by Sara Baume
On the last night I spent in my city bedsit, in the early hours of the morning, after everything was cleared and cleaned, I unpacked my stove-top coffee pot, stuffed it full of Authentic Italian Espresso Blend and began to brew. I decided that if I didn’t allow myself to fall asleep, then I wouldn’t have to wake up again and despair.
I sat at the desk where I’d drawn barely anything in several weeks, and where anything I did draw had turned out badly. I looked out the window as I drank my coffee, down to the roof of the washing machine shed. I saw how it was littered with short twigs and I remembered the treehouse which was actually a hut, and I wondered where they came from, the twigs, when there weren’t even any trees.
I listened to the birdsong, the grumble of trams, the click of my electricity meter. The shuffle and bump of the early-rising residents. I heard the girl who worked in Statoil slam the front door and then the gate behind her, and I heard the tin soldier scuff and tap, push down his toast and pause, then the ker-ching as it popped itself back up again.
I was waiting for my mother, for the landlady, and for Ben, but I had no idea what order they’d arrive in or what I was going to say to any of them when they did. At nine o’clock I left first my chair and then the bedsit, and went outside. The front garden was brown but the dew on the part of the lawn which the sun hadn’t yet reached was sharp to the touch, and sparkling.
Ben came first, as I was crouching, touching the sharp and sparkling lawn. I saw him round the corner, the collar of his army coat raised and his fists pushed down to the seams of his pockets. I waved up at him from my crouch. I wanted to thank him for putting up with me these past weeks; I wanted to apologise for my inconsistency. But I only waved when he was a short distance away and only said good morning once he had reached the gate, and then we only went inside.
Ben was disappointed that I’d already moved everything into the hall. He swept his arm through the air above my plastic necropolis.
‘You don’t need me at all,’ he said.
In my empty bedsit, we perched side by side on the tiny stools at the tiny breakfast bar. Normally I’d offer him a coffee, but I’d already packed the pot for a second time. The mugs, even the mug tree. And so we just perched there and tried to think of things to say.
‘Look, um, I just wanted to thank you,’ I said.
‘I haven’t done anything yet,’ he said, smiling. But this wasn’t what I meant and I assumed it was his way of swatting away a potentially serious conversation, and so I dropped it.
The meter clicked. The trams grumbled. A blackbird sang irreverently.
Hurdygurdy hurdygurdy hurdygurdy hurdygurdy hurdygurdy, it sang.
Then the intercom above the light switch buzzed. Downstairs and outside on the doorstep, the landlady and my mother had arrived in unison.
The landlady was called Loretta Nagle. She was uncommonly old and small but always made a point of informing me of how capable she was. During the months I lived beneath her roof, she claimed to be able to plunge out a blocked drain with a single hand, to work an electric drill to fix a shelf, to climb onto the roof and tweak a satellite dish gone awry. Yet I’d never seen her perform any such tasks; I can’t imagine a tenant had dared ask her to for fifteen years, at least. And so because she had never actually failed, I suppose Loretta continued to believe that she was still able.
The landlady was also uncommonly rich; Jess and I had worked it out once. She owned two houses in the same street, both divided into several bedsits each costing a minimum of one hundred euro a week. And once you have enough money, it doesn’t matter if you are old or small.
Once you have enough money, you can buy yourself youth and you can buy yourself magnitude.
On the morning I reneged on my lease, Loretta held both banisters and took two unsteady steps for every stair and I followed behind, pretending this was a normal pace, pretending I was equally slow. At last she closed the door of the empty bedsit behind us, to talk money and assess my cleaning job. Before the edge of the door hit the frame, I saw Ben and my mother below us in the hallway. Meeting each other for the first time. Together lifting and carrying my belongings away.
Loretta’s fingertips were white and puckered as though she was in a permanent state of having emerged from the bath. That morning she ran them across the countertop and squinted into the smelly darkness of my oven. Even though I could clearly see pocks in the paint where my pictures had come down, even though I was not legally entitled to my deposit back, still she counted five hundred euro in fifties out onto the breakfast bar and I thanked her, repeatedly. I simpered and fawned.
