by Sara Baume
On the beach, I stop hurtling and walk even with the tide line and watch you with your ball. After a while you clamp and carry it. You veer away from the sea and head up the strand toward the cliffs and fields. I call you, and you come back. You carry your football in pace with me along the sand. But after several yards, you begin to veer off again. Now I see how you are drawn from Tawny Bay and back toward the hillslope, irresistibly.
What are you thinking? It’s hard to judge thought by the life in a tail, by the glint of light in a lonely peephole. And I wonder if it’s the badgers.
Is it the badgers, One Eye?
Can you hear them calling you?
simmer
There is singing, singing, singing.
It is sweet and undulating, like a finger licked and drawn around the rim of a wine glass, like a whole chorus of glasses similarly molested. It’s rising from the street, fluting through the cracks of our ill-fitted window pane, diffusing about the living room. I remember the song. I learned it from mass as a boy, years and years and years ago. I shut my book, lean forward in the potbellied armchair and try to dredge the words from the stew of my memory and hook them together again, so I can sing along. What do I sound like? Like a toad trying to squeeze inside a song thrush? Out of tune, out of time.
You’re at your sentry. Back paws on the cushion of the low chair, front paws balanced on a book heap in the windowsill, eye to the sea. The wet of your nose smears against the glass in the spot where you’re pointing, and all around this spot, there are old spots with old nose smears, dried and crusted and yet still glimmering. Like the aimless trails of a night slug, like a whole posse of carousing night slugs. You’re watching the gaggle of singing children on the street, little girls in white dresses with white veils clipped into their hair. You’re tilting your head to the left, pulling your curious face. The little girl’s veils are almost translucent and they skitter in the wind like tiny ghosts. Some are carrying baskets filled with flower petals and the two at the front are holding a plastic arch between them and the arch is decked with artificial roses. Now come the mothers. They’re gaggling a few yards behind the girls, keeping guard. They’re muttering to each other beneath the singing, praising somebody else’s daughter so somebody else will praise theirs back. I peek around the curtain, careful not to lean too far into the window. I don’t want to be spotted by the gaggles. I’m just as afraid of mothers as I am of children, possibly even more so. Dominus tecum, they are singing. Benedict tattoo.
It’s the May Procession, the first Sunday in summer. I haven’t been to mass in almost one year and one half of a year now, I’d forgotten that. Not since the occasion upon which I stood up in the middle of the homily and pronounced the word HORNET. I pronounced it with less force than a shout but precisely enough force to be heard from the pulpit. And because the church was three quarters full and I was in a pew around the middle, I presume most of the other congregants heard it too, from the woman in the wheelchair at the front to the man who always stood beside the water font holding the collection plate.
I didn’t know those people, not really. I knew their mass faces and their mass clothes from decades of Sundays we’d worn down the kneelers together. I’d only ever spoken to a couple of neighbours and only then since my father’s been gone, only then in answer to the questions they asked about him. A nursing home in the city, I told them. And I didn’t mean anything by it, by HORNET. There was a man kneeling in front of me wearing a jacket with a label on the back, and the label read THE NORTHFACE, and I was making anagrams; that’s all it meant. Then I walked out. I cleared the churchyard and was through the gates and in the car before anyone had followed me, if anyone even tried. I didn’t stop to check, but I don’t expect so. And then I realised I didn’t have to go to mass on my own any more, that I’d only ever gone as my father’s companion and now that I’d made the old man’s excuses several times over, I didn’t have to go, and I felt suddenly very stupid for all the times I had.
When I was a boy, I used to sit here in this window and watch children with satchels and lunchboxes passing on their way to school. Back then, hard as it is to picture now, I was small, almost as small as you. Small enough to scrunch my whole body onto the sill. Back then, I didn’t care about being seen. I’d press my nose against the pane and draw snot trails, just like you. I knew every child by sight and I remember them all: the girl who wore her hair in jade ribbons, the boy with iron calipers up to his knees. I imagined the details of all the parts of their lives I couldn’t see, from the contents of their pencil cases to the exact number and colour of stars stuck in their copy books. Even though I’d stare at the crowns of their heads every morning, I never wanted to join them. I was too shy, too frightened. And besides, I didn’t really believe I was of the same species as the children I saw passing along the sea front, going to school. Back then, it never dawned on me that I should have the things they had too. I would have to be made again, I thought. I would have to be reborn.
