by Sara Baume
She fell against the carpet and then she cried, and because she could not move her face or speak like the other children, her crying was a terrible sight, a terrible sound. Distressed, despondent. The bigger boys righted her wheelchair immediately, lifted Kylie back up again. She was uninjured, but still she continued to keen and wail and bay until the teacher came back, until her mother was summoned to fetch her. She couldn’t be consoled. It became as if Kylie was no longer crying over the fall, but over the cumulative indignity of every compromised schoolday gone by and yet to come, by the week after week after week of unspeakable unfairness which would not stop, not ever.
For a while, those thoughts succeeded in making me grateful for my youth, my sight, my mind, my family, my mobility. But gratitude was soon pressed down by the fear that I might contract a disease, or lose someone, or be involved in a horrible accident and then that fear was pressed down in turn by disgust at myself for being so selfish, so petty, so inadvertently ungrateful.
I am not supposed to be one of those people who cry easily; I was not one of those little kids who snuffled and gasped and blubbed at nothing. I was grubby and scab-kneed with a bedroom full of caged animals, and in college I learned to use all the big electric drills and wood-saws in the sculpture department and to weld. I’ve never been a crier and I’ve always prided myself on this.
Until then. Until there. Lying on the amber carpet.
What was it about the sound of a DVD case striking the bottom of a DVD deposit box on a drizzly day in spring that made me feel so abruptly and inexplicably bad?
Encounters at the End of the World. This was the DVD inside the case. I watched it the night before the last day I lay down on my bedsit carpet; I watched it alone and in the dark. Encounters at the End of the World is a Werner Herzog documentary about the South Pole. The setting is vast and white and barren. The cast are people who feel compelled to travel to the extreme edge of human existence, who believe that, for whatever reason, everywhere else on the entire planet has squeezed them away. It was a piece of art made expressly for me; which I had made myself in a previous existence.
And then, close to the end, there came the penguins.
The film is almost over when Herzog conducts an interview with an ornithologist alongside footage of a colony migrating towards their feeding grounds. The camera zooms in on a single penguin that has broken away from the group and set off in the opposite direction, towards the mountains. The ornithologist explains how it often happens that there is one member of the colony who becomes deranged. How, even if he fetched the misdirected penguin back, reunited it with its fellows and pointed it the right way, as soon as he let go it would immediately turn around again and resume its own course towards the hostile, boundless mountains which mark the southern limits of the Earth. ‘The deranged ones couldn’t possibly survive,’ the ornithologist says, and in all his years of study, he still doesn’t understand why they do it.
Was it from the deranged penguin that the huge and crushing sadness came? His pointed tail dragging the snow. His useless wings thrashing. Falling on his front. Pushing himself on again. Waddling, stumbling, waddling.
‘But why?’ Herzog asked. But why.
The world is wrong. It took me twenty-five years to realise and now I don’t think I can bear it any more.
The world is wrong, and I am too small to fix it, too self-absorbed.
Cheek against the faded pile of my bedsit carpet, I stared and stared into the darkness beneath my bed. After a while, my eyes adjusted and I could see boxes outlined against the pale wall, a miniature horizon. It made me remember how I used to draw pictures at Halloween. Of buildings silhouetted against skylines with a big white moon in the middle and a witch on a broomstick, tilting her hooked nose back and into space. I remembered how most of those boxes contained rolls and sheaves and pads of paper either with drawings on or waiting to be drawn upon, and I wondered when—I wondered if—I would ever feel like making another picture.
I raised myself up again. I took a deep and cathartic sniff. I lifted my phone from the table. Cradled it in my lap. Then I called my mother.
Works about Carpet, I test myself: Mona Hatoum, 1995. An expanse of silicone rubber entrails fitted impeccably around one another to form a flawless floor. Our intestines are several metres long; a fact which has always astonished me. So maybe Hatoum’s piece is about the astonishing capacity of the human body. Or maybe it’s about how extravagantly attached we are to the things we own, as if they were the insides of our bodies and not just the insides of our houses. Furnishings, ornaments, even the upholstery. Such that we end up devoting more effort to preserving the carpet than we do to preserving our intestines.
