Pondweed

by Lisa Blower

  Maisie was right. I have been sulking. I have been a child.

  Then I think of Mia.

  I say her name as if she can hear me. For a minute, I think I do hear her – her voice travelling by cloud, telling me she’s okay, she’s always been okay, as I have always been fine. It’s all we ever say. I’m fine. I’m okay. Easier to say that than say we are not. Only when I put the phone down do I blow a gasket. I expect she does too.

  I look down at my feet and wonder how far they could take me right now. I’m wearing these silly blue canvas plimsolls and they are giving me a blister. Selwyn is ahead of me now. Picked up speed and over-taken me. He pulls over on to the hard shoulder and the caravan’s hazards are flashing me.

  Get in. They say.

  Walk past. They say.

  Get in the car, Ginny. I need you to get in the car.

  He’d asked me to get in the car and I got in the car. We get out of the car and then we get back in. It’s not like he’s begging me to get in the car. I only have to be asked once.

  Yet, I roll up my sleeves as if there is about to be a fight. I roll up my sleeves exactly as I do when I’m about to wash up or unblock the drains of Selwyn’s ruddy bladderwort. It’s started to rain hard. Rain that hurts and splits the skin. I remember the hailstorm as if it was yesterday. Bladderwort. Why does Selwyn grow bladderwort in our drains? I have no money. Just silly blue canvas plimsolls that are starting to stain my feet. I will have blue feet. And I’ve no coat. Did I even bring a coat with me? I do everything without thinking. I never think. I just do. My daughter is on the other side of the world with a man she thinks is her father – and he could be; he could be not. And, then again, of course, he is. I think of the pebbledash photograph that Linda tried to give me back in Loggerheads: was it really Meg, or was it not? All farmhands, those Richers, and three boys. The sort of poverty you can’t get your head around. What does it matter, I think? Do I even care? I’ve spent fifty years nibbling on deadly nightshade, yet seem to have the stomach for it. Life is an ice cube, as Meg would say. It melts.

  Selwyn has got out of the car. He is waiting for me. He has always waited for me. He waits and he waits and still I say no. No, Selwyn. I will not marry you. Because he wants us to be something that we cannot be when those two people we were have gone. And yet, we have always been looking for each other. Spent our lives waiting for each other. You’ve let no one come near you for fifty years, he says. And neither have you, Selwyn. Neither have you.

  I went to see a doctor once. I’d kissed a man who’d said it was like kissing porcelain and that there was something very wrong with me. The doctor sent me to a specialist who sent me to a therapist who sat me in a room on a circle of chairs with six others who shared my problem. I never went again. I thought they were inventing words to create problems that weren’t problems; to make you think that things were wrong and get you addicted to pills. I remember the therapist saying to think of it as a choice, if it helped. A biological choice that our bodies had made of their own accord. She was there to help us live with that choice. But I’d made a choice that gave me a child, and then it was no longer about choosing. I had a daughter to raise. I couldn’t be complicating her life any more than it already was. The therapist asked me of my birthing experience. Was it very traumatic? But that was something else I’d boxed away, and so deep I couldn’t remember it. She suggested hypnotherapy to relive the miracle. I burst out laughing and left the room.

  When my daughter became a nurse, she took to leaving leaflets in places where I would find them. In the bread bin. On the grill pan. In my apron pocket. I put them in the bin or burnt them on the bars of gas fires. She’d said, ‘Stop treating it like it’s just a case of bad breath. It’s a serious problem, Mother. You’re absolving yourself for no reason.’ I disagreed. Though I’d had to look up absolve in the dictionary. She’d got that bit right, but women like us, we just got on with it. I didn’t have the time to be worrying about all that didn’t work when I had to go to work. ‘Besides, no-one else got hurt.’ I’d said, after another leaflet dropped out of the TV guide. ‘Would you have preferred it if I’d worn a habit?’ She still accused me of lying through my teeth. ‘Chastity is a choice, Mother. This is something else.’ ‘You’re right,’ I’d said. ‘It is, and because after you left my body, Mia, I let it seal, for nothing and no one to come between us.’

