Spill Simmer Falter Wither

by Sara Baume

  Unless I succumb to one of those brain-eating illnesses of very old age, I don’t expect I’ll forget last winter. Now it’s spring again, see how the cold has delayed all the seedlings from sprouting, stripped the hedgerows to a tangle of naked brown, worn the country roads into scree. So many bulbs remain scrunched in their shallow graves. The hibernating animals oversleep. Where were you last winter? I find it hard to picture a time when we were simultaneously alive, yet separate. Now you are like a bonus limb. Now you are my third leg, an unlimping leg, and I am the eye you lost.

  Do you think my swallows somehow sense how cold our winter was? If they know the way here from Africa, they must know other impossible things as well. Do you think they’re breaking their flight on the continent, gorging themselves on sun-warmed flies? It’s not too late, they might still be coming. Maybe, like the spring, my swallows are just overdue.

  It’s Tuesday, my Tuesday trip to town. The postmaster remarks how nippy it is and I say Sure you’d never know one minute from the next what’s coming. The jumble shop has a set of Russian dolls and a brocade bag tied to the blade of a Samurai sword in the window, and I wonder what’s inside the bag, I wonder is it an amulet. But I must pass by and stop again at the pet shop. I fish about in the collar and leash section for a muzzle that looks like it will fit. I don’t hear the gerbil. Today, the gerbil is calm; the gerbil is safe.

  At home, I tell you SIT. This is the first of your sixty-five words and so you sit and I begin to fasten the straps and buckles around your head and neck. I promise it’s not for always and everywhere, okay? Just certain places and situations to protect you, to protect us both. I promise.

  You trust me enough to let me fix it on without a fidget of protest. I see how you trust me and I feel terrible that I use this trust to constrict you. Once the muzzle is on, the weight of the moulded plastic grill draws your neck down and you hang your nose, more sad than angry. At first you just sit motionless with your head hung. Gradually, you begin to panic. Now you thrash and claw at the muzzle, now you growl as though it were an enemy creature. And I feel immediately terrible terrible terrible, and free you. I hang the muzzle on the apron hook in the kitchen.

  It’s gone now, see? We will not speak of it again.

  There’s only one road in the village where nobody lives. It runs up the hill and past the oil refinery. About a hundred yards along there’s an enormous signboard. It stands supported by two steel legs and wears a red bulb like a miner’s helmet atop its litany of instructions. DO NOT PASS THIS POINT WHEN LIGHT IS FLASHING the signboard says, PROCEED TO NEAREST SHELTER & WAIT FOR REFINERY PERSONNEL TO ASSIST YOU. This is the road where we’ll walk now, the dimmest and most deserted, the best chance we have of being left alone.

  The ditches give way to forest either side. The oak and ash and hazel and birch form an unwieldy guard of honour. They’re so tall their heads incline toward one another and meet in the middle, leaving only a thin, jagged opening into sky. The forest floor is knotted by briars and ferns. On one side it gives way to the refinery compound. On the other it casts off into a small expanse of cliff face, and now sea. Listen to the blackbird bug-hunting beneath the celandine, to the tap of the mussel dropped by a hooded crow against the tarmac. Now he swoops down for his seashell and lifts and drops it again, and so on until it’s cracked enough to sup out the soupy innards.

  Step aside for the contract builder’s van. Now the refinery mini-digger, its bucket of sandbags. Sometimes there’ll be cargo lorries on their way to the refinery with gas cylinders for refilling, and sometimes they’re on their way from the refinery with gas cylinders freshly filled. Listen to them clinking against one another with the bumps in the tarmac, the sway of the axles. The road ends at the staff car park, at an intercom beside a traffic barrier. But we don’t stop here, this is just the point at which we go off-road. Follow me over the hedge and through the mud prints of tractor tyres to the brow of the barley field, the top of the hill. Here we stop and here we look back across the space we’ve just trampled. The chimneys are sputtering sparky smoke into the morning, the refinery wind sock is jimmying about, and beyond again, see the whole of the bay all at once like a blue puddle, the village like a group of dollhouses, and my father’s house in the middle, a bold pink speck amongst the beige. See the green sprouts in the gutters? I love the way the grass grows like that, high up on buildings, as though it’s lost. And on the other side, see Tawny Bay sprawling below.

