by Lisa Blower
I introduce myself again. ‘My name is Imogen and it’s lovely to meet you.’
She turns to look at me, to tell me her name is Maisie, and as she turns, and so slowly with such effort, I see that inside all that brown draping she wears – and it really does make her look like a medicine bottle – is an old, old woman, peeping around the corner of the next life, if some part of her hadn’t crossed over already. Brittle. Delicate. I could snap her in half.
She turns back towards the stove – a sheet of hair as white as a snowdrift cloaks her back – and how she lifts that kettle off the enormous butcher’s hook to put down on the stove begs belief. I move forward to offer to help, but she looks at me alarmed. ‘I don’t need,’ she begins. I back away. This is a woman so private, so withdrawn from everything she once knew, that talking has become too strenuous to even finish sentences.
She heads for the bucket and roots about, brings out a cup and a saucer, which she takes to another bucket and dunks them both in. It’s like watching an ant carry about a tarantula.
‘You know, I’m not really a tea drinker at night,’ I say, because there are flies flying out of the bucket. Dirty creatures – Meg didn’t so much swat flies as punch them dead mid-flight. ‘And I really have no idea why we should be putting you to all this inconvenience, and so late, too.’
She stares at me as if I’ve insulted her. They are eccentrics, I think. Recluses. However does Selwyn even know these people? And where the hell did he go? The wind picks up and rattles the window – it reminds me of the whistling classrooms we sat in at school and the lines I got given for wearing skirts as short as dishcloths. I am not yet a woman. I am not a woman yet. Then going home to admire the beauty of my backside in a baking tray. Meg did not believe in mirrors.
‘We must sit,’ Maisie suddenly says, in such a shadowy voice I’m convinced that this is not just the end but the absolute of ends and that this woman has been sent to fetch me. I wonder if we’ve crashed the car, or if I’m still in the pond back in Hodnet Hall Gardens and have actually begun to drown. And I’m royally pissed off that Meg could not find it in her heart to come and get me herself.
‘I am going to sit,’ she says again, and smiles a little smile.
She has me follow her out of the kitchen and down a stone-floored corridor lit only by the kitchen lights behind us, and opens a door into what must be their sitting room. A cluttered place of bare concrete walls where stacks of old newspapers make tables. Upon them, stuff – a paperweight, a candle in a jam jar, what might be a vase or a pot for pens; the things we find by accident but keep all the same. Above me, a rusting brass chandelier hanging so low it could scalp you, with two missing bulbs out of five. Wires sprout from plug sockets, the painting of the ceiling is unfinished. This place is a hovel. War-torn. The loneliest place on earth. She takes to a battered armchair and perches on it like a bird. She has forgotten about the tea she was making because she suddenly asks, ‘Was I making tea?’ and says that she didn’t know about me else she would’ve made up the spare room.
‘Please don’t worry about the tea. You really don’t need to go to any trouble on my account,’ and I wonder if they’re religious. Those that give up their possessions so they’ve nothing left to lose.
‘We have not seen Selwyn in so long,’ she says. ‘Hugh thought we never would again.’ And that little smile again, like a fingernail of moon: she seems to drift in and out from one world to the next.
‘Who is Hugh?’
Her reply is that they’ve gone to the pond.
‘They’ve gone fishing? Now?’
She says, ‘Do you know where you are? Why he has come?’
I shake my head. ‘We’re on our way to Wales,’ I tell her. ‘Feels like we’ve been driving for days.’
‘You don’t know where you are, do you?’ she says again. This time, she gets up, holds out her hand and gestures for me to follow. She takes me to another room across the corridor and disappears into its darkness. Reappears when she’s illuminated herself by the lights of a massive cabinet tank that fills so much of the room you could quite believe you were in it yourself and the fish were looking at you.
‘Jesus Christ!’ I yelp. ‘Is that legal?’ I clutch at my chest as my heart beats anti-clockwise.
