by Sara Baume
The artist’s last words to his brother, Wikipedia says, were: ‘the sadness will last forever.’
It gets hot in between these glass panes when the sun shines. It makes me think it will be warm enough to sit with my book on the patio, to take a chance on my grandmother’s rickety lounger.
But it turns freezing with each passing cloud, and the freezing breeze turns the pages of my book for me, before I am ready.
I hear the drone of an aeroplane as I lounge in the cold. I see its contrails against the blue. The drone seems louder than it should be. Maybe just because I am outside, or maybe because it is lower than usual.
Now I remember the missing aeroplane. I remember it’s still missing and could be anywhere, could be here.
I drop from the lounger and climb under the patio table. I lie down and pull my knees up to my chest and place my cheek against the ground.
I smell the grass. I wait for the plane to crash.
4
Mouse
I always forget that crows have crow babies in the springtime.
In Junior Infants I learned that swallows have swallow babies and blackbirds have blackbird babies and song thrushes have song thrush babies, then we learned their names in Irish. On the classroom nature table there was a cup-sized nest. Encased in moss, lined with fur. And there was a single intact egg inside. Powder blue, no bigger than a boiled sweet. The teacher said it belonged to a spideog, a robin, or maybe a druid, a starling. But definitely not a crow.
I don’t think I’ve ever known the word for crow in Irish or what colour a crow’s egg is. I know they build their nests very high up and out of kindling. I see the odd one flapping low and carrying an ungainly stick in its beak as though the stick’s a balance pole and the crow’s flying a tightrope. I know they’re smart, the family Corvidae. I’ve watched them solving puzzles on YouTube. Smart enough to open mussel shells and crisp packets, to lay their eggs in the safety of the treetops beyond the reach of badgers and foxes and little boys. Of course they must procreate at some point because they are everywhere, all year round. Every time I think I see a better sort of bird to sight—a kestrel, a buzzard, a glossy ibis—it turns out to be just another jackdaw, or magpie, or rook. So why wasn’t I taught, in Junior Infants, that crows have crow babies in springtime too, just like the small and beautiful and stupid birds? The ones that insist on using the basin instead of the birdbaths.
When I cycle in the mornings, I make an effort to appreciate even the most ubiquitous bits of nature. Not just the exquisite infestations of white blossom, but the elegance of each black thorn. Not just the petal-packed dandelion buds, but the hollow stalks from which their yellow bursts. Not just the swallows and song thrushes, but every different kind of crow as well.
And I look out for the fox, the fox who dropped me a rat. I’d like him to drop me something I haven’t photographed before, preferably exotic. A vole perhaps, a pine marten. I look and look, but there’s only the same neighbours passing at the same time in the same cars and jeeps and vans on their way to the same jobs and schools and crèches.
When my grandmother first moved here, fifteen years ago, there wasn’t any turbine on turbine hill. For miles around, nothing but pasture, pine forest and the occasional unobtrusive cottage. But since then, vast plots have been levelled and poured with cement. Bizarre dormer bungalows have appeared, with white plaster wings and wide-as-a-wall windows, with turrets.
I watch the neighbours passing. I think: there are only two directions, really. Away from home, and back again, and you cannot, in all sincerity, say that you are going somewhere when you return so soon, and play it over again the next day, without ever making any progress.
Works about Progress, I test myself: Vito Acconci, Step Piece, 1970. At 8 a.m. every day in Apartment 6B, 102 Christopher Street, New York City, Acconci stepped up and down off an eighteen-inch stool at a rate of thirty steps a minute for as long as was physically possible, and I know these particulars, because at the end of every month Acconci drew up a report delineating the negligible variation between days. Charting, exhaustively, his total lack of headway.
As well as the cars and jeeps and vans, there’s a solitary minibus, and every day I seem to manage to meet it at a very narrow part of the road. Then I must stop, dismount, haul my bike into the ditch. As it passes, I see faces against the glass, peering tactlessly out at me. Sometimes a hand appears, waves. But I can never tell which face the hand belongs to, and then the minibus is gone.
On the phone I ask my mother about it.
‘Do you remember William Shaughnessy who you were in school with?’ Mum says. ‘It picks him up every weekday morning and brings him to a place up in the city for the day, drops him back again in the evening. A centre for mentally handicapped people, or whatever it is you’re supposed to say now. A centre for people with an intellectual disability . . . ?’
‘I remember Willie,’ I say. ‘I didn’t think he was that bad.’
‘I don’t really know,’ she says. ‘I don’t think he’d be capable of holding down a job or anything, and this place just gives him somewhere to be every day.’
Willie and I started school together, but we weren’t in the same class for more than a few terms. He repeated Junior Infants three times, at least. I can’t remember how far behind he’d fallen by the time I moved on to secondary school. He always seemed to me more shy than stupid. He never played with any one or thing during lunch break, but loitered by the rubbish bin at the very edge of the school yard, wincing whenever anybody approached. I never saw him wear a coat in winter, and on one occasion, as I was depositing orange peel or maybe a chocolate wrapper or maybe a scrunched-up piece of aluminium foil, I noticed that he wasn’t wearing a shirt beneath his jumper. The cheap, rough wool was scratching directly against his bare skin.
