A Line Made by Walking

by Sara Baume

  I’d never heard the term ‘starter salary’ or once considered how I might earn money after college. Uh-oh, I thought, staring wistfully into my bowlful of unusual lettuces, contributing only the odd ‘hmm’ and ‘yeah’ and expressionless inquiry. By the time the lettuces had been taken away, it had dawned on me: we were no longer the kind of people who would be friends.

  And yet, if there had been an exception that afternoon, it was Caitriona. She still had her original hair. She was studying geography and cello and Japanese. She and I had shared the most subjects in school, and I had always expected Caitriona to be the one to go to art college, and I was unfairly glad when she didn’t. I’d felt then that only one of us could be the artist.

  At lunch that day, I was pleased to be confirmed as the outsider.

  I know that if I put off replying to the text message, I will only end up saying no, and I know that I should go; should see someone; should test if normal behaviour might yet be a possibility. For just a few hours.

  So I text back; we set a time.

  I prepare an early dinner. Carry my bowl of dahl down to the sun room, seat myself between the slimed panes. It’s only once I’m chewing and swallowing I start to think: if Caitriona knows I’m back from the city and living in my grandmother’s bungalow, then maybe she also knows why. I assume she heard from her mother who heard from my mother, and so what does my mother tell neighbours when they ask after her children? I try to imagine what it might be like to talk to her if I wasn’t me. Would she state outright that her youngest is having a breakdown, or would she have some cryptic way of putting it? Frankie is unwell. Frankie is struggling. Frankie is a little out of sorts. Would she go so far as to solicit Caitriona’s mother to solicit Caitriona to text me, to suggest a meet-up to check if I’m okay?

  If this had occurred to me earlier, I’d never have replied. I curse myself for being rash; I try to think up last-minute excuses.

  Caitriona is still not blonde; this is a relief. We hug, limply, order half-pints of lager and squabble over who will pay, as if we are our mothers. Finally we pay separately, and settle onto stools in the corner of the bar, as if we are our fathers instead.

  Over the first drink we talk about her life and just a little about mine. I steer the conversation around me as tactfully as I can. With the second, we move on to people we were in school with and what they are doing now. I don’t know anyone any more, but I’m happy to receive Caitriona’s gossip; I’m having a nice time. She fills me in on who has married, reproduced, signed up to a forty-year mortgage. With the third drink she reveals who is cheating on who and who has had a clandestine boob job and whose new baby is ugly as a baked potato. With the fourth, I wonder aloud who has had a nervous breakdown.

  ‘What do you mean, exactly?’ Caitriona says. Her tone is concerned.

  I lose my nerve, mumble excuses, make a beeline for the toilets.

  On the seat, I stare at the timber slats of the cubicle door. The small bolt and the coat hook, the blades of light which splinter through and stripe my white legs.

  I think: well then it must just be me.

  Caitriona and I do not have very big tanks, as my father would say. My father measures a person by the size of their tank. In the aftermath of the fourth drink, we are both pissed. The stone bricks of the gable wall blear together into scabrous brown. The bar lights throb and glister, seeming suddenly terribly far away. Caitriona’s bottom lip goes wobbly and she starts to tell me how, all her life, everything she’s ever been good at, I’ve been good at it too—I’ve been better.

  Through the drunkenness, I register her meaning. Now I remember how, back when we still shared subjects, Caitriona was the first person who made me consider the possibility that my dreams were not singular, not even unusual; that there were countless other people out there who wanted precisely the same as I did, with equal force, and they put equal effort into achieving it. And they stood equal chance. In the years since, I’ve met ten more Caitrionas, and understood that for every one I meet, there are ten more I never even will.

  But I had not once considered that I might also be somebody else’s better version of themselves. I try to tell Caitriona I know what this feels like; I understand. But my words blear together like the stone bricks, and maybe this is for the best. Maybe it would not be particularly helpful for her to learn that there are many much better versions even than me. That the world is rifting at the seams with Caitrionas and Frankies. They are jotting notes in cafés and making beautiful speeches and wearing summer scarves.

