Sara Baume - Spill Simmer Falter Wither

Now the car summits the tumour, tips into the ditch, rolls a little and comes to rest. The man and I stop pushing and straighten up. What if he goes around to the front and tries to lift the bonnet? Again and more firmly this time, I say ‘Thank you but no. No. No thank you.’

There aren’t any other cars passing on the road and over the hedge, perhaps the winter wheat is rustling softly to itself and perhaps the birds are singing, but I can’t hear anything but you, your implacable warning call. Now the man seems to look into the car for the first time. I suppose he notices the blankets and the rubbish bags. The gas cooker and the football. The low chair and food bowl. You. Everything.

‘Right-o,’ he says, ‘only tryna help.’ Now he holds his hands out like a Mary in a grotto, with his greasy palms up. He walks back, climbs into the seat behind his steering wheel, starts the engine. SWIMMING POOL SOLUTIONS says the sign on the side of his transit.

As it passes, a crisp packet blows into the air, falls down again. Now I hear the whisper of the winter wheat, the rattling call of a magpie in the distance. I wonder how a man might attempt to solve a swimming pool. And I feel suddenly terrible. He was only trying to help us, and I drove him away.

Through the spirit-rotting cold, we are driving. The mileage clocks, time passes. I feel as though the farther we descend toward sea level, the ever-so-slightly warmer the nights will become. Things will stop their freezing, or at least freeze less and remain softish in the centre, like a custard cream, one of my father’s.

We pass the last and most resilient of the terracotta beech and melon-yellow sycamore leaves. We pass pheasants strutting the tractor rucks. Fertiliser sacks undulating against the hedgerows. Takeaway boxes turned spongy by rain. Sugar beets fallen from trailers with their heads smashed and tresses ripped from the scalp and strewn. For a time, we pass all of the things we already passed, only in reverse. And so I suppose I know where we are again, not by name but by association.

Do you remember the monkey puzzle trees and peeling eucalyptus, the shoddy rockets and neglected crucifixes? Now here’s the same pair of running shoes slung over the same wires still walking on air above our heads, and the same straw bale rolled from the same hill stuck in the same ditch, only now, it is wizened and black. See how it has been burned out, as though it were a joyridden car.

For a time, we sleep in the same gateways, car pointing in the opposite direction. Now the nights are astonishingly cold. I have four jumpers and a coat, and blankets, even one with sleeves and a hood. I should be acclimatised after so many winters in my father’s house, still everything aches and I don’t know whether it’s the cold or the position I’m trying to sleep in, or both, probably both. At night I feel the old familiar creeping from the sharp bones of my toes up through my spine to shake my shoulders. Now I’m awake and shivering, and you are woken too. I switch on the torch and relight the camping cooker. I boil a cup’s worth of water, and while it’s boiling, I spoon honey from the jar and pour whiskey from the bottle and cut a wedge from a lemon and stud each segment with a clove. It’s fiddly work for a fat-fingered man by torchlight, but a double shot is certain to settle me back to sleep. While it’s cooling, I rinse the saucepan and heat a dish measure of milk. You know what’s coming and dribble with anticipation as you wait. You press your face close to the blue flames, so close your eyebrows and whiskers are singed to brittle kinks.

For a time, we stop in the same villages and buy food in the same grocery shops. Except for a bottle of whiskey here and there, a net of lemons and a jar of spicy twigs, I choose all the old reliable items. I think I could travel as far as Tasmania and still I’d stop in the first little shop I stumbled upon and try to buy gingernuts, margarine, fish fingers, spaghetti hoops. Then I think I’d find a salmon-pink house in a place by the coast where the shore birds wade, and I’d go about every day in the exactly same way I’ve always done, and the only thing different would be that we’d be in Tasmania. Yes, you could come, of course you could come. How could I ever manage without you now?

Passing bungalows after nightfall, see the glow of strangers’ kitchens. Smell the wood smoke from their chimneys. Now we pass a house with an illuminated B&B sign swinging over the mouth of the driveway, and because the kitchen glows and the chimney smells of wood smoke, because I ache from cold and sleeplessness, I’m almost tempted to stop. But all the guesthouses will be guestless at this time of year, and I can’t stand the thought of trespassing on a family, of paying strangers to be kind to me, of lingering in the foothills of their domestic tiffs. I can’t stand the thought of eating from their crockery, of sweating into their bed-sheets, of patting myself from bunions to brow with their bath towels, of being watched through the dark as I sleep by the glassy eyes of their sentimental geegaws. I can’t stand the thought of being steadily infused by their smell, because every house and every family, however scrupulously clean, has its own smell. Of course I know you know this already, that every smell is ten times bigger to your senses, that you can smell history, that you can smell time. My father’s house smelled of black mould, cigarette smoke, fried garlic, hand-wash, damp dust, sweaty slippers, my own heinous breath and the fetid draught through the cracks in the ceiling plaster, the keyhole of the shut-up-and-locked room; but they consolidated into what was simply the smell of home, which no one word can describe and nowhere in Tasmania can ever smell exactly like.

I don’t ask, but she tells me. A woman of thereabout my age with a little boy’s pudding bowl haircut. Her voice is toneless, insincere. From the opposite side of the indoor window where the air is purer, life-prolonging, she tells me ‘That’s the last of it now. It’s a bit of a mixum-gatherum.’ I gather my notes and wonder where the coins came from. And the plastic casing of my savings book makes a low squeak like a plaintive mouse as she slides it back to me over the counter. Or maybe it’s my driver’s licence that’s the plaintive mouse; I cannot tell.

We drive on. It doesn’t get any warmer. Instead, rainstorms come. Wind buffets the car and the wipers fling themselves to and fro until they are exhausted. We stop in petrol stations, as we must. In the queue for the till, I inspect the chocolate display. I locate the position of the Fruit & Nuts, and if I can reach them without stretching too far and becoming conspicuous, then back on the road we’ll share a bar. Fruit for me, nut for you and the chocolate between us.

We pass a hillside of windmills like medieval spindles in the sky, spinning the cirrus clouds into cumulus. We pass sick rabbits with limp ears and socked expressions hopping circles in the ditch. We pass sheep’s wool torn by barbed wire from the sheep who grew it, tussling to bust free of its spokes.

We see a glossy ibis, a spoonbill from southern Europe, Portugal or Spain. An elongated raven with a curlew’s beak, rare as a bank vole. He is delving in the brown puddle of an overflowed field. He flies away as the car passes, did you see?

First thing every day, I wind down the windows to evacuate the stench of our morning breath combined. Now the nights are so cold, so astonishingly cold, I faintly expect it to have frozen inside the car, into a solid clot of lurid green, an ugly embodiment of foul dreams and sleep disturbance. SLOW THROUGH VILLAGE, the signposts say, but I rarely heed them. I keep on until I know from the angle of the trees, from the way they shy their limbs from the brunt of the sea gales, until I know that we are nearly there.