Song of Bees Read online

  SONG OF BEES

  Andrea Hicks

  Copyright ©Andrea Hicks 2020

  This book is a work of fiction. The names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the writer’s imagination,

  or have been used fictitiously. Any resemblance to persons, living or dead, actual events, locales or organisations is coincidental.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be stored

  in a retrieval system or transmitted, or reproduced in any form

  except for the inclusion of brief quotations in review without permission in writing

  from the author.

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Prologue

  The syringe is where Dylan said it would be. Fully loaded and waiting for me. Just as he said. I’m surprised he kept to his word. We’d argued, a real in-your-face fight. I’d thrown things. He’d called me a fucking waste of space, and got as mad as hell because I dared to question him about how much he owes to his dealer. He isn’t usually so generous. Particularly after a fight. A good hit isn’t easy to come by. I slide the needle into a vein then push the plunger down real slow with my thumb, the beginning of a psychedelic journey to chemically induced heaven. He said the fix was his way of saying sorry because he knows he shouldn’t hide stuff from me. He’s right. He shouldn’t.

  Chapter 1

  I want to scream, to open my mouth and just let go of the torrent of frustration running through my body like a river of bile. They’re not listening. No one is listening. The only one who will hear me, is me.

  I glance up to each corner of the ceiling in turn, to where the cameras are fixed on shiny black brackets. There has been an attempt to make them look like wall lights, complete with fancy glass industrial-type prism shades, the kind you’d get in a warehouse apartment. I stick my middle finger up to each one, hoping a guard is checking the monitors. Does it make me feel better? No, not really.

  I know they’re watching me. I’m like a specimen in a jar. What the hell do they think I’m going to do? I can’t go anywhere. The room I’m in—they call it a room; I call it a cell—has no windows and the door is locked. They’re waiting for something to happen, for my behaviour to give me away, like a lab rat. I thought I might pick my nose and eat it, or do my business on the floor in a dirty protest to give them something to log down on one of their clipboards. But honestly? I can’t be bothered.

  I sit on the bed and run my fingers across the scars on the inside of my forearms. The cuts and punctures are puckered, and bloody where I’ve picked the scabs out of boredom and frustration. And to help me feel something. Some of the scabs have stopped bleeding, but I know once the new skin has broken through, they’ll start testing again, the same tests they’ve done for the last two months. I think it’s about two months. Maybe it’s three. I’ve lost count.

  Chapter 2

  The door opens and three dorks come in. One of them is smiling at me and I know from experience it’s not necessarily a good thing, certainly not designed to make me feel better, or out of sympathy because they regret what they’re doing. Not a smile so much as a grimace. One of them looks bored. How dare he look bored.

  ‘Hi, Nina.’ Female dork tries the softly, softly approach. I lay back on the bed left unmade by me on purpose, chewing my fingernails and spitting the detritus onto the floor. ‘How are you feeling today?’

  I stop chewing and access my bitch face. ‘Are you serious?’ I slide slowly off the bed and walk around the cell, then kick the chair and sweep the paper cup and plate with the cardboard bread and plastic ham off the table. ‘How do you think I’m feeling? I’ve had every fluid I possess and some I didn’t know I had removed from my body. I’ve been turned upside down and inside out. I’ve had swabs stuck in every orifice more than once. I’ve been cut, injected, starved, and force-fed. How would you be feeling if someone did that to you?’

  ‘Obviously, we’re sorry you’ve had to go through all that.’

  I frown, lashing out with a clenched fist. ‘What d’you mean, had to go through it? I didn’t have to do anything. Why did I have to go through it? And why have you kept me a prisoner for weeks on end. It must be against some law or other that you’ve kept me here and treated me like a smoking beagle? What are you going to do next? What’s your next trick? Why am I here!’

  ‘You’re here for your own good, Ms. Gourriel,’ says wonky-eyed dork. Maybe it wasn’t a look of boredom.

