by Sara Baume
‘It’s my ear . . . it was because of my ear. I can’t hear anything out my left side. It’s just blocked I think, but I can’t think clearly. I can’t think consequences.’
Mum crouches down and stretches an arm around me.
‘Oh Frankie,’ she says, ‘it’s probably just wax. How long has it been like that?’
‘I don’t know. Maybe a week, maybe less than a week, maybe just a couple of days.’
My mother rubs the palm of her right hand up and down, from my shoulder to my elbow, over and over. The soft weight and warmth is like a sedative. I try to remember the last time somebody touched me.
Works about Contact, I test myself: a kinetic sculpture by Conrad Shawcross, 2010. A wall-mounted electronic machine with three spindly metal arms, each bearing a light at its furthest point. In uneasy coordination, the arms extend, spin, and then come back in again to meet at the centre. Sometimes the lights touch, sometimes they fail to touch. And there is something agonisingly tender about their failure, about the human imperfection, and capriciousness, of machinery. The title of the piece: The Limit of Everything.
This wonderful sedative, I remember, is my mother. My mother has other people, other things to do, a past, even a future. I had forgotten that my mother has a future too.
My mother likes odd numbers and is suspicious of the even ones. She reads a new book every week and is bewitched by black holes in the universe. She describes herself as an optimist but she worries about everything—worries incessantly—worries on behalf of others when she feels they are not worrying adequately for themselves.
And my mother misses her own mother, my grandmother, immensely, who only has a past now; who is only allowed to be as we remember her.
When the hug is over, Mum ruins it; she says: ‘I can feel all your bones.’
The chemist’s is very bright but not in a warm, yellow kind of way. The light is blue like the inside of a fridge, a public toilet, an ambulance.
The waiting chair is already occupied. I linger at the door, pretending to examine a display of dental hygiene products as Mum goes to stand beside the cough lozenges and chewy vitamin tablets and condoms in the queue for the counter. The person in the waiting chair is an elderly woman. In spite of her elderliness, she has a wholesome appearance; straight shoulders, ruddy cheeks. The chemist calls her up and she receives a paper bag of pillboxes, and I wonder if it’s actually her bundle of medication which keeps her looking so wholesome. Do old women live too long now, beyond the point at which good health is sustainable by natural means, to the point at which a monthly bag-load of pillboxes is the only option for survival?
I think: by the time I’m old, pizzas will be delivered by drones and sensors will be able to detect when we break the law.
I think: by the time I’m old, nobody will be able to die any more.
But now I remember, of course, I’m never going to be old.
I can’t believe there are so many different types of floss. Not just waxed and unwaxed but some other kind called ‘silk ribbon’, as well as multi-packs of miniature two-pronged plastic forks with a short length of thread stretched from prong to prong. What kind of person buys a specific type of floss? What could possibly happen in life to cause this person to develop a preference? Or maybe everybody has a preference. Maybe I am the only person in the world who doesn’t give a fuck about floss.
My mother comes at me through the lip balms and travel sweets and mosquito candles. She is carrying a small, red box.
‘This’ll do the trick,’ she says.
In the bathroom, I stand in front of the mirror and Mum stands behind, like the scalp examination all over again.
‘Tip your head to the right.’
She holds the dropper over my earhole. Releases three drips of the liquescent decongestant and stoppers it inside my head. There isn’t any cotton wool so we use a minced-up tissue.
‘What in God’s name is that?’ my mother suddenly says.
‘That’s my desiccated slug,’ I say. ‘I suppose it must have been checking its belly.’
Now I watch as she peels it from the glass, tosses it into the toilet bowl. Splosh. And flushes.
I expect that Mum will tell me I have to return to the famine hospital. Instead, at six o’clock, she phones my father and tells him she won’t be back to make his dinner this evening. She goes to my grandmother’s kitchen instead, and starts to prepare a vegetable stew.
On my own in the sun room, I feel something rolling around inside my head. I root out the tissue and a great clot of wax emerges in its wake, a nugget of soft gold. I stare at the wax and tell myself: I will be good and grateful from now on. I will stop with all this dying.
