by Sara Baume
Delhi in June was a kind of hot we could never have imagined. The first day we walked around outside, the painted wooden beads of my necklace melted a rainbow across my chest. We got into an auto-rickshaw to escape the immobile air, but even when it was gusting, the breeze was still hot. So we took a bus into the foothills of the Himalayas, a fourteen-hour trip. Rising up a long and winding forest road, there was a lay-by with a chai stall and a fridge-freezer full of Anglo-chocolate bars. We stood on a roadside in northern India and ate frozen Dairy Milks. In the town there were temples and flagstones painted in red and yellow script and monks who drifted the narrow streets in billowing robes as though being carried by the hairdryer breeze. At first, we adored it. But then, of course, we ate or drank something dubious, and got sick.
I remember lying on a trolley in a corridor of the Tibetan Delek Hospital. Watching a swallow who had built his nest in a pock high up in the shoddily plastered wall. I could hear chanting in the distance, the crashing of enormous cymbals. I watched the swallow flying to and fro, and the great mound of poo on the hospital floor underneath his home, how it grew and grew.
Though our bodies recovered, our spirit of adventure had perished. For what remained of the trip, we went barely anywhere, tried barely anything new. We stayed in the same hotel and ate in the same restaurant and bought the same brand of bottled water from the same tobacco shop. And with every bottle of water, we checked to make sure the seal hadn’t been tampered with.
When we returned home from India and people asked what it was like, I would always say: breathtaking.
It’s a glarish, muggy day and soon grows stifling inside the sun room. A bell jar, a fish bowl, a cannabis grow house. Jane and I finish our strawberries and carry fresh mugs of tea outside to sit on the bench by the shed.
‘I put Graham’s leash in,’ my sister says, ‘if you feel like taking him for a turn around the garden.’
‘What if he squirms out and runs away with the rabbits . . . ?’
‘Ha! He’s not much of a squirmer. He probably won’t get beyond the first tasty tuft of grass.’
Jane slides a pair of sunglasses from her breast pocket, rests them between her ears. I always feel like a vagrant alongside my sister. Her hair shiny and straight; her outfit neat and stylish. Whereas most of the clothes I own came from market stalls and fit me ill, and smell like strangers. Even now it is shorn, my hair is knotted, my fingernails bitten, and I usually have at least one toothpaste blob, if not more, down the front of my jumper. White badges of slovenliness.
But I work hard never to think about what I look like.
What I look like will not be left behind; only what I make.
Jane finishes her tea, points at the lawn. The dandelions are dead and dying, but the daisies should endure until the end of summer; the clover, too.
‘How long’s it been now . . .’ she says, ‘. . . since Grannie . . . ?’
‘Coming up for three years, believe it or not. I’m still always expecting her to pop out from behind a bush in her gardening duds. There’s something weird about this place and stuff still being here, when she isn’t . . .’
‘I know I don’t come very often any more, but still . . .’ Jane says, ‘I don’t know how I’m going to feel when it sells. It’ll be a bit like a second death.’
‘Like a third death,’ I say. ‘The dog.’
Jane smiles, but sadly. ‘Oh yeah,’ she says, ‘Joe.’ She leans forward on the bench and tugs her sleeve back to reveal her wristwatch. I know she should be leaving, and I cast around for something which might keep her here. To chip away at just a tiny bit more of the endlessness of my afternoon. ‘Jane,’ I say, ‘do you still remember Grannie’s voice?’
My sister looks at me. ‘Of course I remember. Oh hello she’d say, never just hello, always oh hello, and when she called Joe, she’d do it in threes. Joe Joe Joe and then when he didn’t come because he never came, she’d call Joe Joe Joe again.’
‘No, but, I don’t mean the things she said. I mean the sound of her voice. Can you still hear it in your head?’
‘Yes, of course. Can’t you?’
A bird-scarer goes off in the distance. It chooses this precise moment, which is strange, because I’ve never heard it before.
‘No. I don’t think I can. I keep trying but it’s gone. It’s like I didn’t think about her enough over the past couple of years, like I was too busy with my own stuff and I didn’t think about her enough, and now I really want to remember, it’s too late, it’s gone.’
