by Sara Baume
‘This is not a good time,’ I say. And yet, I indicate.
The air is thick and wet even though I cannot see any individual droplet. They slip from the sky and join with the ground invisibly. They leave their trace in the way the tarmac glistens; in the way the new leaves and grass blades are ruthlessly green. The only surface which seems to hold them is the rook’s broken wing. His outstretched feathers are electric black. The drops sit like diamanté just for a second before dripping on, or being replenished and merging into fatter jewels, quivering. Up close, I see that beneath his broken wing, the rook is struggling to draw breath. He opens an eye and his pupil swivels around and registers me. His hindered breathing quickens but he does not caw; he does not shift. He’s lying on a shallow heap of straw, the yellow and the black in bold contrast.
I climb back into the driver’s seat, but I don’t start the engine. I’m not allowed to photograph things which are not dead. And so, I must wait. I take out my book and open it at the page I marked in the hospital waiting room. I stare at a sentence, and then the next, the next, the next. After a quarter of an hour, I get out and check the rook. He is still breathing, slower now. Again I go back to the car. I don’t try to read this time. I rest my head against the headrest, sink my eyes shut.
In the farm behind my parents’ house, when I was a child, the farmer used to string crows across the entrance of the meal shed, dangle them from the guttering by their throats, a grisly length of bunting. It was much worse than my father and the pigeon-post because the crows were still half alive, at first. Until they accidentally strangled themselves in a frenzy of thwarted flight.
After a while, it starts to get dark. I hadn’t realised it was so late, but it’s a dull day, of course, more vulnerable to dusk than most. The leaves blur into shadows. A horsebox rumbles past. The silhouette of pricked-up horse ears.
My sleeve is rolled back and I am fingering a scar which runs from my wrist in the direction of my elbow. A rook gave me this scar, years and years ago, one of the farmer’s examples. Dad warned me not to interfere with them. So I waited until everybody went out at once. Then I sneaked into the farmyard and approached the meal shed carrying my mother’s shears. There were three shot rooks and only one still flapping, and smart as they are, this one could not seem to understand that I was trying to help. It took a swoop and with the sharp tip of its beak split open the skin of the arm I had extended in order to free it. I pulled back, stood shocked. Then ran away and left the rook there—still shot but flapping—still tied. I hid in the bathroom until the bleeding stopped. I bandaged it up before my parents got home, and when my mother noticed the bandage, I told her one of the cats had scratched me.
I fully expected to contract some horrible disease, but I didn’t. For at least a day after, I couldn’t bring myself to look out my bedroom window and into the farmyard, and when at last I did, I saw my rook was upside down. Wings fallen back and open. But the wind continued to toss it about in simulated flight, and so I could not tell whether it was still alive or not.
The car is warm. The sound of soft rain on tin is soothing. I fall asleep and when I wake again my stomach is grumbling and the light is almost completely lost. No cars pass and every house is far in the distance. My hands have stopped shaking and the rook is dead. Or at least, I tell myself he’s dead. In the spool of light cast from my headlamps, I don’t look too closely. I’m tired and hungry and don’t care about my own rules any more. I just want my picture and to be gone.
I find the rook is still enough; I find his stillness will do for me.
6
Fox
Sometimes when I wake in the morning, I find I don’t know how to swallow. It isn’t that I am not able; it’s that I can’t remember how. If someone were to ask, I wouldn’t be able to describe it. Even if they were spluttering, gagging, retching, turning purple, on the brink of drowning in a mouthful, nose-full, throat-full of their own spit. Whenever this happens, I am grateful that my body is able to swallow without my brain’s authorisation. In the same way as it continues to breathe, whether I will it to or not.
Always when I wake in the morning, I marvel at the autonomy of my anatomy, its belligerence. I take a breath. I swallow. I get up.
