A Line Made by Walking

by Sara Baume

  ‘Do you have any understanding of why we go door to door like this?’ he says.

  I know this one. I say: ‘Because they make you.’

  Both the young men shake their heads and smile, regretfully. They look at me as though they can see right through my T-shirt and my pimply chest, my ribcage and lung tissue, my bronchi and bronchioles and alveoli, right through to my enfeebled soul.

  ‘It’s because of the Bible,’ he says. ‘I’d like to encourage you to read your Bible.’

  There’s a policeman’s hat hanging from a hook in the porch, a foot from where the Witnesses are now standing. It used to belong to a garda who was in the same painting group as my grandmother. The garda and my grandmother and several other amateur watercolourists would come together every Wednesday to paint wishy-washy still lives and portraits and landscapes-from-photographs. When she moved to turbine hill, the garda gave my grandmother one of his hats to hang in her porch. This seems to me a cavalier way to deter burglars, but in the twelve years she lived here, nobody ever broke in.

  Both my Witnesses are fair and willowy. At first I wonder if they are brothers; now I remember to wonder if they are robbers or rapists or murderers who’ve hired suits and photocopied leaflets in a cunning ploy to insinuate themselves into the quiet bungalows of defenceless strangers on hills in middles-of-nowhere, and I realise it would be very stupid to invite them in so they can see for themselves there’s no garda here. That’s if they haven’t already guessed from the twelve years’ worth of dust which has collected on his hat.

  ‘I don’t suppose I have a bible,’ I say. A holy neighbour gifted me one for my first communion, but I lost it immediately, almost two decades ago.

  ‘Would you like to keep one of these?’ he says, the one who seems to do all the speaking. His hand is still outstretched, the paper flapping in the breeze like a tiny flag. It makes me think of Jink, Jink’s leaflet. It makes me wonder what it is about me that invites conversion.

  ‘Okay,’ I say, and take it. It’s roughly the same size and shape as the pieces of paper I used to make Graham’s hats, and so I am compelled to fold, and fold, and fold again, and open. I hand it back to the speaking one.

  ‘It’s a boat,’ he says.

  ‘Okay,’ I say. ‘If that’s what you want it to be.’

  Works about God, I test myself: Adam Chodzko, God Look-Alike Contest, 1992–93. The artist placed an ad in the classifieds appealing for people who believed themselves to look like God. The artwork is a collection of the photographs he received in response. What’s interesting is that very few of them are old white men with beards. Instead there’s a boy in denims, a clean-shaven young man in a collar and tie, a woman in a red corset. ‘God is in everything,’ the priest told us at mass when I was a child. And so I used to check in my pencil-case and coat pockets, under the bed, over the hedges, for God.

  A smudge of cerise trickles from the silent one’s beard, down his white neck. Evidently, he is more sensitive than the speaking one, who simply places the boat/hat/leaflet into his briefcase and turns to go.

  ‘I encourage you to read your Bible,’ he murmurs over his shoulder.

  Before the Witnesses have reached the gate, the door seal works itself free again, uncoiling slowly from its nook. I watch its creeping descent; I watch until it comes to rest against the concrete step.

  Because the famine hospital is at a crossroads, it has always attracted unexpected callers. Not alone the parish children, but salesmen, politicians, preachers. And my mother, in her infinite open-mindedness, always used to invite the Witnesses in for tea. I’d sit with them at the kitchen table, watching Mum listening patiently to the predictable speech before asking several sensible questions perfectly politely. Now I can’t remember exactly what she asked, nor what the Witnesses answered, only that they did not adequately satisfy her doubts because I can still hear her making this statement: ‘You have not adequately satisfied my doubts.’ I’ve never asked her why she gave them tea and let them speak in the first place; I haven’t thought about it in years. Was it amusement, or curiosity, or was my mother deliberately making an example of the Witnesses for the benefit of Jane and me? To show us how fundamentalism is always tolerable, yet fallible.

