Free The Death of Bees by Lisa O'Donnell Page B

asleep and I go back to school. It feels safer there. I can’t deal with her when she’s like this, and when she wakes up I know I’ll have nothing to say to her. It’s like that right now.

Lennie
    N elly bled all over the sofa. Thank God I had the plastic covering over it. Marnie had gone back to school and so I had to get the tampons on my own. I thought of going to the chemist, but they know me in there and so I went to the supermarket and hid them under a box of cornflakes. Once Nelly had calmed down, and realized she wasn’t going to drop dead, she was like a bloody budgie. Why was she bleeding? Why did her tummy hurt? How long does it last? I could have screamed. How the hell did she get to twelve, almost thirteen and not know any of this? My sisters couldn’t wait to grow up, stuffing tissue down their bras at eleven years old and utterly jubilant when the bleeding came. I gave Nelly the tampons when I got back but it was obvious she didn’t know how to use them. I didn’t know what to say. I don’t know how to use them either and so I made her some Ovaltine and gave her a chocolate digestive.
    Of course the hardest part was having to tell her about cocks and vaginas, obviously I didn’t use those particular words, but when it came to STDs and abortions I got straight to the point, especially for a girl blooming so rapidly and so beautifully. I suppose I didn’t have to tell her about abortions, but in my thinking the sooner she knows about the consequences of premarital sex the better. Perhaps I should speak to Marnie about cocks and vaginas too, what a lady should and shouldn’t be doing with them. She doesn’t know either.

Marnie
    I couldn’t find it. Izzy made it. A photo album. She’d found all our family pictures, what there was of them and fixed them into a black binder with glue and sticky tape. I remember her putting it together, like a scrapbook. She kept waving baby snaps at me. There was one picture in particular taken in a park. Nelly was maybe a year old. Izzy was holding her close to her chest and Nelly was laughing and pointing at something in the distance. I was sort of pulling away from them and trying to run toward whatever Nelly was looking at beyond the camera, a slide we wanted to slip down maybe or a swing we wanted to play on. Gene was holding the camera.
    I had a vague memory of this photo being in Izzy’s hand, I remember Izzy drinking tea over it and looking sad, as if she didn’t want to see it, but couldn’t help looking at it. There was something about that picture and when I came into the room she hid it.
    Their room was freezing. We had kept their bedroom window open to rid ourselves of Gene’s smell and never closed it. Once inside I hugged myself, it was Baltic. In my head I kept seeing them, I could almost feel them, and I knew they weren’t there, but I couldn’t help thinking of them in the room. I remembered Gene sitting up in bed smoking a fag and holding a paper. He was watching Izzy from the corner of his eye changing out of jeans and into skirts, out of trainers and into shoes, attaching bobbles to her hair and spraying perfume on her wrists. And Nelly, next to Gene, a father and daughter side by side reading and that’s all. Gene reaching for a mug of tea and slurping it dry. Nelly nibbling at a biscuit and letting the crumbs fall between the pages of her book. I’m at the end of the bed, picking at a scab formed after a fall. Izzy gives me shit for it, but I tell her to fuck off , it’s just a knee. It feels like a loving time, a better time and it should comfort me, but it doesn’t, it makes me ill inside and queasy. I pull back to the chill of the room and to their cast-iron frame, a rusting skeleton where they’d once slept, their mattress gone and dumped in the nighttime, a festering stain inking its fabric. We burned it a few days later in a nearby