by Sara Baume
And so, I bend onto my knees and place the plank down and lay out the pillowcase on top. I rope it all together with seaweed, meticulously. I knot the kelp and fasten the eelgrass into bows. You have come back to me now; you are watching.
And so, I let loose my feathery plait and shake my matted hair out. I peel my clothes from my hideous body, layer by filthy layer until I’m standing amongst the sand hoppers and flies in nothing but my yellowed Y-fronts and laddered vest. A slight breeze ruffles the coiled hair on my chest, my back, my calves, my forearms. Look, an in-grown toenail, oozing pus. You, confused, lick the pus and wag your tail. I am horrible. I know I am horrible. Still faithfully you follow me to the water’s edge. Neatly you seat yourself between the shells and pebbles. Patiently you wait, as I wade into the freezing sea. Towing, towing, towing my father on his doorbox.
I can feel the ripples sluicing my marinade of grime away. I remember how much I wanted to have a shower when I was back inside my father’s house, my house. But by the time I’d done all the other things, I couldn’t bear to wait while the water heated, to listen to the pipes cricking out their bones, speaking to me again after such a long silence. The kelp caresses my ankles. Now my thighs, now my stomach. Now my chest, now my chin. It’s joy-sapping, spirit-rotting, chilblain-inducing, nose-dripping, eye-stinging, teeth-aching cold cold cold, but the old man bobs behind me on his old boat, impervious.
Now I need to tell you something. I’d like to lift my feet and splash around and show you a couple of strokes, but I don’t know how to swim. That’s why I’ve stopped here with the water tickling my beard, why I’ve turned around and am staring stupidly back to shore. I can see the brown fields and bare trees and farmhouses, pale plumes spouting from their chimneys. And the smudge-headed gulls circling the bay, godwits and redshanks, lapwings, oystercatchers. Maybe I can even see a lugworm’s extrusion of black sand, rising slowly, lapsing back again. I can see you, the whole of my family, and I wonder why you don’t make a break for the hills. Now you must realise you’d make it, that I couldn’t catch you. Still you’re sitting at the water’s edge; still you’re waiting for me.
Now I push the doorbox as hard as I can, hard enough for the backwash to splash in my eyes, and once I am able to open them again, I see he is drifting out alone now. The current is taking my father, drawing him away to the place where the shorebirds disappear at night-time and high tide, to the great floating continent called Out To Sea.
Now I begin to wade back. The water drops from chin to chest to stomach to thighs to ankles, and out again. Now we know. Now we’ve retrieved the irretrievable days, and can begin again.
Happy Christmas, One Eye.
The flames shiver and cough for several moments before they sink and die.
Inside my clothes, I’m sopping. Wet as a fish and stippled with goose-bumps like pointed scales from crown to soles, my face the colour of dog violet and tufted vetch. The gas has run out; the last canister is empty. I tip it upside-down and shake but the mellifluous blue refuses to be resuscitated. I check my tobacco pouch even though I know, of course I know. I sit down in the driver’s seat. I stare at the pale pools of my palms upturned and laid open on my knees, the white of elder, of angelica. I flinch my fingers, uselessly. I drip. Now you jump from the gravel, land square in my lap and squash my hands. There’s something in the feel of fur against goose-bumps that reminds me of a hamster I held, my Russian Dwarf birthday hamster, a half-century ago, the frail brush and bob and small warmth of him. But my hamster was only the size of a kiwi fruit while you are monumental and unskittery. You are stalwart and you are solemn. You are safety and you are home. But your warmth is not enough, I’m sorry.
‘Sit back,’ I tell you, ‘sit.’
Now the only way to sooth the cold is to drive around with the heater switched to full blast, the fan whirring, the engine eddying hot air through the vents. Just when I need the small comfort of my addictions the most, my fingers fail me. They’re too numb for rolling a smoke, too numb for picking my hangnails. They blunder over the simplest of movements. It takes longer than it should to get my seatbelt buckled, my key in the ignition. The car hasn’t shifted a yard in days, its greasy innards are cold as a box of fish fingers. I don’t expect it to start, but with the first try the engine putters uneasily to life. Now you raise your front paws to the top of the seat and press your nose against the rear windscreen. Now you look back at the beach as we leave. You watch as Tawny Bay shrinks to the size of a photograph on a postcard, a picture on a stamp, and now gone.
Now we’re driving, driving, driving. Up, down, this way and that around a succession of familiar and unfamiliar and almost familiar back roads. We’re passing fields of winter wheat and hawthorns with their trunks bent to perfect right angles against the sea gales. We’re passing waterlogged litter, charred gorse, pine copses, gyrating turbines, bales sealed into their black macs and stacked. We’re swerving around dazed rabbits and bouncing through cavernous potholes.
I touch the radio’s dial to test the airwaves. I twiddle. A voice shouts through the fizz. GLORY it shouts, GLORY GLORY GLORY. Now the voice goes dead and the fizz returns.
