Sara Baume - Spill Simmer Falter Wither

A trail looms from the forest floor and rises up the hill before us. It disappears beneath the forest’s ceiling of dying leaves and thriving needles, of ripening conkers and burgeoning pinecones. There’s a handwritten sign nailed to a stump in the shape of an arrow pointing to the trail. RINGFORT it says. What do you think, would you like to see a ring fort? It’ll probably be overgrown and disappointing even if we manage to find it, but I’ve never seen a ring fort before, and hundreds and hundreds of years ago, people used to live inside them. They built earthen banks and raised huts and dug chambers and clad the chamber walls with flat, smooth stones. Then they squeezed themselves inside to hide from death.

Up, up, up we scramble.

You’re drawn on by your panic-worthy scent, I’m drawn on by the low autumn sun winking through the scraggled branches, the promise of an earthen rampart. Past cobnuts, lords and ladies. Past a magic toadstool bent and macerated like an ancient man, a tiny ascetic taking refuge in the woods. You leap and tear through the tangled stems. I’ve never seen you so messianic. Does the forest make your brain buzz with memories of digging out in spring, of bounding with the baiters? Now you clamp something beneath the knotweed. A dormouse, a field mouse, a bank vole, a shrew? I watch as you mercilessly nibble it to death, now stand with a paw entrapping the tail, waiting for it to betray a sign of life. It appears to be breathing even though its organs are surely pounded to pieces. Now the last nerve-ending in its acorn-sized body short-circuits, and with the flick of its tail you recommence death-nibbling. I see it’s a shrew, poor shrew. It should have kept still, but it’s too late now. The shrew only knew to fear buzzards, foxes, owls, mink. How could it have imagined such a thing as you? Its lost life was worth no more or less than yours or mine, than the man in the pope mobile or the sardines in the sardine tin. You might at least have killed it quickly.

And almost at once, you are off again, and I must run after you. Pitch and clump across the pliant ground, flailing the buckler ferns down, cracking twigs with my planky soles. This time I will not go quietly to the car and wait. This time I will not lose you.

I find you in a bank. I find not you but a burrowhole and know that you have crawled inside it. I know from the sound of your muffled braying. I know from the shrapnel of mud shooting free from the mouth of the hole as you dig.

I am an imbecile. An imbecile for never having you fastened on the leash and an imbecile for bringing you here to this forest filled with irresistible burrowholes. And the only way to redeem my imbecility is to dig too, is to out-dig you.

I find a fat stick. I press my fingers together to make shovels of my ungainly hands. I prod and break and scrabble and fling and claw. I work so hard I forget my ungainliness, I replace it with a reserve of strength I didn’t know until now I’d been reserving, by a wildness that I learned from you. Animalised, I am digging, digging, digging.

An oblivious blackbird shouts from the buckler ferns. Hurdy-gurdy hurdy-gurdy hurdy-gurdy hurdy-gurdy it shouts, and so it must never have heard a car alarm. It sails my thoughts back to the barn owl and even though I know of course it’s a blackbird and not an owl, not a harbinger, I shout into the ferns IT WON’T BE HIM! And then I shout into the hole IT WON’T BE YOU! Do you hear me? It won’t be you, okay? I promise.

Now I brace my strongest shoulder against the bank and shove my arm as deep as it will shove. Now I feel you. The scraggled stump of your amputated tail. I drag you up, dragging against me. I wipe the mud from your mud-drenched face.

I know you are mad. I’ve known from the start you are both kinds of mad but this time I see it’s mouth-frothing, eye-popping anger. You might easily bite me, free yourself, crawl back in. And yet you don’t. Why don’t you bite me, One Eye? We are lying on the freshly dug mud and I am holding you to my chest. I check your heartbeat, just to be sure. I can feel it battering; I can feel my own battering too. I hold our battering hearts together and you do not bite me, and I see how your wiped face is only as incomplete as I’ve ever known it to be. And I realise the earthen bank we just dug down was the rampart of our ring fort.

It’s barely distinguishable. There’s a set of raised, curved ridges, inside which the forest floor is flat and carpeted by old foliage. In the very centre, an oak stands fifty-feet tall, at least. Its thick branches sprawl in every direction like the legspan of a giant octopus. It stands intractable, as though as a reminder to the forest that it was the first tree and will endure to be its last. At the edge of the bank on the farthest side, the forest ends and opens onto fields. A green crop I can’t recognise by just the leaves stretches unimpeded for several miles before the green’s again adulterated by houses and roads and pylons, by people. At first it was a beautiful view, but suddenly it seems like a sad place, don’t you think it’s sad?

We sit on the field-facing bank of the ring fort. I roll a cigarette. I always carry the tobacco pouch with me while we are walking, along with the car key, the leash, some chocolate buttons. Now the smoke runs through my blood vessels and I unclench. I offer you a button. You are back on the leash now, sniffling the wind, tilting your ears this way and that. Can you smell a trace of badger, can you hear them calling you? I place my palm across your shoulders and stroke your warm back. Your silver tag jangles in the wind. Your chest swells and deflates in neat bursts, a string of drool hangs off your chin from the place where your lip is missing. I see the mud already dried into your fur and the threads of grey worming through your curls in the place where I wiped your face clean. And I wonder are you old? I’d forgotten that you might be old.

Now I’m beginning to dream again. I’m sinking to the blackmost layer of sleep, remaining there for longer intervals.

Tonight I dream of your badger, of the badger who took your eye. I dream myself down, down, down an unfathomably small hole. Deep, deep, deep through a bone-crunching tunnel. I dream the air wrung out of my lungs. I dream the smell of an earthworm mausoleum. The spindly ends of tree roots combing the long hairs of my back. The wet of the earth permeating my skin, its cold tongue licking my spine. I dream the muted shouts of men from somewhere up above and far behind. The only clear sound is the grate and slither of my uncertain progress. The only light is shrinking, shrinking, shrinking. Now I dream the flash of the badger’s teeth and a sound like a violent collision of fur and flesh. I can’t see anything any more and now I know; one of my eyes is filled with blood and the other is inside the badger.

When I wake, I am me again, and you are you.

You’re outstretched across the back seat of the car, grunting and waggling your paws as though you have picked up my dream and are again running, running, running. Your right eye is closed and on the other side, your eye-hollow is closed too, so that, in sleep, you look almost symmetrical again. You seem almost unscathed.

Sometimes when I’m descending gears to turn a long corner, the car begins to fail. The engine dips and coughs and I lean my head and shoulders and chest in the direction of the corner’s curve, as though I might impel the car myself. Mostly the putter perks back up in an instant, pushes us on again.