Spill Simmer Falter Wither

by Sara Baume

  The villages we pass through and sleep by, whose marrowfat peas and corned beef we purchase, whose pubs we sometimes sit outside; I read out their names to you. DYSSERT, the signposts say, SUCK, BINDADA, TOSSIT. They are, all of them, middle-of-nowhere countries, left-behind countries, dead-end countries, no countries at all, really. They are sad places. Don’t you think they’re sad? But then I suppose this is how I always expected them to be. But then I suppose I always expect everything to be sad until proven otherwise.

  A boy, a waifish boy with prematurely skimpy hair, asks me to stand by the gate with my arms outstretched so his cows will know which way to go. He’s carrying a switch, twirling it between his fingers like a majorette’s baton. He caught us walking through his field, his father’s field. I thought he’d ask me where I came from, why I’m parting a path through his beet. Instead he asked if I’d help him herd.

  They are black and white and mud caked. There are twenty, twenty-five. I can tell from the swollen udders that they’re milking stock, heifers.

  I tie you to a fence post and stand beside the gate with my arms spread. From fingertip to fingertip, as long as my unstooped self. Now the cows come plundering toward us. They are disconcertingly fast for animals so thickset, so poorly streamlined. My role is to act as a human hedge, to bar the straight-ahead path so they’ll know to bear round the corner toward the parlour.

  The leading heifer waits until her snout is inches from my chest to swerve. I smell a puff of hot fog from her nostrils. It is sort-of sweet, almost cidery. Do you smell it too? Behind me beside the fence post with your hindquarters backed into the ditch, you’re unusually abashed. Now all the other heifers follow. Feel the thunder of hooves as they pass.

  The boy comes last, twirling his baton. He thanks me, locks the gate behind himself. Now he follows his cows along the field boundary toward the farm.

  I untie you, and as I do, I don’t know why, but I feel euphoric. And you hop up and down in excitement, as though the cows were something we survived. You rush and skip into the beet again, as though you are euphoric too.

  The radio plays, almost incessantly. I tune to the speaking station first thing. We listen to the news bulletin over and over, to the newsreader’s accentless voices. I wait for them to sneeze or sniff or clear their throats, but they never do. Every day there’s a succession of experts on the radio, telling us things. Today an expert is telling us how people choose pets they feel reflect the way they see themselves, and in time, the person and pet grow to resemble one another. After the speaking is ended, I turn the volume very low and switch to the classical station.

  Your maggot nose intersects the rearview mirror. Your head’s held erect to catch smells breezing through the opened crack of the passenger window. Your ears have fallen back and open. Inside, they’re white and bald and twisted. What do you think of the classical music? Of the chimes and pops and strums and biffs, of the drum rolls which mount into grand cymbal smashes? You seem to be listening, but I can’t be sure.

  Now I glance at the side of my own face in the mirror’s foreground, and I wonder have we grown to resemble one another, as we’re supposed to. On the outside, we are still as black and gnarled as nature made us. But on the inside, I feel different somehow. I feel animalised. Now there’s a wildness inside me that kicked off with you.

  The sun’s out. It saturates the distant dual carriageway with watery quivers. Inside our shell of steel and glass, sheltered from the nipping autumn wind, warmed by the sun and lulled by the bump and sway, I can feel myself pitching toward sleep. Now our wheels err onto the cat’s eyes and the BONKbonk wakes me up. I roll the window down and hang my elbow into the cleansing car wind. I keep my hand poised to spring into a shield should you attempt to leap out at a pigeon or a cat or some other piece of prey, into the whoosh and crush of the speeding road.

  We’ve already seen enough dead creatures since the driving began, of all shapes and phases. From creatures still drenched by internal fluids to creatures pancaked and sun-dried to a ship’s biscuit of their former selves. Do you see that neat little pile of mush, no more than a balled rag in a puddle of scarlet? It’s either a burly rat or a baby rabbit, impossible to tell. Now here comes a fox with both its eyeballs popped. See the peculiar angle of its dislocated tail bone and the place where a snapped rib has prodded free. Do you remember the tortoiseshell kitten, how it wore a dainty collar and the dainty collar’s dainty bell had been pressed into its throat like a dainty cookie cutter? Do you remember the badger, the badger who forgot to use its designated underpass? He was too sturdy for properly squashing; he lay supine on the side of the new dual carriageway, as though napping.

