Spill Simmer Falter Wither

by Sara Baume

  It was only once I’d started smoking for myself that I realised I never found where my father tore his roaches from. When he was alive, I never came across a single piece of soft card with a tiny rectangle wrought from it, whereas I am forever looting the biscuit and cereal and tissue boxes, slowly smoking a trail through my paperback book jackets.

  Now the sun’s full up and the backyard’s a-twinkle. A pigeon settles on the stone fence. Its feathers are palest mauve, the colour of forest fruit yoghurt. It has a plastic tag around its right ankle and seems to be watching, checking to see if I’m the human it knows, if this is the backyard where it left its coop. You don’t chase it; you never chase birds. I see how bewitched you are by furred things in the undergrowth and it always makes me wonder, why not birds? You’ll squeeze your head down a rabbit hole, convinced your body can be contracted to follow. Yet you seem to know instinctively that you can’t fly.

  Look, the buoys seem polished again. The sunlight’s washed away their slime. Even my dried clothes, my moth-eaten wardrobe of black and brown and grey, even my faded bath towel, look beautiful this morning. The night lorries have arrived, the amulet spider is having baby bluebottle for her breakfast, the business of the salon commences for the day. How strange to think that a few yards through a wall and over a parquet floor people are being shampooed, tinted, plucked, waxed. This makes me remember my calluses, so I remove my socks, take out my penknife and set about the improbably enjoyable task of scissoring the dead yellow meat from my feet. You sniffle them up and chew as though they were chunks of squeak toy, and a child screeches, somewhere way off in the distance, and I wonder was it a screech of joy or a screech of panic, and I wonder how to tell the difference. I wonder if other people can tell the difference. I roll another cigarette, and you breathe deep the second-hand smoke, the croissants and apple pies, the absent cat.

  And our pigeon coos, soulfully.

  Have I told you about my birthday? I’ve only ever had one, but it happened around this time of year, during summer, on a day of storms which followed the first spell of proper sun. A Wednesday, I think. It wasn’t long after Aunt died, and so it must have been the year I turned ten.

  My father didn’t go to work. He ate his bran flakes, his sausages. Then he told me it was my birthday and took me to the zoo, or was it a wildlife park? Maybe it was a wildlife park. At the zoo or wildlife park, he held his unfolded umbrella up. I could feel the raindrops seeping through my sleeves and even though it was summer, even though the rain was warm, the goosebumps rose on my arms like a cold rash.

  There were hardly any other visitors. What few there were we saw over and over as we followed the recommended strolling routes from the aviary through the reptile house, past monkey island to the buffalo plains. All the playground rides were empty and my father told me I was allowed to play on any one I chose. But I wasn’t interested in the seasaws and slides and swings. All I wanted was to look at the birds, the lizards, the big cats and tiny, red pandas.

  There’s nothing sadder than a rainy zoo, or wildlife park. All the creatures look either slightly dejected or slightly deranged. The big ones paced their enclosures. The small ones cowered under something and I couldn’t tell if they were sheltering from the downpour or trying to hide. I moved on reluctantly from each compound. I wanted to stay there forever amongst all the sad animals. As the rain grew heavier, my father coaxed me into the gorilla house, then left me to go and stand in the doorway and smoke. There was a gigantic silverback leaning against the window of his enclosure. His hands were so humanlike, his nails exquisitely kempt, much more so than my own. Slowly, slowly, he extended the index finger of his right hand and placed its tip against the glass. I lifted mine and laid it level on the other side. And we stayed like that a long while, until my father came back and told me it was time to go.

  Once we were home again, my father went to his room to fetch something. At first I thought he was giving me a small cage with an assortment of plastic toys inside, but then I saw its inhabitant. Its eyes were spearing black, its cheek pouches lumpy with stashed seeds. It gripped a bar in either front paw and I remember thinking that all it needed was a stripy jumper to be a perfect cartoon convict.

  ‘It’s a Russian Dwarf,’ my father said. But it wasn’t. It was a hamster.

  I can’t remember the exact date of my tenth birthday, but every Wednesday in summer for years and years after I looked out for it, I waited for it to be acknowledged again.

  Little by little, the pothole tar remembers how to melt. The wind turbines on the further hills cease their impetuous whirling. Their white trunks vanish into the low mist; their blades against the blue sky look as though they’ve been drawn in Tipp-Ex. The sprat organise into torrents and storm into the bay, mackerel hot on their tail fins.

  I watch as you eat the only raspberry on my bush. You smell its ripeness on the breeze and snuffle between the saw-toothed leaves, now nibble it clean to the core with bizarre delicacy, drupelet by drupelet. You’re so engrossed by the berry you don’t see me watching, behind you in the doorway beneath the lintel, coffee cup in hand, cigarette stuck behind my ear. You don’t hear as I let loose a soft snort of laughter.

  My father had a laugh like a rainstick, like a thousand grains of raw rice bouncing about inside his throat. He’d blow his nostrils wide and crinkle his cheeks up, but the noise always remained lodged just below his mouth hole, like the sausage. When my father laughed it was mostly over re-runs of comedy shows from the 1970s. Sometimes I laughed with him and while my congenial laugh wasn’t exactly false, it was always on cue, it was always stiff.

