by Sara Baume
I hear the lilt of human voices coming closer, but not so close as to distinguish words. The viewers don’t linger in my grandmother’s garden. They mustn’t even venture as far as the dog grave, perhaps having already made up their minds.
By the time I hear the door-slam and tyre-crunch and gate-screech again, only in reverse, the calves have me pinned against the hedge. I can’t understand why they aren’t being shocked back by the fence. Instead they stretch their ringworm-riddled snouts to nuzzle me and I shimmy and clamber myself to freedom.
My mother brings new health foods and replenishes the lilies, tidies up where my tidying up has fallen short.
‘Any offers?’ I ask.
She shakes her head and we chant off the reasons why my grandmother’s bungalow will not sell. She is sitting on the living room sofa and I am sitting on the hearthrug. She has lit the fire I never bother lighting, to placate the damp. Its profuse and uncomplicated warmth placates me too. I watch its grate-sized theatre. Lights up, lights down. Dancing, collapsing. Now I watch my mother as she speaks and remember when I was a child, how she used to tuck me into bed at night—and if for some reason she didn’t—the bedclothes would not feel the same. They would feel somehow less tucked, less secure, and I would not be able to go to sleep. And then when I was a teenager, every morning before school, how I stood at the breakfast table and filled a bowl with Raisin Bran, drowned the flakes in milk, carried my breakfast bowl upstairs to my bedroom. Then I tipped the cereal into a plastic bag hidden underneath my bed and poured the milk out my skylight and into the roof gutter. I’d accumulate Raisin Bran until my parents went to the cinema at the weekend, my sister to the pub, then I’d cart the bag downstairs and burn it in the fireplace.
How many times did I lie? I didn’t care. I lied and lied.
Now, by the fire, I watch her speaking and remember, at last, to ask my mother what she does on all the summer days she isn’t working.
And after she has left, I cook a gigantic dinner with all the things I like which she has brought me, and swallow every speck, and lick the plate. Now I eat one of the wheat-free, sugar-free, dairy-free biscuits she has baked, and another. I eat the dried blueberries, the cashew nuts, even the chocolate. I eat until I can’t eat any more, as an apology to my mother.
A lightning storm. In the morning, when lightning, when storms, shouldn’t be. I am out and walking. I miss the first flash and only know it happened when I hear the thunder clapping. I’m glad to be walking and not on my bicycle because it is metal, but then I remember the wheels and wonder if I wouldn’t be better off mounted on rubber strips after all, whether the battered soles of my sneakers will be enough to save me.
A colossal flash, away over the fields, through the curtains of rain. My instinct is to take shelter under a clump of trees, even though, of course, I know this is idiotic, that what I’m actually supposed to do is lie flat in a wide open space. I stop at the nearest gate and check for cows. I climb the steel rungs as swiftly as possible and squelch across the spontaneously waterlogged grass, into the middle of the field. I check again, this time for cowpats. Clear.
I lie down and think about how this whole long, strange summer ought to end in a substantial event. But, probably, won’t. For the first time, I acknowledge the possibility that nothing will die, or change, or even happen.
Works about Lightning, I test myself: Walter De Maria, The Lightning Field. An expansive plateau, Catron County, New Mexico. Standing seven thousand two hundred feet above sea level, there are four hundred stainless-steel poles with pointed tips set into the earth at varying heights, designed to survive the severest storm-force winds. They were erected in 1977, but they’re still up and out there, still catching bolts.
I wonder what it would feel like to go on a pilgrimage; to try and catch a thunderstorm, to witness a pointed pole struck.
I make another trip to the supermarket, and this time, I don’t feel the cold.
Standing in front of the bakery counter, I am studying a triangular bread-roll with sesame and sunflower seeds on top, grains of millet like bright pollen specks. Yes, these are the ones I like; the abstract expressionism of bread. I am not wheat-intolerant; I never was. And I like my salt sea, my pepper black and coarse, my honey pale and set, my lentils green and whole—I cannot understand why anyone ever thought that splitting every individual one might make them more marketable.
