Spill Simmer Falter Wither

by Sara Baume

  Now all my rage transforms to panic. I do an unwieldy U-turn on the too-narrow road. I thwack down the nettles with my number plate. I speed back. It’s been only a moment. You’re still as I left you. Your lonely peephole’s fixed on the precise spot at which my taillights disappeared. Now you’re on your feet. Now you’re beating your stubby tail with all your strength. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. I should never have blamed you. It’s my fault. Everything is my fault.

  I’m tired now. I want to go home.

  Together, on we drive, with all the windows open, even though it’s cold. Together we breathe deep the cold, fill our lungs with fox spray and dead honeysuckle, pine martens and stinkhorns, seven different kinds of sap.

  We are driving, driving, driving. Heading for the coast, keeping to the back roads.

  wither

  Things are freezing, freezing, freezing.

  Dew drops on furze bushes and rain drops on mud. Gutters, cattle troughs, mill races, puddles, potholes, garden ponds. In the boot, the mineral bottles and gallon drums. On the windscreen, condensation. And beneath the bonnet, the tiny plastic gauge for feeding the wipers with washing water.

  What day is it? It must be the beginning of November at least. It seems too early for the first frosts, for such face-aching cold. I still don’t know exactly where we are even though I know now where we’re heading. We’re following the straightest route back to open sea. We’re keeping close as I can keep us to the line which the crow flies, and all of the other birds too, of course. Watch out for people who say it’s only the crow who flies straight. They’ll have you believing the pigeons and starlings and waxwings and gulls are all crisscrossing idiotically, weaving and winding and never quite getting there.

  I wonder if my father’s house is freezing too. It wasn’t ever warm, but the smallness and clutter made it seem somehow cosy. Do you remember last winter? The lowest temperatures for half a century, the meteorologist said. We didn’t know each other then. It was the first winter without my father and the first I felt the full bitterness of his house, the first it drove me back beneath my duvet during the thrifty daylight hours. Through the flimsy single-glazing, I could feel the wind and hear the rain softly tapping as though begging to be let in. Every morning I built a fire in the bedroom grate and every day I kept it crackling until I was back beneath the duvet for the night, and every night the bedroom ceiling froze and the freeze crept up from the sharp bones of my toes and stopped to take me by the shoulders and shake me awake. Then I’d see the ceiling plaster twinkling like a clear sky, as though the roof had been lifted clean off by an enormous godhand.

  One freezing winter years and years ago, one morning after my father had left for the factory, I snuck into his room and yanked the pull-string that swung from the trapdoor. It seemed to me such a paltry device; I couldn’t imagine it might be capable of drawing a folding stepladder down upon my head. But it somehow did. And so I climbed into the roof and there I saw for the first time there was no trace of any insulation, no yellow pillows of spun glass.

  I never considered my father a poor man. He worked every week day of his able-bodied life and he was paid rent in a monthly bundle from the lady who managed the fashion boutique, then the Polish hairdresser after her. My father never spent a reckless copper or owned a frivolous thing. He never showed an interest in money nor any of the spangly things it might have brought him. I don’t understand why he didn’t have the roof insulated, and I wonder if the house is freezing now, even more severely so than last winter without the small warmth of my breath and the jittering fire. I wonder about the bedroom ceiling plaster. I wonder about all of the fluid things I left so carelessly exposed. The suds in the soap dish, the damp earth in the plant pots, the oblong pool at the bottom of the toilet and the vetch’s stagnant water in its unemptied vase. I wonder is my father’s house a salmon pink ice palace now.

  In the winter, Aunt couldn’t take the cold in my father’s house so she’d bring me next door. Down the grocer’s passageway and up the rickety stairwell to her low-ceilinged flat. The smell was TCP and chicken-stock, and it was always warm. A sticky, cheesy kind of warmth. I can’t remember what the source of heat was, though I remember how Aunt kept the curtains drawn so not a wisp could squeeze free. I was already acclimatised to the chill air and ubiquitous draught of my father’s house and I didn’t like to spend the day sealed inside Aunt’s flat. It was too clammy and there was nothing to do. Even though many of Aunt’s belongings resembled toys, she never let me play with anything. She had a whole mantelpiece crammed with porcelain cats and porcelain girls in porcelain skirts and bonnets with porcelain frills. She had a picture of Jesus with a three-dimensional sacred heart and a tiny candle-shaped bulb that constantly flickered. Her only books were the Bible and a mass missal with a leatherette cover, if these can even be called books. I’d sit cross-legged in the central circle of the concentric circles on her living room rug. I’d make believe I was a baby Buddha like the one I’d seen inside a story book. I’d stay still as I could, and pretend to be meditating.

