Spill Simmer Falter Wither

by Sara Baume

  I’ve never really seen the point of board games. They always take too much time to reach the finishing line, and then you either win or lose and that’s it. Nothing new is known. The game goes back into its box. Books have always been another kind of safe space, though if I’m completely honest then most of the things I learned from reading I’ve forgotten anyway. At least by playing the games, by losing, I gave my father some small volt of victory, some sense of accomplishment. I made him feel better, for a while, and that’s all the point there is, really. I owed him that, at least.

  Before he retired, I knew very little of my father other than what I witnessed for myself. He spoke to me in a practical way, he never really told me things. I knew he always took a conference pear and a packet of custard creams to work. I knew he sat with his right ankle rested against the lid of his left knee. I knew he didn’t like the taste of plastic from the new milk bottles. I knew a hundred mundane facts, but nothing of his longings, of his past. Now I wonder if he ate all of the custard creams himself or did he share them? And if he shared them, who did he share them with?

  After he retired, my father transformed his bedroom into a workshop for tinkering the board games into existence. There he spent his days sawing sheets of corrugated card, carving counters from bricks of balsa and painting over everything with his soft-bristled brushes. My father’s tinkerings left their trace in tiny mountains of wood shavings and flakes of cut card which sat on the carpet or got picked up by the door, swept into the hall and trampled across the house. After he retired, sometimes he’d tell me throwaway things and I’d scrabble them up like a squirrel snatching winter’s nuts. Sometimes on the sherbet line, he told me, the sealer would malfunction, then the pressure made the packets explode. The whole length of the belt there’d be a sugar cloud and we’d all be hacking and gagging into our mopcaps. My father hadn’t liked his job. He always made this much clear to me.

  In his bedroom-workshop, he ruined a square of wallpaper by using it to soak the excess water from his soft bristles. One day I noticed how it had been dabbed into an intricate pattern, like a coded message. In his latest years, I’d bring him cups of tea and marmalade on toast and I’d see how he’d added a new mark to his square, how it expanded every day. After he died, I locked my father’s window, I locked his door. I laid the draught snake out. Now there’s nothing more to add. The message is ended and means everything it’s ever going to mean. And I suppose I know now everything I’m ever going to know about my father.

  Come here, I’ve something to show you.

  There are ninety-seven homemade board games inside the shut-up-and-locked room, and the ninety-eighth is here in this box. This is the best one, the only one I still sometimes try to play. It’s a version of a real game called Discovering Europe, I think, only based upon a continent of my father’s creation. See how he outlined his landmass, then sliced it up between borderlines. See how the name of each country is borrowed from an obscurely titled village or town land or valley or river. Now see how my father gave each country a national anthem, a national costume, a national sport and flag as well as a particular landscape and export industry. Here’s Garrowdiff and the Isle of Spence, Moyastree and Ballyooagle. Here’s Palace and here’s Butts. See how Dyssert is mostly desert and Creggish is particularly craggy, how all the citizens of Elphin wear green tights and the flag of Lisfinny is covered in fish.

  It’s a game of luck, so you can play it with me if I roll the dice for you, pick up your chance cards, push your counter on a round trip to nowhere. In the low chair on the opposite side of the gameboard, you’re sitting up straight, watching intently. Are you waiting to be fed one of the coloured pieces? I’m sorry, these aren’t for gobbling.

  My father told me that after he died the games were to be destroyed without exception. I expect he was ashamed of the snot-nosed and sticky-fingered child who dwelt within him, who tinkered. He didn’t want people to weigh the worth of his life in puerile toys. But I didn’t preserve them out of malice; it’s just that I don’t have a knack for destruction. And besides, I had a hand in them too. He asked for my help, and I helped. I did all the dullest and finickiest and most repetitive jobs. I kicked down the days with mind-numbing tasks on my father’s instruction when I wanted nothing but to be reading instead. I know he only came back to remain in the salmon pink house on his retirement because he was old and spent and had nobody to care for him, nobody but me. When I needed him least, he suddenly needed me to sand his balsa and lose at his games. By his eightieth year, my father was scarcely the height of a silverback and he had exactly the same achromatic hair, slouchy gait and pouchy eye sockets. It was hard to hate him then, to treat him cruelly. It would have been like kicking a puppy; it would have made me the troll he’d always led me to believe I was.

