A Line Made by Walking

by Sara Baume

  I knew my bedroom wardrobe was full and I knew I’d never kept clothes inside, but I’d forgotten exactly what else it was I last filled it with and battened the door shut against. On the first day, I dared myself to open the wardrobe. It stuck at first, then jolted free. A gerbil ball fell out and biffed me in the chest. It was the size of a football, but hollow and hard. I remembered how I used to select a gerbil, pick it up by its tail, drop it inside the transparent plastic sphere. Then I’d lock the door and leave the selected gerbil to trundle itself around the playroom carpet, checking back every now and again to dislodge the ball from beneath an armchair. I could see a few bits of ancient poo in there, desiccated, rattling as it hit the floor and rolled across my bedroom.

  Inside the wardrobe, I found cages, water bottles, food bowls, exercise wheels, gnaw blocks, baskets, balls with bells inside, tug toys and tiny tunnels, a squeaky lamb chop and a bundle of sawdust. So the last time I opened my wardrobe must have been after the final pet died. Patchie-the-black-and-white-tomcat was thirteen years old when he suffered an aneurysm and plunged from the kitchen windowsill, and then suffered a broken neck. It was during my first year in college and I was riding on the upper deck of a Dublin bus when my mother phoned. It was dark and raining. I was right at the front. Drops flung themselves out of the black and burst against the glass. A little boy across the aisle saw me crying and started to cry too. I caught a train home. By the time I arrived, my mother had laid Patchie out in the shed on a blanket in a cardboard box. KING Cheese & Onion, the box said. It had come from the local shop. I stroked Patchie’s black-and-white patches for the final time and thought about how I’d been there to witness his litter being born, thirteen years ago in the same shed in a box just like the one he was about to be buried in. I remembered how that box had been a KING Cheese & Onion one as well.

  How I worshipped that cat when I was a child. How cruelly I lost interest as I aged. Not just in the cat, but in all of the pets. As if they were toys, or haircuts.

  I threw the ball back into the wardrobe and battened the door shut again.

  I forgot about the goldfish. I always forget about the goldfish. Patchie wasn’t the last pet because the goldfish is still there on my parents’ kitchen countertop, drifting in her murky tank-water, wiggling to the rhythm of the filter’s ripples. She’s big as a halibut now, and she carries an ocean’s worth of sadness in her watery eyes. The halibut who refuses to die.

  Works about Cats, I test myself: Cory Arcangel, Drei Klavierstücke, op. 11. 2009. One hundred years earlier, the Austrian composer, Arnold Schoenberg, wrote a significant piece of music by the same name. Significant, because it’s considered to be the first atonal composition. Atonal, meaning that it was written in no particular key. I don’t know a thing about classical music but my understanding is that this represented a total defection from the traditions of Western harmony; that the original Drei Klavierstücke, op. 11. sounded not so much like music as like plunder, like dereliction.

  For Drei Klavierstücke, op. 11. 2009, Arcangel edited together videos of cats striking piano keys which he found on YouTube. Note by note, they play the piece, gradually, laboriously, in all its discordant glory. When I first learned of Arcangel’s work, I immediately wanted to believe that he’d chosen cats for some appropriately profound reason and not just because cats happen to be the species most commonly filmed by their owners while striking piano keys. I read down through every section of Schoenberg’s entry on Wikipedia, desperate to discover that he once owned a cat or had a cat-related experience. What I learned instead was that Drei Klavierstücke, op. 11. was written in the aftermath of his wife’s desertion and subsequent elopement with a young painter and friend of Schoenberg. And so, I must assume: the sound that came out of the music was produced simply by the feeling that went in.

  Works about Goldfish, I test myself; I think and think. I can’t come up with a single one.

  Dusk. The burgeoning sunset pink and grey like a weird marshmallow. Soon the slugs and bats and black rabbit will be out.

  I have a car, what do I want a bicycle for? I’m guessing this is what Jink will think.