After the phone call is finished, long into the night, I think about William Shaughnessy; the many years we have been strangers, the essential things we have in common now.
I remember a conversation with Ben, during the installation of an exhibition of enormous textile paintings. He and I were both low down in the gallery hierarchy; we often partook of the most tedious tasks. We were refilling old screw holes, waiting for the filler to dry, sanding it impeccably smooth again, and, ultimately, painting the walls a newer, more brilliant shade of white. During one of these stages, we started to discuss how crazy a person is required to be in order to get committed.
The city psychiatric hospital is situated next door to the train station. I’ve passed it hundreds of times and often stopped to peek through its railings. A grandiose Victorian building surrounded by tall trees and sloping lawns. During the years I rented damp-smelling bedsits or the box rooms of draughty houses shared with people I didn’t like, the psychiatric hospital seemed so peaceful and pleasant in comparison. If I lived there, I thought, I wouldn’t have to fill out forms or pay bills or do my own washing. I’d be left alone, all day, to draw. As it turned out, Ben sometimes thought the same. ‘No one would ever hassle you about getting a proper job and settling down and contributing to society,’ he said.
Tedious though they may have been, there was something therapeutic about those gaps between exhibitions. The processes of erasing, repairing, re-whiting. I always liked working in the gallery. I never minded being low down. I didn’t want to have to make decisions or shoulder blame.
Works about Fakery, I test myself: The Leeds 13, Going Places, 1998. A group of fine art students at the University of Leeds. For their end-of-year project, they presented documentation of a holiday they’d taken to Malaga. Funded, allegedly, by money provided by the university as a project grant. At first, it was the students’ audacity that attracted media attention. Later on, the holiday was revealed to be a hoax. The Leeds 13 had faked everything from plane tickets to suntans. They had travelled no further than Scarborough. They had used photographic trickery to make the sun appear yellower, the sky and sea bluer.
More recently, I learne
d that the psychiatric hospital is located somewhere else in the city altogether. I tried to find out what the pretty building I’d always thought it was actually is, but nobody I asked was able to tell me.
Though I have not met Willie in years, now I know for certain he’s a passenger on the minibus I recognise him immediately.
I am standing in the ditch at a narrow stretch of road, holding my bicycle up. Willie sits slightly apart from the others. He raises his head, just for a second, as if he knows. His pale hair is shaved close to the square shape of his skull; his features are chiselled, almost handsome. He looks older than he is, solemn and mysterious.
He does not wave; nobody waves at all.
I watch the rear doors shrink. It’s an exceptionally straight stretch of road and so they shrink for a long time. I watch, and instinctively, I pity the passengers of the minibus.
But no. Perhaps witlessness is happiness, and pity an insult; perhaps I am the misfortunate one.
Before the minibus finally reaches the corner and disappears, I raise my right hand, a salute to simplicity.
My mother and I had struck a bargain, and so, after four days in the famine hospital, I made an appointment with the family doctor. But I cheated, telling Dr Clancy’s secretary that I’d cut my hand on barbed wire and needed a tetanus shot. She said that Dr Clancy could slot me in early the following morning.
I woke as soon as the first crow croaked. I lay on my back in my child-bed, staring out the Velux, watching daylight grapple through the encrusted bird-crap. I felt deranged, penguinlike. I lay there for as long as I possibly could while still leaving myself enough minutes to rise and dress and drive to the surgery in time for my appointment. Eventually I heaved my legs out from beneath the duvet. I pulled on odd socks and a sweater with a prominent toothpaste blob on the front. Waddling, stumbling, waddling, I left the house, climbed into my car, swung onto the Lisduff road and spontaneously forgot which side to drive on. I coursed along in the middle until a tractor appeared in the distance, trundling towards me on the right. Ah yes, that’s it, I thought. The left.
All the way to the surgery, I concentrated on not-crying. My eyes kept blurring, like tiny windscreens in heavy rain, and I blinked and blinked, wiping them clear again with my lids. Dr Clancy’s surgery is a unit in a shopping centre. To one side, there’s a traditional sweet shop; to the other, there’s a dental hygienist. The woman herself is tall and fair and bulky. She has bricklayer’s hands and a penchant for small acts of acceptable violence: the stabbing of syringes and the bleeding of fat veins. My father calls her ‘Dr Blood’.
‘Ah yes,’ she said, when I repeated the barbed-wire story. ‘Just pop yourself on the table there and roll up your sleeve.’
I tilted my head back and stared at another ceiling. This time, windowless and salmon. I tried to remember the sensation of the last injection I had, to prepare myself. The doctor was at her desk, rummaging loudly through my paperwork.
‘I have it here,’ she said, ‘that you had a tetanus only three years ago.’
I dangled my feet off the edge of the examination table. Kicked them softly in the air, a baby in a highchair. I didn’t know what to say.
‘They cover you for ten,’ she said, ‘so there really isn’t any need for you to be here today.’
I listened to the shuffle of a new patient in the waiting room. The hoarse squawk of yet another crow from a telephone wire outside the window. I started to sob.