  I never meant for what happened to happen. I’ve no more knack for concealment than I do destruction. Please understand, I never meant it.

  Who were they? The people my father thought were going to come for his sloppy games and pass judgement on his life? Were they the people who asked me questions after mass, the people he shared his custard creams with, the people alongside whom he inhaled exploded sherbet? Whoever they were, or whoever he thought they were, they never came.

  Your counter is in Bunraffy when you give in, curl up and sleep, and I play on alone. I steer thoughtlessly through the game for an hour or two, and after the finishing line is crossed, I feel a little better, for a while.

  Sometimes, when I was a boy, my father tore sheets of paper from his graphed pad and gave them to me to draw pictures. But instead of trying to replicate items and aspects of my world, I turned the sheet onto its blank side and re-drew the pattern of the graph, meticulously. Hundreds of teeny-tiny squares, without picking up a ruler. Every now and again I’d make an attempt at forms, but curves and shading always straightened and slimmed and led me back inexorably to the grid. It made some kind of sense to me then. It helped to hold the smog at bay. I don’t know what happened to those drawings. I think my father threw them all away.

  I’ve never looked through his stuff and I can’t explain exactly why it is I’m so incurious. I suppose there are clues about his life there in the shut-up-and-locked room, perhaps even some traces of my mother, but better to be content with ignorance, I’ve always thought, than haunted by the truth.

  The sea relaxes into summer, turns from slate to teal to crystalline. The white horses fall back into ripples and until they recommence their watery gallivanting, there’ll be no sea-wrecked buoys to find on the rocks and beaches, no stir and shake to smash them, no lob and volley to run their broken pieces aground. It’s the season of scantiest harvest for my backyard collection of sea junk. Where the waves have most recently touched, now there are jellyfish instead. No smaller than coins, no larger than coasters. Even though they are beached, traces of poison remain in their floppy tails. Even though they are dead, they can still sting. And there are pinecones. There are always pinecones.

  Now let me show you my junk-treasures. Here are my crabs. Not the severed claws you like to crunch but the shells of their backs, their elegant exoskeletons. I find them knotted into bladderwrack, crisping in the sun on the banks of rock-pools. I bring them home, rinse the stringy meat out, apply a lick of varnish to shield against the bleaching light. The edible crabs are smooth and curved like the red wood of a string instrument. The velvet crabs are fiddly to varnish; my soft bristles get stuck in the down of their carpeted backs. The common crabs have spots and spiked edges, like a pinking shears. Although brown-green under water, once dismembered and risen to the surface, their shells are baked to the colour of marmalade, Seville marmalade. The colour reminds me of Aunt’s open casket in the funeral home. Her cheeks had been bronzed by some blundering undertaker and the tanned head on the coffin pillow was a stranger to me, creepy as a ventriloquist’s dummy, only without the ventriloquist to make it seem harmless, even funny.

  Here’s my driftwood. I prefer the pieces
with swatches of crackled paint. I bring them home and nail them to the yellow walls, each abutting the next, joining the swatches. I think of it as a colossal jigsaw, an abstract assemblage of infinite proportions, and sometimes I wonder if, along with his overlong feet, my father bestowed me his restless compulsion for remaking.

  Now here are my bass lures. They look like fish-shaped toys except for the evil little hooks. Their plastic backs are psychedelic and their plastic bellies rattle like matchboxes. I cut them from great nests of weed wound up with cat-gut and threaded through with tiny, luminous beads. There’s something especially wretched about the washed-up lures. It’s like the plastic fish have been garrotted by their own line, poisoned by the lead of their own weight.

  Best of all treasures, here are my glass pebbles. They’re descended from old bottles, shattered and frosted by millions of the water’s worker particles. They are mostly wine-bottle green, milk-bottle white and beer-bottle brown. Sometimes they are medicine-bottle blue, but the blues grow rarer by the year. At dawn I sit on the stones of Tawny Bay and sift the shale while you’re playing football. And on every afternoon the tide grants us our pebbled beach, I sit and sift again. At home, I fill my jars and stand them in the windows. When the sun shines through, it throws sea-coloured mosaics onto the sill, the walls, the floor. I know what you’re rolling about between your teeth. Come here, spit it out.

