Sara Baume - Spill Simmer Falter Wither

But this evening it’s dry and only gently gusty. Blue jags spring out from the hob and contentedly purr. I always buy the ring-pull cans and cook everything together in one pan, the only pan I brought. I tear fistfuls of bread from the loaf and apportion the cooked gunk between two plates. One you-sized, one toppling. Now we scoff, scoff, scoff in the name of all our missed meals.

I rinse the supper dishes and utensils in the ditch with water from a gallon drum. We are running low on washing water. I need to find a roadside pump, a stream, a public toilet. NON POTABLE the public taps say, and so I buy bottles of the mineral stuff as well. But you don’t like the taste of minerals, you drink from field streams and mud puddles. Now I stack the supper things back in the boot. I parcel the rubbish. You lick your bits in the grass. With your pointy incisors you comb the wirebrush fur of your paws and I sit on the bonnet and smoke until it’s too cold to stay outside. Now I line tea-candles along the dash, open my book, prop it against the steering wheel, read to their twizzling light. And you climb into my lap and lie, semi-sleeping, with your dominant ear at half mast, your eyelid always raised to its sentinel slit. I read until the light has spat itself out.

‘Time for bed,’ I tell you, ‘bed.’

Bed is one amongst your sixty-five words.

Now comes sleeplessness. I wind the driver’s seat back, unroll my duvet and clout my pillow into place. On my left side with feet tucked together and hands pressed between thighs: this is as close to comfortable as it comes. I lie awake and smell your malodorous snores slowly filling the air, and I wonder can you smell me as strongly. My smoky, yeasty, heinous breath. And I wonder which organ is putrefying inside me and how it generates so sickening a stench. Every morning it sits thick and fetid between the walls of the car. It’s like all my bad habits are fermenting in an infernal pit below my mouth hole, rising up to taunt me when I’m fresh from sleep and at my most defenceless. Your snores are almost sweet and biscuity in comparison.

Is this what my father’s house smelled like? Not garlic and coffee and cigarette smoke and bins, not the old feet sweat in his slippers, not the draught through the keyhole and cracks in the ceiling plaster, but like my heinous breath instead?

It’s hard to find Amber Leaf in the village shops and petrol stations where we stop. Liquorice flavour papers are even scarcer. I buy Drum instead; they always have Drum. I don’t like the taste but I tear my tiny rectangles and smoke it anyway. I suppose this means that addiction has superseded sentiment now. I suppose this means I’m an addict.

Sometimes while we’re driving, I kill the radio and we listen to the passing world instead. Most outside sounds are smothered by the rapping of raindrops against tin, sputters rising from beneath the bonnet, a ticking here and a rattle there, the scour and chump, scour and chump, scour and chump of the wipers. Sometimes a chittering magpie peals through, the panicky moo of a ravenous cow, the angry revving of an overtaking vehicle, a faraway siren and I feel a cold flush of fear. Everybody always overtakes me, do I really drive so slowly? Sometimes when I’m thinking and sometimes when I’m not thinking, my accelerator foot relaxes, retracting from its pedal so the car barely ticks along, the gears straining. Sometimes it’s several miles or more before I notice my tailback.

The outer noises are important to me. It doesn’t matter what form they take or how loud they are, but I need to keep them always sounding. I depend on them to gag my thoughts. My thoughts are rancorous, ruinous. They throng through me like a shoal of sharp, silver sprat whenever the outer noises aren’t loud or plenty enough to keep them at bay, to keep them out of the bay, the bay of my brain. I need them most of all during the hours of sleeplessness, the only time at which I can’t play the radio because it would run the car’s battery flat. In the gateways by night, unless it’s raining, there’s little noise, and all the noises are little. But they don’t sound little. Cats skulking in the hedgerows become lions. And the rustling mice they hunt, the rustling rabbits and shrews, become wildebeests and warthogs. On my left side with my feet tucked, interminably pursuing comfort, I think about my father’s house; I think about my father. I analyse my regrets in unnecessary detail with unnecessary force, and I wonder how I wound up with this life, and not somebody else’s. For a while, it’s a topic of tantalising possibility, and then, all of a sudden, it grows sickeningly boring and I’m left with a tension headache in place of an answer. A dull pounding which runs from the blades of my shoulders to the backs of my eyeballs. When I can stand the throng of sprat no longer, this is when I start my commentary.

In the latest years of my father’s life, he misplaced all of his small talk. Have I told you this already? Have I told you how, gradually, he stopped making his usual humdrum enquiries: whether the post had come yet, or if it looked like rain, or what we were having for supper that night. Maybe his mind had gone. Maybe he was an imbecile. Maybe he just didn’t see the point of wasting what breath he had left on such meaningless niceties, I can understand that. Once he had completely stopped talking, that was the point at which I began to gabble. ‘The postman’s passed without leaving anything,’ I’d say, ‘It’s surely going to rain soon,’ I’d say, ‘What do you reckon to a chop tonight?’ I’d say. And now I address it all to you. You who never spoke anyway. You who misunderstands almost everything. I describe the things we pass even though nothing is interesting, even though I’ve already mentioned it several times over, even though I know now I sound like the imbecile.

See how each road sign has its own name. JOHN, this one’s called. It’s because the county council men abuse their spray paint when they are bored. Now MARK, JIM, R153, now JOHN again, or maybe a different JOHN. See how the farmers abuse their paint too. They spray the sheep so they can recognise members of their flock when they’re dotted across the hillside. But the damp air disperses the paint through their wool and the sheep end up pink and blue almost all over, like the sort of gigantic cuddly toys people win at fairground stalls. See a faded teddy bear slumped in the upstairs window of the tumbledown farmhouse, back turned, shunning the view. Now see the nasturtiums. The leaves are like tiny green parasols blown inside-out and the flowers are terrifically garish. In every village we pass through, see how they are everywhere, how they fill every gap in every wall, every crack in every path.

The nasturtiums have it figured out, how survival’s just a matter of filling in the gaps between sun up and sun down. Boiling kettles, peeling potatoes, laundering towels, buying milk, changing light-bulbs, rooting wet mats of pubic hair out of the shower’s plughole. This is the way people survive, by filling one hole at a time for the flightiest of temporary gratifications, over and over and over, until the season’s out and they die off anyway, wither back into the wall or path, into their dark crevasse. This is the way life’s eaten away, expended by the onerous effort of living itself.

Now, I’m gabbling, I’m sorry. I catch sight of you in the rearview mirror. You’re watching the side of my face as I speak. Head tilted left, you look perplexed. I know you don’t understand, and so I bellow a sentence made up entirely of your words.

WALKIES, BICKIES, BEDTIME I bellow, ALL GONE, WAIT, FOOTBALL, BOLD I bellow, SPEAK, ONE EYE, SPEAK.