A Line Made by Walking

by Sara Baume

  The radio usually sits on a shelf in my grandmother’s kitchen, above the whistling kettle. But I have made a habit of carrying it with me from socket to socket, adjusting the dial according to room. It has so much dust on it I’m surprised the airwaves are able to penetrate wherever it is.

  Now a presenter is interviewing a nun from an enclosed order. Her voice is light and tinkling; her take on the world exhaustively optimistic. She makes me wonder what the submission process is like; how difficult it would be to fabricate a vocation. The faking of a quite different form of craziness.

  Now a woman roughly my own age is being interviewed. ‘I’m glad,’ she says, ‘that the stroke happened to me.’ She speaks in a faltering, toneless voice. She speaks this way because she is brain-damaged. ‘It made me a better person,’ she says.

  Not a happier person, I think, but better.

  The village shop is attached to a bungalow with a glass porch and its own garden gate. On the gate, there’s a BEWARE OF DOG sign, and inside the porch there’s a life-size model Labrador as if the sign’s only a joke. In the shop I buy a bread roll, a banana, a box of juice. I wait several minutes at the counter before the shop woman notices I’m standing there and comes in from the back smelling like cigarette smoke.

  ‘You should have given me a shout!’ she says. But then you would have been annoyed, I think, whereas now you are apologetic.

  The bread, fruit and juice are my crappy picnic and I am going on a cycle.

  I pedal, trying to make it to the top of hills without having to dismount and push. I concentrate on furiously pedalling and try not to think about where I’m heading. After roughly an hour, my old primary school reveals itself.

  It seems tinier than I remember. I’ve already witnessed this shrinkage—of places, objects; even people. Yet the old school seems an extremity, so clownishly dinky. I register the empty car park and drawn blinds of half-term break. I jump the gate and skulk around the doll-sized school, cupping my palms to peer through the classroom windows, the narrow gaps between blind and wall, blind and sill. I reach up and tickle the basketball hoop with my fingertips, stamp down the daisies on the soccer pitch as if I am an exiled giant. Finally, I settle on the bank at the edge of the playground and eat my lunch there, just like I used to. I ask the banana a question even though I don’t have a knife with which to neatly slice the butt of its peel for an accurate answer.

  ‘Is William Shaughnessy happy now?’ I ask, and have no choice but to bite it.

  The mark is somewhere between a Y and an indecipherable smudge. No matter what way I look at it, I can’t seem to decide.

  I read somewhere that children have an innate flexibility which diminishes as they grow. Slowly, slowly, adulthood deadens us. Muscles are forgotten, slacken, waste. And one day we realise we can no longer hoist ourselves parallel with the ground to fly from flagpoles. Unless we are acrobats, or digitally generated.

  Every August when I was a child, a large pile of school copybooks would appear at the end of the supermarket checkouts, and once all the groceries had been blipped through, the cashier would dole out a free share in proportion with my mother’s shopping bill. For the four summers before I turned five, I barely noticed the copybooks. School was just some abstract place my sister attended alone. For three years she’d been sent there without me and I’d grown accustomed to being the unchallenged centre of our mother’s attention for most of each weekday. It hadn’t even occurred to me that I might, some September, be sent off to school as well.

  Why do I never use my sister’s name? My sister is Jane. Jane is her name.

  One day in the August of the year I turned five, after the groceries had been unpacked, Mum took a supermarket copybook for herself, and sat down next to me at the kitchen table, and started dipping in and out of the repurposed margarine carton where Jane and I kept our crayons and colouring pencils and felt-tip pens. All day, she refused to show me what she was drawing, but the next morning, after Jane had been dropped to school, she sat me down at the kitchen table and opened the front cover of her copybook.

  ‘Now it’s time for you to begin speaking properly,’ my mother said.

  Because I didn’t speak properly. I jabbered too fast, bleeding words together, mispronouncing the ones that began with an ‘F’ or ‘S’. It wasn’t that I had a speech impediment; I just couldn’t be bothered. My mother and sister and grandmother were able to understand my jabber perfectly well and it didn’t matter to me whether or not anybody else could; there was nobody else with whom I wished to communicate.