  Now follow me down slope, through the ferns and furze, to the beach. Here at sea level, the grass turns sharp and straggly. It gives way first to an uneven row of hefty pebbles, desiccated bladderwrack, drift junk, and now sand. Have you ever seen a beach before? I don’t expect so. What do you make of it? The sea’s a kind of river but instead of flowing sideways against an opposite piece of land, it rushes on and bleeds into sky. Here’s the sand you’ve already found dispersed about the car blanket, now it’s truly everywhere, spread into bumps like the crunchy kind of peanut butter. In some places it’s freckled with heavy stones, in others it collapses beneath your paws. Smell the rot and fish and tang and wet. Feel the air zinging your eyeball. Taste the salted spray of cresting waves on the buds of your lolling tongue.

  There’s no one else on the strand. It’s too early. So I’m going to take a chance. I’m going to unclip your leash, unshackle your harness. I’m going to let you chase and rove and zig-zag feverishly, to be your own unhuman and unprogrammable self, free as a fart.

  ‘FREE!’ I yell. And you run amok between the pebbles and shallows and cliffs and caves, over the lug’s extruded trails and the seagull’s beak punctures. You’re chasing the oystercatchers, licking beached jellyfish, guzzling crab’s legs and pissing in the dunes. You’re moving in a way I’ve never seen you move before. Slack-limbed, almost jaunty. You wag your tail. This is the first time I’ve seen you wag your tail.

  ‘GOOD BOY!’ I yell.

  Now you wade in and lie down, just for a second. And a tiny wave breaks across your shoulders, and you skitter sheepishly back to shore.

  We’ll go this way every day now, I promise. Past the rat holes and broken branches and litter. Past the lolly wrapper lying in the verge at the base of the YIELD sign. Past the banana skin by the refinery gates below the intercom, stealthily perishing. And every day I’ll wonder about the engineer or security guard or whoever it was who ate that banana and tossed it to precisely such a spot, without thinking.

  We’ll go when the wind is high and the seas are storming, when the mud is fluid and deep and the rain so constant that the trees afford no shelter as they should, but instead send an onslaught of accumulated droplets down on our heads. Still we’ll go this way, I promise.

  The mobile library comes every two weeks on a Thursday, and it smells like furniture polish and sticky-fingered children.

  Today, I find a book about blood sports. I flick to the chapter on badger baiting and stand with my back as a bent shield to the librarian. The driver’s out on the sea front, smoking, and there’s nobody else in the bus. Spring, the book says, is the season of digging out. I think I knew this already, but I can’t remember why. Spring is when the sows give birth and become especially aggressive. I skip down a few lines. Badger cubs are pulled from the earth as trophies and given to the diggers to rag about amongst themselves, to finish off. It’s the adult badgers captured in the woods that are kept for the baiting den, those still fighting or trying to fight. I skip down another few lines, until I reach the part I know I’m looking for. The diggers often end up with their bottom jaw clean off and a bleeding too great to be stemmed, at which point they’re clubbed to death with a shovel and rammed back into the ransacked sett.

  Now an old woman who is one of my neighbours totters up the steps of the bus. At the top, she straightens her blazer and makes for the shelf of romance novels in enormous print. I snap my book shut and fumble it back. I check out one about Zen gardens instead, a collection of Indian folk tales and Silas Marner, again. As th
e librarian stamps my card, I wonder what a baby badger’s called. A calf, a cub, a kitten? Already I can’t remember.

  I begin to nod off in the potbellied armchair with Silas lying across my chest, but I wake myself up to finish my cigarette. Now I smash the butt into the ashtray. As I begin to nod again, I see the silhouette of your head at the window. I see you staring past the shore wall, past the bay, past the opposite side of the harbour.

