by Sara Baume
How many weeks now since we turned around? How many gateways revisited? Now we pass a lay-by with a man dressed in steel-capped boots and a high-vis vest. He’s manning a canopy-covered car trailer alongside a display of bundled sticks and reused fertiliser sacks of rough sawn wood. STICKS, his sign board says, BLOCKS. It must be fulsome winter; now we pass Christmas decorations in place of tree ghosts and rotted pumpkins. See the bulbs hanging from the leafless branches of a streetside beech, white light prickling the perpetual grey. See a spray-painted Santa in the chemist’s window, waving at us from between the antiaging potions and protein shakes. Now here’s a car with a red nose attached to the bumper and a felty antler stuck out the windows either side. How puzzling people are.
We are heading south, I think. Getting lost, retracing roads and finding south again. I seem to miss a lot of cul-de-sac signs, now I’m master of the six-point three-point turn. We are keeping the sea in sight as much as possible, sometimes veering into barns, streams and slurry pits, almost. I never expected it would take so much reversing to make a straight line. It’s still so cold, and still I wake at night and relight the gas, and still you wake with me, lean in and drink the blue flames. I make hot whiskey, warm milk and something stodgy to eat, to heat the blood about our bellies.
‘Treat’, I tell you, and you wag.
See the hairs, your hairs. See how they accumulate in the car’s interstices, knit together into fuzzy rope. I strip the upholstery and shake our blankets out. I scrape the ropes from their interstices. I lie them on the wind to fly. From the radio, an expert is telling us how birds will gather loose hair and use it to cushion the lining of their nests. But now I remember, of course, it isn’t spring. It’s December. I’m months and months and months too early, too late.
I wake to a face at the window, again.
This time it isn’t a grizzled old woman but the sheen of a child’s flawless skin, a boy. Not the boy whose shih tzu you spectacularly maimed nor the boy who directed his huffiness toward the wheelie bin nor any of the boys with raised hoods and unlaced runners, not even the boy with calipers around his calves and a weaponry of pebbles bulging his pockets, his pencil case, yet familiar somehow. In my lap, you tweak a sleeping paw. I look down, just for a second, but you don’t wake. And when I look up again, the boy’s face has changed. The brow seems to have bushed, the nose seems to be breaking out in pimples, scales, warts. I watch as it changes, bit by bit, into a troll’s face instead of a boy’s. And I forget that it’s only a trick played by the moon, a distorted reflection of my own face. Just for a second, I forget, and am terrified.
I was standing at the sink with my back to the table.
Are you listening? I’d like to tell you this now. I’d like to tell you about what happened on the morning my father sat choking in the kitchen.
I was standing at the sink with my back to the table.
Then I heard something behind me like the noise a bicycle pump makes when the bicycle tyre is as inflated as it possibly can be. Then I heard the bang of his fist against the formica. All the crockery hopped and dinged and I turned around.
My father had moved his hands up to his neck and wrapped his fingers around his throat. Because he was not speaking or coughing or crying out, it took several beats of my internal metronome to realise there was something wrong, that he was somehow in trouble. For several beats I stood and gawped and tried to bring to mind where I recognised this gesture from, and then I remembered.
It was the International Choking Symbol from the Emergency First Aid for Children chart. I could have lumbered up to my bedroom wall to check but there was no need, I knew each panel off by heart. Whether by accident or design, my father was acting it out. I knew absolutely that he was choking, and I knew exactly what I was supposed to do. I was supposed to lean the adult person forward, to administer five firm blows to their back with the heel of my strongest hand and once this hadn’t worked I was supposed to enfold the adult person with my arms until my hands were able to hold one another beneath their breastbone. I was supposed to drive the knuckle of my thumb into the flesh of their belly, over and over and over, until the sausage was dislodged.
I knew, I knew, I knew. To do all of these things. But I didn’t. Not one.
I stood at the sink facing my father with my arms dangling at my sides. I allowed the only opportunity I’d ever had to practice my panels slip past. I watched as his lips and fingernails turned blue. The blue began pale, with only the intensity of a sea aster, but then it continued to intensify through harebell and into forget-me-not. And I wasn’t paralysed by fear or stunned into spontaneous memory loss. Nothing like that. I didn’t do anything because I simply decided not to.
