A Line Made by Walking

by Sara Baume

  Contents

  * * *

  Title Page

  Contents

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Robin

  Rabbit

  Rat

  Mouse

  Rook

  Fox

  Frog

  Hare

  Hedgehog

  Badger

  Author’s Note

  List of Artworks

  Acknowledgements

  Sample Chapter from SPILL SIMMER FALTER WITHER

  Buy the Book

  About the Author

  Connect with HMH

  First U.S. edition

  Copyright © 2017 by Sara Baume

  All rights reserved

  For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to trade.permissions@hmhco.com or to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 3 Park Avenue, 19th Floor, New York, New York 10016.

  www.hmhco.com

  First published in Great Britain in 2017 by Penguin Random House UK

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.

  ISBN 978-0-544-71695-7

  Cover design by Suzanne Dean

  Author photograph © Patrick Bolger

  eISBN 978-0-544-71697-1

  v1.0317

  For M, Em & Mum

  The worst that being an artist could do to you would be that it would make you slightly unhappy constantly.

  —J. D. Salinger, from “De Daumier-Smith’s Blue Period”

  1

  Robin

  Today, in the newspaper, a photograph of tribesmen in the Amazon rainforest. The picture taken from a low-flying aircraft. The men naked but for painted faces, lobbing spears into the air as high as they can lob them, trying to attack the largest and most horrifying sky-beast they’ve ever encountered, ever imagined. The caption says they are believed to be from the last ‘uncontacted’ tribe.

  What a thing, I think, that there are still. People. Out there.

  And almost immediately, I forget.

  A smudged-sky morning, mid-spring. And to mark it, a new dead thing, a robin.

  Somehow, they always find me. Crouching in the cavernous ditches and hurling themselves under the wheels of my Fiesta. Toppling from the sky to land at my feet. And because my small world is coming apart in increments, it seems fitting that the creatures should be dying too. They are being killed with me; they are being killed for me.

  I decide I will take a photograph of this robin. The first in a series, perhaps.

  A series about how everything is being slowly killed.

  Only it isn’t. The white strata are bunching into clouds. The bunches are competing with each other to imitate animals. A sheep, a platypus, a sheep, a tortoise. A sheep, a sheep, a sheep. The leaves are breaking out, obscuring the white strata, the sky animals, the irregular spaces of cerulean between everything. The fields of the daffodil farm on the other side of the valley are speckling yellow and yellower as I watch. Why do I feel as if I’m being killed when it’s the season of renewal? Cars don’t crash when the days are long. Rapists don’t prey in the sunshine and old folk don’t catch pneumonia and expire in their rocking chairs. Houses don’t burn down in spring.

  But these things aren’t true; Walt Disney lied to me. The weather doesn’t match my mood; the script never supplies itself, nor is the score composed to instruct my feelings, and there isn’t an audience. Most days I make it to dark without anybody seeing me at all. Or at least, anybody human.

  I’ve been here in my grandmother’s bungalow a full three weeks now. All on my own. Except for the creatures.

  My grandmother died during a gloomy October, as one ought, three Octobers ago.

  On the night she died the tail of a hurricane made landfall. It was called Antonio and had travelled all the way from Bermuda. It felled a tree which dragged down a wire and put out the lights across half the parish. Then the tree lay wretched on the ground, strangled by electric cable and blocking the road which led up the hill to her bungalow. My mother and aunts were trapped inside, but I wasn’t there and Mum didn’t phone until a couple of hours later. I was at work in a contemporary art gallery in Dublin. Painting over the previous day’s scuff marks as I did every morning. Transforming the tarnished white into brilliant again.

  Even though I had been expecting the call, I didn’t pick up immediately.

  Even though I had been expecting my grandmother to die, I couldn’t believe it might happen in the morning.

  For several rings my polyphonic ‘Radetzky March’ echoed irreverently around the exhibition space. When at last I answered, my mother confessed she hadn’t called me straight away. And so my grandmother died in the night after all, as one should.

  No change in the light. A temporary sleep becomes permanent.

  Antonio passed on and men from the County Council came in their dump truck to clear the road. By the time my Fiesta climbed her hill there were only broken bits of tree left scattered and a great wiggly hole in the earth where it had stood. I stole a branch from amongst the mess; I stole a branch because I loved that tree; I loved that tree because it had acknowledged the ending of my grandmother’s radiant yet under-celebrated life by momentously uprooting itself.

  ‘When exactly did it fall?’ I asked my mother. ‘When she died or while she was dying, or after?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ she said.

  ‘But didn’t you hear?’

  The sound of the only tree I’ve ever heard falling began with a thunderous crack, the snapping of a monolith. The fall itself was unspectacular in comparison; it sounded like a thousand softer cracks in tuneless concord. There was no rustle and brush of leaves because it was winter and there were no leaves, because trees know in their heartwood that if they don’t surrender their foliage in autumn, high winds will sail them to the ground. They know they must expose their timber bones to increase their chance of remaining upstanding through to another spring.

