Spill Simmer Falter Wither

by Sara Baume

  When I was a boy, the ground floor of my father’s house was a ladies boutique. The lady who ran the boutique always stood two decapitated mannequins in the display window, and I couldn’t understand why she dressed them so fashionably yet never bothered to fix on their heads. I used to be afraid that the mannequin’s forgotten faces would chew their way out of a cupboard by night to rove between the sleeping clothes rails. I’d swear I could hear them, gnashing and dragging themselves across the carpet by their eyebrows. After the boutique shut down, the estate agent used the window as a billboard for advertising his properties. For several years I got to snoop inside every house for sale or rent within a three village radius without ever travelling beyond the front footpath. As a boy, I imagined I lived in every last one. And in every last newly renovated semi-detached with off-white walls and a fitted kitchen, I imagined I was a different boy, a new boy, a better boy.

  Apart from the salon, there’s a Chinese takeaway, a grocer’s, a chip shop and two pubs. It’s a village of twitchers and silly-walkers, of old folk and alcoholics and men dressed in high-visibility overalls. There’s a hummock of fat tanks at one end, that’s the oil refinery. There’s a chimney painted in red and white stripes like a barber’s pole at the other end, that’s the power station. In the middle, it’s a nature reserve. Mallards and grebes paddle cheerfully through the drizzle. Herons stand stock-still and knee-high in tidal mud, pretending to be statues. Because of the oil refinery and the power station, the village murmurs. Sandwiched by the tunelessness of industry, the birds shriek and sing, defiantly.

  Follow me past the steel gate and down a laneway to the front door. Here’s the hall, which looks like the inside of a clothes recycling unit. Wool and tweed and oilcloth spilling off coat hooks onto my wellingtons and the radiator, the banister. Almost none of the coats are mine, or at least they weren’t mine to begin with.

  Now here’s the kitchen, dark and poky with chipped tiles on the walls and unidentifiable stains on the lino. It smells of garlic and coffee and cigarette smoke and bins, and the bins smell of garlic skins and spent coffee grounds and cigarette butts. Leave the bins alone, okay? You’re not allowed to pilfer tin cans and chicken bones, tissues hardened into abstract shapes by snot. Here’s my mug with its indelible coating of black sludge. If I was a gypsy I’d read you my sludge like tea leaves, and if I was a visionary I’d show you the shape of a Jesus face on the base. Can you see it; can you see the Jesus face?

  Now follow me up the stairwell past the salon’s partition into the upstairs hall. See my ornamental plates covering the decomposed plasterwork. They come from every snicket of the globe. This one with a picture of St George is Bermuda. The kookaburra is Australia and these two moustachioed men bartering their cockerels hail from Puerto Rico. Now Andorra has a cable car and Mallorca has almond trees and Hawaii has HAWAII embossed in gold letters, but Djibouti is my favourite. I’ve no idea where that is.

  This room with the carpet concealed by rugs is my bedroom. Each rug is made from the ripped and re-bound rags of strangers from foreign lands. The rug strangers have bigger families but fewer belongings, brighter clothes but dimmer prospects and I feel somehow closer to them than I do the people deflected by my spacesuit in the street. Here’s the bed, the rocking chair, the wardrobe and the fireplace, the grate into which the house delivered me. The buckets either side are one for coal and one for the logs I axe up on an ash stump out the back. Ash is the solidest of all wood; the log against which all other logs will inexorably split. What does my bedroom smell of? Damp spores, fluffed dirt and dead sap? See the black mould on the end wall, how it’s mushroomed into a reverse constellation: the night sky a white wall and the white stars black and wet and furry.

  This curtain of wooden beads hides the bathroom, and when they get stirred up they make a noise like a landslide of tic-tacs, like a leak in a button factory. You’re not allowed in the bathroom, okay? You’re not allowed to lick splashes from the enamel. From every other lintel, multicoloured ribbons dangle from a thin strip of pine. It wasn’t until after my father was gone that I nailed the rainbows up. Sometimes I tread on the ends and they snap back like a tiny riding crop. Sometimes they get tangled around my limbs as I pass and I rip them clean down, without meaning to. They are annoying. I know they’re annoying. And yet, I nail them up again, every time. The bowerbird within me insists.