  I came out with it to Selwyn on the stairs. I wasn’t planning on saying it, and so soon – I wasn’t even sure if I’d said it out loud – ‘I don’t work like that. I don’t know why. I just don’t.’ He’d led me back down the stairs and said, ‘It’s not all that love is, you know. Not everyone learns to swim either. But that doesn’t stop them going near the water.’

  Sometimes, I would climb into his bed. He would wake and shuffle over. Lift the blankets to offer me a warm pod where I might curl up aside of him. Like a cat. Like my daughter would do, and probably for longer than she should. The space always felt like a deep bath, and I was fine within that space until he began to touch.

  Sometimes, I would try to touch too. Mostly, I didn’t.

  I have stopped crawling into that space. I just sit on the end of the bed, watching him sleep with his eyes fixed on the ceiling, and telling him sin after sin after sin when actually there was no sin. Just two bodies, and then three.

  ‘Here,’ I lift up my nightdress to show him, as he sleeps, where I have drawn on myself with a series of dashes across my midriff and right along my caesarean scars; the same as Meg would draw on pig skin to determine between shoulders and thighs and best back bacon. ‘This is where my body divided on that day and then opened up on that other day. It has never come back together you see. There is this part and there is this part and I don’t know how or if it will ever work as one body, do you see, Selwyn? Do you understand what I’m trying to say?’

  His eyes fixed on the ceiling like two marbles, his body with its slow breaths. It’s like un-fathoming the meaning of life with a man in a coma.

  Now, as Selwyn comes towards me with the traffic thundering past, I see there is something different about him. Something that didn’t live under the flyover. This Selwyn swaggers and doesn’t shave. This Selwyn could light fires with his fingertips and rustle up dinner from roadkill. His shirt is more unbuttoned than normal. Has he done something different with his hair? As he breathes out, dragon-smoke. As he breathes in, me; always me. And I will it, I really do. I will it. I wish I knew what to do.

  ‘Ravish me,’ I murmur.

  But it is me who runs into his arms.

  SELWYN TELLS ME THAT Wroxeter is the most Roman place on the planet.

  ‘What? More roman than Rome?’

  We’re staying the night in Shrewsbury, in a weary looking mediaeval B&B hidden within the black and white timber-frames of an old crooked house that is full of candles and the sort of loud-mouthed businessmen I’d thought the internet had eaten alive. Selwyn thinks it will do us good to gather ourselves, as if we have scattered our limbs on the A49 and cannot find which belongs to me and which belongs to him. We’re up in the Gods, in the servant’s quarters, and I will forgive the smell of damp washing, the black boot-mark on the back of the door, the bleak little en suite with its sliver of green soap on the basin, for the bed linen is lovely and, after last night’s sleep in the car, I feel like we’ve arrived somewhere lavish.

  Selwyn is reading from some tourist magazine he’s found, and telling me something about how some of the buildings out in Wroxeter would be up to six storeys high.

  ‘Practically skyscrapers,’ he’s telling me. ‘And all to prevent people from coming. Smoke would billow out from the sixth storey – there was a chimney, you see, right through the middle of the building – and so people coming down what is now the A49, between the Caradoc and Cardingmill Valley—’

  ‘What do you mean people?’

  ‘Enemies, really. They would see the smoke and think, that’s some powerful city over there. If they can build that, th
en I’ve got to watch my step.’ He pauses to tap his nose. I am always wary when he taps his nose. He makes me feel like I look at history through wooden eyes.

  ‘That’s what they thought?’ I’m straightening the coasters on the bedside table. They are very plain.

  ‘A city belching smoke was a signal of power and industry.’ He is being smug now. He likes knowing more than me. ‘And primitive man was awful territorial,’ he says this bit as if it is something I should still appreciate. ‘I should have taken you there, really, for you to see it for yourself. There’s lots of things I should’ve done for you, Ginny.’ He pauses. His face brightens. He is cheery all of sudden. ‘We could go back home,’ he suggests. ‘Plan it all out. Together.’

  ‘You should have told me where we were last night,’ I snap, looking for the switch for the bedside light, which, I find, is an oblong brick in the maroon velour headboard. ‘You should tell me if we are actually going to Wales.’

