Sara Baume - Spill Simmer Falter Wither

Together, on we drive, with all the windows open, even though it’s cold. Together we breathe deep the cold, fill our lungs with fox spray and dead honeysuckle, pine martens and stinkhorns, seven different kinds of sap.

We are driving, driving, driving. Heading for the coast, keeping to the back roads.

Things are freezing, freezing, freezing.

Dew drops on furze bushes and rain drops on mud. Gutters, cattle troughs, mill races, puddles, potholes, garden ponds. In the boot, the mineral bottles and gallon drums. On the windscreen, condensation. And beneath the bonnet, the tiny plastic gauge for feeding the wipers with washing water.

What day is it? It must be the beginning of November at least. It seems too early for the first frosts, for such face-aching cold. I still don’t know exactly where we are even though I know now where we’re heading. We’re following the straightest route back to open sea. We’re keeping close as I can keep us to the line which the crow flies, and all of the other birds too, of course. Watch out for people who say it’s only the crow who flies straight. They’ll have you believing the pigeons and starlings and waxwings and gulls are all crisscrossing idiotically, weaving and winding and never quite getting there.

I wonder if my father’s house is freezing too. It wasn’t ever warm, but the smallness and clutter made it seem somehow cosy. Do you remember last winter? The lowest temperatures for half a century, the meteorologist said. We didn’t know each other then. It was the first winter without my father and the first I felt the full bitterness of his house, the first it drove me back beneath my duvet during the thrifty daylight hours. Through the flimsy single-glazing, I could feel the wind and hear the rain softly tapping as though begging to be let in. Every morning I built a fire in the bedroom grate and every day I kept it crackling until I was back beneath the duvet for the night, and every night the bedroom ceiling froze and the freeze crept up from the sharp bones of my toes and stopped to take me by the shoulders and shake me awake. Then I’d see the ceiling plaster twinkling like a clear sky, as though the roof had been lifted clean off by an enormous godhand.

One freezing winter years and years ago, one morning after my father had left for the factory, I snuck into his room and yanked the pull-string that swung from the trapdoor. It seemed to me such a paltry device; I couldn’t imagine it might be capable of drawing a folding stepladder down upon my head. But it somehow did. And so I climbed into the roof and there I saw for the first time there was no trace of any insulation, no yellow pillows of spun glass.

I never considered my father a poor man. He worked every week day of his able-bodied life and he was paid rent in a monthly bundle from the lady who managed the fashion boutique, then the Polish hairdresser after her. My father never spent a reckless copper or owned a frivolous thing. He never showed an interest in money nor any of the spangly things it might have brought him. I don’t understand why he didn’t have the roof insulated, and I wonder if the house is freezing now, even more severely so than last winter without the small warmth of my breath and the jittering fire. I wonder about the bedroom ceiling plaster. I wonder about all of the fluid things I left so carelessly exposed. The suds in the soap dish, the damp earth in the plant pots, the oblong pool at the bottom of the toilet and the vetch’s stagnant water in its unemptied vase. I wonder is my father’s house a salmon pink ice palace now.

In the winter, Aunt couldn’t take the cold in my father’s house so she’d bring me next door. Down the grocer’s passageway and up the rickety stairwell to her low-ceilinged flat. The smell was TCP and chicken-stock, and it was always warm. A sticky, cheesy kind of warmth. I can’t remember what the source of heat was, though I remember how Aunt kept the curtains drawn so not a wisp could squeeze free. I was already acclimatised to the chill air and ubiquitous draught of my father’s house and I didn’t like to spend the day sealed inside Aunt’s flat. It was too clammy and there was nothing to do. Even though many of Aunt’s belongings resembled toys, she never let me play with anything. She had a whole mantelpiece crammed with porcelain cats and porcelain girls in porcelain skirts and bonnets with porcelain frills. She had a picture of Jesus with a three-dimensional sacred heart and a tiny candle-shaped bulb that constantly flickered. Her only books were the Bible and a mass missal with a leatherette cover, if these can even be called books. I’d sit cross-legged in the central circle of the concentric circles on her living room rug. I’d make believe I was a baby Buddha like the one I’d seen inside a story book. I’d stay still as I could, and pretend to be meditating.

There was a fish bowl, I’d almost forgotten the fish bowl. It was big as a motorcycle helmet and there weren’t any fish inside, nor any water. Instead there was a fistful of marbles; they were the brightest things in the whole flat. As a boy, I’d pretend Aunt’s goldfish had turned to glass, and as I meditated, I’d stare at the marbles. I’d will them to swim again.

Since I forgot to bring the kitchen calendar, I’ve come to measure time in weather, in walks, in passing wilderness, in miles clocked on the dashboard dial.

The weather and walks and miles and wilderness between us and the lay-by with the little witch girl accumulate, so that it seems long ago, even if it isn’t. Now whenever it was, it troubles me less. It troubles me with only the same ferocity as all the other things that trouble me. With your nose glued to the air vents, your thousand-mile stare boring through the windscreen, I wonder: what are the things that trouble you?

I notice, on the index finger of my right hand, a skelp of skin gone from the knuckle leaving a patch of pink, the vivid pink of chewed bubblegum. There’s an extremely fine strand of your fur lodged in the wound, and I wonder how I wounded it and what force of nature carried this particular strand to my finger and deposited it there. Now I tug the free end, but the strand resists. And I see that I’m too late, that it’s already set into a scab, that it’s part of me now, that you’re part of me.

You’re in the low chair on the back seat and I’m pushing. There’s a knoll in the road like a tarmac tumour and I’m struggling to get the car over it. You’re looking through the rear windscreen and watching me push. Your head’s tilted in confusion.

Now a transit van ticks up the road behind us, slows and parks on the grassy verge. A man in a boiler suit climbs out. He’s eating a packet of hoop-shaped crisps. Now he’s coming toward us.

‘D’ya need a hand there?’ he calls, and I pretend not to hear. I don’t see what he does with the crisps, but the packet’s gone by the time he reaches the car and he’s brushing dust from his hands onto his suit, greasy orange dust. ‘What’s the trouble?’ he says, bending down to push uninvited alongside me.

Inside the car, you are apoplectic. I have to raise my voice to be heard over your barks. ‘No trouble,’ I say, ‘just cuts out sometimes. Give it ten minutes and it’ll start again, no trouble.’

Unfazed by you, by your hysterics, the man chuckles. ‘Doesn’t sound right though, does it?’ he says. ‘Want me to take a look?’

‘No,’ I say, ‘thank you and that, but no.’