Sara Baume: Spill Simmer Falter Wither

I carry your new bed down to the kitchen. I’ve never had a pet bigger than a kiwi fruit before, yet I have the impression from somewhere that the kitchen is the proper place in a house for an animal to sleep. I settle it into the nook beneath the apron hooks. ‘In your bed,’ I tell you, ‘good boy.’ Now I switch the light out and close the kitchen door. You on one side, me on the other.

You don’t like being left behind. I should have expected this. I suppose you’ve never been alone in a kitchen before, where the floor is cold and slippery and the walls are built from lofty appliances which sigh and shudder and bleep. Can you hear the drippling faucet? Now the pipes expanding and contracting as though the walls are cricking out their bones, now the scribble-scrabble of claws behind the skirting boards, a rat or two leftover from the spate. Can you hear me bumbling overhead? Water running down the bathroom plughole, slippers moving from lino to carpet, the squeak of the wardrobe door opening, the thud as it swings itself shut again. Now silence as I smoke. These are the sounds of my bedtime ablutions and I perform them each night, trance-like, at the same time in the same sequence. Teeth, face, slippers, pyjamas, smoke. Finally I trip the bedside lamp switch and kill the last incandescent bulb for the night.

Now I’m listening too. I hear you rise from your cushion and walk to the kitchen door. I hear you stop there and begin to whimper. It’s a sound somewhere between cooing and keening, from an organ some place between belly and lung. Plaintive and elegiac, cavernous and craven. I listen for thirteen minutes exactly. I watch the luminescent numbers morphing into one another on my digital alarm clock. For thirteen minutes exactly, I lie rigid on my old springs, entranced.

I get up, descend the stairs, push the door into the kitchen. You’re sitting on the cold lino, eye wide. I touch you between the ears, I mean it in consolation and yet you wince. I lift the low chair and heft it back upstairs, and in the bedroom, I wedge it into a hollow between the wardrobe and the bed. When I turn around, you’re standing cautiously at the threshold. I can see your nose trembling over the moths and kindling and coal dust. I squat down and pat the tasselled blanket.

‘Come here,’ I tell you, ‘here.’

You tippy-toe over the rug, clamber onto the chair. You’re watching as I switch the bedside lamp out, still watching as I nestle beneath the duvet. Now I can see the small reflection of your lonely peephole. It catches the green light from my digital clock and glints though the dark. I wonder can you hear all the things I can’t anymore, all the things rendered soundless by familiarity, in the same way I could never smell my father’s smell even though I know he must have smelled. The hum of the generator in the grocer’s yard, the echo of feathers in the chimney pot where the jackdaws nest, my shilly-shally breaths and the rasping of my tarry lungs. I wonder can you see through the open curtains to the outline of continents on the moon. The moon oceans and moon mountains and lakes full of moon water. Now I watch as your glint flickers and snuffs. Now I listen to your soft snores and grunts, the gruff lullaby of a strange animal who ought properly to be kept in the kitchen.

Sleep sound, One Eye.

Tonight, I dream a strange dream. I dream it’s dungeon dark and I’m belting through forests and over fields. Demented, directionless. I dream the grass blades thwacking my legs and a whirlpool of flies dizzying about my ears. I dream the crackle and pop of invisible rain. I dream chickweed, hawkweed, knotweed, knapweed, bindweed. Now I come to the last stretch of hillslope before a roadway, and here I stop, exhausted. Below the field, there’s a road. Down on the road, there’s a house with a glowing window. The curtains are hooked open and I can see a vase of wilted daffodils outlined above the sill, a mirror hung on the wall behind, and in the mirror, the black through the window with a wisp of angry cloud. My legs give way and I crumple. Now there’s a gap, a tunnel of black. It’s a thousand miles long in dream time, and it ends in a perfect circle of blazing light, as though the sun’s been plucked and fixed into a grill, mounted onto a metal stalk and propped, just to warm me. Up close, the smell is of slightly singed fur and smouldering newsprint. Further away but all around, the smell is of faeces, disinfectant, the secreting fear glands of petrified animals. In the dream, smell is everything to me, smell is my native language. I hear voices and pivot my head around to the right, but there’s only a blank wall with its white paint scuffed. I see I’m behind a locked door; the locked door of a cage which is high up. My head is all doddery and my face is stinging, throbbing. Now I realise that when I pivot my head around to the left, there is nothing.

It is spring in my dream. At first I think I know this innately, but of the things I think I innately know, I rarely do, I’ve only forgotten where they came from. And so I remember, it was the cut daffodils which showed me that it is spring.

I’d say you’re about the size of a badger, just differently proportioned. I’ve seen tens of them over the years, bludgeoned to the hard shoulder, dead as the dirt they’ve been splattered by. I read an article in the paper about how the Roads Authority is obliged to install a special underpass every time a motorway intersects a badger’s territory. Nonetheless nine-hundred-and-ninety-six get killed trying to cross the road every year, so the newspaper said. Every year, nine-hundred-and-ninety-six badgers ignore the special underpass and go the way they’ve always gone. I think that’s immense, appalling.

What size was your badger? Was she a thickset mother sow, angry as a thwacked wasp because of the litter of newlyborns squashed into the dark behind her? Is that why she turned on you with her curved claws slashing? You don’t seem to realise, but you’re skinny as a mink. Your presence may be ten foot tall, even so, you’re squirty as a tomcat. Your ribcage caves into stomach. Your rump tapers to a quarter-docked tail and your weight’s tipped to the front like a dinky wheelbarrow. Your legs are all bone, your shoulders all brawn. Your neck’s too thick for your body, your mouth’s too wide for your head, your ears are just about long enough to kink back in on themselves. Now that your face is healed, you have a hollow and a gaudy scar in the place where your left eye used to be. A gouge of your lower lip is missing, and it draws your mouth down to an immoveable grimace. Save for a feathery white beard from underside muzzle to uppermost nipples, you are solid black, dark as a hole in space.

A week has passed. It is Tuesday again, my Tuesday trip to town.

The post office first. The bell on the door sounds my arrival. I approach the counter and slide my card beneath the indoor window. Always, it’s the old postmaster. Although he’s been old for as long as I can remember, the postmaster never appears to have grown any older. Even sitting in his office chair, he seems sprightly, as though the air on the opposite side of the indoor window is somehow purer than the air out here, somehow life-preserving. As he counts my notes and coins he usually says something about the weather, about how the day is ‘fierce’ or ‘soft’ or ‘desperate’ or ‘close’, and every Tuesday I say the same thing in reply. I say Sure you’d never know from one minute to the next what’s coming , and the postmaster always agrees. I scoop up my money. I thank him. And the bell on the door chimes again, as though it doesn’t understand that I am leaving.