by Sara Baume
The supplies are running low.
How many days spent here now? Several, more? But perhaps the overhang will surrender before the food runs out. Yesterday I watched from the beach as a hunk of dead grass and mud broke away from the cliff’s edge beneath the car park, tumbled down and shattered against the kelp. Today I move the car to the spot directly above the missing hunk. I stand on the gravel and jump about and stamp my feet. But nothing happens, and I know I look ridiculous, and I wonder if I really mean it.
We haven’t a single gingernut left, I’m sorry. I’ve only ever kept enough food in the car for a couple of days, and now we’re down to six tins of spaghetti hoops, three sachets of oxtail soup and a bag of crinkly royal galas. I’m trying to ration now. To eke out what’s left for as long as possible, so as not to have to make a decision about what happens next. But a full stomach is a kind of sanctuary, remember? And so my hunger makes me feel less safe; it tinges my attempts at decision with fear. There are always the sun tomatoes. I hear the jar moving beneath the seat, thunking against the passenger door. And there’s no need to fix me with your greedy stare. There’s a bumper sack of kibble in the boot. The place where my money tin is stashed, remember? Beef rind flavour with added animal derivatives and minimum ash. It’s been there for weeks, in case of emergency, a situation just such as this.
The situation is that I can’t bring myself to return to the village and walk into the grocers. To pick out purchases and place them on the counter in front of the till. I just can’t. If it isn’t the bald-headed, clean-shaven grocer, it’ll be the girl with the name tag, APRIL. And she’ll recognise me, they’ll all recognise me, and what do we do then? I know there are other villages and other shops, I know. But I just don’t think I can drive off anywhere, anywhere at all. I don’t think I can tear myself from the cocoon of the car on the undercut cliff. Now this concrete car park is my only choice of safe space, of sanctuary, and I’m sorry, I just can’t.
And anyway, I don’t have any money left. My mixum-gatherum is spent. My tin’s empty as the day we shared its sardines out. Even if I had the courage to go back to the post office, the postmaster will only tell me my account’s cleared, that there’s some problem with my social security card. Then his voice will go flat and leaden, and to dismiss the uneasy silence he’ll say things about the weather, about the cold, and I’ll reply Sure you never know from one minute to the next what’s coming even though it isn’t true, I did know. For fifty-seven years, I knew. And it’s only now that I don’t. It’s only since you.
Here is our latest aerial seat, the concrete car park on the crumbling cliff’s edge. Ever uprooted and apart, remember?
Sometimes people come to Tawny Bay in tracksuits and try to jog a length along the strand. We watch them slip across a couple of yards of kelp before they give up, return to their cars. Now we’ve adjusted to the stink and learned to navigate our respective ways through the slithery wasteland I’m glad of the kelp, of its deterrence. We lap Tawny Bay every time the tide’s low, the beach deserted. I pitch and clump and flail, you gallop and trot. Together we play graceless forms of football. I try to teach you how to chase the gulls, the pipits and knots.
‘GO ON GETTUM!’ I holler, ‘YOU CAN FLY, ONEEYE! FLY!’
But you’ve always been a smarter animal than I, and you know you can’t.
Now the sea throws me every kind of junk to rifle. A new arrangement every tide, a ceaselessly replenished stock. The biggest items are dropped at the very back of the beach along the seam of clay at the cliff’s base, while the lightest and grittiest keep close to the waves. Here are car tyres, a broken buggy, a trawlerman’s waterproof, a knitting needle, pinecones, my pinecones. Now here are cigarette butts, fragments of anemone shell and individual pieces of styrofoam packaging. Some of the pieces are shaped like an ‘S’ and some of the pieces are shaped like a ‘Y’ and always I find myself looking around in search of a ‘K’. I know it’s daft, but still, I’d like to be able to spell SKY.
It throws you gifts as well, the sea. You find a dead guillemot and carry it around for hours like a possessive child with a favourite toy, like me and Mr Buddy way back when. I watch as you finally find your way through its feathers and yank the white meat from its skimpy breast. Now here’s a rectangle of water-worn plywood. See how it bears a pattern of screw holes, the ghost of a handle. So it didn’t sink, all but its bow, into the mud. See here, it’s a piece of my father’s doorbox, I’m certain.