‘Six hundred and fourteen fish,’ she murmurs, tapping at the glass with the rings on her fingers that slip up and down. ‘I like to watch them spawn, mostly. I’d show you, but I had to kill the last one Hugh impregnated. He experiments, you see, and I don’t agree. The gold was always in carp.’
‘I see.’ I don’t know what else to say. She makes me feel like I’ve lived my life with my eyes closed. I have never seen fish like it. Some of them are the size of small shoes. And their colours are luminous, glow-in-the-dark, like highlighter pens, fins like rosettes, and some look as if they wear beaks. They swim in an underwater woodland that ruffles and bubbles, and all across the pebbles at the bottom of the tank, fairy-tale castles, troll bridges, and mermaids.
‘Do you know about fish?’ she asks.
‘No.’ I watch the tank like a television screen.
She looks disappointed. ‘I’m not even sure where to put you when I’ve had no notice,’ she says, looking around the room as if she’s lost something. ‘I suppose I could get you a blanket and you could sleep in the chair.’
‘I’m fine in the caravan,’ I tell her. ‘Though we’ve not actually slept in it yet.’ I give a small laugh that echoes and bounces off the walls. ‘We came with a caravan and sleep everywhere but. Do you think I should wait for Selwyn to come back?’
‘You won’t see them till morning,’ she sniffs, tapping at the tank. ‘But I’m afraid that it’s just been far too long.’
She turns to look at me and it’s as if I’ve just told her that summer’s a wash-out and we might even get snow in July.
‘Imogen,’ she cocks her head to one side and seems pleased to have remembered my name. ‘Yes. I can see what Sarah saw.’
‘Sarah?’ A jolt of ice shoots down my spine. ‘But you said you didn’t know about me.’
She stretches out her fingers on her right hand to shuffle her rings back into place. Then straightens the lid of the tank and pats it. ‘She’d rattle them up, those boys,’ she starts to tell me. ‘Always wanted things to happen quicker than they did.’
I look around the rest of the room. It’s clean. Lived-in. White plastered walls. Like something has been covered up. Painted over. No curtains mind, but rugs, thin and musty and filled with old-fashioned patterns – she has them spread across the quarry tiles like stepping stones – and what looks like a large pouffe cinched in a dirty pink velour with lilac buttons. This room is looked after. It feels like a shrine. And it’s all done to please those six hundred and fourteen fish.
I start to feel uneasy.
‘You know what?’ I say. ‘I’ll sleep in the caravan. I’m absolutely fine in the caravan. And it’s really late.’
I make to leave the room, but she stops me. Her hand reaches for my arm and those gold rings have tiny diamonds set inside them; little riches she wants to keep secret.
‘He still looks, doesn’t he?’ she says, that childlike voice verging on sinister. ‘Even after all this time. He can’t help but look.’
I tell her very quietly that I’m not sure what he’s looking for.
She turns over my right hand so that she may rest her fingers on the flat of my palm. I start to bend my knees because I’m towering over her, like I could crush her; she is no taller than where my heart beats.
‘I used to be able to do this,’ she tells me, tracing her forefinger along my palm. ‘Not any more. Even knowing what will come cannot stop it.’ She curls my fingers over my palm, then cups my fist with her own hands. ‘No soldier ever forgets,’ she says. ‘But we learn too late that what we battle in ourselves is only because of what we think we have done.’ She releases my hand and leaves it stone cold. Wanders back towards the fish tank and taps against the
glass again. ‘Watch,’ she mutters, as two fish change direction to swim towards her fingertips on the other side of the tank. ‘This one is curious. This one is acting upon a memory it has no recollection of.’ She keeps on tapping. ‘Does it really matter? It’s just something else happening. That is all. And then they will forget about it.’
I don’t know how long I stand there in the corner of the room, so very still, like I’m frozen in ice. I’m entranced by her fingers stroking the side of the tank. Never have I seen someone so comfortable in their skin that they feel absolutely no need to explain themselves. She has the measure of me without even looking at me.
‘You’re sulking,’ she murmurs at the tank. ‘Because it’s just as you remember and you thought people change.’
