by Sara Baume
What was her name? I can’t remember. She looked like a peasant farmer’s wife from the nineteenth century, her breast bound in shawls with a puckered face in a gap at the top and the wrinkles in her skin eddying into the folds of her headscarf. It was Aunt who was responsible for the only other poster that hung upon my bedroom wall. It was headed ‘Emergency First Aid for Children’ and I suspect she intended it more for her own benefit than mine. Beneath the header there was a sequence of panels and each panel depicted a different scenario in which an adult person was in some way struggling for their life and a child person was doing their calm and measured best to rescue them, and now I remember how the persons from the poster used to abscond from their place on the wall at night and insinuate themselves into my dreams.
In the end, Aunt didn’t die on my watch. I didn’t even know she had and that I’d missed my opportunity to put any of the panels into practice until my father took me to the removal. The funeral home was full of people, there must have been an emissary from every household in the parish, but none of them looked particularly upset, nobody sighed or gulped or sobbed. Back again in my father’s house he asked me if I thought I was old enough now to take care of myself. I was nine. I could read fast as a firecracker. I knew First Aid inside out because every night I dreamed up a new emergency. I banked on this being all there was to know. Yes, I said. And in this way, the years passed and passed and passed, just the old man and me and then just me and then you, and now us.
Today, we are planting. I know it’s already too late in the season. My father’s shelf full of gardening manuals would shake their spines in reproach. But every year I plant according to my own unwritten and annually misremembered set of rules, and every year I accept the bounty however scant or sickly. I pick the slugs off and blast the greenfly down the plughole. Too light to sink, they walk on water like tiny green Jesuses.
On Tuesday, I go out alone and into town. The post office followed by the supermarket, and here I buy saplings and seedlings from the gardening section. Fruit, vegetables and herbs; I’ve never bothered with flowers. I’ve always thought it would seem like an insult to the wild ones which every summer arrive unbidden in my yard. Up from the lightless cold they thrust their heads through the compacted dirt and burst into petals amongst the gravel. As though, like the swallows, they’ve chosen me.
Today it’s raining in the yard and on the sea front and all across the bay, and so we’re gardening in the kitchen, right here atop the unclothed table at which my father died. Whereas then it was tidily laid for breakfast, now my packets and utensils are lost amidst the queeny frill ashtrays, marmalade jars packed with inkless biros and a whole squad of other stuff I never get around to throwing out. There’s half a dozen pea plants for transferring into a grow-bag, now a few trays of tomato saplings and a titsy raspberry bush to go into pots. The pots will allow their suckling tentacles to proliferate, and then they’ll stretch and fruit. You sit between the table legs as I work. You examine the trickles of compost. They hit the lino and scarper free in all directions. Under the fridge, the washing machine, the oven. What do you think my compost smells like? Like the kind of soil a man in a factory made, like moistened rootlings and flittered bark but with an aftertaste of chemicals?
I drag the grow-bag through the rain to the stone fence and clear a spot amongst the buoys and bits of buoy which should seize some sun, if ever the sun comes. The raspberry bush can go here too but the tomatoes stay where it’s snug on the kitchen windowsill. I clear the tabletop back to its original mess and roll a cigarette which tastes as though there are tiny pieces of compost entwined with the tobacco. Now I lean against the door frame with coffee cup in hand and you sitting on my shoes. Together we regard the backyard’s newest arrivals. Soon the pea shoots will be twice as long and their curly tendrils will be grappling for something to cling to. Then we’ll go to the forest and gather broken branches and I’ll push them into the grow-bag for the shoots to hoist themselves up and clasp the mini trees tight to their stalky breasts. The pea shoots need the pea sticks like the ivy needs a trellis, like the tickbird needs a rhino, like I need gingernuts and cigarettes and you at my feet, sitting to attention, sniffing the breeze.
You shift your weight to lean against my shin. You’re dry and warm and soft yet solid. I feel the bulge and fall of your ribcage as you sigh. You seem to do a lot of sighing. I find it strange because I always thought of a sigh as an expression of the sort of feeling which animals are not supposed to be capable of, and I wonder do you sigh because you have the smog inside you, my sapping smog. Does it build within your chest until your muscles spasm and push it out, away?
I don’t expect the rain will let up long enough for the plants to need watering. Standing beneath the door lintel regarding our sorry garden, a swallow swoops low, hesitates, flies on. And I wonder was it one of mine. I wonder are my swallows back.