We eat off our laps in the living room, in front of Coronation Street. As we eat, my mother tells me all the things that have happened since I left home and stopped watching it. Seven years of fake births, fake deaths, fake marriages and fake love affairs between the fake walls, around the fake bar. Afterwards, on the news, they are preparing to bury pilot whales in the blackmost layer of sand. The angry environmentalist is now only sad. ‘Hope has been abandoned for the final four,’ he says. They are being left to lie on the beach. Just one has made it back to sea.
‘Well that’s good anyway,’ Mum says, in her perpetual optimism.
‘But is it really?’ I say. ‘Now the surviving one is alone in an enormous ocean, perhaps wishing he hadn’t been rescued after all.’
‘But he’ll find more whales,’ she says. ‘Join a new pod.’
Neither my mother nor I remember the boxes in my grandmother’s bedroom until she is about to leave.
‘What’s inside them anyway?’ I ask on our way back down the hall.
‘Didn’t I tell you already?’ Mum says. ‘It’s her photos, pretty much all of them, from when I was a child right up to when you were. Just after she died I sorted through everything with the sisters. We meant to divvy them up but we only put them in order instead. I suppose we decided they couldn’t be separated; they only make sense all together.’
‘Can I look at them?’ I say. Because I suspect my mother will be more lenient on me after today, that she’ll trust me where I shouldn’t really be trusted.
I sit on the shabby sun room sofa and flick through the magazines my mother brought. All the wristwatches in wristwatch advertisements say the same time. I’ve never noticed that before. They all say ten past ten, as if the clock face is smiling.
This morning, the sun endures past dawn. I realise that it is August: the summer’s last stand.
At a distance, I spot it. A prickly auburn mound by the side of the road. The sky blazing a chemical blue backdrop to its broken spikes. I squeeze my brakes.
Over the hedge from where I pull up, an unplastered house sits atop a plot of freshly seeded grass. A father and son knock a sliotar to and fro.
Now they stop. Lower their hurleys. Walk to the gate to watch me.
‘What’s he doing, Daddy?’ the boy says. The father stares, suspiciously, in my direction.
The hedgehog’s mouth agog. Front teeth splintered, tongue half eaten by giant slugs. I fumble several shots, return to my bike as quickly as possible. But the spokes of the back wheel have managed to become caught up with a clump of flowering groundsel. I stand in the ditch and struggle to untangle my entangled wheel. A Corn Flakes reflector falls off. I swing my leg over and leave it behind, push off and pedal fast to the corner and before I turn, glance back. The hedgehog has shrunk to a thorny dot; the plastic cockerel catches a ray and winks. The boy and dad remain at their gate, waiting for me to disappear.
‘I think he was a she, okay?’ I hear the dad say.
Hedgehogs aren’t supposed to die in summer. They have such little time already. Their whole year is only two seasons long, and so they have to squeeze everything they need to do into the warmish months. They aren’t supposed to die in summer when they are at their most awake, when there’s so much to attend to. And especially now, in August, wh
en they’ve very nearly made it through to the end of another hedgehog year.
They are supposed to die in winter, in their sleep. Winter is supposed to carry off the old and weakly hedgehogs. Peacefully, painlessly.
Now I know: for every whale which survives a stranding, there is a hedgehog that never makes it back to hibernation.
I open the first box. The box labelled ONE. I rip back the duct tape as if it’s a sticky plaster, an old wound I can’t bear to expose. I pour the contents onto the floor, a sepia avalanche onto the green carpet. Sea green; I have decided now—not flora after all, but the unmistakeable shade of deep water beneath lightless sky. Now TWO, THREE, FOUR and there’s colour amidst the avalanche. Faces I recognise, my face. I make piles, like the chimp who thought he was a human. I spread my piles into islands on the sea floor. I nudge my islands, collide them into continents, as if I am their drift.
In the shower, I examine my bones, the ones my mother mentioned.