I am becoming weighed down again, so I decide to road-test a shopping trolley. I climb onto the axle and roll gently down the frozen vegetable aisle, picking up speed at the toiletries, swerving recklessly around the cleaning products. Now I understand: shopping trolleys are roller skates for housewives and old women.
At the fish counter, I find Rudolf Schwarzkogler. A photograph he composed of a man with the head of a goofy, gruesome, buck-toothed fish positioned over his penis. I stand facing the neatly trimmed fillets. Smoked kippers, seafood sausages, salmon darnes. And I think about a dead German’s penis, and I feel a little bit like myself again.
I look up the Schwarzkogler photograph and an Encyclopedia of Ocean Animals so I can try to match fish faces. Eventually I decide it is an Atlantic seawolf. They have six fish-fangs and antifreeze flows through their fish-blood. In spite of being considerably large, the Atlantic seawolf is almost exactly identical in appearance to a tiny, pool-dwelling species called a blenny.
New viewers come. An older couple, middle aged. This time, I have no compulsion to jump the compost heap. I answer the door, introduce myself, apologise for the mess. Now I leave every room as they enter, trying, as I scuttle, not to think about how these might be the people who will eventually expel me from turbine hill and pillage all the places where my grandmother is still to be found.
But no, I have to stop this.
Grandchildren have no right to claim ownership of the death of a grandparent. Children share ownership of the death of their parents; husbands and wives own alone the death of their wives and husbands. But my grandmother’s death? I am not allowed it.
If I can cook and shop again, if I can drive a trolley, then why wouldn’t I also be able to use the washing machine?
I examine it. I find the buttons and dials are perfectly self-explanatory. I don’t have any powder or tablets but I’m sure washing-up liquid will suffice. The machine does its thing for half an hour, runs through its full vocabulary of annoying noises. The clothes come out smelling like a wetter version of how they smelled when they went in. A sock has mysteriously vanished, leaving the sock’s mate alone.
I ball up my lonesome sock, stick it back in my drawer of slightly bigger balls of sock.
And there it lies in wait, for me to lose a leg.
A cat which screams in the night. A humanlike bawling. Or at least, I hope it’s a cat.
In a science laboratory, on the radio, somewhere in America, they are torturing fruit flies to study insomnia.
The common fruit fly, apparently, has the same kind of sleep pattern as a human, and so suffers similar symptoms when deprived of sleep. The producer intercuts the item with the sound of all the sleepless fruit flies. Batting against the walls of their bell jar, zizzing in despair.
I wake in the night to the scream of the human cat; I remain awake, like a fruit fly. By the light of the screen of my phone, I find my glass of water. The phone light, as well as the unfathomable one, catch in the water in my glass, hold there as if floating. Now I drink the lights, and lie back down again. It takes a moment before my screen returns to blackness, but the one on the wall doesn’t.
If anything, I think, it is intensifying.
10
Badger
I haven’t opened the door of my grandmother’s shed since the day I claimed her bicycle. I imagine other items of clutter have subsided into the bicycle-shaped space it left; I don’t suppose it would open again even if I did try. Instead I keep it in the passage which runs between the shed wall and the garden hedge. I lean it against the bricks beneath the roof’s overhang, s
heltered. This is my small act of benevolence towards her bicycle.
Although I never see spiders, every morning the hedge is decked with webs. When I walk down the passage, I feel their silk stretch and snap against my face, and I know I am the first to pass this way.
I’ve never seen the mist lie as low as it does this morning. It has beheaded the bungalow, pruned the trees to shrubs, felled the turbine to a stump. If it was winter mist, it would be grey, but because it’s summer mist, it’s electric white. And from every direction, a cacophony of rustling; the sound of leaves and stalks and blades and petals sighing beneath the moisture’s slow-building pressure. In the passage between the shed wall and the hedge, for the first time I see the threads I’ve only ever felt before. Each beaded by glinting alabaster, necklaces delicately strung.
