A Line Made by Walking

by Sara Baume

  ‘No, thank you,’ I say.

  On the drive back along Lisduff’s main street, I get stuck behind the London bus. I remember the year this route started: I was in my final term of secondary school. My well-behaved friends and I had been granted permission to go downtown during lunch breaks, and so for half an hour every weekday, we loitered between the park benches and the chip shop. Not drinking, not smoking, not even eating chips. And I’d see the bus pass and think how amazing it was that there existed a vehicle which travelled all the way from this middle-of-nowhere in the Irish countryside to the very heart of Western civilisation: Victoria Coach Station. I don’t know whether, at the time, I realised it had started its route elsewhere and was only passing through Lisduff. Either way, in the torturous final term of school, the sight of the London bus was a great source of comfort. I took it as a sign that in spite of who and where I was, escape to an enormous metropolis overseas remained a possibility.

  Works about Sailing Off, I test myself: Antti Laitinen, Bark Boat, 2010. The bark collected from the floor of a Finnish forest. The boat not a toy, but life-size. And then the artist climbed into the life-size bark boat, and sailed across the Baltic Sea. A childhood fantasy made true.

  Since my twenty-first birthday present, since India, I haven’t travelled anywhere at all. Every summer holiday from college, I worked in a poky off-licence on the main street of Lisduff, to save the money I needed for the college year to come, the art projects I had yet to realise, because I have always preferred the feeling of having a head start to the feeling of leisure.

  Sometimes I’d consider putting money aside for a trip, but then I’d glance at the chest X-ray on my bedroom wall and remember the swallows and their pock, the sound of enormous cymbals.

  The off-licence job had slightly more credibility than being a shelf-stacker in the supermarket or a pan-scrubber in the chip shop, and it suited me nicely because it was evening work; my summer days remained free to read and make and draw.

  The shop was rarely busy. The evening regulars were a handful of local alcoholics and Slavic labourers from the town’s construction sites. They’d buy six-packs of Czech lager and pool their crumpled notes for the pricey Russian vodka my manager imported specially. The impoverished alcoholics would select plastic bottles of cider from the fridge, throw a pocketful of fluffy coins onto the counter. The better-off ones would ask for a naggin of something stronger from the high shelves behind me. A new one every night, as if, every night, they promised that naggin would be their last.

  On a late drive back from work one night on the long, quiet road between town and home, a car sped up behind my car and started to flash its headlamps. It was unmarked save for a portable squad light stuck to its tin roof above the driver’s seat, like a jaunty cap. The road channelled a gap between two expanses of pine forest. The trees were tall and densely spaced, rising up slopes either side. No houses for a few miles in any direction. I couldn’t see the shoulders and heads of the person or people in the car behind me. A cold clot of doubt rose in my chest. Don’t stop, I thought, speed up. But my ’89 Fiesta didn’t have the poke to go faster than other cars even if I slammed my foot right to the floor. The year the Wall came down, I thought, and kept a steady pace.

  Works about Slow Cars and the Wall, I test myself: Wolf Vostell, Berlin Fever, 1973. A motorised performance piece. Cars in groups of ten driving as slowly as cars can drive along the Wall’s route for half an hour. A protest? The calmest protest.

  I don’t know whether or not I remember the night the Wall came down. I’ve seen it on television so many times over the years, it’s impossible to know if any of the television memories are from 9 November. I was four years old; I wouldn’t have understood anyway. I vaguely remember a stunned silence, my mum and dad and sister crowding around the black-and-white set, but this might have been a different occasion altogether; it might have been the episode of Coronation Street in which Brian Tilsley got stabbed, or the episode of Glenroe in which Miley and Fidelma tumbled in the hay. I can’t remember.

  After a while, the unmarked car ceased its flashing and doused every light at once. It would have vanished altogether if it wasn’t for the short reach of my tail-lamps. But every now and again it would drop further back into the dark and I only knew it was still there from the glister of moonlight on metal.

