by Sara Baume
What size was your badger? Was she a thickset mother sow, angry as a thwacked wasp because of the litter of newlyborns squashed into the dark behind her? Is that why she turned on you with her curved claws slashing? You don’t seem to realise, but you’re skinny as a mink. Your presence may be ten foot tall, even so, you’re squirty as a tomcat. Your ribcage caves into stomach. Your rump tapers to a quarter-docked tail and your weight’s tipped to the front like a dinky wheelbarrow. Your legs are all bone, your shoulders all brawn. Your neck’s too thick for your body, your mouth’s too wide for your head, your ears are just about long enough to kink back in on themselves. Now that your face is healed, you have a hollow and a gaudy scar in the place where your left eye used to be. A gouge of your lower lip is missing, and it draws your mouth down to an immoveable grimace. Save for a feathery white beard from underside muzzle to uppermost nipples, you are solid black, dark as a hole in space.
A week has passed. It is Tuesday again, my Tuesday trip to town.
The post office first. The bell on the door sounds my arrival. I approach the counter and slide my card beneath the indoor window. Always, it’s the old postmaster. Although he’s been old for as long as I can remember, the postmaster never appears to have grown any older. Even sitting in his office chair, he seems sprightly, as though the air on the opposite side of the indoor window is somehow purer than the air out here, somehow life-preserving. As he counts my notes and coins he usually says something about the weather, about how the day is ‘fierce’ or ‘soft’ or ‘desperate’ or ‘close’, and every Tuesday I say the same thing in reply. I say Sure you’d never know from one minute to the next what’s coming, and the postmaster always agrees. I scoop up my money. I thank him. And the bell on the door chimes again, as though it doesn’t understand that I am leaving.
Today, I bypass the jumble and head for the pet shop instead. I’ve never been inside the pet shop before. It smells like chipped wood, bird poo, meat-flavoured biscuits. You’d like it. You’d especially like the lop-eared rabbit in a box on the floor, methodically chewing its cardboard walls down. It’s made a hole almost big enough to squeeze its head through and I wonder if I should alert one of the shop assistants. But I don’t want to insult the rabbit’s efforts, so I hurry on past. I find the collar and leash section and as I browse I listen to the background lull of scrabbles and gurgles and flaps. The only noise which singles itself out is a curiously rhythmic stamping, as if of tiny feet and as evenly spaced as a human heartbeat.
I want you to have a new collar for your new life. A collar I chose for you. I pick out a red one with small metal studs and a tag in the shape of a bone. What kind of bone is it supposed to be: a femur, a clavicle, a rib? At the counter, the shop assistant makes me write down the letters of your name and the digits of my telephone number. Now she punches my scribbles into a machine and feeds the tag into a slot. An invisible needle engraves the bone and the machine spits it back again. The assistant’s forehead is high and mealy. I stare at it to avoid her eyes. Somehow I manage to make myself ask about the stamping sound.
‘That’ll be the gerbil,’ she says, ‘he’ll be warning the other gerbils.’ She hands me my change and moves on to the next customer.
Let me see you in your new collar. Let me fix your inside-out ear. You look resplendent, even more resplendent. I know you can’t see for yourself, but that jingling sound is the tag batting the collar’s buckle every time you move, everywhere you go. I know you can’t read either, but on the back it says 0214645207, and on the front it says ONEEYE, capitalised and spelled as though all one word like something in African, like you are some kind of African prince.
What did I used to do all day without you? Already I can’t remember.
You sit, spine against the wicker mesh in front of the living room window. Here I’ve angled the low chair so you can see through the glass, over the road, across the bay, and all that goes on there. Beside you in the potbellied armchair, I sit and see too.