  I dream myself inside a pen at the edge of a scrapyard. I dream the scrapyard has a view of the woods and the view’s divided into a hundred tiny compartments with each surrounded by a frame of galvanised steel. I dream I’m gazing through the grating, keeping watch on the woods. I see rabbits at dawn, leaves at all different stages of falling, power-lines bending in the wind, rookeries against the moon. Now I dream myself into the woods and I’m running, running, running. I’ve forgotten every part of myself and all the parts of my surroundings except for my maggot nose. I’ve forgotten the cheeps and chitters overhead, the braying of my fellow diggers. I’ve forgotten the details of the forest floor, the splintered twigs and smithered bark streaming beneath my feet, clinging to the fur of my ankles. Now I’m so far from the scrapyard pen I’ve forgotten the rabbits and leaves and power-lines and rookeries; they melt behind me as I run. In the woods, in my dream, I’m strong as a boar and quick as a buzzard. I’m ten foot tall yet scarcely as high as the shrubbery.

  Before I fumbled the library book back, I glanced at the glossy middle pages, at the photographs. There were three. The first showed a badger yanked between two different pairs of teeth with blood trickling through the lesions in its pelt. The second showed a sett which had subsided with the digger still inside. One of his back legs was sticking up from the earth like a tiny totem. And the third showed a photograph of you, only a you with both of its eyes. A breed calculated into existence, the caption said, for its exceptional obduracy.

  I wake up again. I switch on the television. It’s still cold enough to warrant the nightly lighting of the gas heater, and so I light it. You get up from the window and settle yourself directly in front of the glowing bars. You lean in to stare at them, you hardly move. What are you thinking? Now you sigh so hard from the pit of your lungs that it triggers an attack of the hiccups.

  Sometimes I see the sadness in you, the same sadness that’s in me. It’s in the way you sigh and stare and hang your head. It’s in the way you never wholly let your guard down and take the world I’ve given you for granted. My sadness isn’t a way I feel but a thing trapped inside the walls of my flesh, like a smog. It takes the sheen off everything. It rolls the world in soot. It saps the power from my limbs and presses my back into a stoop.

  In the evenings, we watch television. You like the nature documentaries, the ones that feature high-pitched bird noises in particular. I like the reality shows. I like how, without scripts, people don’t know what to say or say the wrong thing. I like how, without onions, people cry anyway; people cry better.

  I haven’t lived like the characters on television. I haven’t fought in any wars or fallen in love. I’ve never even punched a man or held a woman’s hand. I haven’t lived high or full, still I want to believe I’ve lived intensely, that I’ve questioned and contemplated my squat, vacant life, and sometimes even, understood. I’ve always noticed the smallest, quietest things. A chewing-gum blob in the perfect shape of a pterodactyl. A two-headed sandeel coiled inside a cockle shell. The sliver of tungsten in every incandescent. I’ve read a lot of newspapers. They stack up on the coffee table for weeks before I get around to recycling them. I know how the system of society ought to work. It doesn’t make sense to me, but I’ve come to believe this is because it doesn’t make sense.

  I’m not the kind of person who is able to do things, have I told you this already? I lie down and let life leave its footprints on me.

  All the books I’ve read, they stack up too. The lines and passages bleed together. Sometimes I remember characters and think, just for a second, they were people I once knew. Sometimes I remember places and think, just for a second, that it’s somewhere I once was. I never remember the titles or the author’s name, but I remember the covers, I always remember the covers. A gigantic valley, a tiny horse galloping. A stack of polished silver spoons. A tall man and a small man both in cowboy hats walking a red road toward a blue mountain between a tall tree and a small tree. A great fish with a pointed nose, a loose line skipping. A profile, half-man half-wolf, a single eye in the very centre. And a man rising from a pen’s nib in a suit jacket to drift amongst the skyscrapers.

  But as for the words, the messages: I forget. And if I’ve been changed, so I change back again.

  See the signs of summer, of the tepid seasons starting their handover with subtle ceremony. Now the forest floor is swamped by bluebells, the celandine squeezed from sight. See how the bells hover above the ground, like an earth-hugging lilac mist. Now the oak, ash, hazel and birch are bulked with newly born leaves, still moist and creased from the crush of their buds. The barley is up to my kneecaps and already it’s outgrown you. As we crest the brow of the hill each day, you are shrouded by green blades.