  Now for the living room, which lives up to its title and is the room where most of life takes place. I heard on the radio once that animals like you see in the same way as a colour-blind human, that your world is yellower and bluer and greyer than mine. If this is true then my living room walls will sear your lonely peephole, I’m sorry. They’re painted the colour of purest egg yolk. Now the front window faces south and touches the roof beams. Here’s the sofa and the coffee table and the television set which is mostly switched off with its screen turned to a dark mirror instead, to a tiny replica room all drained of its vibrancy. I look old in the switched-off television screen. It’s one of the places I am an old man. Here are the curtains and indoor hanging plants and pictures in picture frames. I always forget to water the houseplants until their compost is so dry that the water trickles straight through and drips into the carpet. Or sometimes the plant’s famished and gulps too much, drinks until its leaves go limp and pale and spongy, drinks until it drowns itself. Here’s my aloe vera, see the bubbles through its translucent skin. See the picture frame. These smiling strangers inside, I don’t know who they are. I just buy the frames and accept whoever comes inside them. They’re just models chosen by the frame company, told to pose.

  Bowerbirds are the artists of the creature kingdom; impossibly susceptible to prettiness, they deck their nests like vortex-shaped Christmas trees. There’s a picture in one of these books on one of these bookshelves laden with spines of all different heights and colours and states of decay. Here are spines and spines and spines, raised to towers on the coffee table, queued into rows along the skirting boards. What do they smell like? Paper-worms and crackled glue, stale toast and aged sellotape.

  Now here, at the furthest end of the corridor, is the final room, the room with the trapladder reaching up through the trapdoor and into the roof where the spate of rats took place. See the well-worn knob and the keyless keyhole. See the draught snake laid across the threshold with its pink felted tongue sticking out from its untidy stitches in a menacing fork. You don’t go in here, do you understand? I don’t go in here either.

  I see how you watch me closely, startle at the slightest of sudden shifts. I see you’re still frightened, even though I haven’t even raised my voice. Are you waiting for me to whip out a choke chain? For a backhanded nose slap, the butt of my boot? Now I have to put you out the kitchen door and shut you in the backyard, just for a moment. I have to go and buy groceries and I’m not sure about leaving you in the house alone just yet. Spaghetti hoops and gingernuts, a carton of milk and some tinned sardines.

  The backyard is a misshapen square with a stone fence the whole way round and a timber gate into next door’s garden. It’s floored by cracked cement and limestone chippings with weeds in places. Here’s herb-robert, spurge, fumitory, a few other species less beautiful. Most of the green or brown or barely leafing plants in the pots lining the perimeter wall are the skeletons of last summer. Here’s some purple sprouting broccoli, the stems already gone to bolt, the heads to seed. Windmills spin furiously amongst the skeletons. Elsewhere wind-broken blades lie twitching on the gravel. Beneath the sheet of marred tarpaulin is the axing stump, the log pile, the garden hose. Here’s the rotary washing line, the glass-topped table, the plastic patio chairs, and these are tens of bashed and fractured buoys in bleached shades of orange and yellow, and tens more shards of broken buoy, some still sharp but mostly sanded harmless by the sea. These are a collection, my collection. Please don’t piss on them while I’m gone.

  As I leave, you’re sitting on the mat. You’re sitting with your whole body tensed as though in p
reparation for a blow. You look so mournful and helpless as I leave. You raise your head and watch as the kitchen door closes.

  Out the front and into the village, there’s a blast of salt wind off the bay, an empty crisp packet gusting down the footpath, a string of bunting flapping from a telegraph pole. The grocer’s girl, April, talks loudly on the telephone as she scans my goods, forgetting to proffer a paper bag. I’ve always imagined April was born in April and has three sisters called May, June and July, perhaps an only brother called December because if the summer is a woman, so the winter must be a man.

  I’m back at the gate and fumbling with the door key, milk and biscuits in one armpit, fish in the other, when I see you, when I see that you’ve escaped. You’re on your way out of next door’s laneway. Now you make a break across the road to the wall which follows the curve of the shore and you race alongside it past the street lamps and flowerbeds.

  How could you summon the will to jump so high? Five foot at least to scale the wooden gate. As you landed in next door’s identical backyard, were you disappointed to find it was no more than the same cement and spurge and rotary line, another stone wall and five-foot gate?