Once my father was gone, I expected that someone would come for me. I expected them to lock me up somewhere I wouldn’t be able to impede the busy-bodies, the regular people. I expected to be institutionalised. I mistook the shrieking gulls for sirens and locked myself inside the bathroom to hide from flashing lights. But nobody came.
I summoned every last dot of valour I could scratch from my soul, I swallowed a shot glass of rescue remedy and went to the social welfare office. I filled out forms and ticked boxes. I found that continued survival came down to a simple matter of form-filling, a basic proficiency in the ticking of boxes. And because I managed never to miss a box or make an illiterate mark on the bottommost line instead of signing my name, nobody came.
And here I am still, and here you are.
We turn the page of the calendar, from the donkeys to a row of deckchairs in a leafy park with an opalescent pond, a commemorative bench, its inscription too small to read, and a solitary moorhen.
It’s two weeks since the clamping of the collie on Tawny Bay. Two weeks of sheltering in my father’s house. I can tell you’re growing listless. I’m listless too. If it was winter, I could accept the murky weather, the incarcerating walls. But with summer comes hope, and with hope comes disappointment. Now dawn is the only time we can safely walk, and every dawn breaks pale and ungleaming, and every stretch between dawns is ruthlessly long. I want to go out during the day but I’m afraid. I’m afraid of meeting HENRY HENRY HENRY and Henry’s woman again, of being screeched at and flogged in the street with a golf umbrella. I’m afraid of being stopped and asked for my name and our address, of being shown the bite marks in Henry’s princely face and the way in which the distance between them matches the exact distance separating your two pointiest teeth. I’m afraid, I think more than anything, of losing you.
From your sentry on the windowsill, you watch your unfettered fellows trotting the bird walk. You bark and bark yet they never seem to see you back. The living room is cast to darkness by the outside’s bright; you’re but a sparkle on the glass. Do you see the mullet suckling at the water’s surface, snatching for midges? And the old men with girlish fishing rods and packets of white sliced pan? They’re balling bread onto their hooks and floating it on the ripples, feet dangling over the shore wall like gnomes by a garden pond. I rarely see them catch a mullet. With or without reward, they fish. I’ve seen the bread balls snatched by greedy ducks and the hooks snap into their beaks as they try to fly. Only then do the old men reel their broken lines in and gather their gear, drop their feet to the path and shamble away.
And the snapped lines collect eelgrass and litter until the duck grows too weak to cart its monstrous load. Then it lies down in the ripples, its loyal mate forced to watch as it’s slowly drawn under.
See the shelducks and little egrets, the cygnets and swifts. You see every bird the local twitcher misses, although you can’t name a single one.
At dawn, all the places I thought I knew so well are different countries. Damp and rumpled as though rinsed and shook. Our early walks up the refinery road always follow your aimless co
urse of indecipherable landmarks, from a pigeon feather to a smashed snail, from scent to shining scent.
Today, inside the tree tunnel at the end of the sea front, it’s exactly the stage of summer at which the leaves are such a yellow shade of green that they glow, or seem to be glowing. Today, you tow me through the glowing leaves to where there’s a slipway and a boathouse. This is the village rowing club. The boathouse is a prefab painted a coniferous shade of green to flush with the foliage. The slip is slimy concrete. While you are sniffing a spool of fox foul as delicately as though it were a fine cigar, I spy through the window to the wooden yawls laid out on racks, capsized, with their oars amputated and removed.
All winter, the prefab stays locked. The window clots with cobwebs, nobody comes. The yawls hibernate, like big brown bears with polished backs in dark dens. But now it’s summer, the season of regattas. The boathouse is garnished by bunting and every second Sunday, a marquee goes up, a loudspeaker is nailed to a post, a starter pistol is loaded with blank caps, and the rowers come.
My father used to have a shabby rowboat, have I mentioned it before? Have I already told you about the old man’s doorbox? It was roped to a rusted rung along the shore wall and it used to dash itself against the stones in wild weather almost as if it was trying to break itself, or perhaps to break away. After he died, I cut my father’s doorbox loose and I don’t know whether it drifted off or simply sunk into the mudflats.