  Jink returns to my thoughts. Back in the sun room, I wait while my laptop awakens itself. I look up ‘Born Again Christians’ on Wikipedia. ‘To be born again,’ it says, ‘is to undergo a regeneration of the human soul or spirit from the Holy Spirit, contrasted with the spiritual birth everyone experiences.’ What a nice idea, I think, to have a second shot. Now I feel bad I was so furious with him. Only for wanting to believe in somewhere better than here, in some being better than us; only for believing in what I cannot, and being comforted when I am not.

  I urge the old man from my mind, because I know I’ve been unfair to him.

  But as if there is a means by which the person I am thinking about can know I am thinking about him, can sense that my ill feelings have subsided, Jink knocks on my back door. He is carrying an egg box which doesn’t appear to close properly. Instead it is secured by two elastic bands: one yellow, one red. He holds it out to me across the threshold.

  ‘Some eggs,’ Jink says. ‘If you’d eat ’em? The ducks are only laying like mad this time o’ year. Hard to keep up with them meself.’

  I take the box and thank him, even though I’m not so keen on eggs. He asks me how I’m getting on and I say something trite—something untrue—and cut to asking him how he’s getting on. I don’t offer tea; afraid that if we sit down together he’ll start bending the conversation in the direction of his personal obsession, like perverts bending towards sex. Only Jink’s sex is Jesus. Instead I am effusive in my enthusiasm for these eggs-I-will-not-eat, and hope this will do well enough to show that I am sorry.

  I watch him limp away down my grandmother’s driveway. His shoulder bones are knolls beneath his jumper and his white hair is squashed flat, like a baby which can do nothing all day long but lie on its back in its crib. I try to imagine Jink in a meeting hall filled with uproarious evangelicals. Clapping, singing, proclaiming. I can’t. And I wonder if it’s true. And I begin to think it isn’t.

  He seems so much like the kind of lonely old man who has always been old and lonely, even when he was young and surrounded by family.

  I am surprised by my box of eggs. They are weirdly large and pale; not simply white but almost translucent. Now I remember what Jink said—that they are duck eggs in a hen egg box; this is the reason for the elastic bands. They make me think of a scene in Jurassic Park. The one in the laboratory where the baby dinosaurs are hatched. I lower the lid, replace the yellow and red. Now I know for sure I cannot eat them.

  An update on the stranding: most of the whales are dead. The angry environmentalists managed to push them all back out to sea, but nine came in again with the next tide. Nine had already made up their minds; the impenetrable resolve of a deranged penguin.

  On the sidelines of the trembling, more specific parts of me have started to malfunction. A bruise at the site of my tailbone which refuses to fade. A vague loss of sensation in my smallest toe. A tender lump in my scalp. A fly which entered my eye cavity when I was freewheeling, and doesn’t appear to have come out again.

  Works about Body, I test myself: Giuseppe Penone, To Unroll One’s Skin, 1970. The artist took more than six hundred photographs of every inch of his body, using a small rectangle of glass as a guiding device. Pressing it against his flesh, framing each shot according to its proportions, displaying the prints in grid formation. But he must have asked someone to help him at some stage. For the parts of the body which are difficult to reach?

  The parts of my body which are difficult to reach; I’d forgotten all about them.

  I open my eyes to find the morning adjourned. There’s all the light there should be. Green carpet, white wall, pine door. But no gentle ticking of my bedside clock; no rustle of duvet as I shift my limbs about the bed; no chittering of birdsong or baw
ling of calves—not even the turbine’s heartbeat.

  Of course, I understand completely. I am deaf now. To the Earth and sky as well as the ocean.

  I roll from my side onto my back and some of the morning sounds are miraculously restored. I sit up and stick a finger in one ear and listen. Now the other, and listen. I realise the right is fine, whereas the left is completely blocked. I relax for a second before remembering to worry about what it is that’s blocking my ear. Maybe just wax but maybe not wax, maybe a massive brain tumour and the tender lump in my scalp isn’t just the bump from where I clocked it off the corner of a cupboard door, but the rear end of the same massive tumour which is bunging my left ear.

