Spill Simmer Falter Wither

by Sara Baume

  You’re yowling, nipping. Within the confines of the car, the hitchhiker smells like stout, sweat, rancid butter. As he reaches for the seatbelt, your teeth graze the cuff of his shirt. BOLD I tell you, and you sit back, swallow your yowls and press your face into the gap between front seats. Now you grumble like a kettle brewing, poised for attack. The toes of the hitchhiker’s boots scuff dirt onto my duvet, cow shit and ditch mud amongst the spaceships and stars. He looks out the passenger window and chunters away without listening to himself. His manner is noticeably looser and less calculated than a person in an ordinary state and this is how I recognise that he is drunk. He tells me of the softness of the rain, the early coming of the dark, the poor condition of the back roads. His fingers move in time to his words, tracing squiggles in the air like unlighted sparklers. Whenever they sweep too suddenly, you take a snap, growl a warning.

  SSSSSHHHHHHHH I tell you, even though I know you can’t grasp what form of command this reptilian hissing is supposed to be. You throw me a glance and I wonder if you’re checking to see if I’m punctured.

  The hitchhiker doesn’t try to buckle his belt again but rides with his back flattened to the seat as though pretending to be belted. His chunterings don’t need to be stoked by responses; he asks me no questions, makes no enquiries, polite or otherwise. I wonder if he even knows I’m here; I wonder if he even knows he’s here. He doesn’t ask about you; he doesn’t ask where you and I are going. He doesn’t remark upon the mishmash of belongings rolling and juddering around the car. His eyes drift off across the soggy ditches and I keep mine to the left of the white lines, but I am listening, nodding. I listen with unforeseen intensity, and so there is no need to picture the absent details of his life because he tells me in his loosened, uncalculated way.

  He used to be a pig farmer, the hitchhiker says, and now he isn’t. But he hasn’t retired, he’ll never retire. Now he manufactures the wood chippings horses sleep on, and lots of other animals too, of course. His former sows slept on chippings in two enormous sheds equipped with a complicated system of electronic feeding compartments. They were fed on anchovy fishmeal from Peru, bred for an average of six years and the length of each pregnancy was always exactly three months, three weeks, and three days: three, three, three.

  ‘Did the sows ever go outside?’ I ask quietly while he’s pausing for breath. I want to know whether they saw the sun, all their lives long.

  ‘No need, the pig sheds were only massive. INDOOR FREE RANGE is what ye call them.’

  ‘Pigs are smart,’ I say. I suppose I read this in a book.

  ‘The second smartest,’ he agrees, ‘after primates.’

  ‘Keep any animals still?’ I say.

  ‘Just a cupla your fellas now.’ He warily inclines his head toward you. ‘Rhodesian ridgeback and a lab. Never lock them in. It’s proper cruelty to have them locked in.’

  I plunge back into silent nodding. It’s jackdaws and swans again, the perplexing way in which people measure life, but I let it be. I follow the hitchhiker’s directions, down a circuitous driveway to his farm house. There’s grass growing along the middle of the road, tickling the car’s belly as we pass. There’s a jeep parked on the lawn. It has moss in the blades of the wipers, moss encircling the window frames. The house is run-down and every front-facing sill is utterly empty, no vases or books or figurines, not a single personal item to make a home of it. It’s a sad place, don’t you think that it’s sad? There’s no sign of a Rhodesian ridgeback running free, no sign of a labrador either.

  The hitchhiker doesn’t ask me in. He doesn’t offer me supper, even though it’s supper time. He doesn’t even suggest a cup of tea.

  ‘Thanks very much,’ he says, tonelessly and insincerely, ‘all the best.’

  Now he slams the car door and sways off across the splintered slabs of his driveway, into the dark of his slumberous house.

  We stay as we are with the engine ticking until the hitchhiker has his key in the hole and is wiping his boots against the front step. The evening has already piddled most of its light away. But the sky’s cleared to pink and is covered in straight lines as though the clouds have been doused in amaranth, and ploughed.

  I’m tired, so tired. From the effort of being attentive to the presence of another human, of having to say things to someone who isn’t you, to someone who might actually listen. I don’t feel like driving around for hours to find an appropriate gateway, not tonight. But there’s no real need, we’re already well out of the way of civilisation, save for the hitchhiker in his tumbledown farm house. I picture him slumped at the bottom of his staircase; he only meant to sit down for a second to remove his shoes but now he is drunkenly snoring, dribbling into his collar.