  ‘No, actually. No! My own good is doing what I want, which is not being kept here.’ I stare at them and no one says anything. ‘I want to go home.’ Again, nothing. ‘Well,’ I yell. ‘Somebody say something.’

  It kind of reminds me of when I was fourteen and my mum was in hospital. It was bad news but none of her doctors wanted to be the one to tell me. They shuffled their feet and waited, then the ginger minger said, ‘Shall we go into the corridor?’, and I knew. I knew there was no hope, and it was left to the one who’d spoken first to lay it on the line. I think it was a game the doctors played. He who speaks first loses. Before he’d finished telling me my mum was dying and she only had days to live, a priest went into her room and started praying. And I stopped the doctor in his tracks and followed the priest. And I asked him what he was doing, and he said he was praying for my mum’s soul. And I told him to fuck off because her soul didn’t need any prayers.

  He looked at me as though he hated me. ‘Why are you so hostile, young lady? I’m trying to help your mother.’

  I wanted to punch him unconscious. ‘How are you helping her?’ I yelled, pointing at my mum, a corpse waiting to happen. ‘She’s dying. Look at her. She can’t even hear you.’

  He inhaled a breath, patronising and impatient, as though I wasn’t allowed an opinion. ‘I’m easing her out of this mortal world and into a forgiving heaven.’

  I gritted my teeth. ‘She doesn’t need forgiveness. And she doesn’t need you standing there like the grim reaper. Get out. We don’t need you.’

  Then Celine our social worker turned up. She came into my mum’s death room in a bustle of supermarket bags, long multi-coloured knitted scarf and freezing air. As she bundled into the room she looked up and saw me and the priest at standoff. Her eyebrows rose way north of her eyes.

  ‘Nina! What’s going on?’

  I turned away from the grim reaper and Celine and looked up at the ceiling. I didn’t want to look at either of them. ‘Mum doesn’t need a priest, Celine.’ We remained motionless, like insects caught in amber. And we’d still be there if I hadn’t turned and ran.

  ‘Your home is...gone, Nina. It was torched.’

  I frown at female dork, struggling to get my head around what she’d said. ‘Torched. Why would it be torched? Who would torch it?’

  She sighs and sits on the bed, then pats it with her hand as if she’s encouraging a lapdog to jump up like a slave to attention and sit beside her. ‘Someone leaked some personal stuff to the press, and they’ve been running stories on you. Unfortunately, a certain element didn’t take too kindly to the subject matter.’

&n
bsp; I feel as though I’ve been transported to a parallel world because I don’t know what she’s talking about. ‘I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about, and you know what, I think it’s time you told me, or let me go. This is...crazy. You’ve got to tell me because I’m going insane wondering why I’ve been kept here, why you’ve been doing all this stuff to me, painful, inhuman stuff.’ To my total exasperation the tears come. This is not what I wanted to do in front of them. I don’t want to show weakness. I’ve never shown weakness. Not to anyone. Not to them. Most of all not to them, but they’ve achieved it. They’ve made me show my hand, my emotions have been put on show and it goes against the grain.

  She gets up and puts a hand around my wasted arm which feels sore as she grabs it, pulling me to my feet. ‘Let’s go somewhere a little less intimidating and we’ll explain everything to you.’

  For the first time in weeks I’m allowed to walk through the door, and not wheeled out on a gurney prone as they take me off to be punctured again. On the other side is a corridor, with people, sitting behind glass panels, typing, on the telephone, talking, and just being normal. Around the open plan office is a bank of monitors. I was right about the wall lights. There’s my room, my unmade bed, the deconstructed sandwich lying on the floor. She takes me into a small office with squashy mustard-coloured leather chairs, a coffee machine and a low table. On the table is a recording device. The office is divided from the larger one by large sheets of double-sheeted glass, like a partition, all embossed with a logo of a bee, and underneath, the words, “A work of arte; and yet no arte of man, Can worke, this worke, these little creatures can.” Geffrey Whitney.

