A Line Made by Walking

by Sara Baume

  Tonight, the radio interview about the enclosed order of nuns rematerialises in the form of a television documentary. Here are the nuns’ faces: uniformly homely, placid. Old-seeming if they are young and young-seeming if they are old. I sit in my spot on the sofa sipping a G&T, my fourth, and expect to agree with their espousal of a simple, spiritual life lived close to nature. But I don’t. Instead, it angers me that they attribute credit for everything fine and splendid to God. ‘WHY CAN’T YOU LIVE A GOOD LIFE FOR ITS OWN SAKE,’ I yell at the telly, ‘INSTEAD OF IN DEVOTION TO A MYTHICAL BEING?’ I sip my drink. Now one of the nuns describes seeing a salmon jump in a stream, light bouncing from its scales, what beauty.

  ‘That was the magnificence of God,’ she says.

  ‘BOLLOCKS TO GOD!’ I yell at the telly. ‘THAT WAS THE MAGNIFICENCE OF NATURE!’

  But the nun cannot hear me, none of the nuns can hear me. And even if they could, they wouldn’t listen. They are programmed, incapable of thinking for themselves. I might as well reason with a toaster.

  I suddenly remember a Sister of Mercy who, when I was eight, told my class at school that if God called we would have no choice but to answer him, and how, for the next couple of years, I lived in fear of God’s call, until I was old enough to realise that I could simply ignore him.

  She is still talking, the salmon nun. ‘We want to be here in prayer for people,’ she says, and I yell at the telly: ‘HOW DARE YOU ASSUME TO PRAY FOR ME FROM YOUR DECADENT REFUGE FROM THE WORLD? WITH ITS TALL TREES AND SALMON STREAMS AND SHEEP FLOCKS.’ I sip my drink. ‘PRAYING IS AS USELESS AS DOING NOTHING AT ALL. PRAYING IS WORSE THAN DOING NOTHING AT ALL BECAUSE YOU ARE PRETENDING TO DO SOMETHING. YOU ARE PRETENDING!’

  I sip my drink. God is an abdication of personal responsibility, I decide. I like this phrasing. I sip my drink. He is an excuse for escaping the hardest parts of life. I sip my drink. My third, my fourth? God is history’s most successful scapegoat, I think, and this is good phrasing too. How good I am at phrasing tonight.

  When Jane and I were small, our pet cats were semi-wild, and always fluffy. They’d deliver litters in ditches and discard them there too. They’d carry home dead sparrows and shrews instead, lay them out beneficently on the welcome mat. They’d climb the pigeon-post beside our father’s vegetable patch and gnaw out the downy meat between bone and bullet and twine. We’d hear our toms yowling in the night, and in the morning the tips of their ears would have gone missing, and sometimes the whole of a cat would go missing for weeks and weeks, and sometimes forever. There was one morning, I remember, a neighbour found a cat on the road. It had been hit by a car. She knew it belonged to us because it was fluffy, and she phoned the house just as we were about to leave for school. Mum went out with a bin bag and spade and I cried so hard she allowed me to stay at home for the day. This was back when I still cried every school morning and begged her not to make me go; this was the first time she yielded.

  But in the end, it only lasted as long as every day lasts. Immoveable, intractable.

  Here is another rule for my project: no pets, only wild things. So it can be about the immense poignancy of how, in the course of ordinary life, we only get to look closely at the sublime once it has dropped to the ditch, once the maggots have already arrived at work.

  Works about Killing Animals, I test myself: Hermann Nitsch, Orgien Mysterien Theater or Theatre of Orgies and Mysteries or Orgy Mystery Theatre, or something like that. Since 1962, Nitsch has staged it tens of times, over tens of years, with tens of variations. Generally, the performance involves animal sacrifice, the kneading of flesh, the drinking of blood, sex organs, entrails. Generally, it’s organised in the style of a pagan ritual, and the general point being made has to do with how mankind has forgotten its inborn proclivity to violence and slaughter. How, instead, we are all too busy washing our hair, our car. Plucking our guitar strings, our eyebrows.