I know you’re too short to see it, but the picture on our kitchen calendar is a donkey in a sand dune with ribbons fanning from its quadrilateral face like the tails of a kite. It’s summer here in the kitchen, even if, outside, it’s heartily raining. Outside, every porous thing is turning spongy, every un-porous thing is sluiced and dripping.
Still, people are mowing their lawns and dousing their barbeques with lighter fluid and standing under patio heaters nibbling black meat from toothpicks. I smell their cut grass in the day time, their charcoal smoke by night. Can you smell it too? The ice-cream van comes out of hibernation and drives in circles jingling You are my sunshine, my only sunshine and its fog lights through the gloom every dusk are indeed the sunshine, the only sunshine, as though it knew. People are performing the summer on the summer’s behalf, buying flip-flops and body-boards, tricking themselves into believing it’s the season inside their TV sets instead, the one from the Australian soap operas. They are pretending, as though pretending alone might a miracle make.
With such little sign of a change in season, how do the plants know it’s the right time to flower? Because plants are smart in a way people aren’t, never questioning the things they know nor searching for ways to disprove them. All along the road through the forest to the refinery, see how foxgloves split from their buds and tremble over the ditches. And when the weight of their waterlogged bonnets is too much, they keel into the road and their heads are crushed by cargo lorries to a pretty pink pulp.
On the beach, most days the mist is so thick that when we reach the mid-point and stop to look, neither end of the strand is visible, each taking its turn to be scarfed up by cloud. Now we must part a channel through the fog like a pair of tiny jets leaving a pair of reverse contrails in our wake.
Through the thick mist a honeycomb collie comes careering down the strand toward us, his great mane crimped by damp and billowing. He’s already too close before I see him, and there’s no chance to re-shackle you; you’re ahead by almost fifty feet. In a flash you’ve forsaken your football and clamped the collie’s muzzle. Now he’s yelping and flaying and trying desperately to hurl you off. But you don’t budge a hair’s width. You’re stuck as a mouse in a mousetrap, a fly to a flypaper. The collie looks like a prestige pet and the woman he belongs to looks like she prizes him for his placid face and handsome cantering, for his particular pedigree as opposed to his particular self. She’s speedy out of the clouds and to his rescue, speedier than me and my fifty feet. Now she’s clubbing your head with a golf umbrella, and all I can do is shout.
‘DROPPIT ONE EYE!’ I shout, ‘DROP!’
It’s happening so swiftly, too swiftly for my ordinary fears to keep up with. It’s as if the helmet of my spacesuit has been perforated and a flood of oxygen is crashing into my eyes, ears, mouth.
‘DROPPIT DROPPIT DROPPIT!’
But you don’t, and even though I’m pitching and clumping as fast as I’ve ever pitched and clumped, flailing like a plastic bag snagged on a tho
rn in a gale, for a split second, everything goes completely still. The waves stop and the sea turns to cement. A greater-black-backed gull mid-flight halts the smacking of his mammoth wings, lies rigid in the sky.
‘DROPPIT ONE EYE!’ I shout, ‘DROP!’
Now the woman manages to sever you from the collie’s muzzle. As I catch up, he scampers for his life and she beats after him waving her umbrella in the air and crying HENRY HENRY HENRY into the fog. Her voice is so high and sharp, it cleaves through me, and perhaps this is the most unsettling part of all, because people never use such an excited pitch in my presence. People always lower and deaden their tone when speaking to me, as though our conversation is immediately unbearable.
