Sara Baume: Spill Simmer Falter Wither

The kennel keeper points to a copper-coated cocker spaniel in a cage with a baby blanket and a burger-shaped squeak toy. The spaniel looks up as we pass and I see a pair of pink punctures in the droop of his muzzle. ‘Vicious little bugger. Had to prise his jaws loose and got myself bit in the process. Won’t be learning his way out of a nature like that. Another day, y’know, and he’d a been put down.’

I nod, even though the kennel keeper isn’t looking at me. I picture him at home in a house where all of the pot plants belong to his wife and the front garden’s been tarmaced into an enormous driveway. His walls are magnolia and his kitchen cupboards are stocked with special toasting bread and he uses the bread not only for toasting, but for everything.

‘Any good for ratting?’ I say.

‘Good little ratter alright,’ the kennel keeper says, ‘there he is, there,’ and now I see he is pointing at you.

You’re all on your own in a solitary confinement kennel beside the recycling bins. There’s a stench of old meat, of hundreds and hundreds of desiccated globules stuck to the inside of carelessly rinsed cans. There’s dust and sweet wrappers and cardboard cups whirling in from the whoomph of traffic passing on the road. There’s the sound of yipping and whinging from around the corner and out of sight. It’s a sad place, and you are smaller than I expected.

You growl as the kennel keeper grabs you by the scruff and buckles the collar, but you don’t snap. And when you walk, there’s no violence, no malice in the way you move. There’s nothing of the pariah I expected. You are leaning low, nearly dragging your body along the ground, as though carrying a great lump of fear.

‘Easy now,’ the kennel keeper tells you. ‘Easy.’

What must I look like through your lonely peephole? You’re only the height of my calf and I’m a boulder of a man. Shabbily dressed and sketchily bearded. Steamrolled features and iron-filing stubble. When I stand still, I stoop, weighted down by my own lump of fear. When I move, my clodhopper feet and mismeasured legs make me pitch and clump. My callused kneecaps pop in and out of my shredded jeans and my hands flail gracelessly, stupidly. I’ve always struggled with my hands. I’ve never known exactly what to do with them when they’re not being flailed. I’ve a fiendish habit of picking the hard skin encircling each fingernail, drawing it slowly down into a bloodless hangnail. When I’m out in the world and moving, I stop myself picking by flailing, and when I stand still I fold my hands fast over my stomach. I knit my fingers in restraint. When I’m alone inside and unmoving, I stop myself picking by smoking instead.

In certain lights at certain angles, reflecting certain surfaces, I am an old man. I’m an old man in the windshield of the car and the backside of my soup spoon. I’m an old man in the living room window after dark and the narrow mirrors at either side of the tall fridge in the grocer’s. Whenever I go to close the curtains or lean in to reach for milk or margarine or forest fruit yoghurt, I’m an old man. My brow curls down to tickle my eyeballs, my teeth are stained ochre, my frown lines are so well gouged they never disappear, not even when I smile. Although I’m impervious to my own smell, I’m certain I smell old. More must and porridge and piss, I suspect, than sugar and apples and soap.

I’m fifty-seven. Too old for starting over, too young for giving up. And my name is the same word as for sun beams, as for winged and boneless sharks. But I’m far too solemn and inelegant to be named for either, and besides, my name is just another strange sound sent from the mouths of men to confuse you, to distract from your vocabulary of commands. There’s a book on one of my book shelves, now its pages are crinkled by damp, but it’s about how birds and fish and animals communicate, and somewhere it says that animals like you are capable of learning to understand as much as one-hundred-and-sixty-five human words, roughly the same as a two-year-old child. I’m not so sure, but that’s what the book with crinkled pages says.

There was a time when my hair was black as a rook with flashes of electric blue in certain lights at certain angles, now it’s splotched with grey like a dishevelled jackdaw. I wear it fastened into a plait and flung down the stoop of my boulderish back, and sometimes I think that if I had people I bantered about with, they’d nickname me CHIEF for the wideness of my face and the way I wear my womanly hair, for the watery longing in my wonkety eyes. Only I don’t have anybody I banter about with. My confinement has walls and windows and doors instead of PVC-coated diamonds, but still it’s solitary. Still I’m all on my own, like you.

Everywhere I go it’s as though I’m wearing a spacesuit which buffers me from other people. A big, shiny one-piece which obscures how small and dull I feel inside. I know that you can’t see it; I can’t see it either, but when I pitch and clump and flail down the street, grown men step into the drain gully to avoid brushing against my invisible spacesuit. When I queue to pay at a supermarket checkout, the cashier presses the backup bell and takes her toilet break. When I drive past a children’s playground, some au-pair nearly always makes a mental note of my registration number. 93-OY-5731.

They all think I don’t notice. But I do.

‘In!’ The kennel keeper tells you.

We are three of us standing on the compound’s concrete, and you are refusing to climb into the car. The triangular man is beginning to bristle. It must be almost lunchtime and so his mind’s already sitting in the canteen, already eating fat sandwiches on his mouth’s behalf. He hoists you from the ground and plonks you onto the back seat.

‘Right you are now,’ he says, his voice is toneless, insincere. ‘Best of luck.’

You try to resist the slam of the door, spinning your head around to check for other ways out. What does my old car smell like? Like salt and oil and dust mites, stale popcorn and wizened peel? The back seat is covered by a red blanket and the fibres of the blanket are embedded with sand. Have you ever seen sand before? I don’t expect so. You bow your head as though contemplating all of these most minuscule and pearliest of stones. In the driver’s seat, I’m fastening my belt, slotting key into ignition. As the engine begins to putter, you lift your head to the rear windscreen. You watch as the flat-headed cabin shrinks to the size of a photograph on a postcard, a picture on a stamp, and now gone.

Now we are driving from the city and into the suburbs. There are cherry trees lining the roadway in full flower, spitting tiny pink pinches of themselves into the traffic. See the rhododendron and laburnum getting ready to rupture, the forsythia and the willow, weeping. There’s enough laurel to hedge a stadium arena, and every time we speed up, everything is transformed to a mulch of earthy colours and overstretched shapes. But you back away from the mulch, and stretch. You clamber into the front of the car, over the handbrake and the passenger seat. You crouch beneath the dashboard with the heat of the bonnet pressed to your back and the gush of tarmac just a fine layer of steel beneath. Now the suburbs become dual carriageway, the cherry blossoms subside to central embankments of overgrown lawn. The shorter grass is frothed with daisies. And it’s a handsome little piece of wilderness, a tiny refuge of imperfection.

But you won’t come out to look. You stay beneath the dash with only your nose protruding. The particular way it moves reminds me of a maggot squirming. What are you whiffing through the air vents? Pollen and petrol and painted plaster? Now we are passing houses with people inside and shops with goods inside and churches with chalky gods inside, now we are rounding a roundabout and pulling off onto the back road for home. Brace yourself for the potholes and corners, the bump and slide. You hit your head against the glove compartment and grunt, a perfectly hog-like grunt. Now if your lost eye was inside your maggot nose you’d see a field of rape at its yellow zenith against a backdrop of velvet grey, which is the sky. You’d see the rape caving into neverending blue, which is the sea. Has your maggot nose ever seen the sea before? I don’t expect so. We’re following the curve of the bay, we’re parking with two wheels abutting the footpath outside a salmon pink house, which is my father’s salmon pink house and my solitary confinement, which is home.