Spill Simmer Falter Wither

by Sara Baume

  Now I kick your football against the stone fence, against the wall. It smacks into buoys, upsets pots, desolates my ridges. You try to prance behind it but the yard is too small. You lose interest, bit by bit. You cock your leg to piss against the tarp of the log pile and I pick your shit off the gravel before it gets levelled by the ball. I handle it in the way butchers handle raw meat at the deli counter, a plastic bag tied in a knot around my wrist. But I don’t mind because the weather is hot, the turds shrivel into liquorice sticks.

  I’m guessing by Wednesday the calves have arrived in Italy. Would it take three days, or not that long, or longer? Is it only three days since we ventured out? It feels like a lifetime, like the lifetime of a creature which lives extremely long, like an ornamental carp in a Japanese Zen garden.

  You on the sill. Me in the armchair. Facing the bay.

  We see a car with four bicycles strapped above the tow bar, a kayak straddled across the roof rack and a caravan bumping along behind. It jostles up like a shiny-shelled beetle bent out of shape by its alien attachments. Now it jerks to a stop and gobs a family out. The mother takes photographs of the horizon. The children sit along the shore wall tossing fairy bun crumbs to the gulls. And the father adjusts his strappings, bends his attachments back into shape. See the summer whose arrival we waited for so patiently; it doesn’t belong to us. It never belonged to us.

  The salon’s shuttered and locked. The hairdresser’s gone on her holidays and taken the hum of hood dryers with her, the tap of high heels, the tittle-tattle of female voices. I’d always thought these noises irritating, now it suddenly seems they were a kind of comfort. The phone in the salon is ringing, ringing, ringing through the floorboards, jingling like a giant wind-chime suspended in a draught. I try to drown it out by talking, by telling you about the dreary things we do and the blandest of changes beyond the window. I used to tell my father things like this, later when he chose to remain mute and it was left to me to chip away at the surface of our shared silences. Even though I knew he wasn’t listening, it was still hard, it was a bit like stinging myself, over and over. After he died, I continued to ramble. I’d point my face to the ceiling and address him, but it was easier because I knew he couldn’t really hear. And now it’s easiest of all with you. Now there’s no need for the weighing and measuring of words, no need to listen to the way they stand in the air after my voice has finished. I tell you of the new rib tied to a rusted rung, the tower crane raised over refinery hill, the man who practices casting his lead off the pier at high tide. I tell you anything, so long as it staves the smog off, so long as it gags the sentence that shrills in my brain. I KNOW WHERE YOU LIVE it shrills, I KNOW, I KNOW.

  What do you suppose she meant by that? What form of fear was she determining to instil, and am I fearing it as I should be? I’m fearing a poisoned sausage posted through the letter slot, catapulted over the stone fence into the backyard. I’m fearing the piiing-ponnng of the doorbell and a uniformed official standing on the coarse brush, wielding a pole with a modifiable collar sticking out the lowered end. I’m afraid of losing you, I never expected I could be so stupidly afraid of losing you. I see the fat woman on the undersides of my eyelids, her spittle and her sweat. Her words circle inside my skull like a sock trapped in a washing machine, the knob jammed on spin cycle.

  Now see the slim skids of shit down the side of our house, below the roof cranny. Even though I can’t see through the flaky mud, it must mean my swallows, that they’ve chosen me. They’ve chosen us.

  In the yard, I gather all the dead things. Each hummock of solidified earth falls from its pot like a sandcastle, peaked into imperfect turrets. I make a row of earth castles along the stone fence. I stick a few square-ish pieces of gravel into their facades, as windows. I stab a pigeon feather into the centre top of the tallest. Now I realise a castle would never be laid out like this, with its towers all in a tidy row. I should push them together, into a cluster, a fortress. But I don’t. I turn the tap on and unspool the garden hose. I spray my castles down, and as I spray, you snarl and snap at the jet of water, as though it were a living thing. A hostile thing. An assailant.

  She knows where I live, yet I’ve no idea where she lives. But then everybody knows where I live. You’ve seen how they’re always perfectly polite, but this is a pretence; they are pretending. They’ve long since marked me down as strange, a strange man, I am a strange man. And it’s because of my strangeness that they make a special point of knowing where I live. And they wait, and have been waiting all the time I’ve been in this house in this village, all my life, for strange things to happen for which they can finger me, for which they can have me and my threatening strangeness removed.

