by Lisa Blower
‘I’m sorry, shug,’ she says, slowly. ‘But Johnny’s passed. Month back now. Selwyn was there.’
An image comes to mind of Selwyn in black waders and plaid shirt chucking handfuls of an old mucker into Trentham’s lake. I don’t remember a funeral. Or any sadness. I don’t even ask what he’s sold, or even where his day might have taken him, just tell him that the electricity bill needs paying and the council tax is due. The two women intently watch for my reaction.
‘Didn’t you know?’
I can see that this is upsetting Kay Cox. If she could clutch a Bible right now, she probably would, and read me a sermon on the afterlife. She opens and closes her mouth as if she wants to say something else but can’t think what it is. I murmur something about going to wait in the car and repeat the words to both women. Kay Cox mutters how sorry she is, but I can’t even thank her when I’m not sure if I should be sorry too.
The walk I take back across the car park happens without me feeling a single stride. I get back into the car. A wave of hunger comes over me and I turn to root among the empty sandwich cartons for a lone crust or a slice of damp cucumber, anything to wet my mouth and bring me back to life. That’s when I realise that the blanket-covered lump on the back seat has gone too.
In the wing mirror, I see Selwyn striding across the car park pushing a wheelbarrow full of boxes. At first, I look away, which is what I always do when wondering what he sees in me. Then I open the car door and rush towards him like a startled child. I’m already talking, because he didn’t leave me the keys, did he? and I needed to go to the toilet and I didn’t know how long he’d be, and he’d been more than twenty minutes, and there were these women in the foyer – because when did you have to pay to get into Trentham Gardens? – and they wouldn’t let me through and they knew you, like really knew you, and when I came back, the thing on the back seat you’d covered with blankets had gone. And if you’d just told me what we were doing here then I wouldn’t have got out of the car to go to the toilet and would have minded whatever it was on the back seat because now it’s gone, and that’s going to be my fault, isn’t it, when I’ve let so much slip and we’ve gone nowhere but just around the bloody corner? And he just stares at me as if there’s something peculiar-headed crawling up my arm. And this is my least favourite tactic of the salesman: letting me talk myself into admitting something that I haven’t done.
He says, ‘It was a pond filter.’
‘Then you should’ve told me it was a bloody pond filter.’
‘Which I sold to Johnny.’
The words startle me. ‘Selwyn,’ I say. ‘They told me about Johnny.’
But he’s taking the boxes out of the wheelbarrow and putting them into the boot of the car. I try and see if the boxes have labels. They don’t. I ask him what’s in them. He tells me provisions. I ask him again – ‘For what?’ He tells me to stop asking him questions. I’m not letting him think.
‘I don’t want to lose my temper, Ginny,’ he says. ‘Let me think.’
‘Then give me answers,’ I say, with my hands on my hips, because this always seem to work for Val. ‘Tell me properly what is going on.’
‘You know what’s going on,’ he retorts, and he rests his hands flat on a box. He has his eyes closed, which stops me from asking for all the other lies – it’s impossible to know how many other lies there might be, and if we are one too. He starts wringing his hands, as if they’ve gone numb, and when he opens his eyes again I see how scared he is. Selwyn is a frightened man.
‘I’m really sorry about your friend,’ I say, talking to the concrete underfoot. ‘But you didn’t have to lie about it.’
He takes a breath so deep it’s almost stubborn. Then he slams down the car boot and heads for the driver’s seat without glancing up.
‘You’re not listening to me, Selwyn.’
He thumps down his hand on the car roof and makes me jump.
‘Actually, Ginny, I’ve been listening and listening, and the thing about listening is that you expect to be listened to back.’
‘And I’ve been listening too,’ I tell him. ‘But there’s a big gap between what you tell me and what you don’t, so I’m not even sure how we’ve got here, or why you’ve just lied about Johnny.’
‘I’m hungry,’ he says.
‘You’re doing it again.’
