Sara Baume: Spill Simmer Falter Wither

Here’s another car already parked, and so we have to wait for the car’s people to ascend the cliff path and drive away. I know you’re dying to get out, but we can’t risk an encounter with night-walking strangers, I’m sorry. We are last in line, remember? We have to be patient.

We have to keep our dorsal fins stubbornly upstanding.

We stumble down the cliff path in the smudgy dark. It’s been three months of cold season since we walked here, and now the beach is transformed. The sand’s covered in amorphous sea monsters. They are slinking, stinking, swishing, their slick backs glancing off the moon. Ribcages and shin bones stick up through the sand, like an elephant graveyard. The smell is foul, and you’re delirious. Leaping, diving, waltzing with the monsters, drunk on their sulphurous fumes. You know straightaway from smell what I can only tell from touch. Now I crouch down and stroke the ground. It’s kelp. Kelp dredged from the seabed and vomited onto the shore, because of the storms and high seas and because Tawny Bay is outside the harbour’s mouth, unsheltered. I’ve seen kelp plagues before, but never so immense as this. I reach to snap a rib and it bounces back, pliable as a wet baguette. Now you’re ploughing your face through the mess, following rancid scent trails, fish guts and ancient nappies. I call you and clip the leash on. I drag you up the path to the car. I can’t risk losing you in the dark and gunk, not here and now.

‘Tomorrow,’ I tell you, ‘patience.’

It wasn’t true, what I said before. That the nights would seem warmer once we were back at sea level. I’m sorry. I didn’t know then that I was lying. Now we’re as far south as we can go without driving off the side of the island, and still it’s eye-streaming cold. Still we’re lying awake and watching ice crystals spread like an enormous spirograph across the windscreen. See the spider frozen to the glass of the left wing mirror. He’s prising his legs off to free himself, one by one.

In the morning, the spider’s dead and the ditch is white and crunchy. See how the spiders who survived the night have spun tiny web hammocks in the unbending grass. Are they afraid of heights, I wonder. See how the grass here is different to the grass inland. Tough and glossy and sharp, I’d forgotten that. Now you cock your leg and saturate a tuft of winter heliotrope with sweltering piss, and the heliotrope trembles in fury a long time after you have finished.

The smell doesn’t seem so bad this morning as it did last night. It’s early, the tide’s out and there are no other cars, no walkers. I unclip the leash and you run ahead into the kelp. In some places, it’s lying a few feet above the sand. The morning waves are far too frail to suck so much back in again, still they lap, they persevere. There are tens of other kinds of weed too, at all different stages of decay and diced through with smashed shells, dinted bottles, toy tyres, fractured lobster pots, flip-flops. Buoys and broken shards of buoy, but far more than I can carry, more than I can store, more than I can care about. We walk the strand, clearing a path. I’m carrying the deflated football, looking for a patch of flat sand to throw it at. But there aren’t any, and even in daylight Tawny Bay seems strange and unfamiliar. Now the beach we both knew is ossifying somewhere beneath the kelp.

Halfway from the end, there’s a beached porpoise. I catch up just as you’re beginning to gnaw its tail. I pull you off so I can see it properly. I’m no expert, but I can tell a porpoise, which is small and black and blunt, from a dolphin, which is long and grey and shapely. Porpoises look like killer whales without the badger stripes and somehow kindlier. The porpoise’s skin is tough as a block of toffee, tattered in places and lacerated all over by rocks and junk, by crow pecks and rat’s incisors. There’s a gash gaping from the end of its mouth, splitting its cheek. You swallow a few mouthfuls of tail meat before I tug you off and shoo you on along the beach.

At the strand’s end, I look back to the place where I know the beached porpoise is lying. It looks from here like just another old car tyre amongst the kelp. Where do all the tyres come from? Is the seabed covered in sunken cars? Are the eels nibbling their rust? Nibbling, nibbling, nibbling until a tyre is unfastened and bobs to the surface. Another and another. But now a herring gull rises from the tyres and I can see it’s holding a chunk of rosy carrion in its brilliant orange beak.

Before we go back to the car, follow me up the hill at the back of the beach, to the peak of the barley field beyond the refinery, to the exact point at which, together, we first saw Tawny Bay, do you remember? Now the field is striated brown, mottled by the green of stubborn shepherd’s purse. Do you remember how I taught you to play football? Do you remember the day the lion-maned collie appeared through the mist? From here on the hill, Tawny Bay is our beach again. Regardless of hue or surface, regardless of all the trouble you caused here, it’s ours.

I wait all morning for you to sick up the porpoise. I worry my finger caps with especial fervour. I chump them into bloody ribbons. But you don’t.

The supplies are running low.

How many days spent here now? Several, more? But perhaps the overhang will surrender before the food runs out. Yesterday I watched from the beach as a hunk of dead grass and mud broke away from the cliff’s edge beneath the car park, tumbled down and shattered against the kelp. Today I move the car to the spot directly above the missing hunk. I stand on the gravel and jump about and stamp my feet. But nothing happens, and I know I look ridiculous, and I wonder if I really mean it.

We haven’t a single gingernut left, I’m sorry. I’ve only ever kept enough food in the car for a couple of days, and now we’re down to six tins of spaghetti hoops, three sachets of oxtail soup and a bag of crinkly royal galas. I’m trying to ration now. To eke out what’s left for as long as possible, so as not to have to make a decision about what happens next. But a full stomach is a kind of sanctuary, remember? And so my hunger makes me feel less safe; it tinges my attempts at decision with fear. There are always the sun tomatoes. I hear the jar moving beneath the seat, thunking against the passenger door. And there’s no need to fix me with your greedy stare. There’s a bumper sack of kibble in the boot. The place where my money tin is stashed, remember? Beef rind flavour with added animal derivatives and minimum ash. It’s been there for weeks, in case of emergency, a situation just such as this.

The situation is that I can’t bring myself to return to the village and walk into the grocers. To pick out purchases and place them on the counter in front of the till. I just can’t. If it isn’t the bald-headed, clean-shaven grocer, it’ll be the girl with the name tag, APRIL. And she’ll recognise me, they’ll all recognise me, and what do we do then? I know there are other villages and other shops, I know. But I just don’t think I can drive off anywhere, anywhere at all. I don’t think I can tear myself from the cocoon of the car on the undercut cliff. Now this concrete car park is my only choice of safe space, of sanctuary, and I’m sorry, I just can’t.

And anyway, I don’t have any money left. My mixum-gatherum is spent. My tin’s empty as the day we shared its sardines out. Even if I had the courage to go back to the post office, the postmaster will only tell me my account’s cleared, that there’s some problem with my social security card. Then his voice will go flat and leaden, and to dismiss the uneasy silence he’ll say things about the weather, about the cold, and I’ll reply Sure you never know from one minute to the next what’s coming even though it isn’t true, I did know. For fifty-seven years, I knew. And it’s only now that I don’t. It’s only since you.