by Sara Baume
‘Jimmy died last night,’ my mother says, ‘so we’ve got to do the removal on the way home from here.’
‘Who’s Jimmy?’ I say.
She tells me where in the parish he lived. Alongside the parochial house, with red hot pokers in a bed by the front wall. But I neither recognise nor absorb the information. Another faceless old man, perhaps the one who used to ride on a Honda 50, perhaps the one who used to loiter around the crossroads on hot days trying to catch a glimpse of my sister and me and our little friends messing about in the paddling pool.
I don’t keep track of them any more: the old men who die.
Now Mum starts to talk about a new book she is reading. It’s about famous hypochondriacs. Marcel Proust, Andy Warhol, even Florence Nightingale. My mother says: ‘People who suffer from anxiety are usually those with the most vivid imaginations.’ A gentle accusation disguised as consolation, as compliment; this is how I know she knows that I am struggling.
‘How would you feel if I phoned Beth?’ she says.
My aunt Beth is a Buddhist. ‘Buddhist Beth’ my father calls her, sometimes even to her face. She is the member of our family who is mobilised whenever any of the rest of us run into emotional turmoil.
I remember that the hare was Joseph Beuys’s spirit animal. I go back with my camera. It’s still there, just a little bit more battered.
A hare is a rabbit crossed with a horse. All limb and no fluff, an air of prudence. One of the cars has somehow managed to split the bowel and draw out a strand of shocking pink intestine, the colour of sunburn. And to flick a piece of its own shit into its frozen open eye.
This is how it will be for all of us, I think. Even the ones who do no harm.
Back again. To the famine hospital. We sit opposite each other on the floor of the room which used to be the playroom, my aunt Beth and I, cross-legged. We are having a go at meditation.
‘Should I close my eyes?’ I ask.
‘However you feel comfortable,’ she says.
With them open, I feel deeply uncomfortable, so I close them. But it’s just as bad.
I feel Beth’s hand on my right leg. It is jiggling my leg, or rather, my leg is jiggling her hand; this is my habitual right-leg jiggle. I force it to be still, which makes me even more uncomfortable.
Already I know I won’t be able to do this.
Right here on this same floor, when Jane and I were small, Beth would lie on her back and raise her legs up into the air and we’d take it in turns to have her balance us on the soles of her feet. It was a wonderful game. Of course. It was about pretending to fly.
So I open my eyes again and trail them around the room which has now been repurposed as my mother’s study. In my unemptied mind, I peel back the changes my parents have made since I left home: the computer desk and built-in bookshelves, the brilliant-white wall and its tasteful abstract paintings, the sofa bed and its multi-patterned cushions. In my mind, I put it all back the way it was when it was still meant for play.
The most horrible wallpaper of all used to hang here in this room. A stripy pattern the colour of peach yoghurt, and every second stripe was of a spongy material which was curiously satisfying to sink my fingernails into. But Mum used to find the tiny half-moon prints and tell me off, and so I had to be sneaky about it. I’d shunt the furniture forward to poke the wall behind; I’d shunt it back again once I was finished.
I close my eyes and see the peeled room. The toy houses lining its perimeter, toy cars parked in toy driveways, toy grocery shops and toy cafés. Jane’s roller-skater doll lived in a moulded plastic mansion and my Monchichi family lived in a moulded plastic campervan and all of the others lived in renovated cardboard boxes. We had designated the open expanse of carpet in the middle a lagoon, though sometimes we’d forget, or run out of space elsewhere and locate our games in the invisible lagoon anyway, ignoring the fact that the toys ought to be drowning. Jane would always give her dolls the names of nobody we knew or had ever known in real life; American names inspired by the characters on Baywatch. And I copied her; I always copied her. My cuddly cats and bears and monkeys were called Ricky and Shauny and Erica. And we gave them ages. Our toys were sixteen or seventeen; only the very eldest were in their early twenties, because, apparently, I didn’t envision anything of particular interest in life beyond twenty-five. And now I am a greater age than any of the toys were allowed to reach, older than I even cared to imagine as a child.