  The sensation of freewheeling down steep hills, overtaking sparrowhawks, the buzz and bliss of speed. Even though I have a car, I shouldn’t really be trusted with horsepower because I get so incredibly bored, forgetting I’m not meant to look at things that aren’t the road. Pedestrians, central embankments, the houses of perfect strangers.

  Outside the shed by the bench on the gravel, the old man beams at the sight of the knackered bicycle; his old lips crack with the unfamiliar pleasure of being required to be of use. I show him the rusted chain, the seized-up brakes.

  ‘I’d love to get it going again,’ I say. ‘I found a pump in the house, though I guess the tyres might be punctured. I haven’t checked yet because I couldn’t get the chain back on anyway.’

  Jink kneels down and runs his hands along the brake cable and over the chain-stays like a spiritual healer. As I watch I try to remember how well my grandmother knew him. Was he ever mentioned when she was alive, and why, and in what tone of voice?

  I try to remember my grandmother’s voice. I can’t.

  ‘You need a new chain put on alright, a bitta grease here and there.’ He straightens up again, or at least back to as straight as he was in the first place. ‘I’ve some stuff down below in the shed that might do for it. I’ll have a look and call back up?’

  ‘Of course,’ I say. ‘That’d be great.’

  ‘Right so.’

  ‘There’s no rush, I can have a go at pumping the tyres up in the meanwhile.’

  ‘Right so.’

  I walk with him to the road and notice for the first time that he is terribly slow and drags one of his feet. At the gate I say thank you again and again he says right so. He starts away down the hill as I tie the dog string. He hasn’t travelled very far when I call after him, again.

  ‘Jink!’ I say. ‘Do you remember that tree?’

  He is right beside it now. Or rather, right beside the place from where its fallen pieces were removed.

  ‘Aye,’ Jink says.

  ‘Do you remember the day it fell?’

  ‘Aye. It blocked the road the same day your nan passed.’

  ‘Did you hear it? Can you remember hearing it fall?’

  Jink answers faster and with more certainty than I’d expected.

  ‘No,’ he says. ‘Didn’t hear a thing.’

  Now he turns around, and I go back in.

  Works about Bicycles, I test myself: Bas Jan Ader, again. Fall II, Amsterdam, 1970. The artist cycles purposefully into a canal. A symbolic splash, and the film ends, scarcely twenty seconds long. It doesn’t wait for the water to settle. It doesn’t wait for the artist to surface.

  Bas Jan Ader didn’t do happy endings.

  On day three in the lumpish armchair—somewhere in between balling up hair and failing to absorb Salman Rushdie—I noticed an ornament on one of my shelves, pushed into the corner. A ceramic dolphin cresting the ceramic froth of a ceramic wave. From tail fin through froth to nose-tip, standing no higher than a toothpick, pinned in by cobwebs and cassette tape cases. In a flash I remembered how I used to adjust the position of that dolphin last thing at night, every night, fraction by fraction, sometimes for hours on end. Last thing at night, every night, I adjusted that ornament until it was precisely aligned with an invisible point which I perceived to represent completion, and if I didn’t get it absolutely right, then something monstrous would happen to me or someone close to me, or so I believed: some dolphin-induced calamity.

  It wasn’t just the dolphin. Every time I put on a pair of socks, I had to turn them inside-out and backwards, until the heels bulged around the bridge of each foot, and if the socks managed to twist themselves right again during the course of the day, this meant that my grandmother would be struck down with a kidney stone.

  Because most of the calamities I foresaw were bizarrely specific.

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sp; I used to believe that if I didn’t cross the hall from the bathroom and touch down on the kitchen tiles before the toilet stopped flushing, the cat—my Patchie—would get hit by a car. And every time I ate a banana, I had to ask it a question. It was a trick Mum showed my sister and me when we were kids. We’d ask the banana something with a straightforward yes/no answer, then she’d chop the very tip off with a sharp knife to reveal a black shape that was either a clear Y or an indistinguishable smudge which stood for no. Of course she couldn’t possibly have predicted I’d become obsessed with the wisdom of banana skins. Over and over, I turned to them to settle arguments with my conscience; I obeyed the Y or smudge irrespective of sense, of consequence.