  Her words are spinning in my brain. Spinning, spinning, spinning without ever making it to the end of the cycle, without ever reaching the stage at which everything goes still, and the door can be opened again. And now the castles are demolished, you dig a shallow hole for yourself in the yard, a wallowing pool. And you lie in the wet mud. You wallow.

  I’m going out. I won’t be long, not even an hour, I promise.

  It’s Sunday and my father used to bring me to mass on Sundays, have I mentioned this already? In the later years, I used to bring him, and in the latest years he’d place his palm over the back of my hand as we crossed the churchyard and lean down hard as if I was a walking stick. My father was raised a Catholic, I presume, but he didn’t abstain from meat on Fridays or put up a crib at Christmas. He didn’t have Jesus in a picture frame with a tiny red bulb for a sacred heart, as Aunt did, and he didn’t stop what he was doing at six o’clock and bow his head for the Angelus bells. I don’t believe he believed. He only went to mass on Sundays because he liked to grumble and smoke by the gates after the communion notices. I’d leave him with the neighbours and sit in the car. I’d wait, and always, he made his own way back.

  I don’t believe either. It takes all of my energy just to have faith in people. I went to mass and knelt on the cold lumber beside my father every Sunday only because he expected me to. During the service, I’d bow my head and un-tether my thoughts. And if there happened to be somebody sitting in the pew in front with a visible coat label, I’d reconfigure the letters into anagrams, as many as I could think of, until it was time to get up again, to go again to the car and wait.

  Have I told you about HORNET? I think I already told you. Hornets are enormous wasps, you know. They eat bees because bees taste like honey. The church is beside the post office and I must have passed its gates a hundred times since then, one year and one half of a year ago. I’ve seen the church-going neighbours, my father’s fellow grumblers who asked me questions after he was gone, in other places around the village and in town. They always seem somehow incongruous; they always catch me unaware. And even though I know who they are and they know who I am, I’ve never spoken or saluted and not one of them has ever acknowledged me either, not even a nod. It seems that outside the church gates, we are strangers again.

  I’m going to put your chair in the bedroom and close the living room door so no-one can see you at the window. I’m going to lock the metal gate so no-one can reach the letter slot.

  ‘Back in a minute,’ I say, and you are a good boy, and so I tell you.

  ‘Good boy,’ I tell you, ‘good.’

  I get stuck in the mass traffic. I’d forgotten there’s mass traffic. The hedges are covered in red blackberries and amongst the berries, here’s willowherb, wild mint, meadowsweet.

  I can’t bear the prospect of having to retell the nursing home story and so I let everybody else file in before me. From the woman in the wheelchair to the man who holds the collection plate, all wearing their mass clothes and pulling their mass faces.

  The interior walls have been repainted. Now they are limp green, the colour of central embankments in winter. The statue of St Joseph is missing several of his digits, as if St Joseph were once the victim of a ransom that took too long to be paid. The plastic posies above the taber
nacle are caked with dust, the Jesus face on the Eucharistic tapestry is a redhead, and the altar carpet is flattened along the pathway of the altar boys’ duties, as though they move on tiny steamrollers beneath their gowns. It’s odd I don’t remember these details, I must have looked at them Sunday in Sunday out for decades and decades. I must have scrutinised them clean out of existence.

  I’m kneeling at the back with three rows between me and the closest congregant. All the things I’ve forgotten, yet I remember the words of the prayers and responses. But I don’t join in. I’m not here to cut bargains. I’m not here to make anagrams. So why am I here? I can’t remember why I came. It seems suddenly rash, stupid. Maybe I just wanted to have a spy at them, at all of these people who think I am a strange man, and know where I live. Every now and again someone glances around and shoots me a look of misgiving. Now it’s the kiss of peace and there’s nobody nearby enough for me to shake hands with, to wish peace upon. I stand with my wrists at my sides and chin rested against chest, pretending it is some kind of contemplation.

