Sara Baume - Spill Simmer Falter Wither

‘Treat’, I tell you, and you wag.

See the hairs, your hairs. See how they accumulate in the car’s interstices, knit together into fuzzy rope. I strip the upholstery and shake our blankets out. I scrape the ropes from their interstices. I lie them on the wind to fly. From the radio, an expert is telling us how birds will gather loose hair and use it to cushion the lining of their nests. But now I remember, of course, it isn’t spring. It’s December. I’m months and months and months too early, too late.

I wake to a face at the window, again.

This time it isn’t a grizzled old woman but the sheen of a child’s flawless skin, a boy. Not the boy whose shih tzu you spectacularly maimed nor the boy who directed his huffiness toward the wheelie bin nor any of the boys with raised hoods and unlaced runners, not even the boy with calipers around his calves and a weaponry of pebbles bulging his pockets, his pencil case, yet familiar somehow. In my lap, you tweak a sleeping paw. I look down, just for a second, but you don’t wake. And when I look up again, the boy’s face has changed. The brow seems to have bushed, the nose seems to be breaking out in pimples, scales, warts. I watch as it changes, bit by bit, into a troll’s face instead of a boy’s. And I forget that it’s only a trick played by the moon, a distorted reflection of my own face. Just for a second, I forget, and am terrified.

I was standing at the sink with my back to the table.

Are you listening? I’d like to tell you this now. I’d like to tell you about what happened on the morning my father sat choking in the kitchen.

I was standing at the sink with my back to the table.

Then I heard something behind me like the noise a bicycle pump makes when the bicycle tyre is as inflated as it possibly can be. Then I heard the bang of his fist against the formica. All the crockery hopped and dinged and I turned around.

My father had moved his hands up to his neck and wrapped his fingers around his throat. Because he was not speaking or coughing or crying out, it took several beats of my internal metronome to realise there was something wrong, that he was somehow in trouble. For several beats I stood and gawped and tried to bring to mind where I recognised this gesture from, and then I remembered.

It was the International Choking Symbol from the Emergency First Aid for Children chart. I could have lumbered up to my bedroom wall to check but there was no need, I knew each panel off by heart. Whether by accident or design, my father was acting it out. I knew absolutely that he was choking, and I knew exactly what I was supposed to do. I was supposed to lean the adult person forward, to administer five firm blows to their back with the heel of my strongest hand and once this hadn’t worked I was supposed to enfold the adult person with my arms until my hands were able to hold one another beneath their breastbone. I was supposed to drive the knuckle of my thumb into the flesh of their belly, over and over and over, until the sausage was dislodged.

I knew, I knew, I knew. To do all of these things. But I didn’t. Not one.

I stood at the sink facing my father with my arms dangling at my sides. I allowed the only opportunity I’d ever had to practice my panels slip past. I watched as his lips and fingernails turned blue. The blue began pale, with only the intensity of a sea aster, but then it continued to intensify through harebell and into forget-me-not. And I wasn’t paralysed by fear or stunned into spontaneous memory loss. Nothing like that. I didn’t do anything because I simply decided not to.

For years and years, the flat above the grocers has been used as a storage space for the goods sold downstairs. Now I see boxes pressed against the window, bottles of fabric softener and sunflower oil. Next door, there aren’t any lights left on inside my father’s house. At least, not in either of the rooms which face front.

So here we are now. Two wheels abutting the footpath. Home.

I haven’t been able to remember whether I remembered to switch them all out. The lights, my precious incandescent bulbs. Every day these past nine or ten or eleven weeks, I’ve wondered, I’ve worried. Now we’re back in the car’s old parking space outside the terrace, but it’s such a bright morning and all the curtains are drawn, so I still can’t tell for sure, about the lights. Now I think I see the curtain twitch, the curtain of my father’s old workroom. The brushstrokes-on-the-wall room, the shut-up-and-locked room. Did you see it too? There’s the weakest glow, I’m certain, a circular beam pointing down into the street, moving over the shore wall, scanning the bay. And I wonder if he’s somehow sitting up and manipulating his desk lamp, searching for us. Now I hear the boom of a ship’s horn. There’s a cargo vessel coming in to dock at refinery pier, a great tanker with tens of circular reflectors twizzling from its cranes and pulleys. A cloud slings itself across the morning sun and when I look back at my father’s window, the searchlight’s gone, of course it’s gone. Of course it was just the sun bouncing between the ship’s reflectors and the window pane. From the apron hooks to the chimney pots, the house is every bit as dark and somnolent as it ought to be.

It’s almost noon. Last night’s rain has stopped and the bay is as brilliant and blousy as the day in spring I drove you home from the kennel compound and coaxed you out of the cranny beneath the dash. Remember the cherry’s confetti and the flowering embankments, the blinding yellow of the rape? But now it’s December and I’m the one refusing to climb from the car. I can’t stop myself thinking about the halo-headed boy and his barraging mother, about the woman warden with her collared pole who swore she’d come back. I KNOW WHERE YOU LIVE, but they all know where we live, and that’s why I can’t get out.

So here we stay. Here we watch people come and go with their bags and boxes from the grocers, their choco-crispy breakfast cereal and bottles of discounted Chardonnay. They are the people who buy tool belts and steam mops, remember? The people who visit fireplace showrooms on Sunday afternoons. See the icicle lights strung from the grocer’s awning, the wreath of polyester holly batting against the door each time it bangs. Now the Polish hairdresser arrives and raises her shutter. See the notices sellotaped inside her window. GHD STRAIGHTENER SALE, they say, HALF PRICE GELICURES. Behind the notices, there’s a stuffed reindeer. It’s tall as a child with several styrofoam robins perched along its speckled back. Now the twitcher pitches his twitching stool along the bird walk and unfolds a tripod to support his gigantic binoculars. There’s a little egret on parade, a couple of curlews and a clatter of redshanks, the same decorous old heron. The summer boys are gone now; they’re hibernating behind their mother’s venetian blinds and there’s a Christmas tree in their old slouching spot. See the noble fir with gift-wrapped boxes tied to its branches. I can tell by the way they quaver in the wind that the presents are empty, just for show.

We sit outside. We watch everything proceeding oblivious to us. I know I should drive away before somebody recognises the car, and remembers. But I want to sneak in. I want to check if I turned the immersion off and hit the oven switch on the wall. I want to gather some of the stuff I offhandedly left behind, stuff that never seemed precious until I was without it. The brass egg-timer and the pencil-sharpener in the shape of a panda bear eating a bamboo shoot. Then there’s the cushion with an embroidered Indian elephant on the cover, a log splayed between tusks. I read somewhere that elephant motifs are supposed to be lucky, but only if they are facing outwards. What if I left the cushion upside-down, the elephant smothered? Then there’s Mr Buddy. Now I feel terrible I left him behind the washing machine so many years alone. And I want to collect the swallow’s nest from its roof cranny because maybe if I have their nest then the swallows will somehow still know how to find me.