Sara Baume - Spill Simmer Falter Wither

Now she hesitates, perhaps giving me a chance to chip in, but I don’t. Behind me in the hallway, I picture the clutter of fallen coats, wellington boots, cockle shells, driftwood, plastic bags, woollen scarves. I wonder has she noticed your muddy paw prints on the flat-weave rug. I wonder if she thinks I’m the strange man the fat woman told her I’d be.

‘… in which a local boy and his pet were both injured …’ she finishes.

Now my fists jump to a white knuckle grip on the door frame. I register at once the gravity of the thing she has just said. For perhaps the first time in my life, my internal metronome is not several beats behind. It is on beat; I am unbeaten. My heels dig into the welcome mat, the not-actually-welcome-at-all mat. ‘HE DID NOT BITE THE BOY.’ I say, and she sighs. She sighs with all the unstilted force of several years of dwindling job satisfaction. And I say it again.

‘He did not bite the little boy,’ I say, but already the strength is gone from my voice. Because maybe you did bite the boy. I can’t remember. Maybe your teeth grazed his hand in the scuffle, even if you didn’t mean it. Maybe I can’t remember because I don’t want to.

Life never misses an opportunity to upscuttle us, I think. Life likes to tell us it told us so.

‘I’m charged with the authority to seize your animal,’ the woman warden says, ‘and to detain it until such a time as a decision’s reached on its behalf.’

‘He isn’t here.’ I tell her. ‘He’s with a friend.’ I’m ready. I’ve had five days to fear this, to prepare. I’ve learned my lines by heart. I’ve locked you in the bedroom wardrobe and turned the radio up loud to muffle your discombobulated hollering. Now she’s thinking, so I go on.

‘I haven’t been well,’ I say, ‘I’ve been bed-ridden all weekend. So I haven’t been able to walk him and he’s staying with a friend until I’m back on my feet.’

She’s still thinking. Is she thinking she can hear a smothered sort of woofing? Is she trying to make out whether it’s coming from inside the house or somewhere in the distance, down the street, an adjacent building?

‘He didn’t bite the boy.’ I say again, quietly, I implore. If I straightened my spine to its fullest, I’d be half the height of the pole taller than the woman warden, or thereabouts. But because I’m bent like a man in a pillory, we are standing almost exactly eye to eye.

‘Okay.’ She says, clearly, carefully. ‘Here’s what’s going to happen. You’ll collect him tonight and I’ll come back first thing tomorrow. I’ll take a full statement, your version of events.’ I’m nodding, nodding, nodding.

‘If you don’t hand him over to me without fuss, I’ll have a warrant to search the premises.’

She turns to go. The gate swings. I expect she’ll leave it to bang, but she doesn’t. She stops and turns around. She fiddles with the faulty handle until she’s solved its knack. Now the latch clicks softly into place and the sound of the woman warden’s footsteps become the sound of her growling engine. And I stand on the coarse brush of the not-actually-welcome-at-all mat, and wait. I wait until her engine has dissolved into the day. Now there’s only your muffled barking, the radio pealing diddly-eye music, the dinging of a metal rung against the village flagpole, the soft rap and roar of the restive sea.

White sliced pan, I think, and a name like Orla or Grainne or Margaret.

As I open the wardrobe door, you topple out head first and I catch you up. You seem to have forgotten it was me who locked you in there. You grunt your greeting grunt. Gratefully you beat your stumpy tail against the carpet.

Tonight, I do not dream. I sleep in spells, waking every few hours at different stages of the night, as if there were different stages of the night as there are the day, as if for a meal or a walk or a radio programme. But in the dark, there’s nothing. I go to the bathroom and stand on the tiles to cool my feet. I stand over the toilet bowl and try to piss. But I don’t need to piss, and so it only makes my bladder ache. You get up too. You lie in the hall outside the beaded curtain. You wait for me. I wait for the morning.

And as we wait we listen to my father’s house, and as we wait and listen, I realise that the rats are gone. I cannot remember them going or say whether it exactly coincided with you, but I realise I haven’t seen them scurrying the perimeter of the yard, whiskers brushing the stone fence, or heard their scratching against the skirting boards, their affrays inside the roof, not for weeks and weeks and weeks. Standing on the cold tiles in the middle of the night, I realise my spate of rats is ended.

At last, it’s morning enough to get up. I cast the bed covers off. I put my clothes and shoes on.

It’s Tuesday. But there’ll be no trip to town today, no post office.

Instead I’m walking from room to room, slow but purposeful. I’m surveying all the flaccid things which fill my rooms. They churn up pictures in my head but the pictures only smudge together, intermingle into brown. If you take more than two colours and blend them, they always make brown, a hundred different yet similar shades. Now I pick up thing after thing after thing. A margarine tub full of incense sticks, a pottery zeppelin, a lamp without a lampshade. These are my father’s things. I’ve never used, never needed them.

Now I draw two columns in my mind. On the right, there is Everything That Doesn’t Matter. On the left, there is Everything That Does. Now I start to divvy up all of this stuff which isn’t mine but for which I am responsible. And you follow my slow steps, look each way I look, sit at my feet every time I stop. There’s a flake of something pale stuck to the wet of your nose. It looks like a infinitesimal communion wafer. It mocks the seriousness of your face, the worried tilt of your head. I knock it off.

‘It’s okay,’ I tell you, ‘it’ll be okay.’

In the kitchen, I set the switch on the kettle to boil. I lean against the work-top. Already there’s such a compendium of items bulging against my temples. The right column’s an abstract smush, whereas the left is almost empty. I try to remember item by item, but before the kettle has tripped its switch, I realise there’s hardly anything worth crouching down to lift. Hardly anything worth lugging the length of the laneway. Hardly anything worth its weight in expended petrol as we drive. I realise that all these particles of matter don’t matter, that not one is capable of expressing grief as I abandon it. Down the blue rope, from our sit-spot amongst the pebbles, do you remember the lichens, limpets, barnacles, periwinkles, anemones? The sea pinks and chamomile? Do you remember the rocks? Now remember how everything clings to them, how every surrounding life-form must hold fast to the nearest solid thing in the modest hope it will sustain them. Like the pea tendrils to their dead sticks, like me and my unfeeling objects.

We’re back in the bedroom when the first smidges of dawn illumine the toadflax. See how its leaves and flowers have dried up and died back, as if overnight. Now it’s discoloured into umber, wilted into paper. I sit in the rocking chair beside the fireplace. The grate is empty but for some twigs lost from the jackdaw’s nest. I rock.

To the right of my mind, there’re the draught snake and the board games, the ash stump and the rag rugs. There’s the souvenir plates; the stupid plates from places the world over but not one place I’ve ever been and not one plate I’ve ever carried home with me. They follow the trail of a life lived before I was born. The only places I’ve ever been are in the books I can’t bring either. To the right, it’s just card and wood and wool, and the house is just plaster and brick and board, and it’s a sad place, don’t you think it’s sad? And it didn’t give birth to me and it isn’t my mother. It is inert, immoveable. Whereas I am alive, unbound. We are alive, unbound.