Seahorses Are Real (30 page)

He lay quite still in red-coloured water, his eyes tight closed.

‘David?' she uttered, pale and perplexed, half hidden by the door. ‘My love?'

No smile. No laugh. No reply.

At times of great physical or mental agony, the mind detaches from the body apparently. The body carries on and the mind goes off on holiday or follows a few steps behind like a dozy sidekick or little old familiar. And so it was with Marly: her legs hastened her over to David, her fingertips felt the temperature of the water, his pulse, opened the little window, unplugged the bath, bandaged up the gash that went from elbow to wrist in pure white liniment. Her arms threw towels around his cold wet dripping body, pulled him roughly and breathlessly over into what she thought was the recovery position. Her voice calmly and efficiently summoned an ambulance to 120 East Hill.... Her heart bonged and pranged on xylophone ribs...

And all the while her body did these things her mind kept up a little chatter of its own, a flare of hope:

No doubt some practical joke ho ho... putting ketchup in the bath... ketchup on his arms and legs, ketchup on his face and toes. He just couldn't live without ketchup. What what! What a lot of ketchup the gods must need for their daily bread…. He'll be back in the early hours, crawling drawling brawling his way back home, if I sit quite still and quiet as a mouse. He'll turn up again like a little bad old penny ho ho.

Her body darted about the flat, this way and that, searching for clues: a note, a sign, perhaps a goodbye… and her hands fluttered in front of her, uselessly waving the air like flowers or frantically sponging the blood from the walls, the knife, a marbled eyelid, the tip of his nose...

Oh Rudolph the red-nosed reindeer

Had a very shiny nose

And if you ever saw him

You would even say it glows.

All of the other reindeer

Used to laugh and call him names

They wouldn't let poor Rudolph

Join in any reindeer games.

Then one foggy Christmas Eve

Santa came to say

‘Rudolph with your nose so bright

Won't you guide my sleigh tonight?'

Then all the reindeer loved him

And they shouted out with glee

‘Rudolph the red-nosed reindeer

You'll go down in history.

You'll go down in his sto ry.'

When everything was spruce and neat and clean she stopped and waited. She waited as the great golden bauble spun behind a cloud and the rain began. In films the ambulance always comes in a jiffy but in real life it takes an eternity. She sat beside the bath and gripped his hand, her breath breathing warm life over him; and it seemed to her that her own life had come full circle and she was back at the beginning of some endless, hopeless journey; that some unlawful throw of the dice had sent her sliding to the bottom of the snake again. The rain pattered down on the roof like little footsteps or shouts of protest, soft insistent protests; and she was glad because he loved the rain – with or without an umbrella – it reminded him of the hills and valleys of Wales. She sat and held his hand in the darkening room and waited for the ambulance. She sat quite still and quiet as a mouse, a whisper, a feather, a listening snowflake. She wished the ambulance would hurry up so that it could all be over and she might go to sleep again and wake up in a dream. Marly felt quite sure at that moment that for the rest of her life there would only be dreams.

Dearest David

I'm glad we had that argument and glad you made me see how close I came to losing you. I don't
want to lose you. I've dealt so long with the evil in my head (and I don't think evil's too strong a word) that when you came along I put it onto you and into the world and wondered why it came back. I treated you like shit and then wondered why you started be­having like shit. And then, when you started behaving like shit I felt justified in treating you like shit... and, feeling guilty when you hurt yourself, I hated you more and treated you worse.

But I always loved you. I think I loved you from the first moment I saw you in your Tony Hancock t-shirt with your wide shy tender smile, your funny jokes and the letter you sent me so full of the things I wanted to be told. You, the math­emat­ician, so good at letter writing. You, the mathematician, so imaginative. How far I thought I was above you when we first met and how soon I came to see that I didn't even come up to your knees. How real you are and alive, my rock, my velveteen rabbit! And how I love you for that! You have no need of a Terry to guide you, as I do, seeing your way so clearly (all those carrots you had as a child!), surefooted as a cat through the quagmires that bog me down.

And how you've helped me. Never think for a moment you didn't help me. If it weren't for you I shouldn't still be here. You, with your patience, your understanding, your simple uncomplicated love; your humour that kept me from fits of distraction, your incredible, ingenious responses to my illness (your fairies, feathers and Quality Street spell, your ‘gorgeous gorgeous gorgeous' refrain); not to mention your generosity for, as you rightly say, I have no financial capability – I sucked you dry, like a spider on a dark cloud, reeling you in, wrapping you up, leaving you bloodless. Weaving my silken lies (for, as you say, my whole life is built on a fabrication) to gain sympathy, love, respect... playing the victim when I was really the monster. And you, seeing through the sham, hypocrisy, dishonesty and pretension – what astonishing luck for me – you still loved me. I can't quite believe you loved me, for all that.

Yet how I took you for granted – believing it some natural right that you should love me, help me. Making your love uncon­ditional yet mine so conditional. Making our relationship an unequal equation. You bore the brunt of it, taking it all in for my sake. I poured the crap out, believing myself to be sharing not destroying. Over­whelmed by my own misery, I never saw yours. (Please forgive me for that. I shall spend the rest of my life trying to make it up to you.) You faced my reality – how selflessly – never burdening me with your own. I live my life, you might say, on too many points of an Argand diagram while you, my love, are that famously fabulous Fibonacci flower, as Turing might have said. (Well he might have done!)

Terry says we see the rainbow for a while and then it's gone. I must try to keep it in my mind's eye. Will you help me? I know I've made you ill but I can make you well again. We can both be well. We can both regenerate, can't we, like the flowers? Maybe we can see the end of the rainbow together, you and I, if you like. Please let's try.

I love you always,

Marly

About the Author

Zillah Bethell lives in Wales with two children, two cats, one husband and an old piano.

Acknowledgements

With thanks to Penny Thomas for her support,
encourage­ment, and editing precision; DSB for his verbal inventiveness and Grade 8! and SPMB for her unfailing good humour.

Seren is the book imprint of

Poetry Wales Press Ltd

57 Nolton Street, Bridgend, Wales,
CF31 3AE

www.seren-books.com

© Zillah Bethell 2009

ISBN: 978-1-78172-120-9

The right of Zillah Bethell to be identified as the author of this

work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.

A CIP record for this title is available from the British Library.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted at any time or by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the prior permission of the copyright holder.

This book is a work of fiction. The characters and incidents portrayed are the work of the author's imagination. Any other resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Cover image: ‘Winnie' by Rosie Irvine www.rosieirvine.com

Extract from
The Little White Horse
by Elizabeth Goudge,

published by Lion Hudson, reprinted with kind permission.

The publisher works with the financial assistance of The Welsh Books Council.