Works about Getting Up, I test myself: On Kawara, I Got Up, 1968–79. Every day the artist sent at least two different postcards to people he knew. All they said was: I GOT UP, and the time he arose at, and the address of the place where he happened to have slept. On Kawara got up at many different times in many different places over the course of the project, which, to my mind, diminishes its potency. Had he left the same bed every morning for eleven years at the same time in the same place and recorded it, this would have affected me more. This would have made it a work about drudgery, about incuriosity. About, again, workaday despair.
I report back to Mum on the phone: ‘It went fine. They told me I’m fine. No need for a second appointment.’ She replies, hesitantly, that this is great news, that she is glad, but it’s hard to tell how she really feels when I cannot see her face. I should have embroidered my report, but I’ve lost the will. If she does believe me, I know it’s only because she desperately wants to.
I tell myself, I promise myself: this is the last time I will lie to my mother.
Downloading the rook’s picture, I feel compelled to adulterate the colour balance in Photoshop. I fiddle with the contrast until his feathers are unrealistically blue. Why must I blue my crow, I wonder. What does a blue crow mean?
Another item about brain damage on the radio. A man whose 24-year-old daughter has been a vegetable her entire life. She is ‘high-dependency’ he calls it, ‘non-communicative’. She isn’t able to use her spit like a normal person because she cannot talk, and so she produces too much of it. She drools and drools. He talks about how her days, his days, the whole family’s days, play out in a state of ‘suspended animation’. I am surprised by the elegance of his phrasing. It makes me wonder if living under tragic circumstances inflects a person’s sentences, irresistibly, with poetry. He explains how his daughter will never get better even though she will continue to grow. Until she is old; until she dies of oldness like most people.
Works about Suspended Animation, I test myself: Xu Zhen, In Just a Blink of an Eye, 2005–07. Performance or installation? Living sculpture? I’ve only seen a picture in a book. Several people dotted around a gallery. Frozen into several different inconceivable poses. Falls, faints, flings. The first time I saw the picture, I stared and stared, trying to figure out how such positions could possibly be held—and sustained—without falling. But the caption betrayed the artwork, explained its ambiguity away. Each performer was rigged to a supporting structure beneath their roomy clothing. They were not holding their bodies up; they were allowing their bodies to be held.
Even still, art remains the closest I have ever come to witnessing magic.
I change the radio station. On the new one, they are talking about wildlife. Oh good, I think, this should be devoid of hideous tragedy.
‘Merlins,’ the expert says, ‘are the smallest of the raptors. They hunt by chasing even smaller birds until they are exhausted. They literally fly their prey to death.’
This morning, I put away my laptop and unpack my box of paint tubes and brushes instead, my strongest sketchbook, the one of cartridge paper pages. At the sun room table, I take up my limp and soft and pliant weaponry.
But I cannot think of any shapes. All I can manage is blobs. Of yellow, red, blue. I squeeze the tubes. Watch the blobs drop, plop, and sit on the cartridge paper, expectantly. I close the sketchbook, press it. The painting paints itself.
A Rorschach blot. Teasing me, testing me.
Well then, what does it resemble?
A butterfly, of course.
I put my paints away, restore my laptop to purpose. On the internet, I look up Rorschach. I find this is exactly what everybody thinks his blots resemble.
Days go by. The Mental Health Centre doesn�
�t phone, or send an emissary to retrieve me. There isn’t even a letter of discharge. I am relieved, but also a little taken aback. What if I were ill in a normal kind of way, in the way the doctor wanted me to be when she asked all her standardised questions? A danger to myself. To others.
Tomorrow is my birthday, my twenty-sixth.
The night before almost every one to date, I always expect I will wake up the following morning feeling somehow different, somehow transformed. I never do. I feel exactly the same, and am disappointed. But by the time my birthday comes around again the following year, I’ve forgotten the unchangedness and disappointment, and the night before, I always expect to feel different all over again.
But twenty-six is not the same as the other birthdays. Twenty-six troubles me more than any of the others since I turned ten.
