Sara Baume - Spill Simmer Falter Wither

Now the wool cap man is finished stealing pinecones. He loads his van and drives away, and I know we should be driving away too. Will I sprint around the back and grab the spruce? This year, we could decorate it. We could sit it on the back seat with aluminium foil stars dangling from the branches. Only I’m not much of a sprinter, and you’re afraid of aluminium foil. And now I remember, of course, the tree outgrew its pot years and years ago. My father never transferred it to a bigger one, and so it died. Our Christmas tree is a naked stick now, I’d forgotten that.

Now I realise what I must do. I must come back, under cover of dark, with the shop and salon shut, the shore birds roosting. I must bring a can of petrol, a box of matches. Can you picture the night slugs charred and shrivelling? The plates exploding on the walls, the drifted timbers reduced to kindling, the bran flakes turned to ash. The salmon pink and yellow house turned shades of salmon and pink and yellow like never before.

The rain comes. It comes in all vicissitudes of strength, direction, drop size. The only consistency is its constancy. Where once there was silence, now there’s the fizzle and drum against our thin roof.

By the time we’ve reached the graveyard it’s sturdily pouring. If our life was a film the rain would be a sign that something sad is about to happen. But is isn’t a film, of course. No one is watching us. Nobody even knows where we are.

This is the graveyard where my father should have been buried. I park outside the gates. You’re sitting on the back seat with your face pressed into the gap between front seats. You’re whining softly to be let out even though you don’t know where we are. The graveyard in which my father isn’t buried as he should be isn’t beside the parish church, as it should be. Instead it’s an overflow graveyard, zoned to a characterless plot half a mile outside the village. It’s been here for as long as I can remember but only in recent years have the housing estates raised up on either side. From the car I can see over the wall at the graveyard’s far side and right into the rectangular garden of a semi-detached. There’s a timber shed with a heavy-duty padlock, a patio decked in varnished pine and a matching kennel. It’s an elaborate kennel with a pretend chimney on the roof and a pretend window on the side, and now I see there’s a blonde muzzle and black button nose poking out of the doorway. This must be what you’re whining about, what you’re sniffing through the air vents.

‘In a minute,’ I tell you. I am almost finished collecting myself. ‘Just a minute.’

Inside the car, our breath is coating the windows in condensation. Bit by bit, the graveyard and patio and kennel are misted from sight. Now I open the driver’s door and we step into the rain. It seems somehow less fierce than it did inside the car. The graveyard is surrounded by a stone-clad wall. The gate grinds against its hinges as I push. The plots are arranged in a block system, like a miniature Manhattan. Most of the individual graves have marble headstones and dun-coloured gravel. I read somewhere that all grave gravel is imported from China nowadays, that it’s against the law to take stones from the beach, they have to be purchased from a Chinaman instead.

The freshest graves are soil heaps marked with wooden crosses and cortege garlands. SISTER, the flowers spell, NANNY, DAD. Some are plastic and some are silk and the only real ones are carnations, the longest living flower yet also the one most associated with death. I skip the garlands and begin at the furthest corner, the place where I imagine the oldest graves to be. Here the soil has long since slumped into place above each coffin. There are no crosses or figurines or everlasting candles. No trinkets or engravings. No carnations. There is just grass, which is dead, and weeds, which are flourishing. And I wonder if I should take my father’s axed ribs from the pillowcase and use them now, like a dowsing rod. Only not to find water, which is everywhere. To find my mother, my mother’s grave.

But there’s no need. Now I find her easily. All the years I never looked, and now here is my mother. Here she was all along. OUR DEARLY BELOVED RUBY. On a plain grey slab in the perpetual downpour. DIED 1956 AGE 23 the headstone says. I answer by saying it out loud.

‘Nineteen fifty-six,’ I say, ‘when I was two.’

You know I believed she died when I was born, because I was born, and that my father always blamed me. I believed I’d never known her, and now I see I knew her two whole years and can’t remember a single moment. And so I wonder why he blamed me anyway, and if he didn’t blame me at all, why was he always so unkind?

You look up and know it’s you I’m talking to. But you’re busy chewing on a piece of stray grave gravel. I can hear it rattling between your teeth. Now I watch as you swallow. But you always ate the gravel anyway, remember?

‘Ruby,’ I tell you. The same word as for red in Latin, as for one amongst the four most precious of the gemstones. The colour of warning, of admonition.

‘Good boy,’ I tell you, for no reason at all. ‘Good.’

The rain drops grow; they come straighter and surer. Back we go to the car, and I turn on the gas cooker, take out the saucepan and cut open a packet of marrowfat peas. Together we watch the retriever crouching in his kennel atop the decking. We watch all afternoon, but nobody comes to bring him for a walk or give him his supper. Dark falls at five o’clock as usual, and still every ceiling sun inside the retriever’s house is switched off while the graveyard is flickering all over with the dim bulbs of everlasting candles. Each to its own plot, hovering over old bones and teeth and rings and wristwatches, like tiny light-bearers.

Beside me on the passenger seat, you sigh. Front paws rested on the dash, nose pressed to the air vents. You’re waiting for your walk.

‘Will we go to the beach then?’ I say, and you wag, wag, wag with all your strength.

See the skin which crowns each of my fingers and hems my nails in, how it’s all bitten and ragged, crusted and tanned like old rubber, fissured and parched like a drought-stricken landscape. You know why it’s like this. You see me continuously, tirelessly worrying it with the other fingernails or with my teeth. Or sometimes even with the penknife. Fingertip by fingertip, I work the skin loose and tear it away. Then I set the wound aside to mend, and once it’s healed, I worry it afresh. You see me, all the time and during everything I do, picking, picking, picking. Sometimes gently, sometimes viciously, always unstoppably. There was a time when I found it comforting, now it’s just a thoughtless habit. And as with all habits, thoughtless or otherwise, the only release is sleep.

The drive between the graveyard and Tawny Bay is five or six or seven minutes by way of the coast road. For five or six or seven minutes, I attack the skin of my fingertips with particular venom. You press your nose to the window and my father nods his skull in time with the bumps and twists. From the radio, an expert is telling us that whales kept in captivity develop a droopy dorsal fin.

It’s almost a year since we drove this way to the beach instead of walking through the forest and over the fields. Do you remember the refinery road, the boat house, the banana skin, the barley? This time I drive us right into the car park. It’s a stretch of gravelled earth on the opposite hill to the belching chimneys and jimmying windsock. It sits precariously on the undercut cliff’s edge above the sandy strand.