by Sara Baume
But after only a matter of months it occurred to me that once they’d finished with my father they might seek out a weak spot, a cleft between boards which led to a crack in the ceiling plaster. They might not realise I am not dead. They might not discriminate either way. They might scratch and scratch and scratch until they could drop down and land and rampage through my rooms. For months and years the clamour never fully ceased, and I never fully stopped listening or fearing that the rats might still be chiselling away at a fracture, coming for me.
Then one morning there was an expert on the radio. I haven’t told you this before but it’s about you, are you listening? The expert told me that a small animal, like a rat, will instantly smell the presence of a larger animal, a predatory animal. It will smell and know and stay away. This set me first thinking, then looking, and so there came you; this is how there came you, my good little ratter. And for a while I didn’t hear the scratching in the roof any more, or I forgot to listen.
Now if I was the old man, I ask myself, where would I squirrel my most precious things? The only place I can think of is under the bed, so I lift the corner of the duvet which grazes the carpet, I feel around. And perhaps I am more of my father than I pretend to be because after only a second my hand collides with a rigid object. Not a locket, a letter, a tress. Instead I draw out an old-fashioned sweet jar with a screw top and sticker that reads SHELBY’S ASSORTMENT YOUR NAME HERE. Underneath someone has spelled out a name, a woman’s name in red felt-tip: R U B Y. I unscrew the cap and because my fist is too large to force inside I tip the contents out. It’s stuffed with packets of sherbet dip, empty but for a sprinkling of purest white powder. I check in packet after packet after packet until the sugar dust makes me sneeze. Now I lie flat as I can on the flab of my gut and flay my arms and pat my palms around beneath my father’s bed until I know for certain there’s nothing else. Well, what do you think, is this my mother on the sherbet jar? I tear away the sticker as though she might be in some small way revealed.
Now I get up and reach for the pull-string, and you’re too short and have too many legs and not enough arms to climb the stepladder, and so I must go up alone.
‘Back in a minute,’ I tell you.
Amid such an almighty mess of rat shit, it’s hard to believe my father’s bones could be so clean. I hadn’t expected them to eat his clothes, the sausage in his windpipe, his windpipe. They’ve chewed away the cartilage which bound his skeleton together, they’ve waltzed his disparate pieces across the bare boards. Only the exceptionally long toe bones are recognisable as my father’s.
Now I have to go back down for another plastic bag, and when the plastic bag is not strong enough, for a pillowcase, and when the pillowcase is not big enough, I have to take his ribcage out to the ash stump in the yard and splinter it apart with my kindling axe. The pillowcase bears a pattern of tiny white flowers, but when I look closely they are no type of flower I can name. They are no sensible shape of flower at all. They are wrong, they are fake.
With the pillowcase slung across my shoulder, I take the bag with Mr Buddy inside and the bag with the swallow’s nest inside, the egg-timer, the cushion cover, the panda-bear-shaped pencil-sharpener. I stop only to lift a picture frame, to root out its smiling stranger and press the sticker from the sweet jar against the glass instead. Now I take the picture frame along with all the other stuff, and I take you, of course.
Of course I take you.
Curlews rise from behind the Christmas tree and skitter across the bay peeping, peeping, peeping. The bird book spells the sound they make as cour-lee, cour-lee, like a kind of yodel. But it isn’t, not even close. Each call is different; each call means something new.
The curlews pass over the pine copse at the end of the bird walk. Beside the copse, there’s a van parked on the hard shoulder. Now I see a man in a wool cap standing at the top of a ladder propped into a tree. What’s he doing? A brown blob falls to the grass. Another and another, until I see the wool cap man is holding a handsaw and chopping the pinecones, one by one. After a while he climbs down and goes about with a coal sack gathering his brown blobs from between trunks and amongst needles. A long time passes while we are watching him, but the wool cap man never breaks his ceremony to look back along the bird walk to the village. I wonder will he spray the pinecones with fake snow, tie red ribbons to their stalks and sell them from a car trailer with sticks and blocks. He has a hefty sackful now, far more than he could ever hang on his own noble fir.