  Now everything holds a diaphanous kind of potential. Now everything is so quiet and so nice and I feel ever so faintly less strange, less horrible. It makes me uneasy. It reminds me how I must remember to be distrustful of good fortune.

  There is a little boy.

  He has frilly hair, apricot skin, symmetrical features. He reminds me of the people in my picture frames, of the posing boys with sweet, smiling faces and a posing parent either side. Only this sweet face is snarled and gulping. This boy is staggering in distress, struggling to reach for his shih tzu and pressing, pressing, pressing his heartbeat into my outstretched palm. We are on the bird walk at last light, and I never meant to touch. I never wanted to touch. I’m only holding him back, with the front of my hand flat to the front of the boy’s red T-shirt. Red: the colour of warning, of admonition. But I’m only holding him. My other hand is on your mouth, my fingers pressed into your gums trying to lever your canine teeth from the tender skin of the shih tzu’s neck. And there is blood now. On me, on you. But mostly on the shih tzu, because it’s mostly the shih tzu’s blood.

  The boy’s mother must have been all the way back as far as the power station. It takes her forever to catch up with her son. She is fat, too fat for hurrying, and her voice is fat too. A torrent of verbal abuse bulges and rolls from her bulges and rolls. Now she screams and sledgehammers a fist between animals. Her graceless karate chop does the trick. In an instant, I wrench you from your quarry and the little boy scoops his shih tzu back.

  I stride away. With you under my arm, I walk as fast as I can without blatantly running. My hips are swinging like a woman’s, my bad leg is being left behind. My hands are trembling and the trembles travel through my elbows and shoulders, into my chest. The sighted side of your head is twisted back and you’re digging your claws deep into the flesh of my waist, the pork of my gut. Now I lose my grip and drop half of you to the ground. Your front feet are dangling, so I must drag. And as I drag, I stutter angry whispers at the back of your satiny head. ‘Ssssstop.’ I stutter, ‘sssstop ssstop ssstop.’

  But you can’t hear me, and you don’t stop. You’re braying, braying, braying a bloodthirsty bray. It seems to come out through every pore of your bandy body. So this is your kill noise, I’ve heard it only in murmurs before but now here it is at its furious zenith. Perhaps in a different situation I’d appreciate its eerie melodiousness, its piercing resonance. I’d notice how it’s like some hopeless, haunted, strangulated form of singing, singing, singing. Out of tune, out of time.

  Now the boy’s mother is gaining on us. She’s just a few paces behind, puce-faced and perspiring. She buys the low fat cheese, I think. She has a treadmill which stands immoveable as a marble bust in the corner of the spare room. She decides things for her husband and is not worth disagreeing with. Now a sweat mark has appeared at the neckline of her blouse and is creeping down toward the crevasse of her mountainous breasts. The things she shouts, the things she threatens, are clearer now. No longer slurred by shock but whetted by rage.

  ‘VET’S BILLS!’ she shouts, ‘DOG WARDEN! MUZZLE! PUT TO SLEEEEEEP!’

  We pull well ahead, pass the information board and cross the road.

  ‘I KNOW WHERE YOU LIVE!’ she shouts, ‘I KNOW, I KNOW!’

  And even if she is lying it doesn’t matter now, for she’s about to see us disappear behind the blue metal gate, our gate. The last of her shrilling is carried off on the wind, quenched by bigger noises. By the refinery siren, a passing cargo lorry full of freshly filled cylinders, a curlew calling his buddies to roost.

  We fall into the laneway. I slam the gate. Even though you’ve stopped singing, your song’s still reverberating in my head. I bend down to remove the harness. You wag your tail in expectation of approval. You lick your chops in request of a treat, just like before. And I smack you hard across the muzzle, so hard that the bone at the back of my palm makes a sharp, clicking sound as it strikes.

