by Sara Baume
My bedroom in the rented house I shared for most of these years overlooked a fire station. From my window I could see across the wall and into the yard behind the building where the fire engines parked when not in use, which seemed to be practically all of the time. I don’t remember a single fire, though in three years there must have been at least one. Instead I remember a long, low net stretched across the open expanse of concrete, and how, at all hours of the day and night, the firemen would play tennis.
I never went downstairs to join my housemates around the television. I cooked dinner later than everyone else and carried the plate up to my bedroom. I knew they must have thought me aloof, or a little bit eccentric, or maybe even unkind, but I didn’t care. Once the kitchen door swung shut behind me, I was alone, and so everything was okay.
In my room, night in night out, I watched the firemen play tennis beneath floodlights.
After college, I started working in the gallery and found myself surrounded by a whole new set of people who had not yet grown accustomed to my antisocial tendencies, who had not yet learned to expect me to say no, and stopped asking. I was invited to go drinking and dancing again, and so, I tried.
Works about Discomfort, I test myself: Tehching Hsieh, One Year Performance, 1980–81. From 7 p.m. on 11 April 1980 to 6 p.m. on 11 April 1981, Hsieh punched a time clock on the hour, every hour. At the end of the performance, Hsieh had 366 clock-cards, plus one photograph for every punch, and had not slept for more than sixty minutes straight in an entire year.
I think I know what discomfort is? I don’t.
The last time I went out at night in the city was almost a year ago. It began with anxiety, then I was pleasantly pissed for a couple of hours, and finally, around the point at which people started taking to the dance floor, I sobered and saddened and the old chant returned: I want to go home.
I was talking to an up-and-coming artist, a brilliant and sharp man I knew vaguely from exhibition openings. He was chattering away about the Viennese Actionists, telling me how he believed there was real depth and empathy in their barbaric work. It should have been a fascinating subject, but was, instead, curiously boring.
This is something I was beginning to notice about every brilliant and sharp person I’d met while working in the gallery: there always came a point in the conversation at which something about them dulled and blunted, at which they became no more or less fascinating, really, than Jess or Jink or Jane or Dad; than my grandmother had been, and my mother is. It was during this particular conversation that I started to understand that everybody’s pursuits are essentially useless, and that what I was trying to do with my life was probably perfectly useless too.
There’s a dead cat in the ditch this morning, clean but undoubtedly dead. Couched by brambles as if blown up and back a couple of feet by the bumper. I wonder is it the same one who bawls?
I read in the weekend newspaper that swallows and swifts and sand martins all fly at different levels of the sky. They eat the same insects, catch them by the same means, but they never have to compete for food because they have divvied up the atmosphere, agreed without need of negotiation, born knowing this ineffable rule. The swallows fly lowest, the swifts highest, the sand martins in-between. Nature’s air traffic control.
I had forgotten about the missing aeroplane, the inadequacy of human air traffic control. But this weekend, in the newspaper, it says that a section of wing has washed up on an island in the Indian Ocean, that the section appears to be from the same model of aeroplane as the missing one.
They’ve found it, I think. How disappointing.
This morning, when I go to fetch my bicycle, in the passageway formed by the shed wall and the hedge, I notice that the night webs have been broken. First I don’t feel them against my face; now I see the loose strands waving in the imperceptible breeze. I stand and stare. Did the spiders forget to repair the ones I broke yesterday? But they never forget. Or has someone passed through here before me this morning?
I’ve been preoccupied with the moths. Forgetting to worry about the noises I hear in the night—the ones I tell myself are pipes creaking, hunting cats, branches tapping windowpanes, calves in the field next door—but, maybe, aren’t.
I don’t take out my bicycle. I go back inside to my grandmother’s bedroom and lie down on the bottomless carpet with my camera still in one hand. I switch it on and scroll through the photos I haven’t downloaded yet. Fox, frog, hare, hedgehog, all of the killed creatures. Toppling from the sky to land at my feet.