Ten brought with it the gravity of having existed for an entire decade, the emblematic jump to double figures. I could never be a single, solid digit again. In the final months of being nine, ten seemed to represent the death of childhood.
Did I feel different when I woke up on the morning of my tenth birthday? Did I look around my bedroom and momentously condemn the Monchichi Family and the My Little Ponies? I think it might have been roughly the age at which I stopped playing with monkey-and-horse-shaped toys, and instead, started to join organisations for the prevention of cruelty to real animals.
I flattened an empty box of Shreddies and painted a fox on the unprinted side. The background was brilliant red to represent the ruthless shedding of the fox’s blood. The foreground was emblazoned with the words: STOP THE HUNT! Then I propped it in one of the playroom windows which face the front of the famine hospital and the road along which, on the occasional Sunday and bank holiday, the huntsmen and their horses passed. Nobody told me to take it down. Dad was oblivious; Mum didn’t want to crush my reactionary spirit. Jane was mortified.
Twenty-six is not significant in a good way. It’s the age at which I become irrevocably closer to thirty than twenty. I wake on the morning of my birthday, and think at once: now I know, with certainty, that it’s too late to be a genius.
My mother phones. ‘HAPPY BIRTHDAY LOVE!’ she shouts.
‘Oh fuck off, Mum,’ I say. And hang up. I feel immediately terrible, but if there’s one day in the year I can get away with telling my mother to fuck off, I imagine it must be this one. I get up and dress and fetch my bicycle exactly as I always do. My only chance is to pretend it’s a day like any other; to keep the despair only as great as on all the others.
A birthday gift from the capricious countryside: a fox.
I see foxes often, but always they are crossing fallow fields in the distance. Gold flecks on faraway expanses of green. Magnetic to the meandering eye. Enigmatic, unreachable. But not this one. This fox is almost nearby. Sitting still and facing forwards, just like the picture I painted on a placard when I was, roughly, ten.
Only it isn’t. There’s something not-quite-right about it, something misshapen. I can only see it because I am elevated above the level of the hedge by the height of my bicycle. It glances in and out of sight between the hawthorns and blackthorns as I freewheel, such that I can’t figure out exactly what the something strange is. At the next gateway, I squeeze my brakes, stamp my feet down.
It’s wearing a tin can on its head. I stare at the tin-can fox. I feel as though I recognise this scene from somewhere. I stare and start to wonder whether or not I should try and help. But the fox doesn’t give me a chance to decide. It trots off towards the corner of the field as though it knows exactly where it’s going, as though there are eyeholes in its tin can.
As though my birthday fox has built itself a helmet.
My mother arrives in the evening. I hear her Ford Estate climb turbine hill. I know the sound of its engine, like a dog who waits every day for his owner to return home from work. Now the clack and whine of opening gate, the tyre-crunch of gravel. And last, the curious vibration in the living room ceiling triggered by arriving cars. As if there is a seam which runs from the driveway up through the walls of the bungalow, ending in the light fixture.
My mother has never rung this doorbell; when my grandmother lived here, she’d let herself in through the back, knocking cursorily. ‘HALLO MUM!’ she’d shout.
‘Hallo Mum,’ I say as I meet her on the step.
She smiles, worriedly. She is carrying a paper gift bag and a cake. I see that she has made a healthy cake especially: carrots and apples and spelt flour. Sunflower oil instead of butter; maple syrup instead of sugar. I look at the cake in my mother’s arms and think: here stands the only person in the whole world who’d go to such trouble for fractious, ungrateful me.
There’s only a handful of candles. I count them. ‘Eight?’ I say. ‘Why ever eight?’
‘Two and six,’ she says, ‘for twenty-six.’ And we laugh.
I make tea and we sit out in the windy garden, watching the redcurrant bushes jitter. In the gift bag there’s a jar of Manuka honey, a book about Navajo Folk Art, a six-pack of Marks & Spencer cotton-rich socks and a birthday card with two fifties pressed inside, crisp this time.
