Sara Baume - Spill Simmer Falter Wither

The livestock ship sails from the harbour every Wednesday. It’s bound for Italy, I think.

Thursday passes, Friday, now Saturday. We don’t walk to Tawny Bay. Not even at dawn. We don’t scramble the way of the blue rope. We venture no further than the backyard. We can’t. We have to stay here, out of sight.

In the backyard, I rake the gravel. I’m careful to rake around the tufts of grass you like to nibble. And the weeds, the weeds which chose me, which chose us. I uproot the poison ivy, chuck it away. Next spring, I’m going to scatter grass-seeds. I’m going to see how much of a lawn I can plant before the pigeon eats it, our soulful pigeon.

A bee is circling the buoys, trying to figure out what sort of flowers they are. It isn’t one of the chubby bumbles which everyone loves. It’s a wasp-like honey bee instead; it carries baskets of pollen hooked around its backmost legs. I stop raking to watch. You’re chewing a piece of gravel. Even though I’ve told you ten times not to, still you are chewing. Now you swallow and watch with me. The honey bee chooses a blue float and touches down for just a second before flying on again, indignantly. I read in the newspaper that they can see blue and lavender, but none of the other colours. None of your greys and yellows, none of my everything. And they are dying, so the newspaper said, the bees. Perhaps next spring, I’ll plant flowers as well. Every open bud is a bee fed, I’d forgotten that.

Avoiding the weeds and tufts and buoys, the rotary line, the patio table, I’m trying to rake the gravel into smooth lines. I want it to look like a Zen garden, like the picture in my library book, remember? A floor of stones in a swirling pattern of perfectly parallel ridges. But it doesn’t. There are so many obstructions it’s just a mess. Now one of the jackdaws from the chimney pot hops down to the gutter, peers over the edge of the roof and croaks, as though it is taunting me, taunting my dismal attempt to impose order.

Now I kick your football against the stone fence, against the wall. It smacks into buoys, upsets pots, desolates my ridges. You try to prance behind it but the yard is too small. You lose interest, bit by bit. You cock your leg to piss against the tarp of the log pile and I pick your shit off the gravel before it gets levelled by the ball. I handle it in the way butchers handle raw meat at the deli counter, a plastic bag tied in a knot around my wrist. But I don’t mind because the weather is hot, the turds shrivel into liquorice sticks.

I’m guessing by Wednesday the calves have arrived in Italy. Would it take three days, or not that long, or longer? Is it only three days since we ventured out? It feels like a lifetime, like the lifetime of a creature which lives extremely long, like an ornamental carp in a Japanese Zen garden.

You on the sill. Me in the armchair. Facing the bay.

We see a car with four bicycles strapped above the tow bar, a kayak straddled across the roof rack and a caravan bumping along behind. It jostles up like a shiny-shelled beetle bent out of shape by its alien attachments. Now it jerks to a stop and gobs a family out. The mother takes photographs of the horizon. The children sit along the shore wall tossing fairy bun crumbs to the gulls. And the father adjusts his strappings, bends his attachments back into shape. See the summer whose arrival we waited for so patiently; it doesn’t belong to us. It never belonged to us.

The salon’s shuttered and locked. The hairdresser’s gone on her holidays and taken the hum of hood dryers with her, the tap of high heels, the tittle-tattle of female voices. I’d always thought these noises irritating, now it suddenly seems they were a kind of comfort. The phone in the salon is ringing, ringing, ringing through the floorboards, jingling like a giant wind-chime suspended in a draught. I try to drown it out by talking, by telling you about the dreary things we do and the blandest of changes beyond the window. I used to tell my father things like this, later when he chose to remain mute and it was left to me to chip away at the surface of our shared silences. Even though I knew he wasn’t listening, it was still hard, it was a bit like stinging myself, over and over. After he died, I continued to ramble. I’d point my face to the ceiling and address him, but it was easier because I knew he couldn’t really hear. And now it’s easiest of all with you. Now there’s no need for the weighing and measuring of words, no need to listen to the way they stand in the air after my voice has finished. I tell you of the new rib tied to a rusted rung, the tower crane raised over refinery hill, the man who practices casting his lead off the pier at high tide. I tell you anything, so long as it staves the smog off, so long as it gags the sentence that shrills in my brain. I KNOW WHERE YOU LIVE it shrills, I KNOW, I KNOW.

What do you suppose she meant by that? What form of fear was she determining to instil, and am I fearing it as I should be? I’m fearing a poisoned sausage posted through the letter slot, catapulted over the stone fence into the backyard. I’m fearing the piiing-ponnng of the doorbell and a uniformed official standing on the coarse brush, wielding a pole with a modifiable collar sticking out the lowered end. I’m afraid of losing you, I never expected I could be so stupidly afraid of losing you. I see the fat woman on the undersides of my eyelids, her spittle and her sweat. Her words circle inside my skull like a sock trapped in a washing machine, the knob jammed on spin cycle.

Now see the slim skids of shit down the side of our house, below the roof cranny. Even though I can’t see through the flaky mud, it must mean my swallows, that they’ve chosen me. They’ve chosen us.

In the yard, I gather all the dead things. Each hummock of solidified earth falls from its pot like a sandcastle, peaked into imperfect turrets. I make a row of earth castles along the stone fence. I stick a few square-ish pieces of gravel into their facades, as windows. I stab a pigeon feather into the centre top of the tallest. Now I realise a castle would never be laid out like this, with its towers all in a tidy row. I should push them together, into a cluster, a fortress. But I don’t. I turn the tap on and unspool the garden hose. I spray my castles down, and as I spray, you snarl and snap at the jet of water, as though it were a living thing. A hostile thing. An assailant.

She knows where I live, yet I’ve no idea where she lives. But then everybody knows where I live. You’ve seen how they’re always perfectly polite, but this is a pretence; they are pretending. They’ve long since marked me down as strange, a strange man, I am a strange man. And it’s because of my strangeness that they make a special point of knowing where I live. And they wait, and have been waiting all the time I’ve been in this house in this village, all my life, for strange things to happen for which they can finger me, for which they can have me and my threatening strangeness removed.

Her words are spinning in my brain. Spinning, spinning, spinning without ever making it to the end of the cycle, without ever reaching the stage at which everything goes still, and the door can be opened again. And now the castles are demolished, you dig a shallow hole for yourself in the yard, a wallowing pool. And you lie in the wet mud. You wallow.

I’m going out. I won’t be long, not even an hour, I promise.