by Sara Baume
After I finished my office chores for the day, I went down to the small gallery to see if I could help and to say sorry, for even though it wasn’t my fault, I felt responsible, and I cared a lot about what Ben thought of me. I found him with splashes of warm grey on his shoes and trousers, clinging to the strands of his hair like grey glitter. I fetched a second roller and soon I was all warm grey too.
We stayed on after the other staff had left for the day. The exhibition opened the following evening and the walls needed to be dry enough for tea-bowl shelves to be erected in the morning. We painted attentively but talked aimlessly. At some point we stumbled upon the subject of infinity. Perhaps it was the natural response to so much greyness.
‘I remember when I first realised about the universe,’ Ben said. ‘About how it was too vast and complicated for me to contemplate, that I’d never be able to contemplate it. I was just a kid and it scared the crap out of me. Infinity. I couldn’t sleep at night.’
I can’t remember what I replied, but when I thought about it afterwards, it struck me as a fear which made such perfect sense that I couldn’t understand why I had never thought of it, why I hadn’t been frightened too. What was it about Ben?
That is it now. Stop now. I will not think of him again.
Works about Blinking Lights, another, I test myself: Felix Gonzalez-Torres, again, “Untitled”, 1992. A chain of lightbulbs, bound to one another by extension cord. The artist gave permission for curators to display the piece however they wished. He wanted it to bend and change according to circumstance; the only thing he did not allow was for his bulbs to be renewed during the run of each exhibition.
He wanted them to live out their natural lifespan and die, the way a person does.
I pull the tin can off the fox’s head. Restore its handsome face, and take my photograph.
Lying on my back in my wilderness, I kick out my legs and squash down the flowers. I make a crop circle even though the grass isn’t a crop and the shape I make is nothing like a circle.
And now a prey bird soars overhead, chasing a sparrow. It is only tiny, and so must be a merlin.
It must be a merlin flying its sparrow to death.
7
Frog
My grandmother’s strawberry net is in the shed, balled up. I shake the spiders out. They land, like cats, on their feet, and spread out to find new black crevasses.
I must chase the rabbits and pigeons off the patch before I can lay the net down. I pace, trying to stretch it to cover every corner at once, but it’s too skimpy, too balled. Every time I tug it over one part, an opposite part is exposed. Now a summer breeze swishes the leaves, wafts the net up again.
I gather the biggest stones from between the mud and weeds, weight its perimeter. Only now do I notice the slugs, brindled and beige and liquorice black. Trapped beneath my net and already gnawing with their gummy lips on the unripe fruit.
My father would put down pellets. My mother would scatter the rows with crushed eggshell. But I know I will do neither; nothing. I have all the time in the world, and yet, I can’t be bothered.
Works about Ineffectuality, I test myself. There is a picture in my head. Of a man in a stream in a row boat. And he is trying the smooth the surface of the water with his oar, to level the ripples. I can’t remember the name of the piece, or the artist. Maybe it wasn’t even an artwork. Why must I automatically assume that every strange object is a sculpture, that every public display of unorthodox behaviour is an act of performance?
An uneven arrangement of timber planks on the verge of a dual carriageway: art.
The sound of oboes from a decommissioned trawler lilting along a quayside in the dead of night: art.
But what do ordinary people think these things are? Is their world more generally mysterious than mine because they are not so easily able to identify public sculpture?
I think: I can read into anything. I think: I can read into nothing at all.
On the news, a baby girl found abandoned in a rural gateway, freezing, but still breathing. She would not have been discovered at all, the newscaster says, but for a man who pulled his car into the ditch and climbed out at that exact spot, to have a piss. But the radio newscaster doesn’t say ‘piss’; he says the driving man stopped to ‘answer a call of nature’. What a pretty way of describing such a mundane, mandatory bodily function. In the face of immense tragedy—yet again—unexpected poetry.
I wonder if I’d been the one to find the baby in the gateway, would I have presumed she was art? And left her there.
