by Sara Baume
I get the car stuck in the town’s illogical one-way system and drive us in circles until you begin to look sick. Now I stop at the first free parking space and shunt into the drain gully. As we climb from the car, I remember the muzzle far away on its apron hook. I know I promised never to mention it, but I feel as though you should be muzzled now, as though it’s dangerous for us to walk about this sea town with your mouth unshackled. But I brush the feeling off; today I am strangely buoyed, strangely brave. Perhaps it’s the sea gales, the inspiriting salt air. Perhaps the months of driving have peeled back some of my strangeness, my horribleness, and replaced it with pluck.
FARMERS MARKET the sandwich board says, yet few of the stallholders look like the farmers I’ve known, like the old men I used to see at mass, like the pig-farming-horse-chipping hitchhiker. These farmers have woolly scarves and placid, unscrunched faces. Their stalls hold potted heathers, rooster potatoes, plaited and sugar-dusted loaves of bread, iced sponges on paper doilies. The market pleases the bowerbird within me at every swivel. Here are baskets of green, red, yellow apples and glass bottles of clouded juice. WINSTON, JUPITER, the baskets say, EGREMONT RUSSET. Now see the cages packed with poultry of every squawk and plumage pattern: bantams, rosecombs, quail. Plump, white ducks with plump, white eggs arranged in boxes stacked on top of their cages.
Of course you see them. I have to bind the handle loop of your leash around my wrist as we pass and you nearly saw my hand off with your tugging. I know the market’s disorientating; it’s disorientating for me too. All of this colour and movement and sound, after so many weeks just you and me in the quiet capsule of the car. The smells are of stoneground flour and ripe cheese and broken eggs and lavender and shit-coated feathers. So many new smells that you’re tossed about by the whimsy of your maggot nose, from cured hams strung up on hooks to feathery creatures innocently scratting. Now a girl with a stud through her upper lip like a silvered beauty mark proffers a tray of tiny breads.
‘Would you like to try some tapenades, sir?’ she says. Her voice is sing-song.
The tiny breads each carry a tiny splodge of grainy paste, in faded black and brilliant red and anaemic green. I know I should keep walking. Ordinarily I’d pitch and clump away as fast as possible. But I don’t. I take a red, the colour of warning, of admonition. The taste is vivid. It seems to gush into all the parts of my mouth at once, and is good, so good.
‘You like that one?’ the girl says, ‘that one’s my sun-dried tomato. Here, have another.’
As though faintly inebriated by sun tomatoes, again I accept. I take a second red bread, and without thinking, I drop it to you. You’re watching, waiting dutifully at my feet for a little taste of whatever it is I’m eating.
‘Treat,’ I say; this is your favourite word, foremost amongst your sixty-five.
You gobble the bread and lick your chops, and the girl laughs, sincerely. Just for a second, I feel like a regular person, doing regular things, in a regular way. I look around at the crowd, at the peddlars peddling and browsers browsing, at mums rallying three-wheel buggies and teenagers slouching against each other and old folk baby-stepping behind their walking frames. And I feel faintly ordinary, faintly inconspicuous, faintly unsuspicious. And it’s good, so good.
‘I’ll take a jar,’ I say, ‘of the sun tomatoes.’
The girl laughs, but not in an unkind way. From a wad in my shirt pocket, I unroll a note and hold it out and she hands me back some coins and a jar-shaped paper bag.
‘Thank you,’ I say, ‘thanks very much,’ and off again we wander, in the direction of open water, feeling all vivid inside, all sun.
At the stop of the slabbed-stone plaza, there’s a railing running along a step which falls into the sea. I’m leaning against the railing and you’re standing on your two back legs with your front feet rested against the step like a tiny man, like the two-year-old child you match in intelligence. Straight away it feels as if I can breathe better, now the view is blown open, now the land is drowned. And even though it’s a different bay and a different ocean, you smell the cloy of rot and fish and tang and wet and seem to recognise a trace of home.