In the backyard, there’s a potted tree, remember? I’d forgotten it, until now. It’s a spruce, I think, scarcely the circumference of a dinner plate. I read somewhere that the oldest spruce in the world is eight-hundred-and-fifty-two, and not in a pot, I presume. Every Christmas Eve when I was a boy, my father used to carry our spruce indoors and place it on the living room windowsill and leave it there well into January. But he never decorated it, and every Christmas, it looked bereft. And every new year, I’d be glad when he put it outside again.
Now the wool cap man is finished stealing pinecones. He loads his van and drives away, and I know we should be driving away too. Will I sprint around the back and grab the spruce? This year, we could decorate it. We could sit it on the back seat with aluminium foil stars dangling from the branches. Only I’m not much of a sprinter, and you’re afraid of aluminium foil. And now I remember, of course, the tree outgrew its pot years and years ago. My father never transferred it to a bigger one, and so it died. Our Christmas tree is a naked stick now, I’d forgotten that.
Now I realise what I must do. I must come back, under cover of dark, with the shop and salon shut, the shore birds roosting. I must bring a can of petrol, a box of matches. Can you picture the night slugs charred and shrivelling? The plates exploding on the walls, the drifted timbers reduced to kindling, the bran flakes turned to ash. The salmon pink and yellow house turned shades of salmon and pink and yellow like never before.
The rain comes. It comes in all vicissitudes of strength, direction, drop size. The only consistency is its constancy. Where once there was silence, now there’s the fizzle and drum against our thin roof.
By the time we’ve reached the graveyard it’s sturdily pouring. If our life was a film the rain would be a sign that something sad is about to happen. But is isn’t a film, of course. No one is watching us. Nobody even knows where we are.
This is the graveyard where my father should have been buried. I park outside the gates. You’re sitting on the back seat with your face pressed into the gap between front seats. You’re whining softly to be let out even though you don’t know where we are. The graveyard in which my father isn’t buried as he should be isn’t beside the parish church, as it should be. Instead it’s an overflow graveyard, zoned to a characterless plot half a mile outside the village. It’s been here for as long as I can remember but only in recent years have the housing estates raised up on either side. From the car I can see over the wall at the graveyard’s far side and right into the rectangular garden of a semi-detached. There’s a timber shed with a heavy-duty padlock, a patio decked in varnished pine and a matching kennel. It’s an elaborate kennel with a pretend chimney on the roof and a pretend window on the side, and now I see there’s a blonde muzzle and black button nose poking out of the doorway. This must be what you’re whining about, what you’re sniffing through the air vents.
‘In a minute,’ I tell you. I am almost finished collecting myself. ‘Just a minute.’
Inside the car, our breath is coating the windows in condensation. Bit by bit, the graveyard and patio and kennel are misted from sight. Now I open the driver’s door and we step into the rain. It seems somehow less fierce than it did inside the car. The graveyard is surrounded by a stone-clad wall. The gate grinds against its hinges as I push. The plots are arranged in a block system, like a miniature Manhattan. Most of the individual graves have marble headstones and dun-coloured gravel. I read somewhere that all grave gravel is imported from China nowadays, that it’s
against the law to take stones from the beach, they have to be purchased from a Chinaman instead.
The freshest graves are soil heaps marked with wooden crosses and cortege garlands. SISTER, the flowers spell, NANNY, DAD. Some are plastic and some are silk and the only real ones are carnations, the longest living flower yet also the one most associated with death. I skip the garlands and begin at the furthest corner, the place where I imagine the oldest graves to be. Here the soil has long since slumped into place above each coffin. There are no crosses or figurines or everlasting candles. No trinkets or engravings. No carnations. There is just grass, which is dead, and weeds, which are flourishing. And I wonder if I should take my father’s axed ribs from the pillowcase and use them now, like a dowsing rod. Only not to find water, which is everywhere. To find my mother, my mother’s grave.