Do you see how I’m drawing us around in a circle? Now we’re approaching the village again. See the bare branches of the cherry trees. The houses with people inside and the shops with goods inside and the church with all its chalky gods inside, and everything and everybody remaining inside, because it’s Christmas, of course, and there’s nowhere to go. See the bird walk, the information board, the noble fir in all its hollow frippery. See the takeaway, the chip shop. The pub, the other pub. The grocers and the hairdressing salon, all shut. See the community we were insidiously hounded from. See how community is only a good thing when you’re a part of it.
Now the car parks itself in front of the terrace, two wheels abutting the footpath. I clatter the keys to the salmon pink house from the glove compartment. I have to leave you here this time but I’ll be fast as a flash, I promise.
‘Back in a minute,’ I tell you.
Inside, I smell it. The smell I could never smell before. Black mould, cigarette smoke, garlic, hand-wash, coffee, damp dust, sweaty slippers and my own heinous breath altogether compounded into the unnameable stench of home. Now I remember to have a quick look to see if there’s any tobacco still lying around. I rifle the table junk, the kitchen drawers. At the very back of a cupboard I find some soggy cigarette papers in a packet torn away to nothing. Each tear is the perfect shape of a tiny rectangle, and so this is where my father got his roaches from, of course. He robbed it from the cigarette paper packets all along. Such a tiny stupid mystery, solved.
I don’t have any petrol or paraffin or even alcohol. I scatter a box of firelighters across the living room floor. I find a can of Easy Oil and spray it onto the rocking chair, the coffee table, the carpet. I light a match. I throw the match.
I run.
As we drive from my father’s house, my house, I close my eyes. I picture the overloaded coat hooks, the unidentifiable stains on the kitchen lino, the rocking chair, the draught snake, the mouldy marmalade. I know I should be looking at the road, but it’s okay, the car won’t let us swerve off course. It knows the way.
Now I picture it all in yellow and pink flames. From the creaky floorboards to the wormy books and up through the un-insulated ceiling to the slanting slates. I picture the moss hogs erupting in tiny flashes, now leaping and scampering from rooftop to rooftop, across all the buildings of the village, spreading fire in their wake. I picture them surfing the wind through the forest, now pausing a moment to gobble the banana skin, now descending upon the refinery. I picture holocaust. I see gigantic, volcanic, apocalyptic fireworks. And they are lighting up the sky and sea of the bay as though it were the brightest day in summer.
Up up up we drive. To the top of refinery hill. Here we stop. Here we climb from the car to look back down upon the village. Now we see how all the sky high tufts of lost grass remain unburnt, unburning. N
ow we see that the fire hasn’t caught, that the house has already quenched it. And I picture my father still in there, still smoking and shuffling across the rag rugs. The bathroom beads softly clacking, the rainbows caressing his face. He is searching for his slippers, stamping out fires in his socks as he goes.
Didn’t the village used to hum? Now the hum is a grumble, can you hear it too? We get back in the car and I recommence driving. What else can I do?
The village is already behind us. It’s already nothing but a huddle of pastel and beige squares in the rearview mirror.
Now it seems like such a sad place. See how sad it is.
Half a century ago, I closed my fist around my hamster, my first and only birthday present, my Russian Dwarf, and squeezed it to death. I only did it because I thought I couldn’t. If I’d thought I could I would never have squeezed. Then I held him in my palm and felt the frail bob stilled and the small warmth fading and the brush of his fur freshly gummed with blood. I hadn’t known that a life could be ended so effortlessly, so ingloriously.
We cover a final lap of familiar back road. Now down a boreen so narrow and neglected both sides of the car are clawed by furze and a strip of overlong groundsel tiddles our car belly. The boreen ends with a ghost of a track, a cliff drop, a trawlerman’s blue rope. Do you remember? The springy grass and silverweed, the abandoned burrows. The scabious and chamomile and campion are all missing now, the ladybirds and hoverflies. The high tide means our pebble beach, the flat rock we used as a picnic table, are underwater. Now here’s the slope where we’d leave the car; it seems suddenly steeper. I park with our headlamps pointing to the sea and nothing but gorse to break the car’s fall, our fall. If it was to fall, if we were to fall. I wrench the handbrake into place.
The tide is high, the gas is gone, my tobacco. Soon the kibble will be gone too. All it would take is some slight fault of the handbrake. Not even a press, but a tweak, just a tweak. It’s a cold day; is it still Christmas? I can’t remember. There are rocks beneath the surface, below the headlamps. I can’t see them, but I know they’re there. I know by the way the waves are broiling. Whereas far out, they are simply swelling and rolling, failing to break. It’s a sad place, but then I seem to find most places sad, and maybe it’s me who’s sad and not the places after all. Maybe there’s nowhere I can go, and no point in going.