The waves are breaking against the concrete, but it looks like there’s a measly beach beneath the step. What stage of tide are we at? It must surely be the highest. I always used to know, yet somewhere in the scrum of countryside, I lost track. Now I tow you along the shore front in search of sand, past the last of the market stalls and away from the crowd, following the footpath which follows the curve of the bay until we come upon a solitary caravan.
The caravan is a strange distance from everything, everyone else, as if it’s been nudged to the very limits of the town. Through the broad rear window, I can see three seated women with white-gold hair and thick shoulder spans. They’re facing a huge screen mounted to the low wall above their heads. On the screen there’s another gold-haired but slimmer woman facing back out at them. She’s speaking through her smiling teeth and jiggling her hands and bouncing her empty gaze about to include everyone and no one all at once. She’s wearing a madonna blue dress, and on a short shelf alongside the mounted screen, there’s a Mary, a scapula and a crystal vase of fresh carnations: a homemade grotto.
I turn away, I don’t want the women to see me. As I do I notice you’ve rammed your claws into the concrete and will not budge. What is it, what’s wrong? I look into your eye to try and tell what you’re feeling, but it’s black as your fur. All pupil and no iris, no white. Now I remember from somewhere that these are the kind of people who bred you, the kind of people from whom you ran. Is this why your chest’s dropped low to the concrete, why you’re pulling, pulling, pulling? I steal a last look at the caravan and as I do I understand how these people are outcasts too, pariahs, and I know I should feel some throb of kinship. But I don’t.
I turn around and allow you to tow me all the way back through the plaza, the market, the town, to the car. I lock our buttons against the world, against the peddlars and browsers, the slouchers and strollers. I look out the windscreen at all the people walking on the street and sitting on high stools in cafes and queuing beneath the shelter beside the bus stop sign. I know each person is carrying a tiny screen in their pocket. I know each screen holds a list of the names of other people who are not here but somewhere out there also carrying a tiny screen. I know that inside each pocket there’s a gold-haired woman whispering to the person who carries her, telling them they are included. Sitting locked inside our quiet capsule, I try to picture the details of these people’s lives, in order that they’ll seem less unfamiliar, less unsettling. I try to picture the colour of their walls, the clutter on their kitchen tables, the view out their front-facing windows. But no matter how hard I try, all I can see is my purest egg-yolk yellow, my inkless biros, the mud of my bay.
I’m still holding the jar-shaped paper bag in my hand. I place it down beside me. But as I place it down I start to wonder if maybe I didn’t seem regular in the market after all, inconspicuous, unsuspicious. Maybe the girl at the tapenade stall was conniving against us all along. Maybe what we’ve been given is a poisoned dose, a jar reserved for those who seem strange, those who walk the streets unarmed with tiny screens. Now I knock the bag onto the floor mat with a sweep of my fist, now I lean over and push it beneath the passenger seat. And we drive out of the seaside town and away from the main road, away again in search of a reassuring dead end where the drowned view is ours alone.
You understand. I know you understand.
See the black-headed gulls in the fields, picking the naked soil for earthworms. They’re listening with their earless faces for the muffled shuffle of a careless crawler. They’re stabbing the brown glop with their hatchet mouths. See how the gull’s plumage has returned to its winter pattern: a smudge of dark feathers behind the eye. Is that how much time we’ve let slip past inland? I hadn’t realised.
Now we find a narrow back road which leads to an even narrower track. Our wheels amble through hollow
s and weeds and brooks for a half mile at least. Now we arrive at a clump of houses, an unsignposted strand and a shell cottage facing the sea. I’ve heard about such cottages but never seen one. I park and out we climb and go to look. The cottage is completely covered with cockles and limpets, hundreds and hundreds, even thousands. Each shell is shallowly set into the plaster; each is blanched and sullied. Time and weather have transformed the shell cottage from an august monument to a tumbledown thing all barnacled by hard, dead blobs. Who lives here, I wonder. Who would you guess lives here? But you’re busy sniffing, always sniffing. Now the thistles stretching up through the rungs of the wrought iron gate, the pillars either side, the whiskery moss. The path is covered with algae and the shrubs have grown errant. An old woman, I think. An old woman too frail to hoick a lawnmower across the grass or lift a power-hose to her limpets. She has a paunchy son, I think, of thereabout my age, who keeps promising he’ll come and do a job on the garden, but never does. I would willingly hoick and mow and hose for this old woman. I’d chop off my plait to have an old woman of my own who’d let me sit at her kitchen table with a steaming cup and a gingernut. Maybe she’d let you sniff the overgrown garden, to excavate her flowerbeds for buried pats of shit. But it’s too late, I’m sorry. Now I have no idea how things begin, nor how to know that they are safe, nor how to show strangers we are safe too.