We see cargo vessels coasting in and out of harbour, containers heaped like toy building bricks. We see wading birds at falling tide, gouging the mud with their sporky beaks, pillaging a subterranean civilisation of salted organisms. And at high tide, we see pairs of ducks, always pairs. Ducks are like socks. If you’ve only got one, then something’s wrong. We see the cars which park in the street, the people who cross to the grocer’s and cross back again to their cars juggling armfuls of bags, boxes, bottles, sachets, tin cans. ‘LOOK’, I say, and point. See the fat man’s stockpile of fridge ornaments. They’re for staunching some great hunger in some small part of himself which isn’t his stomach. ‘LOOK’, I say again, and again, I point. Now I wait for you to find the tattered cat who is prowling the shore wall, stalking a scrumpled tissue. You make a noise in your throat like a tiny propeller and this is how I know you see the cat too.
Sometimes a delivery van parks on the footpath in front of the house and all we can see is the dirt on its canopy, the skid marks of a low bridge on its rooftop. You tilt your head to the left. I know now this is the thing you do when you’re trying to understand, as if the world somehow makes more sense at an angle, with your sighted side slightly higher than the side the badger blinded. Sometimes the vans collide with my hanging baskets as they leave. We watch as they carry the scarlet heads of my geraniums to their next delivery. Now even the geranium heads are better travelled than I.
The low-sized and broad-bottomed chair is your safe space, now it’s where you always go to hide. You contract to an orb in the middle or unfurl to full stretch and kick your paws through the gap where the lattice is lost. Cloaked within the tasselled throw blanket, you are protected, and nothing bad can touch you. I hadn’t expected there’d be so many commonplace, inanimate things in my father’s house, my safe space, for you to be frightened of. Is it that they mean something else to you? Have you seen the ways they can be transformed into instruments of torture? Plastic bags with their rustle and squeeze, aluminium foil with its twinkle and gash, dishcloths with their thrash and wallop. And even though I’ve never tried to whip or choke or strangle you, still you scamper away to your safe space whenever I open a drawer or start drying the dishes.
I kneel on the cold tiles of the kitchen floor. I roll out a length of foil. I place down a chocolate button and hold it out in offering to you. I know you’re disconcerted, but I do it because you have to learn to fathom your way though a world of which you are frightened, as I have learned.
Most of my boyhood fears dwindled as I grew in size and sense. I figured out the footsteps I heard by night were only the cricking pipes, that the man who skulked up the laneway in the morning to force leaflets through my door was only the postman. I started going into town and buying groceries in the big supermarkets, and there I learned how to face a shop assistant over a checkout and exchange meaningless pleasantries without whispering or muddling my words.
But it’s okay to be frightened sometimes. I’m still afraid of almost every single form of social situation. I still steer clear of uniformed officials. I’ve always had a guilty face, an incriminating nerviness, even when I was innocent. Sirens overwhelm me; only in the face of flashing bulbs do I long for the draining dimness of the energy savers. I’m afraid of swallowing spiders in my sleep, of a moth crawling into my ear drum, of toppling a display in the chemists, of my car breaking down and blocking the dual carriageway at rush hour. I’m afraid of the tiny screens that everybody carries in their pockets, of the irate way they shiver and growl. And I’m afraid of children; I’m especially afraid of children.
I roll the aluminium foil away and drop the button to your bowl.
Now the food bowl is the epicentre of your existence, to which the house is attached and everything beyond radiates from, like sun beams, like the stingers of winged and boneless sharks. I collected tokens from boxes of breakfast cereal and sent them away for that bowl. The day it arrived the postman rang my doorbell and I signed my name in his ledger. Now it lives on th
e kitchen floor in the cubby hole beneath the apron hooks, and you check it constantly, countless times every day.
It’s a cubby hole as grubby as a seedy city alley. There’s a layer of filth sunk into the grooves of the skirting board, buttered across the lino. Bugs creep out of the wall at night to gnaw the filth and its stickiness gathers tiny tumbleweeds of passing hair in spite of how thoroughly you clean after each meal. I see you licking every bit of surface some fugitive morsel might have touched down on, sucking up fluff and dust and sand and bugs as you go. Your food bowl is restocked three times a day, but you never take this for granted. You gobble every meal hardly using your teeth, nor your tongue, nor your swallowing muscles.
‘Please chew this time,’ I say, every time. ‘Please chew.’