By the time Loretta and I had baby-stepped back down to the front door, my mother’s car was packed. Out on the footpath, Mum was making some final adjustments and there was a stranger lingering between the gateposts and speaking to Ben. A black man, no more than thirty, with close-cropped hair and pale blue jeans. Ben must have told him that the landlady had gone inside and would soon come back again, because he seemed to be waiting for her. When Loretta emerged he stopped speaking to Ben and stepped forward and held his hand out.
‘I’m Daniel,’ he said, ‘I’m here to see the studio apartment.’
Loretta held her arms firmly against her sides. Her eyes were blank.
‘There must be some mistake,’ she said: ‘there are no vacancies here.’
‘Mrs Nagle?’ Daniel said. ‘Number 26? You phoned me late last night. You told me to come and view it this morning . . .’
I caught my mother’s eye and nodded to let her know I was ready to leave. She turned to Ben and told him it was good to meet him and thanked him for his help. She climbed into the driver’s seat.
‘I can see these people are moving out,’ Daniel said, but Loretta would not budge.
‘There must be some mistake,’ she repeated: ‘there are no vacancies.’
I climbed into the passenger seat and rolled the window down and Ben leaned in.
‘Thanks again for . . .’ I said. He nodded.
‘Let me know, okay . . .’ he said. I nodded.
‘I’ll be alright now . . .’ I said, as if it were actually that simple, as if my mother was a magic potion which I could drink.
Behind us on the footpath, Daniel’s voice had dropped and hardened. I rolled the passenger window up and we pulled away. I twisted around in my seat and peered through the over-packed rear windscreen to wave to Ben. But he’d already raised his collar and shoved his fists into his pockets and turned around. He was already walking away.
I remember the first black person I saw in Lisduff; the first black person I ever saw anywhere. A woman with intricately braided hair, a dress printed in blazing tangerine and teal. She was beautiful and dazzling. We were in the old grocery store, so it must still have been the eighties, before the supermarket arrived. As soon as I saw her, I yanked Mum’s sleeve and started to yammer, and she swung down and hissed at me through gritted teeth, telling me to shut up and not make a show.
I have always suffered from this misconception: that my mother is a magic potion.
My sister and I went to a primary school small enough to domicile three different classes inside a single room and the single teacher would take turns to attend to each group, leaving the other groups with an exercise to complete. The school’s three teachers were all women of middle age, and back then I believed that it was only women of middle age who were authorised to be teachers. I was a smart child, or maybe just impatient. I always finished my exercises too fast. Then I’d lay my pencil down and glower out the window and contemplate how much I wanted to go home. I understood that the only circumstance which might permit a pupil to leave before the end-of-day bell was if they fell sick and their mother came to collect them. And so, each day as I glowered and contemplated, I longed to be sick.
The view out of every classroom window was the same. A grassy bank tasselled by pine trees. All year round, the trees blocked out the sky and barely changed. In deepest winter the grass would sallow and
in late spring it would break out in dandelions. But for most of each season, there wasn’t much to look out at. My contemplations would slide into darker places. I knew that I could fake sick if I really wanted to, but as soon as we got home Mum would take my temperature and know. It seemed unlikely I’d get a chance to press the thermometer against a radiator like the boy in ET. And even without the betrayal of a thermometer, if I faked it, she’d know. The only solution was to actually feel sick and be telling the truth. And so, I’d hide my hands under the desk and poke myself hard in the stomach, over and over until it actually hurt, until I had a legitimate stomach ache. Then I’d release a hand and raise it high above my head.
My mother did not go out to work in those days and so was nearly always free to come and fetch me when the teacher phoned. In the car on the way home, I’d experience a feeling somewhere between triumph and guilt. I was not lying. I did feel sick. But I had also wanted to be; I had made myself.
I drop the latch and stand inside my grandmother’s front gate absentmindedly retying the string for ensuring nobody lets the dog out, forgetting there’s no dog to let out any more anyway.
