Miss Benson's Beetle Read online

  By the time she was eighteen, her room was like the study of a mad biologist. Insect books everywhere, drawings pinned to the walls, her notes and journals, not to mention all the beetles living in her homemade insect houses and jars. She bought a sweep net for her birthday, and the moment she woke up, she went out. When she searched for beetles, she wasn’t too big anymore or too strange. How tiny the world was when you were pressed up against it, how delicate and meshed and constantly changing. Crawling on hands and knees, eyes stitched to the ground, she thought of nothing except beetles. She disappeared, and so did people.

  Then two things happened. She saw her father. And Barbara told her about the Natural History Museum.

  * * *

  —

  Near to her aunts, there was a park with a lake and a bandstand, and in the summer there were often concerts. Margery was at the park one afternoon, on the trail of Aromia moschata, commonly known as the musk beetle, more than an inch long, rich green in color, thin as a stem, and with very long antennae. One of the few beetles to emit a nice smell. Also, frequently found on willow trees, of which there were many alongside the lake in front of the bandstand. She knelt and began to search. Time passed. A bird called. She looked up.

  Her father was sitting on the other side of the lake. He was listening to the music with one leg stretched out. Until that day she’d forgotten one of his legs was stiffer than the other, and so he always sat that way. Everything in the park parted and disappeared and suddenly there was nothing except Margery by the lake and him by the bandstand. She felt incredibly warm, and happy, really happy. All she wanted was to watch, to be with him like this, both with him and not with him, until a little boy came into view, giving her father a ball, and then a woman, offering him a sandwich. Her father smiled kindly and took both.

  It was as though a whip had been cracked somewhere deep inside her. Fury filled her mouth. A pain so bitter she could hardly breathe. How could he have walked through the French windows all those years ago and abandoned her? She was his daughter. Had she meant nothing? She stayed, nailed beneath the willow trees, her head dizzy, her mouth contorted, while the band played, and her father watched, and people came and went, and the woman fed him sandwiches, and the boy nestled up close and sometimes threw his ball then brought it back, until the concert seemed to be over because people were clapping and the woman packed up her picnic basket and the little boy put away his ball, and they helped her father to his feet, and left.

  He wasn’t her father. He was someone else’s. A little boy’s. But it had upended her to see again what she’d thought she’d left behind.

  She went back to the park every concert day. She knelt by the lake; she waited. The man with the boy never returned. She wrote to several hospitals, inquiring about her father, but there was no record of him. She searched old newspapers at the library and found nothing there, either. What she did find was a reference to her brothers.

  Benson: Archibald, Hugh, Howard, Matthew. Killed 1914. Mons. Unknown graves.

  It was like learning something in her heart that she had known in her head all along. They were dead. Of course they were. Not only that, so was her father. And not to have accepted something so obvious felt like neglect of the worst kind. The chasm inside her opened even further. She walked away from the library, where the early-evening sun threw her thin shadow in front of her, and she watched this strange elongated figure with the small faraway head and was so overwhelmed with shock and grief, she had no idea who it was. She didn’t even know where she belonged. All she felt was blankness. If she could, she would have walked and walked and walked until at last she trod herself into the earth and disappeared.

  * * *

  —

  “You should visit the Natural History Museum,” said Barbara, a few months later. “Go on. Stop mooching, and get out from under my feet. Plenty of beetles there.”

  Margery did as Barbara told her. She was too scared not to. Barbara drew a map on the back of a Sylvan soap flakes box, and Margery held it out in front of her, like a prayer book or strange divining rod, following it step by step while dressed in a frock that was now a bit small and a peculiar hat. Arriving at the vast Gothic building with its towering dark walls, its turrets and spires and hundreds of windows, she almost turned away. It was too magnificent. Then a crowd of schoolchildren swept past, and at the last minute she followed.

  Inside she saw the skeleton of a blue whale. She saw polar bears behind glass. An aviary of colorful birds, suspended midair as if frozen in flight. The ostrich, the lion, camels, an elephant. Animals she’d read about but never dreamed of seeing. She climbed the vast stone steps and followed a long corridor where her feet echoed and, without even asking for help, she turned a corner and found herself in the Insect Gallery.

  Was this how Howard Carter had felt when he opened the door on Tutankhamun’s tomb? For a moment she had to shut her eyes. It was almost indecent, there was so much beauty. Beetles mounted in glass cases and displayed in drawers. Hundreds of thousands. Silver beetles, black beetles; red, yellow, metallic blue, and green beetles; mottled beetles, hairy beetles, stippled, spotted, striped, burnished; antennae like necklaces, mustaches, windshield wipers, clubs; antennae as slight as wispy curls, bobbled antennae; beaded, horned, spiked, and combed; thin bodies, fat ones, round as a bead, slim as a stem; long legs, short legs, hairy, branched, paddle-shaped or pincer.

  Beetles that lived in the roots of trees, beetles that lived inside dung, beetles that fed on rose petals, beetles that fed on rotting flesh. Twice the size of her hand; no bigger than a comma. Why did people lift their eyes to the sky in search of the holy? True evidence of the divine was at their feet or—in this instance—pinned in glass cases and drawers, in the Insect Gallery of the Natural History Museum. She went from one to the next. Dizzy. Ecstatic. Overwhelmed. But nowhere did she find her father’s golden beetle of New Caledonia.

