Sara Baume: Spill Simmer Falter Wither

Here is our latest aerial seat, the concrete car park on the crumbling cliff’s edge. Ever uprooted and apart, remember?

Sometimes people come to Tawny Bay in tracksuits and try to jog a length along the strand. We watch them slip across a couple of yards of kelp before they give up, return to their cars. Now we’ve adjusted to the stink and learned to navigate our respective ways through the slithery wasteland I’m glad of the kelp, of its deterrence. We lap Tawny Bay every time the tide’s low, the beach deserted. I pitch and clump and flail, you gallop and trot. Together we play graceless forms of football. I try to teach you how to chase the gulls, the pipits and knots.

‘GO ON GETTUM!’ I holler, ‘YOU CAN FLY, ONEEYE! FLY!’

But you’ve always been a smarter animal than I, and you know you can’t.

Now the sea throws me every kind of junk to rifle. A new arrangement every tide, a ceaselessly replenished stock. The biggest items are dropped at the very back of the beach along the seam of clay at the cliff’s base, while the lightest and grittiest keep close to the waves. Here are car tyres, a broken buggy, a trawlerman’s waterproof, a knitting needle, pinecones, my pinecones. Now here are cigarette butts, fragments of anemone shell and individual pieces of styrofoam packaging. Some of the pieces are shaped like an ‘S’ and some of the pieces are shaped like a ‘Y’ and always I find myself looking around in search of a ‘K’. I know it’s daft, but still, I’d like to be able to spell SKY.

It throws you gifts as well, the sea. You find a dead guillemot and carry it around for hours like a possessive child with a favourite toy, like me and Mr Buddy way back when. I watch as you finally find your way through its feathers and yank the white meat from its skimpy breast. Now here’s a rectangle of water-worn plywood. See how it bears a pattern of screw holes, the ghost of a handle. So it didn’t sink, all but its bow, into the mud. See here, it’s a piece of my father’s doorbox, I’m certain.

There’s an old creel at the near end of the strand and it makes a good chair, a place for me to sit after you’ve tired me out. I can’t recline exactly, but I can perch. I perch and watch the high, slow rollers. And I watch the sky. I see the weather coming.

When I was a boy I used to be able to stand in the shallows and jump the waves for hours without growing bored, without being bothered by the sensationlessness of my frozen feet. Now I’m only fit for the creel, for chain-smoking, for cloud spotting, for listening. The sound of Tawny Bay is a sonorous slopping of water against rock. And the squeeing of the gulls. And sometimes the clank and whirr of a trawler that seems nearby but is actually distant.

I bring my plank of drifted doorbox back to the car. I show it to my father as though his eye sockets are somehow able to see through their fabric shroud.

There isn’t any radio reception in the car park on the cliff. I twiddle the dial so slow it barely moves but all I can find is white noise and fizz, maddening fizz. Every now and again, I catch a stray airwave. A stranger’s voice shouts a single word through the static like an elapsed mayday. ASSOCIATE they shout, UPSKILL, INORDINATE.

At night, I don’t twiddle. I like to hear the waves rush and burst. I like to feel the spew against my windscreen, even though, of course, I cannot feel it through the glass and the glass can’t feel at all. It makes sleep seem like a kind of swimming. Like my limbs are loose and weightless, treading water. On choppy nights, I fidget in time with the sea. But on calm nights, I sleep so deep I crush my hands and wrists inside some larger cleft of my body and wake to find them bloodless, numb. It makes me afraid the night will come when I crush you instead. Your stalky bones will crumble, your tender lungs collapse, and I will not wake. I will continue to swim, until it’s over.

Still, sometimes I think that I will burn my father’s house, which isn’t my father’s house any more and I shouldn’t keep calling it that. But I always change my mind. I am continuously changing my mind, talking myself out of action, as I’ve done all my life. Now silence and sleeplessness have minced my resolve. And I see how I was stupid to believe that anyone will ever force their way inside. The old man is dead and it’s my house now. Even if people knew for sure that he was dead and I was never coming back, still they’d wait for some distant relative to claim it in my place. To nail a FOR SALE sign between hanging baskets. It’s always seemed to me like people will choose to wait wherever waiting is an option. Until walls fall down unaided. Until every species is extinct and all the ice caps have melted. Or at least, this is what I want to believe, and not the opposite, which is what I’m afraid of. I’m afraid that they are coming for us.

For two years now, the hairdresser hasn’t paid a snip of rent, I’ve only just realised that. She used to post it through the letterbox on the first working day of every month in an envelope that smelled like sweet glue and hand cream. But for the last two years, not a snip. And why would she bother, when the landlord’s disappeared and there’s only his idiot son who won’t notice anyway? And I didn’t notice, did I? So maybe I’m everybody’s idiot after all.

How long? How long since we parked here? You look up from the passenger seat, you tilt your head. I’m sorry for asking, over and over and over. I know you don’t know, you never knew. I know enough days have passed that the date is irretrievable now. My tobacco is gone too, gone with the date. I know well the pouch is immaculately empty still I persist to check and check and check in case some fine strands of twiggish brown might have miraculously grown back. The mineral water’s almost gone and I’m saving the gallon drums for drinking. You drink the grey stream that runs from fields to sea, collecting rain and agricultural effluent as it goes. I tell you not to, still you drink. I watch for signs that you’ve been poisoned, for shakes and faints and fever. But you’re always fine, invincible. You cast your thousand-mile stare across the open water. You grunt. I give you one of my father’s tibias and you gnaw it with relish.

‘Good boy,’ I tell you.

We’re down to the kibble. You seem to like it well enough, but it’s drab and dusty to my taste buds. I can’t detect any whisper of beef and I can’t fathom where on a cow its rind is located.

Two black specks on the furthest rocks at lowest tide become people as the sea rises and the waves drive them in. Are they coming for us? But closer still, they become Chinamen in waterproofs carrying white coal sacks. Two apiece, one slung over each shoulder. The sacks are dripping. The Chinamen’s backs are bent against the weight and their faces are scrunched against the rain. They’re wearing green waders held up by suspenders. The rubber trousers reach up to their nipples, dwarfing the Chinamen, diminishing them to sad, windswept circus clowns. But they are just cockle pickers.

See the cockle pickers, how they stagger.

This is the first night there’s been another car parked after last light. It’s at the furthest end but it’s pointing straight at us instead of out toward the harbour like visiting cars normally do, and I wonder has it come for us.

I saw the stranger car arrive and point this way, but I haven’t seen any car people get out and go to walk along the strand. For a while I continued what I was doing. I was trying to put Mr Buddy back together again. But I don’t have any needle or thread and so it’s a pointless, frustrating task. Now it’s flossy dark, the stage of dusk at which every visible thing disintegrates. The stranger car’s headlights are switched off, the dashboard unlighted. There’s no trace of a face or faces eerily illuminated from below. I’m leaving our lights off too, and I can’t have the gas cooker spreading its blue, not tonight. I’m sorry. I can’t have it illuming my father’s skeleton through the fake white flowers, nor Mr Buddy’s glass eyes through the plastic of his bag. I know it’s cold, but we mustn’t be seen by the person or persons inside the stranger car. I can’t give up so easily, not now.