He opens the car door. ‘Are you getting in?’ He looks at me as if he’s warning me. And it makes me remember how I used to watch him, down by the canal skimming stones. Did he know I was there watching, my legs hooked around a tree branch in ankle socks? Probably. Selwyn sees the world with a fish-eye lens. He would spin those stones right across the canal, count their bounces as they galloped into the hedge on the other side. His whole body would be rigid. He wouldn’t even move his head. And then my mother, happening to walk by, and attempting to hide herself behind a bush. ‘Oh, just looking for blackberries,’ she’d shout when he’d spotted her spectating. ‘Just stretching the old legs.’ And he was kind enough to never give me away up in the tree.
‘Good,’ he says, as I get into the car. ‘You had me worried then that I was doing this alone.’
We might have lived next door to each other, but we knew nothing about each other. We saw each other. On the street. Over the wall between our backyards. When he queued for a pound of middle-cut bacon and two pork chops. We knew that Selwyn’s mother had the night terrors – we could hear her bawling through the walls and wailing her gobbledygook. We knew that Selwyn went to work and then didn’t go to work. Then he seemed to be working again, and his mother’s howling quietened. We knew he was always doing something in the backyard. Out there on his hands and knees with his sleeves rolled up and dipping into tin buckets he’d have lined up against the wall. We asked him once, ‘What are you doing down there?’ He told us he was growing things, things that can slip through your fingers as they can just as easily pull you under. We wondered if he was a scientist. He told us no, just looking for something, and spent a long time fishing out the dead leaves.
One day, as I came home from school, he was sat waiting for me on the front step. He reached for my hand and said, ‘Here.’ Gave me a jam jar full of rose petals that looked melted. He said it was perfume. He gave me a sniff. As I bent down to do so, his fingers coiled in my hair. I let the moment happen and hoped my hair might leave papercuts across his knuckles.
‘I know you’re not her,’ he’d said to me. ‘But some days I think you are. How else would you be here?’
I gave him the perfume back and told him, ‘No, thanks.’
Whatever was in that jar smelt rancid. Like death.
The pub is called the Swan with Two Necks and I think about this – how two heads are better than one; how swans mate for life; how my pair of mothers would sit aside of one another creaming their necks before bed. Gondernecks, the pair of them. There was nothing they didn’t see.
Of course, Meg and the Bluebird weren’t the only women living together to make ends meet and meet again in those hope-thin walls of Joiners Square, but they were women whose small minds took them nowhere. Contented women. Abandoned women. Working women. Women too busy to go in for all that women’s stuff, as they called it, when actually, they were living it. Women who gossiped and fell out then spoke the next day as if nothing had been said. Women who got dressed in disappointment – but kept that quiet too – and never thought to lock their doors, in case someone needed a needle and thread. Women who muscled their way to the front of the queue, stuck it on the slate and worried about it later. Wise women. Knowing women. Women who put up and shut up and whipped up a cake with the cookie crumbles. Gruff women. Sick women. Women who needed no one but themselves. Meg and the Bluebird came together under a grey cloud in the middle of it all, kept the curtains shut, just in case. Children can be the cruellest of creatures, I came to find, but it was other women who became their downfall. Men would simply turn a blind eye.
I know nothing of my father – call him
John for all I care – as I was once told that I was given to Meg, a child for a child so both could grow up. She would say nothing about it other than the world could be a sewer, so I never looked for him and he never looked for me, though, as the Bluebird once pointed out, there was never anything to be found.
If I ever talk about my mothers – which is not a lot, when there’s not much to tell – Selwyn makes any number of curmudgeonly statements to stop me. It is the only time he does not treat me with kid gloves. Your mother was a butcher who gatecrashed funerals sniffing for heirlooms, he will say. She carried a knife like a handbag. She stuck pictures to the wall with chewing gum. She frightened my mother to death.
This did not, however, stop him from counting my hiccups through the wall. He tells me he would lie there listening for me at night and only slept when my hiccups stopped. I tell him that that was probably around the time when I’d discovered that eating toothpaste calmed the indigestion I suffered, because of all the meat I was served.
