Seahorses Are Real (17 page)

‘Both, I think.'

‘We should put a sheet on it!'

‘Ha Ha.' She watched him settle himself in his black leather chair, pick up a pen and paper. He showed her a poem someone had photocopied for him that morning by Kahlil Gibran.

‘“Let there be spaces in your togetherness,''' she read out loud. ‘‘‘Let the winds of the heavens dance between you.” That's nice.'

‘Yes. He was an extraordinary fellow, though, apparently: vagabond, womaniser, drug addict!'

‘He wasn't!'

‘Yes, apparently. He probably wrote that when he was high on heroin, LSD!'

Marly giggled. ‘That's the thing, isn't it, you read all these lovely things and then you find out what they're like. Coleridge was an opium addict, you know.'

‘Was he? I didn't know that.'

‘We did
Kubla Khan
at school. I remember the teacher saying he was an opium addict... I like this though: “the winds of the heavens dance between you…” I suppose that's how a relationship should be… not in each other's pockets too much.' (That was something David's mother had said to her on the phone – that she thought they were in each other's pockets too much.)

‘No, that can be a bad thing. How are you getting on at the moment, you and David?'

‘Alright.' She wanted to keep off David. He wasn't the one with a skinful of rashes, head full of superballs, body full of blocked-up blood.
He
was alright: he slept, went to work, made his jokes, scoffed his grub and now – since the worm or rather giant sloth, as she rather acidly put it to herself sometimes, had turned – used his fists.

‘We had an argument the other day,' she rushed in before she could stop herself, ‘...it got a bit violent. I flipped, got into a rage... started throwing things.'

‘What was the argument about?'

She paused for a moment. She wanted to say it was a word, a look, but it sounded so stupid and it wasn't that really; it was never the thing itself. It was like that play where they joked about people getting divorced because of a salad or some word. It was never the salad or the word; it was the way you ate the salad, garnished the word with a look, a gesture, hid it, bartered with it, kept it hostage under the pillow in exchange for sweet FA nothings.

‘Nothing really, it never is about anything... it's just I always feel like I have to look after myself... that the only person I can trust is myself. I go very cold, detached....'

‘You trust David though, don't you?'

‘Yes, rationally I do... I mean: I know he's potty about me. He's never given me any reason not to trust him. It's just that... well... he's a man.' (
You cudgel, Miss Marlee, you cudgel the keys. Think of the breeze, of air, of fingers of forked lightning running through your pretty hair. Can you play Kinderscenen, Scenes from Childhood, Träumerei, Dreaming, Lullaby or Frightening? Horrorwitz played Dreaming for every finale. Horrorwitz played splay-fingered like you.
)

‘It's not just men.' Terry swivelled in his chair and stared at her with his bad gangster face as if she'd some­how wronged him. ‘It's a human trait to think the grass is greener. I've sat here for nearly twenty years and I've heard stories from women and from men and I can tell you it's a human trait. I don't care if you're a vicar, it doesn't mean you can be trusted. No human being is one hundred per cent trustworthy.'

‘Oh don't say that,' Marly said lightly but meaning it. It wasn't what she wanted to hear. She wanted to hear that some people were different, exceptional. ‘Sometimes I see it all laid out and it's fine, you know, children, a little house, very secure... and then I get scared, think it'll all go wrong. I see couples in the supermarket with kids and it all seems so impossible… seems so impossible that I could ever do that.'

‘You see the rainbow for a moment and then it's gone.'

‘Yes, that's it, that's it exactly. And then at other times – when I'm really bad – I don't think like that anyway. I'm just grateful to be looked after, to be fed.'

‘You're lucky you've got someone like David,' he said gently, ‘who's going to be there.'

‘Yes, I suppose I am.' She thought of the boots kicking her in the ribs, the boots that should have been sent away many moons ago to Dr Barnardo's. ‘I suppose I am.'

His beaky nose dipped over a new sheet of paper as he wrote in his forward-sloping writing, curling up his lower case stems, no doubt to prevent disease creeping in or perhaps some sudden heart attack. Everything was quite caricatured to her today: the picture of the girl in the shape of a cross, her green eyes bulging like gooseberries, the children sniggering behind her back, smiling at her crucifixion; the figures on the vase on Terry's desk, having a ball in perpetual motion, chasing each other round and round, almost seeming to be doing the goose step; and the book of dreams described and analysed Victorian style, laid out on the window ledge. She wondered if it had anything under ‘shrinking kitten': sometimes she had a dream of a tiny kitten, harder to find than a needle in a haystack, though when she did she always realised it was far too tiny to exist. The doorbell went suddenly, making her jump and Terry raised his head to stare gloomily out at the black car squeezing past his far, far too red one in the driveway. ‘They're always trying to sell me the
Reader's Digest
,' he muttered irritably and Marly smiled weakly in return. ‘The problem is,' he added, his eyes trained on the black car, ‘you leap ahead and imagine the worst.'

