Seahorses Are Real (2 page)

‘No fear, not me!' sang a voice in her head as she walked down the road to their little flat, the ring thumping against her chest, her backbone jutting out (an abnormality inherited from her mother) almost through the skin so that her neck reached forward like a delicate, etiolated plant making a bid for the sun. Lovely boy and all that. ‘A real brick,' some horsey woman in a book would have said. ‘A real brick, by Jove!' But wife didn't quite feel right. It didn't envelop her tongue the way fiancée did. Wife was a life of soapsuds and dishcloths, daydreams and under the thumb. Wife was merging with the sealed-up things in the cupboard. Put away. Done and dusted. Wife was a life between a rock and a hard place – Ivy had taught her that. Fiancée, on the other hand, had a pretty-sounding ring to it, but not the heavy, dark, gold thing that made you, like Frodo, a little more invisible every day. Oh no, fiancée was flashing daisies on silver chains. Loving me, loving me not. Completing but never completed. Fiancée was promising to give yet ever withholding.

It suited Marly perfectly.

Two

David was waiting for her in the kitchen and cooking pasta, which he did when he was worried about her or got home early. His pasta meals had developed over the years from a simple cheese and tomato affair to a gastronomic extravaganza full of bits of old vegetable he'd found in the fridge – mushrooms, peppers, courgettes, potatoes – thrown into the pan and let sizzle seemingly for hours on end while he sang and clicked his fingers to any old tune in his head, jumping onto the magic carpet, as he put it, when he got to the good bits. In response to Marly's refrain that the life was boiling out of her as well as the vegetables he would say that it was love grub, practical love – it took great time and care – and she had come to understand, as she waited for her supper in an old pink dressing-gown, that in every buttered mushroom, skinned potato and deflowered tomato there was love, painstaking love. Sometimes, however, when faced with a steaming mound of vegetable and pasta, she would have preferred a simple I love you.

‘I love you,' he said now, in greeting, a questioning note to his voice.

‘And you,' she returned, homing into his outstretched arms, her eyes avoiding his.

He sighed and kissed the top of her head. It had taken her two years to let him touch her face. She was a bottomless pit and sometimes he could shout in frustration. Sometimes he did shout in frustration.

‘Guess who,' she said after a while, disentangling herself and looking at him now, almost expectantly, ‘was painting the door all day in a pair of purple trousers and a little kerchief?'

‘Oh no, not the purple trousers,' he joked. ‘Mr Ratty?'

‘Has he been out?' Marly cried in alarm, her toe nudging the porridge and peanut butter-filled trap that lay against the wall beneath the table. ‘Humane Dead Cert' it had said on the box.

David shook his head. ‘Not a squeak out of him. I've been dancing about on the floorboards: he thinks I'm some sort of voodoo fella! I'll put poison down when you're gone,' he added.

Marly half smiled. She was always on the point of going, leaving for a new life in the countryside, by the seaside, somewhere nice away from this hellhole, but she never did, would or could without him. It was simply a threat she used to keep him precariously balanced, on his toes, never quite settled in the relationship; and it was not for him to be telling her she was going but for her to be telling him.

‘No,' almost angrily, ‘Mrs M. All day she was on that stupid stepladder. I went up and down three times and in the end I thought I've got to come in for lunch. She said all the snails were coming from the bin, you know, nicely, but it was obvious she meant we should clean it.'

‘Fuck it,' said David. ‘Don't worry about it.'

‘Well, it was a bit embarrassing.' Marly chewed her bottom lip. ‘She said, “It's very auspicious I caught you because the new tenant Jason's moving in on Saturday.”
You know how she speaks. He's been commuting all the way from Hampshire if you please.' Marly grinned, being Mrs M. ‘“All the way from Hampshire if you please. He's an optical technician apparently.”'

‘She's the sort of person,' David reflected, stirring the seething red mass on the stove, ‘who'd talk about condiments. And utensils.'

‘Mmm.' Marly started to unlace her muddy old trainers.

