The Bee Sting

The novel flashes back to Imelda’s childhood, told in stream-of-consciousness narration.

Imelda was once told a story about a traveler who gets lost. The traveler lay down by a hill and went to sleep. He woke up to the sound of music and saw a door in the side of the hill. He entered the door even though he was afraid of the fairy stories he’d heard. Inside, there was a feast in a grand hall. The traveler was welcomed warmly and given a ring. After falling asleep, he woke once again on the hillside. Returning to his village, he discovered that his wife and children were long dead—he had been in the hill for decades. The traveler spent the rest of his life futilely searching for another door in a hill so he could go back in time.

Imelda grows up in a poor family in a tiny house surrounded by trash and broken appliances. Imelda’s mother is bedridden, and her father Paddy Jo is terrifying; he violently abuses her brothers, but spares the beloved and beautiful Imelda, who should remain “untouched An untouched beauty like a princess in a fairy tale” (189).

One day, when Paddy Jo is gone, two vans pull up to the house and thuggish men get out. Imelda’s brothers Lar and JohnJoe send her upstairs to hide, but one of the men finds her and drags her downstairs. The invaders force her brothers to watch as they attempt to rape her. Just then, Rose walks in nonchalantly, and asks the men about a black dog outside. Out of nowhere, the men hear bizarrely loud barking and are frightened, recalling stories about people being cursed after seeing a black, barking dog. The men are also afraid of Rose’s powers, so they leave the house without doing further damage. Lar follows them outside; he cannot see or hear the black dog, but the attacking men do. Six months later, one of the men dies after being stabbed with a screwdriver. Lar and Imelda wonder why these men wanted to punish them in their father’s stead.

While Imelda’s father stays away in England for weeks, Rose collects Imelda to stay with her in a small cottage far from anything else in the town. When Paddy Jo returns, he is angry that Rose has taken Imelda, but Rose calmly tells him that Imelda isn’t safe at his house. Rose is a healer and seer; women from all over come to her for treatment or to have their cards read.

When Imelda’s mother dies, Rose still won’t let Imelda return home to take care of her brothers and father, though Imelda visits home often to check in on her family. Imelda can tell that her father has been beating her brothers Lar, Golly, and Christy. One day, Lar tells her that their brothers and father are gone. Imelda assumes they’re away on a job, but Lar shows her an enormous stack of cash he found in their shed. He wants to go to London together, change their names, and never speak to Paddy Jo again. Imelda is tempted. First, they decide to treat themselves to a night out at the local club, Paparazzi’s.

At the club, she’s approached by Frank, a handsome and popular star player in the Gaelic football league. She’s instantly attracted to him. Because of her beauty and her overprotective and possessive father and brothers, she doesn’t typically get to talk to boys. The handsome player invites her to the match the next week. Surprisingly, while Lar agrees to take Imelda to the match, Paddy Jo is the one who takes there in his car. After the game, Imelda and her father go to the pub, where he is impressed and charmed by Frank. When Frank’s father Maurice arrives, decked out in ostentatiously expensive clothing, Imelda immediately understands the importance of impressing this self-made man, who can see that Imelda and Paddy Jo come from a much lower socio-economic class, if she wants to be with Frank and escape her father. Frank also knows that to be with Imelda, he needs to keep charming her father. Imelda and Frank start dating and fall in love, both of them playing one another’s families so they can stay together.

Maurice owns Maurice Barnes Motors; Imelda’s father sees Imelda as an opportunity to get closer to that wealth. Frank has a shy and bookish older brother named Dickie who studies in Dublin, prepping to take over his father’s business.

Frank’s football team makes county, increasing his celebrity. Imelda often feels on the margins because of Frank’s fans. As talented an athlete as Frank is, he is lazy, so Maurice doesn’t know if he can trust Frank with the family business. Frank internalizes the pressures his community places on him as an athlete. In the lead-up to his big match, Frank spends time smoking weed and drinking. In the match, Frank slips when he’s about to make the decisive goal, so his team loses. People in the town are kind about the loss, but they all know that Frank was out drinking the night before. Overwhelmed and drinking more, Frank becomes so unreliable that his coach removes him from the team. Frank floats the idea of moving to London without Imelda to start a Fantasy Football business.