  Come communion everybody gets up and queues toward the priest. I stay as I am, as still as I can, as though I might be invisible just as long as I don’t move. The procession kinks around so people can walk back down the aisle and return to their seats. Christ is melted to a wafery gloop on the roof of their mouths and their faces are pointing in my direction. Now I see the fat woman and her little boy. She is marching. He is scurrying behind. His fingers are pressed together and pointed to the rafters. His photo frame smile is demurely pursed.

  I flee. I don’t stop to genuflect. I don’t stop to drop coppers into the collection plate or dip my fingers into the floating dust of the font. I clear the churchyard’s paving slabs, pass through the iron gates and rush to the car. No one catches up with me; no one tries, just like last time. I leave the church door open, and inside the car I can still hear the communion hymn. I can still hear all those ladies in shoulder-padded jackets with purple perms, and they are singing, singing, singing.

  You’re waiting inside the front door. ‘It’s okay,’ I tell you, ‘I’m home again now.’

  You’re grunting your greeting grunt, wagging your tail ecstatically as though we’d been separated for forever. I know it’s too early for supper, but let’s have sausages anyway. I know it’s too late for dawn, but let’s go out and walk. Up the road past the refinery, over the fields to the beach, to our beach, to Tawny Bay.

  As we approach the edge of the slope, sandmartins lift into the sky. It’s as though someone’s standing below the line of the cliff, holding the birds scrunched in their palms, now flinging them upwards, fast, their wings only opening once they are high in the air. I remember finding a stunned sparrow, as a boy, and doing just that, holding and flinging, watching for its wings to open. Only they didn’t, of course, it fell straight back.

  And once we’re over the edge, we are running. Because it is too steep, because we cannot help but run.

  Do you hear it? The piiing-ponnng of the doorbell.

  Now you have to follow me. I have to leave you here and go downstairs. You have to be quiet. You have to wait. ‘Quiet,’ I tell you, ‘wait.’

  There’s a uniform standing in my laneway. Inside the uniform, there’s a woman. A smallish, oldish woman. I hadn’t expected that. She has the look of a John Dory about her, moon-eyed and frowny. There are dark speckles of stubble either side of her upper lip. Leathern patches encircle her elbow bones and her hair thins from the crown exposing a kippah of vanilla skin. For what feels like a long time, the woman just stands there and says nothing. As though she knows I know exactly why she’s here, exactly what she’s going to say. And even though I do, it takes me some time to register the thing she is carrying, the pole. Only now do I see the modifiable collar sticking out its lowered end.

  I do not imagine the contents of her breadbin or the providence of her Christian name. I have only a second to think, and in that second, I think: things are never so immense when they happen as they were in my head. And so the woman warden asks me if I am who I am.

  ‘Yes.’ I say. I’m ready.

  ‘I’m afraid I’ve received a complaint,’ she says, but she doesn’t sound very afraid. She sounds like she’s tired of being at work. She sounds like she just wants to go home for the day. ‘I believe you were involved in an incident last week, along the village bird walk …’

  Now she hesitates, perhaps giving me a chance to chip in, but I don’t. Behind me in the hallway, I picture the clutter of fallen coats, wellington boots, cockle shells, driftwood, plastic bags, woollen scarves. I wonder has she noticed your muddy paw prints on the flat-weave rug. I wonder if she thinks I’m the strange man the fat woman told her I’d be.

  ‘… in which a local boy and his pet were both injured …’ she finishes.

  Now my fists jump to a white knuckle grip on the door frame. I register at once the gravity of the thing she has just said. For perhaps the first time in my life, my internal metronome is not several beats behind. It is on beat; I am unbeaten. My heels dig into the welcome mat, the not-actually-welcome-at-all mat. ‘HE DID NOT BITE THE BOY.’ I say, and she sighs. She sighs with all the unstilted force of several years of dwindling job satisfaction. And I say it again.

  ‘He did not bite the little boy,’ I say, but already the strength is gone from my voice. Because maybe you did bite the boy. I can’t remember. Maybe your teeth grazed his hand in the scuffle, even if you didn’t mean it. Maybe I can’t remember because I don’t want to.

  Life never misses an opportunity to upscuttle us, I think. Life likes to tell us it told us so.