  Your eye waters. You shy away. You crumple like a tin can stamped beneath a hobnail boot.

  I should never have adopted you. You bring trouble and then just when I think the trouble has passed, you bring trouble again. Caring for you is like keeping a nettle in a pretty porcelain flowerpot, watering its roots and pruning its vicious needles no matter how cruelly it stings my skin, until I’m pink and puffy all over yet still worrying the old welts back to life.

  I find the key and open the front door. I step into the hall, but you don’t follow. You stay where you are. You cringe into the coarse brush of the mat.

  And now I think of how I was my father’s nettle. His big lump of an embarrassing son. A son with no life of his own, no apparent trace of intelligence, of personality. A son fit only to be kept indoors, away from people and from light. Where there’s nothing to sting but himself.

  I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it. Come in and let me clean the blood from your beard. It’s almost time for supper.

  At certain stages of the summer, the bay is fringed by a phlegm of dirty white weed. The top gets crusted by the sun, but underneath, it’s soup. Parsnip, no, cream of mushroom soup. On hot days at low tide, the soup smell steeps the village. Do you get it? Of course you do, you can smell everything. You can smell feelings; you can smell time.

  Now we sit behind the window. You on the sill, me in the armchair. Outside it’s dark. The tide’s coming in and all the birds are gone; gone wherever it is they go at night-time and high tide. Out to sea, the bird book says, as though ‘Out To Sea’ were some immense country unfastened and cast off to drift alone between continents. In the mud still barely visible below the wall, see the traffic cone buried to its third luminous band. See the golf umbrella wasted to its contorted joints. That’s my father’s golf umbrella; there’s the spot where I threw it. See what is maybe the blunt bow of his doorbox and maybe just a bow-shaped hump of bedrock. See the concrete cavity block. Inside it’s brimming with common crabs preparing to shed their softened shells. And across the bay, see the lights of a livestock ship pulling out of harbour. Inside there are hundreds of individual crates, and inside each crate, there’s a calf. I picture the calves are tan, white, black, mottled, and the ones with window cabins are staring out across the bay. But they can’t see as far as the bird walk. They didn’t notice what went on while they were watching. They don’t understand what’s happening to them and they are mooing, even though we can’t hear them from here, they are mooing tragically for their mothers, for solid earth beneath their hooves.

  The livestock ship sails from the harbour every Wednesday. It’s bound for Italy, I think.

  Thursday passes, Frid
ay, now Saturday. We don’t walk to Tawny Bay. Not even at dawn. We don’t scramble the way of the blue rope. We venture no further than the backyard. We can’t. We have to stay here, out of sight.

  In the backyard, I rake the gravel. I’m careful to rake around the tufts of grass you like to nibble. And the weeds, the weeds which chose me, which chose us. I uproot the poison ivy, chuck it away. Next spring, I’m going to scatter grass-seeds. I’m going to see how much of a lawn I can plant before the pigeon eats it, our soulful pigeon.

  A bee is circling the buoys, trying to figure out what sort of flowers they are. It isn’t one of the chubby bumbles which everyone loves. It’s a wasp-like honey bee instead; it carries baskets of pollen hooked around its backmost legs. I stop raking to watch. You’re chewing a piece of gravel. Even though I’ve told you ten times not to, still you are chewing. Now you swallow and watch with me. The honey bee chooses a blue float and touches down for just a second before flying on again, indignantly. I read in the newspaper that they can see blue and lavender, but none of the other colours. None of your greys and yellows, none of my everything. And they are dying, so the newspaper said, the bees. Perhaps next spring, I’ll plant flowers as well. Every open bud is a bee fed, I’d forgotten that.

  Avoiding the weeds and tufts and buoys, the rotary line, the patio table, I’m trying to rake the gravel into smooth lines. I want it to look like a Zen garden, like the picture in my library book, remember? A floor of stones in a swirling pattern of perfectly parallel ridges. But it doesn’t. There are so many obstructions it’s just a mess. Now one of the jackdaws from the chimney pot hops down to the gutter, peers over the edge of the roof and croaks, as though it is taunting me, taunting my dismal attempt to impose order.