Don’t you remember the way Meg used to look at you? I’ll ask him. She’d sparkle up like a Christmas tree!
But no. He doesn’t remember that.
The thing about salesmen, I’ve come to conclude, is that they start everything, finish nothing, and spin much in between. Meg used to say that it was all in the sinew and that his was twisted with pain. You can see it in his eyes, she would say. They’re looking but can’t see what they’re looking for.
He saw me in what he called a ‘thunderclap moment’, and could not take his eyes off me. Said, if he didn’t know any better, he’d have thought me a witch. His mother would not even let me in the house. Or she’d stop me in the street to ask me why I’d come to haunt her and reach out with long arthritic fingers to stroke my hair.
‘I have told you everything I know,’ Selwyn says, snapping me out of my thoughts as we carry our drinks through the pub. And no. He does not want the table by the window. Here, slap-bang in the middle of it all, is fine, and he sets about reorganising his cutlery for the left-handed diner.
I remind him that what he knows and what he tells me aren’t the same thing, and is there a particular reason why he wants us to be so conspicuous in the dead-centre of the room? He takes some tablets from his jacket pocket and swills two down with his pint.
‘What are they for?’ I ask.
‘Indigestion.’ He wipes his mouth on a red paper napkin that stains his lips.
I look around the pub. It’s one of those brewery-owned places with gigantic menus, mock-Tudor beams against walls the colour of banana skins, and hundreds of TVs on different channels. Selwyn spends a long time behind his menu, as if it’s the most complicated set of words he’s ever seen, until we realise that we must order at the bar.
The vase of wine they give me is the same price as a T-bone steak, and it gives me the courage to start asking questions again.
‘Because you were partners, right? You and Louis. Reinvesting your thirty thousand meant a fifty/fifty partnership. Share, or nothing?’
‘Not quite,’ Selwyn corrects me. ‘Don’t forget, he owned the land.’
I screw up my face. ‘You told me that you’d been made a partner, that was the point of reinvesting.’
He does a sort-of shrug at me and picks up a toothpick to gnaw on between nibbling his nails. ‘It’s never been about titles, Ginny,’ he says.
I take another glug of wine. ‘Then tell me this, why does one investor have total access to all the money to play on the fruit machines without the other one knowing?’
‘It was a hedge fund.’
I don’t know what that means. I ask him if he knows what that means. He just says that it was supposed to treble in value and didn’t.
‘And Louis put all the money in there? Your pension. His pension. Your thirty grand?’
Selwyn looks grizzled and starts to flag down a waitress to order a second pint. I remind him that he’s driving.
He says, ‘I’ve told you what I know. And yes, for the last time, please, my pension, his pension, my thirty grand and whatever the business was worth. All gone.’
He stops to beam up at the young waitress as he asks for another pint of Old Peculier. I place my hands on the table and wait for him to finish. But he says nothing and avoids my eyes.
So, I remind him about the land. ‘Because he didn’t invest the land, did he, Selwyn? The yard? “Why don’t you sell it and move everything online?” I’d said. The price Bovis were offering for the place so they could extend the housing estate, Louis could’ve wound things up, retired you with your lump sum and your pension, and you’d both be bobbing about happy. But no. “It’s not how we do things,” you said. “That land was left to Louis by his father. I’ve no claim on that,” you said. He has you so tightly wrapped around his little finger it’s mercenary.’
‘Which is why I took the caravan!’ he interrupts. ‘You can’t stop water flowing, Ginny. But you can direct it into a pond and dam it.’
I slap my hands down on the table. Riddling is my least favourite tactic of the salesman, and we’re going around in circles as it is. It makes me wonder how much Selwyn has sold me when–
‘Yes, I’m the gammon,’ I smile up at the waitress, though I can tell right away that it’s overdone. Meg would be having kittens. Gammon is a boiling meat, she would say. Then you baste it in its juices and roast. The smell of a roasting bacon is what gets hostages talking. Selwyn has ordered the T-bone steak – the most expensive dish on the menu, but not always the best cut.
