A Line Made by Walking

by Sara Baume

  I knock the mud from my boots against the doorstep, lever them off with the mahogany shoehorn. I never used a shoehorn before I came here; I never needed one. But nowadays I deliberately leave my boots half-laced so I have no choice but to ram the tiny paddle down to shovel up my heel. It’s a way of nodding to her customs, of recreating the rituals of her day. I find my grandmother in the shoehorn, and again, as I wash my hands, I find her in the kitchen windowsill curios. In a row above the draining board, there’s a weathered wood St Joseph, a plastic flamenco dancer, a three-legged camel, a panda-bear-shaped pencil sharpener, an oblong pebble painted with the features of a mouse and each one of these silently onlooking objects are immeasurably precious to me, because my grandmother can be found in them.

  When the house finally went on the market, Annika the auctioneer told my mother and her sisters that it would stand a better chance of selling if it wasn’t so cluttered with the belongings of the former inhabitant. ‘It ought to look as much as possible like a show house,’ Annika said. The dead woman’s worn furniture and weird trinkets will only freak out potentially interested parties, she didn’t say, though this is what she meant. Because people don’t want homes; they want show houses—only by means of a show house can they be distracted from the generalised going-nowhereness of their perfectly pointless lives.

  Piece by piece, my mother and her sisters catalogued the bungalow’s contents according to value, necessity and sentiment. Six months after my grandmother died, Mum emailed me an inventory of the objects that still remained. Let me know if there’s anything you want, it read, and I got so angry about that message. Because I wanted everything, from the chaise longue to the velvet curtains, but my life wasn’t large enough. At the time, I didn’t have a car or a bedsit. I was renting a box-room in a shared house in the city with barely enough space for the things I already owned. By the time I arrived to stay, the bungalow was a neatly looted version of its former self. All that was left of the inventory were the things that everybody else in the family had unanimously rejected.

  My aunts didn’t want the windowsill curios; nor did my mother. She dug a shallow hole beneath the garden hedge and buried them. In spite of my substantial capacity for strangeness, this still strikes me as bizarre. My mother couldn’t explain it. ‘I just didn’t want to throw them away,’ she said, and yet, instead of keeping St Joseph and his flamenco wife and their personal menagerie, she treated them as if they were the dead creatures my sister and I used to come upon when playing in the garden. As children, we buried ladybirds and bees and beetles. The shrews our cats laid out on the doormat, the birds that plunged from their nests or dashed themselves against the windowpanes. Only the wasps which drowned in our jam traps were deprived of a dignified disposal.

  I asked my mother what part of the hedge she’d buried the curios under, then I dug them up and rinsed the mud off and stood them one by one back along the sill above the draining board, and they leaked tiny brown pools which have since dried into tiny brown rings of sediment.

  I cannot stand the thought of prospectively interested parties coming here and picturing a new life for themselves. Here is where my grandmother’s life ended, and mine is ending still. I will not allow Annika the auctioneer to exorcise us.

  But it’s been almost a year now, and she hasn’t scheduled a single viewing since the FOR SALE sign was nailed to its post and planted in the rose bed beside the cattle grid.

  ‘It’s because of the turbine,’ my mother said: ‘people don’t like the idea of living so close to one.’

  This bungalow sits on the brow of a yawning valley. To the rear there stands a solitary wind turbine. Sleek, white, monumental. It has always seemed to me more like a thing that had been shot down from space than raised up from the earth.

  ‘I’ve heard about that,’ I said, ‘Wind Turbine Syndrome. People think the noise and shadow-flicker keep them up at night, make them sick. But they’re only suffering from it because they believe they are.’ And then my mother laughed. ‘Sure how many days of the year do we have enough sun to make shadows anyway?’

  My grandmother got on just fine with her two-hundred-foot neighbour; she admired its immensity.