I haven’t the heart or the energy to argue with her. Besides, she is right. I have been sulking. And playing dead.
I watch her say goodnight to every single one of those fish, as if they are children. I count those goodnights until I lose count. I wait for her to say goodnight to me. But she has forgotten I am there.
And on the Seventh Day…
God finished His work that He had done, and He rested.
‘Nymphs are not normally active creatures unless alarmed. In general, they remain quietly among water plants waiting for their prey.’
~ The Great Necessity of Ponds
by Selwyn Robby
I AM NOT PART of all of Selwyn’s past, and he is not part of mine. We did not have anything to salvage, reclaim, or return to. No life lived together, or a love enjoyed. So much he should know. So much I should say. It has never occurred to me to think the same of him.
Selwyn knocks on the passenger window to wake me. Despite the grin, the fresh set of clothes, the comb to his hair, he looks like he hasn’t slept a wink, and I’m loathe to open the car door because I can’t be held responsible for either my use of words or the swing of my feet towards his shins. ‘Where the hell have you been?’ I yell. ‘You left me. Again.’
‘I thought you’d sleep in the house,’ he says, gesturing behind him. ‘Why would you not sleep in the house?’ I let my eyes adjust to the blush of daylight and see all that I didn’t see last night.
‘Oh, my God. It’s a bloody mansion,’ I say.
And it is.
It’s been someone’s stately home. Far less stately than it used to be, but rustic and ruddy with lattice windows and acorn-brown stone draped in a laburnum yet to flower. There are four bedroom windows, all in a row, and pillars outside the front door. It is majestic. It is wild. It’s housed civilised life and perhaps some gentry, but now it is full of woe. When I look up at the roof, it has dipped, like something heavy has landed upon it, and two of the chimneys have crumbled apart.
‘I said I would sleep in the car,’ I mutter at Selwyn who’s watching me gape at the place. ‘She didn’t seem too pleased—’ and I stop. Maisie with Hugh, out of the corner of my eye, and I see them coming into focus as a single shape. She, as she was last night, still in that brown drapery and all that hair that almost reaches her waist. But he is the crippled one, bent so far over that he can barely raise his neck. He holds on to her so tightly, the rhythms of their bodies fuse. I find myself checking that their shoelaces aren’t tied together. And then my throat tightens. This is us, I think, with a brief glance towards Selwyn who is offering his arms to both of them. This is the future us, and right before we must part for good.
‘Good morning, everybody,’ I say cheerily. ‘How were the fish?’
But nobody speaks. Maisie and Hugh look away. Everyone is sobbing. Selwyn tells me to get back in the car.
‘ARE WE GOING TO talk about it?’
Selwyn is yet to speak to me. He’s making me feel like we are irretrievable.
‘I don’t know what I’ve done, Selwyn. Why won’t you speak to me?’
He is putting his foot down to move us into the fast lane of this dual carriageway, and more than he needs to, and I feel the caravan behind us start to sway. It is weighing us down, I think, that caravan, swaying left to right behind us. It is a dead weight carting about memories neither of us want to keep or even make.
‘Selwyn, pull over, please. I don’t know what’s going on.’
He changes down in gear as the caravan struggles against a small incline.
‘Please, Selwyn. I don’t want to go any further. Not like this.’
He slows down – starts to indicate, pulls over into a lay-by and sighs. He won’t look at me. He just murmurs, ‘Why do we leave things too late, Ginny? What is it that we keep on waiting for?’
I think about what to say and how to say it, but mainly of all the things I want to say that I shouldn’t say. I think of him and me and what we are, and look down at my hands expecting to see sores from where we hold on to ourselves; wounds that will not heal. I think of the past ten months and how the word ‘reunited’ belongs on a grave. Me and you, we have a story, Selwyn always says, yet this is his story and not mine. I’m just his passenger. The anonymous one who got in the car.
I look out of the window and have no idea for where we are, or why we’re here, and if I want to go any further. I feel as far away as I can possibly be and yet closer to what I can’t quite put my finger on. I look at him. At Selwyn. This man who loves me as I should love him. Do I have any questions for you, old man? I think. Do I really want to know any more?