  I haven’t seen any of the small and beautiful and stupid birds splashing in their basin for a few days now. This morning when I go out for my bicycle, I notice the reason why. There’s something floating on the surface of the rainwater. I lean in and my face appears reflected in the green, and square in the green of my face, a mouse.

  Floating on its belly, paws and tail extended. Ears inflated, eyes scrunched, nose submerged, whiskers pencilling frail lines through the green, a perfect drawing.

  Works about Drowning, I test myself: the most apposite artwork for my mouse, the most exquisitely macabre. Ophelia by Sir John Everett Millais, 1851–52. A diaphanous redhead lying in a picturesque pool of water. Half above, half below the surface. Her face is chalk, her petticoats billowing. There are wild flowers strung around her dead wrists and spilling from the pool banks. Bindweed, foxgloves, reeds.

  I picture the mouse trying to swim, to scrabble back out. Slipping down the sides, a spider in a bathtub. Beneath the surface, the pads of her paws are pale and bald like the palms of tiny hands. Her back legs are splayed as if she had been kicking at the instant her heart stopped. As if, in the instant which came before the stopping of her heart, she learned to swim, a second too late.

  I should have emptied the basin weeks ago, turned it over.

  Because this Ophelia mouse is a casualty of my carelessness, I don’t know where she fits within the rules of my project.

  I fetch my camera anyway; she makes my most impeccable picture so far.

  5

  Rook

  The last and only time I was inside Lisduff Hospital was when I was a third-year student in secondary school, and a member of the junior choir. It was Christmas and the choirmaster had escorted us on a trip to the part of the hospital which is a nursing home. He divided us into groups and assigned each group a ward. Then he abandoned us to croon at the old folks. Due to diminished size, we didn’t sound very good. The strength of voice in numbers was gone; the good singers no longer plentiful enough to drown out the bad.

  None of the patients seemed to care either way. Some of them weren’t even conscious.

  Lisduff Mental Health Centre is located at the very back of the hospital complex. Despite its rearward location, it’s an inviting building. Stone-faced, creeping ivy clinging to the coarse bricks. From the outside it looks peaceful, almost appealing, but inside it’s too dim, too clean, too clinical.

  The receptionist takes my letter and directs me to the empty waiting room. I sit down and open my book at the page I last marked. I read a paragraph, reread the paragraph, re-mark the page and place the book back in my bag. I sit still and worry about bumping into someone I used to know. How could I possibly hide what I’m here for? It’s nowhere near Christmas, and I’m all on my own, and I’ve never been able to sing anyway. I only joined the choir to avoid PE and I was always amongst its weakest members. One of the ones who sheltered in the lee of stronger voices.

  From down one of these snaky corridors, behind one of these closed doors, the sound of somebody moaning.

  My doctor is a black woman in a purple shirt. I hadn’t expected that. Byzantium purple, checked. She gestures for me to sit down in the chair beside her desk. I hand her the letter from Dr Clancy and she hands me a questionnaire on a clipboard, a blue biro. It’s eight pages long. I am still ticking and scribbling as she places the letter down and starts to lean back on her chair legs like a jaded child, to fiddle with the personal items on her desk. A hole-punch, a beeswax candle, a photo frame. Her chair legs creak. I am stuck on question number fifteen: Do you see or hear things that others do not see or hear ? How am I supposed to know what other people see and hear? It’s multiple choice so I just tick the one I know I’m supposed to tick. I tick NO. I rush to the end, hand the clipboard back to the doctor.

  She places it down on the desk between us and raises a new biro, red.

  My attention straggles to the wall behind the doctor’s head. The light switch, a clock, a painting of a bushy red floret in an ostentatious frame. Hung at her eye level, above my own. A difficult-to-name floret like the one I f
ound pressed inside my grandmother’s Lowry book, as if the dry, dead bloom has somehow reconstituted itself and followed me here.

  At ten minutes to four, the doctor lowers her biro, glances at her wristwatch, folds the palms of her hands across the belly of her shirt and puffs out her cheeks to stifle a sigh.

  ‘Why would you say you here?’

