Sara Baume - Spill Simmer Falter Wither

‘The older you get the tired-er you are,’ he says, ‘but the harder it is to go to sleep.’ He shakes his head sadly, and I picture him lying in a dark room with wood-panelled walls and a china chamber pot under the bed, and I recognise him as a person who is lonely as opposed to solitary, who did not choose to be on his own but involuntarily lost people until he was. Now he digs his nails into the counter’s cracks.

By the time I get back into the car, the fish fingers have started to defrost. There’s a soggy patch on the cardboard, just underneath Captain Birdseye’s lapel. And you lick the lapel, wagging.

Tonight, the windows fog. The fan grumbles and the wipers moan. It’s raining and we’re lost. The bulb of the left headlamp is out, and so it must seem to oncoming traffic as though our car face is winking. See how all the cars have car faces, headlamp eyes and a shiny-toothed number-plate smirk.

The road tapers into a single lane and a succession of roundabouts. Each has a signboard bearing the name of some obscure saint, and almost every second roundabout is encumbered by road works. Now the workmen have gone home and left their machinery slumbering for the night. Portable barricades and flashing arrows draw us into yet more erroneous detours and abandoned traffic cones. Do you remember the traffic cone buried in the bay? When the tide went out, it poked up as far as its third band. Then when the tide came in, it was again submerged and I’d forget that it was there at all. Still buried, just out of sight. I’d again forget that things continue to exist even though I cannot see them.

A wrong exit off the roundabout of St Gobnait brings us to the outskirts of a city, a former village subsumed by metropolis. We pass a Mary in a perspex box beside an ATM machine. Now, on a street too dark to see the street sign, I find a couple of empty parking spaces in front of a shuttered shoe shop, an empty unit with a TO LET notice and a brightly lit fast food takeaway. I’m hungry and dreadfully need to piss, this is why we’re parking. There’s nobody on the street, only the lampposts plotting a passageway through the dark. Come here and let me clip your leash on. Now we leave the car and walk up the footpath and into the shadows. You sniff and raise your leg against a drainpipe and once you’re finished, I bring you back. I lock you up safe with a window ajar, your water dish replenished.

‘Back in a minute,’ I tell you, and now I go into the takeaway on my own.

I don’t like urinals but there’s no-one else here so I hurry up and use it. I glance around the bathroom as I piss. There’s a collage of old tissue glued to the ceiling. Sopped and flung, now it’s dried to creased splats. It reminds me of flat fish only without the sideways eyes. Like flounder, turbot, dab, like Dover sole. Back in the over-bright restaurant, I order a coffee and two large punnets of chips from the brown man behind the till. The brown man is smiling and I notice how his smiling jaw is mottled by spots, and I realise I hadn’t realised before that black skin could pimple in just the same way pink does, and I wonder if Chinese people pimple too. Now I’m fidgeting with the change in my wallet, too embarrassed to look again. I count out the exact price, take the cup I’m being handed and as I pay my fingertips brush the brown man’s palm. I keep my eyes low to my cup. I see the coffee’s weak and watery brown, exactly the same colour as the cashier’s skin.

I wonder if the cashier sleeps at night. I wonder if, when he hears the wind in the phone wires, he thinks it sounds like a howling thing. Like a wolf or ghost.

I sit at an empty table in the empty restaurant. I wait on our chips. The chair’s uncomfortably slippery, the seat of my trousers squeaks against the moulded plastic. There’s a picture on the wall showing a smiling child, and the child is advocating various accoutrements to my chips. Bacon tenders, curry coleslaw, chicken nuggets. In the next picture, the child has been joined by a full set of smiling parents, and altogether they are sharing a Chicken Family Box. Now I look away and out the window. I remind myself that they are just models told to pose, that in reality, they aren’t even related. From where I’m sitting, I can see through the restaurant’s glass front to where our car is parked. I can see the silhouette of your head and ears and neck, your crushed velveteen paws resting against the dashboard, the glint of the tag on your collar, the glint of your maggot nose and the glint of your lonely peephole. Out the restaurant’s glass front and through the car windscreen, I can see all of my family at once, glinting all over. And suddenly you seem so small and faraway, and I realise we haven’t been separated for more than a few moments in weeks and weeks. Since the beginning of autumn, since the driving began.

‘SIR!’

The brown man startles me. I take the paper bag and bolt through the door without looking up again. Inside the car, the smell of chips is deliciously suffocating. We eat so fast we wound our tongues. Now you lick the grease from the empty punnets. You propel them up and down the back seat, and up and down again.

From the radio, an expert is telling us how most of our waters are unlicensed, as though they ought to be licensed, as though every grounded thing is licensed. The trees and bogs and heather and hills and mountains. And now I remember that you should be licensed. I remember I never licensed you.

We sleep in gateways, a new gateway every night.

And every evening, you watch the wraparound cinema screen until the mulch and stretch has warped into our lacklustre reflection. Until, in the arid light, the most familiar things grow sinister. The roving football becomes a mannequin’s head and the sound of the tomatoes softly nudging one another becomes a mutinous mumbling. Now you cave into the hollow of the seat and rest your beard against the blanket. You sigh, laboriously, and I take your laborious sigh as a cue. I begin my look-out for a tangled boreen with a gateway: a left-behind gateway, a deadended gateway, a safe-seeming gateway. The gates are mostly welded metal slats. Sometimes scabbed by rust, sometimes wired into an electric fence and ominously droning. Now here’s a gate which is hardly a gate at all, just a symbolic barrier. It’s slapdashed together with disintegrating pallets, chicken wire, the disparate pieces of a fallen tree. Here’s penny-cress, angelica and a hare over in the field. Stiff as a garden ornament. Now it barrels off, breaks into a succession of long vaults over the stubble of harvested grain, between the bales. Did you see it, did you see the hare?

I shunt the car a little back, a little forth, a little back, a little forth. Tonight, it takes forever to get properly tucked in from the road. I feel the unstable ground caving beneath the wheels and I wonder if we’ll be able to get out again in the morning. Now you’re up from the seat hollow and standing to attention. You’re making your excitement noise. This is your favourite part of the evening, my favourite part of the evening too. Now I let you out to explore the night’s gateway and its nebulous surrounds. While you are exploring, I fetch our groceries from the boot and set up the gas cooker on the flattest part of the bonnet. I take out the saucepan, plates, fork, spoon, tin opener. Tonight it’s peas, baked beans and spaghetti hoops, a French baguette with orange cheese and marmalade. It takes a couple of tries to ignite the hob in the wind. I pull the side of my cardigan taut to shelter the lighter’s flame. On rainy nights, I do this on the passenger seat with the door open. I know it’s careless, even dangerous. The first time I lit the gas cooker inside the car, I made sure you were outside. But nothing happened, and I’ve grown reckless with the cooker since. Sometimes I don’t bother to push the passenger door open and roll the window down. In this way, the heat’s trapped inside and our car home remains warm as a burrow for much of the night.