The phone rings at the same time in the evening that my mother usually calls, but tonight it is my sister. I wonder have they consulted on how to cause me the least possible disruption. Because I am the complicated, creative, cantankerous youngest child, my family have always afforded me dispensations from the petty responsibilities of life, from the conventional social graces. Every year, in the days approaching my father’s birthday, my mother buys me a card to write, stamps and addresses the envelope, puts it in another stamped and addressed envelope and posts it to me so that I can post it all the way back again, to him. In the days approaching Christmas, she always reminds me of the previous year: ‘Jane crocheted you an entire poncho, and all you gave her was a bone-shaped beach stone.’
But nowadays I feel guilty that I am granted the immunity of the artistically gifted, having never actually achieved anything to prove myself worthy.
‘I have a favour to ask,’ Jane says after a few minutes of chitter. ‘I was wondering if you’d mind Graham for me while we’re on hols?’
Graham is her guinea pig; I should have guessed. Pet-sitting is the only task anybody ever trusts me with.
‘I’ll drop him over to Grannie’s for you. It’s only a week so he won’t need to be cleaned out or anything and I already have a bag of carrots and a cabbage.’
‘Of course!’ I say. ‘I’ll be glad of the company.’ Though really, it’s the distraction I’ll be glad of. Or maybe they both mean the same thing; maybe loneliness is idleness, nothing more.
There’s an almighty bang from the kitchen, followed by the clatter of fractured matter colliding with the lino. I had been preparing dinner when the phone rang. Now I remember I left a porcelain plate to warm on an electric hob.
‘What the hell was that?’ Jane says.
‘Um. A bird-scarer,’ I say, not wanting her to know I live so negligently as this.
We arrange a time for her to drop Graham, and after an awkward moment of goodbyes, hang up in unison. We used to share the same bathwater, I think, and yet now, somehow, it has become awkward just to say goodbye.
I take a new plate from the press and place it on the warm hob. Sweep up the shards of the broken one.
I’ve always been prone to domestic mishap. My fingertips and wrists bear many faint burn-scars from leaning against the rims of hot pans and grabbing hold of baking dishes without oven gloves. In the first house I shared which was not home, I set the grill on fire by neglecting a toasting tray of sunflower seeds. An Australian bodybuilder called Rick, one of my housemates, put it out with a wet tea towel, disabled the alarm, ruffled my hair and called me a ‘firebug’. Later on in the year, after Rick moved out, I found a stack of porn magazines underneath his bed, a copy of For Whom the Bell Tolls and a billfold of Turkish lire.
The pattern on the broken plate was a row of daisies. How appropriate. The crack has cleanly severed every one of their heads.
A thing I know about flower-heads, even though I’ve never witnessed it: they shut up their petals and go to sleep at night. So, tonight, I wait until after dark. I go outside and find the poppies and daisies and marigolds have all tucked themselves into ragged buds.
The black garden makes me remember my last night in the city, Jess wobbling away between the street lamps on her bicycle. Those suburbs were old, their front gardens established. There were low trees, hedgerows, shrubbery, and though I cannot distinguish blossoms—cherry from apple from plum—I r
emember how blossom was everywhere that night, hovering over the walls and railings like immobile snow. Why hadn’t all the tiny flowers gone to sleep? It was so late. Instead it garlanded the scene as Jess cycled away, as if it knew it was a special occasion.
There’s something pleasant about standing here in the dark amongst the trembling greenery and dithering moths. I study the silhouettes of the bushes and trees, the steaming lumps of reclining cows. I look up to the turbine, which doesn’t appear to go to sleep as the flower-heads do. It stays up at night, continues to spin. Two white lights glow from the generator at its axis, a set of cat’s eyes, but each of the blades remains unlit. They disappear into the night sky and I only know they’re still spinning from the thrum-thrum-thrum. How is it that owls and bats and helicopters don’t get cut down by the indiscernible blades and plunge into my strawberry patch, my wilderness? I know bats have echolocation. They use their extraordinary voice to feel objects through the dark. But I’m not so sure about owls, or helicopters.