  With or without the turbine, it’s no surprise the bungalow is unappealing to house hunters. The view of mountains comes and goes depending on the weather, the view of valley is filled with melancholy cows. The garden is terrifically overgrown, and everything indoors has fallen into disrepair. The avocado-coloured bathroom has a soggy carpet where lino ought to be. The water comes out of the taps in a series of tiny explosions. Each electric hob takes a full ten minutes to heat up and glows disconcertingly orange as soon as it has. One in three plug sockets are defunct and all the TV channels are tinged green no matter how many times I tweak the aerial. ‘The whole house reeks of dog,’ my father says, and though I cannot smell it, I suspect it smells like dog to people who do not like dogs.

  So little happens, here in the bungalow on turbine hill, that however little the thing that happens, it throws me off kilter. Even though it’s evening now and I’m usually at my best in the evenings, because of the robin I know it will be hard to realign what remains of the day. I go to the sun room where my laptop is. I press the power button and wait for the screen to ignite. My laptop has spongy plastic stars stuck to the lid. As it boots up, it makes a sound like the keyboard is chewing cotton wool.

  Works about Wind, I test myself: Erik Wesselo, Düffels Möll, 1997. The artist is strapped to the blade of a traditional windmill and spun for several minutes, a performance. I look it up on YouTube. The camera follows Wesselo’s rise and drop and rise and drop and rise and drop. Yet again, I think, flight and fall.

  The sun room is at the rear of the bungalow, facing south. I spend most of my time in between its slimy panes, and I find more of my grandmother here in the sun room where she lived than in the bedroom where she died. I find her in the mould-speckled sofa, the Formica tabletop, the red geranium, the barometer, the owl-shaped paperweight, the upholstered chair. Some people call these rooms ‘conservatories’, but this one isn’t a conservatory, it’s a sun room, definitely.

  I keep the branch pressed into the soil of the red geranium’s pot. The branch broken from the unidentified tree which uprooted itself on the day she died. It looms over my keyboard, casts its shadow across my screen. What sort of tree was it? Because the branch will never come into leaf again, I cannot tell.

  I plug my camera into my laptop and download the photos I took today. My robin looks angry, much angrier in reproduction than it appeared in life. Perhaps the Native Americans are right; perhaps the camera stole its spirit. I open my robin in Photoshop. I select Brightness/Contrast. I restore the vibrancy lost along with its spirit.

  I check my emails: no emails. I knock a knuckle against the barometer beside me on the table. The needle doesn’t move. I shut my laptop down and stand up. My phone doesn’t ring and the doorbell doesn’t either and I begin to wonder whether I am still alive.

  I go to the back step and see the mud I knocked off my boots a little while ago. It’s wet and soft and fresh, and so I know that I must exist after all—that I must still be here.

  Works about Being, I test myself: On Kawara, beginning 1966. A series of paintings showing nothing but the date upon which they were made. He also sent missives to acquaintances and friends which simply read: I AM STILL ALIVE, followed by his signature.

  For two months after my grandmother died, her morbidly obese and chronically arthritic golden retriever continued to live in the bungalow alone; this is the reason for the dog smell. He was called Joe, and my grandmother had owned him since he was a puppy. She was all he knew and he worshipped her and refused to be removed from the house in which they’d lived together for twelve years. During the wake, he lay in the corridor outside her bedroom, and once it was over and the door opened again, he lay on the floor in the exact spot where he’d last seen my grandmother.

  My mother wanted, and tried, to
bring Joe home with her. She managed to drag him as far as the driveway but then he cowered and whimpered and wouldn’t climb into the car. He was too fat and arthritic to lift; my mother conceded defeat. Joe remained in the bungalow alone and the old man who lives halfway down the hill called in every day to check on him. Joe would take his medication and eat his meals and amble around the garden to cock and squat, then he’d return to his spot on the floor in her bedroom.

  One day, he didn’t get up when the old man came. His heart had stopped. A soft, pink clock nobody remembered to wind. I go to my grandmother’s bedroom and lie down in the place where her hospice bed used to be, on the patch where the dog died. I lay my cheek against the floor. I smell the carpet.

