by Sara Baume
I stare out at the daffodil farm. I think how strange it is to imagine the indoor flowers un-bunched and outside, almost as strange as it is to picture all the mammoths daintily plucking them.
Works about Flowers, I test myself: Anya Gallaccio, preserve ‘beauty’, 1991–2003. Two thousand red blooms pressed between glass panes, left to atrophy into brown pulp. They are gerbera–daisy hybrids; their heads are so classically floret-shaped. If somebody gave you a pencil and pad and asked you to draw a flower, you’d draw a gerbera–daisy hybrid without even knowing you had. I wouldn’t know either if it wasn’t for Anya Gallaccio; she chose them because they are biotechnologically mass-produced to meet the demands of the global market.
So many people covet their cut stems, the Earth can’t keep up.
Most of Gallaccio’s materials are perishable, her artworks concern mortality, inevitability, powerlessness. You can grow as many mutant flowers as you want, Gallaccio is saying. But you cannot stop a single one from dying.
The house where I grew up was built more than one hundred and fifty years ago, at the tail end of the Famine. The building was originally supposed to function as a hospital, my mother told us, but by the time it had been completed, the Great Famine was more or less over. Two million people had either died or deserted; a new hospital was no longer necessary. For many years, I doubted this story. The house, though reasonably large, seemed absurdly small in comparison to a hospital, and besides, I didn’t really want it to be true. If it was, who knew what ghosts might be gliding down the corridor at night? As a child, I did not believe, as I do now, that ghosts are like God: things you can’t see because they aren’t there. Instead of like dust-mites: things you can’t see even though they are there.
Mine is the pokiest of the bedrooms, only as long as a single bed and narrow bookcase. Side by side, the headboard and a lumpish armchair take up its entire width. On the wall, there are drawings I did in college, a corkboard pinned with old, irrelevant notices, and a photographic image of an X-rayed chest, a ghostly ribcage floating in softly focused darkness. The chair is positioned directly beneath the skylight in the ceiling and the bones on the wall, and it was there I took refuge on my arrival home. It was there I sat with my legs crossed in the patch of perfectly rectangular sunlight which falls through my slanted roof, and for the first four days read Midnight’s Children.
It was during Midnight’s Children that I became convinced my hair was falling out.
My hair was a statement. It hung down to my belly button, got caught in my fly, tried to strangle me during the night. Each strand was split, each split was split again, and yet I loved it so much I freaked out each time the brush filled up with lost hairs; I checked my pillow every morning to make sure it hadn’t somehow severed itself and was left lying there. I’d believed my hair was falling out for some time, but it was only once I was alone with my Rushdie in the lumpish armchair that the idea gripped me. I was certain that a single strand had fallen onto every page, that every time I ran my fingers through my ponytail I pulled out four or five more. Every time I showered, the plughole got clogged, and every time I drew the clog out, it was big as a drowned rat, only more of a drowned mink; the same unforgiving shade of black. So I stopped washing it and plaited it instead, to tie it to my head somehow, and left it plaited for days on end, to prevent it from escaping.
The escaped hairs I tugged from the brush’s bristles and rolled between my palms until they formed a tight ball. Then I squashed my hairballs inside a jam jar and placed the jar on the top shelf of my bookcase. I had carelessly selected, from my mother’s marmalade-making stash, a jar which formerly contained baby onions. Almost immediately, the knitted fibres of each ball were impregnated by the scent of vinegar—of preservation and corrosion both at once.
Works about Hair, I test myself: I learned how to roll strands from Mona Hatoum, an installation entitled Recollection, 1995. Compressed balls of her own long, black, lost locks, collected over the course of years, arrayed across the gallery floor. I want to believe it was in reference to a period of her life in which she had been clutched by the fear that her hair was falling out and felt compelled to collect the fallen strands so that it might in some sense still belong to her. I want to believe this because I want to believe I have things in common with great artists, and that this must mean I might one day be a great artist too.
I kept a pocket mirror tucked beneath the lumpish cushion.
