The Silence of the Wasps
1.
The droning comes from behind the wall in the outhouse. Now and then the volume rises, dies down again. It’s the sound of seething anger.
2.
That same evening we eat pesto-crumbed fish in the dining room, watched over by a stuffed owl and crow. We are as quiet as taxidermy. I keep the radio on to trick myself into believing I’m part of a conversation and to stop spooling back in time to the gut-twisting silence of family meals, broken only by the sound ofmy father chewing each mouthful thirty times. Every now and then I glance over at my husband, hoping he won’t choke on a bit of Italian black cabbage.
3.
One of the symptoms of Parkinson’s is slurred and mumbled speech, difficulty swallowing is another. This can lead to feelings of isolation.
4.
In the past few months, I’ve used the Heimlich manoeuvre twice, once in the gents’ toilets of a gastro pub in Falmouth.
5.
Hear no evil, see no evil, speak no evil. My father chanted the maxim of the three wise monkeys like a mantra, presumably unaware that what he really meant – hear nothing, see nothing, say nothing – more closely resembled the original Japanese teaching, which had nothing to do with monkeys or evil, but was a play on words. If I understood that play on words, I’d explain it to you.
6.
When I was a child, I’d kneel by my bed at night and ask god to banish all the flies, wasps and bees. What surprises me here is the praying.
7.
I listen to the droning, arms folded across my stomach. I’m glad I can’t see the wasps; even so my muscles tense. Given that at rest my body is clenched, tightened like a wood screw until it creaks.
8.
As a child, I regularly had laryngitis. Sometimes I faked it.
9.
My first conversation this week is with Kevin, the wasp removal man. “Yep, it’s a wasps’ nest, all right,” he says. He’s listened to the droning, seen the wasps coming and going beneath the loose slate on the roof of the lean-to. “They’re not supposed to get mad when I spray this stuff in,” he says, kitted out in a beekeeper’s jacket with a spaceman hood. “But I should keep your cat in for a couple of hours, just in case.”
10.
The cat is the reason for calling in the exterminator. I watched him crouching on the roof of the outhouse, his nose just millimetres from the entrance to the nest. I have visions of him eating a wasp, his throat swelling up so he can’t swallow. I’m equally unnerved by the needling buzz of the wasps in the wild cherry tree behind the garden bench, where I like to sit with a glass of wine and a saucer of olives in the early evening.
11.
Wasps build their nests by stripping weathered wood (here, the garden bench) and chewing it into a papier-maché like substance by mixing it with saliva. A scratching sound from the nest indicates that worker wasps are making repairs. Kevin says the droning sound is most likely the wasps fanning the nest to keep it cool.
12.
A fear of wasps is Spheksophobia, from the Greek spheko for wasp. A fear of anger is angrophobia or choleraphobia, from the Middle English colre or Greek kholera. Choleraphobia is also a fear of cholera. I’m afraid of lots of things but contracting a water-borne disease isn’t one of them.
13.
“I’ll call the children’s home and get them to take you away,” my mother said, picking up the phone. I’d had a tantrum. I remember her tight lips, her finger turning the dial.
14.
My second conversation this week takes place at the endoscopy clinic. Lying on my back with a camera traveling through the baby-pink tunnels and caves of my bowel, I discuss the best places to eat in Truro with the doctor, nurse and trainee endoscopist performing my colonoscopy. We also touch on chronic fatigue syndrome. “I’m fascinated by these illnesses you can’t pin down,” the doctor says. He goes on to say he suspects CFS is your body telling you to slow down. I agree, but lately I’ve wondered if there’s something else going on, like throwing a blanket on a fire.
15.
At my most fatigued I’m too numb and tired to feel anything at all, let alone speak. This is protection gone too far, as if the blanket is being wound tight around me, the way a spider might wrap a wasp in silk.
16.
The morning of my hospital appointment, I research the humours in medieval medicine – black bile, blood, phlegm and yellow bile. Yellow bile is choleric, inciting anger, irritability, envy and jealousy. Later, as we reach the last leg of the voyage through my guts, the screen reveals areas of yellow liquid, clinging to the lining of my bowel, puddled in diverticula.
17.
My paternal grandfather insisted on silence at the dinner table. By his side he kept a boot, which he’d aim at anyone who dared speak. My father continued the family tradition, minus the boot. Taking my cue from a favourite book – My Family and Other Animals – I vowed that my own dinner table would be like the Durrells’ in the daffodil yellow villa on Corfu, abuzz with playwrights, poets, authors and artists talking and arguing while the lamps smoked and glass glittered in a “warm, honey-coloured light.”
18.
Gut feelings #1 – 95% of serotonin is found in the digestive system.
19.
We moved into this house last year. Stepping into the dining room, with its tall ceiling and window, its pine paneling, I envisioned conversations, the glint of candlelight on a wine glass. In my excitement I failed to recognise this wasn’t a glimpse into the future but an echo of a former life, the days when I squeezed friends around a wine-ringed dining table to eat my signature coq au vin. This, had I only realised it at the time, was as close as I’d get to that childhood vow.