  I remember: this is how it started.

  It started with the smelling of carpet.

  The carpet it started with covered the floor of my bedsit in the city, the place where I lived before I stayed in my parents’ house for a week, before I came here. For my first several months in that bedsit, I barely noticed the floor. Then one evening, I lay down on it, and in the weeks that followed, barely an evening went by that I didn’t resort to the same position at some stage or another. I became intimately acquainted with that faded pile, the scent of mouldy timber rising up from the boards, the particular shade of amber it had faded to, the colour of watery cider. I’d dig my fingernails down and scratch the lining, as if it was a short-coated pet.

  My mother says that a male dust-mite lives for an average of ten days. If he is exceptionally robust, he could make it as far as nineteen. But this has as much to do with luck as with strength. The male mite might fall victim to a vacuum cleaner or an allergen-blocking bedcover and all his hard won good health will come to naught. There are people who think that they can see dust-mites or that they’ve been bitten by a dust-mite, my mother says, but these things aren’t true. Dust-mites aren’t able to eat skin scales unless they’re already dead, dropped, partially broken down by fungi. Because they are extremely small and transparent, dust-mites aren’t visible to the human eye.

  They are everywhere, yet they are nothing.

  The last full day that I lived in my city bedsit, I went out only once, to return a DVD to the rental store. Nothing of significance happened while I was out. It wasn’t raining and I didn’t see anyone I knew or find that I’d forgotten to clip the disc back in its box. It was for no reason at all that as soon as I returned to the bedsit, my legs buckled and I lowered my cheek to its resting position against the carpet.

  I don’t know how long I’d been lying there when my mobile phone began to quake against the page of a sketchbook I’d left open on the table, a blank page. It started chirping out its cheerful ‘Radetzky March’ and I forced my face up until I could see the screen. JESS it said, and so I lay back down again. Jess was just a friend and she would only have been calling to see if I was okay, and seeing as I wasn’t, I decided not to answer. I pressed my right ear into the carpet as hard as I could and suctioned the palm of my left hand around the up-facing one.

  My eardrums sounded like the inside of a conch shell. Like what my mother told me, as a child, was supposed to be the sea, but was actually the wind.

  Through the floorboards, I could hear the man who lived directly below me moving purposefully around his bedsit. I heard a cupboard door bang, a saucepan clank against a hob, the screech of curtain hooks against rail. I heard the soles of his boots stepping from the kitchen-zone lino, tap tap tap. To the carpet, scuff scuff scuff. And back again. I wondered if his carpet was redder than mine; I wondered what it smelled like. Then I heard a saucepan tinkling and I knew that the man who lived directly below me was having hailstones for dinner again.

  He was Russian, though I can’t remember whether this is something the landlady told me when I moved in or something I decided for myself and remember as if it were a fact. He looked like a tin soldier: black leather boots and a jacket with symmetrical buttons and gold-trimmed epaulettes. I thought he was marvellous, far too marvellous to speak to, and because he had never spoken to me either, his mystique endured, uncontaminated by hallway chit-chat. On the last full day I spent in the bedsit, I listened to him taking cutlery from a drawer and clearing his throat in a Russian sort of way and I longed, how I longed, to have such purpose.

  At six o’clock on the last full day, through my suction-cupped hand, I heard church bells and knew what time it was against my will. I heard somebody else from the building arrive home and climb the first flight of stairs to my door, and then pass my door and continue to climb. My bedsit was sandwiched between the ground and top floors. Because its sole, small window faced backwards into the communal yard, even after several months I wasn’t able to recognise most of my housemates on the street. They came and went invisible to me. In the yard, there was no grass, just a couple of bicycles, a gargantuan wheelie bin and the low roof of the shed where the washing machine slumbered. There wasn’t a dryer and there wasn’t a washing line and oftentimes I’d see clothes slung over my neighbour’s curtain rails, trouser legs dangling, like a footless person hanged.