  I’m particularly fond of sitting in the sun, of basking. It’s a fondness which shows in the skin of my face, scorched over decades to a permanent tan, dappled by dubious freckles and shape-shifting blotches, no doubt the beginning of leisurely carcinomas. Still I cannot help myself. When I sit out to bask, I feel the sun suffusing my bloodstream and it’s like the effects of a tobacco which cannot be pouched. I am instantly revived, inspirited.

  Now I see you’re a basker too. Together we sit out every fine day. In our concrete paddock, our yard-sized universe, we watch as the shadow of the roof steadily skulks across the gravel. I haul the patio chair in line with the shrinking light. You follow and lie at my feet. I haul it as far as the stone fence, to the point where the sun slips into next door, and is lost. Betrayed by the roof, now we bob about the yard, now we fidget like litter on the surface of the ocean. You are nibbling the leaves off a vine of poison ivy. There’s a mischievous tilt to your head, as though you’re consciously mocking death. I notice an ant, another ant; now I count the ants. See how they’re suddenly infinite, when just a moment ago there was only one.

  I long to go to the beach, not just at dawn when the heat’s a little feeble. I long to go now, to walk to the end of the strand furthest from the car park where hardly anybody else ever bothers to walk, and to spread a rug there, to bask. But I’m afraid of being gawped at, and I’m afraid of leading you into a wonderland of things to clamp. Now everybody’s on their holidays and willing to travel from all over the green and concrete county to reach the open blue, the beach will be too busy, and a busy beach is a baited trap. I’m afraid of the fair-weather strangers, of their pets and children, of the trouble they make and how it might make trouble for us.

  There must be, somewhere, a place left behind by the wearers of swimsuits and pitchers of windbreaks and preparers of picnics. The sun’s still high above the chimney pots, so let’s strike off and drive around, see if we can find some small piece of abandoned coastline. Into the car and out of the village, we turn down every overgrown boreen which looks as though it might eventually subside into horizon. Sometimes there are private residences and sometimes there are NO TRESSPASSING signs and sometimes there are bulls who mistake me for their farmer, pick themselves up and trundle toward the silage trough. See the butterflies in the road up ahead, their wings swatting the sunlight as they twirl. But I forget to ease my foo
t from the accelerator, and now the butterflies crash and split against our windscreen. Just for a second before they’re gone, I see they’re red admirals. They leave two tiny smears of gunk and a strange dust on the glass, a glittering dust. Did you see them? Did you see the red admirals?

  At last, here’s the ghost of a track which tapers into an expanse of springy grass, and collapses away down the clifftop.

  The clifftop is studded with scabious, chamomile, campion. Ladybirds hug the grass stalks. Hoverflies tread the air. Cuckoo spit slurs through your coat as you bound to the edge. Now here’s silverweed, its under-leaves gilded like the scales of a white-fleshed fish.

  The track leads down slope. The earth and furze give way to sea pinks and lichen. It’s steep, but there’s a trawlerman’s blue rope bolted into the rock and strung between posts all the way to the bottom. People must have come this way before the undergrowth grew so dense, too dense to push through. I’m stamping it down; you’re tunnelling beneath. At the bottom, there’s a pebbled beach only as big as a disabled parking space, no good for sandcastles or windbreaks and submerged by several feet of sea at high tide, I’m guessing. It’s a beach hostile to holiday-makers, to day-trippers, to fair-weather strangers. My trouser legs are nicked from the furze’s tiny fangs, my wrists are nettled. Purple grass-seeds rest amongst your curls and you are sneezing, sneezing, sneezing from the pollen-clogged air. But it’s low tide, so it’s perfect.

  Tomorrow, once our slanted slates have collided with the course of the sun, we’ll come back here, I promise. We’ll scramble the way of the blue rope. I’ll bring sandwiches and gingernuts, a rag rug to spread across the pebbles. I’ll wedge your water dish between stones, take my book out, find the page with its corner folded, and bask. The slope’s pocked by burrow holes, smattered with dehydrated droppings. Free of the leash, you disappear into the clay at the base of the cliff to exhume the rabbit subways. But the rabbits have long surrendered their old roads to the ravaging roots of the gorse thicket. You don’t get very far and now your face is caked in red dust, scrawled into markings like warpaint, like you are the African prince named on your tag. You settle beside me, maggot twitching and eyeball swivelling. Well, what do you think? Will we come back tomorrow, and the day after, and the day after again?

  Today, I can’t see a soul. There’s a row of cottages on the road, about a quarter mile away. I see flowerboxes on the windowsills, swimsuits on the washing line, cars with city registration plates and unnecessarily wide axles squeezed into the cottage-sized driveways, and I wonder why nobody appears to bother with the blue rope. Don’t children go adventuring any more? Trampling the bracken in pursuit of secret caves and hidden coves, pebbled beaches at the bottom of puzzling blue ropes? But of course, I forgot how nowadays children are taught to plonk their rugs right at the start of a beach, right beside where the car is parked and all the other families are similarly plonking. These children never had the Famous Five because it has since transpired that Enid Blyton was ever-so-slightly racist, or so I heard on the radio. These are the sort of fair-weather strangers of whom we are thoroughly afraid, the sort who rank comradeship over compassion.

