Miss Benson's Beetle Read online

  Then, as suddenly as it had come, the mist went. The mountain came back, the trees, the boundless blue sky. Margery saw things she hadn’t even spotted before. A red flower shaped like two hands in prayer. A cactus as tall as a person. But it was a lesson: a lesson that the weather was bigger than her and must be treated with caution. Unlike Margery, it could change in a moment. They packed their haversacks and took an early night.

  * * *

  —

  Dawn, the next morning. A completely different world: the mountain was ambered in a deep, shifting light. Everywhere there was a smell of ripeness and the booming and sawing of insects.

  Enid paced the veranda in a pair of orange shorts and a bright pink top, her baseball cap on her head, her boots on her feet, and a bush knife in her belt. You could spot her a mile off. But it was the dog that was the worry. They hadn’t even left, and its tongue was hanging out. Before Margery could say anything, Enid scooped him up. “He’s coming with us,” she said. “He’s lucky.”

  “That dog cannot be lucky, Enid. I would lay bets on it.”

  Ignoring Margery, Enid reached for her haversack and hauled it on to her back. Margery checked one more time. Two hammocks and the tent, hurricane lamps and spare paraffin, towels, mosquito nets, enough tinned food and oatmeal to last a week, as well as jerricans of water, first aid kit, cooking pot, plates, journals, pencils, specimen vials, and the killing jar. Slowly, they climbed down the steps of the bungalow.

  The boys from the shantytown were already waiting. They were even up in the trees. But for once they weren’t waving or performing backflips or even trying to flog half-dead animals. They were wide-eyed and tense, staring at Margery and Enid as if they were prisoners being led to execution.

  “Do we lock up?” said Margery. In the silence, her voice came out unnaturally loud. Like addressing Enid through a megaphone.

  “Lock up? What for?”

  “Because almost everything we own is inside the bungalow.”

  “If those kids want to break in, they can stick a foot through the wall.”

  “What if they follow us?”

  “They won’t. They think the mountain’s haunted. They won’t go near it.”

  They pushed through the elephant grass and ferns at the back of the bungalow, tunneling between the stems and rough fronds that grew above their heads. Even that took ages. Enid was right about the boys from the shantytown: they didn’t follow them beyond the bungalow. Ahead, the forest was as thick as a wall and making strange sounds of its own. There was not the faintest hint of a path. The air was dark.

  “Good luck, Marge.”

  “Thank you, Enid.”

  “We might find it today.”

  “We won’t.”

  “We might, though. If we think positive thoughts. It’s exciting. Don’t you think? I’m excited.”

  “Enid, we won’t find it because we are thinking positive thoughts. We’ll find it because we’ve got to the top.”

  “You know your problem?”

  “No, Enid.”

  “You’re too down in the dumps. You think the glass is half empty when it is really three-quarters full.”

  “Half full.”

  “Beg pardon?”

  “The phrase is ‘half full.’ And, anyway, science has nothing to do with positive thoughts. It is to do with hard evidence. Now, shall we start?”

  “Yes, Marge.”

  “From now on, I need you to be quiet.”

  “Right, Marge.”

  “I need to focus on the climb. I need you to stop talking. Is that a possibility?”

  “I can try.”

  Margery reminded her that the plan was to forge a path upward until the trees began to clear and they could start looking for the white orchid. They would stop to collect other specimens along the way. They would set traps. Search dead wood. But if Enid caught sight of a gold beetle, or even something remotely similar, she must stay absolutely still. She must raise her hand. She must not shout, or flap her arms, or in fact do anything that she would normally do: she must simply wait for Margery to bring the sweep net and killing jar. Above all, she must not rush ahead.

  Enid nodded. “And we go back to the bungalow after a week?”

  “Yes. With any luck, we’ll have found a few beetles. We might even reach the top by Christmas.”

  At the mention of the word “luck,” Enid’s hand shot to her collar. It was another superstitious thing. She would have to keep hold of it until Margery said Enid’s special code.