Where are they now? If they fall in the road, the traffic breaks them down, and if they fall in the ditch, the elements; and, in both cases, their fellow creatures. The carrion crows and rats, even when it is a carrion crow or a rat. After I find them for the first time, I never notice them again.
How magnanimous of my killed creatures, to simply disappear.
On the day my grandmother died, the undertakers took her away almost immediately. As swiftly and efficiently as the County Council men cleared the fallen tree. Flesh and wood were all gone by the time I’d finished work and driven back from Dublin. Only flesh came back again, to be laid out on the bed in her Sunday best. In the corridor, my mother asked me if I wanted to go in.
This bungalow, which has become so familiar to me as an empty place, was, on that day, crowded with people. Family, as well as neighbours she’d thought hadn’t liked her, and friends she didn’t know she had.
‘No!’ I said. ‘I mean, I’d rather not. If that’s okay?’
And my mother, who always understands and, even when she doesn’t, forgives me and pretends to, said of course it was okay and could I please slice and plate up some of the fruitcakes instead?
Now I see the timber-screw-box atop her chest of drawers where I placed it. I pick it up. The grain of the lid traces a pattern of concentric circles, and there’s a tiny triangle at the heart of the smallest circle, an eye. I gaze into the eye for a while. I find the box is small enough to close my whole fist around.
No one asked, seventeen years earlier, on the day of our grandfather’s removal, whether Jane or I wanted to go up to the coffin and see him laid out. I suppose it had been agreed that we were too young, too easily perturbed. Instead I stood outside the funeral home holding my father’s hand. The queue of passing people, the sizzle of their whispers, the reassuring smell of his cigarette smoke.
I didn’t really know my grandfather; I wasn’t really upset. For the six years our lives overlapped—the first of mine and final of his—I didn’t see him very often, and in the years since, I’ve managed to mislay all but a single memory: this one from the day of his removal, when I slipped my hand free of my father’s and peeped through the doorway of the visitation room. I recognised my mother’s feet resting between the timber legs of a chair in a row of chairs, of feet. But my mother did not see me; every time a person stepped away, a new person took their place in front of her, and then I saw the coffin. A long, dark, wood box with its satin-lined lid lifted. The polished toes of my grandfather’s funeral shoes poking out one end, and the pale tip of his aquiline nose poking out the other.
My grandfather was a basking shark out at sea. With only his dorsal and tail fins exposed, the rest sequestered beneath the black surface. The entire central stretch of his corpse was obscured, but what I saw was still enough to wipe out every memory I had of it as a living body. And so I was afraid, on the day my grandmother died too, that if I went into her bedroom it would wipe out my memories all over again. It would blanch her essence from the shoehorn, the kneeler, the compost heap, the panda-bear-shaped pencil sharpener.
I could not bear to witness—to remember—my grandmother as a body, but not a being.
Works about Being, again, about Body, again, I test myself: Marina Abramović, Rhythm 0, 1974. Performance in a Neapolitan gallery. The artist set out a table, and on the table, a collection of objects. Items like soap and lipstick, bread and honey, a scalpel and a nail gun. Then she invited the audience
to use them on her body however they wished, and stood. Motionless, compliant. As she was unclothed, caressed, clouted, cut. What was the artist trying, without speaking, to say? You can do what you want to my body; my body is not me.
I open my eyes to my grandmother’s bedroom carpet. Something cracked and woke me, as if the bungalow is a forest and someone has just snapped a twig beneath their foot.
It was bright when I lay down here but now outside it’s dark; and dark—at this time of year—means late. I can’t believe I slept undisturbed for an entire day, but this must be the case; I can’t argue with darkness. I consider the last moments at which I was awake—the morning and the only thing that happened in the morning—the thing that sent me here. I remember the webs, and how they were broken.
I lie on the carpet and listen to the creaking pipes and branches tapping, calves rustling, twigs cracking, cats. I listen and listen and cannot be sure what any of the noises are any more.