I’d take it out and check my hairline every ten minutes at least, to see if I could detect it retreating. I kept thinking about the cashier in the health food shop in the city where I used to buy my mung beans, my yellow split peas. She had a hideous bald patch right at the top of her face, and I always thought it was a poor advertisement for health food and tried not to look. She was only about my age, and she never made any attempt to hide the patch; she didn’t even seem to be aware of it. How noble, I thought, as I checked my own hairline in the pocket mirror incessantly, and all the other mirrors in the house as well, intermittently. But mirrors are treacherous things. Each one revised my reflection according to its position on the wall, my position on the floor, the angle of the light. Because I could not manage to get a complete view, on the fourth day I asked my mother to check the back of my head for signs of impending baldness.
‘It’s fine,’ she said, ‘it looks just like it’s always looked.’
We were in the bathroom and I was sitting backwards on the toilet bowl with the lid lowered. The last time I’d sat like that with my mother standing behind I was fifteen and she was helping me to bleach my dreadlocks.
‘But it’s coming out,’ I said, ‘it’s coming out by the handful.’
Her fingers were warm against my scalp. Long before the bleach, she used to arrange my hair into pigtails every morning before school. I only requested the pigtails because I wanted her to touch my head. I thought it was the most relaxing sensation in the world.
‘It’s spring,’ my mother said, ‘you’re moulting.’
‘I’m not a fucking cat,’ I said.
‘Alright then. You’re imagining it,’ she said. ‘Is that what you want me to tell you? That it’s all in your head?’
She withdrew her warm fingers, and I stood up from the toilet bowl.
‘But it isn’t all in my fucking head,’ I said. ‘It’s all in the fucking pickle jar. That’s what I’m worried about.’
Ever since I learned to read, I’ve had a book on the go—one after another—an unbroken chain from Winnie-the-Pooh to Salman Rushdie. There are so many left behind here in my grandmother’s bungalow; publication dates to span her entire life. Every evening after I’ve eaten, I make myself open one and read, for a while, and then lay the book down spine up on the sofa cushions at the page where I stopped.
The trick to keeping going is to break going into bursts: to stop, and otherwise occupy my brain for a spell, and then start going again. Nowadays I apply this to my whole day long. Each is a succession of shallow occupations, enforced intervals. Even my sleep is only ankle deep, interrupted.
By the time I reached the end of Midnight’s Children, I could not name a single character nor recount a single chain of events.
Up again. Another day. A new one. The next.
Up late. To find the facing field of the daffodil farm full green and brown. My Brazilians have already crested the hilltop and disappeared.
An aeroplane has disappeared too.
I hear about it from the kitchen radio, as I wait for my coffee to ascend its spout. A behemoth of modern machinery vaporised in the space of a single sleep and ‘gone missing’—the phrase the newsreader uses, as if it was a dog, a pair of glasses, a solitary glove, as if it might turn up down the back of the sofa or in a lost property box at the train station. And it isn’t just a great lump of riveted titanium or—whatever it is planes are made from—it’s two hundred and thirty-nine passengers, the newsreader says. In this age of ear-splitting communicativeness, how can it be that so
many people can have gone so suddenly silent? I don’t understand. Perhaps the world is vaster, more bottomless, less discovered than I’ve always believed.
I carry my coffee down the corridor to the sun room and scrutinise my own small expanse of sky for missing aircraft. If it could be anywhere, I think, then it could be here. Why couldn’t it be here?
Only clouds. Only pigeons. Only the green slime and brown moss which grows between the panes. The world within my sight span remains precisely as it was.
I’ve lived here long enough now to fall into a routine. I finish my coffee and go back to the kitchen. I measure out my breakfast things, select my implements. Tear a square of tissue from the roll, pour milk from carton to jug, arrange it all on a tin tea tray. People nowadays don’t have jugs and trays just like they don’t have shoehorns, even though such things become weirdly vital as soon as you fall accidentally into using them. My grandmother has three trays. One with a picture of rose bushes and one with a picture of a sailing ship and one with a reproduction of a L. S. Lowry painting. The Lowry is my favourite. In the living room, I found a book of his industrial landscapes and flicked through the plates at the back until I recognised The Irwell at Salford, 1947. It shows chimneys, smoke, streets and warehouses; I can’t imagine a less appropriate scene for transference to a tea tray.