  “White elephant, white elephant, white elephant.”

  “Thank you, Marge.”

  They began, Margery first, Enid—plus dog—at the rear. They set down their haversacks and took out their bush knives. They would hack a bit, then go back for their equipment, then hack more. Trees surged closer on all sides, losing themselves in the distance in a swampy green dusk. Creepers dropped in thick, matted curtains; climbers flaunted huge red blooms. Roots ran everywhere like tangled cables beneath their feet, while trunks as tall as poles bore pale flowers all the way up to the canopy above.

  It was awful. Infinitely worse than Margery had thought possible. After ten minutes, she was panting for breath and drenched in sweat, and her fingers were fat with heat. Even the leather of her belt swelled, and in spite of a neckerchief, ants slithered down her collar and got inside her shirt. She pushed aside a creeper; it swung straight back and almost knocked her out. Pausing to check that none of the shantytown boys were following, Margery found herself rolling backward.

  Their knives were blunt in no time. They might as well have brought wooden spoons. Monstrous tree trunks, circled with tendrils and coils. Bromeliads the size of pots. The hanging roots of the great banyan trees, jutting out elbows and knees from plaited windings of stems that were so intricately knotted it made her eyes blind to try to follow them. Lianas of all thickness, from several feet to those of the finest hair’s breadth. Sometimes the only way to continue was by untying each one.

  Clouds of insects trailed them in the hot air. A branch blinked a blue eye, and turned out to be a gecko. If a breeze came, they stopped with their arms wide, their mouths open, and took it in, like water.

  For a while, Enid managed to say nothing, though she more than made up for it in sighs. Maybe it was nerves. After keeping silent in a loud way for another half hour, she interrupted to ask if Margery had ever had a pet.

  “A pet?” Margery smeared the sweat from her neck. Her shirt was glued to her back.

  “Sorry. I was just thinking. I must have talked by mistake. Have you, though?”

  “Have I what?”

  “Ever had a pet? You could just answer yes or no. Then I wouldn’t have to think about it anymore.”

  “Enid, I have never had a pet. I wasn’t allowed a pet.”

  “You weren’t allowed a pet?”

  “My aunts were very strict.”

  “That’s so sad, Marge.”

  “Yes, well, I got over it. Can we go on?”

  “Beetles?”

  “What about them?”

  “You kept beetles. Weren’t they pets?”

  “They were specimens.”

  “You mean you killed them?”

  “No. They died. They don’t live long.”

  “So what about the gold beetle? Will you kill that?”

  “Enid, I will have to, in order to take it home and present it to the museum. We’ve been through this. But you don’t have to look. I will do it.”

  Enid gulped. She nodded. “I’m emptying my mind.”

  “I see.”

  “Otherwise my thoughts get in my way.”

  “And is your mind fully empty now?”

  “Not quite. I had two mice. The wife died and the man was so sad. It broke my heart. Animals aren’t sup
posed to be alone. And then I had a cat once—”

  “Enid, this is a full-blown conversation.”

  “All right, Marge. I’ve finished.”

  They forged on. The forest closed over their heads and was as pathless as water. And being silent next to Enid was worse than waiting for a dormant volcano. She began to hum. Just quietly under her breath, like a reminder she was alive. The cruelest thing you could do to Enid was not notice her.

  Two hours more. It got worse and worse. Hacking, clearing, climbing. Another step. Another step. Why had she left it so late in life to do the thing she’d always wanted? Everything that could bite flew straight past Enid and went for Margery. Even little insects that looked too small to leave their mothers, let alone paralyze a human arm. She crouched to pee and couldn’t do it fast enough, desperate to cover her rear end. Doing the other business was even worse: a wild pig appeared, and no small pig, either, but a great big hairy one, built like a tank, and stood waiting for what she was straining to produce, even though she shouted and threw stones. Meanwhile, the forest was so dense there was barely light—Enid was dull green and so was her dog. When a parrot shot out of the undergrowth, screeching and flapping, its cries echoed through the entire forest.