I inhale my father’s cut grass. It makes me remember the depressed millionaire. I throw my head back and drink it through my nostrils, this most utopian of smells. I notice it unprompted, and so this means there are no signs of impending collapse—I must still be okay.
I set off around the side of the house in the direction of the plum trees. Dispersed across my grandmother’s garden are a number of strange objects. Several slimy sculptures carved in soft stone, mostly male figures with multiple, elongated limbs. A ceramic hippo, a timber cross marking Joe’s grave. A bench in the shape of a weird animal, buckled planks held in place by wrought-iron legs which taper into wrought-iron paws—too large for a cat and too small for a lion—and so my grandmother’s bench must be a lynx. There are two bird tables. A proper one mounted on a pole with varnished walls and a slanted roof, and an improvised one made from a steel saucepan lid nailed to a tree stump. Then there’s a basin full of rainwater in which I often see the small birds splashing in spite of both the baths.
I pass it all by: the lynx, the paddling birds, the stone men, the dog skeleton.
Dad has done a stellar job on my wilderness. At ground level it’s a meadow in Minnesota but at eye level, with the plum trees about to fusillade into blossom, it’s a Japanese woodblock. There’s hardly any wind and so the turbine is only murmuring. The sun comes out and turns up the contrast on everything. It makes me want to paint even though I cannot paint. I have always been too inclined towards geometric shapes, precise lines and regimented pencil scratching. I have never been limp-wristed and free-spirited enough to paint.
I follow the path my father mowed for me, to the cow-field fence which marks the garden’s end. Here between the nettle patch and compost heap where he dumped the clippings the smell of cut grass and psychological stability is at its strongest. I lean over to inhale again, and here I find a rabbit. Perfectly dead.
It’s grey-brown and only a kit, neither bloody nor battered. I presume my father spotted it chewing the tulips and clouted its skull with the butt of his shears. A single, clean blow. Every year, rabbits raid his lettuce bed, nibble down his baby leeks, rummage up his daffodil bulbs. Peter and Roger and Thumper and Bugs are vermin to my father, as are the slugs he pellet-poisons, as are the pigeons he shoots and nails to a timber post alongside his vegetable patch as a warning to the other pigeons.
The baby rabbit, so frail and sweet, is slumped atop a pretty mess of onion skins, palm fronds, wilted laurel. I go back to the house to fetch my camera. Now to the greenhouse, to fetch the trowel. I have to bow down over the compost heap to get my shot. I can feel the nettles stinging my kneecaps through the threadbare part of my jeans. I remember refusing to believe my mother when she told me that it was more dangerous to lightly brush against a nettle than to grab on and tightly clutch. I remember rubbing a dock leaf against my sting, after I’d put my mother’s information to the test, until it was worn down to its stem, my skin green and sticky.
I take the photograph. I trowel a parting in the pretty mess. I roll the kit in and cover it.
I rested my forehead against the passenger window as my mother drove me away from my bedsit.
I watched the city dwindle into suburbs and industrial estates.
My mother has owned the same cadmium-red Ford Estate since the late eighties. It always declines to start on cold mornings, chugs and splutters in wet weather. It fails the NCT every year—three times, at least—before it passes, yet whenever my mother mentions getting a new one, my sister and I protest, vigorously, as if the car’s an old pet she wants to put down. Before the days of mandatory safety belts, we played all kinds of make-believe games in the seatless boot space. Around the time we were into Jaws, we’d pretend it was a pool of sea off Amity Island and take turns to be the shark; around the time we were into The Diary of Anne Frank we’d pretend it was a secret attic and take turns to be the SS. Once I even fell out of my mother’s car. I was four or five. It was before the days of central locking and she’d forgotten to push my button down. The door swung free as we rounded a bend. It was just a few yards from home and the car wasn’t travelling very fast. Out I tumbled into the ditch and suffered an almighty nosebleed.
‘Ben seems nice,’ Mum said, ‘really nice.’ Her voice was cautiously upbeat.
‘It doesn’t matter now anyway,’ I said, and drew my feet up onto the seat and clutched my knees and tried to vanquish the sobs with thoughts of things which were not Ben. I considered the dust-mites raised up on my dead skin and whether or not they would survive until a new tenant arrived.