  A part of me knew my rituals and the things they prophesied were insane, but a larger part of me was too wary to refute them. Doubt beat inside me like a metronome, setting the tempo of my days. Just in case, just in case, just in case.

  When the ceramic cetacean crested out of the shadows, I realised that these small torments had each gone away, or rather, I had ceased to perform for them, as thoughtlessly as I invented them in the first place. The metronome had faded into a cat arbitrarily striking piano keys; faded away.

  I got up from the armchair and approached the dolphin. I stroked the dust from its back and then I flicked it with my index finger, as hard as I could, and it hit the wall and fell down behind the bedstead.

  More recently, I watched a TV documentary about people suffering from Obsessive Compulsive Disorder.

  ‘People say “I’m a little bit OCD”,’ says a young man, an art student, who pushes the button for the pedestrian crossing with his foot, who keeps his credit card wrapped in special plastic, who believes everything—absolutely everything—is capable of contaminating him. ‘They’re not,’ he says. ‘They have no idea.’

  And I felt like such a failure. I thought: I can’t even do mental illness properly.

  Works about Goldfish, I remembered one: Marco Evaristti, Helena, 2000. An installation in a gallery in Kolding, Denmark. It consisted of ten food blenders, each containing a measure of water and a single goldfish. It presented audience members with an opportunity to press the button and mince the goldfish, or not.

  The director of the gallery was sued; on grounds of animal cruelty, I suppose. More than a decade later, Evaristti remade the work for a retrospective, but on this occasion he used already-dead goldfish preserved in clear jelly. Goldfish killed in a private place, by some other means.

  I search around online. I want to find out whether anyone pressed the button. Or whether everybody did.

  Around the same time I noticed the dolphin ornament, my parents suddenly started to annoy me.

  My mother was forever reminding me of things I had not forgotten. ‘You’ll need a knife to open that,’ she said when I reached for a vacuum-pack of coffee in the kitchen cupboard. ‘You’ll need to empty the strainer,’ she said when she found me standing over a sink full of smoggy water doing nothing in particular, just waiting. It was as if I hadn’t learned a single thing in the seven years I’d lived independently, as if my mother refused to acknowledge knowledge attained from any source which wasn’t her.

  I only saw Dad in the evenings. After dinner, he’d go back out to one of his sheds and not reappear until the nine o’clock news. Then he’d take up position in his indelible sofa dip and Mum would entreat me to ‘let your father watch what he wants’ because of the ‘long day’ he inflicted upon himself, every day. It didn’t matter that he only ever watched the screen with half his concentration; the other half he split between loudly rustling a newspaper and making the occasional, sweeping statement. ‘Them feckers up the North are off again,’ he’d say, or ‘all them Greens should be shot from a height.’

  I’ve often stayed more than a week at home since I moved out, at Christmas and during the summer holidays, but on those occasions I’d always had an independent life to return to: a bedsit, a college course, a job. And for each new place and situation and set of people, I’d made up a new version of myself, a better version in accordance with my changing tastes and values and perspectives. In the famine hospital, there were no people but the people who made me, no option to be anything but my original self. For abridged periods, this was nice; this was reassuring. But faced with an undetermined length of stay and no independence to return to, my sadness lengthened, my temper shortened.

  It wasn’t my parents who annoyed me; it was the forsaken version of myself I helplessly revert to in their presence; it was the fact that my life was suddenly wide open. I had not yet, at that point, decided whether I wanted to get better or die altogether. I only knew that I couldn’t go back to Dublin, and couldn’t stay where I was either. That was the point at which I remembered my grandmother’s bungalow.

