A Line Made by Walking

by Sara Baume

  Jess and I haven’t spoken since the last night in my bedsit, but this is only because I haven’t answered my phone on any of the occasions I’ve seen her name appear on the screen as it is ringing. Each time, I’ve told myself: don’t be stupid, it’s Jess, it’s only Jess. And once it has stopped ringing, each time I’ve promised myself I will call back, I have prepared myself for calling back, and once I have failed to call back, I’ve promised myself I’ll answer it the next time.

  As for Ben, there was never any question. Whether or not I want to see him, I do not want him to see me.

  The cement is gone now. Instead, there are grassy banks, ten feet at least, rising up on either side of the tracks.

  Every time I take the train, I buy a coffee from the snack trolley and the trolley attendant asks me the same question: ‘sugar or milk?’ And I reply: ‘no, neither, thanks.’ And he or she then presents me with, alongside my coffee, a stirring stick. I probably wouldn’t have noticed if it had happened only once, or if it was always the same attendant, but this is not so. Whoever it is, every single time, they make the same mistake.

  I’ve been gathering these sticks for seven years now. I keep them all together in a paper bag. They don’t seem to take up much space even though they are too many to keep count. They are a project. I have not yet decided how to display them, but they are a conceptual art project about the way in which people don’t listen, don’t think.

  In the final approach to the city, the banks give way to the view of people’s back gardens, sandpits and decking and trellises, so many trampolines.

  Trudging the quays towards the city centre, familiar footpaths channelling familiar streets, flanked by familiar buildings. This woman wheeling a pram of bananas, this halal kebab joint, its conical rotisserie slow-twirling in the window like a gruesome ballerina, a grease-clogged music box. And the same old loose paving slab to shoot rainwater up my trouser leg.

  On the main drag, a rip tide of jaywalkers. Outfits and hairdos and polished shoes, as if everybody were on their way to a wedding. I bump and trip between them. My bag strap snags an elbow. I stop a fraction short of colliding with a lamp post. It’s as if I cannot steer myself through the city as nimbly as I used to. As if I have lost the knack of this place.

  Seven years I lived here. From north side of the miry river to south, box-room to bedsit.

  I break away from the faces, head for the quieter streets I know best, take shelter in the covered market. I leaf through a box of vinyls at the record stall, even though I don’t own a record player. I spin the jewellery stall’s rotating earring rack, hypnotise myself with silver loops and multicoloured beads. In front of a shelf at the second-hand book stall, I stand close to the spines for a long time. I realise I am not able to read words when they are in a vertical line, but I don’t turn my head on its side. I don’t pick anything up. I move on.

  It must be lunchtime. I walk to the salad bar where I always used to go for food. I hold a cardboard tub in one hand and hover the other over the buffet. Each bucket brims with verdant greens and beans, cooled grains and seeds and tofu. I recall the salads I used to choose, and how I’d arrange them in order of preference: my favourite at the bottom so I could save it for last. I lift a plastic scoop. Other customers dodge around and lean across me, just as they used to in the posh supermarket. Come and pay and go while I’m still here. I move from salad to salad, robotically, taking a tiny scoop of each until my tub is filled.

  As I circle the park in search of a free bench, I chant the old sentence inside my head: I want to go home, I want to go home, I want to go home. But my train is almost the last one of the day; I am a prisoner of this city until evening.

  I squat beneath a tree. The wet of the earth soaks through the seat of my trousers, the pigeons start to close in. Unkempt and aggressive. They coo with an exclamation mark, demanding something.

  Coo! Coo! Coo! I toss a forkful of quinoa.

  Now an old woman in a shabby winter coat with a plastic bag of broken bread shuffles up and my pigeons desert me.

  I know I have to do something; something always has to be done. I try to remember my old enthusiasms as if they were an instruction leaflet, a shopping list. I must allow them to lead me around the city, to bridge this gulf between the present and the train.