There are other houses here. It’s not so extremely left-behind. One house has a granite-chipped driveway leading past a laurel hedge, a fuchsia bush. Another has a sculpted stone head sticking up from a gatepost. Remember the peach eagles? This one looks like a tigress, but I can’t be certain, perhaps a leopard. We’re still standing outside the front gate of the shell cottage as a boy in football socks stomps down his driveway to retrieve a wheelie bin. Now we watch as he drags it up through the laurel and back to the house. All his gestures are exaggeratedly huffy, though there’s no one to witness his protest, no one but you and me, and the boy didn’t even see us.
We walk from the thistles to where the cliff drops into open Atlantic and there’s nothing but luscious, jumping blue all the way to America. I’m still thinking of the boy in the driveway, of how he doesn’t realise how lucky he is to live here where there’s space to run and the salt wind ruddies his cheeks each day, how he takes it all for normal and considers himself entitled to be huffy with the wheelie bin. Now I wonder was I was lucky too, and never grateful? Sometimes a little hungry and sometimes a little cold, but not once sick or struck and every day with the sea to ruddy me. Perhaps I was lucky my father took me back when the neighbour woman rang his doorbell, lucky he never drove away and left me on the road again. But it’s too late to be grateful now. It’s too late now for everything but regret.
I’d like a coastal cottage of my own, of our own. What do you think? I’d cover it with seashells, only we’d have queeny frills instead and I’d piece our windows into place with my sanded glass, pebble by pebble. We’d have a lawn for you to lick the dew from and a patch of bare earth where I can raise my faulty crops straight from the ground. Our cottage would be down a narrow track with an unsignposted strand and an unbroken view of jumping Atlantic, just like here. And I’d carry a patio chair to the end of our lawn. I’d put it there, see there? Right there. And I’d face it to the uncluttered horizon.
But it’s too late, of course. And suddenly, it’s a sad place, don’t you think? Suddenly the shimmer of possibility is blotted by the shadow of a soaring gull. The gull scans the tide as it passes, and seeing that it’s not yet low enough for mud worms, it flies back inland, to pick the naked fields again, to root the brown puddles alongside the ibises.
We scrabble down the cliff face.
Below the shell cottage, there are choughs nesting between the juts and scrub, the chamomile and samphire. There’s something sinister about choughs, something impious about their witchity cawing. There’s a bird book in my father’s house which spells the sound they make as chuff-chuff-chuff, like a jaunty steam engine. But the book is wrong. The real sound is raucous, like the choughs chuff sixty smokes a day and are warning us to stay away from them, from their juts and scrub, samphire and chamomile.
The lichen here is different from the lichen at home. Instead of blistering yellow, see how it’s globby and white like the surface of a moon a child might draw. Below the cliff face, here’s a plot of rubbled strand, and now sea. The water is dungeon dark and the way the ethereal weed moves beneath the surface makes it look as if it’s a living, swimming, struggling thing, as if it’s the long black hair of a head held under by an invisible manacle.
Now I let you free of the leash and you take off without a tic of caution. You stick your nose into several different holes, gobble an unidentified object, cock your leg on a patch of dead clover and still reach the bottom before me. On the strand, you stop and push your face into the stones, twist your neck after your face, twist your back after your neck. Your legs lift into the air, the pads of your paws face the sky and waggle. Now I stop my downward scrabble to admire your spontaneous little jive, the ecstatic thwacking of your upside-down tail. Does this place remind you, as it reminds me, of the pebbled beach where we picnicked every rainless day in summer? Now I’m sorry I don’t have my rug and flask and parcels of picnic food. But then you were always afraid of the aluminium foil, so it doesn’t matter.