I start to think it’s unusually dark, darker even than it would be in the dead of night. I check for my unfathomable light. It’s gone. I had believed it was intensifying. Instead, it’s disappeared.
But it can’t be. I get up, and move towards the switch by the door. My legs are watery, my head weighted down towards my watery legs, my eyes gunged with sleep. For no reason at all, a second before I reach the switch, I turn around.
And see. The reflection first. A white face in the window. Not mine. And in the corner of my grandmother’s bedroom, facing away from the light switch and towards the turbine, across the valley. A grey head. A hunched and bony back.
I am out the front door within seconds. It slams shut, locks me out. I am lucky I left the car keys in the ignition; this small mercy of my carelessness. I don’t untie the dog string; I wrench it loose. Its frayed pieces disintegrate, finally, in my hands and fall to the gravel and my tyres gnash over them as I drive away.
As fast as the throttle can carry me, and the car’s rusted steel, its dust-steeped upholstery. Through the no man’s land of countryside by night, the blacked-out trees and fields and hedges. Only the lighted houses remaining, the lemon blush of their inhabited windows.
Works about Inhabitation, I test myself, for calm and for focus, to find a bolthole for my galloping mind: Rachel Whiteread, Place (Village), 2006–08. Tens of old doll’s houses atop gentle, geometric hills against the gallery wall, stacked up from unostentatious boxes. And the houses rigged with miniature electric bulbs, and the gallery blinds drawn, its bigger bulbs doused. How many thousands of times have I ignored a scene like this in real life? Because, sometimes, replicas are more persuasive than what they replicate. Because, all of the time, art is the absolute.
In Lisduff, I park in a concrete yard down an alleyway off the main street, a spot where I’d sometimes leave the car when I used to work in the off-licence. Now I stare at this grey place in the grey light. Why did I come here? I thought I was heading for the famine hospital. If I’d driven there instead, as I should, I’d be in my child-bed now, beneath the roof window and the painted-over stars and the chest X-ray. I’d be safe and warm, in the foothills of sleep. How easy and rational that would have been.
And yet, when I wake up tomorrow morning, the embarrassment would be waiting for me. Crouched beneath the lumpish armchair, poised to throw itself under my wheels. And I would have to put on my clothes and shoes and the forsaken version of myself I helplessly revert to in the presence of my parents, and descend their staircase to face the torrid, sentimental fuss of the night before, the morning-after realisation that I’m too old to run home, that I have failed utterly at adult life, at independence.
Seven years, and I never once successfully used a washing machine.
If I’d driven there instead, all this would have ended as it began.
So I drove here. I stay here. This concrete yard, these concrete walls. A boarded-up window, an abandoned shopping trolley. In the grey moonlight.
I check, and check again, and check afresh, that all the buttons in the car are pushed down. I push them again anyway, just in case it’s possible they can go further. I can’t check if the boot is locked unless I get out. I know it is, still I cannot stop myself from imagining I hear its click and creak, see its reflection lifting into the rear-view mirror followed by the reflection of the face which lifted it, and the face’s feet climbing over the back seat, and the face’s hands reaching for my throat.
So I step outside and check the boot. It’s locked. Of course it’s locked.
I scoot back into the driver’s seat, push down the driver’s button. It takes less than ten seconds for the voice to return. Check it again! the voice hisses at me through the dark. Check it again! Check it again!
In the car, I close my eyes and see Jink.
I had been nosey about his life. I had wanted to touch it. But I should have been kind. I should have sat down with the old man and listened. I think about all the lonely people out there, alone. I think about what a prodigious crowd they’d make if only they got together, if only they knew each other.
I realise I am not kind.
Works about Comradeship, I think of another one: Francis Alÿs, Patriotic Tales, 1997. A camera set up above a large stone plaza somewhere in Mexico City, an oblique aerial view, a film. The artist walking a perfect circle inside the plaza and a sheep following him, unerringly. With every circuit, a new sheep appears, joins the cavalcade, follows. A new sheep, a new sheep, a new sheep. Until the circle has closed itself.