On my grandmother’s bedroom carpet, there is a chest of drawers, a fitted wardrobe, a tattered beanbag which belonged to the dog. High up on the wall, there are a few timber shelves and empty hooks where picture frames used to hang. Stacked beneath the windowsill, there are four cardboard boxes neatly duct-taped shut. When I first arrived my mother told me not to open the boxes and that she’d be over in a couple of weeks to collect them. I didn’t ask what she had taped inside. At the beginning, I didn’t care. My mind was so bunged up by all the sudden changes. But in the three weeks I’ve been here alone, my mother has yet to come, and now I am beginning to wonder.
Every morning my grandmother used to open every window in every room. Her houses were always cold, and even in her eighties, she didn’t appear to notice. She valued fresh air above all forms of comfort.
And so this carpet is surprisingly luxurious for the bedroom of a woman so averse to luxury. It is intensely green; I cannot imagine a factory that would manufacture such a hue in such deep pile. I backcomb it with my fingers. It’s almost fluffy. All the other carpets of the bungalow are flat-weave, though now I come to think of it, they are also green. Lime, pine, emerald, moss. As if my grandmother needed the illusion of flora as surely as she needed the outside air.
Every year during the summer holidays, she would take my sister and me on trips to peculiar places. An old gunpowder mill, a former women’s prison, a deserted beach house gutted by a storm, an allegedly haunted graveyard and—over and over again—some coastal outcrop which got cut off at high tide. She could never resist straying from the designated path, racing against the rising sea. In her company my sister and I always ended up briar-scratched, muddied, wading, lost.
We thought my grandmother was glorious. We looked forward to those trips all year.
There are more of her weird trinkets here in the bedroom. A miniature Eiffel Tower, a wobble-legged beetle in a wooden nutshell, a foot-shaped beach stone. What was it about these that persuaded my mother to spare them from the hedge-burial? Was it because these were the ones which kept my grandmother company in her final weeks? And so they are full up with her gazes, infused by her dying thoughts. Out the window, there’s a short expanse of gravel, a short expanse of grass, the garden hedge. Over the hedge, there’s the valley. Tiny cows in the distance and normal-sized cows up close and the closest one of all is stretching his neck across the electric fence to munch on my grandmother’s cotoneaster.
In her fitted wardrobe, there are fourteen naked hangers. In the bottom drawer of her chest of drawers, there are two tattered handkerchiefs, and on the top there’s a coaster and a solitary picture frame squashed full of black-and-white photos of my mother and aunts as children in bell-bottoms and bare feet. There is just the one of me; I am chasing the dog who preceded Joe across the lawn of her old house. These are my inaugural steps; the very first time I chased something.
Without her teacup on top, the coaster looks abandoned, as does the chest of drawers, without her bed beside it. On each of the timber shelves, there’s a row of books. There are books in the living room as well, books in the dining room she used as a study, books on the coffee table in the entry hall. My mother and aunts have long since divided between them and taken away the ones they want and yet there’s still a whole bus load
left behind, a whole library bus load. I get up from the floor. Stand in front of the shelves. Place my finger on a spine and draw its cover out. A Concise History of Modern Sculpture: 339 Plates; 49 in colour.
I pick a plate at random. Helen Phillips, the caption reads, 1960, Moon. But it isn’t a moon. It’s a great lump of bronze. Brown and hard and twisted like the moon never was.
I tuck the book under my arm, pull the bedroom curtains.
Is the valley full up with my grandmother’s gazes too? The hedge, the cows.
I catch the reflection of a figure in the wardrobe mirror, turn my head to face it. A person too old to be a child but too young to be an adult. Hair falling limply yet somehow wild, short yet somehow knotted. Baggy eyes, blotchy skin. I notice for the first time all day what I’m wearing: a woolly winter cardigan that hangs down to my knees, even though it is warm, even though it is spring.
