Seahorses Are Real (3 page)

‘You scoffed all the custard creams,' she reminded him delightedly. ‘Remember that china dog on the mantelpiece you said looked like it had worms!'

‘Well, it was the position of its legs,' David explained for the umpteenth time, knowing how much it amused her. ‘It was uncannily like our old dog Rosie when she slid her bottom….'

‘Yes yes, thank you very much. I think we've heard quite enough about that. Mind you,' Marly's eyes glimmered, ‘I had a worm remember, when I was little.... It kept sliding back up my…'

David leapt up and ran out of the room, pretending to be horrified at the story.

Marly giggled and he came back in. They sat together in happy silence, holding hands beneath the red sleeping bag and watching television. ‘At least he's passionate about it,' Marly said after a while, meaning the man in shorts and a Panama hat. ‘I bet you wouldn't mind a few students like that.'

‘Well, I don't know,' David grimaced. ‘It's not normal to be keen at their age. I think I prefer Ross Newman's belching. Honestly, that's all he does: leans back on his chair with his can of coke and belches!'

‘He doesn't!'

David perched himself on the edge of the sofa with a dopey expression on his face. ‘“Do we need our books today sir?” Every bleeding lesson he says it. “Do we need our books today sir? Do we need our books on Friday sir?” I said: “Bring 'em anyway, it'll keep you fit!'''

Marly rested her head on his shoulder and listened to his anecdotes, knowing he was making an effort and grateful, too, for every last detail of Ross Newman's belching, of Anton the French teacher who always said ‘
Bonjour Class'
and whose students ran amok and sent messages to each other on their mobile phones, because these were things that connected her back to a world she was drifting away from further and further each day, swinging out into orbit; and only David's arms, she sometimes felt, (he being the only one she trusted) could clutch her back.

They read their books after that, drifting off into other worlds yet side by side beneath the red sleeping bag, shoulder to shoulder, thigh to thigh, heartbeat almost to heartbeat, nodding off now and then like an old married couple or stopping just to peek at where the other was at. This was Marly's refuge, her retreat from a world that lay beyond the confines of their cramped little rundown flat, where the rats played and the green mould grew. She sat reading books amidst the refuse of her life, books she'd read as a child over and over, dear and familiar like a pair of old shoes, the woman who lived in a shoe. Trying to regain a part of herself she'd lost, a part that had burnt out, died. Striving to resurrect herself, ghostly, in those ridiculous too-tight shoes. Whittling time away to bone washed up on ancient beaches, to daylight dimmed in the eye of an ant. There was no need for any other, no world to let in here. If I could shoot the world to bits, she sometimes thought, we might just make it.

She wrote that night in her gratitude diary:

She always wrote ‘I am alive' for number five, not because she was always grateful for being alive, but because she thought that if she didn't, something worse might happen.

Three

She had one of her nightmares that night. It started off pleasantly enough – they always did – with her and David skimming stones from the pebbly bank of a swollen river, the softly slanting rain dribbling down their noses and between their toes. The river was brown and swirling bric-a-brac, dead wood and submarinating trolleys; and on the sandy bank opposite was a little forked set of bird-prints, like arrows. (When you saw only one set of prints, came a voice in her head, that was when I carried you.) ‘Here's a good flat one,' said David. ‘Try that.' And she flung the stone bouncing – once, twice, thrice – across to the sandy shore, like an India rubber or little superball. ‘What must we be to the fish,' she decided, all knowing and omnipotent, ‘in their watery mirror but glowing ghosts or wide-awake trees'; and she spread her arms wide in an arc to encompass the small green field by the pebbly bank and said to David with great serenity or was it solemnity: ‘I shall grow vegetables here. It will be like a garden of Paradise. There will be birds and flowers and all beautiful things. All bright and beautiful things.'

‘You're a bright and beautiful thing,' he replied, holding her, before turning into a small flat stone in her hands which she flung bouncing – once, twice, thrice – across to the sandy shore, like an India rubber or little superball.