  You’re okay, I whisper, all of this is only Wind Turbine Syndrome, remember?

  But I can barely hear myself.

  Works about Deafness, I test myself: Joseph Grigely, who is deaf, started his career as an artist and critical theorist as a painter, but at a certain point in his painting career realised that the paper scraps of scribbled conversations he used to communicate with people who could not use sign language, mostly strangers, were more interesting, as artefacts, than his paintings. Or perhaps more honest and concise, as philosophies, than that which he was trying to paint.

  The precarious silence inside my head is a beach shell: the sound my mother told me was the sea but was actually the wind. I brush my teeth and spit and dress. Fetch my bicycle, tie the frayed dog string, select boreens and back roads at will, swerve around potholes and drowsy pigeons, pedalling faster in pursuit of rabbits, as if I am a fox.

  I’m so absorbed in being a fox, it takes me a while to notice the vehicle stuck behind me. When I do, I’ve no idea how long it’s been there, across how many hundreds of metres of narrow back road it has been forced to tailgate my bicycle. I don’t hear it, because I am deaf now. But, eventually, a sixth sense compels me to turn around.

  Now I see: it is the minibus.

  Everything is very nearly over. And so none of the normal rules of behaviour apply. And so none of my actions can have consequences.

  I do not move out of the way of the bus. Instead I dismount and turn around. I raise my hand to make it stop.

  On my right side only, the sound the door makes as it opens: the release of the lid on a colossal bottle of pop. As I climb the steps into the pop bottle all eyes cling to me, like bubbles. Only the driver speaks. He is asking who I am, what I want, where I think I’m going.

  I’m going past him and down the aisle, scanning faces. Some of the passengers have taken their seatbelts off and are giving me a standing ovation. I pass them and keep going. As soon as I see him I say his name.

  ‘Willie,’ I say. ‘It’s Frankie. We were in school together. Do you remember?’ The driver is climbing out of his booth. Some of the standing passengers are clapping, calling. Willie is the only motionless person. His are the only pair of bubbles drifting away, out the window.

  ‘Willie,’ I say. ‘You’re not like these people; you don’t belong on this bus. You should get off; you should come with me.’

  But he doesn’t look up. And now the driver places his large hands on my shoulders, softly.

  ‘Come on,’ he says. ‘Enough of all this.’

  Alone on the road. Arms flopped to sides and hands held open, empty. My bicycle is lying in the ditch with its front wheel crushing the thistles and its back wheel uselessly spinning. Where does the spinning wheel think it’s going? Does it believe it’s able to cycle in air? And it isn’t my bicycle; mine vanished into the city with the person who stole it, or perhaps the person to whom the person who stole it sold it. All I have left from the last day I saw my bicycle is the scar on my chin in the place where it gashed against the footpath. The doctor glued tiny metal hooks to my teeth, wired my mouth shut for five months. And what would I have done if Willie had come with me? What do I know of Willie, really, all these years gone by?

  My open, empty hands recommence trembling. Because you’re not supposed to initiate confrontation with vulnerable members of society; I’ve only just remembered this. Old people, children, the mentally or physically disabled. I have never been skilled in the peculiar intimacy of conflict, and now, I’ve crossed a line.

  I draw my bicycle up from the ditch. I know I will not be able to steer straight, so I only steady myself against the handlebars, and push. At the bottom of turbine hill, a rogue wave of lassitude crashes over the back of my head. I drop my grandmother’s handlebars to the ditch and her bicycle falls into all the balls which ever rolled down turbine hill.

  I was very small, three at most, and sitting in the shallows in an oversized sun hat. My mother didn’t see the salt water gathering height behind me. Was it the wash from a distant yacht? Did a jet ski flash past, a pilot whale breach? Whatever created it, the wave gushed over my face, my shoulders.

  ‘You were fine,’ Mum told me years later. ‘You just got such a fright. You screamed and screamed and couldn’t swim again.’ Because like all babies, at the very onset of life, I knew intuitively how to swim. But then the wave hit and washed away my intuition as surely as it did my hat.