I sit and take out my tobacco pouch. I pinch and turn and tear and roll and smoke into the setting sun. You and your maggot nose continue with the pressing business of sniff and scoff. You scale and comb the rocks, leaving no pool unpaddled, no inlet unslobbered. You’re watching all the new things and the way they are quivering. You’re waiting for some part of it to rise up, to configure into prey. I see how clumsy you are, how your balance is affected by your lopsided sight. You stumble and fall, chip your knobbled bones and bruise your pallid skin. You disappear for just enough time for me to worry. Now you reappear, dragging a strange bulk over the pebbles. It’s longer than you by a yard and trailing kelp fronds, tens of tiny crabs, a regiment of goose barnacles. It’s an enormous spine.
I laugh. I say, ‘what are you going to do with Moby Dick then?’
And you drop the spine at my feet and wag your tail. It was maybe a dog fish or maybe a spur dog or maybe even a basking shark. Now it’s a gift.
‘It’s a good gift,’ I say, and you settle beside me, and I roll a smoke, another smoke, and smoke.
And we stay like this until the sea has risen to the tip of the dark stain on the cliff-rock which marks the line of highest tide. And I note the time. I memorise it. Now I’ll never let myself lose track again.
There’s an angler spinning for bass on the further rocks, picking his way between the lofty jags and yawning hollows, over the wet weed and moon lichen. Now the white horses are gathering height, their froth licking his boots, and they are heavy boots, designed for drowning men.
I wonder why he takes all that trouble for a fish, just to break its neck against the sandstone, chump off its head, scrape its organs out and bake its sides for supper. Maybe he isn’t doing it for supper but for the sport of killing, for some small spilling of blood to satisfy his internal Neanderthal. It’s hard to understand when you’re a man with no knack for destruction. But maybe it isn’t for supper or sport but for the thrill of the girth of the gap between his drowning boots and dry land, and this I understand, because as much as I crave the sea I crave its openness. I need to know that even though I’m small and land-bound, right in front of my face it is enormous, endless. Can you smell it; can you smell the endlessness?
We watch him for a long time. You patrol the quivers and I smoke, at first, and now forget to smoke. Now I grow as rapt by the spinnerman’s task as the spinnerman, as intent upon a catch. We watch his slow-yet-certain progress across the distant rocks, how artfully he flicks the rod, dips and swishes his jellied lure. Now I begin to feel what he feels, a vestige of the force that compels him to fish even though it’s cold and dangerous and disappointing.
Across the wet weed I am whispering, just once more, just a little closer, this time, almost.
Come the sun’s last stand, the spinnerman hauls a beast of a sea bass from the froth. Fat as a baby crocodile. He holds it up, admires it. The fish bares its teeth, swats his wax jacket with its great tail fin. Now we watch as he tosses his beast back to the toppling waves. It breaks the surface with an almighty splosh. And the spinnerman continues on his way. Sashaying across the rocks, wiggling his worm. Beginning again, for nothing.
We pass playgrounds. There, that’s what that is, there. See all the contorted structures, ply planes connected by rubber-coated bars and painted. Whatever happened to straightforward swings and slides and seesaws? There’s something menacing about these new-fangled contraptions, these rungs and nooses and pony heads mounted to the sharp end of thick springs. If it wasn’t for the bold colours, they’d look like medieval instruments of torture. Here’s the rack, the stocks, the breaking wheel, the Witch’s Closet and the Judas Cradle. The playground’s surrounded by wire and railings to keep children in, paedophiles out. There’s a regulation notice outlining the rules and restrictions of play: NO RUNNING, NO JUMPING, NO PUSHING, NO DUMPING. Alongside the notice, there’s a bench for guardians to supervise from, to ensure that fun is never allowed to list over the line into depravity. They watch us as we pass. They make a mental note of our registration number. 93-OY-5731.