‘What an arse!' cried David – it was a ritual – as she bent over.

‘I know, I know. People'd give their eye teeth for this arse.' Hovering barefoot on her way to the sitting room she added, ‘There was this little kid in a buggy like a dodgem car with a stick thing up the back his mother was pushing him round with. It was dead cute. He was pretending, you know, to steer the wheel. He had little goggles on and a gas mask thing for asthma.'

‘Pollution,' David corrected, smiling at the image of a begoggled baby in a bumper car, gleaning what he could from her mishmash of words. Her sentences got worse – strange to think she'd once been Ophelia – as if her brain were disintegrating or moving too fast for her mouth. She made stuff up half the time to fit her own reality, swapping meanings, pouring words out all jumbled up, all mixed up like vomit. She set no store by the things she said, calling him all the names under the sun, not caring whether they hurt or pleased. And yet she set great store, a squirrel's store by his words, hoarding up something he'd said unthinkingly years ago and bringing it out like a ripe nut in every argument, her bright eyes twitching. ‘That thing you said to me in Birmingham, two years ago.' She was a squirrel for hoarding that sort of thing. ‘What thing? What are you on about?' And yet, he thought, softening, she'll be sitting right now on the settee with that wretched book of hers, staring at the Moses basket and the brightly coloured nursery – how she loved the brightly coloured nursery – reeling off the things you should eat when you're pregnant: sardines, broccoli, raspberry leaf tea. (He knew them off by heart. He even knew the weight a six-month foetus should be.) It was a crazy addiction she had, a craving to know, to
participate vicariously in a process she might never experience. He congratulated himself on the phrase – to participate vicariously in a process she might never experience – not bad for a dim, narrow, weak-minded mathematician! Still, he thought, frowning, any phrase was better than stealing a begoggled baby in a bumper car!

‘No, but anyway,' Marly continued as they settled into their food, ‘it's like I'm a fugitive from my own lies, my own life. I sat here for ages waiting for her to go and then I thought, you know, I'm meant to be at work – she must have thought I was a right mess – so I went up the cemetery.' She didn't tell him about the boys with a ball like an old moon. At first she'd told him everything – it'd been like a burden being lifted from her shoulders – babbling away the stored-up years, every little secret, every last dream, until she was emptied, serene, ready to be filled again with his love. Now their communication was deeper, less tangible – an intimate code of intercepted utterances, delicate tappings, invisible springs and hieroglyph smiles that affirmed their knowingness, their habitual togetherness. Marly sometimes felt that the code half stifled them and it was then she babbled away as in the early days while he, puzzler that he was, took refuge in trying to decipher her heart.

‘You're a poor little thing,' he said, smiling a little between forkfuls.

‘I am a poor little thing. And the sooner you realise it the better.'

‘I do realise it,' he said, sadly this time.

Marly stiffened. Poor little thingedness was all very well for getting sympathy but not pity. Self pity was alright but pity from others she didn't like. ‘I caught a bit of Oprah,' she said, changing the subject. ‘It was terrible….'

‘Caught a bit,' scoffed David. ‘You had a lovely old time of it, sprawled out here with your feet up.'

‘No I didn't,' indignantly, ‘I told you I was up the cemetery.'

‘I know, I know. I was just having a laugh with you.'

‘Well, anyway,' Marly went on, irritated a little by his effervescence, ‘there was this kid who'd been attacked. It was ninety degrees apparently and the puppy had a seizure. It was so bad they couldn't show the pictures – he was just skeleton and teeth.'

‘Jesus,' David muttered appropriately, not yet having a clue what she was on about.

‘They made a face for him out of his arms and legs – like me mam, d'you remember, when she had her neck grafted with fat from her bottom. She said her backside afterwards looked like a wrinkled elephant's. Oh dear.' Marly lapsed hysterically into a giggle.

David nodded, remembering. ‘It's alright, my love.'