  Now you’re running, running, running, as though by running, you might understand. And I am watching, helpless. You arrive at the end of the village and seem to slow. Now you stop and turn around and look back over the length of where you’ve just run. Can you see me on the footpath? I’ve dropped the carton and stumbled to my knees. A rivulet of spilled milk catches the crisp packet, sails it to the gutter. Suddenly I don’t care whether people can see me and hear me and know who I am; I don’t care what they’re thinking. My arms are outstretched and I’m calling your name over and over, louder and louder, wailing into the bay and sending all the oystercatchers soaring.

  ONEEYE ONEEYE ONEEYE ONEEYE!

  Why do you stop so suddenly? Is it that you can’t remember where you’re going any more, that you can’t think of a place that’s home or see anything more familiar than what’s now behind you? The man of must and porridge and boulder and plait, the car, the salmon house, the village that murmurs. Now you sit down in the ditch. Now you stay until I reach you. I slip my fingers under your collar, and you don’t resist as I lead you back.

  We have sardines and spaghetti hoops for our supper, with stacks and stacks of buttered brown toast. We have a tin apiece, except for the crumbly little spines, which I extract from the flesh and skin and sauce about my plate and toss to your waiting jaws. Gossamer ribbons swing from your beard and when they hit the kitchen tiles they form a viscous puddle of drool. There’s something resplendent about the way you sit in your viscous drool, and it suits you. Resplendence suits you.

  You hover in the living room doorway as I haul out the old armchair.

  With my sewing scissors and staple gun, a ball of twine and heap of frayed fleece blankets, I’m going to fix you a bed. The old chair is unusually low-sized and broad-bottomed, like something that belonged to a child and sat in a nursery in the days when children could still be sent to such rooms and instructed to be quiet. It’s so familiar I can’t remember where it came from, only that it’s always been here. I suspect my father was the child who sat quietly in it, and once he’d outgrown the low chair, still he brought it with him, to this house. Looking closely, the wood of its arched arms are stippled with the tracks of tiny fingernails.

  Everything is filled with stories, an old woman neighbour told me once, the same old woman neighbour, as it happens, who taught me to sew. This is when I was extremely little, too little to understand that most things don’t mean exactly what they seem, that meaning is a flighty thing. Because of what she said, I split the seam down the back of my favourite teddy, Mr Buddy, with a serrated kitchen knife. I was searching for stories, commanding words to tumble out and configure into horizontal lines like the ones inside my story books. Instead I found Mr Buddy was all stuffed with minute clouds. I shoved the clouds in again and punched him down the back of the washing machine so that my father wouldn’t see what I’d done. And even though he never did, for years and years I could hear Mr Buddy’s button nose clacking against the wall whenever the washing machine went into a spin. The machine doesn’t work any more, but it sits in the same spot in the kitchen, and I suppose Mr Buddy is back there still.

  The upright part of the old armchair is a mesh of mucky wicker. There’s a lattice cut of thin ply filling the gap beneath the arch of the handle on the left side, while on the right, the lattice is missing. The original cushion is missing too, but with a ragged fleece and a bundle of shredded fabrics, now I fold and fashion and stitch a replacement. Over the grimy wicker, I drape a tasselled throw-blanket in a checkerboard pattern of pinks and blues. See how it’s soft and bright now, how nice and comfortable it will be.

  I carry your new bed down to the kitchen. I’ve never had a pet bigger than a kiwi fruit before, yet I have the impression from somewhere that the kitchen is the proper place in a house for an animal to sleep. I settle it into the nook beneath the apron hooks. ‘In your bed,’ I tell you, ‘good boy.’ Now I switch the light out and close the kitchen door. You on one side, me on the other.

  You don’t like being left behind. I should have expected this. I suppose you’ve never been alone in a kitchen before, where the floor is cold and slippery and the walls are built from lofty appliances which sigh and shudder and bleep. Can you hear the drippling faucet? Now the pipes expanding and contracting as though the walls are cricking out their bones, now the scribble-scrabble of claws behind the skirting boards, a rat or two leftover from the spate. Can you hear me bumbling overhead? Water running down the bathroom plughole, slippers moving from lino to carpet, the squeak of the wardrobe door opening, the thud as it swings itself shut again. Now silence as I smoke. These are the sounds of my bedtime ablutions and I perform them each night, trance-like, at the same time in the same sequence. Teeth, face, slippers, pyjamas, smoke. Finally I trip the bedside lamp switch and kill the last incandescent bulb for the night.

