Sara Baume: Spill Simmer Falter Wither

Today, I bypass the jumble and head for the pet shop instead. I’ve never been inside the pet shop before. It smells like chipped wood, bird poo, meat-flavoured biscuits. You’d like it. You’d especially like the lop-eared rabbit in a box on the floor, methodically chewing its cardboard walls down. It’s made a hole almost big enough to squeeze its head through and I wonder if I should alert one of the shop assistants. But I don’t want to insult the rabbit’s efforts, so I hurry on past. I find the collar and leash section and as I browse I listen to the background lull of scrabbles and gurgles and flaps. The only noise which singles itself out is a curiously rhythmic stamping, as if of tiny feet and as evenly spaced as a human heartbeat.

I want you to have a new collar for your new life. A collar I chose for you. I pick out a red one with small metal studs and a tag in the shape of a bone. What kind of bone is it supposed to be: a femur, a clavicle, a rib? At the counter, the shop assistant makes me write down the letters of your name and the digits of my telephone number. Now she punches my scribbles into a machine and feeds the tag into a slot. An invisible needle engraves the bone and the machine spits it back again. The assistant’s forehead is high and mealy. I stare at it to avoid her eyes. Somehow I manage to make myself ask about the stamping sound.

‘That’ll be the gerbil,’ she says, ‘he’ll be warning the other gerbils.’ She hands me my change and moves on to the next customer.

Let me see you in your new collar. Let me fix your inside-out ear. You look resplendent, even more resplendent. I know you can’t see for yourself, but that jingling sound is the tag batting the collar’s buckle every time you move, everywhere you go. I know you can’t read either, but on the back it says 0214645207, and on the front it says ONEEYE, capitalised and spelled as though all one word like something in African, like you are some kind of African prince.

What did I used to do all day without you? Already I can’t remember.

You sit, spine against the wicker mesh in front of the living room window. Here I’ve angled the low chair so you can see through the glass, over the road, across the bay, and all that goes on there. Beside you in the potbellied armchair, I sit and see too.

We see cargo vessels coasting in and out of harbour, containers heaped like toy building bricks. We see wading birds at falling tide, gouging the mud with their sporky beaks, pillaging a subterranean civilisation of salted organisms. And at high tide, we see pairs of ducks, always pairs. Ducks are like socks. If you’ve only got one, then something’s wrong. We see the cars which park in the street, the people who cross to the grocer’s and cross back again to their cars juggling armfuls of bags, boxes, bottles, sachets, tin cans. ‘LOOK’, I say, and point. See the fat man’s stockpile of fridge ornaments. They’re for staunching some great hunger in some small part of himself which isn’t his stomach. ‘LOOK’, I say again, and again, I point. Now I wait for you to find the tattered cat who is prowling the shore wall, stalking a scrumpled tissue. You make a noise in your throat like a tiny propeller and this is how I know you see the cat too.

Sometimes a delivery van parks on the footpath in front of the house and all we can see is the dirt on its canopy, the skid marks of a low bridge on its rooftop. You tilt your head to the left. I know now this is the thing you do when you’re trying to understand, as if the world somehow makes more sense at an angle, with your sighted side slightly higher than the side the badger blinded. Sometimes the vans collide with my hanging baskets as they leave. We watch as they carry the scarlet heads of my geraniums to their next delivery. Now even the geranium heads are better travelled than I.

The low-sized and broad-bottomed chair is your safe space, now it’s where you always go to hide. You contract to an orb in the middle or unfurl to full stretch and kick your paws through the gap where the lattice is lost. Cloaked within the tasselled throw blanket, you are protected, and nothing bad can touch you. I hadn’t expected there’d be so many commonplace, inanimate things in my father’s house, my safe space, for you to be frightened of. Is it that they mean something else to you? Have you seen the ways they can be transformed into instruments of torture? Plastic bags with their rustle and squeeze, aluminium foil with its twinkle and gash, dishcloths with their thrash and wallop. And even though I’ve never tried to whip or choke or strangle you, still you scamper away to your safe space whenever I open a drawer or start drying the dishes.

I kneel on the cold tiles of the kitchen floor. I roll out a length of foil. I place down a chocolate button and hold it out in offering to you. I know you’re disconcerted, but I do it because you have to learn to fathom your way though a world of which you are frightened, as I have learned.

Most of my boyhood fears dwindled as I grew in size and sense. I figured out the footsteps I heard by night were only the cricking pipes, that the man who skulked up the laneway in the morning to force leaflets through my door was only the postman. I started going into town and buying groceries in the big supermarkets, and there I learned how to face a shop assistant over a checkout and exchange meaningless pleasantries without whispering or muddling my words.

But it’s okay to be frightened sometimes. I’m still afraid of almost every single form of social situation. I still steer clear of uniformed officials. I’ve always had a guilty face, an incriminating nerviness, even when I was innocent. Sirens overwhelm me; only in the face of flashing bulbs do I long for the draining dimness of the energy savers. I’m afraid of swallowing spiders in my sleep, of a moth crawling into my ear drum, of toppling a display in the chemists, of my car breaking down and blocking the dual carriageway at rush hour. I’m afraid of the tiny screens that everybody carries in their pockets, of the irate way they shiver and growl. And I’m afraid of children; I’m especially afraid of children.

I roll the aluminium foil away and drop the button to your bowl.

Now the food bowl is the epicentre of your existence, to which the house is attached and everything beyond radiates from, like sun beams, like the stingers of winged and boneless sharks. I collected tokens from boxes of breakfast cereal and sent them away for that bowl. The day it arrived the postman rang my doorbell and I signed my name in his ledger. Now it lives on the kitchen floor in the cubby hole beneath the apron hooks, and you check it constantly, countless times every day.

It’s a cubby hole as grubby as a seedy city alley. There’s a layer of filth sunk into the grooves of the skirting board, buttered across the lino. Bugs creep out of the wall at night to gnaw the filth and its stickiness gathers tiny tumbleweeds of passing hair in spite of how thoroughly you clean after each meal. I see you licking every bit of surface some fugitive morsel might have touched down on, sucking up fluff and dust and sand and bugs as you go. Your food bowl is restocked three times a day, but you never take this for granted. You gobble every meal hardly using your teeth, nor your tongue, nor your swallowing muscles.

‘Please chew this time,’ I say, every time. ‘Please chew.’

I read somewhere, or maybe heard on the radio, that an animal starved in youth will devote the remainder of its life to the pursuit of eating. There’s nothing here in my father’s house to contest you for your scraps, not the apron tails which tease the back of your neck as you guzzle nor the appliances that sigh and shudder and bleep. Still you eat every bowlful at the speed of light, and afterwards you sit in the kitchen cubby and regurgitate the undigested lumps of kibble, catch them in your mouth for mashing and swallowing all over again. And once you’re finished for a second time, again you check your food bowl.