Ten years and four months later, rooftop of the Nelson Mandela Academy (A Grant-Maintained School, Established: 2003).
Gemma stands well away from the hives. She keeps the headmaster company, as she prefers to do on school apiary visits. Agnes strides back, a broad smile on her face as she throws back her veil, a comet of teenagers trailing behind her. All are clad in an unusual uniform of powder pink boiler suits, with golden crowns embroidered into the top of their right sleeves. Agnes examines the student next to her as he, she, or possibly they, perform a slow twirl, arms outstretched. Behind her the other students are performing similar slow twirls for each other – the dance of the returning beekeeper. Agnes picks something off. Almost certainly a little something with six legs, four wings and a sting: Gemma cannot begin to think how anyone would do that with bare hands.
'You're OK,' Agnes says, and a brown head hatches from the thrown back veil of its boiler suit.
'So d'ye know what we called her, that queen we just clipped?' the boy says, for it looks like a boy identifying as a boy.
'No, what do you call her?'
'Circe Lannister. Cos' she gets all them babies, right, but they all gotta die before her, innit, like? They're all gonna die.'
Agnes smiles, Gemma doesn't. None of these pupils are, in her opinion, old enough to be watching the female exploitative filth that is Game of Thrones.
'And then she shacks up with her brothers too, don't she, Miss?' he winks and laughs, that too-loud laugh of the adolescent boy trying to embarrass a girl. With Agnes he's got another think coming: she stares at him until he's the one whose colour rises.
'Queens never mate with drones from their own hive. We discussed this,' she says in her smokey Parisian drawl.
'I know, Miss, sorry: to prevent inbreeding and diploid drones.'
'Correct, yeah, that's good.'
'We call them all Circe Lannister, Miss. All the queens.'
This time Agnes throws her head back and laughs with him.
It's one of those typical North London summer afternoon. From the ground, an hour ago, the sky looked dark, leaden. But bees are a different dark, and even from a distance Gemma can see them, darting this way and that above the line of hive roofs. Like static on old celluloid films. Hundreds of thousands of bees. Yep, this is as close to them as she cares to be.
All veils are off and the youths are smiling. Half of them have been selected from the school's Gifted and Talented programme, and are earning CV points for extra-curricular science. The other half have either attention or anger management issues, but right now it's impossible to tell one group from the other. They all look equally calm and happy – meditative, Agnes calls it. Bees do this to people. Some people. Apparently. Not to Gemma herself, granted, but there is no trace of jealousy in how she looks at the returning beekeepers.
Agnes is complimenting the group on the health of their hives and encourages them to enter their hive records and early crop into the next National Honey Show. All that now remains is to walk back to ground level, hand some lovely grants and certificates over to the two lucky ones who will be representing the UK at the meeting of International Young Beekeepers in Bulgaria next September, and then get back to the office.
Keeping the bees in her line of sight, Gemma starts to edge back towards the safety of the staircase. She expects the Headmaster to follow, but instead he walks back in the direction of the hives, shakes hands with Agnes, and starts pulling the certificates out of some satchel she hadn't noticed up to this point.
With his back to the hives!
He gestures at Gemma to follow. No way is she going to stand with her back to the hives. They can't be more than, what, twenty five yards away? She can't be expected to stand twenty five yards away from a hive that she can't even look at. How will she know what they're doing? How will she know one's not flying towards her? Into her hair, oh goodness no, she can't start worrying about bees in her hair. Her hair is tied back, it will be fine. Agnes gives her a reassuring nod. How can she not be wearing her veiled hood? Gemma wishes she had a hood, but her horror of boiler suits still surpasses her fear of being stung, so she refuses to wear one. Which also serves as the perfect excuse not go near a hive: win-win. In the end Gemma decides to stand sideways between the headmaster and Agnes, who have their backs to the bees, and the students, who are facing them. A bridge, so to speak. A bridge from which she can keep an eye on the bees while, with his foolhardy back to the hives, the Headmaster starts a speech congratulating his students and thanking Gemma, Agnes and all the staff at Queen Bees, for their sponsorship of the scheme. The speech is mercifully short. Gemma spends it checking no bees are flying at her, and trying to ignore the sensation that nonetheless one must be crawling around the skin of her wrist, her neck, her ankle. It is all she can do to keep still and not brush off many an imaginary insect. There, speech over, it wasn't that bad. Gemma smiles at the students, shakes a few hands. Now they will be safely back downstairs in a jiffy.