  Now I’m listening too. I hear you rise from your cushion and walk to the kitchen door. I hear you stop there and begin to whimper. It’s a sound somewhere between cooing and keening, from an organ some place between belly and lung. Plaintive and elegiac, cavernous and craven. I listen for thirteen minutes exactly. I watch the luminescent numbers morphing into one another on my digital alarm clock. For thirteen minutes exactly, I lie rigid on my old springs, entranced.

  I get up, descend the stairs, push the door into the kitchen. You’re sitting on the cold lino, eye wide. I touch you between the ears, I mean it in consolation and yet you wince. I lift the low chair and heft it back upstairs, and in the bedroom, I wedge it into a hollow between the wardrobe and the bed. When I turn around, you’re standing cautiously at the threshold. I can see your nose trembling over the moths and kindling and coal dust. I squat down and pat the tasselled blanket.

  ‘Come here,’ I tell you, ‘here.’

  You tippy-toe over the rug, clamber onto the chair. You’re watching as I switch the bedside lamp out, still watching as I nestle beneath the duvet. Now I can see the small reflection of your lonely peephole. It catches the green light from my digital clock and glints though the dark. I wonder can you hear all the things I can’t anymore, all the things rendered soundless by familiarity, in the same way I could never smell my father’s smell even though I know he must have smelled. The hum of the generator in the grocer’s yard, the echo of feathers in the chimney pot where the jackdaws nest, my shilly-shally breaths and the rasping of my tarry lungs. I wonder can you see through the open curtains to the outline of continents on the moon. The moon oceans and moon mountains and lakes full of moon water. Now I watch as your glint flickers and snuffs. Now I listen to your soft snores and grunts, the gruff lullaby of a strange animal who ought properly to be kept in the kitchen.

  Sleep sound, One Eye.

  Tonight, I dream a strange dream. I dream it’s dungeon dark and I’m belting throu
gh forests and over fields. Demented, directionless. I dream the grass blades thwacking my legs and a whirlpool of flies dizzying about my ears. I dream the crackle and pop of invisible rain. I dream chickweed, hawkweed, knotweed, knapweed, bindweed. Now I come to the last stretch of hillslope before a roadway, and here I stop, exhausted. Below the field, there’s a road. Down on the road, there’s a house with a glowing window. The curtains are hooked open and I can see a vase of wilted daffodils outlined above the sill, a mirror hung on the wall behind, and in the mirror, the black through the window with a wisp of angry cloud. My legs give way and I crumple. Now there’s a gap, a tunnel of black. It’s a thousand miles long in dream time, and it ends in a perfect circle of blazing light, as though the sun’s been plucked and fixed into a grill, mounted onto a metal stalk and propped, just to warm me. Up close, the smell is of slightly singed fur and smouldering newsprint. Further away but all around, the smell is of faeces, disinfectant, the secreting fear glands of petrified animals. In the dream, smell is everything to me, smell is my native language. I hear voices and pivot my head around to the right, but there’s only a blank wall with its white paint scuffed. I see I’m behind a locked door; the locked door of a cage which is high up. My head is all doddery and my face is stinging, throbbing. Now I realise that when I pivot my head around to the left, there is nothing.

  It is spring in my dream. At first I think I know this innately, but of the things I think I innately know, I rarely do, I’ve only forgotten where they came from. And so I remember, it was the cut daffodils which showed me that it is spring.

  I’d say you’re about the size of a badger, just differently proportioned. I’ve seen tens of them over the years, bludgeoned to the hard shoulder, dead as the dirt they’ve been splattered by. I read an article in the paper about how the Roads Authority is obliged to install a special underpass every time a motorway intersects a badger’s territory. Nonetheless nine-hundred-and-ninety-six get killed trying to cross the road every year, so the newspaper said. Every year, nine-hundred-and-ninety-six badgers ignore the special underpass and go the way they’ve always gone. I think that’s immense, appalling.