The Boy Who Taught the Beekeeper to Read by Susan Hill

Author:Susan Hill [Hill, Susan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction, General, Short Stories (Single Author)
ISBN: 9781446485705
Google: 5WiLn3q-V2YC
Amazon: B0057WR2M0
Publisher: Random House
Published: 2011-06-26T16:00:00+00:00

Moving messages

Moving messages

Some people make tunes, but it is lines that run like moving messages through my head. Whatever else I am saying and doing often has no bearing on this inner, verbal life.

‘Thou hast made me, and shall thy work decay?’

It rode with me up the escalator and my footsteps tapped it out in a rhythm along the street. My mother had a similar problem with hymns.

‘I am a little world made cunningly.’

I wondered if Velma had ever suffered from poetic tinnitus. It might provide an opening.

The restaurant was chrome and black and angular and a shock to the system. The table was square, the plates were square and the water came in a square glass, but the bread rolls were round and soft, like my life now, lived among hills like breasts and tender bales of fabric.

They had tortured flowers with wire stays, and straitjacketed them in thin metal tubes. The table napkins were origami.

‘Didi!’

Her kiss scratched my cheek, dry as a quill.

‘Goodness,’ I said. I have not been Didi for thirty-four years.

I had painted Velma in my mind and the picture had been a good likeness. She was blade-thin, wore cream, smoked.

‘You look so wholesome,’ she said. ‘London is foul.’

The menus were startling, scarlet boards lettered in spikes of black.

‘Shall I order for us both?’

They say we do not see ourselves as others see us, but I saw perfectly how Velma saw me and I was not having it.

‘Crab,’ I said, speaking directly to the waiter. ‘Turbot with buttered spinach. Pommes dauphinoise.’

‘Six gulls’ eggs, and a tiny salad.’

Velma lit a cigarette.

‘You used to smoke Black Russian,’ I said. It had been a matter for wonder among the rest of us.

‘I’d have known you,’ I said.

I meant, you look your age and more, look harder, smarter, slicker, dryer; look like this restaurant. Yet, oddly, still the same. They can do this sort of thing with computers now. Digital ageing.

The hills like breasts and the soft folds of fabric and pillows of fabric have had an effect on me, too.

‘Thou hast made me, and shall thy work decay?’

‘Known you anywhere,’ I said.

The crab tasted of seaside holidays and flaked sweetly between my teeth.

‘Extraordinary.’

I wondered what, but she said it while looking round at two men who were walking into the restaurant. In fact I was not sure she had meant to speak to me at all, and buttered a soft, plump roll to fill in time. It is not every day I eat in a cutting-edge London restaurant with square plates.

‘I am a little world made cunningly,’ the moving message read, neon-green on black. ‘I need intellectual discipline,’ I said, though how could she have understood? ‘Fierce words. Analysis.’

That was probably the reason for the tinnitus.

In a train, when you are facing the moving message about not leaving personal belongings behind you it is possible to raise a newspaper to shut it out, but I have found no similar way of dealing with the lines inside my head. I

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