the layered darkness. She wants to be able to sting. She wants to say that she wants new headphones. She wants to say that she wants a better time slot. She wants to say that she wants Frank and her boss and every straight man, every straight person even, why not, to sink into the ocean.
But she knows that what she needs is honey. She’s got nappies to buy. She’s got a carrier and a cot and a little plastic baby bath to buy. She’s got to cover Isa’s half-pay for her mat leave. She can taste the honey in her mouth.
The honey says that she’s a good queer. Look, she got her hair cut at a women’s salon instead of a barber even though it’s three times the cost because apparently a woman’s undercut and fade is very different to a man’s undercut and fade. Look, she got married, and there were vows and rings and everything. The honey lies thick on her tongue. Look, her wife is pregnant, literally pregnant, and she’s a primary-school teacher too, she wears dresses, she gets her bikini line waxed, what more can a lesbian do than that? The honey pools and clogs behind her molars. She doesn’t even use the word lesbian in case it offends people. She doesn’t use queer in case it offends other people. She doesn’t use any word at all. The honey is sealing up in her throat. She can’t speak for the sticky thickness of it. She wants to cough it out, but instead she swallows.
‘Sounds great, thanks, boss,’ she says, and her voice is so sweet.
Isa doesn’t want kidneys again, to the extent that even the sight or smell of kidneys, even the memory of kidneys, even the word ‘kidney’ makes her retch. So Sigrid makes a spag bol. She tells Isa that it’s vegan mince, but actually she uses beef instead. She puts only the tiniest dash of red wine in, even though she knows it’ll cook off anyway. Isa eats a whole portion, and then a bit more, for the baby. Sigrid understands; she’s kept a little of the raw mince aside.
She understands too why you get beekeepers but only wasp destroyers. Everyone’s all about bees. Save the bees, feed the bees, buy these specific wildflower seeds to attract bees to your garden. No one wants wasps. They don’t make anything, they don’t give anything except themselves.
She tells Isa to relax in front of some reality show, and she takes the raw mince out to the shed. She stands in the doorway, feeling the buzz fill out her throat. She’s wearing a T-shirt, even though it’s cold, so that they can access more skin. The proper name for wasps is Vespula vulgaris , and if she could rename her radio show, that’s what she’d call it: Vulgar. She’s looked up more things about wasps, on her phone in those morning hours which are her night-time, when she should be sleeping, when she should be getting rest now, while she can, before the baby comes. Wasps are sociable and collaborative, working together to build their nests. In the nests grow the wasp larvae. The larvae eat carrion and insects, and the adults feed on the sugary liquid that the larvae secrete. She loves that: the way that they start carnivorous, then consume only the sweetness of their children.
She goes into the shed and pushes the raw mince into the corner, towards the distended paper nest in its layers of shadow. It moves and pulses like a slow-beating heart. There must be thousands of wasps in there. Their bodies crawling over one another in layers, working, building, communing. Vulgar and real.
She feels the buzz in her entire body. The stroke and sting of hungry children on her skin. Her throat feels clear. Not the mawkish, nauseating gloop of honey, but a sharp flake of salt. Something familiar and strange.
She opens the back door.
‘?’ she calls, and her voice is strong and clear. ‘Can you come here? I want to show you something.’