  There’s a vox-pop item on the radio. The presenter is asking people in the street: what’s the first thing you think about when you get up in the morning? They say approximately the things I expect them to say. ‘I think how much I love my lovely hubby who is lying beside me,’ an old woman says. I can tell she is old from the weak spot in her voice and I wonder what she’ll do if her beloved lovely hubby kicks the bucket before she does, as the law of probability dictates. ‘I think: oh shit, am I late?’ says a man, and laughs. A different man wonders whether the dog has crapped on the kitchen floor again. Someone else thanks God he made it through another night without succumbing to ‘the demon drink’. The item closes with a woman who confesses: ‘I think about the gap, the huge gap between my life as it is and my life as I would like it to be . . .’

  As I screw the compartments of my coffee pot together, I try to remember the first thought I had on waking this morning. As the water boils and begins its upward dispatch through the grounds, it comes to me: the penguin; I was thinking about Herzog’s solitary penguin.

  As if the radio can read my thoughts, the vox pop is followed by an interview with a keeper at Dingle Oceanworld. She tells the story of Missy and Penelope the penguins, who appear to have paired off and built a nest together in spite of the fact they are sisters. The keeper explains how females will often make ‘special friends’ but this is the first time she’s experienced a same-sex twosome attempting to hump one another. ‘They can lay eggs,’ she says, ‘but the eggs won’t be fertilised.’ Now the keeper pauses and considers how this might be construed. ‘But of course I don’t see any reason why it can’t be arranged for them to foster a fertilised egg from one of the opposite-sex pairs . . .’ she corrects herself.

  Jink comes in the afternoon.

  Carrying a can of Easy Oil and a bicycle chain which looks brand new. It embarrasses me to think he might have made a special trip to the hardware store in Lisduff and purchased it for me, but he doesn’t say so and I don’t ask; he’d probably be embarrassed too.

  I bring out the bike and show him the pumped-up tyres. They seem to have held their air and must not be punctured after all. He gets down on the gravel and as he tinkers with his canister and chain, I make a pot of tea. Reload the Lowry tray.

  Jink sits on the bench with his mug and watches as I ride the healed-and-risen-again bicycle in a loop around the house. I try to ring the bell. It only makes a wheezing sound. More cough than chirp, frog than bird.

  My mother phones every other evening. Tonight I tell her about the old man and the bicycle. I try to find out if she knows anything about Jink I don’t already, or that I’ve forgotten. ‘Harmless,’ she says, ‘keeps to himself.’

  ‘He didn’t hear the tree either,’ I say, ‘the morning it fell.’ Now she starts talking about that morning, telling the story of how her mother died.

  ‘Joe would always get up and look to be let out at 6 a.m.,’ she says, ‘on the button. This was the appointed hour of each day’s inaugural piss. And on the morning we were keeping vigil around the bed, as it approached piss o’clock we started watching the dog, knowing that none of us could leave her bedside in order to let him out, not then, when she was so close.�
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  ‘But I thought she died earlier,’ I interrupt. ‘I thought she died in the dark, in the night.’

  ‘No,’ Mum says. ‘I never told you that. She died just after seven. It was bright and the dog never got up for his piss. He just stayed there with his head rested on the bedcovers. He knew to not pee. He didn’t budge.’

  ‘I think I must have read this somewhere . . .’ I say ‘. . . about a chimp who was raised in captivity, right? Well he was given a bundle of photographs, some of chimps and some of humans, and apparently sorted them perfectly into two piles, one human, one chimp, all except for a single one, right? He put the photograph of himself into the human pile.’

  ‘Isn’t that fascinating?’ Mum says.

  She doesn’t ask me why I mentioned it. My mother is always able to follow my trail of rationalisation, no matter how weaving. I suppose it must be from her that I inherited the guidelines of my thoughts.

  ‘Where did you hear it again?’ she says.

  ‘A book,’ I say, ‘but a novel. Which I guess means it probably isn’t true.’

  I get up an hour, two hours, three hours earlier than before. I freewheel down the hill and at the hill’s foot, I meet the crossroads—as many alternatives as possible whilst remaining on a man-made path. I pick a path and cycle. Furiously, impetuously. Minuscule flies dash themselves against the bones of my cheeks, the back of my throat.