And then she turned, herself, into a short fat farmer from Idaho and said to herself (for she was both the short fat farmer as well as the painted lady hovering in front of his nose in search of cabbages): ‘you'll grow no watermelons here no more. I used to grow 30lb Jack in the Beanstalk watermelons afore the river changed its malignant course.'

And she saw, with her own eyes, that the top of the precious field, where she was to grow all the bright and beautiful things, had been nibbled away by the hungry river, great clods and chunks of earth – still growing grass and golden buttercups – sitting halfway down the animal's throat; and the beach where they'd skimmed stones was really the great naked pebbly belly revealed as the beast swerved out again. ‘How disgusting,' she said as the sweet-toothed Ivy sped down with the current on a little dead wood tree, her arms flailing. ‘You, you,' she pointed and screamed. ‘Left mammary. Your fault.' And her father's purple fingers curled up through the dead wood branches, like some maleficent river god making a grab at its pretty queen.

She screamed in her sleep and woke up sweating and clinging on to the last few shreds of the dream. How ridiculous to feel such agony in such a thing as a dream. How ridiculous the mind can be, she thought, and lay trembling and watching the headlights of cars as they passed like illuminating beacons across the curtains. ‘I hope it is cancer,' she remembered herself saying so many years ago in a similar room, enraged little fists pumping the pillow of a toy bed by a toy chair, toy bookcase, toy Tobermory lamp. How she wished she could get up now, touch every last poster – Duran Duran, Blondie, Adam Ant, Spandau Ballet – and make it alright again. That magical sequence of cause and effect and that perfect little ego at the core of it. Believing, in those days, that touching posters, watching magpies and stepping on lines could alter an iota, a destiny; a life even. Stranger still to think that these things lingered in the adult mind, mushroomed, even though no longer believed in; the ego so battered by cause and effect that it clung on to the slightest, littlest, remotest hope that it still had control of cause and effect through the arbitrariness of magpies, posters and stepping on lines – though Ivy, of course, had died. No amount of stuffing cushions into covers could keep her soul in place. Bleak news, I'm afraid, the doctor had said. (They were always afraid.) She's got five years at most. What a lot of rot they talked! She'd gone on for ages after that – the everlasting Ivy, the sweet-toothed Ivy, the one-breasted Ivy. Stuffing marshmallows into her neck until they oozed out of her globulous eyelids. Biting into her marshmallow arms, even her marshmallow legs. Delusional, hallucinatory; sinking slowly in fits and starts – a death of agonising slowness bit by bit – into that banquet of bluebells. Better to go, Marly decided, touching posters in her head, in one fell swoop; and the cells proliferated like the fungi in the bathroom, the rats in the kitchen, giving each other a leg up. UB40. What am I gonna do? Sign on. See Terry. What am the fuck I gonna do?

She woke David up then, before her thoughts spun too far out; and told him about the dream, exaggerating details here and there to justify having woken him.

‘Typical!' he muttered, smiling sleepily, the tip of his aquiline nose (how like her mother's) and the whites of his eyes just visible in the strangely illuminating darkness. ‘That's all I am to you, a stone, to be flung across a river.'

‘Don't be stupid,' she replied crossly, sitting up. ‘It was horrible.'

He kissed the top of her head to show that he under­stood and said: ‘I had a strange dream too. Rasputin was after me – I was running like a maniac round the launderette – and then I had this brilliant idea of hiding in his havers…'

‘Let's just go,' she interrupted, suddenly clutching his arm. ‘Anywhere. Away from here.'

‘Anywhere,' he agreed with a mock shudder, ‘to get away from that nutter. Honestly, he was shouting…'

‘No, really. We could, you know. Somewhere by the sea. I'd be well, I think, by the sea. I could work again; you could find a job.'

‘What, like Bonnie and Clyde,' he suggested with a touch of sarcasm. ‘Start robbing banks?'