  I watch him arrange his lips into a scowl and start to think of him as my enemy. The man who built a six-storey house with as many bricks as he could find. I think of women stuck up towers for their beauty and masterful kings. I think of territories and borders; of the walls we build and the lines we draw to join and make squares. I wonder where we are all going. I wonder if we really have moved on, and if all this exists underwater. I wonder how much smoke I could make compared to Selwyn. If my fire would be bigger than his. I think of the fire that he and Louis made when trapped in a thunderstorm in a fisherman’s hut. Did something happen between them that night that only happens when you think your life’s about to end? Another road I shouldn’t go down. I think of all the roads he has been down and how many without me. Salesmen know roads like the back of their hands. And every shortcut known to man.

  I’ve never heard of the A49 but am going to remember it in case this is another trick. Tomorrow, I’m going to buy my own map. Own my own. And a big red felt-tip pen. Draw my own roads. Find my own places. Live without dashes on my skin.

  He’s about to shower so wears no shirt or socks and has unbuckled his belt. His chest is wide, anointed with grey hair and liver spots, old scars from ill-shot jabs and the barely there lines of an eagle tattooed on his right bicep, from another time he will not speak of, during a stint of National Service that I only found out about through mistaking a brown envelope for me. ‘No soldier ever forgets,’ Maisie has said. A dirty green ink stain now, with smudged edges; it reminds me of mould on a bread crust.

  He lies back on the bed covering his face with his hands. I look at his skin and how it stipples around his shoulder blades. There are still muscles in his arms, but they are old now and worn out. He still thinks he can lift heavy things because he desires to lift them, and high above his head to prove that he’s not broken. No other woman has touched that skin: that’s what he tells me, assures me, promises me. There has been no one else, just you, Ginny. I used to believe this. Now, I don’t.

  ‘You should’ve married,’ I find I am saying. ‘You would’ve made a good husband. A good father.’

  He leans away from me to flip the switch on the wall behind him. We’re left in the dusky oblong lamplight. He is trying to start something between us, and he gives a little quirk of the lip and holds out his hands.

  ‘I have,’ he says. ‘To you.’

  ‘And what are you imagining right now?’ I move towards him, sticking with the thought of the masterful king.

  ‘Holding your hand,’ he says, quietly. ‘Listening to you breathe.’

  He is offering his hands up to me. I take one. Then the other. And sit on the bed. His hands move to my waist as he tries to lower me down on to the bed aside of him. I spot a sweet wrapper under the bedside table. He isn’t pushing me, but he is trying, ever-so-gently, to get me to lie down. But that sweet wrapper is bothering me. It reminds me that someone has been in here before us. Using the bed. Doing things in the bed. Tossing about sweet wrappers without a care in the world. I pull away to reach under the cabinet to retrieve the sweet wrapper. It’s pink foil, the sort that covers fudge in Quality Street. I crumple it in my hand and go back into the bathroom to put it in the bin. I close the door.

  We sit looking at each other by candlelight, the candle so big I have to look around it. Selwyn wears a black linen shirt that creases around his armpits. He picks up a fork, puts it down, picks up another fork, then picks up the previous fork and measures them against each other.

  ‘They’re the same size,’ he says, and I know he is stalling because he knows he’s got to tell me properly, including whatever else there is to tell, or I will go no further. ‘It is not an ultimatum,’ I had said, as we sat down at the table. ‘But the secrets have to stop.’

  He shuffles his napkin into his lap and begins where he always begins. ‘There’s a pond,’ he says.

  ‘And that’s where you and Hugh went?’ I ask. ‘To a pond?’

  He nods and swabs at his neck with his napkin as if having a hot flush.

  ‘It was pitch black.’ I also remind him that he came back in the morning with no fish.

  ‘I wasn’t fishing,’ he says. ‘I didn’t go there to fish.’

  I tell him about the fish tank. The size of it. The amount of fish. The way Maisie spoke to them and spoke of them. It was creepy. But the wine is here and the waiter asks if we want to taste it. Selwyn instructs him to just pour and the waiter straightens as if he’s proud to be pouring wine he is too young to drink. When I look at the glass, I realise the wine is the wrong colour.