What is that? Photo? Here? Now? The Headmaster is arranging them in rows – all of them with their backs to the apiary "so you can see the hives in the background". Gemma is gestured to the back row, the very back row, the one nearest the bees. The headmaster conjectures about the precise light exposure necessary to making the bees' flightpath visible in the background. Agnes, cool as anything despite the pink bee-suit, sides up to Gemma and loops an arm through hers. It helps so much. Shame the front rows seem unable to settle down: they insist on taking turns kneeling and standing. Gemma is starting to be able to tell the gifted and talented ones from the angry inattentive ones. Then the headmaster and his deputy decide they have to take turns taking the picture so the other one can be in it. Neither notices anything different about Gemma's smile, even as she fights the urge to brush off yet another imaginary bee from her left hand, then wrist. Wrists are the worst. Wrists and necks: get stung there and the venom might find an artery straight to your heart, and then the allergic reaction can be terrible. Fatal, even. Anaphylaxis. The very thought makes Gemma's pulse rise and her hand twitch, but her smile to the camera remains the same. What if there really is a bee on her hand? She steals a glance down: fraction of a second, then back up. She's horror-struck, but still smiling. There is a bee. There is a bee on the back of her hand and it is walking around. It is walking around searching for a place to sting her.
Though she knows it to be absurd, that is the only explanation presenting itself to her horror-struck brain. Then she remembers: bees don't only have knees, they have six knees each, all with ears in them. Through these sub-genual organs (fancy remembering that in the middle of a panic attack) bees can sense the slightest of vibrations in whatever they walk or stand on. This is how they "hear" each other waggle dance in the pitch darkness of the hive.
So right now the bee on Gemma's hand is not merely walking around. With each of its tiny steps it is taking Gemma's pulse. Listening to the live-feed of her fear, skin deep. If she wasn't going to sting before, the beast is certain to sting now.
'Keefe, settle down! One more!' the Headmaster shouts, which Gemma knows can only anger the bee further, what with all the little hairs all over her body trained to sense every change in air speed and vibration. Gemma freezes both her hand and face. Agnes has noticed something and if Agnes stops smiling at the camera they might be here even longer taking more pictures, so Gemma smiles first at Agnes then at the camera. Click click. Are we done now?
Too late. It hurts, not a lot but it definitely hurts, and with her next stolen glance Gemma establishes that the bee is no longer walking. She is stuck with her lancets inside the outside of Gemma's left pinkie and Gemma wants to cry. She smiles on. When will this end? The bee is frantically flapping her useless wings. She is stuck. To Gemma the buzz is deafening, but none of the beekeepers seem to notice.
And then it's over, and they do head downstairs, finally. Gemma sidesteps around Agnes and while her hand is out of sight she shakes it.
And smiles, and walks on.
x
"Ow, Gem, "Agnes says in the back of the cab to the office, "You've still got a bit of sting in! Why didn't you say?"
"Because crowd of gawping adolescents?"
Agnes gives a gallic shrug and takes a pair of tweezers from the back pocket of her faded black skinny jeans. Her fingers are long and dry skinned, with nicotine stains under fresh propolis stains, and nails chewed almost out of all existence. They work fast, pulling out a tiny bit of sting.
"I'm sorry," says Gem, "I just didn't fancy staying up there a minute longer than necessary. Oh, and I'm really sorry about your bee, of course."
"Hey, no one's ever been able to prove it was one of my bees that stung them. Plausible deniability, that's my game."
Gemma smiles. At Agnes, of course, but not only. At life smiling on her, despite the swelling on the outside of her writing hand. Agnes has finished rubbing on the magic cream: antiseptic + anaesthetic = Gemma's happiness is complete.
"It doesn't matter, Agnes, really. Nothing matters, because Nicky Lam has literally just replied to my LinkedIn and she's agreed to meet us!"
"She has?"
Gemma has the phone screen to prove it:
"Woo-hoo!"
They shriek and hug and high five and then smile some more, but then Agnes stops and double checks.
"Wait, this is that woman you've been going on about, right? The one with money for us to expand into France."
"With a bit of luck, yes, but.., I mean, Nicky Lam! Remember? I told you about her in the…"
"Gem, do you remember about Brother Adam of Buckfast Abbey?"
Gemma is used to such interruptions. Were they to attend their old boarding school today, Agnes would get a diagnosis of mild autism, ADHD spectrum and a lot of counselling and extra time for exams. As it was back in the late nineties, she almost got sent down.