For years and years, the flat above the grocers has been used as a storage space for the goods sold downstairs. Now I see boxes pressed against the window, bottles of fabric softener and sunflower oil. Next door, there aren’t any lights left on inside my father’s house. At least, not in either of the rooms which face front.
So here we are now. Two wheels abutting the footpath. Home.
I haven’t been able to remember whether I remembered to switch them all out. The lights, my precious incandescent bulbs. Every day these past nine or ten or eleven weeks, I’ve wondered, I’ve worried. Now we’re back in the car’s old parking space outside the terrace, but it’s such a bright morning and all the curtains are drawn, so I still can’t tell for sure, about the lights. Now I think I see the curtain twitch, the curtain of my father’s old workroom. The brushstrokes-on-the-wall room, the shut-up-and-locked room. Did you see it too? There’s the weakest glow, I’m certain, a circular beam pointing down into the street, moving over the shore wall, scanning the bay. And I wonder if he’s somehow sitting up and manipulating his desk lamp, searching for us. Now I hear the boom of a ship’s horn. There’s a cargo vessel coming in to dock at refinery pier, a great tanker with tens of circular reflectors twizzling from its cranes and pulleys. A cloud slings itself across the morning sun and when I look back at my father’s window, the searchlight’s gone, of course it’s gone. Of course it was just the sun bouncing between the ship’s reflectors and the window pane. From the apron hooks to the chimney pots, the house is every bit as dark and somnolent as it ought to be.
It’s almost noon. Last night’s rain has stopped and the bay is as brilliant and blousy as the day in spring I drove you home from the kennel compound and coaxed you out of the cranny beneath the dash. Remember the cherry’s confetti and the flowering embankments, the blinding yellow of the rape? But now it’s December and I’m the one refusing to climb from the car. I can’t stop myself thinking about the halo-headed boy and his barraging mother, about the woman warden with her collared pole who swore she’d come back. I KNOW WHERE YOU LIVE, but they all know where we live, and that’s why I can’t get out.
So here we stay. Here we watch people come and go with their bags and boxes from the grocers, their choco-crispy breakfast cereal and bottles of discounted Chardonnay. They are the people who buy tool belts and steam mops, remember? The people who visit fireplace showrooms on Sunday afternoons. See the icicle lights strung from the grocer’s awning, the wreath of polyester holly batting against the door each time it bangs. Now the Polish hairdresser arrives and raises her shutter. See the notices sellotaped inside her window. GHD STRAIGHTENER SALE, they say, HALF PRICE GELICURES. Behind the notices, there’s a stuffed reindeer. It’s tall as a child with several styrofoam robins perched along its speckled back. Now the twitcher pitches his twitching stool along the bird walk and unfolds a tripod to support his gigantic binoculars. There’s a little egret on parade, a couple of curlews and a clatter of redshanks, the same decorous old heron. The summer boys are gone now; they’re hibernating behind their mother’s venetian blinds and there’s a Christmas tree in their old slouching spot. See the noble fir with gift-wrapped boxes tied to its branches. I can tell by the way they quaver in the wind that the presents are empty, just for show.
We sit outside. We watch everything proceeding oblivious to us. I know I should drive away before somebody recognises the car, and remembers. But I want to sneak in. I want to check if I turned the immersion off and hit the oven switch on the wall. I want to gather some of the stuff I offhandedly left behind, stuff that never seemed precious until I was without it. The brass egg-timer and the pencil-sharpener in the shape of a panda bear eating a bamboo shoot. Then there’s the cushion with an embroidered Indian elephant on the cover, a log splayed between tusks. I read somewhere that elephant motifs are supposed to be lucky, but only if they are facing outwards. What if I left the cushion upside-down, the elephant smothered? Then there’s Mr Buddy. Now I feel terrible I left him behind the washing machine so many years alone. And I want to collect the swallow’s nest from its roof cranny because maybe if I have their nest then the swallows will somehow still know how to find me.