I peek at Beth. Her eyes are closed and so I close mine again too. But I cannot make the doll town go away. Ricky and Shauny and Erica are rising out of the carpet-lagoon and dancing inflexibly around my meditating aunt. Kicking their stumpy legs up, shaking their rigid elbows and fluffy bellies about.
‘It’s important,’ she says, ‘to pay attention to the nothings and appreciate them.’
Alone in the car again. Passing the about-to-be-harvested fields, stuck behind a harvester. I think about what Beth said. ‘Don’t feel guilty,’ she said. ‘Nothing good comes of guilt.’ She said it after I admitted how frightened I am that all this stupid sadness is chewing at my intellect.
‘It’s time to let this go,’ she said.
She meant: it’s time to postpone—if not entirely abandon—my burden of unrealistic ambition. To start churning the intellect I have left into simply feeling better; to make this my highest goal. It’s time to accept that I am average, and to stop making this acceptance of my averageness into a bereavement.
‘Do you remember the story of when you were born?’ my aunt said.
I was born blue and breached. Half-strangled by my own umbilical cord. The very thing which kept me alive for nine months tried to kill me as soon as I started leaving it behind. The same name had been written twice on a blackboard in the delivery room. It was spelled once for a boy and once for a girl—Francis and Frances—and for a moment my mother must have thought I’d never get a chance to be either. But then the midwife diligently un-strangled me and a nurse arrived wheeling an incubator.
‘You were resilient,’ my aunt said, ‘right from the off.’
I was, at least, above average at resilience.
Works about Misguided Resilience, I test myself: Robert Morris, Untitled (Passageway), 1961. A floating entrance inside the exhibition space. Leads to a passage. The passage leads on and on, narrows and narrows. The passage becomes so narrow it’s impossible for the person trying to walk down to keep going, but still, the person persists in pushing and pushing. Determined they are heading somewhere; determined to refuse to accept that the passage is the point.
What else did Beth say? I try to focus on the nothings. The air—all of this air I fought so hard to take in as a newborn and have spent every moment since completely ignoring. Now I notice the scuffing of the inside of my clothes against the outside of my skin. How can it be that I have worn clothes every day of my life and never noticed this sensation? It feels as if the labels at my hip and collar are scratting flesh away to bone, as if the elastic band of my pants is sawing a slit towards my organs. And now I notice the trembling. Not just my right leg, but everywhere. Very slight but irrepressible. Have I always trembled? I can’t remember. Was I born breached and blue, and trembling?
Gorse blurs past. Trees, cows, houses. At the bottom of turbine hill, I notice all the stray balls and plastic plant pots in the hedge at the bottom. I see how every rolling thing that ever rolled down turbine hill has lodged here. There seems to be an awful lot for so few houses. How strange I haven’t noticed until now. I drop to second gear and feel the change which occurs in the engine, a mechanical sigh of relief. I reach my grandmother’s bungalow, park in the driveway and walk back to close the gate, to tie the dog string. I notice how frayed it has become. With the force of a few more tugs it will snap and I’ll have to choose between replacing it with an utterly needless new length of twine and accepting that the dog is gone.
I go in the back door to the kitchen. Open a cupboard, click. Take out a tin of tuna chunks and cl
ose the cupboard, thunk. Pull the ring on the can, click, again; a smaller, sharper click. Open the cutlery drawer, jangle, and select a fork, clink. Pick an ant off my sleeve and flick it down the sink. I breathe. I breathe. I breathe.
And all of this time, I am trembling.
I eat my tuna chunks with red wine at the sun room table, dripping brine into the keyboard of my laptop. I drag a duvet off a bed and onto the sofa, trick myself into sleeping by trying not to sleep.