20.
Study after study claim that family meals benefit children’s health and make them less likely to misuse alcohol or drugs. But that’s not all, spending that special time together gives kids and parents the chance to talk and learn, strengthens family bonds. I can only presume what we’re talking about here are the idealised nuclear families of TV ads: clean-cut mummies, daddies and their wholesome offspring smiling and chatting as they tuck into their meatballs.
21.
Gut feelings #2 – gut feelings can also be silenced. The guts of people denied certain feelings or exposed to violence during childhood can be faulty, both physically and emotionally, leading to chronic digestive problems, self-doubt, irrational fear and clouded thinking.
22.
Some years ago, I heard Sharon Olds reading at the South Bank Centre. In her introduction she mentioned a reviewer who’d written, “In her childhood, Sharon Olds’ parents tied her to a chair and she’s been writing about it ever since.” I can only imagine that reviewer was never tied to a chair, never had her head bashed against the dining room door by her father, was never sprayed with spittle as he yelled, “You’re nothing but trouble.”
23.
When I go to scream in a dream, I open my mouth but no sound comes out. The only difference in waking hours is that I don’t open my mouth.
24.
Worker wasps forage for insects to feed the larvae in the nest. They don’t eat the insects because they don’t have the right mouthparts and their cinched waists are too narrow to digest them, but the grubs produce a sugary substance which they feed back to the adults. This reciprocal arrangement reflects the social nature of wasp colonies. But don’t imagine it’s all sweetness and harmony; in those honeycomb domes there are all manner of uprisings, leadership contests, undertakers, freeloaders and thugs.
25.
A piece of salty bacon catches the sore in my mouth. We’re eating bacon sandwiches. I’m hyper-alert, holding my breath as my husband struggles to swallow. He gulps hard twice. This often precedes choking. As my sandwich makes its way through my digestive system, I imagine crumbs collecting in a puddle of yellow bile, trapped in some remote region of my interior.
26.
Parkinson’s is a neurodegenerative disease caused by the death of dopamine cells in the substantia nigra (black substance) part of the brain. In the adult brain the substantia nigra looks like a black streak; this colour pales in people with Parkinson’s. Anyone with a degenerative or chronic illness will recognise this pallor and the narrowing that goes with it. It’s like becoming a bleached-out version of yourself.
27.
I can never resist an online questionnaire promising to tell me who I am. The latest was a test to discover my dominant medieval humour. I say medieval but the concept of the four humours – blood, phlegm, black bile and yellow bile – originated in ancient Greece and persisted into the nineteenth century. According to humourism, most people are born with a dominant humour, which reflects their character. More than choleric, it seems I am melancholic, though to be fair it’s a close-run thing.
28.
Yellow and black, the colours of warning.
29.
I’m in therapy. It’s another route to finding out who I am (silence your emotions for long enough and you’ll no longer hear them, even when they’re screaming). Inevitably, we discuss those mealtimes. Inevitably, she asks the dreaded question: “What do you feel?” I know I should feel sad or angry, but this time around I’ve decided that instead of trying to be the perfect client, I’ll tell the truth. “Nothing,” I say.
30.
I’m also taking Sertraline. As a result it’s months since a malfunctioning printer or a cup slipping through my fingers and smashing on the kitchen floor caused me to let rip one of those primal, wordless roars. I’ve stopped all that crying, too.
31.
The term “talking cure” was coined by Bertha Pappenheim, better known as Anna O. After she developed symptoms later described as hysteria, she was referred to the physician Josef Breuer; he and Freud later included her case study in Studies on Hysteria. Breuer discovered that talking about her anxieties and making up fairy stories helped to relieve her symptoms. She also called this process “chimney sweeping.”
32.
When I say I feel nothing, I mean my mind is like a tree filled with birds that fly off in a storm of squawking and flapping when a cat jumps on a branch.
33.
As it turns out, all that talking and storytelling didn’t much help Anna O. Shortly after her cure she was admitted to a sanitorium in a disturbed state.
34.
Silence is anything but nothing. My own silences resemble the workings of a wasp nest: press your ear to my heart and you might hear the droning, the fanning of the anger inside.
35.
Kevin says that in this heat the entire nest should be dead within six to twelve hours.
36.
A fear of silence is sedatephobia, from the Greek sedate, meaning silent, sleeping or dead. If you rarely express what’s buried in the vaults of your heart, how alive are you?
37.
The morning after Kevin’s visit, not a single wasp flies into or out of the raised slate. Picturing the wasps dead in their paper colony – the queen, the worker wasps, the eggs in their individual cells – I remember the morning my father died in the hospice, how we left Classic FM on for him, so he wouldn’t feel alone. As for the droning, the nest is eerily silent.