  Our farewell hug is warmer than the greeting one. I walk a hundred metres before remembering I brought my bicycle. I go back and find it and start again in the direction of home, careening through the dark, convinced my head is disconnected from my shoulders, paragliding alone over the hawthorns and hedgetops to the base of turbine hill. Now I crash spectacularly into the ditch.

  I don’t think I’m hurt. I check for my head. My body is too flaccid. I didn’t brace it in preparation for impact and so my four lagers have saved me from serious injury. Only a gash in my leg; the skin split even though my trousers aren’t. How curious.

  I get up and push.

  I remember a nature documentary: a beetle who traipsed around all night every night searching for a dead thing to eat. Because he could not kill for himself, the beetle. And he could not eat things that were still alive.

  In my grandmother’s kitchen, in the dark, I press the light switch. But no light comes on. Have I somehow managed to do it wrong? Is there some trick to working light switches which, in my drunkenness, I have forgotten? I press again and again. Nothing. So the bulb must have expired, though there was no clink and blink before the black. But then I am drunk; my perceptions jumbled. Maybe I just missed the clink-blink.

  Sometimes things happen that give me cause to believe I no longer exist. Car park barriers which do not lift when I drive towards them, automatic doors which do not open automatically as I approach. Maybe that’s all this is.

  I stumble across the lino by the light of the screen of my weakly phone. I pat the wall until I find the hall switch. I press. Nothing. How can it be that both bulbs have expired at once? Maybe it’s a power cut, but there have been no storms and no notice from the County Council. I stumble on through my grandmother’s rooms, pawing switches. By the time I reach the end of the hall, I’ve established that every light along the east-facing side of the bungalow is out, whereas on the west, they are all still working.

  But this is even more confusing. Now I’m thinking about who might know I’m staying here alone and went out drinking this evening, and be lying in one of the darkened rooms in wait. Jink? The man on the tractor lawnmower who drove past my gate this morning for no obvious reason? The man who stood on his roof for a whole day last week? Glancing up the hill, pretending to strip slates.

  Suddenly sober, I do what I always do in times of catastrophe. I phone my mother.

  Works about Light, or maybe Dark? I test myself: Martin Creed, Work No. 227: The lights going on and off, 2000. Lots of people were, again, so angry about this piece. Though I have not experienced it in a sterile gallery space, I have recreated it in my own tightly furnished, highly coloured, dust-coated rooms. It is, primarily, boring. And yet, like The Clock, like so many artworks, I love what it might mean. The light and dark in everything, the reaction to every action, the prodigious unpredictability of life. And I love the possibility—the audacity—that it might mean nothing at all.

  My mother’s voice is a mix of grogginess and alarm.

  ‘I’m so sorry for calling so late,’ I jabber, ‘it’s not an emergency or anything, I’m fine. It’s just the lights, half the lights in the house have gone out. I don’t understand why they would do that, why would they do that?’

  I hear the rustle and creak of my father waking beside her. Twisting around, propping himself up on the mattress springs. His voice is saying my name, asking it: ‘Frankie? Is it Frankie? What time is it? What’s th
e matter?’

  My mother, calmer now, tells him what I have told her, asks him why. ‘It’s just the circuit,’ I hear my father say. ‘A switch will have tripped the whole circuit. It just needs to be stuck back up again.’ Now my mother repeats it into the receiver, and after I’ve heard it for the second time, I’m calmer too. I start to clarify the details. ‘Stick what back up? Where? Might I electrocute myself ?’

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

  I carry my phone back to the kitchen, open a cupboard I’ve never opened before. A cupboard which holds nothing, but displays two rows of electrical switches, jam labels bearing the names of rooms. A whole row has snapped down. I use the handle of a wooden spoon to snap them up again. I walk from room to room along the eastern side, watching the lights wink back to life. I thank my mother, apologise. I tell her I’m alright now; that I’ll be alright.

