Sara Baume - Spill Simmer Falter Wither

It’s Sunday and my father used to bring me to mass on Sundays, have I mentioned this already? In the later years, I used to bring him, and in the latest years he’d place his palm over the back of my hand as we crossed the churchyard and lean down hard as if I was a walking stick. My father was raised a Catholic, I presume, but he didn’t abstain from meat on Fridays or put up a crib at Christmas. He didn’t have Jesus in a picture frame with a tiny red bulb for a sacred heart, as Aunt did, and he didn’t stop what he was doing at six o’clock and bow his head for the Angelus bells. I don’t believe he believed. He only went to mass on Sundays because he liked to grumble and smoke by the gates after the communion notices. I’d leave him with the neighbours and sit in the car. I’d wait, and always, he made his own way back.

I don’t believe either. It takes all of my energy just to have faith in people. I went to mass and knelt on the cold lumber beside my father every Sunday only because he expected me to. During the service, I’d bow my head and un-tether my thoughts. And if there happened to be somebody sitting in the pew in front with a visible coat label, I’d reconfigure the letters into anagrams, as many as I could think of, until it was time to get up again, to go again to the car and wait.

Have I told you about HORNET? I think I already told you. Hornets are enormous wasps, you know. They eat bees because bees taste like honey. The church is beside the post office and I must have passed its gates a hundred times since then, one year and one half of a year ago. I’ve seen the church-going neighbours, my father’s fellow grumblers who asked me questions after he was gone, in other places around the village and in town. They always seem somehow incongruous; they always catch me unaware. And even though I know who they are and they know who I am, I’ve never spoken or saluted and not one of them has ever acknowledged me either, not even a nod. It seems that outside the church gates, we are strangers again.

I’m going to put your chair in the bedroom and close the living room door so no-one can see you at the window. I’m going to lock the metal gate so no-one can reach the letter slot.

‘Back in a minute,’ I say, and you are a good boy, and so I tell you.

‘Good boy,’ I tell you, ‘good.’

I get stuck in the mass traffic. I’d forgotten there’s mass traffic. The hedges are covered in red blackberries and amongst the berries, here’s willowherb, wild mint, meadowsweet.

I can’t bear the prospect of having to retell the nursing home story and so I let everybody else file in before me. From the woman in the wheelchair to the man who holds the collection plate, all wearing their mass clothes and pulling their mass faces.

The interior walls have been repainted. Now they are limp green, the colour of central embankments in winter. The statue of St Joseph is missing several of his digits, as if St Joseph were once the victim of a ransom that took too long to be paid. The plastic posies above the tabernacle are caked with dust, the Jesus face on the Eucharistic tapestry is a redhead, and the altar carpet is flattened along the pathway of the altar boys’ duties, as though they move on tiny steamrollers beneath their gowns. It’s odd I don’t remember these details, I must have looked at them Sunday in Sunday out for decades and decades. I must have scrutinised them clean out of existence.

I’m kneeling at the back with three rows between me and the closest congregant. All the things I’ve forgotten, yet I remember the words of the prayers and responses. But I don’t join in. I’m not here to cut bargains. I’m not here to make anagrams. So why am I here? I can’t remember why I came. It seems suddenly rash, stupid. Maybe I just wanted to have a spy at them, at all of these people who think I am a strange man, and know where I live. Every now and again someone glances around and shoots me a look of misgiving. Now it’s the kiss of peace and there’s nobody nearby enough for me to shake hands with, to wish peace upon. I stand with my wrists at my sides and chin rested against chest, pretending it is some kind of contemplation.

Come communion everybody gets up and queues toward the priest. I stay as I am, as still as I can, as though I might be invisible just as long as I don’t move. The procession kinks around so people can walk back down the aisle and return to their seats. Christ is melted to a wafery gloop on the roof of their mouths and their faces are pointing in my direction. Now I see the fat woman and her little boy. She is marching. He is scurrying behind. His fingers are pressed together and pointed to the rafters. His photo frame smile is demurely pursed.

I flee. I don’t stop to genuflect. I don’t stop to drop coppers into the collection plate or dip my fingers into the floating dust of the font. I clear the churchyard’s paving slabs, pass through the iron gates and rush to the car. No one catches up with me; no one tries, just like last time. I leave the church door open, and inside the car I can still hear the communion hymn. I can still hear all those ladies in shoulder-padded jackets with purple perms, and they are singing, singing, singing.

You’re waiting inside the front door. ‘It’s okay,’ I tell you, ‘I’m home again now.’

You’re grunting your greeting grunt, wagging your tail ecstatically as though we’d been separated for forever. I know it’s too early for supper, but let’s have sausages anyway. I know it’s too late for dawn, but let’s go out and walk. Up the road past the refinery, over the fields to the beach, to our beach, to Tawny Bay.

As we approach the edge of the slope, sandmartins lift into the sky. It’s as though someone’s standing below the line of the cliff, holding the birds scrunched in their palms, now flinging them upwards, fast, their wings only opening once they are high in the air. I remember finding a stunned sparrow, as a boy, and doing just that, holding and flinging, watching for its wings to open. Only they didn’t, of course, it fell straight back.

And once we’re over the edge, we are running. Because it is too steep, because we cannot help but run.

Do you hear it? The piiing-ponnng of the doorbell.

Now you have to follow me. I have to leave you here and go downstairs. You have to be quiet. You have to wait. ‘Quiet,’ I tell you, ‘wait.’

There’s a uniform standing in my laneway. Inside the uniform, there’s a woman. A smallish, oldish woman. I hadn’t expected that. She has the look of a John Dory about her, moon-eyed and frowny. There are dark speckles of stubble either side of her upper lip. Leathern patches encircle her elbow bones and her hair thins from the crown exposing a kippah of vanilla skin. For what feels like a long time, the woman just stands there and says nothing. As though she knows I know exactly why she’s here, exactly what she’s going to say. And even though I do, it takes me some time to register the thing she is carrying, the pole. Only now do I see the modifiable collar sticking out its lowered end.

I do not imagine the contents of her breadbin or the providence of her Christian name. I have only a second to think, and in that second, I think: things are never so immense when they happen as they were in my head. And so the woman warden asks me if I am who I am.

‘Yes.’ I say. I’m ready.

‘I’m afraid I’ve received a complaint,’ she says, but she doesn’t sound very afraid. She sounds like she’s tired of being at work. She sounds like she just wants to go home for the day. ‘I believe you were involved in an incident last week, along the village bird walk …’