Sara Baume: Spill Simmer Falter Wither

Sometimes I think if I took the handbrake off, anywhere in the world, the car would roll itself back here, to the footpath outside the terrace beside the bay, grudgingly yet irresistibly. But I’ve never been anywhere in the world. I wouldn’t know how to get there in the first place.

Now you’re refusing to climb from the car. I squat on the ground and you glower from your crawl space. I push the door wide to let the salt air in. It’s rich and giddying, cloying with rot and fish and tang and wet. Your maggot nose catches the cloy and wriggles to life. Now it tugs your front paws forward and your front paws drag the rest of you after them. You grunt, but this time it has a different pitch; this time it’s an inquisitive grunt. Grudgingly yet irresistibly, you step out of shelter, and onto the sea front.

Welcome home, One Eye, my good little ratter.

I don’t know exactly where I was born. A hospital, I suppose. Surrounded by spotlights and freshly laundered bed-sheets and a trolley of sterilised birthing tools. I find it hard to picture some scrubbed-up stranger wielding my naked, squawking self about as though I were a broiled ham. Instead I like to pretend I was born all alone without any fuss, without any gore. And right here, in my father’s house. I like to believe the house itself gave birth to me, that I slithered down the chimney, fell ignobly into the fire grate and inhaled my first breath of cold, swirling ash.

My father’s house is one of the oldest in the village. It’s two storeys tall and capped by slanting slate. Some slates are broken and some slates displaced and each is dusted with green down and rimmed by tiny hedgehogs of moss. The facade is garishly salmon and the roof is a manmade hillside all shaved and pressed out of shape from the creep of soil beneath its surface. Most of the ground floor is taken up by shop space, that’s the reason for the signboard between hanging baskets. It’s a hairdressing salon, which means the sounds that push through the floorboards are rushing water and hood dryers, pop music and high heels, the slicing laugh of the Polish hairdresser as she fakes friendly with whoever has just walked in.

When I was a boy, the ground floor of my father’s house was a ladies boutique. The lady who ran the boutique always stood two decapitated mannequins in the display window, and I couldn’t understand why she dressed them so fashionably yet never bothered to fix on their heads. I used to be afraid that the mannequin’s forgotten faces would chew their way out of a cupboard by night to rove between the sleeping clothes rails. I’d swear I could hear them, gnashing and dragging themselves across the carpet by their eyebrows. After the boutique shut down, the estate agent used the window as a billboard for advertising his properties. For several years I got to snoop inside every house for sale or rent within a three village radius without ever travelling beyond the front footpath. As a boy, I imagined I lived in every last one. And in every last newly renovated semi-detached with off-white walls and a fitted kitchen, I imagined I was a different boy, a new boy, a better boy.

Apart from the salon, there’s a Chinese takeaway, a grocer’s, a chip shop and two pubs. It’s a village of twitchers and silly-walkers, of old folk and alcoholics and men dressed in high-visibility overalls. There’s a hummock of fat tanks at one end, that’s the oil refinery. There’s a chimney painted in red and white stripes like a barber’s pole at the other end, that’s the power station. In the middle, it’s a nature reserve. Mallards and grebes paddle cheerfully through the drizzle. Herons stand stock-still and knee-high in tidal mud, pretending to be statues. Because of the oil refinery and the power station, the village murmurs. Sandwiched by the tunelessness of industry, the birds shriek and sing, defiantly.

Follow me past the steel gate and down a laneway to the front door. Here’s the hall, which looks like the inside of a clothes recycling unit. Wool and tweed and oilcloth spilling off coat hooks onto my wellingtons and the radiator, the banister. Almost none of the coats are mine, or at least they weren’t mine to begin with.

Now here’s the kitchen, dark and poky with chipped tiles on the walls and unidentifiable stains on the lino. It smells of garlic and coffee and cigarette smoke and bins, and the bins smell of garlic skins and spent coffee grounds and cigarette butts. Leave the bins alone, okay? You’re not allowed to pilfer tin cans and chicken bones, tissues hardened into abstract shapes by snot. Here’s my mug with its indelible coating of black sludge. If I was a gypsy I’d read you my sludge like tea leaves, and if I was a visionary I’d show you the shape of a Jesus face on the base. Can you see it; can you see the Jesus face?

Now follow me up the stairwell past the salon’s partition into the upstairs hall. See my ornamental plates covering the decomposed plasterwork. They come from every snicket of the globe. This one with a picture of St George is Bermuda. The kookaburra is Australia and these two moustachioed men bartering their cockerels hail from Puerto Rico. Now Andorra has a cable car and Mallorca has almond trees and Hawaii has HAWAII embossed in gold letters, but Djibouti is my favourite. I’ve no idea where that is.

This room with the carpet concealed by rugs is my bedroom. Each rug is made from the ripped and re-bound rags of strangers from foreign lands. The rug strangers have bigger families but fewer belongings, brighter clothes but dimmer prospects and I feel somehow closer to them than I do the people deflected by my spacesuit in the street. Here’s the bed, the rocking chair, the wardrobe and the fireplace, the grate into which the house delivered me. The buckets either side are one for coal and one for the logs I axe up on an ash stump out the back. Ash is the solidest of all wood; the log against which all other logs will inexorably split. What does my bedroom smell of? Damp spores, fluffed dirt and dead sap? See the black mould on the end wall, how it’s mushroomed into a reverse constellation: the night sky a white wall and the white stars black and wet and furry.

This curtain of wooden beads hides the bathroom, and when they get stirred up they make a noise like a landslide of tic-tacs, like a leak in a button factory. You’re not allowed in the bathroom, okay? You’re not allowed to lick splashes from the enamel. From every other lintel, multicoloured ribbons dangle from a thin strip of pine. It wasn’t until after my father was gone that I nailed the rainbows up. Sometimes I tread on the ends and they snap back like a tiny riding crop. Sometimes they get tangled around my limbs as I pass and I rip them clean down, without meaning to. They are annoying. I know they’re annoying. And yet, I nail them up again, every time. The bowerbird within me insists.

Now for the living room, which lives up to its title and is the room where most of life takes place. I heard on the radio once that animals like you see in the same way as a colour-blind human, that your world is yellower and bluer and greyer than mine. If this is true then my living room walls will sear your lonely peephole, I’m sorry. They’re painted the colour of purest egg yolk. Now the front window faces south and touches the roof beams. Here’s the sofa and the coffee table and the television set which is mostly switched off with its screen turned to a dark mirror instead, to a tiny replica room all drained of its vibrancy. I look old in the switched-off television screen. It’s one of the places I am an old man. Here are the curtains and indoor hanging plants and pictures in picture frames. I always forget to water the houseplants until their compost is so dry that the water trickles straight through and drips into the carpet. Or sometimes the plant’s famished and gulps too much, drinks until its leaves go limp and pale and spongy, drinks until it drowns itself. Here’s my aloe vera, see the bubbles through its translucent skin. See the picture frame. These smiling strangers inside, I don’t know who they are. I just buy the frames and accept whoever comes inside them. They’re just models chosen by the frame company, told to pose.