Marly sighed and felt herself detaching from the man at her side, the man who loved her, cared for her, did almost everything for her, except go along with her dreams; and her mind dropped (as it too often did) like an injured animal, into its cold, dark, lonely lair while the rest of her carried on with the daylight. ‘It doesn't matter,' she said impassively. ‘You've got no soul anyway.'

‘And you've got no head,' he responded lightly, kissing the top of it again before adding in a softer tone: ‘I love you, you know, Marly stole some barley Smart! I think you're magnificent.'

She lay without responding in the comforting warmth of his arms, listening to his words in the soft cocoon of his weaving, snug as a bug in a small green rug; and her mind crept bit by bit, almost reluctantly at first, out of its cold, dark, lonely place until all at once she was there back with him, her wounds wide open for him. ‘I can't take any more. I can't… really can't… take any more,' she sobbed.

‘I know, my love, I know.'

‘It's like I'm on this road,' she babbled, ‘and I can't turn back. I'm trapped, cornered at the end of it. That's what it feels like now, that I've come to the end of the road – I really have. I can't see any future,' her voice trailed off, ‘any future at all….'

‘Yes you can,' almost sternly. ‘You're in a tunnel at the moment, that's all – it's a blip. It doesn't mean,' he added in what Marly called his wise old Gandalf voice, ‘it isn't daylight outside.'

‘Maybe not; but I can't see it. That's the business of the tunnel, not believing there's anything else, however many times you've been through it. People say get help, but you can't, you're a vegetable, you can't even pick up the phone – you've seen me. And even if,' she went on, drilling it in to him, ‘I did believe I could get through it, even if I did believe that, I still know I'll be back here again and again and again like some sort of stuck record, some sort of sick joke. That in itself,' she added wearily, ‘is enough to kill me off, the fact that I'll be here again, that it will go on like this forever.'

It kills me too, David said to himself, clinging on to her as if he might hold her up with his own arms, seeing you like this, dying away a little more each day, no matter what I do. But aloud he said: ‘You don't know that,' lightly, gently, because he knew she knew or at least thought she did; but he wanted to hold out a little piece of hope for her to latch on to if she would; and surprisingly, tentatively at first, hands out and palms towards the ceiling in an almost prayer-like gesture, she did.

‘We-ell. I suppose I might be alright, one day. It's not impossible.'

‘Course you will,' he leapt in, sensing his advantage. ‘You'll be fine, one day, see if I'm not right.'

‘I'll always get depressed though.'

‘Ye-es, you'll always have that tendency, but you'll deal with it better, that's the thing. It won't happen so often and you'll have better coping mechanisms.'

‘Maybe I'll have children,' she cried then, almost wildly, hands clutching the sheet. ‘Live by the sea?'

He kissed her warmly. ‘Course we will. Think of some names,' he added, knowing how much she liked thinking of names.

‘John,' without hesitating. ‘John's a good, strong, masculine name.'

‘I'm rather keen on Neville myself. Neville's got a good sort of ring to it.'

‘Neville!' she spluttered.

‘And Petunia. Petunia's a good name…' but he had lost her again to the stillness – that strange stillness that came over her when she was leaving him – and the faraway look in her eyes. ‘Petunia,' he repeated, nudging her.

She gave a bitter little laugh. ‘Who am I trying to kid? I can't even look in the mirror.' And she added, as if suddenly remembering, though he knew she'd simply been resisting the temptation to ask: ‘How's my cheek?' and thrust her face, tongue stuck out to see if it hurt, towards him.

‘It's fine,' he assured her. ‘Perfectly fine.'

‘You can't see in this dark,' she reproached him; and he thought for one horrible moment she was going to take him round to the landing light where he stood, often for minutes on end, squinting, staring, straining his eyes to see some imaginary or minuscule growth or blemish that had suddenly come up on the side of her cheek. (Was it like that yesterday? Is it worse than that thing I had in Birmingham? Will it go?) ‘I've got magic eyes remember,' he smiled.