By Charlotte Turnbull.
None of us notice the hornets’ nest per se, but we all hear a whine in the lounge. It is distracting when we try to watch the television, but we are too tired in the evenings to mention it to one another.
Until Gill arrives.
‘How long does it take to make one?’ Gill stands at a distance. The rest of us stand even further away, behind her. Gill has the authority of someone who only drinks tea from a mug with her own name on it. ‘It hasn’t just suddenly appeared,’ she adds. ‘It’s not, like, magic.’
‘It hasn’t been a problem so far.’ Paul has been in the house the longest, and spends the most time in the lounge, yet never instigates conversation. ‘Let’s leave it alone. Just in case.’
‘It’s not like it’s hurting us,’ says Sophie. Although we try not to find out anything much about each other, she is clearly such a nice person that we all allow her the final word.
But Gill pulls Sophie into her room that night, where no one else can see. I only know because my bed is pushed up against the other side of Gill’s wall. ‘Do you agree with Paul, Sophie? Or should we do something about it? I can’t hear a word Matthew Macfadyen says, can you?’
‘I don’t know,’ says Sophie, probably trying to remember the previous episode of Succession. ‘Which one’s Matthew Macfadyen?’
‘Forget it.’ Gill sighs.
We didn’t choose each other. We were curated by a landlord none of us had met. We each have a room, of course, a private place where we sometimes meet with another housemate, surreptiously, like, if there is an issue and we want to take sides. But, generally, we get on okay. The lounge is for everyone. We meet there accidentally.
We all prefer the armchairs. The last of us in each evening are forced to sit leg-to-leg on the two-seater sofa. We bring individual cans of drink, reheated leftovers, perhaps an old Sunday supplement and we all look at things together. We always go to the lounge knowing there’ll be someone else there, although none of us are especially social. We try not to ask each other questions because we don’t really care about the answers. Except when someone else asks a question and someone else answers it; then we listen very carefully and both those people are, briefly, more interesting.
But, on the whole, we don’t care who’s in the lounge.
Gill calls a formal house-meeting to discuss the hornets’ nest coiled above the bell lampshade in the lounge. It is now a foot or so high: a pale grey planet in papery layers of chewed pulp, spinning around, never ending nor beginning. The nest has been spat out, instinctively, saliva-pasted. At the bottom an entrance drops open in a scream.
‘The males have no sting at all.’ Paul looks up from his phone. He is a little pink and excited, as if he’s been looking his whole life for an opportunity to contribute to a conversation.
‘That doesn’t sound right,’ Gill says. ‘What’s your source?’ We have no idea what Gill’s job is, but we do know that she is good at it.
‘This phone,’ Paul says.
‘That’s not what I mean, Paul. The point is, someone might get hurt if we keep living like this.’
‘How?’
‘Look at them!’ Gill shouts, so we all look.
The hornets spin around their nest in a frenzy. They are yellow-striped bullets in a hurricane, occasionally slamming into the ceiling.
Gill confronts us. ‘Sophie? Adam? What do you think?’ But we are waiting to watch Succession. All we hear is buzz-buzz-buzz. We look away, so we don’t have to get involved. We don’t want to add layers of nuance to an already very complicated situation. We want to watch Succession, like we’ve been told to, by a bunch of people we don’t know.
‘Fine, then.’ Gill slumps down in the armchair that we all leave available for her these days. ‘Press play.’
Someone does.
Gill tries to give Sophie a stiff-eyed look. Sophie doesn’t notice because she is watching the hornets, or Succession.
Once we hear it, we can’t unhear it. The hornets begin to spoil Succession for all of us, not just Gill.
‘Who’s Stewy, again?’ says Sophie.
‘The hornets seem really angry tonight,’ Gill says. ‘I can’t be in here, sorry.’
We don’t care on a personal level whether or not Gill misses an episode of Succession. But the hornets do sound menacing and there is some safety in numbers. Something like an alarm is rattling above our heads and when Gill ducks moving across the room the insects fall suddenly from the ceiling towards her.
Once she’s gone, we watch them butt gently against the window.
‘We could herd them out,’ Sophie says. ‘They’ll all go. They move as one.’
‘I wouldn’t,’ Paul says, cautiously. ‘Just in case.’
We sit in silence until eventually it is time to go to bed. We don’t finish that episode of Succession, but we do look at one other on the way out of the room to make sure each one of us knows that we haven’t finished that episode of Succession.
We still turn up in the lounge every day, even Gill. After the build-up—after living with the hazard for so long—there is some part of us that doesn’t want to miss the moment, if there is a moment, that anyone gets stung. Even kind Sophie.
We stop putting the television on, in order to stay focused, although none of us has a plan of what we would do, in the event.
Then one evening Gill comes into the lounge with a glass of wine although she stops in the doorway.
‘This is such a waste of time,’ she says, looking up at the hornets’ nest.
We all agree, but no one moves, just in case. I realise I am doing what people might call ‘manifesting.’
Gill never comes back. I feel vindicated.
