Sara Baume - Spill Simmer Falter Wither

The waves are breaking against the concrete, but it looks like there’s a measly beach beneath the step. What stage of tide are we at? It must surely be the highest. I always used to know, yet somewhere in the scrum of countryside, I lost track. Now I tow you along the shore front in search of sand, past the last of the market stalls and away from the crowd, following the footpath which follows the curve of the bay until we come upon a solitary caravan.

The caravan is a strange distance from everything, everyone else, as if it’s been nudged to the very limits of the town. Through the broad rear window, I can see three seated women with white-gold hair and thick shoulder spans. They’re facing a huge screen mounted to the low wall above their heads. On the screen there’s another gold-haired but slimmer woman facing back out at them. She’s speaking through her smiling teeth and jiggling her hands and bouncing her empty gaze about to include everyone and no one all at once. She’s wearing a madonna blue dress, and on a short shelf alongside the mounted screen, there’s a Mary, a scapula and a crystal vase of fresh carnations: a homemade grotto.

I turn away, I don’t want the women to see me. As I do I notice you’ve rammed your claws into the concrete and will not budge. What is it, what’s wrong? I look into your eye to try and tell what you’re feeling, but it’s black as your fur. All pupil and no iris, no white. Now I remember from somewhere that these are the kind of people who bred you, the kind of people from whom you ran. Is this why your chest’s dropped low to the concrete, why you’re pulling, pulling, pulling? I steal a last look at the caravan and as I do I understand how these people are outcasts too, pariahs, and I know I should feel some throb of kinship. But I don’t.

I turn around and allow you to tow me all the way back through the plaza, the market, the town, to the car. I lock our buttons against the world, against the peddlars and browsers, the slouchers and strollers. I look out the windscreen at all the people walking on the street and sitting on high stools in cafes and queuing beneath the shelter beside the bus stop sign. I know each person is carrying a tiny screen in their pocket. I know each screen holds a list of the names of other people who are not here but somewhere out there also carrying a tiny screen. I know that inside each pocket there’s a gold-haired woman whispering to the person who carries her, telling them they are included. Sitting locked inside our quiet capsule, I try to picture the details of these people’s lives, in order that they’ll seem less unfamiliar, less unsettling. I try to picture the colour of their walls, the clutter on their kitchen tables, the view out their front-facing windows. But no matter how hard I try, all I can see is my purest egg-yolk yellow, my inkless biros, the mud of my bay.

I’m still holding the jar-shaped paper bag in my hand. I place it down beside me. But as I place it down I start to wonder if maybe I didn’t seem regular in the market after all, inconspicuous, unsuspicious. Maybe the girl at the tapenade stall was conniving against us all along. Maybe what we’ve been given is a poisoned dose, a jar reserved for those who seem strange, those who walk the streets unarmed with tiny screens. Now I knock the bag onto the floor mat with a sweep of my fist, now I lean over and push it beneath the passenger seat. And we drive out of the seaside town and away from the main road, away again in search of a reassuring dead end where the drowned view is ours alone.

You understand. I know you understand.

See the black-headed gulls in the fields, picking the naked soil for earthworms. They’re listening with their earless faces for the muffled shuffle of a careless crawler. They’re stabbing the brown glop with their hatchet mouths. See how the gull’s plumage has returned to its winter pattern: a smudge of dark feathers behind the eye. Is that how much time we’ve let slip past inland? I hadn’t realised.

Now we find a narrow back road which leads to an even narrower track. Our wheels amble through hollows and weeds and brooks for a half mile at least. Now we arrive at a clump of houses, an unsignposted strand and a shell cottage facing the sea. I’ve heard about such cottages but never seen one. I park and out we climb and go to look. The cottage is completely covered with cockles and limpets, hundreds and hundreds, even thousands. Each shell is shallowly set into the plaster; each is blanched and sullied. Time and weather have transformed the shell cottage from an august monument to a tumbledown thing all barnacled by hard, dead blobs. Who lives here, I wonder. Who would you guess lives here? But you’re busy sniffing, always sniffing. Now the thistles stretching up through the rungs of the wrought iron gate, the pillars either side, the whiskery moss. The path is covered with algae and the shrubs have grown errant. An old woman, I think. An old woman too frail to hoick a lawnmower across the grass or lift a power-hose to her limpets. She has a paunchy son, I think, of thereabout my age, who keeps promising he’ll come and do a job on the garden, but never does. I would willingly hoick and mow and hose for this old woman. I’d chop off my plait to have an old woman of my own who’d let me sit at her kitchen table with a steaming cup and a gingernut. Maybe she’d let you sniff the overgrown garden, to excavate her flowerbeds for buried pats of shit. But it’s too late, I’m sorry. Now I have no idea how things begin, nor how to know that they are safe, nor how to show strangers we are safe too.

There are other houses here. It’s not so extremely left-behind. One house has a granite-chipped driveway leading past a laurel hedge, a fuchsia bush. Another has a sculpted stone head sticking up from a gatepost. Remember the peach eagles? This one looks like a tigress, but I can’t be certain, perhaps a leopard. We’re still standing outside the front gate of the shell cottage as a boy in football socks stomps down his driveway to retrieve a wheelie bin. Now we watch as he drags it up through the laurel and back to the house. All his gestures are exaggeratedly huffy, though there’s no one to witness his protest, no one but you and me, and the boy didn’t even see us.

We walk from the thistles to where the cliff drops into open Atlantic and there’s nothing but luscious, jumping blue all the way to America. I’m still thinking of the boy in the driveway, of how he doesn’t realise how lucky he is to live here where there’s space to run and the salt wind ruddies his cheeks each day, how he takes it all for normal and considers himself entitled to be huffy with the wheelie bin. Now I wonder was I was lucky too, and never grateful? Sometimes a little hungry and sometimes a little cold, but not once sick or struck and every day with the sea to ruddy me. Perhaps I was lucky my father took me back when the neighbour woman rang his doorbell, lucky he never drove away and left me on the road again. But it’s too late to be grateful now. It’s too late now for everything but regret.

I’d like a coastal cottage of my own, of our own. What do you think? I’d cover it with seashells, only we’d have queeny frills instead and I’d piece our windows into place with my sanded glass, pebble by pebble. We’d have a lawn for you to lick the dew from and a patch of bare earth where I can raise my faulty crops straight from the ground. Our cottage would be down a narrow track with an unsignposted strand and an unbroken view of jumping Atlantic, just like here. And I’d carry a patio chair to the end of our lawn. I’d put it there, see there? Right there. And I’d face it to the uncluttered horizon.