Sara Baume - Spill Simmer Falter Wither

You look spooked. It’s in the way you’re holding yourself: head dropped and shoulders raised, eye narrowed, neck shuttling at every crackle and creak. Are you spooked because there’s something spooky out there or are you feeding off my own incompressible uneasiness, my stupid fears? I cannot tell. Now you clamber into my lap and fidget. I lay my big hands over you. I stroke your head and neck and back until your muscles soften and your body stills.

‘Sleep,’ I tell you, ‘it’s okay. Sleep.’

Now I force myself to stop watching the stranger car which is watching us with its headlamp eyes and number-plate grin, its car face. I fix my attention on the harbour instead. Beyond the disintegrating forms, the sea’s a great empty space between land masses and even the opposite landmass is distinguishable only by scattered lights, by ten hundred tiny shining points. Each point is a car or a streetlamp, the window of a house or prison or hospital or pub. Each one stands for a story of continuing life and each life is continuing to be eaten away by the onerous effort of living itself, remember? It’s marvellous, yet strangely distressing. The sound of the sea is heightened by night, but its spectacle is blotted into an abyss. Now a fin breaches. See the fin. Already it’s gone again, but it was a dorsal fin, exquisitely undrooped.

I need a smoke. How desperately I need a smoke.

You fall asleep. I try, but can’t. My attention segues from the harbour to the luminous hands of the clock face on the dash. Sometimes they catch up with each other and fuse into one. It’s halfway between ten and quarter past twelve by the time the stranger car lights up and makes a careful U-turn. As it pulls back onto the road with its indicator blinking, I catch sight of two dishevelled lovers side by side in the front seats. They’re so intent on one another, they don’t even glance in our direction.

You wake for just a second, now fall back to sleep. And again I try, and again I can’t. I listen to the waves crash and spit, playing timpani on the windscreen. The seas are high tonight, higher than all the nights passed since we arrived, so it seems. Now the clear sky’s choking up with rain clouds. They take the moon out, now begin to shed. See how the drops are dense and drowsy, as close as rain can come to snow. It’s half past two exactly, and still I cannot sleep.

See there behind the shedding rain clouds, there are moon oceans and moon mountains and lakes full of moon water. Remember? Or is there even water on the moon? I’m not so sure any more.

They come in the morning.

It’s first light, and I’m still awake. The rain’s stopped and the wind’s snuffed. I sit up in the driver’s seat and rub out a circle of condensation with my fist, now I melt the frost with my breath. Through the windscreen I see how the night’s high seas have scoured the beach clean. Now the deepest water beyond the rocks is slack as a city puddle. The kelp fronds and junk are gone, from the trawlerman’s oilcloth to the creel chair, even the pinecones. The tide’s on its way out again, the sand inching back into sight, the smooth banks and squat peaks, the depressions. Up on the cliff, the grass has crystallised and the heliotrope is stiff as a stick. But there’s no trace of snow, and I wonder if it snowed at all, or if I just wanted snow, and imagined it.

I get out. I fill the saucepan with a frozen puddle, smash it up a bit. I fetch the gas. Now I notice we’re down to the last canister. I set it burning at its lowest setting, roaring mellifluously through the prick-holes of its nozzle. I watch as the ice melts into drinking water, and I wonder why, why I’m trying so hard to keep going.

You’re awake, stretching effusively and yawning with such particular inflection it almost sounds like a human word, like ark or arm or Arles. Now that it’s morning you aren’t spooked any more. I can tell from the tilt of your ears, the twitch of your maggot nose. Look here through the windscreen, see how the beach has been restored to us. But you look into your food bowl instead, and it’s kibble for breakfast again, I’m sorry.

They come as you’re licking up the last of the kibble juice. They come in family-sized cars with chocolate labradoodles, fleece-lined ski jackets and two or three apple-cheeked children apiece. They park slipshod all over the gravel. Now they emerge and fall into groups. They hug, jig on the spot, cup their palms over their mouths and puff. They unpack sports bags and wicker baskets, thermos flasks and portable cup sets. Now they point their keys and push buttons which make their cars blip and wink on command.

They don’t seem to notice us. They descend to the beach. Together we peep out of my condensation porthole. Who are these people and what are they doing down there on the strand, so many and so early in the morning? They’re wrapping themselves in tent-towels and wiggling out of their winter clothes. Trousers, knickers, skirts and socks are lying like laundry on the new sand. And now the people are shrugging off their towels to expose bathing costumes, stripy trunks and sleeveless wetsuits. Of course, that’s what it is, the Christmas swim. They haven’t come for us after all, it just happens to be Christmas.

Our porthole’s beginning to re-fog as the swimmers altogether advance into the freezing sea. We hear them whoop and cheer as the small swell shatters against their milky legs. We watch as they dip down and dabble a few weakly strokes between the seaweed and the styrofoam letters. Now they’re dashing back to shore in a blur of pinkened cheeks and purpled kneecaps. Already they’re climbing back under their tent towels. We must look away while they’re redressing. I can see you’re still peeking, look away. The swimmers loiter and josh on the beach. They take out baby bottles of brandy and wrap their fingers around plastic cups and gingerly sip. Now they’re drifting back up to the gravelled rectangle. You begin to hop about and bark but I shush you. Already it’s over, and we must sit still again. We can’t be spotted by such cheerful strangers. We mustn’t dare to mar their joy with our shabby faces, our carload of stolen nests, dead bears and decomposed fathers on such a day.

Carload by carload, family by family, the swimmers leave. Now the hands of the dashboard clock are fused erect at midday, and the car park on the undercut cliff is empty again.

You’re keening to be let loose. I open the driver’s door just a chink and you’re over me and out before I’ve fastened the leash. I open my mouth to call you back, but there’s no point, it’s dinner-time, Christmas day. I picture the swimmers beside their stoves, basting and peeling and stirring. No one will come, not now. And so, I tuck the plank under my elbow and sling the pillowcase over my shoulder. You’re dancing the gravel, tracking the departed labradoodles, pissing where they pissed. Now you hurry down the cliffslope and I trip behind.

The new sand is printed with paws and feet and scored by finger-written names, lovehearts and smiley faces. There are freshly dug holes and scuff marks and the dents left by children who pressed their heels into the sand and spun around to make a perfect circle the perfect length of their perfect foot. Even though the strand is swept clear, I can still see the porpoise, now pushed against the clay. See how the Christmas swimmers’ children have sunk a rock into its skull. The jaw bone’s flittered, the up-facing eye socket buried beneath the weapon stone. A tablespoon measure of the porpoise’s teeth have been bashed free and lie sprinkled about the swept sand like chrome confetti. But you don’t see, you’re far ahead of me now, almost at the strand’s end. You’re skirting the dunes, keeping always to the edges of things, like a sewer rat. You’re pointing your nose to the cliff, susceptible always to the inveigling hills and forests from which you came. I follow you. I reach the end and look back. I’m checking the gravel for cars. I’m scanning the beach for new arrivals. But there’s nothing and no one back along the length of Tawny Bay. There is only us, and so.