I read somewhere, or maybe heard on the radio, that an animal starved in youth will devote the remainder of its life to the pursuit of eating. There’s nothing here in my father’s house to contest you for your scraps, not the apron tails which tease the back of your neck as you guzzle nor the appliances that sigh and shudder and bleep. Still you eat every bowlful at the speed of light, and afterwards you sit in the kitchen cubby and regurgitate the undigested lumps of kibble, catch them in your mouth for mashing and swallowing all over again. And once you’re finished for a second time, again you check your food bowl.
Now you know the slightest of sights and sounds which indicate I’m preparing to eat. You know the curt compression of air which signals the opening of the fridge, the click of the cupboard’s magnet, the whirr of the springloaded drawer. You know the screech of spatula against the base of a margarine carton, and you know this means it’s ready for you to slather out. You know, when I eat an apple with a paring knife, the exact angle my hand takes when I pare a piece especially to toss to you.
A full stomach is a kind of sanctuary, I understand that. I’m a scoffer too. Even though I’m never hungry, I remember hunger and so sometimes I scoff desperately, mindlessly, as though I can eat now every proper meal I missed in childhood. It took me many years to face the shop assistants, to fathom my way into town alone, and until then I was dependent on my father who could barely cook and kept the cupboards only erratically stocked. Now when I feel the food heat oozing from my belly, bulging through my blood, it makes me feel better. Can you feel the heat, the ooze? I know the reason you check your bowl compulsively is because I’m always dropping titbits into it. A splash of milk here, a spaghetti hoop there. Wherever you happen to be in the house or yard, you hear it and bolt to the kitchen, crash into the cubby hole, your head already dropped to bowl-level. I have inadvertently trained you, but you have trained me too. Now I let you slather everything out, every mixing bowl and plate and lid. With the herculean strength of your tongue, skilfully you propel my crockery around and around the kitchen floor, until it gets stuck beneath a stool, wedged into the fractured kickboard.
Tonight, again I dream as you.
I dream I’m inside a pen with a water dish but no food bowl. I dream a man who comes once a day with a basin and trowel and he slaps scraps onto the ground with a noise like a colossal bird plop. The scraps come from all colours but blend together into brown and taste like yeast and grease and soured milk. I dream the seasons passing, real seasons, like when I was a boy. In sun times, the scraps arrive congealed. In rain times, they come puddled, diluted by drizzle to a grizzly grey gruel.
Tonight, I dream of the place where you came from, the place where you were starved.
I’m going to teach you to walk nicely, and we’re going to practice along the bird walk, to the very end and back again, every day.
The bird walk is a belt of concrete skirting the sea front from the main street of the village to the gates of the power station. Running alongside the concrete there’s a squat wall and a row of street lamps. There are flowerbeds and picnic benches and a couple of ornamental ponds. As we cross the road, you’re trotting steady with the planky soles of my shoes, keeping stride with the swoosh of my trouser legs. Here’s the signpost that says BIRD WALK and here’s the information board. See behind the cracked perspex, each wader’s portrait in peeling and discolored paint. But you’re distracted by the tumult of smells rushing from the banks of the path to meet you. You launch into the weed-beds, nose first.
The ponds are filmed by gunk too thick on the surface for skeeters and too stagnant underneath for frogspawn. What once were blooms are now mostly weeds, and even the weeds are smothered by the gloop of leaves still festering from last autumn. What are not weeds are the descendents of seeds sown by the resident’s committee, years and years ago. Even though nobody tends them any more, some still manage to flower in spring and summer. See here, these buds will become marigolds, I think. And these leaves belong to the sweet-william. I know the names of most trees and flowers, but I learned them very slowly. With no one to guide me, everything I know is learned slow and fraught with mistakes. Now I know the wildflowers only by finding them, one by one, and searching in my nature book for a name, and then finding them over again and naming them for myself, until I’ve got them all right, and remembered.
