"Beatrice" by Diana Reed

Beatrice. Beatitude was in some mind long ago when the name was given. Bee, they call her now. Honey hair, bee-stung lips. Beautiful.

She has her being in one of the maisonettes, high up near the roof. The ceiling conceals the rafters. Walls slope up to the ceiling, punctuated by dormer windows over-looking gardens and sky. Up in the eaves the bees come and go. But now that's a lie. They are not bees, but wasps. The bees are dead, their nest deserted and rank. The swarm built it in a high corner of the room. Beatrice left the windows open for them to fly in and out freely - too high for burglars, though at night or on the coldest days she closed the glass, and the bees never complained. It is impossible for Beatrice to remove the hive. She cannot consider such a thing. She does not see it any more. Barmy Beatrice, bees in her bonnet.

With the honey gone she is thin and forever visiting the shop for more, but buying sugar or syrup, because she cannot bear the taste of the supermarket honey which is nothing like the honey her bees made. For a while she did become lonely on her own, so desperately lonely because she cannot speak to other people, cannot bring a man's warmth back to her bed. Never again, not ever, not since the bees were poisoned.

It wasn't a natural disaster; it wasn't society punishing her; the poisoner believed he was doing her a kindness. He woke up in the morning after the night before and saw the bees and thought he knew why she had needed him, what she had seen in him. Beatrice had long since woken up and was out and about her business. He hurried to his van - the pest exterminator's van, though how could Beatrice know, in the dark of the night before? - for the tools of his trade, and the chemicals he used. When she came back her bees were gone. She cried, she howled. He was upset, but he was leaving anyway. Going to work. She told him not to come back, and that suited him.

Beatrice left the nest untouched, but stored the honey-making paraphernalia and bought herself sugar, or syrup, or nothing at all.

Cold dreams. Not many in a lifetime. The dreams you wake from cold, knowing there is no way out. She had too many of them.

Much later she heard a buzzing against the window. A queen wasp. She opened the pane to let it in, but it chose not to come through. It zig-zagged up into the eaves, found a crack to ease through, then came and went; and afterwards sent its daughters to and fro instead.

The buzzing of a hive began again. She could sleep in peace, instead of blackness; though the wasps are black, and also hugely voracious and well disciplined, in and out of the ever growing paper nest in the roof-space as they chew the wood through; but not enough to bring the roof down.

Sometimes she opens the ceiling hatch to look. Why they have come to live in the void Beatrice does not know.

But she likes it that way, now.

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