From the window we watch the handsome boats skimming across the bay between their markers, the rower’s heads lined up as targets on a coconut shy, pumping time like synchronised pendulums. The markers are gallon drums, strung together into a bobbing boundary. The races tempt a straggle of revellers to the shore wall. I can tell the true enthusiasts from their wolf-whistles and binoculars, whereas most of them are wielding choc-ices and coke cans instead, more entertained by the sport of putting things into their mouths than the rowing.
Here in our aerial seat, we are ever uprooted and apart. We are ever looking down on life, at sun visors and bald pates and umbrellas. The rowing club marquee sends a perfume of pig meat coasting over the village and up to meet us. Can you smell it? Sausages blistering against barbeque coals. You lift your head to the opened crack, a crack just wide enough for smells and sounds and breeze but not quite so wide that you could dive-bomb an unsuspecting innocent on the street below. You are concentrating hard on the sausages. Your thousand-mile stare stops dead at the marquee. The drool falls, snares on your beard and swings. We can’t go out to join the revelling, I’m sorry. The regatta is for families. See the kids in miniature life-jackets all blown up like rubber bath toys? See the parents hanging onto a pudgy arm lest a sudden gust capture their balloon child and send them surfing to the trees? It’s for families, not for us. We can only hide here and watch the yawls and the pendulums, the gobblers and gawpers and gabbers.
As evening sneaks in, we go down to the kitchen. I clank the pan onto a hob and fetch a packet of sausages from the fridge. I can’t bear the fatty lumps which squeak against my teeth like polystyrene and I can’t bear the way each end puckers to an unfryable twist, but I like the ritual of Sunday sausage cooking. I like having a calf-high, furred and dribbling excuse to perform it for. I chop your share into easily swallowable cylindrical segments. I extract all the gristly bits from my own sausages with the filleting knife, drop them to your bowl. Now I lean beneath the lintel of the back door with my coffee cup in one hand, a cigarette in the other and you at my feet. Together we wait for the pan to cool.
The tomato plants are sleeping outside now. Perhaps they look a little hardened, fruitless but in flower. Against the stone fence in their sunless sun spot, the peas have yet to clasp their sticks and probably never will, not now. Their leaves are drab, their roots drowned dead in the gritty black scum of the bag. Why does everything either starve or drown? Always either too much or too little, always imbalance. From the doormat at dusk, we hear the race commentator still calling names and numbers and progress reports, still breathing too loudly into the microphone. I’ve never seen what he looks like but his disembodied voice is almost godlike in the way it booms from nowhere and reaches everyone, in the way it’s terribly indistinct but probably trying to tell us something.
Now the pan is cool, ready for you to slather. The steel scrapes against the lino as you lick, and the sound it makes is like tired boots dragging the last few yards home.
My father died of a sausage.
I haven’t told you before because it’s a stupid kind of death. It’s the death of fables told by over-protective parents to caution their children against things which seem humdrum and harmless, to teach them something of the complicated grown-up ways of fearing. There’s the fable of the little boy who had his head knocked off by a lamppost because he stuck it out the upstairs window of a double-decker bus. Then there’s the little girl who tried to pet a lion at the zoo and had her arm munched, right up to the shoulder. But death by sausage is the fable told by adult persons to their own discarded mums and dads, for whom choking is the only crummy kind of peril left to confront them on a daily basis.
My father is the man you can smell all over the house, his house, but never find. You’ll smell his dead skin cells in the leather bind of never-opened books and swept beneath the never-lifted rugs. You’ll smell his dead breath, sausage scented, through the cracks in the roof plaster and the draught from the keyhole of the shut-up-and-locked room. You’ll smell him most of all in the feet sweat pong of my slippers; here the stench is so strong I can smell it too. The slippers are excessively big for me, have you noticed? Even though my feet are uncommonly long and flat to balance the plundering mass of my limbs and pork of my gut, my father’s feet were longer and flatter still; they seemed to reach the full diameter of his unfolded umbrella. When I wear his slippers I must slide my heels along the carpet and grasp my toes to the tatty insoles. Still, I wear them, my incommunicable sense of superstition trumping comfort. Still, I hang two towels on the bathroom rack and stand two brushes in the toothbrush jar. I know the stagnated spit that festers at the bottom is juice of my gums alone, but still.