  ‘I’m charged with the authority to seize your animal,’ the woman warden says, ‘and to detain it until such a time as a decision’s reached on its behalf.’

  ‘He isn’t here.’ I tell her. ‘He’s with a friend.’ I’m ready. I’ve had five days to fear this, to prepare. I’ve learned my lines by heart. I’ve locked you in the bedroom wardrobe and turned the radio up loud to muffle your discombobulated hollering. Now she’s thinking, so I go on.

  ‘I haven’t been well,’ I say, ‘I’ve been bed-ridden all weekend. So I haven’t been able to walk him and he’s staying with a friend until I’m back on my feet.’

  She’s still thinking. Is she thinking she can hear a smothered sort of woofing? Is she trying to make out whether it’s coming from inside the house or somewhere in the distance, down the street, an adjacent building?

  ‘He didn’t bite the boy.’ I say again, quietly, I implore. If I straightened my spine to its fullest, I’d be half the height of the pole taller than the woman warden, or thereabouts. But because I’m bent like a man in a pillory, we are standing almost exactly eye to eye.

  ‘Okay.’ She says, clearly, carefully. ‘Here’s what’s going to happen. You’ll collect him tonight and I’ll come back first thing tomorrow. I’ll take a full statement, your version of events.’ I’m nodding, nodding, nodding.

  ‘If you don’t hand him over to me without fuss, I’ll have a warrant to search the premises.’

  She turns to go. The gate swings. I expect she’ll leave it to bang, but she doesn’t. She stops and turns around. She fiddles with the faulty handle until she’s solved its knack. Now the latch clicks softly into place and the sound of the woman warden’s footsteps become the sound of her growling engine. And I stand on the coarse brush of the not-actually-welcome-at-all mat, and wait. I wait until her engine has dissolved into the day. Now there’s only your muffled barking, the radio pealing diddly-eye music, the dinging of a metal rung against the village flagpole, the soft rap and roar of the restive sea.

  White sliced pan, I think, and a name like Orla or Grainne or Margaret.

  As I open the wardrobe door, you topple out head first and I catch you up. You seem to have forgotten it was me who locked you in there. You grunt your greeting grunt. Gratefully you beat your stumpy tail against the carpet.

  Tonight, I do not dream. I sleep in spells, waking
every few hours at different stages of the night, as if there were different stages of the night as there are the day, as if for a meal or a walk or a radio programme. But in the dark, there’s nothing. I go to the bathroom and stand on the tiles to cool my feet. I stand over the toilet bowl and try to piss. But I don’t need to piss, and so it only makes my bladder ache. You get up too. You lie in the hall outside the beaded curtain. You wait for me. I wait for the morning.

  And as we wait we listen to my father’s house, and as we wait and listen, I realise that the rats are gone. I cannot remember them going or say whether it exactly coincided with you, but I realise I haven’t seen them scurrying the perimeter of the yard, whiskers brushing the stone fence, or heard their scratching against the skirting boards, their affrays inside the roof, not for weeks and weeks and weeks. Standing on the cold tiles in the middle of the night, I realise my spate of rats is ended.

  At last, it’s morning enough to get up. I cast the bed covers off. I put my clothes and shoes on.

  It’s Tuesday. But there’ll be no trip to town today, no post office.

  Instead I’m walking from room to room, slow but purposeful. I’m surveying all the flaccid things which fill my rooms. They churn up pictures in my head but the pictures only smudge together, intermingle into brown. If you take more than two colours and blend them, they always make brown, a hundred different yet similar shades. Now I pick up thing after thing after thing. A margarine tub full of incense sticks, a pottery zeppelin, a lamp without a lampshade. These are my father’s things. I’ve never used, never needed them.

  Now I draw two columns in my mind. On the right, there is Everything That Doesn’t Matter. On the left, there is Everything That Does. Now I start to divvy up all of this stuff which isn’t mine but for which I am responsible. And you follow my slow steps, look each way I look, sit at my feet every time I stop. There’s a flake of something pale stuck to the wet of your nose. It looks like a infinitesimal communion wafer. It mocks the seriousness of your face, the worried tilt of your head. I knock it off.