Sara Baume - Spill Simmer Falter Wither

I want so badly to sneak in. I want to stand beneath the scorching gush of the showerhead and feel the filth of nine or ten or eleven weeks wash from my skin, my hair, and down the plughole and through the secret pipes. Now I feel as though I’m crawling with tiny worms, and as I slice them with my scratching nails each slice becomes a new worm. Each slice is burrowing, burrowing, burrowing.

I look up at my father’s house. The sun has shrugged its cloud off and turned the window panes opaque. I think of all the books inside I left unread. I think about the marmalade mouldering, mouse shit collecting in the presses, mouse-bitten bran flakes leaking onto the beauty board. I think about all the planes of soft card with tiny rectangles torn from them and I think about the tin of baking powder with its picture of a tin of baking powder, with its picture of a tin of baking powder, and so on, into infinity. I think about the bathroom sink, about the furiously blue watermark, the blue of forget-me-nots, of my father’s choked lips and choked fingernails. It pinpoints the exact spot beneath the tap where drip hits enamel, over and over and over, and I wonder how much more furiously it will have blued.

What will happen if they come and break the door down? It’s only a flimsy door. It won’t take much breaking. What happens if they go rifling through all my offhandedly left behind stuff? Toss the panda into the bin, smash the frail glass of the egg timer, kick the draught snake from the threshold of the shut-up-and-locked room, find my father’s shoeboxes and snort with laughter at his homemade games. What happens if every last thing is cleared out, lobbed into an industrial bin bag and left on the side of the street to spill? The neighbours will come poking to see what utensils or appliances might be worth recycling for themselves, and then they’ll quickly move on again, empty handed. Shocked by how a life might come to be so wretched as ours, so insignificant.

What happens if they find some small trace of my mother? For all I know she was there all along. If our life was a film, it would be a photograph in a locket, a love letter, a tress of hair. What happens if they decide to take a look in the roof?

Strung from the left-side hanging basket, there’s a length of clear plastic, the sort that comes off the goods pallets delivered next door. It’s long as a lamppost, strangling the facade of my father’s house, flapping. I wonder why no one’s bothered to remove it. But I don’t remove it either.

My father never got up from the table all the time he was choking. He didn’t thrash around; he didn’t knock anything over. It seemed like it took a very long time for the old man’s choked face to drop and settle against the formica. He placed his nose neatly between the crockery and leaned the weight of his head down after it without upsetting so much as a teaspoon. I remember looking at the dash of discoloured milk at the bottom of the bowl from which he’d eaten his bran flakes, at the smears of grease on the plate from which he’d forked his sausages up. I remember noticing there weren’t any pieces left. The one he choked on must have been the last. I remember thinking that it was up to me to wash and dry the bowl and spoon and plate and fork now, to return them to the shelf and drawer.

I’d never made a phone call in my life before. I’d never answered the doorbell.

I sat down at the table beside him. I pictured the ambulance men in their high-visibility ambulance outfits. It was raining, and so I pictured water droplets against the black of the body bag as they wheeled him out. In my mind I saw the doors of the ambulance closing and I heard the siren bawling as it drove away. And then I realised of course there wouldn’t be any siren, that it was already too late to bother switching it on.

Behind the blue gate, there’s new litter in the laneway, unfamiliar litter. The front door of my father’s house groans, as if in protest at being re-entered. Now you tramp new paw prints across your old ones and I follow you. You go directly to the nook in the kitchen where I used to keep your food bowl. But it’s in the car, remember? It’s been in the car now for months.

Straight away I single out the egg-timer and the panda sharpener from amongst the kitchen table jumble. I remember suddenly how the tabletop was always kept clear while my father was alive and so this jumble must have taken years to accumulate, and belongs exclusively to me.

Now I hunker down and hug the washing machine and haul. I hear the slight scratch and gentle slither of some creaturely thing descending to the floor tiles. I reach around and grab and tug. Mr Buddy comes out in three different fistfuls. So the spate must have reached him too, so the rats must have ripped his clouds out. I bundle Mr Buddy’s stuffing up with Mr Buddy’s hide and stick the lot inside a plastic bag and knot the handles as though he might somehow reassemble himself and escape. Now I take the bread knife from the block and tear a new bag from the roll and carry it all upstairs with me.

You go a few steps before. You find your old spot on the sill and I open the curtain so you can check the view from the window to make sure that nothing has erred from its place. The elephant cushion is on the rocking chair, facing the right way up, of course. Now I must lean over you to push the window open. I reach out and up to the swallow’s nest. Using the bread knife, I scour it down. Using the bag, I catch it. See how it still has papery shards of eggshell inside, how it smells more of warmth and life than dry, dead mud. Come here and see my nest, smell the life.

Now I place down my peculiar luggage and go to the foot of the door of the shut-up-and-locked room. I lift the snake, I let the fetid draught through. I turn the key.

Now there’s something I need in here. Something that I have to do.

On the morning he choked, I sat beside my choked father at the kitchen table and tried to decide what would happen next. I sat there a long time. Even after I’d decided, I continued to sit. After a while, I started to speak. To ramble away as I often did, only this time, for the first time, I felt free to say different, truer things.

‘Hallo old man,’ I said, even though we’d both been there all along.

‘Well,’ I said, ‘what did you tell her?’ I couldn’t remember the woman’s name, the neighbour who took me from the side of the road and drove me to my father’s house.

‘What did you tell her when she found me all on my own?’ I said, ‘in the ditch in the dark and drove me home and rang your doorbell?’

I tried and tried and tried to remember her name, but I couldn’t.

‘Speak up, old man,’ I said, ‘what did you tell her?’

But my father didn’t answer, of course, and of course it didn’t matter. I knew anyway. Whatever the name of the woman who drove me home, I knew my father told her I’d run away, and wouldn’t come back, and couldn’t be found. Because I wasn’t a right-minded little boy. I wasn’t all there. I was special. See how that explains why nobody came to ring the bell again? It explains why I never started school, never lined up with all the other little boys and girls, all those all there and right-minded and unspecial. It explains why I never got a chance to play on the straightforward swings and slides and see-saws. Now do you see?

Now I see. I see how uncourageous I was. I see how I only asked about the neighbour woman because I was yet too afraid to ask about my mother woman instead. The old man was dead and still I hadn’t the nerve to confront him. I stopped talking and stood up. I washed and dried and put away and once it was all done I went upstairs to my father’s room. I pushed the door and pulled the pull-string which opened the roof and drew the folding stepladder down. Then I went back to the kitchen to fetch him.