‘I do do that, yes,' she agreed.

‘Which when you come to think of it,' he sighed, ‘is a terrible waste of energy. We don't know what's going to happen... we only really have the moment.'

‘That's true,' she murmured though it went against the grain. What if the moment was too bad to live in; then what did you do? The moment stank! The moment was overrated. You could only live it second by second whereas dreams could be spread quite thinly over the day like margarine or Philadelphia, memories crammed into a minute. And how did you live in the present anyway, with all those past lives ganging up on you?

‘I've been reading a book,' she began conversationally, as he delved in his suitcase of poisons, ‘about past lives.'

‘I see.' He always said ‘I see' like that, his head very straight when he didn't want to commit himself or come down on something like a GP or a politician. When she'd first asked him how long it would take to be well he'd coughed and spluttered, hummed and haa'd and said he was sounding like a politician and she'd had to reply that he was a bit.

‘My mother's friend, Maureen, said my mother must have done something very bad in a past life to end up the way she did.'

‘That was a very irresponsible thing to say.' The bottles clinked as he searched amongst them, his long, twisted fingers rooting around remedies for bee stings, athlete's foot, syphilis and gingivitis.

‘No, but anyway, she kept getting these messages from Ivy in heaven. Apparently my mother wanted her to get a plant for the rhubarb patch, so she went off and bought a plant but when she got back the car boot wouldn't open. She kept bringing back these different plants but the boot wouldn't open for any of them. In the end she got this huge white rhododendron and the boot opened for that one so she concluded that was the one Ivy wanted for the rhubarb patch! It was huge, beautiful, very expensive – about thirty quid apparently.'

‘I see.' He kept his head very straight but his mouth appeared to be twitching.

‘David said that she's going to get very sick of Ivy's messages from heaven if they cost her thirty quid a time!'

‘You're much better you know,' he smiled from his chair, taking two brown envelopes from behind the book of dreams. ‘Daily' he wrote on one, ‘Wed & Sat evening' on the other, curling up his lower case stems again to prevent some virus getting at him or maybe an airborne pathogen. ‘From where I'm sitting you've got much more energy than you had, say, a year ago.'

‘Hope so.' She shuddered to think what she'd been like, say, a year ago.

‘You're really pretty good now.' She watched him lick the top of the envelopes, his tongue darting in and out like the honeyeater she'd seen on a TV documentary – or was it an anteater? She shuddered a little and he looked her full in the eye. ‘How's the job, by the way?'

‘Okay,' she replied, smooth as silk. How easily the lies came up to her lips: white lies, black lies, pink elephants can fly lies. (
A nocturne, a variation, an invention, an étude. Chopin, Schumann, JS Bach, Mendelssohn Bartholdy, even Debussy.
) Anything to fit in, shift the guilt, protect herself or please someone else. He'd seemed so keen to see her well and she hadn't wanted him to think his treatment had been
altogether unsuccessful. Always so eager to please a man, young or old, fat or thin, except David, of course, who
was far too close. Besides which, it had become a little embarrassing to be unemployed still after nearly two years... and so the little job of dental receptionist in Gravesend had come along quite suddenly, out of the blue, out of the backside of a bright pink elephant.

‘Any root canals recently?' he joked.

‘Oh no, not for me,' she laughed hysterically, licking her gums in apprehension. ‘One thing I have got is perfect teeth… which reminds me, it worries me not using fluoride….'

‘Oh, you don't need that. They use that stuff in rat poison. Anything left over they shove into toothpaste.'

‘You don't use it then?'

‘Oh no.' He shook his head vehemently.

‘And you're alright?'

‘Well, these are dentures....'

Marly stared at him in astonishment, counting her teeth with the tip of tongue in agitation, not sure whether to laugh or cry.

‘... But I lost them way before, after the radiotherapy.'

Ah yes... when he'd nearly died near Wormwood Scrubs. She smiled at him sympathetically. ‘My grandmother refers to hers as teeth not made by God!'