I dream about pneumatic drills and Himalayan earthquakes. I wake up thinking about the Tibetan Delek Hospital and why I ended up there. It wasn’t because of the stomach thing, not initially. Jane, initially, called an ambulance because I thought I could not breathe; because I was so scared of the thin air and the vomiting that I forgot my body knows to inhale and exhale on its own and does not require my brain to initiate every breath; I panicked. And as soon as the fuss had been made and we were both in hospital I felt like such a fucking eejit. The doctor who X-rayed my chest gave me the photograph to keep, the one which showed my lungs were perfectly fine. I rolled it up and carried it home over land and sea, through sky, and nailed it to my bedroom wall as a reminder of what a fucking eejit I’d been.
When people ask what India was like, still I always say: ‘breathtaking’.
In the morning, they are all still here; the under-appreciated nothings. Pulsing, bleating, blaring, swirling. Once in a doctor’s waiting room I overheard two old women talking about the irritation of how, when they have their hearing aids switched up to full volume, it results in an unsettling din of white noise. Water hissing through pipes, mice twitching in their sleep, the whirr of light fixtures. Now I recognise what the old women were talking about, the deafening silence.
This morning, I see the lead in my glass tumbler. A slim, bright glint, a silverfish. I feel it collecting in my blood, papercutting the lining of my veins.
There’s a queen wasp in the sun room, beating her fragile head against the glass, crushing her antennae down. ‘Why can’t I go on,’ she is thinking, ‘when there’s nothing here to stop me?’ I watch, and wait unnecessarily long before I open the window.
When I do, I see the flies which have built up in the frame and on the floor. Houseflies and horseflies and bluebottles, dead and dry and crispy. What do so many mean? They are time, of course. All the time I’ve been here, neglecting to open the windows, to clean up like my mother told me.
I will leave the flies where they have fallen, as a unit of measurement.
What is it about crying? As if my body believes that squeezing all its salt out might somehow quell the sadness. As if sadness is a parasite which suckles on sodium chloride.
After a few days of dry heat, a huge shower. The thrust of descending rain so strong it guns my unpegged socks down from the line to the sodden grass.
Rising from the earth and through the open sun room door: the scent of a chemical reaction between the heated ground and the cold cloud’s water; of summer thunderstorms.
I hit the radio switch and assume foetal position on the mouldy sofa. On the radio, lone joggers are being devoured by wolves, because the way the wolves see it, running away is a sign of vulnerability, an open invitation to give chase.
There’s a toad who is able to predict earthquakes, a cat who got locked in a freezer and lost his tail and ears to frostbite, a man who is able to hypnotise squirrels.
On the radio, at last, there is a head to fit the suitcase body.
The storm stops fast. The sky unclenches, a blanket lifted from a birdcage. I go outside to survey the damage. The rain has battered down the tall grass of my wilderness as well as my socks, erased my crop circle. I bend over and begin to stand the stalks back up again. But one by one, they resist me, refusing to be repaired.
The inaugural thunderstorm heralds more rain: a whole monsoon season in the space of a week. On behalf of the green world, I am glad. The grass had started to develop jaundice, the flower-heads to droop. The strawberry patch surrendered the last of its crop to the indomitable slugs; the leaves of each plant withered, whorled. I suppose I should have watered the garden, but I didn’t think of this until the clouds stepped in on my behalf.
And yet, the early mornings are always fine. The sun climbs into a clear sky and burns away the dew, as if the dawn is a perpetual optimist.
Every afternoon, clouded mood beneath clouded sky, in foetal position on the sun room sofa, I listen.
There’s the one-in-one-thousandth donkey that has given birth to twins, a man who was charged with public drunkenness because he was found administering the kiss of life to the corpse of an opossum, a woman on a waiting list for gastric band surgery followed by a spokesperson from the Size Acceptance Movement whose members prefer the term ‘fuller figured’. This makes me think about how there’s a counter argument for everything: every single thing I thought I knew—there’s someone out there who can discredit it.
I lie on the sofa and tremble, until the radio stories jumble into nonsense. The toad that lost his tail and the donkey twins that can predict earthquakes.