You go to chase them but I grab you. Now I feel as though I’ve left my stomach behind me, as though it dropped out several yards ago and is lying on the sand, quivering globulously. My hands are shaking as I smooth them across your face and neck and back and legs, as I pat you over to check for wounds. My palms come away blotched with red, but there’s no sign the blood belongs to you. You’re intact, and looking up at me with tongue lolling idiotically, tail skipping. With eye and tongue and tail, you’re begging a chocolate treat, expecting my approval.
I don’t know what to do with you. I don’t know whether I’m furious or frightened or a little of both.
I turn and hurry us back in the direction of the fields. I stop only to scoop up the football before reaching the brow of the hill. Now the beach has vanished again. The mist is sitting in the sky like the froth churned up by angry waves sits on the sea in stormy weather. I can’t see the car park on the opposite cliff and I can’t see Henry or his woman or the umbrella. But I notice the place where the sand’s been churned up by our dashing, hurling, thrashing feet. And the black smear of a gull’s wingspan. Flying again. Growing smaller, smaller, smaller.
My father had a golf umbrella. It was dark blue, as dark as blue can be before becoming black. And he brought it with him every time he left the house, his house, even if it wasn’t raining.
My father always left very early in the morning and arrived back travel-weary and infused with the scent of the pineapple air freshener that swung from his rearview mirror, and some nights he didn’t come back at all. When I was a boy, he’d bring me toys and clothes in crumpled carrier bags. The jumpers were usually bobbled with thumb-holes low down in the sleeves, and the jeans were patched in places with slightly brighter squares of denim. The teddy bears were pre-cuddled, the tyres of the dinky cars shorn to their hubcaps, and if anything ever needed batteries, they came either missing or flat. But I didn’t mind. The toys didn’t need to move; I made them move myself. And besides, I liked to imagine the children who played with them before me. I pictured their faces, made up their voices. Then I shifted my playmates into place around me. I included them in my games.
Oftentimes the carrier bag would be box-shaped and jagged. These were the ones I liked the best, they were filled with books. The pages were already dog-eared and finger-printed, sometimes there were even crumbs. But I didn’t mind. I thought then that nothing could ever be absolutely new. The world was so big and so full of people I was certain that every material thing must be used and reused to its zenith; this was the only way it could make sense.
Now I’m afraid to go take you out during the daytime. Now I’m afraid to go out alone.
‘Quiet now,’ I tell you, ‘quiet.’
You’re at the window, yapping. You yap with your whole body, as if each yap were a volt of electricity, cracking through you from whiskers to tail. Now the schools have closed for the summer holidays. I can tell from the arrival of the boys who congregate along the sea front in the evenings, who frolic around until after dark. They’re no smaller than twelve, no larger than sixteen. They number four at least and ten at most, but it changes. Maybe they’re the same boys as last year or maybe they’re the baby brothers of last year’s boys, I can’t tell. They all have the hoods of their tracksuit tops raised and the laces of their runners left undone. They all have the same shiftless way of holding themselves, as though their limbs are hinged into their torsos by a network of sagged bungee clips. Always, they’re an unsightly bunch, see how the silhouettes of their oversized adolescent heads block the bay out? From now until autumn, they’ll be there every warmish night irrespective of the pizzle, as if they’re immune to poor weather, as if the blaze of their hormones is keeping them consistently toasty inside. Their presence is the price paid for longer evenings, a reminder that lessened cold and added light is public property, and not ours alone, as I would like.
The summer boys come from housing estates built into the fields and hillsides stretching inland away from the village and the sea. The housing estate houses are as young as the boys and just as indistinguishable from one another. Venetian blinds and block-paved driveways, dormer windows and red-brick cladding. See that woman coming out of the takeaway? She’s the mother of a summer boy. I can tell from the way she has the face of a potato and the hair of a film star. See that man coming out of the pub? He’s the father of a summer boy, a neatly dressed but beleaguered version of his son, coat over tracksuit and laces neatly tied. These are the people who buy the tool belts and steam mops and magic knickers we see advertised between television programmes, and every day at dusk, their sons trail down-slope to the shore wall. They swagger and perch. Snigger and sigh out a language of abbreviated words and exaggerated gestures drawn from experiences exclusive to this itchy, nasty phase of their lives.