  I spot, coming down the footpath, a girl who was in my class in college. I duck into a shop and pretend to browse party shoes until she has passed. I am heading for an art gallery, but not the one where I used to work. If I go there, the assistant curator will pop out of the office for a chat; the invigilators will ask how I am, what I’m up to. Only Jim-the-security-guard will leave me alone to drift between paintings. Maybe he’ll whisper an unobtrusive hello; maybe he’ll tell me how his cats are doing.

  I picture Jim in his invigilator’s chair, rustling his Daily Mail. I wonder how his cats are doing. I hope they are okay.

  In a different gallery, I ascend a timber staircase up to a concrete floor. It’s empty; they are always empty. My footsteps echo. There’s a table with some catalogues and a guest book in the corner; there are artworks. Today, I need so badly to be inspired by them, even though I hate that word: inspiration. It crops up in too many advertisements, politicians’ speeches, Disney films, its meaning obliterated. I refuse to be ‘inspired’ in the same insipid way that ad executives and politicians and Hollywood producers suggest I should be. What I need from these works is to be reminded of why I used to care about art—so much that I’d try and make it for myself.

  I begin slow-stepping around the concrete. A series of black-and-white photographs. Each printed large as a door. Depicting a dry-stone wall or a section of dry-stone wall or a vista of dry-stone walls. But size is not force. My pace picks up as I weary of walls.

  Works about Walls, I test myself: Lin Yilin, Safely Maneuvering across Lin He Road, 1995. The artist raised an un-cemented barrier of cavity blocks at the edge of a wide, main, hectic thoroughfare in Guangzhou city. Twelve high, five across. Then, for hours and hours, he moved the wall across the road. Progressing one block at a time. Taking from the back end, building on to the front. Traffic roaring all around as he assembled, dismantled, assembled, dismantled, assembled, dismantled.

  I come to a stop in front of the guest book and leaf back through its pages. I see how every visitor who preceded me has noted only their name and the date of their visit. Four pages of people content to register no opinion; nothing more than the fact that they came, and saw. I pick up the guest pen.

  Stack up your own damn walls, I write.

  Sitting on a tall stool in a café window, looking out at the people who pass. Most of them move in fast, short skips. Some stride or lope, roll as if set on miniature wheels. Often two come up against each other and the weaker-willed walker must dodge to the side and stand a second and watch for their chance to weave back in. We are all an enormous waltz, I think. Our limbs know how to follow the rhythm, like throats to swallow, lungs to breathe. Even though there are no fixed moves, no steps. The waltz is spontaneous, speculative. Some get to join in; others don’t. Some end up waltzing against their will.

  I suck the lip of my coffee cup, watch the passing people who never appear to see me back; as if the window glass is one-way. Whereas I see everything. The mouth which spits a blob of chewing gum onto the street, the shoe which picks up the blob and carries it away. I finish my coffee. I am spooning up the scum of milk when I see Ben. He is walking down the opposite side of the street. He is with a girl.

  I don’t know the girl but she looks like one of the art crowd; she seems faintly familiar. Once they have passed I see how she has her hand rested in the small of Ben’s back and he has his in the small of hers. I watch as their crossed arms and resting hands move away down the street. I watch until other members of the crowd waltz in front of them, waltz them away.

  Well then, I think.

  Well then that’s that then, I think. Of course.

  When I first started working in the
gallery, I was an intern, and there was never very much for me to do. Every couple of hours I asked the curatorial assistant: what now? What now? What now? Ben was an invigilator and so it was acceptable for him to sit at the front desk alongside the radiator in the bookshop all day, leafing through art magazines, doodling in the back pages of the memo book. I was always jealous of the invigilators.

  Ben would take at least one cigarette break for every shift he worked. Roughly halfway through, he’d get up and stand at the edge of the partition which separated the bookshop from the office. He’d do a smoking mime and point at the exit; that was my cue to cover for him. I relished the warmth and the magazines, but most of all, the opportunity to sit in Ben’s squashed-down coat. It was khaki green and canvas. It smelled like dust and smoke. It had no buttons, and I never asked him why he’d cut them off. I feared there was no reason, that it was an affectation, in which case I preferred not to know.