  I glance at female dork but there’s no change of expression. It’s as if her face is caste in plaster. We’re followed in by the other dorks and they remain standing while she indicates for me to sit and she sits opposite, her knees close together, her black rimmed glasses covering most of her cosmetic-free face. Her hair is pulled back into a ponytail, tight, so tight it’s pulling the skin on her face. I don’t think female dork does fashionably messy. She leans forward, false matey, conspiratorially.

  ‘Can you remember your last day at work, Nina?’

  I look down at my hands. The swarthy skin. The bitten fingernails. ‘Yeah.’ I nod. ‘Yeah, I think so.’

  ‘And what happened after that day?’

  I frown and shrug. ‘What d’you mean?’

  ‘Where did you go?’ I stare at her, trying to remember, but I can’t. I shake my head again. ‘You came here, Nina. You collapsed at work and you were taken to hospital. Do you have any recollection of that?’

  I think about the café. I remember the bus commute from my flat in Islington to Angel. I hadn’t felt right that morning. I wanted to throw up on the bus and had to work like crazy to keep it down. When I got to the café Laura reckoned I was pregnant.

  ‘You’re pregnant. Look at the state of you. Have you been sick this morning?’

  I shook my head. ‘I wanted to be...on the bus.’ I remember serving someone at the counter, a regular, an old man with a little dog. He always ordered the same thing, a cappuccino. I’d watched him run his finger around the cup to get at the froth left in the cup, then, nothing. Except the hospital. The lights as they flashed by overhead when I was on the trolley, a syringe in my arm, the rest a hazy grey cloud, but I was there. Definitely I was there.

  I nod at female dork. ‘Some of it.’ I glance at the guys at the side of me, but they’re looking straight ahead, then back at her. ‘Am I pregnant?’

  Female dork shakes her head. ‘No, Nina, you’re not pregnant.’

  ‘What then? Am I sick? Is that why I’m here? I’ve caught something? Something bad.’

  ‘We don’t know if you’ve caught anything.’

  ‘Then why...?’

  ‘When the hospital took samples from you, your blood showed high levels of countless different antibodies. There’s an anomaly in your blood. Your immune system is, well, let’s just say it’s unique.’

  ‘Unique? In what way?’

  ‘We’ve carried out every available test. I know it’s been unpleasant for you and I’m sorry about that, but it had to be done. We had to find out what was going on inside your body, and why.’ She pauses. ‘Have you ever been ill, Nina? Have you ever been admitted to hospital apart from recently, or had to take days off college or school?’ I shake my head and press my lips together. ‘Were you vaccinated against childhood diseases like measles or mumps? Rubella? Tetanus?

  ‘No. Mum didn’t believe in vaccination. She said the body should be allowed to defend itself naturally.’

  ‘You’re a drug user?’ I nod. ‘You should have died from your last fix?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘It was a bad one. It had been modified.’ I stare at her shaking my head, my eyebrows knotted together, then think of Dylan. A vague memory of us arguing plays out behind my eyes. Then the fix. The fix he left for me. ‘What about your mum?’

  I shrug. I don’t want to talk about her. ‘She’s an alcoholic. Was. She wouldn’t have known if she was ill. She was always out of it. Cirrhosis of the liver killed her.’ I wait for her to say something. ‘Are you going to tell me why I’m here?’

  She nods, then swallows before she speaks. ‘Your blood tests revealed immunoglobulins and antibodies against every microbe we know of. You’re a walking cure-all for every known disease and possibly some unknown or yet to develop. We’ve checked everything.’

  ‘But that’s a good thing to have, right?’

  ‘We’re not sure yet, Nina. That’s what we’re trying to work out.’

  Chapter 3

  I’m numb. For the first time in my life I have nothing to say.