  The only tree I ever heard falling I also saw falling. It was in the Phoenix Park beyond the place where elephants and tigers and oryxes are enclosed, before the place where deer rove, and I was roving too. It was an ash and it had dieback. It was felled not by high wind but by men in helmets and luminescent overalls.

  ‘No,’ my mother said, ‘I didn’t hear a thing.’ And when I asked my aunts the same question, they also said no.

  Works about Falling, I test myself: Bas Jan Ader, 1970. The artist rolls off the roof of his house and lands in the shrubbery, a filmed performance. His house is so American: clapboard, with a veranda. It doesn’t look like the sort of place a Dutch conceptual artist would live, but perhaps this is the point he was trying to make by climbing onto his roof to fall. I am not sure at what instant the film ends. The way I remember it: the screen blacks out at the moment of impact. The way I remember it: Jan Ader chose not to show himself getting up again.

  Why must I test myself? Because no one else will, not any more. Now that I am no longer a student of any kind, I must take responsibility for the furniture inside my head. I must slide new drawers into chests and attach new rollers to armchairs. I must maintain the old highboys and sideboards and whatnots. Polish, patch, dust, buff. And, from scratch, I must build new frames and appendages; I must fill the drawers and roll along.

  When I was five, I had the flu. Sitting up in bed, watching my bedroom wall. I must have had a soaring temperature which was causing me to hallucinate, but I didn’t know this at the time. I believed that what I could see was as true as the wall itself. What I could see was the whole of the world rolled flat. Each of the continents, every island. And they were swelling, stuffing up the sea, and I w
as screaming, because I believed I would be squeezed away, that there would be no space left for me to perch on the grossly overextended earth. Back there and then, this made certain, chilling sense, so I yelled until my mother came, and when she came, I couldn’t explain why I was yelling. For twenty years I couldn’t decipher what it was that had frightened me; it’s only now I understand.

  I understand how it can be that I am being killed when it is spring. I am being killed very slowly; now is only the outset. My small world is coming apart because it is swelling and there’s no place for me any longer, and I still want to cry out but there’s no point because I am a grown individual, responsible for myself.

  My mother will not come.

  Anyway, what’s the point in perching on an earth without sea?

  Once I saw a jackdaw flying amongst a flock of gulls. I was on the top deck of a bus, level with the flock. I witnessed the member of the family Corvidae who wanted to be—who maybe even trusted that he was—a seabird. I thought: I am that jackdaw. At home with the sea even though the sea is not my home, and never has been.

  Works about Sea, I test myself: Bernard Moitessier, 1969. In promising position to win the first ever single-handed round-the-world yacht race, he chose to abandon the competition, veering off course for the finishing line, continuing on around the world again, going home to the sea.

  But he was a sailor, and not a conceptual artist. I always forget about that.

  DO NOT BE AFRAID, the angel Gabriel told the frightened people.

  At midnight mass on Christmas Eve last year, the priest told us that DO NOT BE AFRAID is the phrase which appears most frequently in the scriptures. ‘It appears three hundred and sixty-five times,’ he said, ‘once for every day of the year.’ He was a man in his late sixties or early seventies and I cannot think of a single word to describe his manner and appearance other than ‘priestly’. He was so priestly it was hard to think of him as a person made from hair and limb and skin. All I could picture beneath his cassock was another slightly smaller cassock and another, and another. It was easier to believe the priestly priest was a matryoshka doll of cassocks rather than a man. I pictured him trawling through his bible, carefully shaping this vaguely radical message, appointing an occasion for its delivery. Christmas Eve is his busiest mass of the year, his sell-out gig. At quarter past midnight, in a pool of candlelight, the priestly priest delicately suggested that for too long the Catholic Church has instilled fear—that now it needs to spread a message which is old but was there all along: DO NOT BE AFRAID.

  How laudable, I thought. But then, at the end of the service, he sent an altar boy down into the congregation carrying a wicker dish, collecting money from pew to pew, and I was so angry about this intrusion that his laudable message, his small concession, didn’t matter any more.

  But mass hadn’t changed; I had. There was always a wicker dish. I even used to be the server who carried it down. And on all the Sundays I went to church as a child, the collection of money was as meaningless as everything else that occurred between the hardwood pews and fibreglass saints.

  Objects don’t seem incongruous if they’ve been there forever; doings don’t seem ridiculous if they’ve always been done that way.

  Why is it only now that I can see how many ordinary things are actually grotesque?

  This robin is the first of the dead creatures I’ll record, but there were others before it; if there hadn’t been I’d never have thought to begin. Beaked and scaled and furred. Struck and squashed and slaughtered. Shape-shifting into plastic bags, sugar beet, knolls of caked mud. Blending into the tinctures and textures of the countryside. The tree which falls without any human hearing still falls, as the creatures who die without being found by a human still die. But it’s too late for them now. It begins today, with this robin.

  There used to be a dainty woodland at the far end of my parents’ garden. No more than a copse of straggled pines, their topmost branches so densely laden by rookeries that the red bricks of the garden path vanished from sight beneath splattered shit during nesting season. There was also a skinny hawthorn and an alder, but no tree was sturdy enough to hold a structure, and so my father built a Walden-esque hut on the ground between trunks instead. The hut had tin walls, a tin roof and timber pallets on the floor. It was too cold in winter and too dark in summer, then one day an enormous spider dropped from the door lintel into my sister’s hair. She screamed and screamed and refused to play in Walden again after that.