My sister looks at me. She lifts her empty mug. She smiles her sad smile. ‘I really have to go,’ she says.
When I was a child, I was able to wiggle my ears. None of the other kids in my class could do it and so it was my party trick. But throughout secondary school and college, I had no cause to wiggle my ears. And when I remembered and tried again in adult life, I discovered I couldn’t do it any more. From the internet, I learned that everybody possesses muscles with the potential to flex the cartilage of each ear. But most people don’t use them and so they seize up early in life. If you are able to wiggle your ears, you have to keep doing it, or the ability will eventually be lost.
‘Of course,’ I say, ‘of course you do.’
Stalled at the gate in the aftermath of my sister, I see, down the valley, a man standing on the roof of his bungalow. He seems to be stripping the slates off, exposing a paler layer, the wooden beams beneath. It looks as if he has stopped and is staring up the valley towards the turbine, towards me, but in truth the man is too far away for me to tell which direction he is facing, or if he has a face at all.
I trail my gaze to Jink’s cottage. A grey rod of smoke rises from his chimney even though it’s a warm day. Muggy, glarish. I wonder why Jink has his fire lit in summer. I wonder if he is spying on me through the trees.
Works about Time, I test myself: Christian Marclay, The Clock, 2010. A 24-hour film, a collage of extracts from several thousand other films, the complete history of cinema. Each extract represents a minute of the day. Mostly, though not exclusively, by means of a clock face. Wherever the film is screened, it is played in sync with actual time. But I have never seen it for real. Right the way through from beginning to end. I don’t imagine many people have. Nevertheless, I love this piece. I love the idea.
I love that an idea can be so powerful it doesn’t matter whether I’ve seen the artwork for real or not.
Graham is roughly the size and shape of a travel pillow, the colour of woodstain. He makes a sound like a squeaky wheelbarrow whenever I pass. This is his way of summoning me for food. But he is already nibbling hay as he squeaks. So I put him into his harness, clip on his flimsy leash, carry him out into the garden for some exercise.
In the garden, I find that Graham does not want to exercise. He wants to eat. Just as Jane predicted, he stops at the first patch of grass and commences to munch.
‘But look!’ I implore him. ‘It’s such a great big garden out there!’
But no. Graham is apparently not a Shackleton sort of guinea pig. I watch as he takes down several blades with each swipe of his buck teeth and sucks them through his tiny mouth like green spaghetti. Chews and chews. I watch and try to guess whether he is standing or sitting or lying down. His amorphous belly drags the ground, making it impossible to distinguish between positions. I plonk myself next to Graham and tickle the fur on his back and begin to examine it, strand by strand.
Now, suddenly, I want to draw.
It happens so seldom; I must catch and keep this slender yearning, a rare beetle in a jam-jar trap. But mustering will is not the same as wanting. I lie in the garden and think about all the footsteps between my body on the grass and my pencil-case and notebook on the table in the sun room. All the muscles I’ll have to flex and relax to get myself there.
‘Make yourself,’ I command my muscles. ‘Just fucking make yourself.’
I rip up fistfuls of Graham’s blades and weeds; he can finish them inside. He kee
ps chewing as I lift him, continues to chew as we cross the lawn, the kitchen, the hall, to the hutch. He is still chewing when I return from the sun room with my drawing tools, as I spread them out across the table.
How I adored to draw as a child, a teen; all my life before I began to try and shape a career out of it. As soon as I started college, art became a pursuit I might succeed at, and so it followed that I might also fail, that failing was the easiest way. Drawing and making meant more to me than ever before, but I was no longer able to immerse myself in their processes as I once had. Their processes no longer made me solidly happy.
In college, I used to weigh and measure everything in my whole small world for its potential as an art project. In the studio I’d burrow my headphones deep and hew away at whatever I happened to be hewing. The gluing of kindling to plywood, the whittling of old Christmas trees, the scratching of tableaux into eggshells, the carving of balsa birds.
And in the rented beds of rented rooms, I surrounded myself with the pictures and objects I made, and then I made myself up as if I were art too. A ring through my lip, a ring through my nose, a pair of oxblood Doc Martens.