  By that stage I was about to reach a crossroads where there are two pubs and a petrol station, houses and street lamps. Just before I got there, the unmarked car switched its lights back on, performed a precarious U-turn in the narrow road, and raced away in the opposite direction.

  My parents were in bed by the time I got home. The next morning, I didn’t mention the ghost car; I still hadn’t decided whether or not it was remarkable. Then, roughly two weeks later, I received a text message: a garda alert forwarded by my sister. In abbreviations, it described how a barmaid driving home from work alone and late at night had been pulled over by an unmarked car bearing a portable squad light, skull-dragged into the road by two men and attacked, brutally. And I felt a surprising equanimity at hearing this; I felt strangely as if I’d passed a test and was thus inoculated from such forms of harm from then on.

  In the end I told only Jane about the car that followed me, and for a couple of years afterwards, we collected similar stories: of the cyclist who narrowly escaped having her throat slit by a length of fishing line pulled taut across the width of a street, of the driver whose credit cards were robbed after he had been forced to brake for an empty pram shoved into the road in front of him.

  ‘Remember the golden rule?’ Jane would say. ‘Always hit the baby.’

  The sun is low; the moon out early. As my Fiesta chugs up turbine hill, it holds position in my windscreen. An air-freshener without a string. On either side, there’s a pleasing phosphorescent tinge to the valley, the view. It’s windless, as if the weather has switched off the turbine and switched on a light beneath the rind of the landscape which makes all the vistas seem cleared, sharpened. Why is it that even inhabited places appear still from far away? As if distance is somehow capable of stalling everything. From turbine hill, the view of mountains comes and goes. And I have always admired this about the view: its unreliability.

  When I was a child, August was always the ruined part of my holidays. I knew it by the stack of free copybooks at the end of each supermarket checkout, by the shoe shop’s window full of patent leather, by the newsagent’s cornucopia of trigonometry sets and novelty rulers. They’d fill me with a feeling somewhere between real-sick and the sick I faked to convince the teacher to phone my mum, to ask her to come and bring me home, so it could be the two of us again, for just a while.

  There was only one place in Lisduff where you could buy our specific school uniform. A children’s clothes shop attached to an undertaker’s and run by the undertaker’s wife; as if being fitted for new shirts and skirts wasn’t morbid enough already. I couldn’t have felt more wretched if I was being measured for a coffin.

  There is a strange pool of water beneath the breadboard this morning, as though the kitchen worktop has sprung an upside-down leak. It reminds me that my grandmother’s bungalow has a fate independent of mine, outside the limits of my control.

  Please don’t break, I whisper. Standing in the middle of the kitchen, addressing no appliance in particular. The tap drips, the fridge shivers. Now all is silent again.

  A project for this morning: I strip the sheets, pillows and duvet from the single bed in the road-facing spare room. Yank off the mattress, haul the naked frame towards the door, flip it onto its side but the front end hits the hall wall and the rear end hits the wardrobe before it’s even halfway out. I push it back into place and haul the mattress into my grandmother’s bedroom instead. Now I position it where her bed was, on the patch where the dog used to lie. I dress it in its clothes again.

  This bungalow has always seemed to me to have an awful lot of bedrooms for a single storey. Since I came to stay I’ve slept in all
of them. This is partly so that I’ll never need to wash any sheets, but also because I haven’t been able to choose, until this morning.

  Works about Rooms, I test myself: Gregor Schneider, Dead House u r. Since 1985, the German artist has been subtly contravening the infrastructure of his three-storey house in Rheydt. He has built replica rooms inside rooms, blocked entrances, bored hollows, manipulated lighting, replastered walls, over and over, so that certain spaces progressively shrink. Schneider’s house has become so renowned that gallerists arrange for entire rooms to be transported to galleries across the world. Taken down, brick by brick. Built back up again, elsewhere.

  I feel a little new now; I go out and travel a comprehensive circuit of the garden. Skirting the hedges, hopping the shrubs, reaching out to the dead flower-heads, crumbling them between my thumb and forefinger. Past the greenhouse, the compost heap, the plum trees. My wilderness is disappearing into ordinary grass again. I don’t see a single rabbit; black, brown or Snowball.