  Midday, they stopped to eat. She cracked open a tin each of Spam, which Enid mixed with curry powder to put off the flies. It was possibly the worst thing Margery had ever eaten, and they had barely covered half a mile.

  Enid asked if it was okay to pick up on their conversation, now that they were resting. She said she’d been thinking all morning of the babies she’d lost. She’d been thinking, too, of her twin sister, the one who’d been born dead. Her voice went up and down, like a song.

  “Every time I see a butterfly, I say to myself, ‘That’s her.’ I know my sister’s here. And my babies, too. They’re all with me.”

  Enid pointed at a blue butterfly, fanning its wings on a leaf. If Margery had seen one that morning, she had seen hundreds. She tried to imagine her brothers as butterflies. It was as absurd as saying they were still alive. If she thought of them too long, or tried too hard, she could barely see their faces. But it was too hot to think. It was too hot to listen. And she didn’t like to break it to Enid, but most butterflies died after a couple of weeks, even great big blue ones.

  They spent the rest of the afternoon hacking their way up a steep ridge that turned out to be a tiny plateau. By now, her haversack was so heavy she felt as if she were carrying a dead person on her back, and her clothes were so thick with sweat and dust they hurt. She said nothing to Enid—who had overtaken her and was now forging ahead, yelling every time she spotted an insect—but her hip was beginning to seize up. Mr. Rawlings looked back at her as she lagged further and further behind. Worse, they had finished the water, and it was all she could think about. Her throat felt sliced. Her mouth was filled with thick white paste. Then, briefly, the trees cleared and the mountain peak rose straight ahead, two-pronged, like a blunt wisdom tooth.

  It was just as high as it had been that morning. If anything, it seemed to have grown. At this rate, it would be February before they even got to the top, let alone began to search for the gold beetle.

  Enid cocked her head. “Water!” she yelled, and with that she went thrashing and cutting through the undergrowth so fast Margery could barely thrash and cut fast enough to keep up.

  But she was right. Margery heard water before she saw it. A sizzling, like oil in a frying pan. In her joy, Enid pulled Margery up a boulder; her hip practically split in half. But down below lay a clearing of light: a place where the trees parted and sunshine fell onto a pool of water so deep and blue she could see the bottom; water making a crisscross of paths down a sheer rock face and sending up a mist of spray that held the colors of the rainbow. Carefully they picked their way down, though Enid got fed up with being careful and slid the last part on her rear end. They scrambled to the water’s edge and were soon kneeling in the sunlight and making cups of their hands. It tasted of stone. It was possibly the coldest thing Margery had ever drunk. Then Enid pulled off her clothes and hat, and, before Margery could object, was tearing bare-naked into the shallows, shrieking and laughing, “Yahoo!” as if she’d just leaped out of a wild Western. Her skin was white where her clothes had been, her breasts full and blue-veined, a swatch of dark between her legs. By the look of things, she’d actually put on weight.

  “Yahoo! It’s beautiful! Come on, Marge! Come in!”

  Margery had never swum in her life. She hadn’t even paddled. “No, Enid.”

  “Come on, Marge!” Enid smacked the water with her fists and shouted to make echoes. “Yahoo! I’m alive!” Then she plunged underwater, and her hair moved like a sea anemone.

  Mr. Rawlings looked up at Margery. She looked down at him. He closed his mouth and stopped panting, as if he expected her to say something.

  “After you,” she said.

  He continued to stare at her. He clearly had no intention of getting wet, and neither did she. But he was a dog, a useless one, and she was a human being. In order to prove herself the superior species, she took off her boots and shorts, though she drew the line at removing her top—or, indeed, her underwear. The water was ice cold. It was like being bitten. It even seemed to snap at her bones. But she held on to a root until it broke in her hands and she lost her footing and suddenly the water was not up to her knees, it was up to her chest, then her chin, it was in her mouth, ice-cold water, and her head was going under. She threw out her arms. She struck furiously. She began, if not to swim, then at least to stop drowning. Once she choked and went under again but kept going. She reached the other side where she could touch the bottom, but she did not get out, she stayed, staring up at the thundering cascade of water and dark green pine clumps and, above them, the sky as blue as a piece of glass.