I want so badly to sneak in. I want to stand beneath the scorching gush of the showerhead and feel the filth of nine or ten or eleven weeks wash from my skin, my hair, and down the plughole and through the secret pipes. Now I feel as though I’m crawling with tiny worms, and as I slice them with my scratching nails each slice becomes a new worm. Each slice is burrowing, burrowing, burrowing.
I look up at my father’s house. The sun has shrugged its cloud off and turned the window panes opaque. I think of all the books inside I left unread. I think about the marmalade mouldering, mouse shit collecting in the presses, mouse-bitten bran flakes leaking onto the beauty board. I think about all the planes of soft card with tiny rectangles torn from them and I think about the tin of baking powder with its picture of a tin of baking powder, with its picture of a tin of baking powder, and so on, into infinity. I think about the bathroom sink, about the furiously blue watermark, the blue of forget-me-nots, of my father’s choked lips and choked fingernails. It pinpoints the exact spot beneath the tap where drip hits enamel, over and over and over, and I wonder how much more furiously it will have blued.
What will happen if they come and break the door down? It’s only a flimsy door. It won’t take much breaking. What happens if they go rifling through all my offhandedly left behind stuff? Toss the panda into the bin, smash the frail glass of the egg timer, kick the draught snake from the threshold of the shut-up-and-locked room, find my father’s shoeboxes and snort with laughter at his homemade games. What happens if every last thing is cleared out, lobbed into an industrial bin bag and left on the side of the street to spill? The neighbours will come poking to see what utensils or appliances might be worth recycling for themselves, and then they’ll quickly move on again, empty handed. Shocked by how a life might come to be so wretched as ours, so insignificant.
What happens if they find some small trace of my mother? For all I know she was there all along. If our life was a film, it would be a photograph in a locket, a love letter, a tress of hair. What happens if they decide to take a look in the roof?
Strung from the left-side hanging basket, there’s a length of clear plastic, the sort that comes off the goods pallets delivered next door. It’s long as a lamppost, strangling the facade of my father’s house, flapping. I wonder why no one’s bothered to remove it. But I don’t remove it either.
My father never got up from the table all the time he was choking. He didn’t thrash around; he didn’t knock anything over. It seemed like it took a very long time for the old man’s choked face to drop and settle against the formica. He placed his nose neatly between the crockery and leaned the weight of his head down after it without upsetting so much as a teaspoon. I remember looking at the dash of discoloured milk at the bottom of the bowl from which he’d eaten his bran flakes, at the smears of grease on the plate from which he’d forked his sausages up. I remember noticing there weren’t any pieces left. The one he choked on must have been the last. I remember thinking that it was up to me to wash and dry the bowl and spoon and plate and fork now, to return them to the shelf and drawer.
I’d never made a phone call in my life before. I’d never answered the doorbell.
I sat down at the table beside him. I pictured the ambulance men in their high-visibility ambulance outfits. It was raining, and so I pictured water droplets against the black of the body bag as they wheeled him out. In my mind I saw the doors of the ambulance closing and I heard the siren bawling as it drove away. And then I realised of course there wouldn’t be any siren, that it was already too late to bother switching it on.
Behind the blue gate, there’s new litter in the laneway, unfamiliar litter. The front door of my father’s house groans, as if in protest at being re-entered. Now you tramp new paw prints across your old ones and I follow you. You go directly to the nook in the kitchen where I used to keep your food bowl. But it’s in the car, remember? It’s been in the car now for months.
Straight away I single out the egg-timer and the panda sharpener from amongst the kitchen table jumble. I remember suddenly how the tabletop was always kept clear while my father was alive and so this jumble must have taken years to accumulate, and belongs exclusively to me.
Now I hunker down and hug the washing machine and haul. I hear the slight scratch and gentle slither of some creaturely thing descending to the floor tiles. I reach around and grab and tug. Mr Buddy comes out in three different fistfuls. So the spate must have reached him too, so the rats must have ripped his clouds out. I bundle Mr Buddy’s stuffing up with Mr Buddy’s hide and stick the lot inside a plastic bag and knot the handles as though he might somehow reassemble himself and escape. Now I take the bread knife from the block and tear a new bag from the roll and carry it all upstairs with me.