  But I’d still go and sit there alone, to sulk. In the hut-which-should-have-been-a-treehouse, I listened to the sound of twigs falling from the rookery and striking my tin roof. A great rippled drum being played by tens of different drumsticks. Sometimes I’d hear a duller sort of strike and find an eggshell and baby bird with a busted neck. Eyes the size of its feet, as yet unopened, never to open. I’d bury the baby and steal its broken shell for the classroom nature table.

  Almost every time I sulked alone in the hut, a robin came to me. It would hop between the spindly trees and sing like a battered xylophone. It would speak to me in its language and I would speak back in mine. I’d tell it the unedited version of what I told the priest in confession, profess my pathetic sins. As a child, I used to believe that robin was my guardian angel. I didn’t like the idea of yellow-haired girls in mini wedding dresses with wings, but I wanted there to be some inhuman thing which was looking out for me, and it made sense that my guardian might be a bird.

  Most of the time, it was too high up, too far behind, too obscured by surroundings to distinguish, but in the boughs of our dainty woodland, my guardian would always reveal itself.

  Today’s robin has been thumped by a speeding windscreen, launched into artificial flight, crash-landed. I’m only a hundred yards from my grandmother’s gateposts; this is why I decide to go back and fetch my camera.

  I drop to my knees in the undergrowth. Old rain seeps through the shins of my trousers, smears across the screen. I point my lens at its motionless plumage. Click.

  My mother says that robins are resolutely territorial; no more than one is likely to occupy an average-sized garden. If you want to summon a robin, my mother says, you should dig, and one will soon arrive to inspect your freshly turned earth for worms. Back in my grandmother’s garden, I take a trowel from the greenhouse and hunker down in the strawberry patch. I dig and dig, but no robin comes. I pick the earthworms out myself and lay them on the surface.

  ‘Here,’ I say aloud. But still, no robin.

  So now I know for sure that the dead one was my guardian. I place my trowel down.

  You’re on your own now, I am thinking.

  Works about Flight, I test myself: Yves Klein, 1960. A black-and-white photograph which shows the artist lying in the air several feet above a Parisian street. Deserted save for the flying man and a bicyclist in the distance. At the time, people couldn’t figure out how Klein had made the image without being seriously injured. Now, in this era when any illusion is possible, tedious even, nobody cares about the photograph any more, which was, of course, a photomontage, and the artist was, in fact, hurt, despite being trained in judo and landing on a tightly drawn sheet. Leap into the Void it was called, and so maybe it wasn’t a work about flying after all, but a work about falling. About how flying and falling are almost exactly the same.

  As a toddler on a toddler leash, I used to grasp onto my mother’s skirt, a fistful of pleated corduroy in either paw and holler: MUMMY I LOVE YOU AND I’LL NEVER LEAVE YOU, and she would laugh kindly in the face of my ferocious devotion and reply: ‘Of course you will, once you are old enough. That’s just the proper order of things.’ Now that my sister and I are both older than old enough and gone, we joke about how we had such a quintessential childhood that nothing since has ever quite lived up to it. We agree we’d both surrender everything we have now in an instant if it meant we could return to being kids.

  It’s a joke. Just a joke.

  I am twenty-five, still young, I kno
w. And yet, I am already so improper, so disordered.

  There is a sentence I chant, compulsorily, inside my head. I want to go home, it goes, and has been going, at intervals, since as far back as I am capable of remembering. As a child, I chanted it mostly during bad days at school, but also during trips and holidays and sleepovers at friends’ houses: places I went in order to enjoy myself; places where I ought to have been content. Later on, I chanted it during college lectures, job interviews, and in every room I’ve rented since I was nineteen years old.

  For a week before I came here, I stayed beneath my parents’ roof, and even then, I continued to chant it. I want to go home, I want to go home, I want to go home, even though I was there. But that house doesn’t feel like the place I grew up any more. Last year my mother replaced all the curtains, tore the old wallpaper away and painted every stripped surface a different shade of white. The dainty woodland is also gone. After my sister and I left for college, my father started buying clapped-out vintage cars. He razed the garden and erected a compound of haphazard sheds in which to shelter his steel children. He ploughed away the flower beds, chopped down the pines, sawed up the swing-set for scrap, sealed the rootlets and bulbs beneath concrete foundations. Whenever I visit, there is always some new structure flattening what used to be a patch of pleasant green.

  Hunkering in the strawberry patch, I poke my worms back into the earth where they belong. I close my holes, return my grandmother’s trowel to the greenhouse.

  I find my grandmother in the greenhouse. The shape of her kneecaps in the old foam board, the mud-print of her right palm around the handle of the rusted secateurs. The compost in the flowerpots has turned hard and sprouted green crud. No one has emptied them since they were filled by her and so I wonder what my grandmother planted, three years ago, and why it never grew.