Spill Simmer Falter Wither

by Sara Baume

  ‘It’s okay,’ I tell you, ‘it’ll be okay.’

  In the kitchen, I set the switch on the kettle to boil. I lean against the work-top. Already there’s such a compendium of items bulging against my temples. The right column’s an abstract smush, whereas the left is almost empty. I try to remember item by item, but before the kettle has tripped its switch, I realise there’s hardly anything worth crouching down to lift. Hardly anything worth lugging the length of the laneway. Hardly anything worth its weight in expended petrol as we drive. I realise that all these particles of matter don’t matter, that not one is capable of expressing grief as I abandon it. Down the blue rope, from our sit-spot amongst the pebbles, do you remember the lichens, limpets, barnacles, periwinkles, anemones? The sea pinks and chamomile? Do you remember the rocks? Now remember how everything clings to them, how every surrounding life-form must hold fast to the nearest solid thing in the modest hope it will sustain them. Like the pea tendrils to their dead sticks, like me and my unfeeling objects.

  We’re back in the bedroom when the first smidges of dawn illumine the toadflax. See how its leaves and flowers have dried up and died back, as if overnight. Now it’s discoloured into umber, wilted into paper. I sit in the rocking chair beside the fireplace. The grate is empty but for some twigs lost from the jackdaw’s nest. I rock.

  To the right of my mind, there’re the draught snake and the board games, the ash stump and the rag rugs. There’s the souvenir plates; the stupid plates from places the world over but not one place I’ve ever been and not one plate I’ve ever carried home with me. They follow the trail of a life lived before I was born. The only places I’ve ever been are in the books I can’t bring either. To the right, it’s just card and wood and wool, and the house is just plaster and brick and board, and it’s a sad place, don’t you think it’s sad? And it didn’t give birth to me and it isn’t my mother. It is inert, immoveable. Whereas I am alive, unbound. We are alive, unbound.

  My mother is dead. I always knew from the twist in my father’s face, from his fundamental coldness, that she had died and bequeathed him a tragedy with which to define himself for the rest of his years. And me, of course. I was paramount to his tragedy. Now I go to the door of the shut-up-and-locked room and I stand outside fingering the handle. I look down to the draught snake and I look up to the cracks in the ceiling plaster. I feel as though there’s something I was going to say, but it escapes me. And so, I go back to the rocking chair.

  To the left of my brain compendium, there are a few practical items: underpants and the camping cooker, kibble and gas, my father’s slippers, a pebble jar, the low chair and the football, your precious food bowl. To the left, there is you. Of course there is you.

  Now you hop into my lap. And together, we rock.

  ‘It’s okay,’ I tell you, ‘it’ll be okay.’

  falter

  We are driving, driving, driving.

  Over hillslopes and humpback bridges, through loose chippings and potholes wide as children’s paddling pools and deep as old people’s graves. Past lavender hedges, betting shops, sports grounds. Past countless closed doors behind which are countless uncaring strangers, their lives going on and on and on, relentlessly. We are heading inland, keeping to the back roads as much as possible. You are looking out the rear window where the view is best, or perching on the passenger seat with your maggot pressed to the air vents. What do you smell? Fox spray and honeysuckle, pine martens and stinkhorns, seven different kinds of sap? Riding in the car is like watching a neverending reel at a wraparound cinema, complete with the surround-sound of engine putter, the piped scent of petrol fumes and passing countryside.

  We are driving, driving, driving.

  And the wraparound car screen is reeling off monkey puzzle trees and peeling eucalyptus, parish halls and handball alleys. Here’s a pair of running shoes tied by the laces and slung over a phone wire above the road. Here’s a steel grain silo at the edge of a farmyard, nose pointed to the moon like a shoddy rocket. Now here’s a crucifix set in concrete with a vase full of shrivelled stalks in front, a roadside memorial shrine. The plaque’s too small to read but what it means is that somebody died here. On this most seemingly non-treacherous of corners with a cow field either side, some stranger evacuated their vessel for good. What it means is that even the tattered verges are depositories of celebration and devastation in unequal measure.

  We are driving, driving, driving.