My father was eighty-three when the sausage segment stoppered his windpipe. I’d expected that having reached such an age, he’d die of some lazy, predictable thing, in a bed with last words and an emphatic rattle. But life never misses an opportunity to upscuttle us. Life likes to tell us it told us so. Even when we are so very old that nothing is alarming any more. So old we sit and watch, and whatever it is, we see it coming. My father had no last words, or at least his last words were spoken too long before the time he died to be remembered, to be cherished, and instead of rattling he banged his fist on the kitchen table, and with the bang still ringing, he raised his hands to clutch his throat.
My father’s name was the same word as for the small insectivorous passerine birds found most commonly photographed on Christmas cards, with orange-red blushed breasts as though they’ve been water-boarded by molten amber and stained for life. But my father’s name is just another strange sound sent from the mouths of men to confuse you, to distract from your vocabulary of commands. It doesn’t mean anything; it doesn’t matter.
Come here, I’ve something to show you.
I’ve kept this book close since I was a boy. As a boy, it helped me to work out certain of my uncertainties about the world. Fairy Tales from Across the Globe is what the cover title says, now let me show you the page I’ve visited most. See the mountain and the meadow. See the humpback footbridge. Now here are the three Billy Goats Gruff, and beneath the stone-clad arch down in the damp and gloom, here is the crouching troll. His nose is warty and his brow is bushy. His eyes have a flash of crazy in them. They are cast up to the elegantly skipping goats. When I was a boy and came to this page, I thought of the children passing on their way to school and felt a twinge of camaraderie with the crouching troll, as though I’d discovered my species. There’s only one picture, still sometimes I’m convinced that I see h
im crouching outside of the pages. On the living room windowsill, beneath the log tarp, low down in the kitchen nook.
Sometimes it makes me chuckle and sometimes it makes me queasy to see how closely I’ve grow to resemble this troll as an adult, as an old man.
You sit in the backyard, on the gravel in a scrap of sunshine, your ears ruffling in the breeze and all the rusted roots gleaming through your ragged coat.
I see your maggot nose twitching. I smell the day’s confections baking in the grocer’s kitchen. The sickly wafts of croissant and apple pie, two different continents together in one oven. What are the other smells, the ones too wispy for my inadequate human senses? Can you smell the compost toasting in the plant pots, the heated wax of the bike tarpaulin, the trace of a cat who passed in the night?
Maybe I was wrong about the seasons. Some sort of summer arrived during the early hours. We woke to the transcendent stillness of a fine day, the first fine day. Bright rays poured through the uncurtained bedroom window, triumphing over the toadflax. We tripped the stairs two at a time, pushed the back door, hopped over the welcome mat. We roused the garden spider who lives between the ropes of the rotary clothes-line and has a gold-flecked abdomen like a tiny amulet. She rose to find the dew already evaporated from the filaments of her flimsy home, a baby bluebottle freshly throttled by her silken entrapments. Dangling alongside the amulet spider, the load of washing I pegged up over a week ago and watched being re-washed by the elements several showers over, is finally dry.
For the first time all summer, I carry our breakfast bowls out to the patio table and we eat to the noise of seagulls barking and night lorries roaring up refinery hill, reaching their destination. I lean back in the patio chair. The muscles of my face droop and my jaw cocks open. On the glass of the tabletop, there’s a bowl of inappropriately winterish porridge, a cup of pungent coffee, a packet of liquorice flavour papers stuck to the flap of a tobacco pouch, my Amber Leaf. The first time I smoked, I was fifty-five-and-three-quarters. Too old for beginning to experiment with injurious substances, but just the right age for taking up a habit that encourages death. I knew exactly how to assemble my first cigarette, I’d watched my father do it ten thousand times. A fat pinch of softly wizened shag, a roll between the middle fingers and thumbs of both hands in smooth co-ordination. I’d trouble getting the perfect turn. My father always made it look effortless. After a few attempts I managed to seal the paper, to pop the roach in, to light. Then I propped it in the ashtray to smoke itself out. Amber Leaf was my father’s brand; liquorice was his dubious choice of papers, and all I wanted was to breathe the companionable smoke. Yet with the smell, a certain dull gnawing inside me eased, and I stopped picking the tough skin around my fingernails. With the second cigarette I rolled, it wasn’t enough to inhale the air above as it smouldered itself to a stub. I lifted it to my lips. Sucked, swallowed. And then I felt a little rush, a little swimmy-headed, a little better.