  I try out a few different answers in my head: I’m here because my mother made me come. I’m here because I accidentally cried in the doctor’s surgery. I’m here because I thought that attending counselling might mean I won’t be forced to take mind-altering drugs. But in the end I don’t say any of these things, I say: ‘I’m here because . . . I’m just going through a . . . adult life isn’t . . . and I’m just . . . a bit . . . you know . . . lost.’

  Works about Lostness, I test myself: Stanley Brouwn, This way brouwn, 1960–64. A performance and its documentation. The artist would stop people on the street and ask them to draw him a sketch to a particular point. Most of the maps don’t have any words, only wiggly lines and circles, Xs and arrows. Perhaps more so than any piece I have ever encountered, This way brouwn is an apt and forcible metaphor for living. For how: we start out trying to decipher other people’s plans for us, a process which might last decades. For how: throughout all of this time, these decades, we have no choice but to obtusely, optimistically, follow.

  On the website for the Richard Saltoun Gallery, I found a page bearing the artist’s name, and on it a declaration. ‘Since 1972,’ it read, ‘Brouwn has asked that no biographical information should be given about him and that no works be reproduced.’

  How forcible, how apt, I thought, again. That he does not want anyone to know where he eventually ended up.

  The doctor doesn’t reply. I am strangely pleased with my answer. Yes, I think, that’s it. I am not sick, just lost. And lostness is an entirely fixable state. Whereas sickness—mind-sickness in particular—is entirely contrary, intangible, unfix-able. And I am calmed by this idea, encouraged. And so I go on.

  ‘There really isn’t much wrong with me,’ I say, ‘it’s just that, well, I’m not like other people; I don’t want the things they want. And this is not right, I mean, in other people’s eyes, and I feel as though they feel they are duty-bound to normalise me, that it isn’t okay just to not want the things they want, you know?’

  I realise I’ve been leaning forward. I lean back. ‘So it’s as if,’ I say, ‘I’m okay in my own bones, but I know that my bones aren’t living up to other people’s version of what a life should be, and I feel a little crushed by that, to be honest, a little confused as to how to align the two things: to be an acceptable member of society but to be able to be my own bones both at once.’

  A pause which stretches into an uncomfortable silence. Finally, the doctor speaks, says:

  ‘You have job at present?’

  ‘No,’ I say. ‘I don’t have a job.’

  ‘You think you feel better if you have job?’

  I lean further back again. I try not to show how disappointed I am by her response.

  ‘Do you think you would feel better if you had a job,’ I say, correcting her. ‘You’re missing the little words that hold it all together.’

  Somebody passes through the corridor outside, the hollow clonking of sensible shoes. I realise I can’t hear the moaning from inside this room, or maybe the moaning person has gone silent. I notice the compartment beneath the doctor’s hole-punch is packed with tiny, multicoloured circles, like old-fashioned confetti, the sort which took too long to disintegrate. So long they had to invent a new sort which disintegrated instantly.

  The doctor doesn’t take kindly to my correcting her English. She picks up a notepad and starts to write a prescription instead. ‘You on dole?’ she says.

  ‘No,’ I say. ‘I have . . . a benefactor.’

  ‘Excuse me?’

  When my grandmother knew she was terminally ill, she opened a special bank account and deposited five thousand euro. The money was for Joe, because she did not know then that he would die so shortly after she did. Joe had an extravagant lifestyle, for a dog. Because he was morbidly obese, he ate only specialised low-calorie kibble; because he was ancient, he required pills to keep his heart going, elixirs to soothe his arthritis. By my grandmother’s optimistic calculations, five thousand would allow him to outlive her by two years. But he survived only two months, and so the account remained almost untouched. My aunts agreed my mother should have the money, as she was the one who had always dog-sat. And then Mum gave me the account book and said I could use whatever I needed, that Joe always loved me the best anyway.

  And this made me feel terrible because I don’t think I liked Joe when he was alive. I think I’ve only convinced myself of this since they both died, because I liked my grandmother so very much. I’ve blocked out of my mind: the way he smelled of genitalia, the stripe of stained fur below his asshole, and all the times he stuck his slimy muzzle into my crotch and I smacked it away as soon as my grandmother had left the room to refill the teapot.

