Sara Baume - Spill Simmer Falter Wither

Now there aren’t any ceiling suns. I used to care so much about incandescence and now all I have is a bag of tea-candles and two torches. I forgot to bring spare batteries. I forgot lots of things. I remember them gradually as we go. Now home is only one room big, I’m surprised by how much stuff we still seem to need, and by how much rubbish we are creating. I sort through our rubbish, apportion it into bags small enough to shove through the slot of a public bin. And every time I see one, we stop and shove, scattering little clues of our passing behind us as we go.

The car bounces, rolls and jitters like a steel orb in a pinball machine, with no right way to go and no particular destination. We round an everlasting succession of hairpin bends, bump through ten thousand bottomless ruts. Every day we see abandoned traffic cones and signposts heralding road works which never materialise. Now the ditches are distended by blackberry brambles, ferns, nettles, fuchsia, knapweed, elderberries and rose hips, so overgrown they narrow the road to a single lane for travelling both directions. See how the hedge trimming tractor has left a trail of massacred vegetation in its wake. Flowers with their throats slit and berries chopped, popped.

But between our windscreens, everything is in its right place. My bed-things, a single duvet and a feather pillow, are pummelled into the cranny below the passenger dash where once you cowered. The duvet cover is midnight blue with a motif of stars and spaceships, a coffee stain somewhere, a splodge of toothpaste somewhere else. On the passenger seat, there’s the camping cooker, a flask and a carrier bag of assorted snacks: sesame sticks, granny apples, comice pears and gingernuts, of course.

The back seat belongs to you. Your food bowl and water dish on the floor, the low chair wedged between back and front seats, the tasselled and checker-boarded blanket slung over its grimy wicker. Your football, gnawed and deflated, is always on the loose somewhere, roving and jumping to the motion of the hairpin bends and bottomless ruts. The boot is three-quarters filled with gas canisters, blankets, toilet paper, a sack of emergency kibble, two gallon drums of washing water. The pockets and compartments are bursting with a muddle of things both useless and useful, from crab shells and bass lures to wet wipes, pencils, loose change, a toothbrush and my penknife. Laid across the sill between the back seat and the glass, there are the tomatoes, twenty or twenty-five at least. I picked every last one before leaving. Then they were still pea green and hard as passion fruit; now they are almost ripe. The tomatoes bring out your inner thief. You can smell their exact phase of ripeness and as soon as I’m not looking, you snatch and pop and swallow. Whenever I leave a window lowered, the last of summer’s drowsy wasps sneak in and fumble between the snipped and shrunken tomato branches. With weary antennae they fondle the fruit, feeling out tiny fissures through which to siphon juice. You snap at the wasps, irritated. They sting you in the mouth and your upper gums expand and lift off your teeth into a Cheshire cat grin.

Every dawn, we leave the car to walk, to follow your directionless route of indecipherable landmarks. Over a drumlin and a bog, past a saltwater lake and a shooting sanctuary, through a patch of magic mushrooms and a fairy circle. Now here’s an alien thing which might be a lizard and might be a stranded newt. You lick its dead belly. What does it feel like? Like boiled, cooled leather, like licking your own tongue back again? You learn each new stopping spot detail by detail, by its symphony of smell, and never by its signpost. Still I read them out to you. BUNRAFFY, the signposts say, DOWRASH, CREGGISH, LISFINNY. And every dusk, I place a row of tea-candles along the dash and watch until the longest lasting wick is drowned by wax. Spit spit hiss. This is our power cut.

They are mostly villages, the signposted places, some hardly even that. Did my father realise every last one of them was inland? And if he did, what does it mean? But meaning doesn’t exist unless you look for it, and so I mustn’t look, and so things will not mean.

After several villages we stop at the sight of a post office.

‘Back in a minute,’ I tell you.

I slide my savings book and driver’s licence beneath the safety glass to a girl with an armload of copper bangles. I ask her how much I’m allowed to withdraw at once. She says ‘what?’ three times before she hears me properly, and each time I repeat myself, I feel smaller and smaller and smaller.

I drive from the village until we are between cow fields again. Now I pull over and rummage in the rubbish parcel for last night’s sardines tin. I rinse it into the ditch with the washing water from our gallon drum. The lid is only peeled back a fraction, just enough space to fork the fish out. I dry it with a tissue and fold my notes and poke them in. Now I hide the tin in the kibble sack and lock the kibble sack in the boot.

A village becomes a town when somebody builds a supermarket, a library, a secondary school, a third or fourth or fifth pub, a retirement home. And we are avoiding them, the towns.

Here’s a thatched and ruined cottage, a couple of slime-walled farmhouses surrounded by shit-caked yards. Here come the featureless bungalows, each with a couple of garden ornaments distributed about their neatly trimmed lawns. Squirrels, gnomes, wild cats, wishing wells, nymphs. Here’s one with a stone eagle atop either gatepost, painted an inauspicious shade of peach and turned in to face one another across the cattle grid. Now here’s an electronic gate with a keypad mounted to a post. At the far end of the extensive driveway, see the unfinished palace. Naked plaster and a lake of mud where grass-seeds ought to have sprouted. Count the front-facing windows. There are no fewer than twelve, plus three dormers and a skylight.

You can guess the size of a village by the grandiosity of its grotto. Blonde Marys, black Marys. Marys in blue, Marys in white, but Mary always draped in rosary beads, standing on a serpent and holding her palms open around the height of her crotch.

This village is a row of stuck-together houses, just enough to call a terrace, and the same again on the opposite side of the street. They are pebbledashed and painted beige, cream, wheat and buff. What smells are wafting from them? Soup and gas and bleach and bread and tea and turf? As our car passes in the dark, we see clearly into their brightly lit rooms. We see a china tea set displayed on a dresser, trophies in a trophy cabinet, cooking knifes planted in a block and the steam that rises from an invisible saucepan on an invisible hob.

In almost every village there’s a shop, and almost every village shop is attached to a pub with a sign over the door bearing the full name of the original proprietor: JAMES O’SHEA, they say, JOHN T. MURPHY. The shelves are dusty. The merchandise is bizarrely organised. A box of powdered custard sits next to a can of engine oil, which sits next to a tin of marrowfat peas, which sits next to a tub of nappy powder. In the stationary section, there are multicoloured elastic bands but no red biros, and greeting cards for a Holy Communion but none for a Happy Birthday. Now these are the only places we stop to shop. They never stock exactly what I think we want, but there’s always something close enough to compromise.

And I like the cramped proportions. I like the cold and clammy air, the surplus of useless clutter; it puts me in mind of my father’s house.

Tonight it’s JACK P. RUSSELL, and I can see over the counter into the part that is a pub. It’s dim and dank and quiet there. It makes me crave a hot, sweet whiskey and a packet of salty nibs. Now I drop my batch loaf, chicken noodle soup and bottled water into the snack bag on the passenger seat. Now I go in through the pub door and rest my hands against the bar.