I used to try so hard to be this thin and now I find it bittersweet that I am even thinner still without having tried at all. Back then, I would have been triumphant. Now, I am only perplexed. Where did so much of me go, so effortlessly?
I used to be able to encircle the top of my right arm with my left hand, fingers touching. Every day, ten times a day, I’d check to be sure I was still able to do this, pushing up my sleeves, no matter how many sleeves I had layered on to insulate my showing bones. And today? I am only perplexed as to why I thought it mattered. I am only ashamed of all the knowledge and ideas which passed me by while I was busy obsessing about circumferences; about a body I never even liked in the first place.
The chemical blue sky which blazed a backdrop to my hedgehog prevails for the rest of the week. The temperatures tip over twenty-five degrees for what is the first time—and also surely the last—all summer. I lie on my back in the dying grass. We are both turning brown. From the sun room radio, volume turned up loud so that it reaches my wilderness, I hear a man say: ‘. . . clouds are the facial expressions of the atmosphere . . .’
I set out on foot for the shop. It’s twenty-seven degrees, the radio says as I am leaving. The road up ahead is a mirage. I think I see a fallen bird. From a distance, it’s hard to tell; maybe only a clump of tawny leaves in the ditch. But gradually, I am close enough to see that the clump is flailing, and closer still, that the clump is beady-eyed. I drop to my knees at the side of the road. I see that my clump is a small and beautiful and stupid bird—a sparrow—and that it has somehow managed to become fused to the melted tar of a freshly filled pothole.
I should know better than to help. I think of the whales, and of all the wounded creatures I tried to rescue in childhood. I can’t remember a single one that survived.
There was a family of thrushes who nested in the dainty woodland, and every spring, our cats would upscuttle the nests, displace the hatchlings. How many times did I try to salvage the peeping babies before they had their bones crunched by cat jaws? I’d wrap them in my mother’s linen napkins and feed them pureed worms through a surgical dropper. Once, I successfully nursed two thrush babies to a condition at which they might have been able to fly away, then I locked the cats into the house and left the birds in the woodshed with the doors opened wide. A few hours later, they were gone, and I was overjoyed. But before the end of the week I found a severed leg beneath the silver birch, some feathers caught in its lowest branches, fluttering, and the second thrush baby turned up a week later. It had fallen behind the woodpile and starved to death.
One-legged pigeons, bats with snapped or fractured wings, rabbits with myxomatosis. My sister and I grew up digging tiny graves. Dad had designated us a flower bed in which we were allowed to cultivate whatever we wished, but our plants were few and far between, wild or weed-smothered. Instead we used the flower bed for burying creatures, several deep, until we couldn’t dig a new hole without unearthing a crushed matchbox coffin, a ghoulish hamster skull.
I try not to think about the countless lives I failed to save as I prise my sparrow from the pothole, cradle it in my T-shirt, carry it home to my grandmother’s house.
Struggling bird clasped to stomach, I tip the gunge out of the basin, refill it with clean, warm water. On the back step, in the basin, in the water, in my hands, the sparrow’s plumage soaks and shrivels to nothing, a ball of wriggling gristle.
‘I can feel all your bones,’ I whisper.
I don’t understand why I remember how to distinguish the sex of a sparrow when I’ve forgotten so many other, more valuable things, and yet, I know from its dark nape that my bird is a male. My male’s mouth and nose are bunged, the black glue is everywhere, encrusted with dirt and vegetation. I try for some time before I realise that tar does not come out of feathers, and remember, of course, I knew this all along. Everybody knows this.
I place him in the shade of the garden shed. My sparrow lies, exhausted. And I hope he will die soon.
I forget my trip to the shop, return to my wilderness, the shade of my grandmother’s plum trees. But all afternoon, blaring above the words of my book, I can hear him beating his sopping wings, hammering the shrubbery down.
It’s almost dark before I fill the basin again. This time the water is nearly scalding. This time I know it’s useless; I do it anyway. I manage to clear enough mess from his beak to allow the sparrow to drink. He gulps and gulps, even though it’s scalding, and suddenly he goes still, relaxes, floats on the surface without my support.