  There was a fish bowl, I’d almost forgotten the fish bowl. It was big as a motorcycle helmet and there weren’t any fish inside, nor any water. Instead there was a fistful of marbles; they were the brightest things in the whole flat. As a boy, I’d pretend Aunt’s goldfish had turned to glass, and as I meditated, I’d stare at the marbles. I’d will them to swim again.

  Since I forgot to bring the kitchen calendar, I’ve come to measure time in weather, in walks, in passing wilderness, in miles clocked on the dashboard dial.

  The weather and walks and miles and wilderness between us and the lay-by with the little witch girl accumulate, so that it seems long ago, even if it isn’t. Now whenever it was, it troubles me less. It troubles me with only the same ferocity as all the other things that trouble me. With your nose glued to the air vents, your thousand-mile stare boring through the windscreen, I wonder: what are the things that trouble you?

  I notice, on the index finger of my right hand, a skelp of skin gone from the knuckle leaving a patch of pink, the vivid pink of chewed bubblegum. There’s an extremely fine strand of your fur lodged in the wound, and I wonder how I wounded it and what force of nature carried this particular strand to my finger and deposited it there. Now I tug the free end, but the strand resists. And I see that I’m too late, that it’s already set into a scab, that it’s part of me now, that you’re part of me.

  You’re in the low chair on the back seat and I’m pushing. There’s a knoll in the road like a tarmac tumour and I’m struggling to get the car over it. You’re looking through the rear windscreen and watching me push. Your head’s tilted in confusion.

  Now a transit van ticks up the road behind us, slows and parks on the grassy verge. A man in a boiler suit climbs out. He’s eating a packet of hoop-shaped crisps. Now he’s coming toward us.

  ‘D’ya need a hand there?’ he calls, and I pretend not to hear. I don’t see what he does with the crisps, but the packet’s gone by the time he reaches the car and he’s brushing dust from his hands onto his suit, greasy orange dust. ‘What’s the trouble?’ he says, bending down to push uninvited alongside me.

  Inside the car, you are apoplectic. I have to raise my voice to be heard over your barks. ‘No trouble,’ I say, ‘just cuts out sometimes. Give it ten minutes and it’ll start again, no trouble.’

  Unfazed by you, by your hysterics, the man chuckles. ‘Doesn’t sound right though, does it?’ he says. ‘Want me to take a look?’

  ‘No,’ I say, ‘thank you and that, but no.’

  Now the car summits the tumour, tips into the ditch, rolls a little and comes to rest. The man and I stop pushing and straighten up. What if he goes around to the front and tries to lift the bonnet? Again and more firmly this time, I say ‘Thank you but no. No. No thank you.’

  There aren’t any other cars passing on the road and over the hedge, perhaps the winter wheat is rustling softly to itself and perhaps the birds are sing
ing, but I can’t hear anything but you, your implacable warning call. Now the man seems to look into the car for the first time. I suppose he notices the blankets and the rubbish bags. The gas cooker and the football. The low chair and food bowl. You. Everything.

  ‘Right-o,’ he says, ‘only tryna help.’ Now he holds his hands out like a Mary in a grotto, with his greasy palms up. He walks back, climbs into the seat behind his steering wheel, starts the engine. SWIMMING POOL SOLUTIONS says the sign on the side of his transit.

  As it passes, a crisp packet blows into the air, falls down again. Now I hear the whisper of the winter wheat, the rattling call of a magpie in the distance. I wonder how a man might attempt to solve a swimming pool. And I feel suddenly terrible. He was only trying to help us, and I drove him away.

  Through the spirit-rotting cold, we are driving. The mileage clocks, time passes. I feel as though the farther we descend toward sea level, the ever-so-slightly warmer the nights will become. Things will stop their freezing, or at least freeze less and remain softish in the centre, like a custard cream, one of my father’s.