Works about Validation, I test myself: Jennifer Dalton, What Does an Artist Look Like? (Every Photograph of an Artist to Appear in The New Yorker, 1999–2001), 2002.
My held up, held out, hovering pencil reaches, touches, caresses the paper. In the reflection of my grandmother’s living room window: no dreads or wraps or rings or Docs. Now I look like a perfectly regular person, definitively not a genius.
It took me five years of formal education to figure out that what I truly wanted to be was an outsider artist, and that it was too late. I’d already put five years into generating a career out of solid happiness. I wanted both and ended up with neither. Like the pike in the museum; the one who died in the process of eating a weaker member of his own kind. And there’s no going back—now I’m closer to thirty than twenty—condemned by formal education to rationalise, conceptualise, interpret. Not just think, but rethink. Not just look for meaning, but make meaning all by myself.
Art is the only thing I am able for. And yet here I am. All day every day. Doing nothing. Feeling worse.
Tonight, it rains. Soft rain. I dabble in the shallows of sleep, listening to the rain-murmur, the turbine’s beat.
I like the night, I try to persuade myself. At night, l am immune. There is no onus to fill hours; nothing I should do or feel like I have to. Night is a nothingness to be savoured.
But on the radio today, an expert talking about how a person needs at least eight hours of unadulterated unconsciousness in every twenty-four so that the brain can adequately repair itself in readiness for the next day. If brains spend the night-time necessarily repairing themselves, this must mean they spend the daytime involuntarily depleting. Now I lie awake and try not to think about this.
When I couldn’t sleep as a child, my mother would bring me two cream crackers and a glass of milk, and if that didn’t work, she’d tell me it made no difference whether I was actually unconscious or not, so long as I was resting. But now I know this isn’t true. Now I know that a tiny piece of my brain is annihilated by each moment of missed sleep, and the only solution is oblivion.
I look down the bed at my protruding foot, the left. Spread my toes, bend them all together. Now I try to bend them one at a time, as if I were playing toe piano. But they won’t, I can’t. I stick out my other foot, the right, and try the same. Better, but no. I try to remember if I wasn’t ever able to play toe piano, or whether I have recently lost the ability, as with my ears. Another small part of me which has seized up, because I neglected to practise.
In this morning’s paper, a story about a burned-out car meticulously covered in Christmas wrapping paper and abandoned on a beach: art.
A pine forest in the midlands where several tiny houses with tiny timber doors and tiny panes of glass and tiny floral-patterned curtains have been found built into tree trunks: art.
I tear yesterday’s guinea pig page from my sketchbook, start to scrumple it.
Stop scrumpling. Unscrumple. Smooth. Start to fold instead.
I bend and tuck the failed fur drawing into a miniature paper hat. I open the door of the hutch and balance it between Graham’s satiny ears.
It began like this, with Make & Do. Rockets out of Fairy Liquid bottles and castles out of cereal boxes. Wigs out of shredded newspaper and superhero costumes out of old underwear and glitter-glue and sequins. Make & Do was my introduction to art, and my signature technique has never changed, never matured. All those years in the studio with power saws and welding rods and kilns—all the hours I put down in the hope that time might make up for talent—and still, instinctively, I reach for the sticky-tape and crayons and scissors. I end up with a paper hat, when it should have been a masterpiece.
And the hat falls off the guinea pig, into his bedding straw.
Lying face-up in my wilderness, music pressed as close as possible to my brain, playing at full volume. I skip, skip, skip. Every song it contains is etiolated. Every singer bored, every note flat; my music a drug to which I’ve grown resistant.
The sky stopped up with sooty cloud. But after a while, a blue vortex. I watch it creep into my line of vision. Creep across, creep from. I watch for something to tumble out, or to be sucked in. But the vortex passes, the sky restored to soot. I close my eyes.
It’s Friday. The Friday of the June bank holiday weekend. The director of the Road Safety Authority comes on the radio to tell me that today is the day of the year upon which more people die in car accidents than on any other, as though if he tells me this I might postpone the car accident I had scheduled; I might remember not to be so common, so vulgar, as to die today.