They wait until the grocer’s shutters are lowered and most of the curtains along the main street have been drawn. Now they produce cartons of cheap Czech lager and cigarettes stolen from the jacket pockets of their dads. The lit street lamps are casting a spooky pallor to the boy’s expressions, a hint of menace to suit their moonlit raillery. Sometimes there’s a football and I hear it very late and from my bed, pounding against the salon’s shutters like a leviathan crawled from the sea, knocking to be let in. And in the morning I’ll see scuffs on the sides of the car, perfect circles in the dust where the leather was kicked, struck. The suction cup prints of a colossal tentacle fastened and unfastened in a moment.
Come away from the glass. It’s the most dangerous thing in the world to draw attention to my father’s house. You don’t understand what those boys could do, how easy it is for them to destroy me, to destroy us. I’ve always regretted the way the living room window faces square onto their summer territory and can be faced square back into. This is why I always pull the curtains when it’s full bright, why we never get to watch the sun set behind the buildings across the harbour. I’m afraid the boys will look up and see me sitting pathetically in front of the television with my pathetic dinner on a plate on a cushion nestled between my pathetic knees. I know how cruel boys can be. Even the one with calipers, when we were both older, joined his friends to chase me, chanting, down the laneway, and I saw that what he really kept inside his pencil case were stones for chucking at my window. Now I’m afraid these new boys will come to know me. I’m afraid they’ll call out when they see me on the street. I’m afraid they’ll form a procession as I gambol to the shops and back. Can you picture it? All the summer boys pitching and flailing and clumping in unison behind me.
‘Come away from the window,’ I tell you, ‘away.’
The temperatures are rising, a little bit, I think. The toadflax swells and stretches. From the walls of the village, valerian pushes through the brick’s seams and points unsteadily upward, toward the rooftops. See the buttercups and birdsfoot trefoil. See the red clover which is not red, but pink, pink as the valerian. Now is the season of yellow and pink. The days are still grey, but the grey is lukewarm and airtight, like the village and the bay are sealed inside an enormous Tupperware tub.
You sit quietly on the windowsill. In the potbellied armchair, I read. Sometimes you’re up straight and looking away across the water, your thousand-mile stare. Sometimes you lie with your beard rested on your front
paws, looking in, watching me. What are you thinking? I wish I could teach you how to read. I wish you could understand when I read to you.
When I was a boy, before my father brought me books, on my bedroom wall he hung a chart with the alphabet on it. Twenty-six squares with a letter and a picture in every one and sometimes with the picture over-spilling its designated square to intrude on its neighbour. The RAT was rudely flicking his tail in the face of the SNAKE, who was in turn shaking his rattle into the topmost leaves of the TREE. The only thing my father told me about the alphabet was that H was aitch and not haitch, Z was zed and not zee. He corrected mistakes I hadn’t even made yet.
It was the old neighbour whose name I can’t remember who, after she’d taught me to sew, taught me to read. I remember she lived above the grocer’s and I called her Aunt even though she wasn’t; she was just the woman my father enlisted to sit with me during the day. At the beginning, I read with the index finger of my right hand tracing each sentence word by word, and each word syllable by syllable. Aunt would sit in the rocking chair with her nose poked over my shoulder and shout the whole word every time I hit an unfamiliar sequence of syllables. Aunt’s eyes were sharp but her hearing was patchy and her limbs were quaky as a rabbit with myxomatosis. She only knew when I’d faltered because she’d see my index finger had stalled and was tremulously hovering. Then she’d shout it so loud that the ladies downstairs in the boutique could surely hear. ‘ENORMOUS!’ she’d shout, ‘TURNIP!’
Early in life I learned to look after myself as well as Aunt. I’d see how she was trying to do something: open a can, butter a slice of toast, reach the shelf where the biscuit tin sat, then I’d do it for her. ‘GOOD BOY!’ she’d shout, and a little more quietly but never quietly enough, ‘poor fool’, she’d mutter, ‘poor little fool.’