  In the village, a damaged row boat appears. Somebody’s hauled it into position between the signpost and information board at the mouth of the bird walk, leaned it sidewise on its keel. From our sitting spot inside the window we see members of the resident’s committee in high-visibility vests, painting its planks pistachio, shovelling compost between its thwarts and planting the surface solid with primula polyanthus. My father used to own a rowboat. It was much smaller and shabbier than the flowering one, and he kept it moored right there in the bay, roped to a rusted rung along the shore wall. It looked like a box made out of old doors, one of the burden boards even bore the screw holes of an absent handle. I have no memory of my father rowing his boat but he always went out to check on it in stormy weather. I used to think he didn’t care very much, now I wonder whether he cared too much, so much he could never bring himself to cast it loose and row.

  Next door in the grocer’s the ice-cream machine is restored to service, and every morning the grocer or his girl wheel a display cage filled with plastic footballs and seaside paraphernalia onto the street front. There are small spades and flimsy fishing nets, rubber rings and buckets shaped like miniature castles. I’ve never really noticed the cage before, but now, this year, I think I’d like a football. What do you think?

  Some are printed with cartoon characters and popstars, but I choose the one that is patched yellow, blue and grey as though it was tailor-made for you, for your incomplete colour spectrum. I carry it with us in a plastic bag, through the trees and past the oil refinery, over the brow of the barley field and down the hill to the beach. At first, you don’t take any notice. When I free you from the leash you set about your business of gallop and scavenge and splash as usual.

  I kick the football into the air. It’s light but bounceless, and lands with a dull bump and the skew of the sand rolls it into the water. Paw-deep in drift junk, chewing the leg off a putrefied crab, you ignore it. So I chase after the football, kick it out of the small waves and keep kicking the length and breadth of the strand. Now I shout back at you as I go, stupid slogans of encouragement.

  ‘COME ON! CHASE!’ I shout, ‘GETTIT! GOOD BOY!’

  What must you think of me? A giant hurtling about an empty beach with my clodhoppery hands clapping, my black plait beating against my hunch as I run. Now I’ve disturbed the sludge in my lungs and it swooshes and swirls and makes me wheeze, pant, wheeze, pant, wheeze. So I stop but when I turn back to check the junk, you’re hurtling after me. You’ve conquered your maggot nose, forsaken the pursuit of rotten apples and fermenting crustaceans. Tongue flapping free, you’re running, running, running. Snatching up the football, puncturing it with your fangs. Now semi-deflated, it fits snug between your jaws and you can clamp on, firm, and shake.

  There’s no need for me to chant encouragement. You’re nosing it along
the sand at a sprint and grunting with joy. Now you’re hunting it down as if it were a living thing, a hostile thing, an assailant. Now you’re killing, killing, killing.

  I dream a dream of being born. I slop down onto a bed of newspapers. It’s cold and dirty and the headlines are blotted by amniotic fluid. Beyond the end of my nose, I see the pink tips of my mother’s teats, and all around I feel the clamour of my litter, the heat of tails and legs and bodies battling to suck.

  Do you remember your mother? As a boy it took me years to realise I didn’t have one. At the beginning I believed children were allowed to have only one parent. That’s just the way it was. Only a rare few, only the children in storybooks and on television were lucky enough to have hit the double jackpot. I got a father, that was my lot. By the time I realised I’d misunderstood, it was too late to suddenly ask him what happened to the woman who gave birth to me. By then I’d accepted the chimney was my birth canal, the fire grate was my cradle, my mother was the house.

  The first thing I see when I open my eyes in the morning, the view from the bedroom window at pillow level with the curtains open: the high wall behind the stone fence which conceals the grocer’s generators, can you see too? Can you see the mass of ivy-leaved toadflax flourishing there? The flowers have violet petals with bright yellow lips, but they are lost amid the plethora of five-pronged leaves and spaghetti stems. Every night it grows and climbs with ravenous force. Every morning it fills a little more of our window. One day, will we open our eyes to nothing but toadflax? Still we’ll claw our way through, I promise.