Sara Baume - Spill Simmer Falter Wither

I land flat on my front like a domino, like the last domino. I ram the heel of each graceless hand into the ash, the horse chestnut, the sycamore, so hard that the blood rises instantly into my cuticles. I feel more than winded; I feel split in two. From the gash that’s opened in my chin, clean down the centre, like an axed log. I picture the bruise, from forehead to toes, as though my biggest vein has burst blue ink beneath my skin.

It’s decades since I’ve fallen. As a boy I was forever falling, and every time I picked myself up again without fuss. I wore short trousers all year round and all year round my knees were scabby and the scabs were as ordinary a part of my legs as were my god-given knobbly knee caps. But now I am old. In the reflection of the car door as I lie like a domino on the ground, I am an old man. I’ve completely forgotten what my bare legs look like and my clobbered jaw hurts with every ounce of consciousness, with the united intensity of every fall I never felt in boyhood.

You’re facing away from me. You’re pulling against the leash. You’re histrionic. Now I look to where you’re looking, now I see what you’re seeing. Advancing toward us across the lay-by, there’s a little girl. She’s snot-nosed and soft-shaped and dressed like a story-book witch. She has a tall hat, cat-patterned petticoats and a pair of patent leather shoes with pointed toes. Now I remember, it’s Halloween, or thereabouts.

‘Ouch!’ the little girl says on my behalf, ‘y’okay mister?’

She is four or five, I can’t tell exactly. She’s extending a hand to my crumpled frame. She’s trying to help me up, even though she is tiny. The weight of a tumbleweed, the strength of a moth. Hasn’t anyone taught her how to recognise when a man is strange? Hasn’t anyone told her to stay away from strange men? Now I heave myself up, wrench myself back.

‘You shouldn’t talk to strangers,’ I say, ‘didn’t anybody ever teach you not to talk to strangers?’

She must have come out of the Volvo with the chip van man. She must be his daughter, yet too young for school and brought along to work instead. Why isn’t he watching her now? Why hasn’t he called her back? Now her eyes skip from me and settle on you.

‘We’d one like him before,’ she says, ‘can I pet him?’

She takes a footstep closer and reaches out again. In a flash, you snap at her hand. I know you don’t mean it. I know you’re only protecting your property, which is the car, and your family, who is me. You miss, but I know you’ll snap again and so I’m on you. I’m hobbling and bundling and chucking and slamming. I’m pulling the car fast, fast, fast to the mouth of the lay-by and indicating into the traffic.

But I have to stop, I’m forced to stop. As I wait for a gap, I curse rush-hour. I look up and see the little witch girl in the rearview mirror. She’s a solitary splash of colour against the grey sky and mud. She glissades around the lay-by, having forgotten us already. The tip of her hat is drooping slightly and the cats on her tights are splattered by dirt. What posters has she on her bedroom walls, I wonder? Has she stars in her copybooks, stones in her pencil case? Suddenly she stops and raises a palm. Look, the little witch girl hasn’t forgotten, and is waving.

The car kicks up a cloud of ash keys in its wake. Blood drips from my chin onto my trousers. I thrust the gear-stick into fifth as we speed down the main road, away.

My hands shudder against the steering wheel. I feel like I swallowed a free bird and it’s lashing its wings against the bars of my bones, trying to find the way back up to my mouth-hole. But this time the free bird isn’t fear. This time the free bird is rage.

When I used to feel angry in my father’s house, I boxed cushions, flung knick-knacks, kicked kickboards. But I never broke anything and always tidied up afterwards. My anger was a tea-candle, one more useless sensation amongst a snowslide of useless sensations I suffer but never act upon. Now it’s a whole cathedral of tea-candles, an inferno. I’m angry at myself, for being careless, but I’m angry at you too, I’m even more angry at you. Because of the little girl. Why did you have to snap? She wasn’t trying to hurt you. Because the pain in my walloped jaw is blighting my sense of reason. And you are the only animate thing at which to direct my anger. You are the only thing; you are the only.

I drive. For several miles down previously uncharted back roads. Ballistic, directionless, I drive. Now, on a road between two hedgerows of dead honeysuckle, I skid the car to a halt. I climb out of my seat and flip it forward, violently. I grab you by the scruff and drag you from the shelter of the low chair. I haul you from your safe space. The tasselled blanket is caught on your back paws. I snatch it away. The leash is trailing from your collar like a polyester umbilical chord. I pull it off and drop you to the ground. Now I get back into the car and slam the door. Now I drive away, and leave you.

When I was very young, too young for riding in the front seat of the car, I remember a journey home from town one murky evening. I remember the tonsured back of my father’s head as he drove and the radio playing wordless songs, and I remember crying. I bawled and screeched and sobbed and snivelled because I’d dropped Mr Buddy on the floor and couldn’t reach to pick him up again. All of a sudden my father yanked the handbrake and stopped the car. He leaned over and lifted me from the back seat. Then he placed me into a tuft of grass at the side of the road, and drove away. Young as I was, I remember thinking this wasn’t the sort of thing fathers were supposed to do. I remember thinking he would soon come back, he would definitely come back. But he didn’t. And I remember the exact stretch of road and how promptly the daylight died that day, how the crows went off and the cats came out, how the car faces lighted their eyes. I grew very cold, my fingers turning numb, my nose leaking unstoppable runnels of snot. I remember worrying about Mr Buddy and what my father might have done with him. Eventually a neighbour passing in her car saw me and stopped. She picked me up and I remember the rustling sound her jacket made against my legs and I remember how she took my hands in hers and raised them to her lips and I thought that she was going to bite me, but she only blew on my freezing fingers. Then she drove me home and rang our doorbell, and when my father answered, he looked surprised; he pretended to be surprised. He sent me to my bedroom and I never heard what he said to the neighbour, how he explained it away. But after that day, I never cried in the car again. I never cried anywhere. With or without onions, I never cried.

You stay as you are in the road, at exactly the point where I dropped you. Is the air not thick with new smells? Are you not surrounded by new fields and hedges and ditches untrammelled? Yet you resist, and stay as you are. I watch you in the rearview mirror, your small shoulders black and hunched against the green and vast. I watch until the car rounds a corner and I can’t see you any more.

Now all my rage transforms to panic. I do an unwieldy U-turn on the too-narrow road. I thwack down the nettles with my number plate. I speed back. It’s been only a moment. You’re still as I left you. Your lonely peephole’s fixed on the precise spot at which my taillights disappeared. Now you’re on your feet. Now you’re beating your stubby tail with all your strength. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. I should never have blamed you. It’s my fault. Everything is my fault.

I’m tired now. I want to go home.