  My circuit returns me to the bench, the bike shed, the basin in which the mouse drowned herself and I drowned the sparrow. I smell my fingers. They are vile, worse than earwax, and it takes me a moment to remember why. The flowers, of course. This bitter smell is pollen vomit. And I realise what I’ve just done is a kindness, a scattering of seeds. Dissemination, germination.

  There’s a splotch of light on the wall of my grandmother’s bedroom. This isn’t unusual. I like to sleep, or not sleep, with the real and changing light, like a bird. And so the curtains are always open, my walls vulnerable to reflections. What is strange about this particular splotch is that it forms such an even shape, a tidy oval. What is strange is that I cannot figure out exactly where it’s coming from; what it’s being cast by.

  There are no street lamps. This window doesn’t face the dark stalk and shining eyeholes of the turbine, but the valley instead. And this bungalow stands alone on its hill, too high up and far away from other houses to be impinged upon by their artificial light. It might be the moon, but the moon doesn’t make shapes; it makes whole rooms glow ethereal white, and even if it did, it wouldn’t be an oval, only either crescent or round. And besides, it isn’t a clear night, it’s bumper-to-bumper night clouds.

  My unfathomable light isn’t coming from the sky. It can’t possibly be.

  Today, I leave my bike behind and walk. I crave firmament beneath me. A steadier pace. A lower, slower view.

  My eyes prickle from the early cold, crying without my consent. Beneath an almighty horse chestnut at the roadside, a fresh fall of conkers. Their shells are rich red-brown, covered with fingerprint-fine swirls. Most have been popped by passing wheels and lie spewing their milky innards, a miniature battlefield of detonated tree bombs. I feel like I should photograph them.

  I can’t believe how many blackberries there are on the bushes and what a waste this surely represents. An old lady couldn’t possibly pick all of these for jams and pies; a bird couldn’t possibly eat them. I suppose they drop and rot and the seeds go back into the mud, that nature needs them for next year. In order that, next year, they can be too many all over again, to drop and rot and reseed for the year after.

  Back in the kitchen, I see there’s a leaf stuck to my sneaker. Small, yellow, sycamore, like the one which obsessed Littlefoot in The Land Before Time. The leaf of the last growing tree which kept the herbivorous dinosaurs alive. Perfectly centred on my toe, as if it was the only visible part of an invisible pattern.

  Works about Lower, Slower Views, I test myself: Richard Long, A Line Made by Walking, 1967. A short, straight track worn by footsteps back and forth through an expanse of grass. Long doesn’t like to interfere with the landscapes through which he walks, but sometimes he builds sculptures from materials supplied by chance. Then he leaves them behind to fall apart. He specialises in barely-there art. Pieces which take up as little space in the world as possible. And which do as little damage.

  Now when I wake up, at least once every night, I check for my unfathomable light. My eyes move irresistibly to the place where it sits on the wall, level with the bookshelves, just below the hook from which a picture frame has been removed. I try to unfathom it.

  Does the light go away when I draw the curtains? I’m not sure that I am brave enough to try.

  Mum comes on Sunday with a boot-load of beige things.

  ‘Annika phoned,’ she says, ‘there are some viewings coming up.’

  I’d forgotten all about the FOR SALE sign in the rose bed. Now my mother rattles through my grandmother’s rooms. She doesn’t comment on the empty bed frame in one and the dressed mattress in another; she doesn’t ask me why, nor tell me to put it back the way it was. The only comment she passes is that it smells damp.

  I’ve noticed this too. The longer I’m here, the stronger the stench of abandonment grows. I am supposed to be keeping this bungalow alive; instead things break, things fall away, dampness sets in.

  ‘Do you want me to put the heat on?’ I say. ‘Light scented candles, bake bread, brew coffee?’