  I never kept a bicycle there. The only time I ever cycled in the city was at the very beginning of my first year in college. One morning my front tyre bounced off the side of the footpath at too great a speed. My wheels skidded out in front of a taxi and I fell face first against the concrete, splitting my chin and fracturing my jawbone. The taxi driver drove me to hospital. He didn’t charge a fare but he didn’t wait around either and I had to get the bus back to my bicycle. I remember the other passengers staring at my swollen face and fresh stitches, the splashes of blood down the front of my coat. An old woman asked me if I was okay and when I replied my voice sounded wrong—weak and crumpled—as if my distended cheek had squeezed it away to practically nothing.

  By the time I got back to the place where I’d left my bicycle, it was gone. Of course it was gone.

  When I was a child, I used to believe that everyone experienced childhood in the countryside and simply chose or didn’t choose to abandon their rural beginnings later on; that there was nobody under eighteen in the city at all.

  I wasn’t very good at living in Dublin. Every day I walked an unnecessarily circuitous route from my bedsit into the gallery simply because this was the way I walked the first day. I knew there were any number of shortcuts, but I refused to find them.

  My sandwiched bedsit with its backward-facing window and faded carpet seems now like a good place—a fitting place—to have lost my mind. The walls were smudged in places by the greasy fingerprints of people who lived there before me. A spooky draught intermittently rattled the air duct, spindly spiders nested in the folds of the curtain and made a scuffling sound in the dead of night. There were three switches, one for the immersion, one for the cooker, one for the heater, and every time I set out anywhere, I used to recite: watercookerheater watercookerheater watercookerheater because I was so afraid I might have neglected to turn one off and the whole building would burn down in the time it took me to walk into the city centre and home again. Too often I turned around and went back. I added a half hour to my circuitous, unnecessary journey just to check a switch I knew was off, but couldn’t trust myself.

  And I never once used the communal washing machine. I don’t know how to work a washing machine and I was too shy, when I first arrived, to ask anyone, and almost a year later I was too shy to admit that I’d never used it and still needed to ask. Instead I washed everything in my kitchen sink. Even the bedsheets, even the towels.

  It started slowly, with the switches and the rattle and the spiders.

  I spent most of the last full day with my cheek against the carpet. Just after six o’clock, I made a disconsolate attempt at snapping myself out of it. I heaved my head up, sat with my spine against the side of the bed and started whispering, earnestly, angrily:

  There are women and children in a central African country nobody’s ever heard of and they are being raped and slaughtered by their countrymen
, I whispered, YOU have NOTHING to cry about. There are people behind these closed doors and net curtains and they’re old or blind or cancer-bald, they’ve been brain damaged by a car accident or tenderised by one of those horrible degenerative muscle-wasting illnesses. They’re confined to wheelchairs or reduced to sippy cups or they have to re-bandage their entire bodies every other day just to stop their skin from falling off, I whispered, YOU have NOTHING to cry about. And then there are the people who love the people who are old or blind or cancer-bald or brain damaged, the people who look after them, who push their wheelchairs and replenish their sippy cups, who bear the brunt of their perfectly justifiable rage—I had raised my voice a little by then, from a whisper to a mutter—YOU have NOTHING to cry about. You have NOTHING.

  Then I thought about Kylie.

  Kylie was the only kid in my primary school who could not walk. Her arms and hands and fingers were twisted up. Her legs were manipulated into the most untwisted position possible and strapped to the special supports of her wheelchair. Her head was permanently crooked to one shoulder; her mouth hung open. She could not speak or write or participate in PE but Kylie still came to school every day. She still understood everything in her books and on the blackboard. And then, one rainy playtime, when the supervising teacher had stepped out of the classroom to attend to something, a couple of the bigger boys started to mess about. Gallivanting between desks, over chairs, knocking Kylie’s wheelchair sideways onto the ground.