Dr Clancy got up from her desk, gagged me with a mansized tissue, manoeuvred me to the tableside chair. Then she waited as I sucked and blew, as I tried to explain that I had no explanation, that I just spent rather a lot of time trying not to cry; that trying-not-to-cry had become my normal state.
‘Well, well. You’re depressed,’ she said, flatly. ‘It’s nothing to be ashamed of; a medical matter of imbalanced chemicals, depleted stores of serotonin, plain and simple. It requires a prescription, that’s all.’
She turned back to her desk and took out her notepad and started to scribble. I made a small and stupid sound, some kind of honk-squeak of protest.
‘If there was a blood test for it then I’d be able to show you,’ she said, without looking up. ‘It’s a deficiency just the same as iron or thyroxin or whatever. It’s basically a happiness deficiency.’
She shook the box of tissues at me. I took a new one and did not say anything. I stared past Dr Clancy at the eye chart and tried very hard to concentrate on singing the shortsighted person’s deviant alphabet into the white noise of my head. F P T O Z L P E D U W Q. I wished that my tissue really was the size of a man, that I could cast it over my shoulders and hood my face, like a child in a ghost costume at Halloween. That I could cut two oval holes in front of my eyes and see the world without it seeing me back.
After a couple of minutes, the doctor handed me the prescription and an envelope with the address of the Mental Health Centre, Lisduff Hospital, on it.
‘Look, let’s get the antidepressants started and if you post this today you should have an appointment for an assessment in a couple of weeks, okay?’ she said, and that was that.
I paid her the money my mother had given me, and left.
Works about Happiness, I test myself; but no.
How interesting that I cannot think of one.
For her money, my mother got the reassurance that my appointment had gone fine. I considered telling her that Dr Clancy had diagnosed me as emotionally well, but this would have been a deception too far. So I told her I was being referred to a counsellor in Lisduff Hospital, but withheld that I’d been prescribed antidepressants. I didn’t feel good about lying, but I was afraid that if I told her what the doctor actually said, she’d insist I cash the prescription and remain in the famine hospital. So I chose this half-truth instead, and she was cautiously satisfied, as I had calculated, and okayed it with her sisters for me to go and stay in their mother’s bungalow, as I had hoped.
I cleared the mess of boxed and bagged belongings from the floor of my father’s shed into the boot of my Fiesta, and set off.
I’ve told my mother countless lies over the years. The past ten in particular. But I’m trying to be done with all that now. And I’m trying, diplomatically, to fix the lies I’ve already told.
I did not want to post the doctor’s letter, but I knew I had to make amends. As for the prescription, my ticket to a softer, slyer sort of sadness, I left it folded inside a slot in my wallet and waited for Dr Clancy to somehow intuit that it was languishing there, and phone me.
But she didn’t.
Works about Lying, I test myself: René Magritte, The Treachery of Images, 1929. The painting shows a pipe, and beneath it Magritte has painted the words: Ceci n’est pas une pipe. Because his image of a pipe is not a pipe, of course, it’s a painting. Every painting is just a painting.
The last night I spent in my child-bed in the famine hospital, I lay awake, making ceiling studies.
A shadow, a dint, a scuff, a bump, and then, for the first time all week, I noticed the old sticky stars. Almost twenty years ago, I sketchily configured them to resemble the only two constellations I have ever been able to identify: Orion and the Plough. They had long since been painted over, which made them invisible during the day. But in the dark, they persisted in glowing weakly through the Dulux. Then I turned my head a fraction and looked out my skylight at the real stars. There were only two, and at first, I couldn’t figure out why they appeared and disappeared as I watched, a jagged kind of twinkling. But after a while I realised, of course, that there must be clouds at night as well. That it must have been because of the night clouds.
Works about Stars, I test myself: William Anastasi, Constellation Drawings, a series from the 1960s. He made each by blindfolding himself and playing a specific fugue: Bach’s The Well-Tempered Clavier. For the duration of the piece, he drew dots on a sheet of paper with black India ink, stopping when the music stopped. He made ninety-six in total, and named them as he named them beca
use, I am guessing, he believed they resembled, more than anything else he could think of, star clusters as viewed from the Earth.
When I first saw some of these drawings in a book, I was struck by the limited amount of space they take up on each sheet of paper. Almost every one occupies just a tiny area. But then, isn’t this as it should be? The ink in proportion to the whiteness a reasonably accurate replication of constellations in proportion to the galaxy.
After the minibus is lost from sight, I turn around and start back. At the bottom of the hill, I dismount and hold the handlebars and push. Although it doesn’t seem like a windy day, I can see the blades of the turbine spinning. I can hear their soft beat. And so I know it must be windy two hundred feet above my head. It must be a different day up there in the low sky, than down here, on the road.
Works about Wind, again, I test myself: Allora & Calzadilla, Half Mast/Full Mast, 2010. A split-channel video upon which a procession of acrobats take turns to hoist themselves up a flagpole. Each body holding itself momentarily perpendicular, in imitation of a flag, flying.
I think it might be about a disputed territory somewhere, a legacy of military occupation.
Or maybe it is just about hauling yourself up again. Holding fast for as long as possible.
