Sara Baume - Spill Simmer Falter Wither

My father was eighty-three when the sausage segment stoppered his windpipe. I’d expected that having reached such an age, he’d die of some lazy, predictable thing, in a bed with last words and an emphatic rattle. But life never misses an opportunity to upscuttle us. Life likes to tell us it told us so. Even when we are so very old that nothing is alarming any more. So old we sit and watch, and whatever it is, we see it coming. My father had no last words, or at least his last words were spoken too long before the time he died to be remembered, to be cherished, and instead of rattling he banged his fist on the kitchen table, and with the bang still ringing, he raised his hands to clutch his throat.

My father’s name was the same word as for the small insectivorous passerine birds found most commonly photographed on Christmas cards, with orange-red blushed breasts as though they’ve been water-boarded by molten amber and stained for life. But my father’s name is just another strange sound sent from the mouths of men to confuse you, to distract from your vocabulary of commands. It doesn’t mean anything; it doesn’t matter.

Come here, I’ve something to show you.

I’ve kept this book close since I was a boy. As a boy, it helped me to work out certain of my uncertainties about the world. Fairy Tales from Across the Globe is what the cover title says, now let me show you the page I’ve visited most. See the mountain and the meadow. See the humpback footbridge. Now here are the three Billy Goats Gruff, and beneath the stone-clad arch down in the damp and gloom, here is the crouching troll. His nose is warty and his brow is bushy. His eyes have a flash of crazy in them. They are cast up to the elegantly skipping goats. When I was a boy and came to this page, I thought of the children passing on their way to school and felt a twinge of camaraderie with the crouching troll, as though I’d discovered my species. There’s only one picture, still sometimes I’m convinced that I see him crouching outside of the pages. On the living room windowsill, beneath the log tarp, low down in the kitchen nook.

Sometimes it makes me chuckle and sometimes it makes me queasy to see how closely I’ve grow to resemble this troll as an adult, as an old man.

You sit in the backyard, on the gravel in a scrap of sunshine, your ears ruffling in the breeze and all the rusted roots gleaming through your ragged coat.

I see your maggot nose twitching. I smell the day’s confections baking in the grocer’s kitchen. The sickly wafts of croissant and apple pie, two different continents together in one oven. What are the other smells, the ones too wispy for my inadequate human senses? Can you smell the compost toasting in the plant pots, the heated wax of the bike tarpaulin, the trace of a cat who passed in the night?

Maybe I was wrong about the seasons. Some sort of summer arrived during the early hours. We woke to the transcendent stillness of a fine day, the first fine day. Bright rays poured through the uncurtained bedroom window, triumphing over the toadflax. We tripped the stairs two at a time, pushed the back door, hopped over the welcome mat. We roused the garden spider who lives between the ropes of the rotary clothes-line and has a gold-flecked abdomen like a tiny amulet. She rose to find the dew already evaporated from the filaments of her flimsy home, a baby bluebottle freshly throttled by her silken entrapments. Dangling alongside the amulet spider, the load of washing I pegged up over a week ago and watched being re-washed by the elements several showers over, is finally dry.

For the first time all summer, I carry our breakfast bowls out to the patio table and we eat to the noise of seagulls barking and night lorries roaring up refinery hill, reaching their destination. I lean back in the patio chair. The muscles of my face droop and my jaw cocks open. On the glass of the tabletop, there’s a bowl of inappropriately winterish porridge, a cup of pungent coffee, a packet of liquorice flavour papers stuck to the flap of a tobacco pouch, my Amber Leaf. The first time I smoked, I was fifty-five-and-three-quarters. Too old for beginning to experiment with injurious substances, but just the right age for taking up a habit that encourages death. I knew exactly how to assemble my first cigarette, I’d watched my father do it ten thousand times. A fat pinch of softly wizened shag, a roll between the middle fingers and thumbs of both hands in smooth co-ordination. I’d trouble getting the perfect turn. My father always made it look effortless. After a few attempts I managed to seal the paper, to pop the roach in, to light. Then I propped it in the ashtray to smoke itself out. Amber Leaf was my father’s brand; liquorice was his dubious choice of papers, and all I wanted was to breathe the companionable smoke. Yet with the smell, a certain dull gnawing inside me eased, and I stopped picking the tough skin around my fingernails. With the second cigarette I rolled, it wasn’t enough to inhale the air above as it smouldered itself to a stub. I lifted it to my lips. Sucked, swallowed. And then I felt a little rush, a little swimmy-headed, a little better.

It was only once I’d started smoking for myself that I realised I never found where my father tore his roaches from. When he was alive, I never came across a single piece of soft card with a tiny rectangle wrought from it, whereas I am forever looting the biscuit and cereal and tissue boxes, slowly smoking a trail through my paperback book jackets.

Now the sun’s full up and the backyard’s a-twinkle. A pigeon settles on the stone fence. Its feathers are palest mauve, the colour of forest fruit yoghurt. It has a plastic tag around its right ankle and seems to be watching, checking to see if I’m the human it knows, if this is the backyard where it left its coop. You don’t chase it; you never chase birds. I see how bewitched you are by furred things in the undergrowth and it always makes me wonder, why not birds? You’ll squeeze your head down a rabbit hole, convinced your body can be contracted to follow. Yet you seem to know instinctively that you can’t fly.

Look, the buoys seem polished again. The sunlight’s washed away their slime. Even my dried clothes, my moth-eaten wardrobe of black and brown and grey, even my faded bath towel, look beautiful this morning. The night lorries have arrived, the amulet spider is having baby bluebottle for her breakfast, the business of the salon commences for the day. How strange to think that a few yards through a wall and over a parquet floor people are being shampooed, tinted, plucked, waxed. This makes me remember my calluses, so I remove my socks, take out my penknife and set about the improbably enjoyable task of scissoring the dead yellow meat from my feet. You sniffle them up and chew as though they were chunks of squeak toy, and a child screeches, somewhere way off in the distance, and I wonder was it a screech of joy or a screech of panic, and I wonder how to tell the difference. I wonder if other people can tell the difference. I roll another cigarette, and you breathe deep the second-hand smoke, the croissants and apple pies, the absent cat.

And our pigeon coos, soulfully.

Have I told you about my birthday? I’ve only ever had one, but it happened around this time of year, during summer, on a day of storms which followed the first spell of proper sun. A Wednesday, I think. It wasn’t long after Aunt died, and so it must have been the year I turned ten.

My father didn’t go to work. He ate his bran flakes, his sausages. Then he told me it was my birthday and took me to the zoo, or was it a wildlife park? Maybe it was a wildlife park. At the zoo or wildlife park, he held his unfolded umbrella up. I could feel the raindrops seeping through my sleeves and even though it was summer, even though the rain was warm, the goosebumps rose on my arms like a cold rash.