  I didn’t learn again until I was eleven and Mum insisted that I attend lessons in the Spastic Clinic. Nowadays the Spastic Clinic is called something else, something politically correct. I’d already tried and failed at the swimming lessons organised through school and I was lucky that the Spastic Clinic didn’t discriminate because I wasn’t a spastic, and that the instructor was significantly more patient.

  Still, I was so slow to learn. Wary of straying out of my depth.

  How is it that we’re born able to swim? Like gazelles. Who know how to stand up and walk moments after they’ve dropped from their mother’s uterus onto the savannah. Who know to fear hyenas though they’ve never seen or heard a hyena, never been informed what a hyena is. How is it that we are born able to swim, but as we grow and subsume a glut of conventional wisdom, we forget, and have to learn again?

  That wave was the onset of consciousness. The moment it broke the moment at which I realised I was not indestructible, that the world was filled with forces separate to me, hostile to me, horrifyingly beyond my control. Just the same as a gazelle’s.

  Innate flexibility fades; muscles seize up.

  How many more small injustices of adulthood are still to be discovered?

  For six full swimming lessons, I paddled and splashed. It wasn’t until the seventh and final week—the last day, my last chance—that I spontaneously understood how to float. You have to lie, not stand but lie, in the water. You have to picture the part of yourself which isn’t your body, the weightless part. You have to picture it breaking off and rising away, as if you are just about to die, and this is your out-of-body experience.

  But why hadn’t any of the instructors told me? They showed me how to position my arms for the different strokes. How to kick my feet in such a manner to create minimum splash, maximum motion. But I already knew how to move in the ways that would make my body swim; it was the ineffable part I struggled with.

  Works about Weightlessness, I test myself: Piero Manzoni, Artist’s Breath, 1960. A series of inflated balloons fixed to wooden stands. And as if he somehow knew his breaths were numbered, Manzoni died young.

  The strangled birth, the broken wave, the swelling dream. But these aren’t things which constitute a troubled childhood; not even close. In the newspaper, the story of a boy raised by drug addicts. Routinely starved and slapped about by strange junkies who wandered in and out of his home. He grew up to become a psychiatric patient, hospitalised for persistently swallowing small implements. A pair of nail scissors, a miniature stapler, a napkin ring.

  And yet, here I am. Perceiving everything that is wonderful to be proportionately difficult; everything that is possible an elaborate battle to achieve. My happy life was never enough for me. I always considered my time to be more precious than that of other people and almost every routine pursuit—equitable employment, domestic chores, friendsh
ip—unworthy of it. Now I see how this rebellion against ordinary happiness is the greatest vanity of them all.

  I think of my aunt and her ‘self compassion’. But it isn’t fair to forgive myself so easily.

  In the final weeks of being nine, how could I possibly have guessed how many more years of childhood were yet to come? But the last dreg has left my system now, abandoned me to my intellect.

  Another day of partial deafness. I miss the thrum-thrum-thrum, the gentle domestic burring. I jab my blocked ear with a cotton bud, just to see what will happen. It becomes sore and inflamed. Of course. How stupid of me.

  She stands in my grandmother’s kitchen, an empty canvas shopping bag with a ladybird motif in one hand, a tinfoil-covered cake plate in the other. Not just on the phone any more but right here in front of me. It seems like a very long time since I’ve seen my mother, even though it isn’t.

  ‘Why ever did you stop the minibus?’ Mum says.

  She claims to have come for the duct-taped boxes in my grandmother’s bedroom. She doesn’t mention who told her about the minibus, though I’m not particularly surprised that she has heard. In the ladybird bag there are vegetables from the garden, new potatoes still coated in mud, courgettes still wearing their flowers, and things from the health food shop—dried figs and toasted wheatgerm and smoked tofu—and the arts supplements from the Sunday papers. She unpacks it all onto the kitchen countertop before she asks me again, about the bus.

  I rest my spine against the frosted glass of the back door and slide down until I am hunched on the welcome mat, beside the shoehorn. I cry. Because my mother is the only person in the world with whom I can, I cry.