  I covered the front desk on everybody’s breaks. I sat in jackets and macs and blazers and furs, but Ben’s coat was inviting, and consoling, in a way that nobody else’s quite was. Left alone, I’d scrunch down and inhale the lining.

  We rarely saw each other outside the walls of the gallery, but inside its glaring white spaces, to exorcise the tedium of the tasks we shared, Ben and I often ended up talking, and time and time again, he would say things that resonated so powerfully with my uneasiness about life, and back there and then, I believed it was an uneasiness unique to us, and that we were somehow bound by it.

  But no, now I see I never meant to Ben what Ben meant to me. If there was anything I said which resonated in return, he found a better speech elsewhere. My romance went no further than his coat.

  I take out my sketchbook to jot down this small revelation. But now I see a woman in the corner of the café in the corner of my eye. I remember that whenever I linger over coffee, it’s in the kind of café where people take out notebooks as they nibble and sip, and gnaw on their pen-lids and gaze around and jot things down, ponderously. They almost always wear the same sort of clothes as me. Eyeliner, slightly weather-beaten faces, and a scarf, always a scarf, even in summer. And now I wonder why the fuck I bother, when there are already so many versions of me, writing down my thoughts.

  Is this why Ben’s girl was familiar? Because she is me. Only better.

  I leave the café strangers to their jotting and walk a circuitous route to the gates of the Natural History Museum. I used to come here as a student, after classes had ended for the day. When my fellow students were all in the park sitting around on one kind of grass and smoking another, I used to come here with my pencil-case and sketchbook and crouch on these timber boards and draw. I have never been any good at fur. I just can’t figure out a shortcut to the right effect; I only know how to depict every strand individually. And so my fur drawings are the ruined pages. The Tasmanian Devil, a tousled macaque. My successes are reptiles and fish and birds and skeletons, the elk’s antlers, the toucan’s beak, the rhino head with missing horn. And the conjoined pikes. The larger of which tried to swallow his slightly smaller compatriot and killed them both in the attempt.

  But today, I don’t have the right pencils.

  In front of the rumpled hide of a calf elephant, beneath a reconstructed whale’s worth of yellow bones, I wonder why I came here instead of going to the zoo. It didn’t even occur to me to go to the zoo.

  Works about Zoos, I test myself: Peter Friedl, The Zoo Story, 2007. A stuffed giraffe. Seams wiggly, posture somewhat slack; more giant toy than living animal. He was called Brownie. He was killed in Qalqilya Zoo in the West Bank in 2002. Startled by the sound of gunfire from the advancing Israeli army, he ran into a metal pole and struck his head. He fell down and his heart failed. Because giraffes are not supposed to lie flat, or so I’ve always believed, and if they do, they die. Later on, the local vet, who was also an amateur taxidermist, shoddily stuffed him.

  But this is Brownie’s story; where is the art? The artist came across the wonky giraffe, identified his force, and placed him in an exhibition.

  The art was the appropriation.

  I have to run for the train. All the time I spent idling, and now I must run. On James’s Street, the length of footpath beneath the dodgy flats, between the Adult Shop and the hospital, some kids launch a water balloon off their balcony. It hits me square on the crown, blasts its icy load across hair, clothes, bag. I curb my reaction. Don’t scream, don’t stop, don’t even look up. It’s just a balloon, just water, just strangers. I am still late.

  I reach the station just in time, sprinting a final stretch along the platform. I notice a marshmallow lying on the tracks. It looks like a tiny, lost penis. I launch myself into my carriage, triumphing over the departing train. The automatic door closes as I land.

  Gradually the body heat of running dwindles, replaced by the chill of my wet clothes and hair. I start to shiver as I sit. There are a couple of students in the booth in front of me. I follow the byways of their conversation, study their reflections in the opposing glass. They are my age. But no, of course. I forget I am twenty-six, closer to thirty, whereas they are each closer to twenty for sure. They talk about the future and the litany of impossible things they expect from it. In American accents even though they are not American, they earnestly tell each other that they are great, that things will turn out great.