  But my mother knew I wouldn’t get away with this once I was in school. In her copybook she had expertly written and illustrated a series of stories. There were Flower Fairies with names like Stacy and Sammy and Philly and Fanny, and they all lived together in a Fairy Fort in the Forest, eating Strawberries and Sugarcubes, and so on. Sitting at the kitchen table with her copybook open in front of me, I read out every line slowly, clearly. I faultlessly pronounced each word. Then, as soon as we got down from the table, I resumed jabbering exactly as I’d always done.

  Works about Intelligibility, I test myself: Gillian Wearing, 10–16, 1997. A video piece in which adults lip-sync the voices and affect the mannerisms of children. It’s a work about the loss of childhood, about the pervasiveness of gibberish, about the insuperable difficulty of articulating what we honestly feel. It’s a work about how, even as adults, most of our fears remain so petty. So inadequate.

  When I finally started school, I refused to speak at all. Jane must have been so mad at me. On the final evening of my first week, she told our mother: ‘Teacher says everybody thinks Frankie’s stupid.’

  For roughly the first three years, I cried every weekday morning in the car on the drive to school and refused to forgive Mum for making me go. I was so young, and yet, I had already established an unshakeable sense of priority. I knew precisely what things I wanted to do—and when and why—and I was deeply resentful of other people’s attempts to enforce structure on my days.

  I don’t remember the jabbering, nor when I stopped. These are just stories my mother has told me over the years: the legend of how I first struggled with expression. As the years passed, I cried less and less until I didn’t cry at all. I fell, carelessly, into the habit of speaking properly. I became one of the regular, unremarkable children. No special abilities or disabilities, neither a bully nor bullied. I made friends and scored decent marks and never once stood alone by the rubbish bin in winter without a coat.

  On the cycle home, pedalling up the hills I freewheeled down and freewheeling down the hills I pedalled up, my ears recklessly plugged with headphones, I listen to Cat Stevens on repeat. I listen to ‘Wild World’ until I cannot stand it any longer and switch to the radio.

  A man is talking about how he is saving to purchase his own grave. He confesses he is not terribly old, dying or sick. Nor does he have an exclusive graveyard in mind, a pre-eminent plot. All the same, he is saving to buy his own grave and he talks about this as if it’s perfectly reasonable. As if death ought to be life’s foremost preoccupation.

  What a waste of water and light and oxygen this man is, I think. What a tragedy that so many others who are trying so frantically to continue to live, will die, while he’s still saving.

  It’s dinnertime once I’m back at the base of the hill. I’ve nearly pushed my bicycle all the way to the top when the upright figure of a man becomes visible. Jink. Standing in the road outside the bungalow’s gate, perfectly still with his big-eye-small-eye fixed on the window of the front bedroom, a vase of hydrangeas on the sill. Those petals used to be moist and baby blue. Now they’re bone dry and brownish. The curtain is open, the window slightly ajar. Is Jink watching for me? How miserable he looks.

  I drop back and press my bicycle into the ditch and crouch. I don’t want to say hello, nor do I want him to know that I’ve seen him and failed to say hello. Only days ago I wanted to be the old man’s friend, and now here I am, hiding from hi
m.

  I think: You might be like that man one day.

  I think: Old? Lonely? Born again?

  After a couple of moments, Jink turns around and begins, down the opposite side of the hill, the limping descent to his cottage. I remain as I am until he is good and gone. Until there is only the turbine to welcome me home.

  My Brazilians are gone now too. The unrestrainable weeds, the irrepressible lushness, replaces the daffodils and their pickers, as it replaces the mud, the wood, the brambles.

  How long ago was it that packets of pancake batter and plastic lemons appeared in a display at the front of the posh supermarket? Shrove Tuesday. Back then I hazily contemplated giving up some vice for Lent, not in the name of religious observance, but just to practise asserting willpower. I tried to think of a vice I want to sacrifice, and ended up reasoning that I need my bad habits, desperately, just to coax myself through each day.