  ‘It’s red,’ I hiss at Selwyn. ‘We ordered white.’

  ‘Does it matter? You drink red too, don’t you?’

  ‘Yes. But it’s not what we ordered.’

  ‘And what did you order, Ginny?’

  It comes out so quickly I feel slapped. I pick up my wineglass and drink half of it. ‘It’s fine,’ I say, though it’s cheap and sweet. ‘It’s very good.’

  He stares at me, yet he is gone from behind his eyes, off somewhere else where I am not. And he is blushing. And not from the wine.

  ‘You obviously don’t think it too bad,’ I say, watching him pour himself a second glass.

  ‘I’m just thirsty,’ he says. ‘It’s been a long day.’

  ‘It’s been a long trip,’ I say, knotting my hands in my lap. ‘And yet we’ve not even been away a week.’

  This is a shock to him. He had thought it longer. ‘Really?’ he says. ‘Not even a week?’

  ‘Not even a week,’ I repeat. ‘We left on Monday, and today is Sunday.’

  He rubs his chin with the heal of his hand and appears to be counting on his fingers under the table.

  ‘Look,’ he begins, ‘we went to live there, at the Corbet Hall, when it was a commune. Maisie and Hugh’s commune. Maybe about ten, twelve people.’ He squints with one eye. ‘I don’t know how many lived there. There were always a lot of people, just coming and going. And we had this little place, out back, away from the main house. For about four years, as it was.’ He pauses again to drink and finishes the second glass. ‘I thought it was paradise. But then Mother—’ He pauses. ‘It just wasn’t somewhere she thought she could be. No privacy, she said. So, we left.’

  He puts his elbows on the table and plays with the forks again. The waiter is here with our food and there is more fussing about sauces, condiments, and the waiter tops up our glasses until the bottle is empty, and yes, says Selwyn, why not? And the waiter trots off for a second bottle.

  ‘Your father,’ I begin. I am drawing the outline of a fish with my knife on the table as I say it. ‘He didn’t come with you to Joiners Square.’

  ‘No.’

  I put two and two together and make five – once I caught a fish alive. ‘You weren’t expecting to see him, were you?’

  He sighs. ‘My father died a long time ago. You know that.’

  ‘Then why did he not come with you to Joiners Square?’

  ‘What’s your point, Ginny?’ he demands.

&
nbsp; ‘My point?’ I am angry with him. ‘You never ever talk of your past and now you are. I’m interested to know.’

  He looks at me with very round eyes. A good salesman, Selwyn always says, maintains eye contact by concentrating on the bridge of the nose so that even his lies are sincere.

  ‘Father didn’t come with us,’ he murmurs. ‘He had his reasons. He stayed.’

  By rights, I should be far more inquisitive, but I slug my wine and look away because I don’t think I do want to know. If I know more about him, he’ll use it to know more about me, and we once agreed, call it a pact if you like, that what we didn’t know shouldn’t matter. Not everything needs to be sewn together to make a past. We don’t always need to know everything about each other. We found each other again. Let that be enough.

  ‘But we’re going around in circles,’ I say. ‘You and me, this trip, there’s no A to B.’

  ‘There never was any A to B,’ he says, slicing into his steak. ‘Why do you need to keep working everything out? Why can’t you just enjoy the journey? Like a magical mystery tour!’

  My knife and fork clatter on to my plate of their own accord. ‘A magical mystery tour?’ I start to laugh. ‘Is that what you call it?’

  I beam up at the returning waiter, that moment when they come and ask if everything is alright. ‘Thank you, thank you. It’s lovely. No, we can pour it ourselves, thank you.’ I trip over my words until I am flat on my face, pick up half a buttered potato with my fingers and shove it into my mouth.

  ‘You need to start again,’ I tell him.

  ‘There’s really very little to say.’ Selwyn straightens himself in the chair. ‘We lived at the Corbet Hall for four years. That was all. And it was four of the happiest years of my life. I thought we’d be there forever and leaving was a wrench. I’ve thought a lot about going back – I even tried once, but then the years passed – and we were heading that way and I just thought…’ He pauses to drink more. ‘There was absolutely nothing more to it than that.’