  And every time the engine stops, you expect we’ve reached the end. But each stop is never an arrival, just another pause along the way. A snack, a walk, a smoke, a sleep, and off again. Now we piss in the hedgerows, side by side. Shit in the dykes under the cover of dark, side by side. I understand you’re confused, that you had settled into a routine and now it’s hard to fathom the new nook where your food bowl lives, the altered angle of your safe space and the way the view is ever rushing, changing. It’s hard for me too. I hurt to the core of my bones from trying to sleep in the rolled-back driver’s seat. I still haven’t found an efficient way to fold my limbs, nor decided which is the more comfortable side to lean on. My body snaps and creaks louder than the radio and I tend to nod off on dual carriageways. The car wavers onto the white lines and the cat’s eyes bonk beneath our wheels. BONKbonk, BONKbonk, BONKbonk, and I wake to the red twigs of the dogwood shrubs clawing our paintwork. But it’s not only sleeping that’s hard, it’s everything. It’s hard to learn anew how to make it through from dawn to dark without all of the props and pointers inside my father’s house. Without plant-watering, yard-pottering, chair-rocking and channel-zapping. I expected it would be exciting; I expected that the freedom from routine was somehow greater than the freedom to determine your own routine. I wanted to get up in the morning and not know exactly what I was going to do that day. But now that I don’t, it’s terrifying. Now nothing can be assumed, now everything’s ill-considered, and if I spend too long thinking it makes my eyes smart and molars throb. I tense myself into a stone and forget how to breathe. I pull the car to the side of the road and put my flashers on. I list aloud all the things that are good and all the reasons I must go on. Glass pebbles are good, games of football on deserted strands, oil refineries by night, jumble shop windows, gingernuts, broken buoys, nicotine, fields of flowering rape. And I must go on because of you. Now it’s okay; I can breathe again. And on we go. I put distance in front of my face and my body has no choice but to follow, unthinkingly, and your body too. Is this how people cope, I wonder. Is this how everybody copes?

  We are driving, driving, driving.

  And the wraparound car screen is reeling off fields and fields and fields, of wheat and oats and barley which have all died now, and in death, turned to gold. Torn filaments of their gold blows to the ditches, sticks in the prickles, dangles and glitters like premature tinsel.

  We are driving, driving, driving.

  And the car is our house now, home. The boot is our attic. The loose chippings are our floorboards. The sun roof is our balcony. The back roads and hinterlands are our ceaselessly surging view.

  My father didn’t teach me to drive until I was in my forties and he’d started to suffer from gouty feet. It was the twinge in each gigantic foot that caused him to foresee a time when he’d require a personal chauffeur. I used to grant him nobler reasons, now I see this was the only reason. Learning to drive was the most gruelling thing I’ve ever done. I mastered the simultaneous operation of pedals, gear-stick, steering wheel, indicator and mirror easily enough. I trained alone by patting my head and rubbing my belly. The difficult part was sitting in a confined space with my father looking on as I made mistake after mistake after mistake. He’d bellow instructions and mutter and smoke in the passenger seat. He’d slam his heels to the floor every time he feared I’d fail to break, every time I grazed the undergrowth because the passenger window was obscured by smoke. He’d grasp the door handle and squeeze so viciously his fist left a dent in the supple upholstery. Because I was allowed bare
ly any opportunities to practice, it took me three years before I was confident enough to sit with a licensing official in the passenger seat instead of my father, before I obtained my first ever document of identification. The official was a bald man with librarian spectacles. He barely spoke and appeared to be immensely distressed even before he climbed into the car, which set me somewhat irrationally at ease. I imagined he had a wicked wife who had dramatically walked out on him just before he came to work. His state of shock was such that he overlooked every mistake and carelessly passed me. It was a Monday and the date was September 19th. That was the day I became a person; I still believe I owe it to a licensing official’s unfaithful wife.