But there’s no need. Now I find her easily. All the years I never looked, and now here is my mother. Here she was all along. OUR DEARLY BELOVED RUBY. On a plain grey slab in the perpetual downpour. DIED 1956 AGE 23 the headstone says. I answer by saying it out loud.
‘Nineteen fifty-six,’ I say, ‘when I was two.’
You know I believed she died when I was born, because I was born, and that my father always blamed me. I believed I’d never known her, and now I see I knew her two whole years and can’t remember a single moment. And so I wonder why he blamed me anyway, and if he didn’t blame me at all, why was he always so unkind?
You look up and know it’s you I’m talking to. But you’re busy chewing on a piece of stray grave gravel. I can hear it rattling between your teeth. Now I watch as you swallow. But you always ate the gravel anyway, remember?
‘Ruby,’ I tell you. The same word as for red in Latin, as for one amongst the four most precious of the gemstones. The colour of warning, of admonition.
‘Good boy,’ I tell you, for no reason at all. ‘Good.’
The rain drops grow; they come straighter and surer. Back we go to the car, and I turn on the gas cooker, take out the saucepan and cut open a packet of marrowfat peas. Together we watch the retriever crouching in his kennel atop the decking. We watch all afternoon, but nobody comes to bring him for a walk or give him his supper. Dark falls at five o’clock as usual, and still every ceiling sun inside the retriever’s house is switched off while the graveyard is flickering all over with the dim bulbs of everlasting candles. Each to its own plot, hovering over old bones and teeth and rings and wristwatches, like tiny light-bearers.
Beside me on the passenger seat, you sigh. Front paws rested on the dash, nose pressed to the air vents. You’re waiting for your walk.
‘Will we go to the beach then?’ I say, and you wag, wag, wag with all your strength.
See the skin which crowns each of my fingers and hems my nails in, how it’s all bitten and ragged, crusted and tanned like old rubber, fissured and parched like a drought-stricken landscape. You know why it’s like this. You see me continuously, tirelessly worrying it with the other fingernails or with my teeth. Or sometimes even with the penknife. Fingertip by fingertip, I work the skin loose and tear it away. Then I set the wound aside to mend, and once it’s healed, I worry it afresh. You see me, all the time and during everything I do, picking, picking, picking. Sometimes gently, sometimes viciously, always unstoppably. There was a time when I found it comforting, now it’s just a thoughtless habit. And as with all habits, thoughtless or otherwise, the only release is sleep.
The drive between the graveyard and Tawny Bay is five or six or seven minutes by way of the coast road. For five or six or seven minutes, I attack the skin of my fingertips with particular venom. You press your nose to the window and my father nods his skull in time with the bumps and twists. From the radio, an expert is telling us that whales kept in captivity develop a droopy dorsal fin.
It’s almost a year since we drove this way to the beach instead of walking through the forest and over the fields. Do you remember the refinery road, the boat house, the banana skin, the barley? This time I drive us right into the car park. It’s a stretch of gravelled earth on the opposite hill to the belching chimneys and jimmying windsock. It sits precariously on the undercut cliff’s edge above the sandy strand.
Here’s another car already parked, and so we have to wait for the car’s people to ascend the cliff path and drive away. I know you’re dying to get out, but we can’t risk an encounter with night-walking strangers, I’m sorry. We are last in line, remember? We have to be patient.
We have to keep our dorsal fins stubbornly upstanding.