  The first time she looked up was when the bell rang for closing time. Watching her from the door was a short older man with one of those puffy faces that suggest there might be a handsome one hidden inside it.

  “Do you like beetles?” he said.

  The heat in Brisbane. It was like being sat on. Insects chittered like electricity.

  Emerging at the top of the gangplank, Margery blinked. A sun such as she had not imagined pulsed down from the sky. Everywhere she looked people were meeting friends, shouting, waving, hurling suitcases, pointing which way to go. Gladstone bag in one hand, suitcase in the other, she was shoved along in a crowd of thousands toward the Health and Immigration Hall. Points of light shot from the water and burned her eyes. Her head hammered inside her helmet. A woman behind shouted down her ear that they’d be lucky to get out alive.

  Margery was held for hours in a loud sea of boiling hot, smelly people—swatting flies and doing her best not to touch anyone—until finally a medical officer called her forward. “G’day!” he boomed. He examined her fingernails for the ridging that might be a side effect of TB. He asked her to roll up her sleeves, and inspected her arms, like meat on a stall, and before she could object, he shone a flashlight to her eye, his mouth so close they could have kissed. But when it came to her passport and tickets, the customs officer stared at the photograph, as if it were the world’s most complicated puzzle.

  Panic tightened her throat. She told him about the woman who had charged into the booth at the passport office in London when she was trying to have her photo taken. She explained that her tickets showed a berth for two people, but her assistant had already left. Her assistant had been an extremely unreliable person. A liar, you could say. She had been lying right from the start. So it didn’t matter, she said. She was more than capable of managing by herself. She had done so all her life. When her aunts died, she’d inherited their flat, and also a maid, but then the maid had become ill so she wasn’t really a maid….

  The words kept sp
ewing out. Even to herself, Margery sounded ridiculous.

  The passport official held up both hands, unable to take any more. “Whoa,” he said. “Welcome to Australia, Miss Benson. I hope things get better for you, ma’am, I really do. It’s a big country. You’re bound to make a new friend.” Then—before she could explain any more about her situation—he asked the next person to step forward.

  * * *

  —

  The Marine Hotel was an ugly yellow establishment, close to the port. However, it took a long bus journey to get there and Margery couldn’t open her window. Everything looked alien and too colorful—the trees were all wrong, and the flowers didn’t make sense. Not even the sky seemed right. There didn’t seem to be enough room in her head to accommodate so much that was different, and it hurt her eyes to keep looking. Worse, the bus was packed with happy people who insisted on cheering every time they passed a sign welcoming them to Queensland. At the hotel, a friendly young woman sang, “G’day, Margery!” as if she actually knew her, and offered to ring for the porter, but Margery—still smarting from Enid’s rejection and determined to prove not only to herself but also to the southern hemisphere that she could manage without help of any kind—insisted on dragging her things to a room on the second floor. Sweat poured from every part of her. Her hip felt jackknifed. She could only hope that wherever Enid had ended up, it was not very nice.

  There had been times at sea when Margery would have given anything to be in a silent room with proper windows and a bed, none of them shifting up and down. But now that she was in one, she could hardly bear to close the door. She told herself she didn’t need Enid Pretty. “I don’t need you,” she said aloud, and since that didn’t make her feel better, she said it more fiercely: “I can find another assistant.” But the quiet seemed to spread into every corner of the room and swallowed it whole.

  Margery unpacked her toothbrush and soap, and all she could think of were Enid’s multiple pots and jars. For dinner she ate a steak the size of her head, and no one talked so long she felt an urge to snap things in half. The waitress asked if she was in Brisbane for a holiday and instead of being interrupted by Enid—who would have twittered away not just about the gold beetle, but the waitress’s lovely hair, and then whether or not she had children, and did she have any photographs, and oh my goodness weren’t they lovely—Margery said, “No,” and the waitress took her empty plate and moved on. In bed, she opened her guide to New Caledonia and a scrap of paper floated free: “GoOb luck, Marge! Finb the deetle!” Outside, the trees gave a soft sound, like a whispered conversation that had nothing to do with her, while a thousand insects briefly switched to mute. It was like the silence before an air raid.

  That night Margery dreamed she was carrying a red valise packed with her collecting equipment, but she couldn’t manage to secure the lid, and bits of her equipment kept falling out and getting lost. In the end, all she’d had left was a useless pink hat. She turned over and went back to sleep and had the same dream yet again. At that point she gave up. She lay in the strange bed, in the strange room on the other side of the world, feeling so lost and unknown, she could barely move, while outside the insects buzzed, then paused, then buzzed again, as if following an invisible conductor. She couldn’t stop thinking of the pink hat.

  Enid was far from perfect. And yet it was suddenly clear to Margery, as clear as the light already sharpening at her window, that without Enid’s help, she would never be able to find her father’s beetle. And while Brisbane was big, it wasn’t big enough to hide Enid Pretty: to do that would take a small continent. She had a whole day before the flying boat. Margery would find her.