We crawl through the lounge across the carpet, keeping low, not speaking to each other. We lie in a row, on our bellies, not moving. We watch the hornets from the corners of our eyes, feeling for them with the tops of our heads. I imagine tasting them on my tongue.
Sophie arrives late, and lies beside Paul.
‘Anything happened?’ she says. We all feel a tremor of surprise, and perhaps disgust, to have to glance over the row of our own prone bodies in order to answer her. We realise we are too afraid to move. I suppose that’s why Paul eventually stands.
‘This is stupid,’ he says, ‘I can still enjoy the lounge, and doing things—’ He is shaking his hands, despairing, at us, when he gets stung. ‘Argh.’
Paul screams, falling to his knees, collapsing onto the floor. His entire being curls around one scarlet fingertip. We can see the black hot needle of a sting still in his soft pad.
‘It doesn’t hurt at all, guys!’ he shouts, really loudly. ‘There’s absolutely no need to be afraid! They can’t harm us!’
‘Are you all right, Paul?’ Sophie says, with such sympathy, without moving an inch towards him. He probably can’t hear her above the thrum of the hornets.
‘Stay away from him,’ I whisper to her. ‘We don’t want them to think we’re involved.’
We all say we’re too tired to watch Succession and we leave the lounge as quickly as we can, trying not to make it too obvious that there is a manner of safety in numbers and that other bodies can be used as shields.
Paul may have moved out because we stop seeing him, and someone called Kelly keeps appearing in the kitchen. She seems nice although she brings a mug she is not prepared to share. It is oversized, easily big enough for two cups of tea at once, and the lips are thick enough to keep the tea warm for much longer than all the other mugs we have—we’d all like to take a turn for the novelty. Kelly communicates that the mug is hers, by never washing it so that it’s ringed inside with pale brown circles. She also uses it to drink other things—oat milk, wine, Lucozade—and takes it with her to bed each night, waving it at us, lest there be any doubt.
But she does seem sort of nice.
I dream of stinging others, and also of being stung. And, also, of flying and buzzing and being swatted and crushed.
Tonight, when I elbow myself across the lounge floor, I find a note where we lie:
Hi, sorry everyone, I’ve realised that what I really want to do with my life is finish Succession. Help yourself to whatever I’ve left in the fridge. Soph.
I take my place and lie quietly for hours on my own, so as to continue not to attract attention, until Kelly comes to the door.
‘All right,’ she says, flinching at the hornets’ nest. ‘How are we supposed to sleep with all this going on?’
‘Don’t worry,’ I say, trying to be friendly, but forgetting exactly how. ‘Actually, male hornets have no sting.’
‘But,’ she says, wincing a bit, ‘so?’
I don’t know when she did it, but I know Kelly called the council about the hornets’ nest.
She appears at the door with a man in navy overalls before anyone else is up, mug in hand, as I lie beneath the quiet nest. ‘This is Quintus,’ she tells me.
‘I can’t watch,’ she says to the man opening the bag at her feet. ‘It’s a risk,’ she says to me. ‘Mass envenomation. It won’t be on purpose. It’s an instinct. But if a load of them inject venom into you it can cause organ failure.’
‘I can’t do it with him lying there,’ the man from the council says. ‘I’m supposed to be at least twenty foot away.’
‘Come on.’ Kelly holds out her enormous mug, offering it to me. ‘I’ll make you a cup of tea.’
I sweat in my least favourite seat at the kitchen table. From here you cannot see the window or the door, only the food cupboards. There is a brief, urgent exhalation from the lounge, but Kelly keeps talking, not seeming to notice it.
‘We should have done it in the dark,’ she says. ‘You know we can’t go back in there now? You know we can’t go back in for at least a day. But this is much better. We’ll all be able to use the lounge again.’
She has not, in the event, given me the large mug, but washed up a chipped mug with GILL written in red bubble-writing on the side.
Without the ringing of the hornets dulling my hearing, I hear too much. Kelly keeps scratching the same part of her scalp, tugging, pulling at a hidden scab or pimple or something. Someone’s heels click on the pavement outside the front door. The boiler whirrs as someone takes a shower in the second-floor bathroom. I’m aware that I keep up some manner of monologue within my own mind.
‘Paul told me this house was really friendly and I’d love being here. Why did he move out anyway?’
A single hornet staggers across the threshold to the kitchen and I think my eardrums might explode. Its little shiny body is trembling. Its abdomen thrusts up and down. It’s lost the rhythm of its gait. Sometimes three legs are touching the ground, sometimes four, sometimes only two. I think I might pass out, as I suspect I cannot live with the hornets but now I cannot live without them.
‘Oh, God, says Kelly, following my gaze. She brings her large, empty mug down on the hornet. It is the kindest thing anyone has ever done for me, although that was absolutely not Kelly’s intention.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Charlotte Turnbull’s work has been published as part of the Galley Beggars Short Story Prize 2023, as well as in Litro, New England Review, The McNeese Review, Denver Quarterly, Nightjar Press and others.