  Now, from the appearance of chocolate rabbits in the village shop, I determine it must be almost Easter. Mum phones to invite me for dinner. I want to refuse, but I have never missed an Easter Sunday in the famine hospital, and I need my mother to believe I still feel like doing the things I used to. I don’t want her to know about how it has become necessary to coax myself.

  Works about Deprivation, I test myself: Tehching Hsieh, One Year Performance, 1978–79. The artist erected a cell inside his studio and remained there for a year, confined. Every day, he did practically nothing. He did not allow himself a radio or television, or to read or write or talk to the people who came in to see him. An image I find on the internet shows Hsieh in his studio-cell, its spare interior. A sink, a waste-paper bin, a bed, a bare bulb, a very small window. On one wall, the artist has drawn rows of short, upright lines. Each has been crossed off, indicating that some length of time must have passed before this picture was taken. Hsieh sits on the bed dressed in a pale, plain uniform of trousers, shirt. His chin is tipped to the ceiling, his spine supported by pillows. One of the foreground bars intersects his head. But enough of the artist’s face is visible to see that Hsieh’s eyes are open, that he is not asleep.

  Blown, painted, fractured eggs. A sponge cake with primroses glued into the icing. Chickens made out of pipe-cleaner s and a real one in the oven. Headless, footless, oozing ambrosial juices as it roasts. Easter dinner at my parents’ proceeds exactly as it always has. We sit around the kitchen table saying too many meaningless things, eating too much fat and salt and sweet.

  I stay until I sense it’s acceptable to leave. At the garden gate, I tell Mum I’ve booked myself in for a haircut next week. I want to say something to give the impression I am okay. As pathetic as a hair appointment is, it’s all I can come up with.

  Mum crumples a fifty-euro note into my pocket as I leave. Perhaps for the haircut or perhaps because she knows I am the adult-child who always needs and accepts sneakily crumpled fifties.

  Alone in the car, I realise I have lied again. I drive back via Lisduff, to make amends. I slow and stop on the main street at the first hairdresser’s I see. Park on the double yellow lines, take out my mobile phone, punch in the number on the door and promise myself that next week, I will make a real appointment.

  On my grandmother’s sofa, I bash the chocolate orange my sister gave me until I feel it loosen, give.

  I eat every bit, right down to the chocolate pith: the piece that appears to serve no practical or aesthetic purpose, a formless chocolate mistake between segments.

  When the hairdresser asks me what style I would like, I realise I don’t know any styles; I’ve never had one before.

  ‘Just . . . short,’ I say.

  The floor is tiled and strewn with clippings. The air cloys with chemicals and the sound of taps rushing, dryers roaring, teaspoons tinkling. In spite of the black cloak everybody is obliged to wear, there’s something especially naked about people in salons. Hair hosed back, or in a bag, under a hood. Stripped of the frame around their face which defines their face. Here in the hairdresser’s, we are all ill-defined, inchoate. We are all but ankles and shoes, wet necks and wet foreheads.

  ‘Would you like a cup of tea or coffee?’ the hairdresser says.

  Her own style reminds me of a portrait of Marie Antoinette in my Junior Cert history book. A great, stacked mop with waves and rolls and flicks and highlights, tall enough to conceal a whistling kettle. I can’t resist staring at it in the mirror. I think about the time it must take to get it positioned in the morning.

  ‘I’m okay, thanks,’ I say.

  On the ledge below the mirror in front of me, there is a well-thumbed woman’s magazine. I pick it up and it falls open at a page bookmarked by a tuft of vibrantly blonde hair. I skim an article about female friendship. About how if females are especially close to their female friends, they menstruate in synchronisation and get fat by osmosis.

  ‘Did you do anything nice over the weekend?’ the hairdresser asks.

  ‘Um, not really . . .’ I say.

  ‘Are you going anywhere nice on your holidays?’ she asks.

  ‘I don’t really . . . um, I suppose not . . .’ I say.

  ‘Are you sure now you wouldn’t like a nice cup of something?’ she asks. I am running out of different ways to phrase refusal. I feel like such a disappointment to my hairdresser.

  ‘Don’t you ever get sick of asking all that stuff?’ I say, very quietly.