There’s an old creel at the near end of the strand and it makes a good chair, a place for me to sit after you’ve tired me out. I can’t recline exactly, but I can perch. I perch and watch the high, slow rollers. And I watch the sky. I see the weather coming.
When I was a boy I used to be able to stand in the shallows and jump the waves for hours without growing bored, without being bothered by the sensationlessness of my frozen feet. Now I’m only fit for the creel, for chain-smoking, for cloud spotting, for listening. The sound of Tawny Bay is a sonorous slopping of water against rock. And the squeeing of the gulls. And sometimes the clank and whirr of a trawler that seems nearby but is actually distant.
I bring my plank of drifted doorbox back to the car. I show it to my father as though his eye sockets are somehow able to see through their fabric shroud.
There isn’t any radio reception in the car park on the cliff. I twiddle the dial so slow it barely moves but all I can find is white noise and fizz, maddening fizz. Every now and again, I catch a stray airwave. A stranger’s voice shouts a single word through the static like an elapsed mayday. ASSOCIATE they shout, UPSKILL, INORDINATE.
At night, I don’t twiddle. I like to hear the waves rush and burst. I like to feel the spew against my windscreen, even though, of course, I cannot feel it through the glass and the glass can’t feel at all. It makes sleep seem like a kind of swimming. Like my limbs are loose and weightless, treading water. On choppy nights, I fidget in time with the sea. But on calm nights, I sleep so deep I crush my hands and wrists inside some larger cleft of my body and wake to find them bloodless, numb. It makes me afraid the night will come when I crush you instead. Your stalky bones will crumble, your tender lungs collapse, and I will not wake. I will continue to swim, until it’s over.
Still, sometimes I think that I will burn my father’s house, which isn’t my father’s house any more and I shouldn’t keep calling it that. But I always change my mind. I am continuously changing my mind, talking myself out of action, as I’ve done all my life. Now silence and sleeplessness have minced my resolve. And I see how I was stupid to believe that anyone will ever force their way inside. The old man is dead and it’s my house now. Even if people knew for sure that he was dead and I was never coming back, still they’d wait for some distant relative to claim it in my place. To nail a FOR SALE sign between hanging baskets. It’s always seemed to me like people will choose to wait wherever waiting is an option. Until walls fall down unaided. Until every species is extinct and all the ice caps have melted. Or at least, this is what I want to believe, and not the opposite, which is what I’m afraid of. I’m afraid that they are coming for us.
For two years now, the hairdresser hasn’t paid a snip of rent, I’ve only just realised that. She used to post it through the letterbox on the first working day of every month in an envelope that smelled like sweet glue and hand cream. But for the last two years, not a snip. And why would she bother, when the landlord’s disappeared and there’s only his idiot son who won’t notice anyway? And I didn’t notice, did I? So maybe I’m everybody’s idiot after all.
How long? How long since we parked here? You look up from the passenger seat, you tilt your head. I’m sorry for asking, over and over and over. I know you don’t know, you never knew. I know enough days have passed that the date is irretrievable now. My tobacco is gone too, gone with the date. I know well the pouch is immaculately empty still I persist to check and check and check in case some fine strands of twiggish brown might have miraculously grown back
. The mineral water’s almost gone and I’m saving the gallon drums for drinking. You drink the grey stream that runs from fields to sea, collecting rain and agricultural effluent as it goes. I tell you not to, still you drink. I watch for signs that you’ve been poisoned, for shakes and faints and fever. But you’re always fine, invincible. You cast your thousand-mile stare across the open water. You grunt. I give you one of my father’s tibias and you gnaw it with relish.
‘Good boy,’ I tell you.
We’re down to the kibble. You seem to like it well enough, but it’s drab and dusty to my taste buds. I can’t detect any whisper of beef and I can’t fathom where on a cow its rind is located.
Two black specks on the furthest rocks at lowest tide become people as the sea rises and the waves drive them in. Are they coming for us? But closer still, they become Chinamen in waterproofs carrying white coal sacks. Two apiece, one slung over each shoulder. The sacks are dripping. The Chinamen’s backs are bent against the weight and their faces are scrunched against the rain. They’re wearing green waders held up by suspenders. The rubber trousers reach up to their nipples, dwarfing the Chinamen, diminishing them to sad, windswept circus clowns. But they are just cockle pickers.