  The season of falling foliage kicks off with falling rain instead. And a wind so ferocious it shakes down leaves that aren’t yet dead enough to drop. It wrenches away stalks still green to the tips, still being fed by mother trunk, and off they blow. Somewhat less decorously, old fat and rotted branches belly-flop into the electricity supply lines. Now all the surrounding houses are swamped by dark. The people inside are eating their dinner out of yoghurt pots and going to bed un-showered. They’re lying awake listening to the plip-plip-plop of petit-pois and chicken drippers musically defrosting. It’s a power cut, but then I don’t suppose you ever understood where the small ceiling suns in each of my rooms came from in the first place. I don’t suppose you ever pondered the working of the magic switches.

  Now there aren’t any ceiling suns. I used to care so much about incandescence and now all I have is a bag of tea-candles and two torches. I forgot to bring spare batteries. I forgot lots of things. I remember them gradually as we go. Now home is only one room big, I’m surprised by how much stuff we still seem to need, and by how much rubbish we are creating. I sort through our rubbish, apportion it into bags small enough to shove through the slot of a public bin. And every time I see one, we stop and shove, scattering little clues of our passing behind us as we go.

  The car bounces, rolls and jitters like a steel orb in a pinball machine, with no right way to go and no particular destination. We round an everlasting succession of hairpin bends, bump through ten thousand bottomless ruts. Every day we see abandoned traffic cones and signposts heralding road works which never materialise. Now the ditches are distended by blackberry brambles, ferns, nettles, fuchsia, knapweed, elderberries and rose hips, so overgrown they narrow the road to a single lane for travelling both directions. See how the hedge trimming tractor has left a trail of massacred vegetation in its wake. Flowers with their throats slit and berries chopped, popped.

  But between our windscreens, everything is in its right place. My bed-things, a single duvet and a feather pillow, are pummelled into the cranny below the passenger dash where once you cowered. The duvet cover is midnight blue with a motif of stars and spaceships, a coffee stain somewhere, a splodge of toothpaste somewhere else. On the passenger seat, there’s the camping cooker, a flask and a carrier bag of assorted snacks: sesame sticks, granny apples, comice pears and gingernuts, of course.

  The back seat belongs to you. Your food bowl and water dish on the floor, the low chair wedged between back and front seats, the tasselled and checker-boarded blanket slung over its grimy wicker. Your football, gnawed and deflated, is always on the loose somewhere, roving and jumping to the motion of the hairpin bends and bottomless ruts. The boot is three-quarters filled with gas canisters, blankets, toilet paper, a sack of emergency kibble, two gallon drums of washing water. The pockets and compartments are bursting with a muddle of things both useless and useful, from crab shells and bass lures to wet wipes, pencils, loose change, a toothbrush and my penknife. Laid across the sill between the back seat and the glass, there are the tomatoes, twenty or twenty-five at least. I picked every last one before leaving. Then they were still pea green and hard as passion fruit; now they are almost ripe. The tomatoes bring out your inner thief. You can smell their exact phase of ripeness and as soon as I’m not looking, you snatch and pop and swallow. Whenever I leave a window lowered, the last of summer’s drowsy wasps sneak in and fumble between the snipped and shrunken tomato branches. With weary antennae they fondle the fruit, feeling out tiny fissures through which to siphon juice. You snap at the wasps, irritated. They sting you in the mouth and your upper gums expand and lift off your teeth into a Cheshire cat grin.

  Every dawn, we leave the car to walk, to follow your directionless route of indecipherable landmarks. Over a drumlin and a bog, past a saltwater lake and a shooting sanctuary, through a patch of magic mushrooms and a fairy circle. Now here’s an alien thing which might be a lizard and might be a stranded newt. You lick its dead belly. What does it feel like? Like boiled, cooled leather, like licking your own tongue back again? You learn each new stopping spot detail by detail, by its symphony of smell, and never by its signpost. Still I read them out to you. BUNRAFFY, the signposts say, DOWRASH, CREGGISH, LISFINNY. And every dusk, I place a row of tea-candles along the dash and watch until the longest lasting wick is drowned by wax. Spit spit hiss. This is our power cut.

  They are mostly villages, the signposted places, some hardly even that. Did my father realise every last one of them was inland? And if he did, what does it mean? But meaning doesn’t exist unless you look for it, and so I mustn’t look, and so things will not mean.

  After several villages we stop at the sight of a post office.