  We pass the last and most resilient of the terracotta beech and melon-yellow sycamore leaves. We pass pheasants strutting the tractor rucks. Fertiliser sacks undulating against the hedgerows. Takeaway boxes turned spongy by rain. Sugar beets fallen from trailers with their heads smashed and tresses ripped from the scalp and strewn. For a time, we pass all of the things we already passed, only in reverse. And so I suppose I know where we are again, not by name but by association.

  Do you remember the monkey puzzle trees and peeling eucalyptus, the shoddy rockets and neglected crucifixes? Now here’s the same pair of running shoes slung over the same wires still walking on air above our heads, and the same straw bale rolled from the same hill stuck in the same ditch, only now, it is wizened and black. See how it has been burned out, as though it were a joyridden car.

  For a time, we sleep in the same gateways, car pointing in the opposite direction. Now the nights are astonishingly cold. I have four jumpers and a coat, and blankets, even one with sleeves and a hood. I should be acclimatised after so many winters in my father’s house, still everything aches and I don’t know whether it’s the cold or the position I’m trying to sleep in, or both, probably both. At night I feel the old familiar creeping from the sharp bones of my toes up through my spine to shake my shoulders. Now I’m awake and shivering, and you are woken too. I switch on the torch and relight the camping cooker. I boil a cup’s worth of water, and while it’s boiling, I spoon honey from the jar and pour whiskey from the bottle and cut a wedge from a lemon and stud each segment with a clove. It’s fiddly work for a fat-fingered man by torchlight, but a double shot is certain to settle me back to sleep. While it’s cooling, I rinse the saucepan and heat a dish measure of milk. You know what’s coming and dribble with anticipation as you wait. You press your face close to the blue flames, so close your eyebrows and whiskers are singed to brittle kinks.

  For a time, we stop in the same villages and buy food in the same grocery shops. Except for a bottle of whiskey here and there, a net of lemons and a jar of spicy twigs, I choose all the old reliable items. I think I could travel as far as Tasmania and still I’d stop in the first little shop I stumbled upon and try to buy gingernuts, margarine, fish fingers, spaghetti hoops. Then I think I’d find a salmon-pink house in a place by the coast where the shore birds wade, and I’d go about every day in the exactly same way I’ve always done, and the only thing different would be that we’d be in Tasmania. Yes, you could come, of course you could come. How could I ever manage without you now?

  Passing bungalows after nightfall, see the glow of strangers’ kitchens. Smell the wood smoke from their chimneys. Now we pass a house with an illuminated B&B sign swinging over the mouth of the driveway, and because the kitchen glows and the chimney smells of wood smoke, because I ache from cold and sleeplessness, I’m almost tempted to stop. But all the guesthouses will be guestless at this time of year, and I can’t stand the thought of trespassing on a family, of paying strangers to be kind to me, of lingering in the foothills of their domestic tiffs. I can’t stand the thought of eating from their crockery, of sweating into their bed-sheets, of patting myself from bunions to brow with their bath towels, of being watched through the dark as I sleep by the glassy eyes of their sentimental geegaws. I can’t stand the thought of being steadily infused by their smell, because every house and every family, however scrupulously clean, has its own smell. Of course I know you know this already, that every smell is ten times bigger to your senses, that you can smell history, that you can smell time. My father’s house smelled of black mould, cigarette smoke, fried garlic, hand-wash, damp dust, sweaty slippers, my own heinous breath and the fetid draught through the cracks in the ceiling plaster, the keyhole of the shut-up-and-locked room; but they consolidated into what was simply the smell of home, which no one word can describe and nowhere in Tasmania can ever smell exactly like.

  I don’t ask, but she tells me. A woman of thereabout my age with a little boy’s pudding bowl haircut. Her voice is toneless, insincere. From the opposite side of the indoor window where the air is purer, life-prolonging, she tells me ‘That’s the last of it now. It’s a bit of a mixum-gatherum.’ I gather my notes and wonder where the coins came from. And the plastic casing of my savings book makes a low squeak like a plaintive mouse as she slides it back to me over the counter. Or maybe it’s my driver’s licence that’s the plaintive mouse; I cannot tell.