  * * *

  —

  “No,” people said. “Sorry, ma’am. Never met that woman.”

  Margery described her, over and over. Yellow hair; strong to the point of physical violence; talks a mile to the minute. No one had seen her. The hotel porter asked if she had tried the motel. The motel receptionist sent her to a boardinghouse for women. As the temperature rose, Margery trudged from one street to the next. The sky burned down, glaring and white-hot in the streets, and her helmet was worse than an iron on top of her head. She tried cafés, milk bars, shops where women in afternoon frocks of blue and cerise bought whole joints of meat without whipping out a ration book. She had traveled through Suez, she had seen leaping fish and the green flash at dusk, she had heard about camels and watermelons and palm trees, and now here she was, alone on the other side of the world, looking for a woman with the yellowest hair—and she seemed to have vanished. Somehow, she had believed that her simple will to find Enid would be enough to invoke her spontaneous appearance. Then a man asked if she had tried the old American army camp out by Wacol that was now a holding place for migrants.

  It was already midafternoon. Margery took a bus through dusty outer suburbs until the suburbs ran out, and all she could see was dust. By now she was a pool of sweat on her plastic seat; she was actually sliding up and down. She sat with her face toward the window. The great sweeps of space and the hard elemental colors almost blinded her. She still couldn’t believe that trees were not the green things she knew at home, but these spindles with rags for leaves. Finally, the bus reached the gates of an army camp, surrounded with high coils of barbed-wire fencing and a hand-painted sign: WACOL EAST DEPENDANTS HOLDING CAMP FOR DISPLACED PERSONS.

  The camp stretched for miles, a bleached town of Nissen huts with corrugated roofs, like great big tin cans sliced in half and set on their sides, the heat sizzling over them. She was stopped by a guard at the gate, wanting to see her paperwork, but when she asked after Enid Pretty, he consulted his record book and found no mention of her. It was only as a last resort that she tried Mr. and Mrs. Taylor, just arrived. He checked again. Yes, they were there. He pointed the way—keep on the main road until the fourth intersection. Take a left. Take a right.

  Margery limped from one road to the next, from one pinch of shade to another. The air smelled of stew and reminded her of how hungry she was. She turned her eyes from peach and nectarine trees in pink bloom, and orange and lemon trees with proper fruit, to old petrol cans and broken bits of machinery and lines of washing that hung motionless in the heat. In one road, people were hosing their huts to cool them down. In another, they sat on front steps, fanning themselves and incapable of moving. She had no idea why she had come.

  Then she saw a figure ahead of her. That figure was Enid.

  Distance is an illusion. We stand apart so that we may know each other better: Margery had been away from Enid for a day and a half, and now she barely recognized her. If it weren’t for the yellow hair and the clack of her pom-pom sandals, Margery would have marched straight past. Enid moved like an old woman. She was also being followed by several mangy dogs—another telltale sign—though she didn’t seem to realize that. She seemed only half awake.

  When Margery had imagined this moment, she hadn’t banked on it hurting. She had assumed, too, that she would know what to do, but she didn’t. She stopped, waiting for Enid to turn and make the discovery for herself, but Enid trudged on, slow as slow. Then she took a left—still followed by dogs—until she reached a hut and paused. She cast a frightened look over her shoulder, and slipped inside.

  Margery waited. So did the dogs. They all waited. The sun got hotter. She sat a bit. Walked up and down a bit. Briefly a shadow moved on the opposite side of the road, then disappeared. Panting like heavy machinery, the dogs crawled off in search of shade. By now Margery felt parboiled. Stay there much longer, she would either pass out or spontaneously self-combust. She had no choice but to knock politely at the door of Enid’s hut. The door turned out to be a canvas flap, her tap turned into a push, and without so much as a “Good afternoon,” she crashed straight through.

  If she had known it was a party, she would have brushed her hair. She would also have checked her boots.

  “Christ, what’s that te
rrible stink?” was all she got by way of greeting. A hundred lights seemed to shine on Margery. So there she was, standing in the middle of a Nissen hut that was lined with hardboard and hot as an oven, with a number of temporary beds inside it, while ten people gawped back at her. None of them were wearing pith helmets. None of them were dressed in purple frocks. And the terrible stink was Margery. A mix of her own sweat and the lump of dog business that she knew, without needing to lift her foot, was attached to the sole of her boot. Spotting her, Enid’s jaw dropped.

  “Marge?”

  “Who’s this, then?” said one of her new friends.

  All Margery could see was Enid’s face. Despite the makeup, it looked flat and empty. She said, “I need to speak to you in private, Enid.”

  Taylor pushed his way forward, and stood between them. “Whatever you need to say to her, you can say to me.” He was sweating hard. It was even dripping from the end of his nose. He punched one hand over and over again into the cup of the other, his knuckles meeting his palm with a wet slap. It occurred to Margery that she didn’t just dislike the man, she loathed him. Then a woman at the back laughed and asked if Margery had spotted any lions recently.

  She said, “Beg pardon?” A stupid thing to say. She never usually said “Beg pardon?” but borrowing one of Enid’s phrases was like holding on to a handrail.