Sara Baume - Spill Simmer Falter Wither

And so, I bend onto my knees and place the plank down and lay out the pillowcase on top. I rope it all together with seaweed, meticulously. I knot the kelp and fasten the eelgrass into bows. You have come back to me now; you are watching.

And so, I let loose my feathery plait and shake my matted hair out. I peel my clothes from my hideous body, layer by filthy layer until I’m standing amongst the sand hoppers and flies in nothing but my yellowed Y-fronts and laddered vest. A slight breeze ruffles the coiled hair on my chest, my back, my calves, my forearms. Look, an in-grown toenail, oozing pus. You, confused, lick the pus and wag your tail. I am horrible. I know I am horrible. Still faithfully you follow me to the water’s edge. Neatly you seat yourself between the shells and pebbles. Patiently you wait, as I wade into the freezing sea. Towing, towing, towing my father on his doorbox.

I can feel the ripples sluicing my marinade of grime away. I remember how much I wanted to have a shower when I was back inside my father’s house, my house. But by the time I’d done all the other things, I couldn’t bear to wait while the water heated, to listen to the pipes cricking out their bones, speaking to me again after such a long silence. The kelp caresses my ankles. Now my thighs, now my stomach. Now my chest, now my chin. It’s joy-sapping, spirit-rotting, chilblain-inducing, nose-dripping, eye-stinging, teeth-aching cold cold cold, but the old man bobs behind me on his old boat, impervious.

Now I need to tell you something. I’d like to lift my feet and splash around and show you a couple of strokes, but I don’t know how to swim. That’s why I’ve stopped here with the water tickling my beard, why I’ve turned around and am staring stupidly back to shore. I can see the brown fields and bare trees and farmhouses, pale plumes spouting from their chimneys. And the smudge-headed gulls circling the bay, godwits and redshanks, lapwings, oystercatchers. Maybe I can even see a lugworm’s extrusion of black sand, rising slowly, lapsing back again. I can see you, the whole of my family, and I wonder why you don’t make a break for the hills. Now you must realise you’d make it, that I couldn’t catch you. Still you’re sitting at the water’s edge; still you’re waiting for me.

Now I push the doorbox as hard as I can, hard enough for the backwash to splash in my eyes, and once I am able to open them again, I see he is drifting out alone now. The current is taking my father, drawing him away to the place where the shorebirds disappear at night-time and high tide, to the great floating continent called Out To Sea.

Now I begin to wade back. The water drops from chin to chest to stomach to thighs to ankles, and out again. Now we know. Now we’ve retrieved the irretrievable days, and can begin again.

Happy Christmas, One Eye.

The flames shiver and cough for several moments before they sink and die.

Inside my clothes, I’m sopping. Wet as a fish and stippled with goose-bumps like pointed scales from crown to soles, my face the colour of dog violet and tufted vetch. The gas has run out; the last canister is empty. I tip it upside-down and shake but the mellifluous blue refuses to be resuscitated. I check my tobacco pouch even though I know, of course I know. I sit down in the driver’s seat. I stare at the pale pools of my palms upturned and laid open on my knees, the white of elder, of angelica. I flinch my fingers, uselessly. I drip. Now you jump from the gravel, land square in my lap and squash my hands. There’s something in the feel of fur against goose-bumps that reminds me of a hamster I held, my Russian Dwarf birthday hamster, a half-century ago, the frail brush and bob and small warmth of him. But my hamster was only the size of a kiwi fruit while you are monumental and unskittery. You are stalwart and you are solemn. You are safety and you are home. But your warmth is not enough, I’m sorry.

‘Sit back,’ I tell you, ‘sit.’

Now the only way to sooth the cold is to drive around with the heater switched to full blast, the fan whirring, the engine eddying hot air through the vents. Just when I need the small comfort of my addictions the most, my fingers fail me. They’re too numb for rolling a smoke, too numb for picking my hangnails. They blunder over the simplest of movements. It takes longer than it should to get my seatbelt buckled, my key in the ignition. The car hasn’t shifted a yard in days, its greasy innards are cold as a box of fish fingers. I don’t expect it to start, but with the first try the engine putters uneasily to life. Now you raise your front paws to the top of the seat and press your nose against the rear windscreen. Now you look back at the beach as we leave. You watch as Tawny Bay shrinks to the size of a photograph on a postcard, a picture on a stamp, and now gone.

Now we’re driving, driving, driving. Up, down, this way and that around a succession of familiar and unfamiliar and almost familiar back roads. We’re passing fields of winter wheat and hawthorns with their trunks bent to perfect right angles against the sea gales. We’re passing waterlogged litter, charred gorse, pine copses, gyrating turbines, bales sealed into their black macs and stacked. We’re swerving around dazed rabbits and bouncing through cavernous potholes.

I touch the radio’s dial to test the airwaves. I twiddle. A voice shouts through the fizz. GLORY it shouts, GLORY GLORY GLORY. Now the voice goes dead and the fizz returns.

Do you see how I’m drawing us around in a circle? Now we’re approaching the village again. See the bare branches of the cherry trees. The houses with people inside and the shops with goods inside and the church with all its chalky gods inside, and everything and everybody remaining inside, because it’s Christmas, of course, and there’s nowhere to go. See the bird walk, the information board, the noble fir in all its hollow frippery. See the takeaway, the chip shop. The pub, the other pub. The grocers and the hairdressing salon, all shut. See the community we were insidiously hounded from. See how community is only a good thing when you’re a part of it.

Now the car parks itself in front of the terrace, two wheels abutting the footpath. I clatter the keys to the salmon pink house from the glove compartment. I have to leave you here this time but I’ll be fast as a flash, I promise.

‘Back in a minute,’ I tell you.

Inside, I smell it. The smell I could never smell before. Black mould, cigarette smoke, garlic, hand-wash, coffee, damp dust, sweaty slippers and my own heinous breath altogether compounded into the unnameable stench of home. Now I remember to have a quick look to see if there’s any tobacco still lying around. I rifle the table junk, the kitchen drawers. At the very back of a cupboard I find some soggy cigarette papers in a packet torn away to nothing. Each tear is the perfect shape of a tiny rectangle, and so this is where my father got his roaches from, of course. He robbed it from the cigarette paper packets all along. Such a tiny stupid mystery, solved.

I don’t have any petrol or paraffin or even alcohol. I scatter a box of firelighters across the living room floor. I find a can of Easy Oil and spray it onto the rocking chair, the coffee table, the carpet. I light a match. I throw the match.

I run.

As we drive from my father’s house, my house, I close my eyes. I picture the overloaded coat hooks, the unidentifiable stains on the kitchen lino, the rocking chair, the draught snake, the mouldy marmalade. I know I should be looking at the road, but it’s okay, the car won’t let us swerve off course. It knows the way.

Now I picture it all in yellow and pink flames. From the creaky floorboards to the wormy books and up through the un-insulated ceiling to the slanting slates. I picture the moss hogs erupting in tiny flashes, now leaping and scampering from rooftop to rooftop, across all the buildings of the village, spreading fire in their wake. I picture them surfing the wind through the forest, now pausing a moment to gobble the banana skin, now descending upon the refinery. I picture holocaust. I see gigantic, volcanic, apocalyptic fireworks. And they are lighting up the sky and sea of the bay as though it were the brightest day in summer.