I picture my grandmother in the mirror instead. A hazy effigy in tweed skirt and tracksuit jumper, levitating above the fluffy carpet, shimmering. How glorious that would be. I summon and summon my grandmother’s ghost. But nothing happens.
Even the cows she gazed at are dead now too, of course.
I step out into the corridor, close the bedroom door, and, almost at once, open it again.
If my grandmother is in there, I don’t want to trap her. I want her to waft free, and find me.
For the last few weeks I occupied my city bedsit, I didn’t cook an awful lot of meals. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to eat; I just couldn’t face all the rinsing and chopping and stirring and tossing that cooking entails. It seemed to me only the same sort of a waste of time as lying on the carpet.
Just a few feet beyond my bedsit, the streets were lined with cafés, grocers, takeaway joints. Most evenings I’d stop by the posh supermarket on my walk home. I always shopped there even though I could only barely afford it. There was a Lidl a few streets away but I hated Lidl; it reminded me of the dole queue, only with vegetables. I’d pick up a basket from the doorway of the posh one and drift the aisles. I’d stand perfectly still and stare at an item for an uncomfortable length of time. Several other customers would come and go in the minutes it took me to remember whether I had any honey left, whether I prefer my tuna in oil or brine, whether or not I am able to tolerate wheat. Eventually I’d make it to the checkouts with a few random products sliding from side to side in my basket, and then at home again I’d lie on my floor for a couple of hours before going to bed on a bar of chocolate—something slightly revolting like a Double Decker or a Toffee Crisp—because only the slightly revolting chocolate bars were suitably evocative of childhood.
Every night I did this, I’d be woken by the angry burbling and sloshing of my almost entirely empty stomach. I’d get up and sit at my breakfast bar and eat bowlfuls of muesli and curse myself for having forgotten the one thing I always needed and always forgot. The milk, the milk, the fucking milk.
The point of being here, alone in the bungalow on turbine hill, is to recover. This is what I told my mother before she agreed to let me care take, and the only thing I can do to stop her from worrying is to try and look well when she comes to visit. Because she cannot see inside my head, outside my head I must be nourished and calm and bright. The straightforwardness of this comforts me: body over brain.
With only a poorly stocked village shop, the absence of choice is liberating. I buy whatever they have and challenge myself to cobble it into something. They always have milk and I always remember. Here on turbine hill, meals are the only thing that structure my days and so I force myself to maintain their pattern. Because structure and maintenance and pattern, and broccoli, are what sanity consists of.
In my grandmother’s kitchen I measure three handfuls of brown rice into a pot. I heat oil in the only frying pan. It has a great dint in the base and I have to push my irregularly chopped vegetables to and fro across the hot part to ensure they, irregularly, fry. I place a tray of peanuts to roast beneath the grill. They are red and pointy and I suspect the shop woman had intended them for bird feeders.
When I arrived here, there were two bags of flour in the cupboard. One wholemeal, one cream. The flour had set into bag-shaped blocks and a posse of weevils were gnawing the paper. The flour and the weevils were kept company by a few leftover jars. Bovril, mustard, pickled beetroot and maple syrup, none of which I remember my grandmother eating. I dumped everything into the standard waste wheelie bin without emptying the bags or rinsing the jars. Because right at that moment, I did not—could not—care a shit about recycling.
I carry my dinner plate through to the living room. On the coffee table there’s an open bottle of wine and I pour a generous glug down on the burgundy stain at the bottom of last night’s unrinsed tumbler. In the village shop the wine bottles are positioned on the highest shelf behind the counter. The only choice is red or white and then the shop woman brushes the dust off before squirrelling it away in a brown paper bag. She does the same with toilet roll and paracetamol. By means of her brown paper bags, the shop woman shows me which purchases I ought to be ashamed of.