‘Why not go for a trip to Dublin?’ Mum says, indicating the fifties. ‘Buy yourself something nice, catch up with a few friends?’
I get up and give her an awkward hug of thanks. I flick through the pages of my new book. I see her watching the movement of my hands.
‘Your fingernails have grown very long,’ she says.
I look at them. They have.
‘I’m trying to make a tiny bird.’ I have to stop myself from saying aloud: Works about Tiny Birds, I test myself. ‘There’s this artist called Tim Hawkinson,’ I explain, ‘. . . he made a bird out of fingernail clippings and glue. A bird skeleton, I mean. Like a tiny exhibit in a natural history museum.’
‘Bird bones are fine as fingernails,’ she replies. Because my mother always understands.
There is one last thing in the gift bag. Overlooked, almost. It’s a tiny timber box in the shape of a circle. Mum shows me how the lid works like a hollow screw. Inside, it’s half filled with a fine grey powder. Instinctively, I lean in to sniff.
‘Ashes,’ Mum says. ‘A small share of Grannie to keep, if you would like.’
They smell like earth and wind and fire.
‘Of course I would,’ I say.
Works about Motherhood, I test myself: Mary Kelly, Post-Partum Document, 1973–79. For the formative six years of her son’s life, the artist documented his development, from feeding regimes to language skills. I look it up. The pictures I find are of charts and diagrams, wool vests and nappy linings mounted in frames. Was it Kelly’s first child? I wonder. I flick, flick, flick. Was it a celebration of the astounding initial stage of existence which everyone forgets? Or was it a means by which to salvage some artistic purpose from the chaos and disruption of child-rearing? I see that the project ended around the time the boy started school, the commencement of his sovereign self. And this makes me less curious about the artist than I am about her son. I try to find some reference to what became of him. I can’t. And so it’s fair to presume, from the age of six to date, he has had a perfectly ordinary life, one in which the internet is not interested.
I place the timber-screw-box on the chest of drawers in my grandmother’s bedroom. I shunt it a few inches to the right. Now she is in the place where I last saw her; the exact spot where the dog lay down once we had let him back in after the wake.
The Dublin train is four carriages long with a disconcertingly wide gap between its position on the rails and the station platform. There is a very fat woman a few seats down and across the aisle. She is wearing a lilac blouse and a velvet scrunchie, but it’s her fatness which prevails over every other potentially defining feature. Apparently, there’s a specific point of fatness beyond which it’s virtually impossible to ever reduce back to normal. Apparently, very fat people are only ever able to lose one tenth of their volume, no matter the weight they start at, no
matter how hard they try.
The worse things get, the more onerous they are to put right again. But this applies to every aspect of life. How can it be that the very fat people didn’t know?
It’s Friday. Because Friday is the sort of day upon which you’re supposed to do this sort of thing. Go on nice trips, buy nice stuff, catch up with nice friends. As the train sets off, I realise I have positioned myself in the wrong direction. I am facing backward as we move forward. Now I will feel ever-so-slightly disorientated for the entire journey.
Almost as soon as the station is gone, the train enters a long tunnel and I am forced to assess my reflection in the window. I see how I decided upon completely the wrong clothes in spite of all the time I devoted to the decision. Until my reflection vanishes back into the grey cement city, I feel thoroughly awful.
I may have booked my train ticket, saved up the coins I needed to feed the station parking meter and decided, poorly, on what clothes to wear, but I don’t want to be here. This trip is nothing but a small concession to my mother. I agreed to go and I must not lie again, but there will be no niceness.
After everything was organised, I thought about the people I know in Dublin. I realised that almost every one is only a casual acquaintance. Ex-housemate, ex-classmate, ex-workmate. I suppose these acquaintanceships might have budded into something had I not been so stubborn about Facebook. Instead, to them, I am but a banal email address, a tiny profile picture of a taxidermy hedgehog. And it would be strange to phone or text and attempt to arrange a meet-up. They might agree but they’d also be surprised, and the meeting itself would be uncomfortable.