A Line Made by Walking

by Sara Baume

But mass hadn’t changed; I had. There was always a wicker dish. I even used to be the server who carried it down. And on all the Sundays I went to church as a child, the collection of money was as meaningless as everything else that occurred between the hardwood pews and fibreglass saints. Objects don’t seem incongruous if they’ve been there forever; doings don’t seem ridiculous if they’ve always been done that way. Why is it only now that I can see how many ordinary things are actually grotesque?

flying and falling are almost exactly the same.

Because people don’t want homes; they want show houses—only by means of a show house can they be distracted from the generalised going-nowhereness of their perfectly pointless lives.

I forced my face up until I could see the screen. JESS it said, and so I lay back down again. Jess was just a friend and she would only have been calling to see if I was okay, and seeing as I wasn’t, I decided not to answer.

The ornithologist explains how it often happens that there is one member of the colony who becomes deranged. How, even if he fetched the misdirected penguin back, reunited it with its fellows and pointed it the right way, as soon as he let go it would immediately turn around again and resume its own course towards the hostile, boundless mountains which mark the southern limits of the Earth. ‘The deranged ones couldn’t possibly survive,’ the ornithologist says, and in all his years of study, he still doesn’t understand why they do it.

The world is wrong. It took me twenty-five years to realise and now I don’t think I can bear it any more.

The world is wrong, and I am too small to fix it, too self-absorbed.

Because she cannot see inside my head, outside my head I must be nourished and calm and bright. The straightforwardness of this comforts me: body over brain.

For my father, mowing is a leisure pursuit, as is axing up a week’s worth of kindling, rotavating the potato patch, replenishing the oil and wiper water in everybody’s car, and he saves all such leisurely jobs concerning gardens and family for Sundays.

I should know that my father doesn’t pay attention to details such as these; I should know because for decades my mother and sister and I have played sneaky little games of let’s-see-how-long-it-takes-Dad-to-notice, and he never noticed, not once. The tongue piercing, the nose piercing, the lip.

I am less fearful of being alone than I am of not being able to be alone.

I realise I no longer care whether or not my father is sophisticated. He has more effervescence—more sturdy grace—than any man who ever wore a tie to an office.

‘I’ll be alright now . . .’ I said, as if it were actually that simple, as if my mother was a magic potion which I could drink.

I have always suffered from this misconception: that my mother is a magic potion.

As a child, I did not believe, as I do now, that ghosts are like God: things you can’t see because they aren’t there. Instead of like dust-mites: things you can’t see even though they are there.

The trick to keeping going is to break going into bursts: to stop, and otherwise occupy my brain for a spell, and then start going again. Nowadays I apply this to my whole day long. Each is a succession of shallow occupations, enforced intervals. Even my sleep is only ankle deep, interrupted.

My mother was forever reminding me of things I had not forgotten. ‘You’ll need a knife to open that,’ she said when I reached for a vacuum-pack of coffee in the kitchen cupboard. ‘You’ll need to empty the strainer,’ she said when she found me standing over a sink full of smoggy water doing nothing in particular, just waiting. It was as if I hadn’t learned a single thing in the seven years I’d lived independently, as if my mother refused to acknowledge knowledge attained from any source which wasn’t her.

I struggle to say aloud the sentences which form inside my head, either clamming up or feverishly rambling. Jess used to try and reassure me that I came across just fine in company: chatty and bright. But I have never wanted to be perceived as chatty and bright. I have always wanted to be solemn and mysterious.

I wished that my tissue really was the size of a man, that I could cast it over my shoulders and hood my face, like a child in a ghost costume at Halloween. That I could cut two oval holes in front of my eyes and see the world without it seeing me back.

Back then I hazily contemplated giving up some vice for Lent, not in the name of religious observance, but just to practise asserting willpower. I tried to think of a vice I want to sacrifice, and ended up reasoning that I need my bad habits, desperately, just to coax myself through each day.

Tomorrow is my birthday, my twenty-sixth. The night before almost every one to date, I always expect I will wake up the following morning feeling somehow different, somehow transformed. I never do. I feel exactly the same, and am disappointed.

My only chance is to pretend it’s a day like any other; to keep the despair only as great as on all the others.

Apparently, there’s a specific point of fatness beyond which it’s virtually impossible to ever reduce back to normal. Apparently, very fat people are only ever able to lose one tenth of their volume, no matter the weight they start at, no matter how hard they try. The worse things get, the more onerous they are to put right again. But this applies to every aspect of life. How can it be that the very fat people didn’t know?

I haven’t answered my phone on any of the occasions I’ve seen her name appear on the screen as it is ringing. Each time, I’ve told myself: don’t be stupid, it’s Jess, it’s only Jess. And once it has stopped ringing, each time I’ve promised myself I will call back, I have prepared myself for calling back, and once I have failed to call back, I’ve promised myself I’ll answer it the next time.

Whether or not I want to see him, I do not want him to see me.

I used to get so angry with my father, for the way he is so cynical about everybody on the news, and so quick to insult. But now I am beginning to understand that we all become tyrants beneath our own roof slates. Or maybe we don’t; maybe it’s just my father and me—the tyrannical gene I inherited from him.

At night, l am immune. There is no onus to fill hours; nothing I should do or feel like I have to. Night is a nothingness to be savoured.

For the first time, I acknowledge the possibility that nothing will die, or change, or even happen.

The last time I went out at night in the city was almost a year ago. It began with anxiety, then I was pleasantly pissed for a couple of hours, and finally, around the point at which people started taking to the dance floor, I sobered and saddened and the old chant returned: I want to go home.