  Hares and mice, wagtails and rooks, squirrels and mink. Every kind of creature every kind of killed. Eviscerated and decapitated, lobotomised and disembowelled. Sometimes the only remains are a puff of uprooted plumage, pale down dancing in the whoomph of air from passing vehicles, no sign of the bird from which it was bashed loose. The people inside the grim reaper cars don’t care, they have places to go, they keep going. Now we circle a roundabout and circle again, and as we circle, I watch the traffic. I wonder where everyone is going. And I wonder if any of the roadkill creatures actually wanted to die and threw themselves beneath the speeding wheels. A lethargic swallow who couldn’t bear the prospect of flying all the way back to Africa again. An insomniac hedgehog who couldn’t stand the thought of lying awake all winter with no-one to talk to.

  I indicate, pull onto another dual carriageway. Up ahead, there’s an indiscernible thing obstructing the traffic. For at least a hundred yards, vehicles queue to pass the obstruction in single file. We creep closer. I squint into the sun, trying to make out what the fuss is. You press your face between front seats and squint with me. There’s a car and a motorbike pulled awkwardly into the hard shoulder. The car has its flashers flashing, its hazard-triangle propped inside the yellow line. Now we see it, lying in the middle of the road. A swan, a mute swan. It looks like an offcut of organza, crumpled around the edges, twitching. As we pass we see its long neck has buckled into its body like a folding chair. We see its wings are tucked back as if the tar is liquid and the swan is swimming.

  There are two men and a woman in the road. One man is standing on the tar, the other is directing the traffic. The woman is kneeling down beside the swan. I think she is crying, she seems to be crying, and this makes me suddenly angry. I think of all the other creatures we’ve seen since we set out. I think of the rat, the fox, the kitten, the badger. I think of the jackdaw, did you see the jackdaw? We passed it in the queue to pass the swan. Its beak was cracked open, its brains squeeged out. Why didn’t anybody stop for the jackdaw? Because the swan looks like a wedding dress, that’s why. Whereas the jackdaw looks like a bin bag. Because this is how people measure life.

  From the radio, an expert is telling us how the extinct and endangered animals and birds and fish must be brought back, or the planet will slowly fall to pieces, bit by bit by bit by bit.

  We stop at a petrol station with a sign for a public toilet. I find the bag containing my soiled socks and jocks, I squash it small as it will squash.

  ‘Back in a minute,’ I tell you, even though I know, all going to plan, it will take ten at least. Sometimes I take liberties with the things I tell you. I know you understand this phrase means I’m leaving and not bringing you along, but every time I leave I guess you don’t understand when I’ll be back again, or if I will be back at all. You may be able to smell time, but you cannot tell it.

  There’s nobody else inside the gents. There’s hot in the hot tap and soap in the soap dispenser. It’s the powdery sort. It comes out in feeble coughs. It slows me down. Still I’ve managed to wash everything up to the final sock when the door swings and a man comes in. I don’t see what manner of man; I bow my head as he passes. I feel his eyes travel down my plait and across my hunch to settle on the gap between sinks where my underwear’s heaped. Now he goes into a cubicle. I hear the slide and clac
k of the bolt, and a second later, an ugly, jagged splash. Now I squeeze the heap, slop it back into the bag and make for the car park.

  A mile or so along the road, I pull in and drape my washing over the rim of the back seat. You examine my socks as though they’re somehow exciting. You sniff my underpants crotch by crotch until I shout at you to stop.

  ‘You’re horrible,’ I tell you, but I’m laughing.

  It’s the oak that goes first; the beech that holds on for longest.

  Last night, the in-between leaves dropped altogether and at once, as though a herd of nocturnal giraffes came sweeping through, stretching their prodigious necks into the treetops, stripping the branches bare and then scattering the stripped leaves over their footprints so no-one will know who to blame. This morning, now freed, the stripped leaves skip and soar and shapeshift. They scuttle like pygmy shrews, jump like natterjack toads, flutter like common chaffinches. They spread across the road and contort into letters of the alphabet, miniature whirlwinds, religious apparitions. Did you see it? Did you see the Jesus face? They always look so much like something else from a distance, and up close, I’m always disappointed when they transfigure back into leaves, just leaves. Now I’m snatching the air because it’s supposed to be lucky to catch a falling leaf. I’m jumping, jumping, jumping and still I can’t get any. But they’re landing on my boulderish back and sticking to my greasy hair, and maybe this is lucky too.