  Both sides of the road are frilled by dead ragwort, dead montbretia. Beyond there’s nothing but field upon field of harvested tillage. We drive on through the dead flowers and the dark. There’s a rat high up in the hedge, can you see him? He’s scaling the scrawny branches of a hawthorn tree. With his lardy arse wedged into a crook, like an ugly bird with its wings coiled into a pointy tail, now he’s gorging himself on hawberries. I’ve never seen a rat in a tree before and I wonder why, if rats can climb, they never climbed down the stepladder in the shut-up-and-locked room? There was a time when I could hear them constantly, running and jumping and scratching about in the roof. There was a time when I used to constantly listen and constantly wait for them to come down on me.

  Further along, there’s a chunk of old fortress collapsed to a landlocked spit, bearded all over by creeping ivy. There’s a great mob of rooks scavenging a freshly shorn field, delving for gold nuggets amongst the gold spikes. Now they rise altogether to the ear-splitting pop of an invisible scarer. There must be fifty of them, maybe even a hundred. See how they fill the sky with tiny brains and tiny hearts, so many tiny pairs of feet.

  You’re watching your reflection gathering definition in the back windscreen. You’re still watching as I find us a gateway and park for the night. A little back a little forth, a little back a little forth. Dinner is powdered mash watered back to life, corned beef shavings and chocolate biscuit fingers for dessert. We’re almost out of washing water again; tomorrow I’ll have to find a stream or tap. The last of it goes toward brushing my teeth, the only way I know of quelling my horrible breath for a few hours, at least. I’m too tired to bother with the tea-candles tonight. I roll out my bedding, brush the hitchhiker’s toe-prints away. Now I try to smoke myself to sleep, and once the tobacco is all gone too, I yank up the duvet, draw it tight around my iron-filing stubble, which isn’t really stubble any more but a beard, my Brillo Pad beard.

  I lie awake on the old seat foam and two fields over from our gate, I see a trailer with a portable billboard attached. The field is otherwise empty, fallowing, and the billboard looks so out of place, like some alien creature that had been dropped there and abandoned. I suppose it must be visible from the main road, which is perhaps another few fields over, I can’t remember exactly. The words of its slogan are barely visible through the dark. It says something like: MAKE WAY FOR A WHOLE NEW YOU. But it took me fifty-seven years to become this me, I think, and I just don’t have the stamina to make so many mistakes all over again.

  At night, the sheep look like walking headstones.

  You’re quick to guiltless sleep, shifting through a sequence of dream positions. Now crumpled, now sprawled, now foetal. Now with elbows akimbo, paws pushed forward and bunched together as if bound, as though you are a dead boar swinging from a hunting sling. I extend my hand to touch you, just to check. You are the only living thing I dare touch. And you like to be rubbed dry with a towel on rain days, to feel your skull patted when you have been good, to be stroked from ears to tail whenever I am reading. Now I run my big hand over your neat ridges of muscle and fat, your sporky bones, your wirebrush coat. And I check your heartbeat, just to be sure.

  The leaves overhanging the car are jostling in the moonlight, tossing their shadow-puppet s
hapes across the dash. Through the slits of my half-closed eyelids, they look like trapped insects swarming on the floor mats, scooting beneath the seats. Now a bat dips and pitches over the bonnet before continuing down the road. For a while, I watch the place where it faded out and I wonder whether it was a bat, or maybe just a light leaf surfing a bouncy piece of wind. It is now, and only because I’m already watching, that I see an owl, a gigantic barn owl. Its face is apple-shaped and onion-coloured. Its wings are huge and mottled. It moves in thoughtful strokes, dives for something, disappears. It’s the most splendid thing I’ve ever seen.

  You’re awake as fast as I can raise the lock. We fall from the car and set off in ungainly pursuit of a bird-ghost. We gamble and trot over a field of square bales and startled mice, smashing the spikes and nuggets as we go. The owl flashes back into view, just for a second before vanishing again, this time into a patch of forest. Now it’s properly lost, impossible to trace its route through the black canopy. Still we trammel to the edge of the bale field, and here I pause for just a blink, but you push on alone, and so I follow you.

