Sara Baume - Spill Simmer Falter Wither

From your sentry on the windowsill, you watch your unfettered fellows trotting the bird walk. You bark and bark yet they never seem to see you back. The living room is cast to darkness by the outside’s bright; you’re but a sparkle on the glass. Do you see the mullet suckling at the water’s surface, snatching for midges? And the old men with girlish fishing rods and packets of white sliced pan? They’re balling bread onto their hooks and floating it on the ripples, feet dangling over the shore wall like gnomes by a garden pond. I rarely see them catch a mullet. With or without reward, they fish. I’ve seen the bread balls snatched by greedy ducks and the hooks snap into their beaks as they try to fly. Only then do the old men reel their broken lines in and gather their gear, drop their feet to the path and shamble away.

And the snapped lines collect eelgrass and litter until the duck grows too weak to cart its monstrous load. Then it lies down in the ripples, its loyal mate forced to watch as it’s slowly drawn under.

See the shelducks and little egrets, the cygnets and swifts. You see every bird the local twitcher misses, although you can’t name a single one.

At dawn, all the places I thought I knew so well are different countries. Damp and rumpled as though rinsed and shook. Our early walks up the refinery road always follow your aimless course of indecipherable landmarks, from a pigeon feather to a smashed snail, from scent to shining scent.

Today, inside the tree tunnel at the end of the sea front, it’s exactly the stage of summer at which the leaves are such a yellow shade of green that they glow, or seem to be glowing. Today, you tow me through the glowing leaves to where there’s a slipway and a boathouse. This is the village rowing club. The boathouse is a prefab painted a coniferous shade of green to flush with the foliage. The slip is slimy concrete. While you are sniffing a spool of fox foul as delicately as though it were a fine cigar, I spy through the window to the wooden yawls laid out on racks, capsized, with their oars amputated and removed.

All winter, the prefab stays locked. The window clots with cobwebs, nobody comes. The yawls hibernate, like big brown bears with polished backs in dark dens. But now it’s summer, the season of regattas. The boathouse is garnished by bunting and every second Sunday, a marquee goes up, a loudspeaker is nailed to a post, a starter pistol is loaded with blank caps, and the rowers come.

My father used to have a shabby rowboat, have I mentioned it before? Have I already told you about the old man’s doorbox? It was roped to a rusted rung along the shore wall and it used to dash itself against the stones in wild weather almost as if it was trying to break itself, or perhaps to break away. After he died, I cut my father’s doorbox loose and I don’t know whether it drifted off or simply sunk into the mudflats.

From the window we watch the handsome boats skimming across the bay between their markers, the rower’s heads lined up as targets on a coconut shy, pumping time like synchronised pendulums. The markers are gallon drums, strung together into a bobbing boundary. The races tempt a straggle of revellers to the shore wall. I can tell the true enthusiasts from their wolf-whistles and binoculars, whereas most of them are wielding choc-ices and coke cans instead, more entertained by the sport of putting things into their mouths than the rowing.

Here in our aerial seat, we are ever uprooted and apart. We are ever looking down on life, at sun visors and bald pates and umbrellas. The rowing club marquee sends a perfume of pig meat coasting over the village and up to meet us. Can you smell it? Sausages blistering against barbeque coals. You lift your head to the opened crack, a crack just wide enough for smells and sounds and breeze but not quite so wide that you could dive-bomb an unsuspecting innocent on the street below. You are concentrating hard on the sausages. Your thousand-mile stare stops dead at the marquee. The drool falls, snares on your beard and swings. We can’t go out to join the revelling, I’m sorry. The regatta is for families. See the kids in miniature life-jackets all blown up like rubber bath toys? See the parents hanging onto a pudgy arm lest a sudden gust capture their balloon child and send them surfing to the trees? It’s for families, not for us. We can only hide here and watch the yawls and the pendulums, the gobblers and gawpers and gabbers.

As evening sneaks in, we go down to the kitchen. I clank the pan onto a hob and fetch a packet of sausages from the fridge. I can’t bear the fatty lumps which squeak against my teeth like polystyrene and I can’t bear the way each end puckers to an unfryable twist, but I like the ritual of Sunday sausage cooking. I like having a calf-high, furred and dribbling excuse to perform it for. I chop your share into easily swallowable cylindrical segments. I extract all the gristly bits from my own sausages with the filleting knife, drop them to your bowl. Now I lean beneath the lintel of the back door with my coffee cup in one hand, a cigarette in the other and you at my feet. Together we wait for the pan to cool.

The tomato plants are sleeping outside now. Perhaps they look a little hardened, fruitless but in flower. Against the stone fence in their sunless sun spot, the peas have yet to clasp their sticks and probably never will, not now. Their leaves are drab, their roots drowned dead in the gritty black scum of the bag. Why does everything either starve or drown? Always either too much or too little, always imbalance. From the doormat at dusk, we hear the race commentator still calling names and numbers and progress reports, still breathing too loudly into the microphone. I’ve never seen what he looks like but his disembodied voice is almost godlike in the way it booms from nowhere and reaches everyone, in the way it’s terribly indistinct but probably trying to tell us something.

Now the pan is cool, ready for you to slather. The steel scrapes against the lino as you lick, and the sound it makes is like tired boots dragging the last few yards home.

My father died of a sausage.

I haven’t told you before because it’s a stupid kind of death. It’s the death of fables told by over-protective parents to caution their children against things which seem humdrum and harmless, to teach them something of the complicated grown-up ways of fearing. There’s the fable of the little boy who had his head knocked off by a lamppost because he stuck it out the upstairs window of a double-decker bus. Then there’s the little girl who tried to pet a lion at the zoo and had her arm munched, right up to the shoulder. But death by sausage is the fable told by adult persons to their own discarded mums and dads, for whom choking is the only crummy kind of peril left to confront them on a daily basis.

My father is the man you can smell all over the house, his house, but never find. You’ll smell his dead skin cells in the leather bind of never-opened books and swept beneath the never-lifted rugs. You’ll smell his dead breath, sausage scented, through the cracks in the roof plaster and the draught from the keyhole of the shut-up-and-locked room. You’ll smell him most of all in the feet sweat pong of my slippers; here the stench is so strong I can smell it too. The slippers are excessively big for me, have you noticed? Even though my feet are uncommonly long and flat to balance the plundering mass of my limbs and pork of my gut, my father’s feet were longer and flatter still; they seemed to reach the full diameter of his unfolded umbrella. When I wear his slippers I must slide my heels along the carpet and grasp my toes to the tatty insoles. Still, I wear them, my incommunicable sense of superstition trumping comfort. Still, I hang two towels on the bathroom rack and stand two brushes in the toothbrush jar. I know the stagnated spit that festers at the bottom is juice of my gums alone, but still.