‘I thought it was still like it was and it wasn’t,’ he suddenly tells me. His chin buckles. He is trying to hide his face with his shoulders and rubbing his eyes. He has not shaved in a while, but it suits him, this rugged jaw – he positively reeks of the doomed hero.
‘Why would it be?’ he carries on. ‘Why did I expect it to be the same? Why do I expect you to be the same? That everything should stay the same?’
I tell him he’s making no sense. None of it is making any sense.
‘You left me,’ I say. ‘Just disappeared. And there was this enormous fish tank where they were breeding all these fish.’
He slaps the steering wheel. ‘Goddamnit, Ginny! Not everywhere is about you.’
‘That’s not what I’m saying. You left me with a woman who was a hundred, if a day. She could barely remember herself let alone wonder for me. Put yourself in my position. I am in this car with you!’
‘Are you?’ he asks. ‘Are you really sat there aside of me?’
I take my time to answer this, because physically I am sat here, but no one else knows I am here, not really, not even Mia. Anyone who might see me sitting here will see me only as a stranger and someone they will not ever see again. It will not cross their minds to think that I might not want to be sitting here when I am in the car. They will just assume that I’m going somewhere and, more importantly, want to go there. I am a fish in a moving glass tank having my eyes opened.
Carry on like this and I will start talking about myself as an obituary.
‘You are making this about me,’ I say, eventually, ‘when this is all about you. Where you want to go. You have planned it and you have been planning it, I can see that now, and I will come with you, Selwyn. I said I would, and I’m here, right here. But you said we were going to Wales. A holiday in Wales. You can’t keep driving to places and not telling me why we’re there! I still don’t even know who those people were last night.’
‘I left it too long,’ he is raising his voice at me. ‘They thought I’d forgotten them and I thought it was still the commune and it wasn’t.’ He makes it sound like a diagnosis.
‘Commune? What commune? It was the middle of nowhere!’
‘That was its point. You don’t just drop out, Ginny. You drop off the face of the earth.’
‘So, why were we there?’
‘Because it’s where we went before…then after…but Mother…it wasn’t for Mother and we left. I thought it’d be like it was. That we could stay. Have some time.’ He isn’t looking at me. He’s telling it all to the windscreen. ‘But I couldn’t. I couldn’t stay. How ca
n I stay?’
‘I don’t know what you’re telling me,’ I say quietly. ‘Are you saying that’s where we were headed? This thing we’re doing. That you wanted us to live there?’
He doesn’t speak. Just stares straight ahead.
‘Selwyn!’ I shout. ‘You have to talk to me!’
‘I’ve just told you!’ he shouts back. ‘That’s it. End of story. And on we go.’
‘I’ve just about had enough of this,’ and I’m unplugging my seatbelt and I’m out of the car.
Except I have nowhere to go. There is a ruddy great hedge in front of me and the only option I have is to head straight down the dual carriageway.
So, I do.
SELWYN KERB-CRAWLS ME all the way with the hazards on. For once, he is following me and I start to think that this is it. We have parted. He will carry on and I will carry on as we have always done. Because that’s what we do, me and Selwyn Robby. He asked me to move in and I moved in, but he carried on with his life, as if he didn’t know what to do with me, and I carried on being there in case he started to change. But Selwyn doesn’t change. Do I even know enough to know if he has changed? Can change? So, I will walk home. That’ll be the story. The day I walked home down a dual carriageway. And he will carry on going to wherever it is he’s going because Selwyn is going somewhere and I am not.
I think of my phone on the bed back at home, like a body between lives, and if there are any missed calls. People who miss me, people I will miss. Have I gone nowhere because I didn’t want to miss him? Has my life really been about just in case he comes around the corner?
It isn’t that big old house that’s lonely and falling apart. It’s me.
There is a band of rain, gunpowder clouds: they make the fields below look filthy, and I take it all in – this unfamiliar outside world I’ve never seen before; the furthest away I have ever been – and think myself braver than I am.