  The dry, bare branches high ahead clop against one another. They make a sound like timber horseshoes on hard ground. In the dark, you are no more than a jagged stripe of white beard. It’s only a short way over the crackling floor to a ruined house. Inside, the windows are veiled by filthy nets and lacy cobwebs. Here’s a picture frame with its glass shattered, the photograph bleached out. Here’s a broken mug with a cockerel on the outside and somebody’s old tea stains still tarnishing its base. The roof is off, and high up on a rafter fixed into a nook, there’s a box. A wooden box exactly the size of an owl, with a few coloured wires trailing from it, leading to an identical box lower down. Now here at eye level, there’s a sign emblazoned with the words: WARNING: FILMING IN PROGRESS. DO NOT INTERFERE WITH OWL BOX.

  On our way back to the car, we trudge more than we trot. It’s not until you’re tucked into the low chair and I’m back beneath the duvet, that we hear the owl. It sounds nothing like a hoot, nothing like a too-it-too-woo. But even now, even at a distance, it is startling: it is livid. And I remember what I’d forgotten all throughout our night adventure up until this point. I remember that the owl is a harbinger of death.

  There are barns and slatted sheds behind us, water troughs beside. There’s an electric fence and a mud track. How many suchlike cattle paths have we walked now, between fields at dawn? The fence is switched on and sizzling. I’m stopping, starting, leaning into the bramble hedge to reach the ripest berries. There’s a bag swinging from my wrist carrying at least a half-mile’s worth of fruit, now crushed and leaking black blood through a prick-hole in the bottom. You’re at my feet, scoffing your way through the knee-high berries. I wonder how is it you can tell red from black amongst all your yellow and blue and grey, now I remember that ripeness has a smell.

  One second you’re beside me scoffing, the next you’re rocketing away up the cattle path, and I glimpse a ginger-coated thing rocketing inches ahead.

  A fox? I call your name even though I know you won’t hear me, won’t come back. The ginger streak dives into the undergrowth and you lunge after it. I hear it howl, you yelp. I’m running to catch up, though I’ve no idea what I’m going to do once I get there. Now I see it catapult into a tree, and because rats aren’t red and foxes can’t climb trees, of course, it must be a cat.

  The cat crouches in the low branches, raises its hackles to hiss. Now you’re sniffing hasty circles around the trunk. You don’t appear to understand exactly where the cat has gone; it doesn’t seem to occur to you to raise your head upwards. Now I reach you and hold you still. There’s a red scrawl across the bridge of your muzzle, a few dabs of blood on your forehead, but the cat missed your eye. Thank goodness, it missed your eye.

  I re-attach your leash but you’re obstinate, and now I’m dragging, dragging, dragging. Back on the cattle path, I lift a stone and turn around. I take aim and fling, hard as I can. Now I do it again and again, until I clip the cat’s back and it scrambles higher and blends into the unfallen yellow leaves. It is a sycamore tree; it seems to be marking a field boundary.

  ‘Come on,’ I tell you, ‘brekkie.’ And you come.

  What happened to our blackberries? I must have dropped them. Now see how the bag’s exploded in the dirt. We leave them for the birds and bugs.

  The road meanders. There’s a river to one side and a wood to the other. Another wood. I didn’t expect that for every shell on the coast there’s a tree in the midlands.

  From the radio, an expert is telling us how some blackbirds have a tendency to imitate car alarms. But what does the car alarm mean in bird-speak, and what do the other birds say back? Or do they say nothing and shun the alarm bird? Do they point him out to one another and remark that he’s strange? The expert doesn’t say.

  You’re not listening anyway; your thousand-mile stare pierces the woods. The river is really only a stream. Still, good enough for refilling our drums. In some places there are shallow meres and squitty waterfalls. Elsewhere the ditch is too thick to see through. The wood climbs a hill away from the river and the road. Most of the slope has been deforested and there’s nothing but gorse to hold the loose logs back, to prevent all the rejected bits from ricocheting into the traffic. Not that there is any traffic, just us.