I stay up late and watch a foreign film on the Irish language channel. It is spoken in Hungarian, subtitled in Irish. I can’t understand either, but I still have all the little gestures and noises and faces people make in order to express themselves; I still understand the film, enough. How prosaic words are, I realise, how insufficient.
After the Hungarian film, the late-night news. A woman walking her dog has found thirteen pilot whales beached on a long strand of the north-west coast. The reporter is talking to an angry environmentalist who is doing an interview when he ought to be dragging sea mammals into the falling tide. The JCB can only take them so far; there are teams waiting in the shallows, towing them into deeper water, dressed up in wetsuits as if to better resemble the creatures they are trying to save. The angry environmentalist implicates fleets of Dutch and French trawlers which have indiscriminate access to our waters; the signals from their enormous boats interfere with the cetaceans’ sonar, he says, causing them ferocious, unknowable trauma from which they cannot recover—from which they see no means of escape but to throw themselves on the mercy of the treacherous dry land.
The camera lingers on a whale stretched out in the sinky sand of the shallows, the sort into which my sister and I used to plant our feet and pretend we’d had them amputated. Every now and again, he pushes a great gust of air through his blowhole, out and out and out, and never in again. The environmentalist says they are called pilot whales because they like to crest the wave created by a ship’s bow, as though they are piloting it. He says that, of all whales, pilots are the ones which most frequently strand. The ones with the most sensitive hearing, or perhaps, the closest listeners.
The ocean is a cacophony of noise. I’m guessing David Attenborough said this at some point and it stuck with me because it’s so hard to believe. I’ve held my nose, plunged my head beneath the surface on summer days at the beach, and heard nothing but the suctioning of water. But now I understand that this isn’t because the ocean is silent; it’s because I am ocean-deaf.
A final monsoon shower. The clouds recede into a watery rainbow. I watch it through the sun room roof, fading as fast as it coalesced. I go outside to stand in the centre of the garden, the openest part. This is my ocean lawn. The other parts of the garden—the wilderness and flower beds and compost heap—are only seas. The bungalow is only an island. The birds sing and the calves cry and the turbines’ blades thrum. And yet, it’s peaceful. Here is the peace I craved all the years I lived in the city, shushing my sneezing neighbours.
How could I have known that peace could become so boring?
In only my socks on the lawn ocean. Beneath the throbbing turbine and the fading rainbow. I shut my eyes, raise my hands up and my elbows and shoulders raise after them. Slowly, methodically, I sway. Like a hammock. A pendulum. The clapper of a church bell.
9
Hedgehog
The doorbell, slicing throu
gh my reverie. I sit up on the sun room sofa. Why would my mother ring the doorbell? Because it isn’t my mother, obviously. Because it’s somebody else; somebody who is obliged to request entry.
It takes another couple of moments before I remember I am obliged to respond.
There is a man standing on the front doorstep, a second a few paces behind. They are carrying identical briefcases and wearing identical suits and formal coats which are ludicrously black and heavy and long for a day like this, the end of July. They are young to be dressed so formally, younger than me. I stand mute on the other side of the threshold, dazzled by their clothes, by the unlikeliness of their presence. I don’t see and didn’t hear any car, or the gate creak or approaching footsteps; there is something fantastic about how they’ve appeared here on turbine hill on an ordinary Tuesday and pressed my grandmother’s doorbell.
‘I’m here to ask you whether you know God by name,’ the closest man says.
Of course. They are Jehovah’s Witnesses.
‘His name isn’t God?’ I say.
A short section of the rubber seal which runs around the inside of the door frame has come loose at the top and is dangling. Waggling gently, licentiously, in the space separating us. The man who has spoken is slim and bearded. He holds out a leaflet and points at the capitalised heading word by word as if I might be slow at reading. DO-YOU-KNOW-GOD-BY-NAME? I reach up past both our heads and begin to poke the seal back into its nook.