You go a few steps before. You find your old spot on the sill and I open the curtain so you can check the view from the window to make sure that nothing has erred from its place. The elephant cushion is on the rocking chair, facing the right way up, of course. Now I must lean over you to push the window open. I reach out and up to the swallow’s nest. Using the bread knife, I scour it down. Using the bag, I catch it. See how it still has papery shards of eggshell inside, how it smells more of warmth and life than dry, dead mud. Come here and see my nest, smell the life.
Now I place down my peculiar luggage and go to the foot of the door of the shut-up-and-locked room. I lift the snake, I let the fetid draught through. I turn the key.
Now there’s something I need in here. Something that I have to do.
On the morning he choked, I sat beside my choked father at the kitchen table and tried to decide what would happen next. I sat there a long time. Even after I’d decided, I continued to sit. After a while, I started to speak. To ramble away as I often did, only this time, for the first time, I felt free to say different, truer things.
‘Hallo old man,’ I said, even though we’d both been there all along.
‘Well,’ I said, ‘what did you tell her?’ I couldn’t remember the woman’s name, the neighbour who took me from the side of the road and drove me to my father’s house.
‘What did you tell her when she found me all on my own?’ I said, ‘in the ditch in the dark and drove me home and rang your doorbell?’
I tried and tried and tried to remember her name, but I couldn’t.
‘Speak up, old man,’ I said, ‘what did you tell her?’
But my father didn’t answer, of course, and of course it didn’t matter. I knew anyway. Whatever the name of the woman who drove me home, I knew my father told her I’d run away, and wouldn’t come back, and couldn’t be found. Because I wasn’t a right-minded little boy. I wasn’t all there. I was special. See how that explains why nobody came to ring the bell again? It explains why I never started school, never lined up with all the other little boys and girls, all those all there and right-minded and unspecial. It explains why I never got a chance to play on the straightforward swings and slides and see-saws. Now do you see?
Now I see. I see how uncourageous I was. I see how I only asked about the neighbour woman because I was yet too afraid
to ask about my mother woman instead. The old man was dead and still I hadn’t the nerve to confront him. I stopped talking and stood up. I washed and dried and put away and once it was all done I went upstairs to my father’s room. I pushed the door and pulled the pull-string which opened the roof and drew the folding stepladder down. Then I went back to the kitchen to fetch him.
Things are never so immense when they happen as they were when only in my head, as I made them, remember? My father was not so heavy to lift nor was it so very arduous to drag him. He smelled like pork and smoke and toothpaste and I realised I’d never been so close to the old man to be able to smell him before. He lost one slipper on the stairs, the other on the stepladder. Then I placed him down on the bare boards of the attic. I rolled him onto his back and brushed his eyelids closed, like they do in films. If the roof had been insulated there would have been yellow pillows of spun glass upon which to lay him out, but it wasn’t and there weren’t, and that was my father’s fault.
I pushed the stepladder back up and the roof obligingly sucked it in. I locked my father’s room without searching for a single trace of my mother and I stuffed up the gap beneath the door with a lumpy fabric snake.
Now as I push open the door of the shut-up-and-locked room, I think again about how things are never so immense when they happen as they were when only in my head, as I made them. Remember? The old man’s room is as I left it, as he left it. There’s hardly even any dust, but then dust is made of human skin, so how could there be? Of course.
You follow me over the threshold and sit at my feet as I sit at his desk. Do you know what the first thing I did was after I put my father in the roof? I locked myself in the bathroom to hide from flashing lights. It was sitting on the toilet seat with the lid lowered that I remembered something I’d read about a custom called Sky Burial. It was in a book about Tibet, there in the living room on one of my shelves. The highest country in the world, where there’s too much buried rock for digging graves. But that isn’t the reason why people bring their dead into the mountains and slash open their flesh and leave them for the vultures. They do it because they believe a dead body is just a vacuous slab of meat to be disposed of in as munificent a way to nature as possible. As I sat on the lowered lid thinking and gradually knowing no flashing lights would come, I saw that I couldn’t have dug a hole for him anyway, in my garden of gravel and cement. I saw how a Sky Burial was to the unknowing best of my ability what I had improvised for my father, and so when the spate of rats began, I was glad, even a little triumphant. The clamour of their activity was a kind of companionship, a kind of comfort. A kind of Sky Burial.