  They take me, make me, come back to my room, a persuasive hand on my arm, pushing me in the right direction because I’m still trying to compute what I’ve been told, to process it all and make some sense of it. I nearly trip over my own feet, almost get them tied up in knots because my legs feel like jelly, like I have no control over them. They sit me on the bed, then someone brings in a drink and a sandwich and they tell me to eat it because they’re sure I’m in shock, and I need to eat something. Well, they’re right about that. I don’t know what they’re talking about, don’t understand most of what they’ve told me, but one thing I do know, I don’t like it. Not one bit. I have to work out what all this means, and why if it’s true, it gives them the right to treat me like a human pincushion and keep me locked up against my will.

  I wolf the sandwich and knock back the drink. It’s one of their high energy mixes that taste very suspect with no flavour I recognise, but at this point I don’t care. I’ve had nothing since breakfast; my lunch ended up on the floor, and there’s no way I would eat anything of this floor. Who knows what’s been on it? I usually believe in the five, no, ten second rule, but not here.

  I must have drifted off because when I open my eyes again it’s clearly evening. It’s funny, since I’ve been here, in this room, with no windows and no contact with the outside world it’s like my body tells me what time of day it is. My natural body clock has taken over and I don’t need a mobile or a clock to tell me. Do I know what the time is? No, but I know whereabouts in the day I am. That’s really all I need in here.

  I’m fully awake now and wondering what’ll happen next. Apart from mealtimes nothing is certain for me now. The female dork said they’re trying to work out if what they’ve found inside me is a good or bad thing and I can’t work out why it matters. Whatever it is I don’t know what they’re expecting to do with it, or what they think I’m going to do with it. The truth is I just want to go home, or to what’s left of it. I’m not interested in what’s going on. It’s my blood and my body and I should be allowed to do what I want with it. And what I want to do with it, is nothing.

  Yeah, I’ve had a wakeup call since I’ve been in here. I’ve realised I don’t need the stuff. I find that pretty amazing. I thought I couldn’t get through a day witho
ut it but...I’ve been in here for weeks and I’ve not even had a sniff of it, literally. I’ve had no highs and no deep lows. No fuzzy head or bad trips. Anything I’ve experienced has been only through what the dorks have done. And they’ve done plenty, none of it with my permission. Since when, in the United Kingdom, did human beings not have rights over their own body?

  Someone unlocks the door and it startles me out of my daydream. A guy I’ve not seen before comes into the room carrying a meal tray. He’s five eleven, broad, muscles stretching the back of his white coat, and sandy-blonde hair in that ruffled, just-got-out-of-bed look, like surfer-chic. He’s the cutest thing I’ve seen since I’ve been in here.

  ‘Hi, Nina.’

  ‘Hi.’

  ‘Dinner’s up.’

  ‘Yeah, great. Can’t wait.’

  He laughs and puts the tray on the table. ‘Er, it’s macaroni cheese with some sort of...crumbly thing sprinkled over the top.’

  ‘Nice.’

  ‘How are you holding up?’

  I raise my face and look him right in the eyes. ‘This hotel leaves a lot to be desired, but then...I didn’t have a choice about where I stayed, did I?’ He sits on the chair opposite the bed and nods slowly, looking around the room. I notice he’s wearing split jeans under his white coat, and trainers. ‘Are they Gucci?’ He nods again and I raise my eyebrows. ‘They must be paying you a wedge to do what you do.’

  ‘And what do you think that is?’

  ‘Where shall I start? You kidnap people and subject them to tests they didn’t want, didn’t ask for and didn’t give permission for. Will that do?’

  He rubs his hands together in a kind of embarrassed way, and I watch his face as he tries to come up with an answer. ‘Yeah well, it’s not something we do every day.’

  ‘What d’you mean?’

  ‘You’re... an enigma, Nina. A paradox. And when they discovered the unusual attributes of your blood,’ he shrugs, ‘they had to find out why.’