  ‘Frankie,’ Mum says, ‘have you been drinking?’

  Now I am ambushed by a yawning fit. I know this is a sure sign that I will soon begin to faint and puke. Tonight, I am grateful to my body for obliging to wait until I am back beneath my grandmother’s roof, until the crisis of the failed circuit is over and done with. I yawn first on the phone, yawn again as I am standing at the kitchen counter waiting for a slice of bread to pop up, yawn again as it pops up, transformed into toast. I have mistaken the queasy feeling in my gut for hunger. As soon as I bite into the toast, I know it’s the opposite, that instead of desiring to consume substances, my gut was preparing to expel them. Now a different set of lights—the ones inside my head—begin to go out, as if someone is filling a vial of ink behind each eyeball. I lean against the fridge, slither to the floor. A selection of alphabet magnets fall down after me. I lay my head against the lino and raise my feet to try and swoosh some blood back to my heart. I forget that I’m still holding the toast. I clutch it into crumbs.

  As soon as I can see again, I check what the letters are. A, P, C, R, T. Spelling nothing in particular, or at least, nothing meaningful. I crawl from the kitchen and along the hall in the direction of the bathroom. It seems as if a lot of time has passed before I feel the bathroom carpet beneath my grappling fingers. I collapse upon its clammy warmth.

  A wave of relief, followed seconds later by a wave of puking.

  For the rest of the night, I alternate between cowering over the toilet bowl and lying prone beneath it. Each bout of vomit comes as a relief, but almost as soon as it has ended, the dreadful nausea begins to accrete inside me again. I try lying in different positions, hauling myself up to the tap and gulping down mouthfuls of cold water. I try distracting myself by studying the details of my grandmother’s shabby bathroom. The cord on the bathroom heater blackened by years of finger filth, the pubic hairs—presumably mine—woven into the pile, and the slug on the mirror who is dead now, slightly desiccated. But no detail can make the cycle of puking cease. It persists until natural light blobs through the frosted window and a blackbird pipes up from the garden beyond. Until the muscles of my throat ache from retching, and there’s nothing left to project from mouth to bowl but leaflet-coloured stomach bile, and my body is too exhausted to retch any more.

  Have I puked up my deadness now?

  Only dahl, only lager.

  I haul myself to the closest bed. I lie awake and feel more alone than I have all the days and nights I’ve been here alone so far.

  I fall into a treacle-sleep and hallucinate the swelling world.

  When I wake again I know, from the constrained intensity of the light and the subdued tone of the birdsong, that morning has passed into evening. Even though I am too hot I do not flail my legs for a patch of cold somewhere beneath the duvet. I do not move. I know with unqualified certainty that I want to die. But I also know with equivalent certainty that I won’t do anything about it. That I will only remain here and wait for death to indulge me.

  But now, from the living room, I hear the furious meeping of a guinea pig, delirious with hunger and anguish. I remember that I have not fed Graham in over twenty-four hours.

  And so I get up.

  And so I go and feed the guinea pig.

  Works about Death, or maybe Life, or maybe Misunderstanding, I test myself: Jo Spence and Terry Dennett. From a photographic series called Final Project, 1991–92. A picture called (What 1991 felt like . . . (most of the time)). Which shows Spence standing on a narrow plank laid across a channel. The surface so thick with green sludge that it barely resembles water. Spence’s face turned away from the camera, cast down upon the sludge. The first time I saw the photo, I only glimpsed the writing underneath, and when I thought about it later, I misremembered the title as What life feels like . . . and I thought I understood it utterly. Later I learned that 1992 was the year of Spence’s death, and for two years before, she had known she was suffering from leukaemia, that her chances of survival were as murky as that water. And this new information made it mean something tremendously different, and it made me feel tremendously guilty and tremendously stupid for recklessly empathising with a condition, a state of mind, a level of existence of which I am, in fact, of course, utterly ignorant.

