Sara Baume - Spill Simmer Falter Wither

There are two men and a woman in the road. One man is standing on the tar, the other is directing the traffic. The woman is kneeling down beside the swan. I think she is crying, she seems to be crying, and this makes me suddenly angry. I think of all the other creatures we’ve seen since we set out. I think of the rat, the fox, the kitten, the badger. I think of the jackdaw, did you see the jackdaw? We passed it in the queue to pass the swan. Its beak was cracked open, its brains squeeged out. Why didn’t anybody stop for the jackdaw? Because the swan looks like a wedding dress, that’s why. Whereas the jackdaw looks like a bin bag. Because this is how people measure life.

From the radio, an expert is telling us how the extinct and endangered animals and birds and fish must be brought back, or the planet will slowly fall to pieces, bit by bit by bit by bit.

We stop at a petrol station with a sign for a public toilet. I find the bag containing my soiled socks and jocks, I squash it small as it will squash.

‘Back in a minute,’ I tell you, even though I know, all going to plan, it will take ten at least. Sometimes I take liberties with the things I tell you. I know you understand this phrase means I’m leaving and not bringing you along, but every time I leave I guess you don’t understand when I’ll be back again, or if I will be back at all. You may be able to smell time, but you cannot tell it.

There’s nobody else inside the gents. There’s hot in the hot tap and soap in the soap dispenser. It’s the powdery sort. It comes out in feeble coughs. It slows me down. Still I’ve managed to wash everything up to the final sock when the door swings and a man comes in. I don’t see what manner of man; I bow my head as he passes. I feel his eyes travel down my plait and across my hunch to settle on the gap between sinks where my underwear’s heaped. Now he goes into a cubicle. I hear the slide and clack of the bolt, and a second later, an ugly, jagged splash. Now I squeeze the heap, slop it back into the bag and make for the car park.

A mile or so along the road, I pull in and drape my washing over the rim of the back seat. You examine my socks as though they’re somehow exciting. You sniff my underpants crotch by crotch until I shout at you to stop.

‘You’re horrible,’ I tell you, but I’m laughing.

It’s the oak that goes first; the beech that holds on for longest.

Last night, the in-between leaves dropped altogether and at once, as though a herd of nocturnal giraffes came sweeping through, stretching their prodigious necks into the treetops, stripping the branches bare and then scattering the stripped leaves over their footprints so no-one will know who to blame. This morning, now freed, the stripped leaves skip and soar and shapeshift. They scuttle like pygmy shrews, jump like natterjack toads, flutter like common chaffinches. They spread across the road and contort into letters of the alphabet, miniature whirlwinds, religious apparitions. Did you see it? Did you see the Jesus face? They always look so much like something else from a distance, and up close, I’m always disappointed when they transfigure back into leaves, just leaves. Now I’m snatching the air because it’s supposed to be lucky to catch a falling leaf. I’m jumping, jumping, jumping and still I can’t get any. But they’re landing on my boulderish back and sticking to my greasy hair, and maybe this is lucky too.

It is the most absolute of autumns. See the tractor-lawnmowers riding out for the last cut of the year. Smell the freshly severed stalks. The slow-to-start summer clung on throughout September, but now it must be October, or nearly October. How long have we been driving? A month, at least. Six weeks, maybe. Soon I think I’ll need another post office.

What else is wafting through the air vents? Wind-fallen crabapples abandoned to rot? Bonfire smoke and rowan berries? Here’s a rusted iron water pump, handleless and unpumpable, so there’s no need to stop and test it, to try and fill my drums. Here’s a fugitive straw bale lodged in the ditch brambles, estranged from its fellows still clustered in their field like a herd of motionless highland cattle: oblong and exquisitely brindled. Now these are last year’s stacked point-to-point jumps, birch twigs bundled, cast aside. The cotoneaster and its waxwing in his Zorro eye mask, and everywhere the blackberries are undersized and inedible after the superfluity of summer rain. See how every berry is the runt of the briar’s litter, rotting in its receptacle.

Here’s another grain truck. We’ve spent the whole of harvest season getting stuck behind strange farming contraptions, listening to the clatter of threshers and shearers and spinners as we drive. But now it’s only grain trucks, a new truck round every corner, and every truck sending pale chaff flurrying from their open tops into our windscreen. I never overtake them. Why bother, what’s the rush? It’s good to be able to roll a cigarette and hang my elbow out the window, to watch the pumps and bales and jumps pass as I smoke. See in the distance, the mustard-coloured apex of a hillslope perfectly centred inside a V of greenery? It doesn’t matter what month; it’s exactly the time of year at which everything is mustard-crested. It’s the most absolute of autumns. But soon, slow, autumn will lose its radiance. Autumn will be threshed and chopped and spun back to brown and bole and dun.

Now all the ditch’s tiny celebrations and devastations proliferate and fill me, buoy me, and in this way, the fear subsides, to some degree. I realise that you were not born with a predetermined capacity for wonder, as I’d believed. I realise that you fed it up yourself from tiny pieces of the world. I realise it’s up to me to follow your example and nurture my own wonder, morsel by morsel by morsel.

See here, a banana skin squewered onto the spike of a fence. Do you remember the walk up the road through the forest and the banana skin which lay by the refinery gates below the intercom? Remember how the world was then that small. See how, now, it’s a limitless expanse of liberated bananas.

At last, a village shop that stocks the right batteries.

I can see where the old fireplace has been shoddily boarded up. And the bench which stood in front is pushed against the wall and piled with multi-packs of toilet paper. The grocer’s next to my father’s house used to have an open fire in winter, way back when I was a boy, long before the era of tags for measuring loyalty and robotic checkouts. Today I load up on batteries and jumbo oats. I take an eight-pack of fish fingers from the freezer for our supper and balance a bag of barley sugars on top.

The tall, concrete counter is paved with broken tiles and I can see the borders of lost coppers twinkling between the cracks. The man behind the counter is easily old enough to have lit fires inside his shop. He asks a lot of questions. He asks if I’m just passing through and where did I come from. Am I from there originally and what was the weather like when I left. He eyeballs my toilet paper and batteries and fish fingers and barley sugars as though he’s never seen them before, as though his own goods are suddenly as alien to him as I am. Both his palms are laid against the broken tiles and he gives no indication that he’s going to charge me until I answer.

‘Yes,’ I say, ‘the south coast, yes, and it was dry, but windy.’

Now he starts to chunter about the prevailing southerlies as though they’re somehow my fault. He doesn’t like the wind, he says. It makes a howling noise in the telephone wires and keeps him awake at night. Now he forgets to be nosy and starts telling me of his struggle against sleep.