  We drive on. It doesn’t get any warmer. Instead, rainstorms come. Wind buffets the car and the wipers fling themselves to and fro until they are exhausted. We stop in petrol stations, as we must. In the queue for the till, I inspect the chocolate display. I locate the position of the Fruit & Nuts, and if I can reach them without stretching too far and becoming conspicuous, then back on the road we’ll share a bar. Fruit for me, nut for you and the chocolate between us.

  We pass a hillside of windmills like medieval spindles in the sky, spinning the cirrus clouds into cumulus. We pass sick rabbits with limp ears and socked expressions hopping circles in the ditch. We pass sheep’s wool torn by barbed wire from the sheep who grew it, tussling to bust free of its spokes.

  We see a glossy ibis, a spoonbill from southern Europe, Portugal or Spain. An elongated raven with a curlew’s beak, rare as a bank vole. He is delving in the brown puddle of an overflowed field. He flies away as the car passes, did you see?

  First thing every day, I wind down the windows to evacuate the stench of our morning breath combined. Now the nights are so cold, so astonishingly cold, I faintly expect it to have frozen inside the car, into a solid clot of lurid green, an ugly embodiment of foul dreams and sleep disturbance. SLOW THROUGH VILLAGE, the signposts say, but I rarely heed them. I keep on until I know from the angle of the trees, from the way they shy their limbs from the brunt of the sea gales, until I know that we are nearly there.

  Look, the sidewise branches.

  ‘Nearly there,’ I tell you, ‘nearly.’

  I dream I’m tied to a post and standing up to my chest in snow. Even asleep, even inside the dream, tied to my post, I know the picture-making part of my mind has borrowed the dream’s landscape from an article I read in the newspaper roughly this time a year ago. It was about a group of greyhounds who were left tied up in their compound and froze to death. Without kennels, they lay on the concrete and were buried the first night of the blizzards. The article’s photograph showed a scene of wheelbarrows, shovels and ropes which trailed off into the drifts. Now I can see, in my dream, greyhounds on their backs with their legs standing high and rigid as the post I’m tied to. I can see tongues stuck to fangs and turned a powdery blue, the colour of cornflowers. It’s a cruelty I never even witnessed, yet I associate it with you, I dream it into your past.

  Sometimes I notice tiny scars beneath your coat, tiny claw slashes and teeth prints. A few bits of your ears are missing, a few bits of your face. Can you remember how you l
ost them? Do you dream about it, as I do? I see how you move your left brow up and down and left and right in coordination with the expression on your face. I notice how still you blink your hollow. Do you miss your missing eye, I wonder. Have you even realised it’s gone?

  The concreteness and geometry of the scenery is building, building, building into a town, a seaside town.

  First come the bungalows, always the bungalows. Each surrounded by a lake of lawn, by swan-shaped flowerpots and terracotta cherubs, perennial shrubs and flatpack sheds. See the palm trees; I never expected there’d be so many. The palm is a tropical tree, as out of place in this wetland of cows and fog as a bullseye in a bag of apple drops.

  Next come the Italian and German supermarkets. Now a secondary school with three storeys of bored and pimpled faces peeking through the slatted blinds. Now come the narrow streets and shops and pubs, a library and town hall. Buckets on the footpath in front of a flower shop, bouquets of gerbera and gypsophilia looking strangely cheerful against the bleached winter. A rail of second-hand clothes wheeled out of a charity shop onto the street, a sea gale knocking the mothballs out of capacious cardigans and chintzy frocks. Now come the apartment blocks, all taupe and steel and stifling close together, with balconies too narrow to open a newspaper, never mind a folding chair. The apartment blocks are abutting a plaza of wide, smooth slabs. Now here on a pillar is a statue of some dead sea captain. There’s a herring gull perched on the crown of his admiral hat and a splattering of milky crap down his epaulettes. In the town by the sea a man in a sandwich board pronounces that it is Friday, and Friday is market day. And I wonder if, when he was a little boy, he wanted to be a man in a sandwich board when he grew up. The slabs of the plaza the length of the shore front are pitched with open tents, billowing with canvas canopies, bustling with browsing bodies. Beyond the Friday market, the bay curves like a beaten horseshoe.