  Out on the line where I hung my washed clothes several days ago—three pairs of pants to every peg, no peg at all for the socks—I find a long streak of bird-shit down a trouser leg, more shit than I can even imagine a bird-body producing. I went to all the trouble of washing them in the avocado bath, against a chopping board, like making some stringy kind of guacamole. Now my eyes fill with stupid, unnecessary tears and I think: even when I wash my clothes. Even when I try to be good and tidy.

  All week after the bank holiday, it rains. Frogs come out into the wet. I find one on the road early in the morning. Thin skin grated off, legs vastly distended, organs buttered across the tarmac. Still I am able to see how small it originally was; it must be a new-season frog. It’s too annihilated and would barely show up in a photograph. I can only hope there’ll be another, intact. A frog that died of cancer, perhaps, or cardiac arrest.

  Jane and I used to steal frogspawn from a field-stream every year at the start of March. We loaded it into flimsy plastic castle-shaped buckets. Crumbs of last summer’s seaweed and shale floating amid the polkadot jelly. We lugged it home under electric fences and over stiles, then we slopped it into an old fish tank in the greenhouse. The tadpoles, once hatched, would eat their own spawn, nibble by nibble. After it had run out, we fed them aquarium flakes and mashed fruit flies.

  The black flecks fortunate enough to survive to froghood were few. As soon as their tadpole tails were shed, Jane and I transplanted them to a water barrel in the garden. But the froglets rarely stuck around for more than a fortnight, fleeing to the countryside beyond our trimmed lawns, clipped hedges and artificial pools. A staggered exodus home to the wilds whence we pinched them, somehow capable of remembering a place they encountered only as spawn. As well as the way back.

  Mum comes at the weekend. I hear her nearing, like a dog.

  And stand in the doorway as her old Ford climbs turbine hill, and wait while she parks. I can tell she is worried. I can see she has an overnight bag. She arrives in the afternoon, and I am grateful.

  ‘Well,’ she says. ‘How do you feel you’re doing?’

  I try to smile and nod; instead I well up.

  ‘Oh Frankie,’ my mother says, ‘you’ve got this far.’

  ‘I know,’ I gulp. ‘But something’s given way.’

  She suggests I go back and see the doctor. ‘To get something just to take the edge off?’ she says.

  ‘But Mum,’ I say. ‘I need edge. Edge is my only hope.’

  She cooks dinner with my unwashed pots. We talk about the book she’s reading, the other members of the family. We go out and stand in the garden after dark. We are looking for shooting stars.

  I think I have spotted one, but Mum says it is too slow. ‘What we really ought to do,’ she says, ‘is put on big coats and lie on our backs in the
wilderness.’

  But we don’t. Because we don’t have big coats. Because it is summer and neither of us really live here.

  Now I spot another slow star, another and another. Until Mum says maybe they are shooting after all.

  This morning, the perfect frog. Miles from turbine hill. I have forgotten my camera.

  The surface of the laneway is more moss than road. Gorse presses in from either side, closing it to a dark and prickly passage. I cycle all the way back and turn around again. My knuckles numb into a handlebar claw. I’m afraid a car will have passed by the time I get back again, split and pulped my frog, or a song thrush swiped and scoffed it. But no, it’s still here. I drop my bicycle to the ditch and kneel. I have to shake the feeling back into my fingers before I am able to press the button.

  Jane returns from holiday with a small package of strange gifts. Cinnamon-coated walnuts and sea-salt-flavoured chocolate. A wooden honey spoon and a miniature porcelain plate hand-painted with a scene of geese in a cobbled farmyard, a maiden carrying a wicker basket. I make tea again. As the kettle boils, I hold the plate up to the window. ‘It’s so pretty,’ I say.

  ‘I think they’re a foie gras flock,’ my sister says, ‘so I suppose the maiden must be force-feeding them.’