The Bee Sting: Shortlisted for the Booker Prize 2023 by Paul Murray

Author:Paul Murray [Murray, Paul]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction, Literary, Family Life, General, Siblings, Humorous, Small Town & Rural
ISBN: 9780241984413
Google: KimIEAAAQBAJ
Publisher: Random House
Published: 2023-06-08T09:05:30.050710+00:00

THE CLEARING

I

Why do people say the birds and the bees? the boy said. When they’re referring to sexual intercourse?

Dickie paused, confused – though he’d been confused since he arrived. Are you talking to me? he said.

If they mean it as a euphemism, the boy went on, they clearly don’t know much about either birds or bees. In both cases their mating habits are quite baroque. Although perhaps that’s what the expression’s getting at – that nature is almost never natural. Do you think that’s what it is? When people say the birds and the bees, do they mean – the orgiastic?

Students were drifting by, dawdling over the cobblestones, which had grown warm in the unseasonable sunshine. It would be so easy to join them! To say he had an appointment, hurry off – or not even speak, simply nod benignly and continue on his way.

But he didn’t know what was the correct thing to do. For a week he hadn’t known; he constantly felt on the verge of committing some terrible faux pas, even when doing something ostensibly quite straightforward, like checking his coat at the cloakroom, or walking, as he had been a moment ago, through the square. Simple things baffled him; conversations were unfathomable. To begin with, every facet of life at Trinity was known by some archaic code name. The Buttery was the bar, the Lecky was the library, Michaelmas Term was this, October, and he was a Junior Freshman, he’d figured out that much – but countless other referents remained obscure to him (House 6? The GMB? The 1937? DURNS?) and he only ever understood a tiny portion of what anyone said to him. Worse, even when it seemed like he did understand, he still found himself at sea, because people here habitually said the opposite of what they actually meant and expected you to be able to tell. Irony was the university’s lingua franca; it made it impossible to know if someone was being serious, or making fun of you.

Take this boy who had accosted him. Dickie had no idea whether the absurd language and preposterous manner was something he was putting on, or if it was what he was really like; if he was putting it on, whether he was doing it to be funny, i.e. to signal that it was exactly what he was not like, or whether he thought it was impressive; in that case, or in the case that it was what he was really like, whether he was regarded generally as a freak, or whether others also found it impressive, and so Dickie should too.

It was too much to figure out then and there; he should just have kept walking; but he found himself pinned to the spot by the boy’s question and the boy’s questioning gaze, like a bested sailor held at the point of a sword by some swashbuckling buccaneer.

Bees, for a start, the boy said, releasing him, at the very least, from the necessity of answering. The mating habits of the honeybee are a case in point.

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