He laughed and patted her arm. ‘You'll be alright,' he said reassuringly. ‘Keep off the sweets, cakes, chocs, colas... you haven't got a sweet tooth have you.'

‘No, my mother had though, at the end – I think it was the steroids. She kept a bag of Maltesers and marsh­mallows in a drawer by her bed.' (
That cake is a magnum opus, he said to her once in sleep. Did you make it out of tripe? Did you measure the constellations? The teacup rattled on Scott Joplin's nose and there were always crumbs on his top wet lip – the remains of a half-eaten digestive biscuit. Doing the Cake Walk, Sunflower Slow Drag, Elite Syncopations and Peacherine Rag. My heart stopped beating, did an intermezzo
....
)

‘We're going on holiday next week,' he remarked pleasantly, helping her on with her raincoat, ‘to Ireland. Looking for leprechauns!'

‘That'll be nice.' She felt a giggle rising like a hiccup in her throat, the way it had done long ago in school assemblies, detentions, always at the most inappropriate moments and she pumped his arm extra hard so as not to give herself away. He ushered her out through the stained-glass porch, his blue eyes twinkling like a merry widow's sapphires and she grabbed his hand again in delight, the giggle opening up into a red hibiscus flower. ‘Hope you find one,' she laughed as she squeezed her way past his far too red car; and he smiled back and said he was absolutely counting on it, laughing and waving back at her until she was out of sight.

(
fingertips creeping ri... tar... dando.
)

Eleven

‘He thinks you're vain and obsessive,' she said to herself, standing in the queue at the job centre. The video showing today was
How to become a Bus Driver
; the sound was turned off and the buses kept going round and round on a little screen above her head. ‘And compared to him you are – a man who'd lost his heart and teeth near Wormwood Scrubs.' What a fate for anyone – to have lost their heart and teeth by twenty-one! No wonder he'd never got to New Zealand; just ended up in his big white house behind his far too red car, eating the good stuff June prepared for him and consoling himself no doubt with the fact that other people's heads and bodies were as screwed up, wonky and buggered as his own. Accepting it all – reality, fate, the rubbish God cared to bestow – out of trepidatious timidity. Trepidatious timidity – she knew about that; she inched herself forward a few steps in the queue and stared angrily at the man in front of her. ‘Look at him looking,' she almost shouted to herself, ‘at that woman in the pinstripe suit!' She hated the way men looked at women and hated it even more if they didn't look at her. In the old days they would have done before… before…

‘Those eyes,' someone had cried admiringly once, on a train, on a bus, under the bedclothes perhaps, ‘don't need anything.' Did David know he was with a woman whose eyes didn't need anything, not an inch of kohl or a dash of mascara? It was imperative somehow that he know, that he be told. The fewer compliments he gave her the more vociferously she voiced the compliments of others. He knew all about Imran and the cashew nut. She'd regaled him with every last detail of his silken curling moustache, his shiny shirts and the lines he'd written in a poetic trance about her goblet neck, soft bright heart and dancing peacock steps. ‘The problem with him,' David had said a little drily, ‘was that he needed a television; he obviously had far too much time on his hands!' Funny man. Funny man. Weren't they all such funny men! Look at him looking at that woman in a pinstripe suit. Human trait, my eye, there was nothing remotely human about men. ‘Shall we go to Swan-Sea?' Imran had asked her, twirling his curling silken moustache and defrosting a chicken at halfway past midnight in an effort to seduce her. ‘Shall we go to Swan-Sea?' Trepidatious timidity. She'd go now, like a shot, if she were well. Everything was do-able if you were well: riding Appaloosas over the Andes, racing alligators up the Blue Danube. Fly away, said a voice more than once in her head, when you have got through the chrysalis stage. She was saving up time in a savings account and when she was well she would spend spend spend it, though Terry had said she must live for the moment, face the here and now of her reality. Funny man, funny man – sitting there in his black leather chair, chewing on the dead wood in people's heads like a ruddy woodworm, burrowing into their cobwebbed and creosoted secrets. No wonder he went off looking for leprechauns, he probably thought if he made a wish they'd give him back his heart and teeth. The secret of life, he'd confided once in his room where dreams were tied up in books and books were tied up in dreams, is to find excitement on your own doorstep. Marly didn't know if it was the cry of a wise man or a defeated one. To find excitement on your own doorstep. How on earth did you do that?