  ‘Back in a minute,’ I tell you.

  I slide my savings book and driver’s licence beneath the safety glass to a girl with an armload of copper bangles. I ask her how much I’m allowed to withdraw at once. She says ‘what?’ three times before she hears me properly, and each time I repeat myself, I feel smaller and smaller and smaller.

  I drive from the village until we are between cow fields again. Now I pull over and rummage in the rubbish parcel for last night’s sardines tin. I rinse it into the ditch with the washing water from our gallon drum. The lid is only peeled back a fraction, just enough space to fork the fish out. I dry it with a tissue and fold my notes and poke them in. Now I hide the tin in the kibble sack and lock the kibble sack in the boot.

  A village becomes a town when somebody builds a supermarket, a library, a secondary school, a third or fourth or fifth pub, a retirement home. And we are avoiding them, the towns.

  Here’s a thatched and ruined cottage, a couple of slime-walled farmhouses surrounded by shit-caked yards. Here come the featureless bungalows, each with a couple of garden ornaments distributed about their neatly trimmed lawns. Squirrels, gnomes, wild cats, wishing wells, nymphs. Here’s one with a stone eagle atop either gatepost, painted an inauspicious shade of peach and turned in to face one another across the cattle grid. Now here’s an electronic gate with a keypad mounted to a post. At the far end of the extensive driveway, see the unfinished palace. Naked plaster and a lake of mud where grass-seeds ought to have sprouted. Count the front-facing windows. There are no fewer than twelve, plus three dormers and a skylight.

  You can guess the size of a village by the grandiosity of its grotto. Blonde Marys, black Marys. Marys in blue, Marys in white, but Mary always draped in rosary beads, standing on a serpent and holding her palms open around the height of her crotch.

  This village is a row of stuck-together houses, just enough to call a terrace, and the same again on the opposite side of the street. They are pebbledashed and painted beige, cream, wheat and buff. What smells are wafting from them? Soup and gas and bleach and bread and tea and turf? As our car passes in the dark, we see clearly into their brightly lit rooms. We see a china tea set displayed on a dresser, trophies in a trophy cabinet, cooking knifes planted in a block and the steam that rises from an invisible saucepan on an invisible hob.

  In almost every village there’s a shop, and almost every village shop is attached to a pub with a sign over the door bearing the full name of the original proprietor: JAMES O’SHEA, they say, JOHN T. MURPHY. The shelves are dusty. The merchandise is bizarrely organised. A box of powdered custard sits next to a
can of engine oil, which sits next to a tin of marrowfat peas, which sits next to a tub of nappy powder. In the stationary section, there are multicoloured elastic bands but no red biros, and greeting cards for a Holy Communion but none for a Happy Birthday. Now these are the only places we stop to shop. They never stock exactly what I think we want, but there’s always something close enough to compromise.

  And I like the cramped proportions. I like the cold and clammy air, the surplus of useless clutter; it puts me in mind of my father’s house.

  Tonight it’s JACK P. RUSSELL, and I can see over the counter into the part that is a pub. It’s dim and dank and quiet there. It makes me crave a hot, sweet whiskey and a packet of salty nibs. Now I drop my batch loaf, chicken noodle soup and bottled water into the snack bag on the passenger seat. Now I go in through the pub door and rest my hands against the bar.

  The shopkeeper is the landlord. He tells me it’ll take a minute and he’ll bring it out once the kettle’s boiled. I can tell he was butch as a youth, but now he’s sagged like a lumpy old sofa and the tattoos on his forearms are engulfed by body hair. I go back to the car and harness you. I tie the leash’s handle to the leg of a picnic bench and together we sit beneath the patio heater. The barman brings my drink and nuts and a cardboard mat printed with the picture of a beer I haven’t ordered. Tonelessly, insincerely, he wishes me well, and closes the door. It’s a soft night, rainless and calm.

  I sip slow and you catch peanuts in your mouth. How smart you are not to miss a single one. I’d have though the partial eyelessness would affect your depth of vision, but apparently not. I sip, you chew and we watch the sycamore’s crashed helicopters dithering in the dirt, trying desperately to lift into the air again, ignoring their broken rotors.