At the bottom of the hill, I push down my feet to halt my freewheel. Heels skid against the chippings, vision blurred by the moisture on my eyelashes. And on my bare arms, a new alabaster bead clinging to each fine hair. There’s no hint of breeze to propel the droplets. The mist is inert; I am the only detail which moves. Thrusting myself onwards through the decollated, albino world. Allowing it to bind me in necklaces, delicately, delicately.
Works about Whiteness, I test myself: Wolfgang Laib’s ‘milk-stones’. Each one a rectangle of marble with a shallow depression sanded into its surface and refilled with milk, so as to appear solid again. White and whole.
A brown moth is scurrying across the armchair cushion, an appendage almost as big as himself stuck to his rear end. He is dragging it, bumpty bump, across the uneven landscape of embroidered cotton, an image of a golden Labrador and a marmalade cat sitting up straight on a patio amongst flowerpots. They sit together so tranquilly, the fur of their shoulders brushing. They appear in cotton and thread as compatriots, even though everybody knows that cats and dogs fight like cats and dogs. And so, this is a visionary cushion, prophesying a future in which it is possible to cast off historic differences and coexist, harmoniously.
I pluck away the moth’s moth-sized appendage. I see it is a vessel—a hollow cocoon—and I recognise it from a cluster stuck to the roof of the corridor beside the hot press. There’s also a single one inside my red sneaker, another clinging to the kitchen tea towel, another again lodged into the fibres of my grandmother’s bedroom carpet.
In the corridor I use a sweeping brush to knock a few cocoons down into my open palm. I select the largest and squeeze. It makes a quiet cracking sound and the crushed head of a grub erupts, followed by a blob of snot-coloured goo. I drop it and dust my hands off and examine the wall-hanging where the moths have chosen to pupate. Monochrome brown with a pattern of horizontal stripes, depicting nothing. The wool must be real because I can see the holes where the moths have chewed it. Some of the stripes have been eaten away entirely, leaving the weaver’s guide-threads exposed, strained, textile tendons.
Works about Whiteness, again: Ian Burn, Xerox Book, 1968. The artist photocopied a blank sheet of paper, then he photocopied the photocopy, then he photocopied that photocopy, and so on. He kept going for a hundred copies and bound the hundred pages into a book; the last page a hundred times less white than the first.
Today, on the phone, my mother tells me about some special spray I can buy to exterminate the moths. She tells me about how, once I’ve bought the right special spray, I will need to apply it in a well-ventilated area, then repeat the application every two hours for twelve hours.
My mother and I both know I will not do this.
‘If the hanging is still here,’ I say, ‘then nobody wanted it anyway.’
This house is a depository for things whose fate is yet to be decided.
In the corridor, I stare at the hanging’s desecrated stripes. I lift it down from its hook and carry it into the garden and peg it to the washing line. Perhaps I should beat it, like a rug, thrash the moths away. I fetch the kitchen broom, raise it up. But how can I hurt the hanging even more, after it has already suffered so much? It looks drastically worse out here in the brightness, sun bleeding through its abrasions. I lower my broom and go back inside. I sweep the pupae down from the corridor wall into the pan, and flick them away into the grass.
Stamp, stamp, stamp.
But they are too small and the soles of my sneakers are too creviced, and it soon rains. The moths flee back inside again. Finding their former pasture has mysteriously disappeared, they spread out around the bungalow, tasting new wools.
Works about Whiteness, there are so many. An early piece by Tom Friedman which came about while the artist was a student in the University of Illinois. The piece was Friedman’s studio. At a loss to think of anything to present for an obligatory project, he removed all the items from his work space, boarded up the windows and painted everywhere brilliant white. The walls, the ceiling, the cupboards, the floor, the boards that boarded the windows. It’s such a perfect work; the one which every former art student is still wishing they’d thought of. It captures, so concisely, the despair of trying to think something which has never been thought before—to make something which has never been made before—and repeatedly drawing a blank.