  It is the most absolute of autumns. See the tractor-lawnmowers riding out for the last cut of the year. Smell the freshly severed stalks. The slow-to-start summer clung on throughout September, but now it must be October, or nearly October. How long have we been driving? A month, at least. Six weeks, maybe. Soon I think I’ll need another post office.

  What else is wafting through the air vents? Wind-fallen crabapples abandoned to rot? Bonfire smoke and rowan berries? Here’s a rusted iron water pump, handleless and unpumpable, so there’s no need to stop and test it, to try and fill my drums. Here’s a fugitive straw bale lodged in the ditch brambles, estranged from its fellows still clustered in their field like a herd of motionless highland cattle: oblong and exquisitely brindled. Now these are last year’s stacked point-to-point jumps, birch twigs bundled, cast aside. The cotoneaster and its waxwing in his Zorro eye mask, and everywhere the blackberries are undersized and inedible after the superfluity of summer rain. See how every berry is the runt of the briar’s litter, rotting in its receptacle.

  Here’s another grain truck. We’ve spent the whole of harvest season getting stuck behind strange farming contraptions, listening to the clatter of threshers and shearers and spinners as we drive. But now it’s only grain trucks, a new truck round every corner, and every truck sending pale chaff flurrying from their open tops into our windscreen. I never overtake them. Why bother, what’s the rush? It’s good to be able to roll a cigarette and hang my elbow out the window, to watch the pumps and bales and jumps pass as I smoke. See in the distance, the mustard-coloured apex of a hillslope perfectly centred inside a V of greenery? It doesn’t matter what month; it’s exactly the time of year at which everything is mustard-crested. It’s the most absolute of autumns. But soon, slow, autumn will lose its radiance. Autumn will be threshed and chopped and spun back to brown and bole and dun.

  Now all the ditch’s tiny celebrations and devastations proliferate and fill me, buoy me, and in this way, the fear subsides, to some degree. I realise that you were not born with a predetermined capacity for wonder, as I’d believed. I realise that you fed it up yourself from tiny pieces of the world. I realise it’s up to me to follow your example and nurture my own wonder, morsel by morsel by morsel.

  See here, a banana skin squewered onto the spike of a fence. Do you remember the walk up the road through the forest and the banana skin which lay by the refinery gates below the intercom? Remember how the world was then that small. See how, now, it’s a limitless expanse of liberated bananas.

  At last, a village shop that stocks the right batteries.

  I can see where the old fireplace has been shoddily boarded up. And the bench which stood in front is pushed against the wall and piled with multi-packs of toilet paper. The grocer’s next to my father’s house used to have an open fire in winter, way back when I was a boy, long before the era of tags for measuring loyalty and robotic checkouts. Today I load up on batteries and jumbo oats. I take an eight-pack of fish fingers from the freezer for our supper and balance a bag of barley sugars on top.

  The tall, concrete counter is paved with broken tiles and I can see the borders of lost coppers twinkling between the cracks. The man behind the counter is easily old enough to have lit fires inside his shop. He asks a lot of questions. He asks if I’m just passing through and where did I come from. Am I from there originally and what was the weather like when I left. He eyeballs my toilet paper and batteries and fish fingers and barley sugars as though he’s never seen them before, as though his own goods are suddenly as alien to him as I am. Both his palms are laid against the broken tiles and he gives no indication that he’s going to charge me until I answer.

  ‘Yes,’ I say, ‘the south coast, yes, and it was dry, but windy.’

  Now he starts to chunter about the prevailing southerlies as though they’re somehow my fault. He doesn’t like the wind, he says. It makes a howling noise in the telephone wires and keeps him awake at night. Now he forgets to be nosy and starts telling me of his struggle against sleep.