‘And it’s tough,’ he says, pulling a ligament from his lips.
‘It’s probably too young,’ I offer. ‘The older the cow, the better she will taste.’
He carries on tucking in. I look around the pub to reassure myself that Louis is not here; there’s some uncomfortable laughter and I wonder if that’s him. It was his laugh that I couldn’t stand. Brash and high-pitched, like women cackling under hairdryers; it made people stare and he liked that. He liked people to look at him. When he knew people were looking, he turned up the jokes until he had everyone in the palm of his hand, cracking up. Oh, Louis, they’d say, you’re wasted. Priceless. You should be on the stage. I grant that he has wasted a fair proportion of his life performing, to the point that he no longer knew who he really was.
I pick up a strand of grated carrot and chew on it like cud, shift my gammon about with my fork to make a perfect right angle.
‘Do we fit together?’ I ask.
‘What does that mean?’ he spits more gristle into the red napkin.
‘Like fit together. Like Alan and Val fit together. Like Meg and the Bluebird came together.’ I twist my foot under the table and hear it click. ‘I sometimes don’t know if we’re trying to be this thing that’s just in your mind.’
He lets his cutlery clatter on to his plate. ‘This thing?’ he repeats.
‘You say all these things to me, how you’ve waited, how there’s been no one else. But there was. There was always Louis, and even now we’re here because of Louis.’ I pause. He’s looking for my hand across the table and I hide it on my lap. ‘What do you see in him?’ I snap. ‘What do you see that I can’t?’
He wipes around his mouth with his hand and then does the same thing with a napkin. I watch his face. Wait for the confession. Brotherly love, maybe? A snatched kiss once? Two men who grew up without fathers, manning each other up into one another’s heroes?
‘Something binds you to him,’ I carry on. ‘It’s unnatural.’
Selwyn looks startled by this. ‘You really don’t like him?’
‘Are you serious? He’s cheated you out of your life’s earnings, yet you still treat him like you owe him your life.’
‘He has saved my life more times than I deserve,’ he says stoically.
‘Don’t paper over this. He is a liar and he is a thief.’
‘And what’s that out there?’ he raises his voice at me and swings his arm to point out of the window towards the caravan in the
car park. ‘Tell me, Ginny. What is it?’
‘I don’t know what it is,’ I fire back. ‘I don’t even know what you’re doing with it, or where you think we’re even going to go in it. All I know is that it is not your pension or your thirty-thousand-pound stake in the business.’ When I stop, I see that he’s looking straight into my eyes. ‘What?’ I ask.
‘Your eyes,’ he says slowly. ‘They never look like they belong to you.’
I cover my face with my hands and snort. ‘I’ll tell you what I see, Selwyn,’ I say between my fingers. ‘Because when people like Val and Alan look in the mirror, they see each other. But when you and I look in the mirror, you see me and I see…’ I stop. I dig my front teeth into my bottom lip. ‘What I’ve always seen.’
I wait for him to ask me what? But he doesn’t. He slices into his T-bone steak instead and, as I watch him chew, I realise that I have eaten with this man for the past ten months but have never known how he really chews his food.
‘You’re grinding your teeth,’ says the Bluebird to Meg. ‘You’re eating like a pig in a trough. Take your time.’
Meg looks at me. I look down at my plate, but I don’t remember what we’re eating, just that it’s meat. It’s always meat.
I’ve just turned sweet sixteen. There is something stuck in my teeth and I’m taken to the dentist. He removes a piece of meat and removes the tooth too. The anaesthetic I’m given makes me dream of the sea – a sea that’s a hundred miles away when we’re slap bang in the middle of things in a place too north for the Midlands and too south for the north – and I’m using fried doughnuts for armbands. When I open my eyes, I hear my mother asking the dentist if he’s legal. She is a butcher, and never in her life has she witnessed such butchery on the gum of a child. And though I’m woozy on the anaesthetic, she marches me out into daylight, shoving cloves into my cheeks, vowing revenge.