Friedman was the one who realised: all he had to do was make the blank his artwork.
On my first day of art school, after the mandatory orientations were over and done with, I fell in with a crowd of my classmates and all together we trooped to the park and lounged on a patch of grass by a pond in the last rays of September sunshine passing between us an enormous bong which appeared as if from nowhere. I’d only once smoked hash before; at a rock festival in the UK with my sister and her then-boyfriend. Because I am bad at inhaling, I only managed to become very partially stoned. I lay in the grass outside our dome tent and looked down across the sloping field which had been transformed into a campsite at all the other dome tents in every garish colour, and I remember remembering the pool of featherweight plastic balls at the fun park where we had been brought on trips as children and how this made me want to push off down the slide and thrust myself feet first into the ball pool which was not a ball pool, of course, but a campsite. By the pond in the park on my first day of college, scarcely nineteen, I inhaled as much smoke as I possibly could and still felt exhilarated as opposed to stoned; buzzed up by the knowledge that none of my family knew where I was, who I was with nor when I’d be home again. I didn’t even know exactly who I was with or when I’d be home again or where home really was any more.
Every day is going to be like this, I thought, and then corrected myself.
Every day is going to feel like this.
Works about Comradeship, I test myself: Roman Ondák, Good Feelings in Good Times, 2003. Outside the Kölnischer Kunstverein in Cologne, the artist organised a queue. At the front stood people who understood that the queue was a sham, who were in on the sham queue. But soon, they were joined by other people, by a small crowd willing to queue without knowing what they were queueing for, who trusted absolutely in the uncontextualised conviction of total strangers, or perhaps, who simply craved the solidarity of temporarily standing in close proximity to other humans.
I never returned to the park with those classmates again. Within a couple of weeks we weren’t particularly friendly any more. Sometimes, on a Sunday, I visited the pond alone with a plastic bag of stale bread. I’d sit at the same spot on the grass where I’d sat that day with the others and throw the stiff, torn slices clean over the tall necks of the swans to the herring gulls bobbing in the deeper water beyond, loitering for leftovers.
I felt sorry for the scraggy seabirds; everybody always wanted to feed the swans.
Today, I hear an item on the radio about feeding bread to birds; a warning not to do so because it swells inside their digestive systems, bungs up their bellies with damp dough. The bird nutritionist suggests the outer leaves of cabbages and broccoli stalks instead, shredded and diced.
I picture myself beside the duck pond. Squatting on a patch of shitty lawn by an expanse of murky
water. Insidiously, obliviously, hurting the birds I believed I was helping.
A nature documentary about our longest, fattest river, and all the paddling, scuttling, fluttering creatures whose lives are determined by its ebb and flow. They are burrowing in its mudbanks and building caskets out of shale. They are wading in its still pools with their harpoon beaks poised for attack.
The presenter is a man with a musical voice. He speaks to the camera as if he is singing to the animals. He is camping at the edge of a fallow field in the floodplain. It’s dark but for the light cast by his fire. ‘Can you hear the corncrake?’ he whispers.
There’s a gentle whirr of crickets, but over the whirr the bird call is clear. It comes in twos and has a buzzing quality; the sound of the arrival of a text message, a second in quick succession.
The presenter explains how the corncrake we can hear is a male who has flown all the way from Africa, looking for a mate. He stays up very late, listening. ‘I guarantee that when I get up in the morning,’ he says as he zippers his tent for the night, ‘the corncrake will still be calling.’ They are almost extinct, he explains. Because of the intensity of modern farming practices. Because at the same time of year the female lays her eggs, the farmer cuts his hay and the nests are destroyed. The male is calling, the presenter says, because he can’t see through the long grass; because he doesn’t know that there aren’t any females left to hear.
When I was in college, I never thought of myself as being friendless. I got along fine with my classmates, chattering away with whoever happened to drop in and out of the communal sculpture studio where I spent the entire day, a full twelve hours from nine to nine. But I always arrived and left on my own; I never went out to parties and pubs and clubs at the weekends.