  But I don’t tell the doctor any of this, and she doesn’t ask me to elaborate. She hands me the slip of paper.

  ‘You present within the bracket of moderate to severe depression,’ she says. And suddenly she’s using the little words again, as if reciting something learned by heart, as if using someone else’s lines, like Jink. ‘You require to be started upon a programme of antidepressant medication as soon as possible.’

  I hold the slip in my hand; so I am able to do mental illness properly after all.

  I say: ‘I don’t want to take this.’

  The doctor drums a finger against the surface of her desk and begins to release a new sigh. A little through the lips, the rest through her nostrils, an exasperated wheeze. ‘If you don’t take the antidepressants, you won’t be eligible for counselling. You will get steadily worse. Every patient I treated who initially attempt to get better without medication come back to me after a couple weeks begging for the drugs.’

  ‘Okay then,’ I say. ‘I refuse. I refuse to take them.’

  The doctor drums a second finger, a third, all of her fingers, puffs a massive sigh out through every orifice of her face at once, tells me: if I haven’t already been started on the programme of medication by the time I have my first counselling session, her boss will be very angry with her. ‘You want me get in trouble with my boss?’ she says.

  I laugh. A single, high, completely inappropriate cackle. ‘I don’t know what they call that in your country,’ I say, ‘but in my country we call it emotional blackmail.’

  I take out my wallet, and from my wallet, the prescription which Dr Clancy gave me. I place both the prescriptions down on the surface of the desk between us. One crumpled, one smooth.

  I tear them up and drop the torn pieces into the wastepaper basket on my way out.

  Works about Lostness, again, I test myself: Vito Acconci, again, Following Piece, 1969. The artist selected strangers on the street at random and pursued them. For as long as he could, for as far as they went. Until they lost him, or he lost them. It’s a piece, again, about aimlessness and pointlessness. About how selecting a total stranger to determine your path is every bit as reckless and jeopardous as trusting yourself.

  As I leave the centre, my hands are shaking. Sometimes they start to wobble when I haven’t eaten enough, but this is different. I place my shaking hands upon the steering wheel and grasp. Start the engine. Pull out of the hospital car park. Indicate in the direction of turbine hill, of home.

  My heart is racing, my mind is racing; I race a bus back through Lisduff. As it pulls in at a red pole and I am overtaking, I suddenly remember to wonder what the doctor will tell her boss. Will she say I threw a tantrum, stormed out? Will she write in my file that I made racist remarks, that I am a racist? By the time I reach the back road, I am deeply appalled by the ‘your country/my country’ remark, and how it came to me so naturally. Would I have been as rude to a white woman? Wou
ld I have located some trait other than her foreignness, her imperfect English? Am I a racist after all?

  But now I remember: I am mentally ill. Properly, officially. And cannot be held responsible for my actions, my words.

  And I wonder—if this is the case—will the centre phone and tell me to come back? Will they send someone, some vehicle, to come and fetch me?

  When Jane and I were little kids with semi-wild and fluffy cats, there was this thing we used to do to them, for a joke, a joke only little kids would laugh at. We used to hold them in our laps and stroke their heads, and as we stroked, we’d tug back the skin and fur of their faces, pulling it gently until their eyes went slitty and small, and then we’d cry out: HING-HONG CHINESE PUSSYCAT! And giggle uncontrollably.

  In the car, through the town and out the other side, onto back roads again, I remember this and think: I am a racist after all.

  My heart is racing, my mind. My hands are shaking, my vision. And so, it is strange that, in spite of everything, I notice the rook.

  In the ditch at the side of the road. Lying splayed but still. It appears to have been hit by a car which passed before me.

  ‘This is not a good time,’ I say aloud. My camera is in the glove compartment but I’m in the worst state of mind to attempt the making of art. And besides, it’s raining.

  But I don’t have a crow and I like crows. Their skulls significantly smaller than that of a dog, a cow, a horse, and yet they are so much smarter—so smart they can solve puzzles on YouTube.