‘They'll be transplanting faces soon apparently. They had this monkey – it was horrible – with a transplanted head. They said, “It's so exciting, his eyes are tracking us.” They kept going on about how marvellous it was they'd saved this kid's life and everything with this miracle surgery but... I mean... you should've seen him. He looked terrible.'

David rolled his eyes in mock despair. Here we go, he thought.

‘I mean it's hard enough for most people to live, to exist, let alone a kid with a face made up of arms and legs. What sort of life's he going to have?' He'll miss out on the adolescent vitamin for sure, she thought. ‘I don't know, it should be wonderful, the fact that he's alive and that but… it might've been better... people have such terrible lives.'

‘That's true,' said David tonelessly.

‘It's like the bit of an end of a documentary I saw…'

‘Yeah, yeah, bet you saw the whole…'

‘No, seriously, when you were at your evening class. There was this Russian woman who had to sweep the streets from ten thirty at night till four in the morning and she only got paid three quid for it. We don't know we're born,' Marly added.

‘That's true,' agreed David and then quickly, ‘I love you,' because it was his job, he felt, to nip things in the bud, to bring her back before she was anywhere near close to the brink. ‘I think you're marvellous.'

‘Am I?' she cried, falling as always – childishly eager – into the trap. ‘In what way am I marvellous?'

David put his finger to his chin as if pondering the question for the first time. ‘Every way. Ironing shirts, washing socks…'

‘Hor
ri
d!
'

He laughed and opened his arms wide. ‘You're beautiful and soft and gentle and,' stupidly, ‘you're a poor little thing.'

‘I'm alright,' Marly pushed back at him, sealing up the vulnerability, pleased to hear she was such things yet feeling none of them.

He put the television on then, flicking through the channels with a cumbersome grace, his arms still close about her.

‘You don't care do you?' she remonstrated, breaking free, feeling there was still some point or other to be made, that the depth of their discussion wasn't up for grabs, didn't warrant the usual crisp-packet-in-the-cinema routine which he employed for effect in moments of high seriousness. ‘D'you want a crisp?' he'd whispered once, loud and rustling into the dark, tense, tenterhooked silence, much to Marly's amused embarrassment. ‘D'you want a crisp?' She eyed him suspiciously now but he was innocent enough, his face sad, angry even.

‘It's because I care. To distract you. Stop you moping about.' And it was true he'd turned it on to distract her, as well as himself, from her misery, her unrelenting misery that brought him down, sometimes, as low as she. I work hard all day, he thought, and come back to this.

‘I'm not moping,' she muttered sulkily, sitting very straight on the sofa and opening her book at ‘Lilian's Caesarean Section', tears welling up in her eyes. He'll never understand, she thought, it'll never work, and she read a sentence blurrily over and over: ‘I felt I'd missed out on the real thing, having a Caesarean. I felt I'd missed out on the real thing, having a Caesarean. I felt I'd missed out on the real…'

David chuckled and nudged her. She focused even harder on the sentence though her ears, in spite of herself, were listening. ‘I felt I'd missed…'

‘In a tropical jungle like this one,' came an excited little whisper from the television, ‘bright colours signify genuine nastiness.' Marly looked up and saw a man in shorts and a Panama hat. ‘But this little humdinger of a treecreeper's got everything he wants right here under his very nose, a veritable cornucopia right under his nose. Figs! It's all he eats. He relishes them, can't get enough of them.'

‘Relishes 'em,' spluttered David. ‘I bet he's sick to death of them!'

Marly giggled and put down her book. ‘You'd be off for a slap-up curry,' she teased, sarcastically enough to sound as if she hadn't quite given in yet. ‘With ketchup,' she added.

‘What, what!' David obliged, being the proprietor of Mariners where he – she never let him forget – had had ketchup with everything. Mariners, where they'd stayed two nights for one of his interviews, where Marly had laughed and smiled at the sea view, the little sachets of hot chocolate, the bourbons and custard creams; and the proprietor who'd looked like a toad, made his own clocks and gone about saying ‘what what' all the time. ‘“Full English breakfast is it again sir? With ketchup? You're a brave man sir. What what!”'