Saved by beekeeping, Agnes was, when the caretaker started taking her to his apiary every Wednesday and Saturday afternoon. Once she was hooked, and without so much as a word with anyone on the school's teaching or pastoral staff, Old Mr Martin made looking after a hive conditional on Agnes stopping dope, so she did. And somehow passed four A'levels too, in what was not her mother tongue, but her detested stepfather's.
Agnes hasn't spoken to her stepfather in ten years. That is, not since she came out. Rough edges, fraying jeans and chewed nails and all, Agnes is a fighter. She's the first of the Queen Bees, the original and still the best, and if she needs to disappear down a bee tangent for a bit Gemma knows it won't be long and she'll probably learn something interesting. She does find bees very interesting, in theory. She just doesn't like to be near one, that's all. She searches her memory for a brother at an abbey. This Brother Something is some sort of big deal, she remembers this much, but what did he come up with? Some new bee disease? Some new hybrid? Some new frame or hive format made out of wine crates or cigar boxes or cricket bats or something? Artificial insemination? Grafting? Microscopy? Some implement for cleaning the contraption what holds the paraphernalia? Quite possibly all of the above.
"Agnes, I'm sorry I can't quite remember…"
"Then I'll refresh your memory if you refresh mine about Nicky Lam, that OK?"
"Touche," Gemma nods, but she's more than happy to oblige:
"To start with: I can't believe Nicky Lam is only forty-nine. Actually, she looks more like thirty-three, she's stunning…"
An appreciative nod from Agnes.
"She's from Singapore but she went to our school, and then to Harvard. She worked for Bains Capital, then she made partner at the Boston Consulting Group, which she left three years ago to start her own Venture Capital fund. She only invests in Environment and Diversity projects. Oh, and she's just starting mentoring programme for young female entrepreneurs, so maybe she could mentor us as well!"
Agnes thinks about this, in the self-conscious way she has trained herself to think when she's not "in the zone".
"So she's cool, yes?"
Agnes' low, smoker's voice makes the word cool sound so cool. She's never fully got rid of her Parisian drawl, but that is only the cherry on top.
"Nicky is very very cool, Agnes."
"Sounds like you have a corporate crush on her, girlfriend."
"Oh my god, Agnes, such a massive one. She's my hero! She's never had an investment go bust. Her fund hasn't posted a loss in any quarter since inception, and she's helped literally dozens of women grow their businesses."
"Well then she's going to love your work, Gem."
"You mean your work?"
"OK, I mean our work. She's going to love Queen Bees. We've never lost money in any quarter either, right?"
"That's right."
"Not even when we had small hive beetle in Rwanda in 2014?"
"Nope, provision drawdown covered it."
"Whatever that means, well done you."
"That was easy. Besides, I know they're both bad news but I'm still not sure I could tell a small hive beetle from Sir Paul McCartney hiding behind a salad leaf. So well done you, for stopping the infestation early."
"And if Nicky invests, we'll be able to launch in France?"
Gemma nods.
"Germany?"
"And Spain, and Italy, in time. Provided you have enough wax..."
"Wax? Of course I 'ave wax. I 'ave lots of wax, last year was great for wax. We can launch that new range of gingham wax wraps if you like."
"And the new beard wax too? Gosh, it smells absolutely amazing, by the way. I don't know how you do it."
"And I'm sure I don't know how you deal with all the marketing and numbers shit and find time to get Nicky Lam to meet with us."
"Thanks, Agnes."
"Don't thank me, we're lucky to have each other, Gem, that's all. We're a team: together we're greater than the sum of our parts."
Gemma makes no answer. "Greater than the sum of our parts": she has thought that too, every day since she and Agnes met again and started Queen Bees. But the last time she heard anyone said it out loud was... well never mind that. That was a long long time ago, and it's a good job she didn't fall for it. Since then Dylan's girlfriends have lasted an average of two weeks, with a median of five days and a range from five minutes to two months: not exactly sterling relationship material. Whereas Queen Bees recently lifted its one thousandth African woman out of poverty through beekeeping, adding years to each woman's life expectancy, and to that of her children. Soon, with Nicky Lam's help, they'll be able to take the dream even further.
"You're so right, Agnes. We are greater than the sum of our parts," Gem says as their cab pulls in front of the office.
"We are, Gem. We are Queens!"
Copyright Mel Liffragh 2021, all rights reserved.
Updated weekly on Fridays, cross posted on AO3