  Works about Penises, I test myself: Rudolf Schwarzkogler. For years, I believed he had bled to death in the 1960s in the aftermath of a performance piece in which he amputated his own penis, inch by inch. Recently, somebody told me that this is not true; that he died after falling out a window, in a perfectly decent, respectable sort of way.

  I sit shivering. I play Bjork at full volume. Out the window, there are flat fields and forests, sweeping racecourses, llama farms. All obscured by the almost-dark except for where the rape is flowering. These expanses are not utterly yellow, but faintly glowing. Like the painted-over star stickers on my childhood bedroom ceiling. Water towers, treehouses. A flock of swans in a huddle next to a wide pond, their necks folded down like deckchairs. And I remember walking home through the city from Jess’s flat one night, my stomach sodden with cheap wine, and along the canal side in the dark, the city swans all huddled asleep, pretending to be soft, white boulders.

  There isn’t a single night cloud and the sky above the midlands is flecked with aeroplane lights, as if the whole central clod of the country lies beneath hundreds of parallel flight paths. Every time I spot a blinking set, I think of the missing aeroplane, missing still. On the radio, just yesterday, the newscaster said: beyond all reasonable doubt it crashed; every last passenger dead.

  Works about Blinking Lights, I test myself: Atsuko Tanaka, Electric Dress, 1956. A gown made out of strip lights with a train of wires. A Christmas tree, a wraparound sleigh. Only the artist’s hands and face were visible; the rest of Tanaka entombed within clinking, winking, twinkling illuminations.

  How easy to be electrocuted. How fine the line between beauty and peril.

  I wake. In the bed I wearily selected last night. The one with an almost white duvet cover. A pattern of dandelion seed-heads so faint it might be that the flowers are real and sprouting inside my duvet, pressing ghostlike against the cotton. Bjork is all gone now; replaced by the I want to go home chant. I push myself up in fury. Because I went away yesterday, and now I’m back, and there are only two directions, remember? I beat about the bedroom in frustration. Up-scuttling my drinking water, clocking a wrist off the door frame, pulling one sock on inside out and failing to find the other.

  I am so terrible at socks.

  Today it is June. This morning, summer has broken out like a plague. The garden filled with quarrelling butterflies, more on each flower than flowers on each bush. Rorschach blots rising, dipping, gliding, flitting.

  Now I’ll open every window in the house every morning. Hose the herb garden, tend the strawberry patch. I’ll make a home in my routine. And this will be enough
for me, and I will be right again.

  I pack yesterday away. I flip down the faces in the crowd of yesterday’s street as if they are the tiny plastic panels in a game of Guess Who? I place the lid back on the Guess Who? box in my brain.

  In the bathroom, I floss until my gums bleed. On the mirror, speckled by diluted blood and spit and tartar, there is a brindled slug. I follow his glitter trail down the wall and over the carpet. Out of the bathroom, through the study, all the way to a crack in the sun room door. I follow his trail but I leave the brindled slug where he is. I assume he knows why he wanted to be there, what business he has with the bathroom mirror.

  It’s a calm day as I am calm, but brighter than me. On with tracksuit, out with bike. Tie the dog string. The real seed-heads of real dandelions lie in drifts along the ditch like frost. They are waiting for a breeze to parachute them on.

  And now, a fox. My birthday fox.

  Pelt matted with dust, rear quarters indented with the mark of passing tyres. Hind legs twisted, paws flattened into novelty slippers. A gash in its side from which its entrails have slipped, already bloodless and writhing with flies.

  And on its head, the tin can. Yellow label of Pedigree Chum, no eyeholes. So the tin-can fox couldn’t see where it was going after all, nor what was approaching it.

  Maybe it was a whole year ago: the last rambling conversation I had with Ben. In preparation for the arrival of a collection of Japanese tea bowls, I painted the walls of the small exhibition space from brilliant white to grey. But the artist decided that my shade of grey was not warm enough, and Ben, who was taller and faster and neater than me, was called in to repaint.