Whilst flicking I came upon a mess of dead petals. Real ones, I mean, and not a painting. They were pressed between factories and matchstick men. They had mostly turned a dirty mustard, and so I couldn’t tell what colour or flower they had once been.
This morning, I retrieve the book I left behind on the living room sofa cushions last night and continue down the corridor to the sun room with my Lowry tray. The day is dull; the dullness makes it airless between the glass walls; the airlessness makes it almost warm.
I’m reading The Siege of Krishnapur by J. G. Farrell. I found it in the dining room and chose it because J. G. Farrell tripped off the Sheep’s Head peninsula into the North Atlantic and, mysteriously, drowned. He was trying to fish. I knew this about the author before I chose his book. I liked this about him, or rather, I liked him for this, his elegiac death. The Siege of Krishnapur is strong enough to stave off reality. I plump up the foam of my chair and slip away to a garrison surrounded by sepoys, the advancing infantrymen of the East India Company.
When I look up, there is an old man standing on the path. Gawping in at me.
I don’t recognise him at first. The last, and perhaps only, time we came face to face must have been my grandmother’s funeral and he must have queued to shake my hand like all the others. I remember his name, Jink, though I don’t remember what real name it is short for. He was her closest neighbour, and now he is mine. If the hedge was a little lower and less furry I’d be able to see the thatched roof of his cottage from my kitchen window. I get up from the table, slide the glass door and go to the place where he is standing.
‘Jink,’ he says when I get there, and I say ‘Frankie’, as if neither of us can speak or understand the other’s language, and so have agreed—subliminally, mutually—to begin with a name.
The old man’s surprise at seeing me has subsided now.
‘Sure didn’t I nearly take you for a robber,’ he says.
Two and a half years have passed since the funeral queue. I can’t say if I look different. People in their twenties tend to change a lot in two and a half years, whereas men, as soon as they summit fifty, remain perpetually the same. Jink looked old then and still looks old now. Hook-nosed and bent-backed, one eye slightly smaller than the other, a jersey displaying the insignia of a university I doubt he was ever a student of. Up close there’s a pattern of tiny holes across the part where his belly pulls the cotton taut, as if he’s been clawed by a cat, or splashed by hot oil, or stabbed in the gut with a toothpick.
‘I’m staying here for a while,’ I say. ‘I’m sorry, I meant to come down and let you know.’ Which I didn’t, though now I see this would have been the polite thing to do.
‘I’ve just been coming around every now and again, taking a turn of the place, keeping an eye on it, like,’ Jink says.
I find it hard to believe he hasn’t seen me before now and I wonder why he wouldn’t say so instead of making an effort to appear startled.
‘You’re very good,’ I say. ‘We’re all very grateful for what you did for the dog, after she died.’
‘Ah sure ’twas no bother, no need to be thanking me. He was a grand old dog. I’d a had him up the house with myself only he wouldn’t come, wouldn’t step beyond the gate there.’
I smile and hold his asymmetrical eyes and hope he’ll speak on, unprompted. I remember the night we buried Joe, how Dad dug a great hole beside the greenhouse and it took the whole family to hoist the dog’s flaxen body from the house and down the garden. By the time we got to the hole, our arms were tired. We fumbled him unceremoniously into the ground. It was dark by the time we’d covered it in again. The sun had gone down with the dog.
‘He was happy enough just having a stroll on the grass.’ Jink nods his head towards the compost heap and I wonder whether he has noted my wilderness.
‘Do you’ve a dog yourself?’ I ask.
‘I’d a grand old sheepdog there for years but then it up and died like your nan’s and ’twas desperate sad. ’Twould put you off getting another one, y’know? Only to see it go like that.’ He chuckles again, dispelling the sombre note.