We stumble down the cliff path in the smudgy dark. It’s been three months of cold season since we walked here, and now the beach is transformed. The sand’s covered in amorphous sea monsters. They are slinking, stinking, swishing, their slick backs glancing off the moon. Ribcages and shin bones stick up through the sand, like an elephant graveyard. The smell is foul, and you’re delirious. Leaping, diving, waltzing with the monsters, drunk on their sulphurous fumes. You know straightaway from smell what I can only tell from touch. Now I crouch down and stroke the ground. It’s kelp. Kelp dredged from the seabed and vomited onto the shore, because of the storms and high seas and because Tawny Bay is outside the harbour’s mouth, unsheltered. I’ve seen kelp plagues before, but never so immense as this. I reach to snap a rib and it bounces back, pliable as a wet baguette. Now you’re ploughing your face through the mess, following rancid scent trails, fish guts and ancient nappies. I call you and clip the leash on. I drag you up the path to the car. I can’t risk losing you in the dark and gunk, not here and now.
‘Tomorrow,’ I tell you, ‘patience.’
It wasn’t true, what I said before. That the nights would seem warmer once we were back at sea level. I’m sorry. I didn’t know then that I was lying. Now we’re as far south as we can go without driving off the side of the island, and still it’s eye-streaming cold. Still we’re lying awake and watching ice crystals spread like an enormous spirograph across the windscreen. See the spider frozen to the glass of the left wing mirror. He’s prising his legs off to free himself, one by one.
In the morning, the spider’s dead and the ditch is white and crunchy. See how the spiders who survived the night have spun tiny web hammocks in the unbending grass. Are they afraid of heights, I wonder. See how the grass here is different to the grass inland. Tough and glossy and sharp, I’d forgotten that. Now you cock your leg and saturate a tuft of winter heliotrope with sweltering piss, and the heliotrope trembles in fury a long time after you have finished.
The smell doesn’t seem so bad this morning as it did last night. It’s early, the tide’s out and there are no other cars, no walkers. I unclip the leash and you run ahead into the kelp. In some places, it’s lying a few feet above the sand. The morning waves are far too frail to suck so much back in again, still they lap, they persevere. There are tens of other kinds of weed too, at all different stages of decay and diced through with smashed shells, dinted bottles, toy tyres, fractured lobster pots, flip-flops. Buoys and broken shards of buoy, but far more than I can carry, more than I can store, more than I can care about. We walk the strand, clearing a path. I’m carrying the deflated football, looking for a patch of flat sand to throw it at. But there aren’t any, and even in daylight Tawny Bay seems strange and unfamiliar. Now the beach we both knew is ossifying somewhere beneath the kelp.
Halfway from the end, there’s a beached porpoise. I catch up just as you’re beginning to gnaw its tail. I pull you off so I can see it properly. I’m no expert, but I can tell a porpoise, which is small and black and blunt, from a dolphin, which is long and grey and shapely. Porpoises look like killer whales without the badger stripes and somehow kindlier. The porpoise’s skin is tough as a block of toffee, tattered in places and lacerated all over by rocks and junk, by crow pecks and rat’s incisors. There’s a gash gaping from the end of its mouth, splitting its cheek. You swallow a few mouthfuls of tail meat before I tug you off and shoo you on along the beach.
At the st
rand’s end, I look back to the place where I know the beached porpoise is lying. It looks from here like just another old car tyre amongst the kelp. Where do all the tyres come from? Is the seabed covered in sunken cars? Are the eels nibbling their rust? Nibbling, nibbling, nibbling until a tyre is unfastened and bobs to the surface. Another and another. But now a herring gull rises from the tyres and I can see it’s holding a chunk of rosy carrion in its brilliant orange beak.
Before we go back to the car, follow me up the hill at the back of the beach, to the peak of the barley field beyond the refinery, to the exact point at which, together, we first saw Tawny Bay, do you remember? Now the field is striated brown, mottled by the green of stubborn shepherd’s purse. Do you remember how I taught you to play football? Do you remember the day the lion-maned collie appeared through the mist? From here on the hill, Tawny Bay is our beach again. Regardless of hue or surface, regardless of all the trouble you caused here, it’s ours.
I wait all morning for you to sick up the porpoise. I worry my finger caps with especial fervour. I chump them into bloody ribbons. But you don’t.