Now that it’s evening, I push the power button on the tiny television set. I don’t really care what programme I’m watching; I just like how it chatters softly from the corner, requiring no particular response. When I was growing up, my parents didn’t allow the set to be switched on during the hours of light. Daytime television was for incapacitated or lazy people, not for us, not for our family. Even now that I’m free to watch it whenever I want, I don’t. I wouldn’t dare.
Nowadays most people on the telly seem to have recently recovered from either cancer or depression and feel compelled to talk about it, to add their personal nuggets of wisdom to the broken taboo. First it was only ambiguously famous people: Gaelic sportsmen, celebrity chefs, traditional musicians. Then the spouses of ambiguously famous people began to pipe up, and now any civilian who can spin a decent line about their horrifying struggle is deemed worthy of airtime. Away they yammer all week on the talk radio programmes—and then at the weekend I get to see them in the unremarkable flesh on The Late Late Show—until it seems to me it would be more taboo not to talk about it at all, but to hold back and suffer in decorous silence.
If each one perceived their respective illness in a unique and interesting way, it wouldn’t bother me so much. But they each say the same slim range of things and end on the same slim range of messages: ‘Be Sure To Get Your Balls And Boobs Checked,’ they say. ‘It’s Okay Not To Feel Okay And Ask For Help.’
As soon as my dinner plate is empty, I pick up A Concise History of Modern Sculpture and drink another generous glass of wine. It must be Friday because here it comes now: The Late Late Show, and the first guest is a millionaire who suffers from depression. The angle, I presume, is that even people with obscene amounts of money are not immune to bouts of tremendous sadness; that tremendous sadness does not necessarily target the poor. To be fair to the depressed millionaire, he describes the nature of his bouts with a lucidity I haven’t heard before; with poetry, almost.
He describes how, when he feels bad, every colour drains from his surroundings.
He describes how, when he feels bad, he can’t taste food—even garlic, even spice.
He describes how, when he feels bad, all of the things that usually animate him suddenly don’t. He describes the whole dead world and how he feels as if it has died for no one but him.
‘Now I can spot the signs it’s coming,’ he says, meaning the cartoon cloud of desolation which appears from nowhere and remains for an unspecified spell, hovering above his head, following him everywhere he goes. A coffee cup left unwashed is a sign, a misplaced set of keys, an unmade bed. When the depressed millionaire walks past an expanse of fresh-cut grass and forgets to inhale, this is the most irrefutable of signs, the point at which he knows it’s time to start extending the metaphorical stretchers of his metaphorical umbrella of defence. ‘I run,’ he says, and for just a moment everybody in the aud
ience and everybody watching at home thinks that he is speaking figuratively, but now he starts to espouse the healing power of exercise and we realise he means it literally. The depressed millionaire literally runs until the forward thrust has caused his cartoon cloud to disperse back into ordinary life again, into ordinary feeling.
Works about Running, I test myself: every winter, a Dutch performance artist and musician called Guido van der Werve runs thirty-two miles from an art gallery in Chelsea to Kensico Cemetery in Valhalla, upstate New York. Where he lays a bouquet of chamomile flowers at the tombstone of Sergei Rachmaninoff, the Russian maestro composer who died in 1943. Running to Rachmaninoff, the piece is called, and van der Werve runs because Rachmaninoff suffered debilitating depression for three significant years of his life. And running. Ah yes. Is supposed to make depression go away.
He brings chamomile because chamomile is Russia’s national flower, but also because it is supposed to alleviate the symptoms of hysteria. From which Rachmaninoff, apparently, also suffered.
It’s half past ten and would be entirely dark if it wasn’t for this clear sky, this perfectly completed moon. In the hall I kick off my slipper-boots and pull on my sneakers. Throw the front door open. Hurdle over the gate.
I run.
And for approximately the first three minutes of running, I feel spectacular.
Through the dark, the grey road stands out faintly against the black ditches and guides me. I run like I ran when I was a child, without realising I am running, without considering that I might at any moment twist an unsuspecting ankle or be stopped dead in my tracks by an undetected heart defect or trip over and fall flat on my face and smash my nose away.
