Sara Baume - Spill Simmer Falter Wither

Look, the sidewise branches.

‘Nearly there,’ I tell you, ‘nearly.’

I dream I’m tied to a post and standing up to my chest in snow. Even asleep, even inside the dream, tied to my post, I know the picture-making part of my mind has borrowed the dream’s landscape from an article I read in the newspaper roughly this time a year ago. It was about a group of greyhounds who were left tied up in their compound and froze to death. Without kennels, they lay on the concrete and were buried the first night of the blizzards. The article’s photograph showed a scene of wheelbarrows, shovels and ropes which trailed off into the drifts. Now I can see, in my dream, greyhounds on their backs with their legs standing high and rigid as the post I’m tied to. I can see tongues stuck to fangs and turned a powdery blue, the colour of cornflowers. It’s a cruelty I never even witnessed, yet I associate it with you, I dream it into your past.

Sometimes I notice tiny scars beneath your coat, tiny claw slashes and teeth prints. A few bits of your ears are missing, a few bits of your face. Can you remember how you lost them? Do you dream about it, as I do? I see how you move your left brow up and down and left and right in coordination with the expression on your face. I notice how still you blink your hollow. Do you miss your missing eye, I wonder. Have you even realised it’s gone?

The concreteness and geometry of the scenery is building, building, building into a town, a seaside town.

First come the bungalows, always the bungalows. Each surrounded by a lake of lawn, by swan-shaped flowerpots and terracotta cherubs, perennial shrubs and flatpack sheds. See the palm trees; I never expected there’d be so many. The palm is a tropical tree, as out of place in this wetland of cows and fog as a bullseye in a bag of apple drops.

Next come the Italian and German supermarkets. Now a secondary school with three storeys of bored and pimpled faces peeking through the slatted blinds. Now come the narrow streets and shops and pubs, a library and town hall. Buckets on the footpath in front of a flower shop, bouquets of gerbera and gypsophilia looking strangely cheerful against the bleached winter. A rail of second-hand clothes wheeled out of a charity shop onto the street, a sea gale knocking the mothballs out of capacious cardigans and chintzy frocks. Now come the apartment blocks, all taupe and steel and stifling close together, with balconies too narrow to open a newspaper, never mind a folding chair. The apartment blocks are abutting a plaza of wide, smooth slabs. Now here on a pillar is a statue of some dead sea captain. There’s a herring gull perched on the crown of his admiral hat and a splattering of milky crap down his epaulettes. In the town by the sea a man in a sandwich board pronounces that it is Friday, and Friday is market day. And I wonder if, when he was a little boy, he wanted to be a man in a sandwich board when he grew up. The slabs of the plaza the length of the shore front are pitched with open tents, billowing with canvas canopies, bustling with browsing bodies. Beyond the Friday market, the bay curves like a beaten horseshoe.

I get the car stuck in the town’s illogical one-way system and drive us in circles until you begin to look sick. Now I stop at the first free parking space and shunt into the drain gully. As we climb from the car, I remember the muzzle far away on its apron hook. I know I promised never to mention it, but I feel as though you should be muzzled now, as though it’s dangerous for us to walk about this sea town with your mouth unshackled. But I brush the feeling off; today I am strangely buoyed, strangely brave. Perhaps it’s the sea gales, the inspiriting salt air. Perhaps the months of driving have peeled back some of my strangeness, my horribleness, and replaced it with pluck.

FARMERS MARKET the sandwich board says, yet few of the stallholders look like the farmers I’ve known, like the old men I used to see at mass, like the pig-farming-horse-chipping hitchhiker. These farmers have woolly scarves and placid, unscrunched faces. Their stalls hold potted heathers, rooster potatoes, plaited and sugar-dusted loaves of bread, iced sponges on paper doilies. The market pleases the bowerbird within me at every swivel. Here are baskets of green, red, yellow apples and glass bottles of clouded juice. WINSTON, JUPITER, the baskets say, EGREMONT RUSSET. Now see the cages packed with poultry of every squawk and plumage pattern: bantams, rosecombs, quail. Plump, white ducks with plump, white eggs arranged in boxes stacked on top of their cages.

Of course you see them. I have to bind the handle loop of your leash around my wrist as we pass and you nearly saw my hand off with your tugging. I know the market’s disorientating; it’s disorientating for me too. All of this colour and movement and sound, after so many weeks just you and me in the quiet capsule of the car. The smells are of stoneground flour and ripe cheese and broken eggs and lavender and shit-coated feathers. So many new smells that you’re tossed about by the whimsy of your maggot nose, from cured hams strung up on hooks to feathery creatures innocently scratting. Now a girl with a stud through her upper lip like a silvered beauty mark proffers a tray of tiny breads.

‘Would you like to try some tapenades, sir?’ she says. Her voice is sing-song.

The tiny breads each carry a tiny splodge of grainy paste, in faded black and brilliant red and anaemic green. I know I should keep walking. Ordinarily I’d pitch and clump away as fast as possible. But I don’t. I take a red, the colour of warning, of admonition. The taste is vivid. It seems to gush into all the parts of my mouth at once, and is good, so good.

‘You like that one?’ the girl says, ‘that one’s my sun-dried tomato. Here, have another.’

As though faintly inebriated by sun tomatoes, again I accept. I take a second red bread, and without thinking, I drop it to you. You’re watching, waiting dutifully at my feet for a little taste of whatever it is I’m eating.

‘Treat,’ I say; this is your favourite word, foremost amongst your sixty-five.

You gobble the bread and lick your chops, and the girl laughs, sincerely. Just for a second, I feel like a regular person, doing regular things, in a regular way. I look around at the crowd, at the peddlars peddling and browsers browsing, at mums rallying three-wheel buggies and teenagers slouching against each other and old folk baby-stepping behind their walking frames. And I feel faintly ordinary, faintly inconspicuous, faintly unsuspicious. And it’s good, so good.

‘I’ll take a jar,’ I say, ‘of the sun tomatoes.’

The girl laughs, but not in an unkind way. From a wad in my shirt pocket, I unroll a note and hold it out and she hands me back some coins and a jar-shaped paper bag.

‘Thank you,’ I say, ‘thanks very much,’ and off again we wander, in the direction of open water, feeling all vivid inside, all sun.

At the stop of the slabbed-stone plaza, there’s a railing running along a step which falls into the sea. I’m leaning against the railing and you’re standing on your two back legs with your front feet rested against the step like a tiny man, like the two-year-old child you match in intelligence. Straight away it feels as if I can breathe better, now the view is blown open, now the land is drowned. And even though it’s a different bay and a different ocean, you smell the cloy of rot and fish and tang and wet and seem to recognise a trace of home.