It feels as if the cat’s eyes are looking down, looking back at me. Watching over the garden, the bungalow. But I’ve never been good at judging the distance or size or position of objects in the sky. I remember riding in the back of my mother’s Ford Estate: I was four, it was night-time, and the moon was full. I was gazing out the window, and I couldn’t understand why it moved through the sky at the same pace as the car along the road, why we never managed to leave it behind. ‘Drive faster!’ I commanded my mother, but refused to tell her why, and so, she didn’t.
I turn my attention back to the tucked-up petals.
How do the flowers know it’s night-time? Why is the moon everywhere?
On the radio, nobody comes forward to claim the ditch-baby. An engineer talks about how there is a special type of microphone which can be slotted into the infrastructure of a building to record the conversation between brick and cement. Cement and glass. Glass and floorboards. An unemployed man talks about how he makes a hobby of posting unusually shaped items to himself, the most-difficult-to-post things he can think of. A loo roll. A dice. A jigsaw puzzle which the postman had to piece together in order to read the address.
I can’t hear the thrum-thrum-thrum of the turbine from every room inside the bungalow. Instead there’s a gentle domestic burring which never goes mute. Today, I try to switch everything off. Even the things that never get switched off: the kettle, the radio, the fridge. I troop from room to room. Sliding my hand behind wardrobes and mattresses, drawing it out dust-covered, sticky. But the burring remains. As if the house is a body working. As if the electricity is stalled in its wires, anxiously jittering, impatient to be allowed back in.
Tonight, a book open on my lap, and an episode of Dragons’ Den. I half read and half watch until I am only pretending to read.
A would-be entrepreneur wheels out his demonstration trolley, strokes a flip chart with a long stick, passes around a sampling tray. His shoes are sleek and pointy; his shirt is buttoned right up to the collar. He asks the dragons for fifteen thousand euro for ten per cent, thirty thousand euro for fifteen per cent, one hundred thousand euro for fifty per cent.
Another and another. Each accent is different but they all speak with the same rhythm and intonation. Voices and hands shake; necks flush. Those who manage to remain level through to the end are praised for their bearing, the canniness of their money-making ploy.
‘THERE’S NO INNOVATION, NO CREATIVITY—’ I yell at the set, because I’ve had a few gins ‘—IN MONEY BEGETTING MONEY!’
And yet, here they all are, placed upon a television pedestal. I look back to my book, finger the pages. But who am I pretending for, when no one knows what I am doing at any stage of the day or night anyway?
I am pretending for myself.
I cannot bear to be the kind of person who simply watches television.
I used to get so angry with my father, for the way he is so cynical about everybody on the news, and so quick to insult. But now I am beginning to understand that we all become tyrants beneath our own roof slates. Or maybe we don’t; maybe it’s just my father and me—the tyrannical gene I inherited from him.
‘Life’s a bitch and then you die,’ he always says.
Works about Television, I test myself: William Anastasi, Free Will, 1968. A set on the floor in a corner of a gallery, a video camera sitting on top. The camera is filming the corner obscured by the set, which is being broadcast directly onto the screen. It’s a preposterous piece about the preposterousness of what can pass for art. But also, about the preposterousness of television. How it circumscribes our sightlines, restricting us to corners. How it feigns showing us real things, when it is in fact obscuring reality.
Is the title meant to remind us that we are free to look around, to look away?
The entrepreneurs are only about my age, probably even younger, but they don’t seem so. Their tailored clothes and unbending hairdos, their clipboards and laser pointers, make them seem like real grown-up people in a way I have never been.