  Now we come upon a clearing at the river’s edge which looks faintly as though it might once have been a designated parking space. Here the river pools, so once my drums are filled, I set to washing my socks and jocks. I empty my soap powder into the water without thinking. It’s not until I gather my slop pile for its final squeeze that I remember the river creatures. Some bubbles escape my washing pool and infiltrate the current. And I feel suddenly thoroughly terrible that I might have poisoned them. Remember the radio expert who told us about the male roach who developed eggs as well as sperm, because the water he lived in is polluted by insidious endocrines, do you remember?

  Here’s a footbridge with rope handrails and decomposing planks. You’ve already crossed and found something to sniff on the opposite side. You seem especially panicked by the meaning of this smell. Now I hesitate to follow, just for a second. I think about the wood where I lost you or you lost me, where we lost each other. I remember the Billy Goats Gruff and I lean over the handrail to check for a troll. Below, now my bubbles have been carried on, I can see minnows, sticklebacks, baby rainbow trout. See these brittle stone caskets; they are sheltering the larvae of the caddis fly. And these triangular ripples are the tracks of a whirligig beetle who’s just skated across the surface to reach the farther bank. See the silty mud at the pool’s very bottom. Down there I’ll bet there’s a family of frogs preparing to sleep out the coming winter. But there isn’t any troll, of course not. I am the troll.

  A trail looms from the forest floor and rises up the hill before us. It disappears beneath the forest’s ceiling of dying leaves and thriving needles, of ripening conkers and burgeoning pinecones. There’s a handwritten sign nailed to a stump in the shape of an arrow pointing to the trail. RINGFORT it says. What do you think, would you like to see a ring fort? It’ll probably be overgrown and disappointing even if we manage to find it, but I’ve never seen a ring fort before, and hundreds and hundreds of years ago, people used to live inside them. They built earthen banks and raised huts and dug chambers and clad the chamber walls with flat, smooth stones. Then they squeezed themselves inside to hide from death.

  Up, up, up we scramble.

  You’re drawn on by your panic-worthy scent, I’m drawn on by the low autumn sun winking through the scraggled branches, the promise of an earthen rampart. Past cobnuts, lords and ladies. Past a magic toadstool bent and macerated like an ancient man, a tiny ascetic taking refuge in the woods. You leap and tear through the tangled stems. I’ve never seen you so messianic. Does the forest make your brain buzz with memories of digging out in spring, of bounding with the baiters? Now you clamp something beneath the knotweed. A dormouse, a field
mouse, a bank vole, a shrew? I watch as you mercilessly nibble it to death, now stand with a paw entrapping the tail, waiting for it to betray a sign of life. It appears to be breathing even though its organs are surely pounded to pieces. Now the last nerve-ending in its acorn-sized body short-circuits, and with the flick of its tail you recommence death-nibbling. I see it’s a shrew, poor shrew. It should have kept still, but it’s too late now. The shrew only knew to fear buzzards, foxes, owls, mink. How could it have imagined such a thing as you? Its lost life was worth no more or less than yours or mine, than the man in the pope mobile or the sardines in the sardine tin. You might at least have killed it quickly.

  And almost at once, you are off again, and I must run after you. Pitch and clump across the pliant ground, flailing the buckler ferns down, cracking twigs with my planky soles. This time I will not go quietly to the car and wait. This time I will not lose you.

  I find you in a bank. I find not you but a burrowhole and know that you have crawled inside it. I know from the sound of your muffled braying. I know from the shrapnel of mud shooting free from the mouth of the hole as you dig.

  I am an imbecile. An imbecile for never having you fastened on the leash and an imbecile for bringing you here to this forest filled with irresistible burrowholes. And the only way to redeem my imbecility is to dig too, is to out-dig you.

  I find a fat stick. I press my fingers together to make shovels of my ungainly hands. I prod and break and scrabble and fling and claw. I work so hard I forget my ungainliness, I replace it with a reserve of strength I didn’t know until now I’d been reserving, by a wildness that I learned from you. Animalised, I am digging, digging, digging.

  An oblivious blackbird shouts from the buckler ferns. Hurdy-gurdy hurdy-gurdy hurdy-gurdy hurdy-gurdy it shouts, and so it must never have heard a car alarm. It sails my thoughts back to the barn owl and even though I know of course it’s a blackbird and not an owl, not a harbinger, I shout into the ferns IT WON’T BE HIM! And then I shout into the hole IT WON’T BE YOU! Do you hear me? It won’t be you, okay? I promise.