Desperate to keep Frank in her life, Imelda tells Maurice about Frank’s plan. Maurice decides to bring Frank into the business as a car salesperson. Frank earns a lot of money, finds happiness again, and stops drinking. The job gives him structure and he even gets back on the football team. He proposes to Imelda, who decides to not have sex until their wedding night. Imelda is overjoyed until Rose has a vision about the wedding: a hay bale on fire, mist, and a ghost. Imelda sees this as a betrayal, but three days later, Imelda wakes up in dread and calls Frank, who doesn’t pick up. It’s misty outside, and Frank has crashed his car into a hay bale that has caught on fire because of fermentation. Frank dies.

After the funeral, Dickie invites Imelda to stay over. She sleeps in Frank’s room and when she cries in her sleep, Dickie comes in to comfort her. In their grief, they start sleeping next to each other and eventually develop a sexual relationship. Maurice has Dickie take over the car shop early, so he will not return to Dublin. When Imelda becomes pregnant, Dickie asks her to marry him to escape loneliness: “No one can replace Frank…I’m not talking about replacing him But that doesn’t mean you have to be alone. To go on suffering” (272). Imelda doesn’t want to marry Dickie, but she remembers Rose’s prophecy of a ghost at her wedding—maybe if she marries Dickie, Frank’s ghost will appear.

Everyone in town thinks that Imelda never loved Frank and that her engagement to Dickie proves she just wanted to marry into a rich family. Imelda doesn’t tell her father about the engagement. Lar warns Imelda that Paddy Jo will hurt her when he finds out, which Imelda doesn’t believe. On her wedding day to Dickie, Imelda searches everywhere for Frank’s ghost, but when she sees her reflection in a bridal veil, she realizes that this is the ghost Rose.

The narrative returns to the present.

At Maurice’s honorary dinner, Cass passes out drunk after sneaking drinks from the bar throughout the evening. She is brought to the hospital, where her stomach is pumped. The adults assume Cass is stressed out waiting for her Leaving Cert results. Privately, Imelda tells Maurice that Cass is also worried that she won’t be able to afford to move to Dublin because of the family’s financial problems. Maurice agrees to help: He will give Cass money for school and help Dickie fix the business. Cass gets top marks on her Leaving Certificate.

Maurice discovers that the failure of the business is not just due to the recession; there are also serious mismanagement issues. Customers have had their catalytic converters—parts that trap toxic gases and contain gold—stolen. The main suspect is Ryszard, a mechanic. The business’s reputation has been destroyed, and Maurice blames Dickie: Phil, the head mechanic, reported Ryszard to Dickie, but Dickie didn’t do anything about the problem. Maurice can’t bail out the business on his own since he also took a major financial hit in the crash, so he asks Big Mike to partner in the car dealership and garage.

Imelda remembers meeting Ryszard at the garage. He claimed that he had her name tattooed on his butt and took her into a back room to show her. Despite herself, she was curious and attracted to him. However, when he removed his pants to show her a tattoo reading “Your Name,” Imelda felt humiliated that she fell for his mocking seduction.

Big Mike offers to give back Imelda’s old car back, but she accuses him of being a crook. Big Mike sends her a beautiful bouquet of flowers as an apology and texts her about signing apartment rental documents for their daughters, who will room together in Dublin. Imelda meets Big Mike at his farm to sign the papers. He confides in her about his failing marriage and his affair. Alarmed by his openness and her loneliness, Imelda rushes away.

Maurice and Big Mike discover a big discrepancy in the business’s accounts: A huge amount of money is missing from an account that only Dickie has access to. Imelda defends Dickie as a moral person who is perhaps not good at business, but not a crook.

Meanwhile, Dickie stops going to work and spends more time on construction projects in the woods with Victor and PJ. When Imelda goes out to see what Victor, PJ, and Dickie are building, she finds out that they’ve been hunting grey squirrels with Victor’s gun because grey squirrels are an invasive species. Imelda is frustrated with Dickie and what he’s prioritizing.

Imelda visits Rose in the nursing home. Rose’s dementia is getting worse; she can’t remember names or events. Imelda wants help, but Rose can no longer predict the future.