When I was two, or maybe three at most, I was slightly afraid of my father. He left for work early in the morning and returned home late at night, and so I didn’t see him very often. At the weekends, he worked shorter hours, and I remember how he used to lean against the kitchen countertop smoking rolled tobacco, using the sink as a gigantic ashtray. He had a single trick to entertain Jane and me: an impression of the Incredible Hulk. He’d button his grubby work shirt right the way up to the collar. Then he’d bellow and squeeze his biceps, puffing out his muscular beer gut. One by one, the buttons would pop off his shirt and skip away across the kitchen floor. Under the table, the washing machine, the fridge; into the spider’s black crevasses. It was both wonderful and terrifying.
Now I wonder if maybe my father’s Incredible Hulk impression is the reason I’ve never shown any respect for fully buttoned shirts.
Jane and I had agreed she would come around four. It was me who suggested afternoon: the stage of day I find most difficult to endure. In the morning, I am generally purposeful. In the evening, I am content to be purposeless. It’s in the afternoon, every afternoon, I despair.
Today, at five to four, I open the gate and sit down on the front step.
When I was twenty and Jane was twenty-three, she went to study French for a year in Marseilles. Early in the summer, I flew over to visit, and for five nights we slept side by side, feet to face in her stuffy bed in a stuffy dorm of the stuffy student accommodation complex. I’d never bunked with my sister before. She wore earplugs and an eye mask. A pop-sock over her head to flatten her hair. She lay very still with her arms crossed over her chest. She made no sound, and every night I woke up alone and feared she had died, and every morning we woke up together and she asked me what I wanted to do for the day.
During the family dinners which mark Christmas and Easter and birthdays, I automatically compete with my sister, vying for our parents’ attention. I disagree, disapprove. Because I am the artistic one, with my artistic temperament. Because there were only ever the two of us, and we were always too similar.
But in the south of France, we ate croissants and walked around Carcassonne and visited Cezanne’s house. We’d never spent so much time together so far away from everyone else; I had never been the sole focus of my sister’s attention. I loved that trip better than any before or since.
Marseilles smelled like lavender.
Or maybe it was Jane who smelled like lavender, when she lived there. Maybe it was just the glue-stick she rolled onto her temples at night, in the hope that it would make her perpetual headache go away.
Together we carry Graham’s hutch from car to house. Now we go back for the paraphernalia. I’ve cleared a space on the surface of the living room table. I stow the food mix, salt licks and leash underneath, adjust the hutch until it’s parallel with the window.
‘This way he can look out at the rabbits,’ I say. As if the guinea pig had specially requested a view which might allow him to m
ake-believe he is a wild animal.
In the kitchen I put Graham’s vegetables in the fridge and fill the kettle for tea. It’s strange having my sister here in this house where we have always been equals, and yet now it’s somehow my territory and not hers. I must be the one to set the mugs and jug on the Lowry tray, to offer the biscuit box.
‘I’m okay for a biscuit,’ Jane says—‘any sign of strawberries?’
‘There should be ripe ones by now; I haven’t checked in a few days. Will we have a look?’ I take a bowl from the cupboard and we walk down. Chase the rabbits and pigeons off the patch, peel back the net, pick off the slugs.
‘You don’t mind a slug’s leftovers?’
‘Good protein in slug-slime.’
‘I hear it tastes like chicken!’
Back in the kitchen, I divide the strawberries into two smaller bowls. ‘Apologies,’ I say,‘no cream.’
‘That’s okay. Just like when we were kids, remember?’
My sister and I weren’t allowed cream as children. I suppose it had something to do with decadence. Cream was for grownups, like olives, like wine, like Viennetta. Fruit was served alongside the sugar bowl. Sitting at the table in the sun room, Jane and I help ourselves to conservative spoonfuls, and after a couple of strawberries, go back for more. The flesh of the fruit is tough and tart, with a hint of chicken-slime.
Apart from those four days in Marseilles, there was one other time Jane and I were alone together very far from home. For my twenty-first birthday, I asked Mum and Dad for the price of flights to and from New Delhi, and Jane was gifted the tickets as well. For three weeks in India, she was to be my guardian.
