Free The Hive by Gill Hornby

monstrous…”
    OK, so it wasn’t a campaign for her children to do more extracurricular stuff.
    “As I said to Mary, ‘She’s lucky she’s got two parents,’ I said. ‘Rachel couldn’t manage anything like that. Now she’s on her own …’”
    There: ambush. It was a divorce conversation.
    “Josh and Poppy have two parents, Mum. As it happens. In fact, I do believe you’ve even met the other one. Remember? That guy? At my wedding?”
    “Well in the past I have, yes. But a long time ago…”
    “He only left—we only decided to separate—last month.” She started to mumble, “Or month before last…” Christ, it was actually coming on for three.
    “And he’s certainly not been as around as I’m sure he made out he would be.”
    “He’s always around!” Brilliant. How had this happened? Rachel was suddenly the chief cheerleader of the Chris Mason Fan Club. Always around? Hilarious. “He took Josh to the football only the other night.” The week before last, actually.
    “How nice. And Poppy? Hmm? When did he last see his daughter?”
    Good question.
    “He’s got them both for the entire weekend!” She could barely believe the triumph in her own voice. Listen to it! Her children’s father was finally getting it together to have them for the first time since the summer, and suddenly he was Brad bloody Pitt.
    “Well I don’t see how he’s going to manage it, if he hasn’t got them any beds…”
    “He’s getting beds this week!” Hurrah hurrah for him. Let us all worship the Great One who provideth beds even unto his own children.
    “Yes, well, he won’t, will he? Anyway. I was wondering if you could pop over and help me some time.”
    “Sure. Hey. I’m only a struggling single mother.” She hated herself as she said it. “All the time in the world. What can I do for you?”
    Her mum ignored that one.
    “It’s my bees. I need to open them up and I don’t really like being out there with them on my own…”
    So here was something else that Chris had dumped her with: her mother’s permanent quest for self-sufficiency that seemed to suck in the energies of everyone around her. Rachel turned her back to the sink and slumped against it in defeat. It was a mystery of physics, as yet unexplained, that the longer she had to get used to her husband’s absence the larger became the hole he had left behind. While it had registered the departure of her co-parent and her lover—and how—her brain had, until that very moment, failed to compute what was going on at the peripheries. Like the fact that her mum had lost a son-in-law in the process. A son-in-law who, she had to admit, was remarkably good-humored about popping round there whenever summoned by Her Imperial Highness.
    So she must miss him too, then. Rachel hadn’t thought of that.
    “Yeah. OK. But I’m working all this week.”
    “Oh yes. Of course. Your ‘job.’” Her mum always somehow contrived to convey vocally those inverted commas: it was still a struggle for her to equate drawing pictures with earning a living.
    “Yes. My ‘job.’ It’s very ‘busy.’ I’ll come at the weekend.”
    She hung up, and her head started to clear. Her arsey, difficult fourteen-year-old self shimmered, faded away and was replaced with an entirely reasonable adult once again. Poppy the Doctor Who expert would be fascinated: it was a transmutation worthy of a pretty convincing alien.
    Rachel would go round on Sunday and, she vowed, be as nice as pie. But now she must get down to some work. She sat down at the table, put a pencil in her mouth with one hand and smoothed the other over the blank paper in front of her, and then her mobile chirruped. Oh God, she thought. A text. Her stomach clenched. A bloody text. It ripped her apart that all communication with the man to whom she was technically still married was reduced to a sequence of electronic messages. Presumably before the invention of the mobile phone, separating couples actually had