Sara Baume - Spill Simmer Falter Wither

But it’s too late, of course. And suddenly, it’s a sad place, don’t you think? Suddenly the shimmer of possibility is blotted by the shadow of a soaring gull. The gull scans the tide as it passes, and seeing that it’s not yet low enough for mud worms, it flies back inland, to pick the naked fields again, to root the brown puddles alongside the ibises.

We scrabble down the cliff face.

Below the shell cottage, there are choughs nesting between the juts and scrub, the chamomile and samphire. There’s something sinister about choughs, something impious about their witchity cawing. There’s a bird book in my father’s house which spells the sound they make as chuff-chuff-chuff , like a jaunty steam engine. But the book is wrong. The real sound is raucous, like the choughs chuff sixty smokes a day and are warning us to stay away from them, from their juts and scrub, samphire and chamomile.

The lichen here is different from the lichen at home. Instead of blistering yellow, see how it’s globby and white like the surface of a moon a child might draw. Below the cliff face, here’s a plot of rubbled strand, and now sea. The water is dungeon dark and the way the ethereal weed moves beneath the surface makes it look as if it’s a living, swimming, struggling thing, as if it’s the long black hair of a head held under by an invisible manacle.

Now I let you free of the leash and you take off without a tic of caution. You stick your nose into several different holes, gobble an unidentified object, cock your leg on a patch of dead clover and still reach the bottom before me. On the strand, you stop and push your face into the stones, twist your neck after your face, twist your back after your neck. Your legs lift into the air, the pads of your paws face the sky and waggle. Now I stop my downward scrabble to admire your spontaneous little jive, the ecstatic thwacking of your upside-down tail. Does this place remind you, as it reminds me, of the pebbled beach where we picnicked every rainless day in summer? Now I’m sorry I don’t have my rug and flask and parcels of picnic food. But then you were always afraid of the aluminium foil, so it doesn’t matter.

I sit and take out my tobacco pouch. I pinch and turn and tear and roll and smoke into the setting sun. You and your maggot nose continue with the pressing business of sniff and scoff. You scale and comb the rocks, leaving no pool unpaddled, no inlet unslobbered. You’re watching all the new things and the way they are quivering. You’re waiting for some part of it to rise up, to configure into prey. I see how clumsy you are, how your balance is affected by your lopsided sight. You stumble and fall, chip your knobbled bones and bruise your pallid skin. You disappear for just enough time for me to worry. Now you reappear, dragging a strange bulk over the pebbles. It’s longer than you by a yard and trailing kelp fronds, tens of tiny crabs, a regiment of goose barnacles. It’s an enormous spine.

I laugh. I say, ‘what are you going to do with Moby Dick then?’

And you drop the spine at my feet and wag your tail. It was maybe a dog fish or maybe a spur dog or maybe even a basking shark. Now it’s a gift.

‘It’s a good gift,’ I say, and you settle beside me, and I roll a smoke, another smoke, and smoke.

And we stay like this until the sea has risen to the tip of the dark stain on the cliff-rock which marks the line of highest tide. And I note the time. I memorise it. Now I’ll never let myself lose track again.

There’s an angler spinning for bass on the further rocks, picking his way between the lofty jags and yawning hollows, over the wet weed and moon lichen. Now the white horses are gathering height, their froth licking his boots, and they are heavy boots, designed for drowning men.

I wonder why he takes all that trouble for a fish, just to break its neck against the sandstone, chump off its head, scrape its organs out and bake its sides for supper. Maybe he isn’t doing it for supper but for the sport of killing, for some small spilling of blood to satisfy his internal Neanderthal. It’s hard to understand when you’re a man with no knack for destruction. But maybe it isn’t for supper or sport but for the thrill of the girth of the gap between his drowning boots and dry land, and this I understand, because as much as I crave the sea I crave its openness. I need to know that even though I’m small and land-bound, right in front of my face it is enormous, endless. Can you smell it; can you smell the endlessness?

We watch him for a long time. You patrol the quivers and I smoke, at first, and now forget to smoke. Now I grow as rapt by the spinnerman’s task as the spinnerman, as intent upon a catch. We watch his slow-yet-certain progress across the distant rocks, how artfully he flicks the rod, dips and swishes his jellied lure. Now I begin to feel what he feels, a vestige of the force that compels him to fish even though it’s cold and dangerous and disappointing. Across the wet weed I am whispering, just once more, just a little closer, this time, almost .

Come the sun’s last stand, the spinnerman hauls a beast of a sea bass from the froth. Fat as a baby crocodile. He holds it up, admires it. The fish bares its teeth, swats his wax jacket with its great tail fin. Now we watch as he tosses his beast back to the toppling waves. It breaks the surface with an almighty splosh. And the spinnerman continues on his way. Sashaying across the rocks, wiggling his worm. Beginning again, for nothing.

We pass playgrounds. There, that’s what that is, there. See all the contorted structures, ply planes connected by rubber-coated bars and painted. Whatever happened to straightforward swings and slides and seesaws? There’s something menacing about these new-fangled contraptions, these rungs and nooses and pony heads mounted to the sharp end of thick springs. If it wasn’t for the bold colours, they’d look like medieval instruments of torture. Here’s the rack, the stocks, the breaking wheel, the Witch’s Closet and the Judas Cradle. The playground’s surrounded by wire and railings to keep children in, paedophiles out. There’s a regulation notice outlining the rules and restrictions of play: NO RUNNING, NO JUMPING, NO PUSHING, NO DUMPING. Alongside the notice, there’s a bench for guardians to supervise from, to ensure that fun is never allowed to list over the line into depravity. They watch us as we pass. They make a mental note of our registration number. 93-OY-5731.

How many weeks now since we turned around? How many gateways revisited? Now we pass a lay-by with a man dressed in steel-capped boots and a high-vis vest. He’s manning a canopy-covered car trailer alongside a display of bundled sticks and reused fertiliser sacks of rough sawn wood. STICKS, his sign board says, BLOCKS. It must be fulsome winter; now we pass Christmas decorations in place of tree ghosts and rotted pumpkins. See the bulbs hanging from the leafless branches of a streetside beech, white light prickling the perpetual grey. See a spray-painted Santa in the chemist’s window, waving at us from between the antiaging potions and protein shakes. Now here’s a car with a red nose attached to the bumper and a felty antler stuck out the windows either side. How puzzling people are.

We are heading south, I think. Getting lost, retracing roads and finding south again. I seem to miss a lot of cul-de-sac signs, now I’m master of the six-point three-point turn. We are keeping the sea in sight as much as possible, sometimes veering into barns, streams and slurry pits, almost. I never expected it would take so much reversing to make a straight line. It’s still so cold, and still I wake at night and relight the gas, and still you wake with me, lean in and drink the blue flames. I make hot whiskey, warm milk and something stodgy to eat, to heat the blood about our bellies.