See the cockle pickers, how they stagger.
This is the first night there’s been another car parked after last light. It’s at the furthest end but it’s pointing straight at us instead of out toward the harbour like visiting cars normally do, and I wonder has it come for us.
I saw the stranger car arrive and point this way, but I haven’t seen any car people get out and go to walk along the strand. For a while I continued what I was doing. I was trying to put Mr Buddy back together again. But I don’t have any needle or thread and so it’s a pointless, frustrating task. Now it’s flossy dark, the stage of dusk at which every visible thing disintegrates. The stranger car’s headlights are switched off, the dashboard unlighted. There’s no trace of a face or faces eerily illuminated from below. I’m leaving our lights off too, and I can’t have the gas cooker spreading its blue, not tonight. I’m sorry. I can’t have it illuming my father’s skeleton through the fake white flowers, nor Mr Buddy’s glass eyes through the plastic of his bag. I know it’s cold, but we mustn’t be seen by the person or persons inside the stranger car. I can’t give up so easily, not now.
You look spooked. It’s in the way you’re holding yourself: head dropped and shoulders raised, eye narrowed, neck shuttling at every crackle and creak. Are you spooked because there’s something spooky out there or are you feeding off my own incompressible uneasiness, my stupid fears? I cannot tell. Now you clamber into my lap and fidget. I lay my big hands over you. I stroke your head and neck and back until your muscles soften and your body stills.
‘Sleep,’ I tell you, ‘it’s okay. Sleep.’
Now I force myself to stop watching the stranger car which is watching us with its headlamp eyes and number-plate grin, its car face. I fix my attention on the harbour instead. Beyond the disintegrating forms, the sea’s a great empty space between land masses and even the opposite landmass is distinguishable only by scattered lights, by ten hundred tiny shining points. Each point is a car or a streetlamp, the window of a house or prison or hospital or pub. Each one stands for a story of continuing life and each life is continuing to be eaten away by the onerous effort of living itself, remember? It’s marvellous, yet strangely distressing. The sound of the sea is heightened by night, but its spectacle is blotted into an abyss. Now a fin breaches. See the fin. Already it’s gone again, but it was a dorsal fin, exquisitely undrooped.
I need a smoke. How desperately I need a smoke.
You fall asleep. I try, but can’t. My attention segues from the harbour to the luminous hands of the clock face on the dash. Sometimes they catch up with each other and fuse into one. It’s halfway between ten and quarter past twelve by the time the stranger car lights up and makes a careful U-turn. As it pulls back onto the road with its indicator blinking, I catch sight of two dishevelled lovers side by side in the front seats. They’re so intent on one another, they don’t even glance in our direction.
You wake for just a second, now fall back to sleep. And again I try, and again I can’t. I listen to the waves crash and spit, playing timpani on the windscreen. The seas are high tonight, higher than all the nights passed since we arrived, so it seems. Now the clear sky’s choking up with rain clouds. They take the moon out, now begin to shed. See how the drops are dense and drowsy, as close as rain can come to snow. It’s half past two exactly, and still I cannot sleep.
See there behind the shedding rain clouds, there are moon oceans and moon mountains and lakes full of moon water. Remember? Or is there even water on the moon? I’m not so sure any more.
They come in the morning.
It’s first light, and I’m still awake. The rain’s stopped and the wind’s snuffed. I sit up in the driver’s seat and rub out a circle of condensation with my fist, now I melt the frost with my breath. Through the windscreen I see how the night’s high seas have scoured the beach clean. Now the deepest water beyond the rocks is slack as a city puddle. The kelp fronds and junk are gone, from the trawlerman’s oilcloth to the creel chair, even the pinecones. The tide’s on its way out again, the sand inching back into sight, the smooth banks and squat peaks, the depressions. Up on the cliff, the grass has crystallised and the heliotrope is stiff as a stick. But there’s no trace of snow, and I wonder if it snowed at all, or if I just wanted snow, and imagined it.
