M-A-R-T M-A-Y.’
‘You can do it. You can. Tomorrow I’m going to teach you my name.’
But on that next day, for the first time in nine years, the man did not go to work. His head was stabbed with black spikes. For a week he did not go. He was exhausted by a fear within him which formed itself into a dread of seeing the boy.
He sat in the dim kitchen. The light from the small panes filtered through the plants that filled the window ledge and clambered up from the flower bed outside. The room smelled permanently, faintly, of cat. He slept half the day, but the dreams had eased. The black letters became velvet and fur, blurred and softened at the edges.
At last, he woke to rain, soft veils of it blotting out the colour from the sky. He took his bicycle from the lean-to and rode to the bees.
It was as though he had slept for a year and woken in shame to see what he had neglected. For the four days he worked until late into the evening, as if to do penance. He felt changed, older, was uncomfortableinside his own skin, uncertain where he had always known certainty.
Late on the fourth afternoon, coming into the tack room, he saw that the catch was off on the door of the wall cupboard. It swung open to his touch. The silver tin with the worn blue letters was at the front. He lifted it down, opened it, took out a mint, and, as the fumes of it caught his throat, he had a sudden sharp sense of loss and emptiness. The boy had not appeared once since his return.
Three more days passed, during which Mart May felt restless, missing the quiet, pale figure at his elbow. He wanted to ask about him, but did not, only worked on at this job or that, until gradually he was no longer so alert for the sudden appearances. Days were like the old days again and beginning to shorten. The bees were still and close. The evenings and nights were cool.
He should have been settled in himself as the year slipped down, his old self, but he lacked something and there was always an edge to his mood, a frustration. He had unfinished business.
He spoke sometimes to the bees.
In the middle of an afternoon he finished repairing the hinge on the gate into the sunken garden, swung it to and fro to see that it ran smooth, and then, as if hearing a click in his head, at the same time as the latch clicked shut he knew what he should do.
In the shed, at the back of the shelf, he found the tin of paint and the brush. In the tack-room cupboard, he found the tin. He emptied the sweets onto the bench.
He hadn’t forgotten. The boy had made sure, teaching him slowly, going over and over it until he was certain that Mart May knew. If he had been afraid that he would not remember, the moment he held the full paintbrush over the tin, he knew that he was all right; he could see the letters, clear as lights in the sky. Slowly he began to copy them from the pictures in his head onto the tin.
M-A-R-T M-A-Y.
That night he slept without dreaming, without stirring.
After that he saw the letters everywhere, but now he was dissatisfied, hungry to learn the next, to piece all the black spikes together until they gave up their secrets.
Once or twice he bought a newspaper or a magazine and spent his lunch break picking out his own letters like individual thorns in a bramble bush. Once he saw his own name, M-A-Y, surrounded by other unknown marks, and seethed with frustration. He needed to know. He needed the boy.
He did not reappear until late the following spring. One afternoon, there were shouts from the far end of the garden; the next, the crunch of bicycle wheels on the gravel paths. Then, on his way from the beehives, he saw them – the boy, and another boy, shorter, darker. They were attaching an old apple crate to one of the bicycles with twine.
‘You want wheels on that.’
They both looked up. Mart May saw the cloud-grey eyes with their skein of green for an instant, before the boy bent his head again.
The twine was tied and knotted. The box bumped and