Sara Baume - Spill Simmer Falter Wither

You’re quick to guiltless sleep, shifting through a sequence of dream positions. Now crumpled, now sprawled, now foetal. Now with elbows akimbo, paws pushed forward and bunched together as if bound, as though you are a dead boar swinging from a hunting sling. I extend my hand to touch you, just to check. You are the only living thing I dare touch. And you like to be rubbed dry with a towel on rain days, to feel your skull patted when you have been good, to be stroked from ears to tail whenever I am reading. Now I run my big hand over your neat ridges of muscle and fat, your sporky bones, your wirebrush coat. And I check your heartbeat, just to be sure.

The leaves overhanging the car are jostling in the moonlight, tossing their shadow-puppet shapes across the dash. Through the slits of my half-closed eyelids, they look like trapped insects swarming on the floor mats, scooting beneath the seats. Now a bat dips and pitches over the bonnet before continuing down the road. For a while, I watch the place where it faded out and I wonder whether it was a bat, or maybe just a light leaf surfing a bouncy piece of wind. It is now, and only because I’m already watching, that I see an owl, a gigantic barn owl. Its face is apple-shaped and onion-coloured. Its wings are huge and mottled. It moves in thoughtful strokes, dives for something, disappears. It’s the most splendid thing I’ve ever seen.

You’re awake as fast as I can raise the lock. We fall from the car and set off in ungainly pursuit of a bird-ghost. We gamble and trot over a field of square bales and startled mice, smashing the spikes and nuggets as we go. The owl flashes back into view, just for a second before vanishing again, this time into a patch of forest. Now it’s properly lost, impossible to trace its route through the black canopy. Still we trammel to the edge of the bale field, and here I pause for just a blink, but you push on alone, and so I follow you.

The dry, bare branches high ahead clop against one another. They make a sound like timber horseshoes on hard ground. In the dark, you are no more than a jagged stripe of white beard. It’s only a short way over the crackling floor to a ruined house. Inside, the windows are veiled by filthy nets and lacy cobwebs. Here’s a picture frame with its glass shattered, the photograph bleached out. Here’s a broken mug with a cockerel on the outside and somebody’s old tea stains still tarnishing its base. The roof is off, and high up on a rafter fixed into a nook, there’s a box. A wooden box exactly the size of an owl, with a few coloured wires trailing from it, leading to an identical box lower down. Now here at eye level, there’s a sign emblazoned with the words: WARNING: FILMING IN PROGRESS. DO NOT INTERFERE WITH OWL BOX.

On our way back to the car, we trudge more than we trot. It’s not until you’re tucked into the low chair and I’m back beneath the duvet, that we hear the owl. It sounds nothing like a hoot, nothing like a too-it-too-woo. But even now, even at a distance, it is startling: it is livid. And I remember what I’d forgotten all throughout our night adventure up until this point. I remember that the owl is a harbinger of death.

There are barns and slatted sheds behind us, water troughs beside. There’s an electric fence and a mud track. How many suchlike cattle paths have we walked now, between fields at dawn? The fence is switched on and sizzling. I’m stopping, starting, leaning into the bramble hedge to reach the ripest berries. There’s a bag swinging from my wrist carrying at least a half-mile’s worth of fruit, now crushed and leaking black blood through a prick-hole in the bottom. You’re at my feet, scoffing your way through the knee-high berries. I wonder how is it you can tell red from black amongst all your yellow and blue and grey, now I remember that ripeness has a smell.

One second you’re beside me scoffing, the next you’re rocketing away up the cattle path, and I glimpse a ginger-coated thing rocketing inches ahead.

A fox? I call your name even though I know you won’t hear me, won’t come back. The ginger streak dives into the undergrowth and you lunge after it. I hear it howl, you yelp. I’m running to catch up, though I’ve no idea what I’m going to do once I get there. Now I see it catapult into a tree, and because rats aren’t red and foxes can’t climb trees, of course, it must be a cat.

The cat crouches in the low branches, raises its hackles to hiss. Now you’re sniffing hasty circles around the trunk. You don’t appear to understand exactly where the cat has gone; it doesn’t seem to occur to you to raise your head upwards. Now I reach you and hold you still. There’s a red scrawl across the bridge of your muzzle, a few dabs of blood on your forehead, but the cat missed your eye. Thank goodness, it missed your eye.

I re-attach your leash but you’re obstinate, and now I’m dragging, dragging, dragging. Back on the cattle path, I lift a stone and turn around. I take aim and fling, hard as I can. Now I do it again and again, until I clip the cat’s back and it scrambles higher and blends into the unfallen yellow leaves. It is a sycamore tree; it seems to be marking a field boundary.

‘Come on,’ I tell you, ‘brekkie.’ And you come.

What happened to our blackberries? I must have dropped them. Now see how the bag’s exploded in the dirt. We leave them for the birds and bugs.

The road meanders. There’s a river to one side and a wood to the other. Another wood. I didn’t expect that for every shell on the coast there’s a tree in the midlands.

From the radio, an expert is telling us how some blackbirds have a tendency to imitate car alarms. But what does the car alarm mean in bird-speak, and what do the other birds say back? Or do they say nothing and shun the alarm bird? Do they point him out to one another and remark that he’s strange? The expert doesn’t say.

You’re not listening anyway; your thousand-mile stare pierces the woods. The river is really only a stream. Still, good enough for refilling our drums. In some places there are shallow meres and squitty waterfalls. Elsewhere the ditch is too thick to see through. The wood climbs a hill away from the river and the road. Most of the slope has been deforested and there’s nothing but gorse to hold the loose logs back, to prevent all the rejected bits from ricocheting into the traffic. Not that there is any traffic, just us.

Now we come upon a clearing at the river’s edge which looks faintly as though it might once have been a designated parking space. Here the river pools, so once my drums are filled, I set to washing my socks and jocks. I empty my soap powder into the water without thinking. It’s not until I gather my slop pile for its final squeeze that I remember the river creatures. Some bubbles escape my washing pool and infiltrate the current. And I feel suddenly thoroughly terrible that I might have poisoned them. Remember the radio expert who told us about the male roach who developed eggs as well as sperm, because the water he lived in is polluted by insidious endocrines, do you remember?

Here’s a footbridge with rope handrails and decomposing planks. You’ve already crossed and found something to sniff on the opposite side. You seem especially panicked by the meaning of this smell. Now I hesitate to follow, just for a second. I think about the wood where I lost you or you lost me, where we lost each other. I remember the Billy Goats Gruff and I lean over the handrail to check for a troll. Below, now my bubbles have been carried on, I can see minnows, sticklebacks, baby rainbow trout. See these brittle stone caskets; they are sheltering the larvae of the caddis fly. And these triangular ripples are the tracks of a whirligig beetle who’s just skated across the surface to reach the farther bank. See the silty mud at the pool’s very bottom. Down there I’ll bet there’s a family of frogs preparing to sleep out the coming winter. But there isn’t any troll, of course not. I am the troll.