Sara Baume - Spill Simmer Falter Wither

Today, I can’t see a soul. There’s a row of cottages on the road, about a quarter mile away. I see flowerboxes on the windowsills, swimsuits on the washing line, cars with city registration plates and unnecessarily wide axles squeezed into the cottage-sized driveways, and I wonder why nobody appears to bother with the blue rope. Don’t children go adventuring any more? Trampling the bracken in pursuit of secret caves and hidden coves, pebbled beaches at the bottom of puzzling blue ropes? But of course, I forgot how nowadays children are taught to plonk their rugs right at the start of a beach, right beside where the car is parked and all the other families are similarly plonking. These children never had the Famous Five because it has since transpired that Enid Blyton was ever-so-slightly racist, or so I heard on the radio. These are the sort of fair-weather strangers of whom we are thoroughly afraid, the sort who rank comradeship over compassion.

I’ve never read you any Famous Five. I should, I think you’d like it. I’m trying to remember whether Timmy ever scoffed lumps of shit or savaged guileless walkers. I don’t think so.

Every dawn, I expect the weather to have broken overnight. As though it will wait until I’m not watching to break. But it doesn’t. We walk the refinery road to Tawny Bay. We eat porridge in the yard. And when the tide is right, we drive to the steep cliff and scramble the way of the blue rope. Now the days are longer than ever before, but like never before, I’m grateful.

I bring a thermos flask to the pebbled beach and stand it on the flattest rock. It’s too hot, I know, but I’ve always wondered what it feels like to drink coffee on the beach. Are you too hot too? You’re pumping out short, fast puffs of breath. I tow you by the collar to a rockpool, hoist you up and lower you in, cup my hands to splash your chest and belly. As the water resettles, you stay as you are. You’re watching the shrimp around your feet, snapping at the water, coughing and spluttering it out your nostrils.

You always come back to me in your own time. Now you lean against my crossed ankles beside the thermos rock. Behind us and beyond the holiday cottages, see the fields. Remember how they seemed to be green as we drove past them? Now see how, from here, they are taupe and mint, emerald and lime.

Interrupting the fields, there’s a golf course and a purposeless dispersal of bungalows. Barns, cars, bales and trees. Cows moving as imperceptibly as the hands of a clock, getting there without ever seeming to go. Now look out and see the ocean; the ocean’s interruptions. There’s a hunk of grassy rock all covered in cormorants. A lobster buoy. Sail boats very far away. A blue gallon drum, presumably attached to something beneath the surface. And a cargoship passing a floating lighthouse on its way into harbour.

Whenever I look at a cargoship, I start to picture all the different things enclosed within each container, then all of the components which went into making the things, and then all of the component’s components, and so on, into perpetuity. Like the picture on the tin of Royal baking powder. When I was about as tall as the letter slot and riding in the back of my father’s car, we were passing through town one day, driving along the main street, and I remember seeing a woman through the window, standing in her doorway. After a moment, she turned and went back inside, closing the door behind her, and then of course I couldn’t see her any more. I know it sounds like nothing much, but it was the first time I realised that other people’s lives go on. All of the time, out of sight and without me. It was the first time I realised that everything just goes on and on and on. Regardless, relentless.

Don’t you ever wonder what exactly people do, all day long, every day? The regatta revellers, April and the Polish hairdresser, the summer boys’ mums and dads? We see them power-walking along the shore front, queuing in the supermarket, zipping through the village in their fat cars. Then they pull into driveways and vanish behind front doors. Secure inside their magnolia dens with the venetian blinds tilted, what do they do?

I can imagine; I do imagine, but my father and Aunt are the only people I’ve ever actually been shut behind a door with, before you. And of course you’re not a person, I always forget that. Now it’s forty-seven years since I was shut up with Aunt, and my father hardly counts either. For most of the days each week, for most of my life, he left the house in the morning and didn’t come back again until night, and only some nights, not even all of them.

Every morning, he put on an ironed white shirt, a pinstriped tie, suit trousers and sensible shoes. My father was employed by a factory which manufactured confectionary. He was on the production line, and so he must have changed as soon as he arrived at work, and changed back again as soon as he clocked off. He never brought me to the industrial estate in the city to show me his factory, and so the picture I have in my head of little orange men and chocolate rivers isn’t real.

My father wasn’t an educated or well-heeled man, even if he dressed as if he was. He saved enough money every year to go on holiday, once a year. And every year, once a year, on holiday, he bought a plate. He didn’t retire until he was seventy-six. One morning he got up as early as he always had and ate his bran flakes and sausages as usual. He was wearing his shirt and suit trousers, but I noticed he’d substituted slippers for tie. After he finished his post-breakfast cigarette, he went back into his bedroom and closed the door. He did the same thing the next day, and the next. Sometimes I’d stand outside and listen. I could hear pencil scratching, scissor squeaking, cardboard sawing and the tinkling of a paintbrush being rinsed in a jar. After a couple of weeks, he opened the door and showed me what he was making.

It was a board game, colourful and complicated, yet also crude and logistically flawed. It fell far short of what I’d always imagined to be my father’s standards of precision, but of course, I didn’t tell him that. He made ninety-eight board games in the years between retirement and death, and I never told him. Some of them were reinvented versions of the classics. Cluedo on a cruise liner with a crew’s mess instead of a dining room and a guy rope instead of a candlestick. Snakes & Ladders in three dimensions with footstools and waterslides instead. The games my father invented for himself all had names which ended in an exclamation mark and sounded like a fairground ride or an ice-lolly: Scaffold! Golly Whizz! Scramp! I spent thousands of evenings playing his disorientating games with him, losing to my father’s ridiculous rules. And for thousands of evenings, I longed to be left to my books instead, to be far away inside their worlds and protected from my own.

I’ve never really seen the point of board games. They always take too much time to reach the finishing line, and then you either win or lose and that’s it. Nothing new is known. The game goes back into its box. Books have always been another kind of safe space, though if I’m completely honest then most of the things I learned from reading I’ve forgotten anyway. At least by playing the games, by losing, I gave my father some small volt of victory, some sense of accomplishment. I made him feel better, for a while, and that’s all the point there is, really. I owed him that, at least.

Before he retired, I knew very little of my father other than what I witnessed for myself. He spoke to me in a practical way, he never really told me things. I knew he always took a conference pear and a packet of custard creams to work. I knew he sat with his right ankle rested against the lid of his left knee. I knew he didn’t like the taste of plastic from the new milk bottles. I knew a hundred mundane facts, but nothing of his longings, of his past. Now I wonder if he ate all of the custard creams himself or did he share them? And if he shared them, who did he share them with?