The state of his plumage is even worse. Coated with moss, with dust, with buttercups. Now my sparrow looks costumed, almost foolish.
In the kitchen, I find an old dishcloth. In the yard, I find a heavy, smooth stone. I place the cloth over my sparrow and wish he’ll go quietly, but he doesn’t. For a second before I weigh the stone down, my sparrow recognises that his light and air have run out, and he pushes against me with his last shred of useless strength, and eternity passes before the tiny bubbles rising to the surface from beneath fabric and rock and tar and feathers eventually stop.
When I unwrap him, my sparrow’s beak is frozen open. Tongue extended, eyes vast with terror. I do not take a photograph. This is the rule, remember? I am not allowed to kill something and then steal its spirit as well. I only bury him in the compost heap. Bird bones are fine as fingernails. And back on the step, I sit with my arms folded around my knees and I cry indecently hard. I cry my throat raw and eyes puffed and head sore for a long, long time.
Have I cried out my deadness now?
I wake. And know. To get up is to be confronted by the continents of photographs on my grandmother’s bedroom floor. Pawed and strewn, utterly muddled.
I think: Mum is going to fucking kill me.
But of course she won’t. She’ll only be angry and sad and disappointed, and this will be worse, and I don’t know if I can stand it on top of every other time I’ve made her angry and sad and disappointed already. And so, I get up. I pad barefoot across the hall in only my vest. I fold my showing-bones into a crouch on the bottomless sea floor.
And begin, at last. To fix things.
The last photograph is easy; I know which box it belongs in as soon as I turn it over. My grandmother from the breastbone up, a jaunty regimental hat pinned at an angle to her sensible hairdo.
Here is London at the start of the Second World War; the day she entered the Women’s Royal Naval Service. She is nineteen and still smiles with her teeth showing. By the end of the war, most of the ones in the front rows had been knocked out: not by a bomb but a car accident—an ambulance which crashed into a crater. This is a fact that has proved helpful to me in the sorting of the muddled photographs. Some of those without a date scribbled on the back can be dated by whether or not my grandmother has opened her mouth to smile.
How beautiful she looks, but then everyone always says that about old photographs; it can’t possibly be that people were uniformly better looking in the past, but that grainy monochrome is more generally flattering
than crystalline technicolour, and because having your portrait taken was uncommon enough for people to bother dressing their best. Combing their hair just so, striking an elegant pose.
I place the photo in its place. I pause for a moment of silent appreciation: my grandmother’s radiant yet under-celebrated life.
I crush the old duct tape into a fist and jot a note to myself to buy more. There’s a dog-eared, mug-rimmed piece of paper on the kitchen countertop: my shopping list. Now it’s both sides of a page torn from a sketchbook. I fold and pocket it. Now that I have fixed things, perhaps I ought to replenish.
The dusty shelves of the village shop will not do this time. I drive to Lisduff and park beside the supermarket, in the shade of the trolley depot. I flip down the sun shield to assess my face for public consumption. It must surely be a magnifying mirror; here’s every pore and thread vein, every misdirected lash. I snap the mirror back into place and promise myself never to look in it again.
I refuse to take a trolley, even though I require a whole, torn-out sketchbook page’s worth of groceries, both sides. Trolleys are for housewives and old women. The supermarket is so cold. I trudge the aisles until I am barely able to lift my basket. I drag it to a self-service checkout despite the fact I am significantly in excess of the ten-item limit. The robotic voice inside the machine grows angry. ‘ITEM IN BAGGING AREA!’ it scolds me, repeatedly, even when I have everything bagged and am trying to pay.
‘But there’s nothing there,’ I say. I reason with it.
The attendant comes over and swipes her magic barcode.
‘Do you want some free copybooks?’ she asks.
I’d forgotten it’s copybook time of year. The old summer’s-end melancholy nips at my heels. There’s no school to go back to; no detail of my life will change come the onset of September, yet still, I feel the old trepidation.