Now look in the rearview mirror and see the cows and the sandpits and the holiday cottages, deserted now. See all the licensed earth in its hundred different shades of brown. Now look through the windscreen and see the floating lighthouse pulsing red, the empty water. I’ve never been able to figure out exactly how much you can see through your lonely peephole. Does it affect distance, depth, perspective? I know I don’t need to list everything we pass like I do. I know I don’t need to talk to you like this. I know it’s nonsense, it’s all nonsense. But now I have to tell you something, and this time it’s important, okay? This time you have to listen. You have to understand.
I’m no spinnerman. Remember the spinnerman? How he continuously began again for nothing? Well I’m no spinnerman. And remember the burrowhole in the forest that I almost followed you down? Well now I wonder why I drew back instead of pushing on and allowing the bank to cave in and extort the air from my lungs and be done with it. But that wouldn’t have been right, because you don’t belong to me, One Eye. You don’t belong to me and I was wrong to ever treat you like you do. You belong to the inveigling hills, to the fields and ditches untrammelled, to the holes in the forest, the horizon line, the badgers. The seasons don’t belong to me and the sea doesn’t belong to me and the sky doesn’t belong to me. All I own is my father’s house, the saddest place in our whole small world. And the warden will return in time, the old man’s bones will be sloshed back to shore and identified, and even if I did change, I’d only change back again. And so.
Do you think if I take the handbrake off, the car will roll us home to the salmon pink house, grudgingly yet irresistibly, like I always said it would? There’s a free bird of fear inside my chest but beneath its wings my organs are putrefying, bit by bit by bit. There’s a hunk of grassy rock a little way out. A tiny island upon which ten, fifteen, twenty cormorants are gathered. Now here’s a lobster buoy and a plastic bottle coasting past. Now a blue gallon drum with a common gull perched on top. I’m sorry, I’m doing it again. I’m listing every last thing as though you can’t see at all, as though I am the eye you lost.
‘See for yourself,’ I tell you, ‘see.’
My hand is on the handbrake, my lamps are to the water. And now you must turn around from the shore. Now you must listen to the forests and the fields.
You are the only thing, One Eye. You are the only.
Now listen. Can you hear it? The badgers are calling you.
I close my eyes and our life is a film and we are rolling, rolling, rolling.
The car parks in its space outside the terrace with two wheels abutting the footpath, and inside I tidy up the mess of firelighters and Easy Oil and out again we go along the bird walk and laid on the mud at the foot of the shore wall we find the pillowcase of bones on its doorbox chariot and I carry it down our laneway and up the stepladder and into the roof. I shut up and lock the shut-up-and-locked room, realign the snake.
Now in the kitchen I place the sausage pan on its hob and you sit at my feet and wait as I fry. And you are a good boy and so I tell you.
‘Good boy,’ I tell you. ‘Good.’
EPILOGUE
There is a tiny figure, right on the cliffslope’s edge, like a sock puppet to the theatre of the open sea.
His shoulders are bunched and his head is lowered. There’s a trail of smashed briars and gorse running across the slope in a straight line, from the spot where the tiny figure is hunching, into the water. And he is looking down as though he is waiting for something to rise from there.
The tide is high.
He can see a gallon drum, a plastic bottle. He can see a lobster buoy nodding in time with the waves, tussling against its anchoring pot. But he can’t see a fleet of by-the-wind sailors which has just been disbanded by a mighty disturbance. Now they are struggling to regroup, and he cannot see because they are too small, too blue, too scattered. And he can’t see the conger eels several feet below the surface either. Unseen they are nibbling, nibbling, nibbling.
Now he turns his head to look to the fields. He stares at the telegraph poles and firs and hedges, as though he is learning the horizon off by heart, as though he is listening very carefully.
Now a bird scaring machine fires its thunder clap into the sky. And all the crows and gulls and starlings, all the cormorants out on cormorant island ascend flapping and soaring in perfect synchronicity. And the tiny figure on the cliffslope’s edge ceases his waiting and springs to his paws and sets off at a sprint.
He is running, running, running.
He is One Eye.
He is on his way.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Thank you Thomas Morris: without your bizarre encouragement, constructive criticism and completely unrewarded efforts on its behalf, this would certainly never have become a book.
Thank you Sarah Davis-Goff and Lisa Coen: your kindness, conviction and commitment have continually confounded my expectations of the publishing industry.
Thank you David Baume: for condoning my ludicrous career path, and Mark Beatty: for all the elegiac observations with which you enhance my days.
Thank you Deborah Baume: if I ever manage to achieve anything good in life, it will be because of you.
And thank you Wink, of course, wherever the fuck you came from, for all the trouble you cause me, still and all, I’m glad you washed up here.
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William Heinemann
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William Heinemann is part of the Penguin Random House group of companies whose addresses can be found at global.penguinrandomhouse.com.
Copyright © Sara Baume 2015
Sara Baume has asserted her right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
This is a work of fiction. Names and characters are the product of the author’s imagination and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
First published by William Heinemann in 2015
(First published in the Republic of Ireland by Tramp Press in 2015)
www.randomhouse.co.uk
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN 9780099592747