  I see, in the mirror, a raised eyebrow. She doesn’t reply, keeps snipping.

  ‘Do you get up every morning,’ I say, ‘and do that to your hair? Do you undo it at night and then, the next morning, do you get up and do it all over again?’

  She hesitates, but still says nothing, keeps on cutting. I can see her glowering at the back of my head, the wet gaps where my pallid scalp peeks through. The skin there is so curiously white, a ghost head hidden beneath my hairline.

  ‘Doesn’t that leach at your soul?’ I whisper. ‘Even a little bit, even at all?’

  The ability to talk to people: that’s the key to the world. It doesn’t matter whether you are able to articulate your own thoughts and feelings and meanings or not. What matters is being able to make the noises that encourage others to feel comfortable, and the inquiries which present them with the opportunity to articulate their thoughts and feelings and meanings, the particulars of their existences, their passions, preoccupations, beliefs. If you can talk to other people in this way, you can go—you can get—anywhere in this world, in life.

  The hairdresser is finished. Now I see I should have tried to be a bit more specific. What I meant by short was drastically longer than what she meant by short. I stay in my seat as she brushes the clippings into my eyelashes and down my collar, indignantly, and it’s a good little piece of revenge for my conversational insubordination because on the way home in the car I can feel them disseminating down my shirt.

  Scratch, tickle, prickle.

  People don’t like it when you say real things.

  I have not had a dead creature in some time now. I don’t want anything to die, of course; I only want to make good pictures, a good project. With only a robin, rabbit and rat it hardly seems like a series yet; I could hardly call it art.

  Sometimes, when I’m in the car, I think maybe I should consider accelerating when I come upon dozy pigeons. Only once in all my driving years have I created my own piece of roadkill: it was early autumn, the height of harvest season. It was pecking spilled grain from the tarmac, and I must have been concentrating on something else or not concentrating at all, because my unthinking instinct was to accelerate. I hope that I also unthinkingly assumed the pigeon would fly away safely before I reached it, that its untimely death was no more than a tragic miscalculation. I’d like to believe, as everyone does, that I am innately good; innately wired to do good.

  But maybe I innately wanted to see the pigeon burst against my windscreen, a miniature piñata.

  It left two smears across the glass, one of blood and one of shit. Or maybe the shit had al
ready been there; maybe it belonged to some other pigeon and the one I hit merely smeared it. Afterwards, I refused to clean my car. I left the blood and shit there as a reminder of my instinctive brutality, as a caution. And every time I looked through my windscreen during the weeks before the rain rained the smears away, I thought about the Second World War; how pigeons used to carry messages across cities and seas and mountains; how they are navigating geniuses whereas I can’t even remember what side of the road I’m supposed to keep my car on.

  I have decided to lay down some ground rules for my project. I’m not allowed to photograph a creature I kill myself; this would only encourage unnecessary barbarism. Or a creature which is wounded but still alive; this would be unnecessarily irreverent. Such creatures, I decide, will not count.

  Tehching Hsieh. Confined to his studio-cell. I think about what he thought about for all those unsleeping hours. I wonder if he managed to teach himself not to think, and if a mind can ever be rehabilitated after an experience like that.

  This morning it is May. An item of post arrives, the first to find me since I moved to my grandmother’s bungalow. I can see it was originally addressed to the famine hospital and has been forwarded by my mother. It has a Health Board logo on the envelope and so Mum will have guessed what it is, and will soon phone to make sure it has arrived. I open it. Lisduff Mental Health Centre. My assessment is Wednesday, 3 p.m.

  The appointment letter throws me off kilter. I lose even the puny, haphazard purpose I normally maintain. The day prostrates itself before me, the same cruel length as it always is. Immoveable, intractable.

  I cycle to the shop and buy a bag of popcorn because even though I haven’t eaten popcorn in years, I experience a specific craving. In the evening, I eat toast and Marmite for dinner, and only once my insides are glutted with salt do I desire sweet again. So I finish with feeding and commence to drink. It’s too warm for red wine; now I mix gin and tonics instead. I find they make the ordinary sensation of living lighter, less ruffled.