We filtered onto the motorway and left the concrete behind. We passed cabbage fields and mud-caked sheep, trees so bare they seemed to consist of more negative space than timber. After several miles, my mother spoke again. The cheer had dropped out of her voice.
‘I don’t know,’ she said, ‘if you’re hubbubing because of something, or because there’s something wrong with you.’
My limbs mangled about the passenger seat. My leaking nostrils pressed into my sleeve. My leaking eyes fixed on the windscreen, flicking between the paper discs and the stalled wipers. It was then that the heightened sense of unfounded despair I thought I’d managed to stave off came clattering down. I pressed my eyelids together and pictured the windscreen I’d just closed out; pictured the swirling, white oblong of sky brilliant, petrol blue instead.
When I was a child, I used to believe there was a sky roof. Perhaps every child does, but I had a very particular panorama in my head, replete with all the floated-away stuff which had snagged there. Balloons, kites, bubbles, plastic bags.
Now I wonder if flying birds become deranged in the same way as penguins? And if this is what ultimately halts them? The sky roof.
Works about Sky, I test myself: Cai Guo-Qiang. Well known for his work involving pyrotechnics. Beginning in the early nineties, using lengthy trails of gunpowder, he made a series of ambitious environmental works. One beneath the ocean spanning a thirty-thousand-metre stretch of the coastline of Japan. Another along ten thousand metres of the Gobi Desert, beginning where the Great Wall finishes. The series is called Project for Extraterrestrials, and so, of course—it’s actually about communication.
I despise my mother’s use of words that are not words. Like ‘hubbub’. As if she is the child.
‘Because of nothing,’ I said. ‘Because there’s nothing right with me. Because I cannot fucking help it.’
I knew it was unnecessary to swear, that I would not have sworn at Ben or Jess, nor would I have cried in front of them, but the rules are different with my mother. With my mother, there are no rules. When I opened my eyes again, the cloud had solidified. Mum was staring out the oblong. Her eyeballs had turned twinkly. She took a CD from the stack between us and pushed it gently into the slot. It was the Easy Rider soundtrack I gave her for her birthday last year. From
somewhere deep inside a box on the back seat behind us, there came the sigh of an unknown object being slowly crushed beneath the pressure of its fellow objects, and all the while, the Holy Modal Rounders snarled from the dashboard, something about wanting to be a bird.
3
Rat
The last of the tree buds bust out. The grass clippings shrink down as surely as the living grass grows up again. The daffodil farm across the valley yellows and yellows until a truckload of huddled figures arrive very early one morning and spread out in a row and begin an uneven procession uphill. Even though I am too far away to discern their individual hands or the individual flowers, I know the figures must be picking. Slowly, slowly, the field turns patchy in their wake. Green again, brown again.
They’ll appear in the supermarket in Lisduff one of these days, the daffodils. Divided into bunches, elastic-banded, propped up in water buckets. But I won’t buy them. Daffodils only remind me of cancer, forget-me-nots of kidney disease, red poppies of the trenches.
I wonder are the huddlers the heavyset, hazel-skinned men who congregate in a corner of Lisduff square early every weekday morning. Loitering between the dry cleaner’s and the discount store, offering their muscle to passing trucks. They arrived during the boom to work in the meat factories, my father says. But now there are too many Brazilians and not enough beef, or at least, not enough demand for it. I see the same faces every time I pass through town. Now I wonder is it the daffodil farmer to whom these mammoth, silent men must prostitute themselves.
My mother always buys flowers from the supermarket water bucket. She divvies them into vases and distributes the vases between low-sized tables, mantelpieces, windowsills. My parents’ garden is overflowing with daffodils at this time of year, of every frill and petal-shape and shade of yellow imaginable. But it is against my mother’s rituals to pick them. According to ritual, there are outdoor flowers and indoor flowers in the same way as there are wild animals and pet animals, free fish and farmed fish, garden vegetables and shop vegetables; they must not be muddled.