How many hours does it take to train an animal to do that? Or maybe they don’t need to be trained at all, just like the humans don’t.
I can’t force my brain to sleep, but manage to keep my eyes closed until it is light again. The supermarket opens at seven. I don’t know why I know this because I’ve never been in any supermarket earlier than nine. But perhaps we are programmed to know the supermarket opening hours without ever having to consult one another, like the swallows and swifts and sand martins.
My camera and the timber-screw-box are the only things I carried with me from my grandmother’s bungalow. This was not something I thought about; they just happened to still be in my hands. Now they are on the passenger seat, looking on. I transfer them to the pockets of my cardigan. By the luck of my carelessness: my bank card is in the glove compartment. Maybe this is a sign; maybe some incomprehensible force is subtly endorsing what I am about to do.
I go first to the cashpoint. I collect no receipt. I roam the aisles with a basket dangling from my forearm like a tiny cable car. I’ve never seen the place so deserted, a scene from after the Apocalypse. But I must resist this impulse to lose control; I must pace calmly from aisle to aisle and try to picture what I might have brought with me had I not fled; had I known before fleeing where I was going to go.
After I’ve paid and before I leave, I visit the supermarket toilet, peel the annoying circle of foil from inside the toothpaste cap. Crack open the packet of my new toothbrush and christen it with froth and spit.
I go back to the car but don’t get in. I only check for the final time that all the buttons are lowered, the doors locked. Now I carry my plastic bag of belongings to the bus stop, stand by the red pole, and wait.
A man in the seat next to me. The laces of his sneakers are very loose. He doesn’t look out the window or listen to headphones or read the newspaper lying folded in his lap. How curious that he chose to buy that tabloid, to carry it with him, and yet now he can’t summon the will to unfold it, to pick a page, to read. He sleeps a little, checks his phone. I can’t see what he’s looking at, only the thumbprints on his screen, like contours on a map.
Almost everybody on the bus is only staring. Are they thinking about the thing they are staring at? Making sky studies, crowd studies, ditch studies. Are they thinking about something else entirely? Or somehow managing not to think at all?
Maybe everybody on the bus is meditating.
Rain scratches the glass.
A smudged-sky morn
ing, the terminus of summer. Weather to match my feelings, as I always expected it to.
There’s a fragrance of deep-fat fryer on the bus as though everybody’s just got chips even though we haven’t stopped for over an hour. According to my ticket, the ferry sails from Dublin port late this evening, and so there must be more stops to make, for more passengers, for real chips. There’s the sound of a baby crying even though I can’t see any babies. And out the bus window, here is my dead world come true, my whole dead world in motion. Mud lawns and milk parlours, caliginous fog obscuring a relief which might or might not rise into a mountain. Abandoned building sites, boarded-up houses in fenced-off estates, the rusted chutes and silos of a seed-processing factory, the base of a stolen pump outside a derelict petrol station, and a lorry stacked with telegraph poles, a portable forest. Another lorry, this one decked with empty cars, and all the moving cars, full and half full, and all the driving zombies with their laptops and toddlers and uncompromising expressions fixed across steering wheels and through shatterproof glass, acknowledging only road and speed and time and progress.
On the bus, I am meditating too, against my will. I don’t have a book and I don’t have my MP3 player. I try to remember the tracks saved inside it and sing them to myself; I realise I know all the words to ‘Zimbabwe’ by Bob Marley and the Wailers and no other song. I remember that ‘Zimbabwe’ is my favourite song and I have never admitted this to anyone. I search the lyrics for something arousing, but there’s only rather a lot of impassioned stuff about emancipation. And I realise it’s the melody which moves me; my weakness for ‘Zimbabwe’ has nothing whatsoever to do with the words.