  I’ve never read you any Famous Five. I should, I think you’d like it. I’m trying to remember whether Timmy ever scoffed lumps of shit or savaged guileless walkers. I don’t think so.

  Every dawn, I expect the weather to have broken overnight. As though it will wait until I’m not watching to break. But it doesn’t. We walk the refinery road to Tawny Bay. We eat porridge in the yard. And when the tide is right, we drive to the steep cliff and scramble the way of the blue rope. Now the days are longer than ever before, but like never before, I’m grateful.

  I bring a thermos flask to the pebbled beach and stand it on the flattest rock. It’s too hot, I know, but I’ve always wondered what it feels like to drink coffee on the beach. Are you too hot too? You’re pumping out short, fast puffs of breath. I tow you by the collar to a rockpool, hoist you up and lower you in, cup my hands to splash your chest and belly. As the water resettles, you stay as you are. You’re watching the shrimp around your feet, snapping at the water, coughing and spluttering it out your nostrils.

  You always come back to me in your own time. Now you lean against my crossed ankles beside the thermos rock. Behind us and beyond the holiday cottages, see the fields. Remember how they seemed to be green as we drove past them? Now see how, from here, they are taupe and mint, emerald and lime.

  Interrupting the fields, there’s a golf course and a purposeless dispersal of bungalows. Barns, cars, bales and trees. Cows moving as imperceptibly as the hands of a clock, getting there without ever seeming to go. Now look out and see the ocean; the ocean’s interruptions. There’s a hunk of grassy rock all covered in cormorants. A lobster buoy. Sail boats very far away. A blue gallon drum, presumably attached to something beneath the surface. And a cargoship passing a floating lighthouse on its way into harbour.

  Whenever I look at a cargoship, I start to picture all the different things enclosed within each container, then all of the components which went into making the things, and then all of the component’s components, and so on, into perpetuity. Like the picture on the tin of Royal baking powder. When I was about as tall as the letter slot and riding in the back of my father’s car, we were passing through town one day, driving along the main street, and I remember seeing a woman through the window, standing in her doorway. After a moment, she turned and went back inside, closing the door behind her, and then of course I couldn’t see her any more. I know it sounds like nothing much, but it was the first time I realised that other people’s lives go on. All of the time, out of sight and without me. It was the first time I realised that everything just goes on and on and on. Regardless, relentless.

  Don’t you ever wonder what exactly people do, all day long, every day? The regatta revellers, April and the Polish hairdresser, the summer boys’ mums and dads? We see them power-walking along the shore front, queuing in the supermarket, zipping through the village in their fat cars. Then they pull into driveways and vanish behind front doors. Secure inside their magnolia dens with the venetian blinds tilted, what do they do?

  I can imagine; I do imagine, but my father and Aunt are the only people I’ve ever actually been shut behind a door with, before you. And of course you’re not a person, I always forget that. Now it’s forty-seven years since I was shut up with Aunt, and my father hardly counts either. For most of the days each week, for most of my life, he left the house in the morning and didn’t come back again until night, and only some nights, not even all of them.

  Every morning, he put on an ironed white shirt, a pinstriped tie, suit trousers and sensible shoes. My father was employed by a factory which manufactured confectionary. He was on the production line, and so he must have changed as soon as he arrived at work, and changed back again as soon as he clocked off. He never brought me to the industrial estate in the city to show me his factory, and so the picture I have in my head of little orange men and chocolate rivers isn’t real.

  My father wasn’t an educated or well-heeled man, even if he dressed as if he was. He saved enough money every year to go on holiday, once a year. And every year, once a year, on holiday, he bought a plate. He didn’t retire until he was seventy-six. One morning he got up as early as he always had and ate his bran flakes and sausages as usual. He was wearing his shirt and suit trousers, but I noticed he’d substituted slippers for tie. After he finished his post-breakfast cigarette, he went back into his bedroom and closed the door. He did the same thing the next day, and the next. Sometimes I’d stand outside and listen. I could hear pencil scratching, scissor squeaking, cardboard sawing and the tinkling of a paintbrush being rinsed in a jar. After a couple of weeks, he opened the door and showed me what he was making.

  It was a board game, colourful and complicated, yet also crude and logistically flawed. It fell far short of what I’d always imagined to be my father’s standards of precision, but of course, I d
idn’t tell him that. He made ninety-eight board games in the years between retirement and death, and I never told him. Some of them were reinvented versions of the classics. Cluedo on a cruise liner with a crew’s mess instead of a dining room and a guy rope instead of a candlestick. Snakes & Ladders in three dimensions with footstools and waterslides instead. The games my father invented for himself all had names which ended in an exclamation mark and sounded like a fairground ride or an ice-lolly: Scaffold! Golly Whizz! Scramp! I spent thousands of evenings playing his disorientating games with him, losing to my father’s ridiculous rules. And for thousands of evenings, I longed to be left to my books instead, to be far away inside their worlds and protected from my own.