  ‘The older you get the tired-er you are,’ he says, ‘but the harder it is to go to sleep.’ He shakes his head sadly, and I picture him lying in a dark room with wood-panelled walls and a china chamber pot under the bed, and I recognise him as a person who is lonely as opposed to solitary, who did not choose to be on his own but involuntarily lost people until he was. Now he digs his nails into the counter’s cracks.

  By the time I get back into the car, the fish fingers have started to defrost. There’s a soggy patch on the cardboard, just underneath Captain Birdseye’s lapel. And you lick the lapel, wagging.

  Tonight, the windows fog. The fan grumbles and the wipers moan. It’s raining and we’re lost. The bulb of the left headlamp is out, and so it must seem to oncoming traffic as though our car face is winking. See how all the cars have car faces, headlamp eyes and a shiny-toothed number-plate smirk.

  The road tapers into a single lane and a succession of roundabouts. Each has a signboard bearing the name of some obscure saint, and almost every second roundabout is encumbered by road works. Now the workmen have gone home and left their machinery slumbering for the night. Portable barricades and flashing arrows draw us into yet more erroneous detours and abandoned traffic cones. Do you remember the traffic cone buried in the bay? When the tide went out, it poked up as far as its third band. Then when the tide came in, it was again submerged and I’d forget that it was there at all. Still buried, just out of sight. I’d again forget that things continue to exist even though I cannot see them.

  A wrong exit off the roundabout of St Gobnait brings us to the outskirts of a city, a former village subsumed by metropolis. We pass a Mary in a perspex box beside an ATM machine. Now, on a street too dark to see the street sign, I find a couple of empty parking spaces in front of a shuttered shoe shop, an empty unit with a TO LET notice and a brightly lit fast food takeaway. I’m hungry and dreadfully need to piss, this is why we’re parking. There’s nobody on the street, only the lampposts plotting a passageway through the dark. Come here and let me clip your leash on. Now we leave the car and walk up the footpath and into the shadows. You sniff and raise your leg against a drainpipe and once you’re finished, I bring you back. I lock you up safe with a window ajar, your water dish replenished.

  ‘Back in a minute,’ I tell you, and now I go into the takeaway on my own.

  I don’t like urinals but there’s no-one else here so I hurry up and use it. I glance around the bathroom as I piss. There’s a collage of old tissue glued to the ceiling. Sopped and flung, now it’s dried
to creased splats. It reminds me of flat fish only without the sideways eyes. Like flounder, turbot, dab, like Dover sole. Back in the over-bright restaurant, I order a coffee and two large punnets of chips from the brown man behind the till. The brown man is smiling and I notice how his smiling jaw is mottled by spots, and I realise I hadn’t realised before that black skin could pimple in just the same way pink does, and I wonder if Chinese people pimple too. Now I’m fidgeting with the change in my wallet, too embarrassed to look again. I count out the exact price, take the cup I’m being handed and as I pay my fingertips brush the brown man’s palm. I keep my eyes low to my cup. I see the coffee’s weak and watery brown, exactly the same colour as the cashier’s skin.

  I wonder if the cashier sleeps at night. I wonder if, when he hears the wind in the phone wires, he thinks it sounds like a howling thing. Like a wolf or ghost.

  I sit at an empty table in the empty restaurant. I wait on our chips. The chair’s uncomfortably slippery, the seat of my trousers squeaks against the moulded plastic. There’s a picture on the wall showing a smiling child, and the child is advocating various accoutrements to my chips. Bacon tenders, curry coleslaw, chicken nuggets. In the next picture, the child has been joined by a full set of smiling parents, and altogether they are sharing a Chicken Family Box. Now I look away and out the window. I remind myself that they are just models told to pose, that in reality, they aren’t even related. From where I’m sitting, I can see through the restaurant’s glass front to where our car is parked. I can see the silhouette of your head and ears and neck, your crushed velveteen paws resting against the dashboard, the glint of the tag on your collar, the glint of your maggot nose and the glint of your lonely peephole. Out the restaurant’s glass front and through the car windscreen, I can see all of my family at once, glinting all over. And suddenly you seem so small and faraway, and I realise we haven’t been separated for more than a few moments in weeks and weeks. Since the beginning of autumn, since the driving began.