Sara Baume: Spill Simmer Falter Wither

Bowerbirds are the artists of the creature kingdom; impossibly susceptible to prettiness, they deck their nests like vortex-shaped Christmas trees. There’s a picture in one of these books on one of these bookshelves laden with spines of all different heights and colours and states of decay. Here are spines and spines and spines, raised to towers on the coffee table, queued into rows along the skirting boards. What do they smell like? Paper-worms and crackled glue, stale toast and aged sellotape.

Now here, at the furthest end of the corridor, is the final room, the room with the trapladder reaching up through the trapdoor and into the roof where the spate of rats took place. See the well-worn knob and the keyless keyhole. See the draught snake laid across the threshold with its pink felted tongue sticking out from its untidy stitches in a menacing fork. You don’t go in here, do you understand? I don’t go in here either.

I see how you watch me closely, startle at the slightest of sudden shifts. I see you’re still frightened, even though I haven’t even raised my voice. Are you waiting for me to whip out a choke chain? For a backhanded nose slap, the butt of my boot? Now I have to put you out the kitchen door and shut you in the backyard, just for a moment. I have to go and buy groceries and I’m not sure about leaving you in the house alone just yet. Spaghetti hoops and gingernuts, a carton of milk and some tinned sardines.

The backyard is a misshapen square with a stone fence the whole way round and a timber gate into next door’s garden. It’s floored by cracked cement and limestone chippings with weeds in places. Here’s herb-robert, spurge, fumitory, a few other species less beautiful. Most of the green or brown or barely leafing plants in the pots lining the perimeter wall are the skeletons of last summer. Here’s some purple sprouting broccoli, the stems already gone to bolt, the heads to seed. Windmills spin furiously amongst the skeletons. Elsewhere wind-broken blades lie twitching on the gravel. Beneath the sheet of marred tarpaulin is the axing stump, the log pile, the garden hose. Here’s the rotary washing line, the glass-topped table, the plastic patio chairs, and these are tens of bashed and fractured buoys in bleached shades of orange and yellow, and tens more shards of broken buoy, some still sharp but mostly sanded harmless by the sea. These are a collection, my collection. Please don’t piss on them while I’m gone.

As I leave, you’re sitting on the mat. You’re sitting with your whole body tensed as though in preparation for a blow. You look so mournful and helpless as I leave. You raise your head and watch as the kitchen door closes.

Out the front and into the village, there’s a blast of salt wind off the bay, an empty crisp packet gusting down the footpath, a string of bunting flapping from a telegraph pole. The grocer’s girl, April, talks loudly on the telephone as she scans my goods, forgetting to proffer a paper bag. I’ve always imagined April was born in April and has three sisters called May, June and July, perhaps an only brother called December because if the summer is a woman, so the winter must be a man.

I’m back at the gate and fumbling with the door key, milk and biscuits in one armpit, fish in the other, when I see you, when I see that you’ve escaped. You’re on your way out of next door’s laneway. Now you make a break across the road to the wall which follows the curve of the shore and you race alongside it past the street lamps and flowerbeds.

How could you summon the will to jump so high? Five foot at least to scale the wooden gate. As you landed in next door’s identical backyard, were you disappointed to find it was no more than the same cement and spurge and rotary line, another stone wall and five-foot gate?

Now you’re running, running, running, as though by running, you might understand. And I am watching, helpless. You arrive at the end of the village and seem to slow. Now you stop and turn around and look back over the length of where you’ve just run. Can you see me on the footpath? I’ve dropped the carton and stumbled to my knees. A rivulet of spilled milk catches the crisp packet, sails it to the gutter. Suddenly I don’t care whether people can see me and hear me and know who I am; I don’t care what they’re thinking. My arms are outstretched and I’m calling your name over and over, louder and louder, wailing into the bay and sending all the oystercatchers soaring.

ONEEYE ONEEYE ONEEYE ONEEYE!

Why do you stop so suddenly? Is it that you can’t remember where you’re going any more, that you can’t think of a place that’s home or see anything more familiar than what’s now behind you? The man of must and porridge and boulder and plait, the car, the salmon house, the village that murmurs. Now you sit down in the ditch. Now you stay until I reach you. I slip my fingers under your collar, and you don’t resist as I lead you back.

We have sardines and spaghetti hoops for our supper, with stacks and stacks of buttered brown toast. We have a tin apiece, except for the crumbly little spines, which I extract from the flesh and skin and sauce about my plate and toss to your waiting jaws. Gossamer ribbons swing from your beard and when they hit the kitchen tiles they form a viscous puddle of drool. There’s something resplendent about the way you sit in your viscous drool, and it suits you. Resplendence suits you.

You hover in the living room doorway as I haul out the old armchair.

With my sewing scissors and staple gun, a ball of twine and heap of frayed fleece blankets, I’m going to fix you a bed. The old chair is unusually low-sized and broad-bottomed, like something that belonged to a child and sat in a nursery in the days when children could still be sent to such rooms and instructed to be quiet. It’s so familiar I can’t remember where it came from, only that it’s always been here. I suspect my father was the child who sat quietly in it, and once he’d outgrown the low chair, still he brought it with him, to this house. Looking closely, the wood of its arched arms are stippled with the tracks of tiny fingernails.

Everything is filled with stories, an old woman neighbour told me once, the same old woman neighbour, as it happens, who taught me to sew. This is when I was extremely little, too little to understand that most things don’t mean exactly what they seem, that meaning is a flighty thing. Because of what she said, I split the seam down the back of my favourite teddy, Mr Buddy, with a serrated kitchen knife. I was searching for stories, commanding words to tumble out and configure into horizontal lines like the ones inside my story books. Instead I found Mr Buddy was all stuffed with minute clouds. I shoved the clouds in again and punched him down the back of the washing machine so that my father wouldn’t see what I’d done. And even though he never did, for years and years I could hear Mr Buddy’s button nose clacking against the wall whenever the washing machine went into a spin. The machine doesn’t work any more, but it sits in the same spot in the kitchen, and I suppose Mr Buddy is back there still.

The upright part of the old armchair is a mesh of mucky wicker. There’s a lattice cut of thin ply filling the gap beneath the arch of the handle on the left side, while on the right, the lattice is missing. The original cushion is missing too, but with a ragged fleece and a bundle of shredded fabrics, now I fold and fashion and stitch a replacement. Over the grimy wicker, I drape a tasselled throw-blanket in a checkerboard pattern of pinks and blues. See how it’s soft and bright now, how nice and comfortable it will be.