That’s nonsense, I think. I want to tell him: you’re an old man now, maybe you’ll die first. I want to reason that one can’t not do things because they might go wrong.
I remember something I heard on the radio.
‘Did you know there’s this place in London called the Death Café?’ I say. ‘It’s for people to go and drink coffee and talk about their own death, or somebody else’s, but the point is to get it off their chest, y’know? The point is that it will stop them from being frightened.’
Jink looks astounded, but after a moment, he seems to realise this is something which happens very far away, conducted by total strangers.
‘And you couldn’t even get a cup of tea?’ he says. ‘Fierce funny fellas, them Londoners.’
We gaze across the garden. I wish at least one of us had a dog upon which to focus our idling attention; upon which to pass meaningless comment.
‘Your father done a great job on the grass there,’ Jink says. ‘He’s a grand man, your father.’
I um-hum my agreement.
‘Sure I’d better be getting on,’ he says. ‘If there’s anything you need doing, call down to me.’
‘Thanks for that, thanks a million.’ Now his offer makes me remember something.
‘JINK!’ I say, wishing I had a proper name to call him. ‘Actually if you have a minute? There is maybe just the one thing . . .’
The door of my grandmother’s shed opens inward and the only unfilled space is that which was cleared by the opening door. Stacks of junk lean against the walls or free-stand on the concrete beyond the walls’ reach. Old bedsheets are draped across almost everything. Each sheet is blobbed with different shades of pastel-coloured paint. I’m sure I could match each colour to one of my grandmother’s rooms if I tried, that these are the ones she laid down to redecorate when she first moved in. I don’t know exactly what manner of junk lies underneath. My father says that once the bungalow has been sold he’ll load up the car trailer with everything still here, drive it to the quarry where he works and dump it into his burning pit. The burning pit in the quarry is the place where our old possessions go to die, everything that can’t be stamped down into a wheelie bin. Busted furniture, worn-out boots, electrical appliances, sweat-stained duvets. I’ve never understood how other people dispose of these things. As a child, I believed every family had their own personal burning pit.
The only things in the shed which haven’t been draped by bedsheets are the shelves and their contents. Plant pots, white spirit, spanners, screwdrivers and a rusted handsaw. Bey
ond the space cleared by the opening door, there’s a coal sack, a tower of peat briquettes, and a bicycle. I presume it was my grandmother’s, from before she had dogs and had to walk or drive everywhere. The frame is black gloss and hefty. There are reflective cockerels fastened to the spokes. I suddenly remember that they came free inside a packet of Corn Flakes. Do things still come free inside cereal packets? I remember digging my fist down towards the plastic-wrapped toy, smashing an elbow’s length of gold flakes in my wake. Or is it a health and safety issue now? Like everything else that used to be fun.
I’ve told Jink to wait outside because it’s too cramped in the shed to admit more than one body at a time. Now I haul out the bicycle, push it over the gravel and present it to him.
Works about Sheds, I test myself: Cornelia Parker, Cold Dark Matter: An Exploded View. In 1991 the Banbury Army School of Ammunition agreed to blow up a perfectly ordinary garden shed at the artist’s request in order that, after it had been reduced to kindling and splinters, Parker could pick up every piece and suspend them in a maelstrom from a gallery ceiling.
Backlit by a single bulb, this is what the best of art does: uncovers an unrecoverable view of the world.
Now I wonder did Parker reorder the pieces according to how they were originally ordered? I hope so. Because this is something else the best of art does: the seemingly impossible.
For those seven strange days I spent in the famine hospital, all but one of the boxes and bags which arrived back with me went into my father’s largest shed and remained packed. For seven days, I used only essentials. I wore the same jeans and jumper, the same socks and vest. I wore pants I’d never worn before, which I found in a drawer in my bedroom I hadn’t opened since my teens. I hadn’t opened the packet of pants either. They were patterned with sailboats and starfish. They smelled of plastic and mildew.