I get out. I fill the saucepan with a frozen puddle, smash it up a bit. I fetch the gas. Now I notice we’re down to the last canister. I set it burning at its lowest setting, roaring mellifluously through the prick-holes of its nozzle. I watch as the ice melts into drinking water, and I wonder why, why I’m trying so hard to keep going.
You’re awake, stretching effusively and yawning with such particular inflection it almost sounds like a human word, like ark or arm or Arles. Now that it’s morning you aren’t spooked any more. I can tell from the tilt of your ears, the twitch of your maggot nose. Look here through the windscreen, see how the beach has been restored to us. But you look into your food bowl instead, and it’s kibble for breakfast again, I’m sorry.
They come as you’re licking up the last of the kibble juice. They come in family-sized cars with chocolate labradoodles, fleece-lined ski jackets and two or three apple-cheeked children apiece. They park slipshod all over the gravel. Now they emerge and fall into groups. They hug, jig on the spot, cup their palms over their mouths and puff. They unpack sports bags and wicker baskets, thermos flasks and portable cup sets. Now they point their keys and push buttons which make their cars blip and wink on command.
They don’t seem to notice us. They descend to the beach. Together we peep out of my condensation porthole. Who are these people and what are they doing down there on the strand, so many and so early in the morning? They’re wrapping themselves in tent-towels and wiggling out of their winter clothes. Trousers, knickers, skirts and socks are lying like laundry on the new sand. And now the people are shrugging off their towels to expose bathing costumes, stripy trunks and sleeveless wetsuits. Of course, that’s what it is, the Christmas swim. They haven’t come for us after all, it just happens to be Christmas.
Our porthole’s beginning to re-fog as the swimmers altogether advance into the freezing sea. We hear them whoop and cheer as the small swell shatters against their milky legs. We watch as they dip down and dabble a few weakly strokes between the seaweed and the styrofoam letters. Now they’re dashing back to shore in a blur of pinkened cheeks and purpled kneecaps. Already they’re climbing back under their tent towels. We must look away while they’re redressing. I can see you’re still peeking, look away. The swimmers loiter and josh on the beach. They take out baby bottles of brandy and wrap their fingers around plastic cups and gingerly sip. Now they’re drifting back up to the gravelled rectangle. You begin to hop about and bark but I shush you. Already it’s over, and w
e must sit still again. We can’t be spotted by such cheerful strangers. We mustn’t dare to mar their joy with our shabby faces, our carload of stolen nests, dead bears and decomposed fathers on such a day.
Carload by carload, family by family, the swimmers leave. Now the hands of the dashboard clock are fused erect at midday, and the car park on the undercut cliff is empty again.
You’re keening to be let loose. I open the driver’s door just a chink and you’re over me and out before I’ve fastened the leash. I open my mouth to call you back, but there’s no point, it’s dinner-time, Christmas day. I picture the swimmers beside their stoves, basting and peeling and stirring. No one will come, not now. And so, I tuck the plank under my elbow and sling the pillowcase over my shoulder. You’re dancing the gravel, tracking the departed labradoodles, pissing where they pissed. Now you hurry down the cliffslope and I trip behind.
The new sand is printed with paws and feet and scored by finger-written names, lovehearts and smiley faces. There are freshly dug holes and scuff marks and the dents left by children who pressed their heels into the sand and spun around to make a perfect circle the perfect length of their perfect foot. Even though the strand is swept clear, I can still see the porpoise, now pushed against the clay. See how the Christmas swimmers’ children have sunk a rock into its skull. The jaw bone’s flittered, the up-facing eye socket buried beneath the weapon stone. A tablespoon measure of the porpoise’s teeth have been bashed free and lie sprinkled about the swept sand like chrome confetti. But you don’t see, you’re far ahead of me now, almost at the strand’s end. You’re skirting the dunes, keeping always to the edges of things, like a sewer rat. You’re pointing your nose to the cliff, susceptible always to the inveigling hills and forests from which you came. I follow you. I reach the end and look back. I’m checking the gravel for cars. I’m scanning the beach for new arrivals. But there’s nothing and no one back along the length of Tawny Bay. There is only us, and so.