Sara Baume - Spill Simmer Falter Wither

Now you wade in and lie down, just for a second. And a tiny wave breaks across your shoulders, and you skitter sheepishly back to shore.

We’ll go this way every day now, I promise. Past the rat holes and broken branches and litter. Past the lolly wrapper lying in the verge at the base of the YIELD sign. Past the banana skin by the refinery gates below the intercom, stealthily perishing. And every day I’ll wonder about the engineer or security guard or whoever it was who ate that banana and tossed it to precisely such a spot, without thinking.

We’ll go when the wind is high and the seas are storming, when the mud is fluid and deep and the rain so constant that the trees afford no shelter as they should, but instead send an onslaught of accumulated droplets down on our heads. Still we’ll go this way, I promise.

The mobile library comes every two weeks on a Thursday, and it smells like furniture polish and sticky-fingered children.

Today, I find a book about blood sports. I flick to the chapter on badger baiting and stand with my back as a bent shield to the librarian. The driver’s out on the sea front, smoking, and there’s nobody else in the bus. Spring , the book says, is the season of digging out . I think I knew this already, but I can’t remember why. Spring is when the sows give birth and become especially aggressive. I skip down a few lines. Badger cubs are pulled from the earth as trophies and given to the diggers to rag about amongst themselves, to finish off. It’s the adult badgers captured in the woods that are kept for the baiting den, those still fighting or trying to fight. I skip down another few lines, until I reach the part I know I’m looking for. The diggers often end up with their bottom jaw clean off and a bleeding too great to be stemmed, at which point they’re clubbed to death with a shovel and rammed back into the ransacked sett.

Now an old woman who is one of my neighbours totters up the steps of the bus. At the top, she straightens her blazer and makes for the shelf of romance novels in enormous print. I snap my book shut and fumble it back. I check out one about Zen gardens instead, a collection of Indian folk tales and Silas Marner , again. As the librarian stamps my card, I wonder what a baby badger’s called. A calf, a cub, a kitten? Already I can’t remember.

I begin to nod off in the potbellied armchair with Silas lying across my chest, but I wake myself up to finish my cigarette. Now I smash the butt into the ashtray. As I begin to nod again, I see the silhouette of your head at the window. I see you staring past the shore wall, past the bay, past the opposite side of the harbour.

I dream myself inside a pen at the edge of a scrapyard. I dream the scrapyard has a view of the woods and the view’s divided into a hundred tiny compartments with each surrounded by a frame of galvanised steel. I dream I’m gazing through the grating, keeping watch on the woods. I see rabbits at dawn, leaves at all different stages of falling, power-lines bending in the wind, rookeries against the moon. Now I dream myself into the woods and I’m running, running, running. I’ve forgotten every part of myself and all the parts of my surroundings except for my maggot nose. I’ve forgotten the cheeps and chitters overhead, the braying of my fellow diggers. I’ve forgotten the details of the forest floor, the splintered twigs and smithered bark streaming beneath my feet, clinging to the fur of my ankles. Now I’m so far from the scrapyard pen I’ve forgotten the rabbits and leaves and power-lines and rookeries; they melt behind me as I run. In the woods, in my dream, I’m strong as a boar and quick as a buzzard. I’m ten foot tall yet scarcely as high as the shrubbery.

Before I fumbled the library book back, I glanced at the glossy middle pages, at the photographs. There were three. The first showed a badger yanked between two different pairs of teeth with blood trickling through the lesions in its pelt. The second showed a sett which had subsided with the digger still inside. One of his back legs was sticking up from the earth like a tiny totem. And the third showed a photograph of you, only a you with both of its eyes. A breed calculated into existence , the caption said, for its exceptional obduracy.

I wake up again. I switch on the television. It’s still cold enough to warrant the nightly lighting of the gas heater, and so I light it. You get up from the window and settle yourself directly in front of the glowing bars. You lean in to stare at them, you hardly move. What are you thinking? Now you sigh so hard from the pit of your lungs that it triggers an attack of the hiccups.

Sometimes I see the sadness in you, the same sadness that’s in me. It’s in the way you sigh and stare and hang your head. It’s in the way you never wholly let your guard down and take the world I’ve given you for granted. My sadness isn’t a way I feel but a thing trapped inside the walls of my flesh, like a smog. It takes the sheen off everything. It rolls the world in soot. It saps the power from my limbs and presses my back into a stoop.

In the evenings, we watch television. You like the nature documentaries, the ones that feature high-pitched bird noises in particular. I like the reality shows. I like how, without scripts, people don’t know what to say or say the wrong thing. I like how, without onions, people cry anyway; people cry better.

I haven’t lived like the characters on television. I haven’t fought in any wars or fallen in love. I’ve never even punched a man or held a woman’s hand. I haven’t lived high or full, still I want to believe I’ve lived intensely, that I’ve questioned and contemplated my squat, vacant life, and sometimes even, understood. I’ve always noticed the smallest, quietest things. A chewing-gum blob in the perfect shape of a pterodactyl. A two-headed sandeel coiled inside a cockle shell. The sliver of tungsten in every incandescent. I’ve read a lot of newspapers. They stack up on the coffee table for weeks before I get around to recycling them. I know how the system of society ought to work. It doesn’t make sense to me, but I’ve come to believe this is because it doesn’t make sense.

I’m not the kind of person who is able to do things, have I told you this already? I lie down and let life leave its footprints on me.

All the books I’ve read, they stack up too. The lines and passages bleed together. Sometimes I remember characters and think, just for a second, they were people I once knew. Sometimes I remember places and think, just for a second, that it’s somewhere I once was. I never remember the titles or the author’s name, but I remember the covers, I always remember the covers. A gigantic valley, a tiny horse galloping. A stack of polished silver spoons. A tall man and a small man both in cowboy hats walking a red road toward a blue mountain between a tall tree and a small tree. A great fish with a pointed nose, a loose line skipping. A profile, half-man half-wolf, a single eye in the very centre. And a man rising from a pen’s nib in a suit jacket to drift amongst the skyscrapers.

But as for the words, the messages: I forget. And if I’ve been changed, so I change back again.

See the signs of summer, of the tepid seasons starting their handover with subtle ceremony. Now the forest floor is swamped by bluebells, the celandine squeezed from sight. See how the bells hover above the ground, like an earth-hugging lilac mist. Now the oak, ash, hazel and birch are bulked with newly born leaves, still moist and creased from the crush of their buds. The barley is up to my kneecaps and already it’s outgrown you. As we crest the brow of the hill each day, you are shrouded by green blades.