At high tide, the sea rises to lap against the bird walk’s wall and gulls bob at beak-level with the concrete. At low tide, the water falls back to expose a no man’s land of stinking mud. It’s at low tide that the wading birds come. Oystercatchers with their startled eyes, redshanks scurrying tetchily on strawberry legs, little egrets freshly laundered, whiter than white. The path ends in a copse of pines which hide the security fencing and boxy buildings of the power station, but the trees are far too short to hide the chimney and its flossy smoke. In winter, the wind shakes their cones into the sea, and I find them washed up on the beaches. On every beach all around the bay, I recognise these pinecones.
As I turn back, you’re still hustling amongst the greenery. I call but you don’t seem to hear, you’re hypnotised by smell. Now you zig-zag the concrete, hop onto the wall and shout at the gulls, bust into a frenzied run. Now you freeze beside a tuft of primroses and plug your claws into the ground and won’t budge for all the chocolate buttons in my trouser pocket. How can you be so unremittingly interested? How can every stone be worthy of tenderly sniffing, every clump of grass a source of fascination? How can this blade possibly smell new and different from that blade, and why is it that some require to be pissed upon, and others simply don’t? I wish I’d been born with your capacity for wonder. I wouldn’t mind living a shorter life if my short life could be as vivid as yours.
You aren’t exactly obedient. I want to believe your intentions are good, but I doubt they stand a chance against your maggot nose. I watch it working as we walk, drawing you into everything most vile, all the drippings and droppings left in the weeds by creatures gone before. The spraint of an otter, the spray of a tom, a bobbin of sweet shit which you try to wolf while I’m not looking. I haul you up, prise your jaws open, shake the shit out.
‘BOLD!’ I holler, ‘BOLD BOLD BOLD!’ But I know it’s wrong of me to scold what’s natural to you. I’m sorry, I shouldn’t holler.
Another walker’s coming toward us. A man in a fleece with a boxer, I think it is. Tanned fur and face ironed flat like a primate. The closer they come, the more you’re tugging, tugging, tugging. I stop and draw aside from the path and bind my wrist into the leash’s loop. Now you’re barking and thrusting with all your strength and wrath, and I’m holding on so hard the blood drains from my knuckles. The man nods as they pass but the boxer just stares as though you’re a lunatic, as though we are a pair of lunatics.
‘Bold!’ I whisper, ‘bold bold bold!’
I don’t understand why you aren’t throttled. I heave us on toward the information board. It takes until they’ve disappeared for you to calm down and walk forward again. Still for some distance, you glance behind. You whimper as though wounded, bereft.
Back inside my father’s house, you rest beside my planky feet on the living room rug and I ruffle the red roots of your scalp as I smoke. N
ow you’re yourself again. The self who doesn’t sit or stay or halt or heel on command, who doesn’t come back when I call, who doesn’t walk very nicely, not nicely at all. Still I must admire the way you suit yourself. I don’t want to turn you into one of those battery-powered toys that yap and flip when you slide their switch. I was wrong to tell you you’re bold. I was wrong to try and impose something of my humanness upon you, when being human never did me any good.
See how sluggish the spring is this year. Almost May and still no sign of swallows. Look here, see this lump of flaky mud wedged into the roof cranny? It’s a nest and has hatched ten generations at least. They fly all the way from South Africa, across the Sahara and the Pyrenees, just to lay their dappled eggs in my cranny. Every year they remember me, and come back. But sometimes swallows go hungry and sometimes storms knock them down and sometimes they just can’t bear the slog, and stop.
When I was a boy, the seasons seemed to exist more than they seem to exist now. For the past ten years at least, all year round, the meteorologist who reads the weather forecast has always said the same thing, and the picture at the end has always showed the same symbol. A raining cloud with a very small sun shying behind it. There haven’t been any intensities of hot and cold or light and dark; instead it’s been the same glum, tepid day over and over, and it’s made me feel similarly seasonless. Apathetic when I should have been elated, drowsy when I should have been upset. Then, out of the blue, last winter grew tremendously cold. The meteorologist said there were the lowest temperatures for half a century. It put paid to my theory of seasonlessness, but not in exactly the way I wished for.