  And just for a moment she could have sworn she heard something inside her, groaning with pleasure and whispering, “Oh, Margery Benson, what was this beautiful crazy thing that you just did?”

  Dusk came fast. Or, rather, day went. One minute there had been occasional pins of light between trees; the next darkness was flooding in. Enid rushed to find the hurricane lamp. Once lit, it shone like a small moon.

  “What I don’t understand,” she was saying, “is why you never tried putting up this tent before?”

  “Because,” Margery was saying, “I didn’t need to. I live in a flat.”

  “You taught domestic science for twenty years.”

  “That doesn’t mean I put up tents. I taught girls how to iron men’s shirts, and boil vegetables.”

  “That’s all?” said Enid. “That’s all you taught them?”

  They had filled the jerricans and moved on from the bathing pool. The forest was thick again; so was the insect life. And even though Margery had brought towels, the humidity had got into them and they were soaked. The euphoria she had experienced in the bathing pool was gone. Now all she felt was very wet. Meanwhile, the separate pieces of the A-frame tent were spread at her feet. The truth was that she hadn’t dealt with the tent before now because she’d had no idea what to do with it, and so—in her mind, at least—this was a task she had allocated to her assistant. But her assistant was currently busy unrolling the hammocks and studying the ropes and hooks.

  “I would just have expected,” continued Enid, “that you might at least have tried the tent before now.”

  “You may not be aware of this, Enid, but I had a flat filled with tinned supplies and equipment. I could barely move.”

  Margery fitted the poles together and threaded them through the tent’s roof. Now what she had was a piece of canvas on a stick, more like an enormous flag than accommodation. Margery took it apart, tried again. She rammed the poles through the sides. She tried to pin the ropes into the ground to keep it upright. Mr. Rawlings brushed past. The tent keeled over.

  “You have
done this before?” said Enid. “You have put up a tent before?”

  “No.”

  “You haven’t?” Enid paused. “But you’ve led an expedition?”

  “I haven’t.”

  “But you’ve been on one?”

  “Not exactly.”

  “You’ve never been on an expedition?” repeated Enid, spelling this out with such force she might as well have hit Margery over the head while she was at it.

  “What? Never?”

  “No, Enid, I have never been on an expedition. I told you. I was a teacher.”

  “Bugger,” she said, followed by a slower “Okaay.” She sucked the end of one of her plaits. “So maybe we should cut our losses and go to the bungalow tonight.”

  The idea of dragging her body one more step appalled Margery. Besides, she wasn’t entirely sure that if she went down the mountain she’d ever come back up it. “No,” she roared. “We can’t go to the bungalow. The whole point is that we keep moving forward.”

  Enid held up both hands as if stopping traffic. “Suits me. I’ll sit and watch you put up the tent. It’s very entertaining.”

  “Enid, you could at least do something useful. You could put up the hammocks.”

  “Marge, I don’t want to upset you again. But aren’t the hammocks supposed to go inside the tent?”

  “Enid. Why don’t you just work out how to put them up?”

  And she did. She had them hanging securely in minutes, just like that, two perfect hammocks, strung low between trees, as if Enid had camped in tropical rainforests all her life. She even draped them with mosquito nets. Afterward she took Mr. Rawlings to fill the jerricans with more water from the bathing pool, and then she gathered stones the size of Ping-Pong balls, which she arranged into a fire pit, laying it with fronds of dried palm, though the flames wouldn’t take and she wasted one match after another. Since they had no heat, they had to mix the dried oats with cold water, which just floated like bits of sawdust in a bowl. After that they had more Spam, spiced up with more curry powder. Occasionally one of Enid’s matches took light and a leaf burst into flame, while above glowed the enormous pines and giant ferns, freckled with quick shadows, but never long enough to last.