  ‘Whatever suits,’ Mum says. We both know only the coffee suits, that I brew it anyway, that now I can use the damp smell and the viewings as an excuse to drink more coffee.

  She takes the boxes away. I help her carry them to the car.

  I shuffle from room to room, encountering lilies, lampshades, cushion covers. And everything clean, and the alien smell of cleanness.

  I find that my mother has hoovered up the fallen flies from the sun room.

  But nobody comes to view my grandmother’s bungalow until the old lilies and new flies have all died. As I chuck the whole lot in my grandmother’s bin, I’m confronted by what an awful lot of sardines I’ve eaten this summer. I’m not so fond of the taste; I eat them because I want to believe that consuming the skin and bones of a smaller creature must surely be a fast track to nourishing my own skin and bones.

  This makes me remember my fingernails. I am at the sun room table absently clipping them with a penknife scissors when I hear the gate-screech and tyre-crunch of gravel. A first car, a second.

  I slip out and down the garden. I can’t hide inside; what if they want to open every wardrobe, check under every bed? But perhaps they’ll also want to root through every shrub, circumnavigate every tree. So I keep going, summit the compost heap, sink onto my haunches at the edge of the cattle field, in the gap between my grandmother’s hedge and the farmer’s electric fence. Only now I notice I’m still holding the penknife. And so I crouch in the dirt grasping a tiny weapon.

  The calves are way off on the other side of the field. Only one appears to have spotted me. He raises his head and stares. Above the tall trees in the distance, a crow, a crow, a crow. My mother says that all the birds and fish amass at this time of year. They remember they need each other and team up again, to leave. As soon as I think of this, the erratic bird-scarer sounds and the sky stuffs up, a frantically pixelating blackness.

  Works about Blackness, I test myself: Kasimir Malevich, Black Square. Only there isn’t just the one Black Square; the artist painted four between 1915 and the 1930s. And not one of them is properly, purely black any more. Now each is covered with craquelure: a zillion fine splinters in the old, spoiled paint. There is an original canvas, but when the conservation experts X-rayed it, a composition of brightly coloured shapes were revealed beneath the black.

  How strange to think it possible that this pre-eminent symbol of nihilism can be scraped back to pattern and hue.

  I’m too far from the house to hear voices. Maybe if it wasn’t for the turbine, the swishing leaves, the cawing of the swarming crows. I wish I’d thought to grab my book before I fled. Instead I watch the calf who watches me; I watch the sky. I see how some birds fly so easily, glide and swoop, while others stutter, stagger. I see that there are different styles of flying, and all different characters of crow.

  I remember, one morning when I was a teenager, my mother in her coat and boots, coming in from an early walk.
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br />   ‘All the different leaves make different noises in the wind!’ she said as soon as she saw me. ‘According to their size and shape and density. Have you ever noticed that?’

  Back then, I hadn’t, nor did I care. But in the years since, I’ve grown to appreciate my mother’s remarkably perspicacious mind, and how this kind of remarkable perspicacity is impossible to learn. I’ve grown to believe that it’s my mother who is the artist, and not me.

  ‘You have to stand still and listen carefully,’ she said, ‘. . . but once you hear it for the first time, it’s easy to keep hearing. It’s really quite wonderful . . .’

  After a while, I raise my eyes above the parapet of the compost heap to spy through the branches and rotting fruit of the plum trees. I see no sign of life at first. I am about to give up and go back to the bungalow when they begin to appear in the sun room. Annika, I presume, is the one who comes first, clutching a clipboard. The people who follow—the people interested in buying my grandmother’s bungalow—are a couple about my age, probably newly-weds. I watch them surveying, judging. The woman swings her ponytail as she nods; the man leans a hand on the back of my chair, stiffly. How like creatures-from-another-planet they are. Their easy-mindedness, their sense of priority. I wonder have they noticed my fingernail clippings scattered across the tabletop, the slivers of grime beneath.

  Annika slides the door and they begin stepping out onto the lawn. I duck, turn my back. Now the calf who was staring is ambling up the field towards me, the others following uncertainly behind.