There’s a sign on the gate of the quarry where my father works. ACCIDENTS DON’T HAPPEN BY ACCIDENT, it reads. But of course they do. That’s what the word ‘accident’ means. Who are the people who decide what signs will say and where to put them? And how many times have I obeyed a sign without considering the sign-makers, how they are fallible humans too, doing a job they are humanly bored by, making human mistakes?
Evening settles in, the pigeons and rooks flap off to roost and I have not died on this popular day for dying. I feed Graham when he squeaks. I make him a new paper hat. I go to bed much earlier than usual, eager to have woken up in the morning and survived.
Works about Signage, I test myself: Gillian Wearing, Signs that Say What You Want Them to Say and Not Signs that Say What Someone Else Wants You to Say, 1992–93. Wearing flagged down strangers on London streets, presented them with a sheet of blank paper, a black pen, and asked them to write something, to hold it up. Then she took a photograph. I HAVE BEEN CERTIFIED AS MILDLY INSANE! reads the sign of a man with a snake tattooed on his face. I’M DESPERATE, reads the sign of a man in a snazzy suit, with soft features and yellow hair thinning at the peak. But my favourite photograph shows an archetypal nerd: bad haircut, thick-rimmed glasses. His sign reads: EVERYTHING IS CONNECTED IN LIFE THE POINT IS TO KNOW IT AND TO UNDERSTAND IT. And he is smiling, as if he does.
The Saturday of the bank holiday weekend. Standing in my grandmother’s garden, I can hear, in the distance, my neighbours’ mowers and strimmers and power-washers being brought to life. A man passes the gate riding a tractor lawnmower. Driving it along the left side of the road as if it were a vehicle like any other. He stares straight ahead and doesn’t see me. As if he still has a very long way to go.
By noon, I can smell other people’s freshly cut grass. I can see pollen hanging in the air. Now a small bird shoots a white blot to earth. It lands in the grass, millimetres from the spot where my head lies in the wilderness. On my brow, I feel its microscopic backsplash.
Works about Pollen, I test myself: Wolfgang Laib, but I don’t know what the piece was called, or if it even had a name. I was seven or eight or nine. My mother brought me to a great concrete art gallery in the city. What were we there for? I think perhaps I’d had a hos
pital appointment. When I was seven or eight or nine, Mum suspected I had a heart defect, which turned out to be only arrhythmia. But I don’t remember the hospital that day; I only remember the gallery. How the walls were blank and blinding white. How there was nothing but a rectangle of pollen anywhere on the whole of the vast floor. It was so insubstantial, so easily harmed, and yet, so arresting. It made its patch of floor throb. It made everything else dim and deaden.
The artist gathers the pollen himself. I learned this years later. Where it comes from matters to him, matters to the artwork. Hazelnut trees, wild flowers, pines, or perhaps, all of these mixed together. Collected bloom by bloom, plant by plant, season by season.
The old battery in my mobile phone is so weak I avoid carrying it around, as if physical motion might weaken it even more. This afternoon, from the sunspot on the kitchen windowsill where I leave it to rest and regenerate, it signals the arrival of a text message, a noise which is supposed to mimic a released spring. The message is from Caitriona. Caitriona with whom I used to compare fathers. She is staying at her parents’ house for the long weekend, she explains, just down the road from my grandmother’s. She has heard I am around and wonders whether I’d like to have a drink. Maybe tonight, maybe tomorrow.
The last time I saw Caitriona was on a lunch date roughly two years after the end of secondary school. There were five of us, my old clique of friends, and we met in a restaurant in the city, to compare notes on our differing college courses, our diverging new directions in life.
The restaurant had slippery leather seats, a single lily in a glass flute on every table, an enormous painting of a cupcake. It was the sort of place I’d never dare walk into alone; the sort of place in which I’d be more comfortable serving others than being served. And yet, my old classmates seemed at ease. Two out of four had acquired incredibly blonde hair and looked almost exactly the same as each other. Over seafood salads and transparent soup, they talked about their science and business degrees, compared the starter salaries of their respective careers and speculated as to what sort of a lifestyle might be afforded in accordance with each.
