Sara Baume - Spill Simmer Falter Wither

You’re yowling, nipping. Within the confines of the car, the hitchhiker smells like stout, sweat, rancid butter. As he reaches for the seatbelt, your teeth graze the cuff of his shirt. BOLD I tell you, and you sit back, swallow your yowls and press your face into the gap between front seats. Now you grumble like a kettle brewing, poised for attack. The toes of the hitchhiker’s boots scuff dirt onto my duvet, cow shit and ditch mud amongst the spaceships and stars. He looks out the passenger window and chunters away without listening to himself. His manner is noticeably looser and less calculated than a person in an ordinary state and this is how I recognise that he is drunk. He tells me of the softness of the rain, the early coming of the dark, the poor condition of the back roads. His fingers move in time to his words, tracing squiggles in the air like unlighted sparklers. Whenever they sweep too suddenly, you take a snap, growl a warning.

SSSSSHHHHHHHH I tell you, even though I know you can’t grasp what form of command this reptilian hissing is supposed to be. You throw me a glance and I wonder if you’re checking to see if I’m punctured.

The hitchhiker doesn’t try to buckle his belt again but rides with his back flattened to the seat as though pretending to be belted. His chunterings don’t need to be stoked by responses; he asks me no questions, makes no enquiries, polite or otherwise. I wonder if he even knows I’m here; I wonder if he even knows he’s here. He doesn’t ask about you; he doesn’t ask where you and I are going. He doesn’t remark upon the mishmash of belongings rolling and juddering around the car. His eyes drift off across the soggy ditches and I keep mine to the left of the white lines, but I am listening, nodding. I listen with unforeseen intensity, and so there is no need to picture the absent details of his life because he tells me in his loosened, uncalculated way.

He used to be a pig farmer, the hitchhiker says, and now he isn’t. But he hasn’t retired, he’ll never retire. Now he manufactures the wood chippings horses sleep on, and lots of other animals too, of course. His former sows slept on chippings in two enormous sheds equipped with a complicated system of electronic feeding compartments. They were fed on anchovy fishmeal from Peru, bred for an average of six years and the length of each pregnancy was always exactly three months, three weeks, and three days: three, three, three.

‘Did the sows ever go outside?’ I ask quietly while he’s pausing for breath. I want to know whether they saw the sun, all their lives long.

‘No need, the pig sheds were only massive. INDOOR FREE RANGE is what ye call them.’

‘Pigs are smart,’ I say. I suppose I read this in a book.

‘The second smartest,’ he agrees, ‘after primates.’

‘Keep any animals still?’ I say.

‘Just a cupla your fellas now.’ He warily inclines his head toward you. ‘Rhodesian ridgeback and a lab. Never lock them in. It’s proper cruelty to have them locked in.’

I plunge back into silent nodding. It’s jackdaws and swans again, the perplexing way in which people measure life, but I let it be. I follow the hitchhiker’s directions, down a circuitous driveway to his farm house. There’s grass growing along the middle of the road, tickling the car’s belly as we pass. There’s a jeep parked on the lawn. It has moss in the blades of the wipers, moss encircling the window frames. The house is run-down and every front-facing sill is utterly empty, no vases or books or figurines, not a single personal item to make a home of it. It’s a sad place, don’t you think that it’s sad? There’s no sign of a Rhodesian ridgeback running free, no sign of a labrador either.

The hitchhiker doesn’t ask me in. He doesn’t offer me supper, even though it’s supper time. He doesn’t even suggest a cup of tea.

‘Thanks very much,’ he says, tonelessly and insincerely, ‘all the best.’

Now he slams the car door and sways off across the splintered slabs of his driveway, into the dark of his slumberous house.

We stay as we are with the engine ticking until the hitchhiker has his key in the hole and is wiping his boots against the front step. The evening has already piddled most of its light away. But the sky’s cleared to pink and is covered in straight lines as though the clouds have been doused in amaranth, and ploughed.

I’m tired, so tired. From the effort of being attentive to the presence of another human, of having to say things to someone who isn’t you, to someone who might actually listen. I don’t feel like driving around for hours to find an appropriate gateway, not tonight. But there’s no real need, we’re already well out of the way of civilisation, save for the hitchhiker in his tumbledown farm house. I picture him slumped at the bottom of his staircase; he only meant to sit down for a second to remove his shoes but now he is drunkenly snoring, dribbling into his collar.

Both sides of the road are frilled by dead ragwort, dead montbretia. Beyond there’s nothing but field upon field of harvested tillage. We drive on through the dead flowers and the dark. There’s a rat high up in the hedge, can you see him? He’s scaling the scrawny branches of a hawthorn tree. With his lardy arse wedged into a crook, like an ugly bird with its wings coiled into a pointy tail, now he’s gorging himself on hawberries. I’ve never seen a rat in a tree before and I wonder why, if rats can climb, they never climbed down the stepladder in the shut-up-and-locked room? There was a time when I could hear them constantly, running and jumping and scratching about in the roof. There was a time when I used to constantly listen and constantly wait for them to come down on me.

Further along, there’s a chunk of old fortress collapsed to a landlocked spit, bearded all over by creeping ivy. There’s a great mob of rooks scavenging a freshly shorn field, delving for gold nuggets amongst the gold spikes. Now they rise altogether to the ear-splitting pop of an invisible scarer. There must be fifty of them, maybe even a hundred. See how they fill the sky with tiny brains and tiny hearts, so many tiny pairs of feet.

You’re watching your reflection gathering definition in the back windscreen. You’re still watching as I find us a gateway and park for the night. A little back a little forth, a little back a little forth. Dinner is powdered mash watered back to life, corned beef shavings and chocolate biscuit fingers for dessert. We’re almost out of washing water again; tomorrow I’ll have to find a stream or tap. The last of it goes toward brushing my teeth, the only way I know of quelling my horrible breath for a few hours, at least. I’m too tired to bother with the tea-candles tonight. I roll out my bedding, brush the hitchhiker’s toe-prints away. Now I try to smoke myself to sleep, and once the tobacco is all gone too, I yank up the duvet, draw it tight around my iron-filing stubble, which isn’t really stubble any more but a beard, my Brillo Pad beard.

I lie awake on the old seat foam and two fields over from our gate, I see a trailer with a portable billboard attached. The field is otherwise empty, fallowing, and the billboard looks so out of place, like some alien creature that had been dropped there and abandoned. I suppose it must be visible from the main road, which is perhaps another few fields over, I can’t remember exactly. The words of its slogan are barely visible through the dark. It says something like: MAKE WAY FOR A WHOLE NEW YOU. But it took me fifty-seven years to become this me, I think, and I just don’t have the stamina to make so many mistakes all over again.

At night, the sheep look like walking headstones.