by Lisa Blower
I can see a small bone protruding from the cod loin. I pick it out and realise that I’m always picking bones, picking fights.
‘They’re good people,’ he tells me. ‘Salt of the earth. So, I gave them some money.’
I swallow hard. ‘That was kind of you. How much money did you give them?’
He tells me what he made at Hodnet. I swallow hard.
‘All that money? You just handed it over? For what?’
‘You saw the state of the place. My father would have done the same.’
‘It’s completely on its knees! And what are they both, a hundred? What money will help them now?’
He puts down his knife and fork and pushes his plate away. ‘You don’t get it, do you?’ he snipes at me. ‘It’s a way of life, Ginny. A sense of sharing, family, and that was the life he wanted. Because him and Hugh…’ he wipes his mouth with his napkin and makes to get up from the table.
‘Your father was gay?’
The look Selwyn gives me could catch fire. ‘You are talking about my father, Ginny.’
‘But he wanted to be with Hugh. That’s what you’ve just said.’
‘That is not what I said at all.’
‘But he stayed behind.’
‘It’s where he wanted to be.’
‘Why are you being such a gnarly old oak tree with me? I never knew my father. Christ, what do I even know about fathers? Stop punishing me for being interested.’
‘Then don’t make him out to be the monster here. Goddamn you, Ginny. That is not what happened!’
‘But what does it really matter when it’s a life long gone, and you have nothing to be ashamed about. For goodness sake! Where are you going? Selwyn! You’ve not finished your food…’ But in the time my fork takes to drop to my plate in frustration, Selwyn has disappeared.
She was always going to ask, my daughter. You hope the questions won’t come, but they do, and they came home from school like a dirty lunchbox. Everyone else had one. Why didn’t she?
‘Look,’ I’d said. ‘They aren’t always necessary, and you’ve been lucky in other ways.’
Another time: ‘That’s the way it goes, sweetheart, and it never bothered me.’
And another time: ‘Yes, I know you know about the birds and the bees, but he really was just an irrelevant sperm.’
Then later, Mia had a different set of questions: ‘Does he know about me? Why doesn’t he want to know me? Someone must be out there thinking about me. What do you mean you don’t know, when it was ’70s Stoke-on-Trent?’
Mia is twenty and she’s nursing so she knows about records now, how to acquire birth certificates, death certificates, so I may as well tell her my version at least. I tell her: he was almost thirty and a cobbler by trade who became a ten-pound pom. He re-heeled my shoes and Meg paid him in goat. He set about me like tying up a pair of temperamental bootlaces and it was such a bloody nuisance for it to be that one and only time.
‘And that’s it,’ I’d said. ‘That really is it.’
I can see the disappointment in her face even now.
In times so far away they’ve grown rind:
Me to Meg: ‘Do I have grandparents? Where are they?’
Meg to me: ‘Ask the Bluebird. She’ll tell you.’
Me to Meg: ‘She’s not here.’
Meg to me: ‘Yes, she is. She’s standing right beside you. And don’t look at me like that. Everyone’s dead.’
I once had a friend who went through her husband’s wallet on a daily basis. It wasn’t because she didn’t trust him, she said. But because it made her trust him more. I’ve known other women for whom their husband’s bulging wallet is something they like to leave on the side for me to see. As if it had secret powers. Meg kept her money in a drawstring bag made of cowhide that she kept under the sink. I’ve never had a husband, and, until that moment, when a lumbering light cracked through the curtain slits, I have never taken Selwyn’s wallet into the bathroom to check its contents for explosions.
I laid out everything in a line on the bathroom floor while he slept in the next room. I then sat back on my haunches puzzling over how I’d ordered it and asking myself all sorts of little questions. A bank card. A library card. A National Trust membership card. A coffee shop loyalty card. There were receipts. One for the tyres. Another for petrol, where he’d also bought mint imperials and a jar of coffee. There was a slip of paper with a telephone number on. I recognised that number. It was his. There was a button, its holes still filled with a dark brown thread that seemed to be concealing something, so I pulled it all out and put the thread in the bin. The button was naked, but it still told me nothing. There was money. Almost two hundred pounds in twenties and tens, and then an old five-pound note folded up into a small square that he’d pushed deep into a section of his wallet, which made me think other things – when that five-pound note was of another time. Why had he not spent that five-pound note so specifically? And then there were the business cards.
– Selwyn Robby, Sales Executive
– Selwyn Robby, Sales Manager
– Selwyn Robby, Commercial Sales Director
– Selwyn Robby, Co-Partner Toogood Aquatics
Flimsy little slips of paper really; they could barely stand on their own two feet.
I put everything back in the wallet as I’d found it, then folded the old five-pound note back up, but this time with the button inside of it. I wanted him to know that I’d seen something. Then I went downstairs to call Mia on the lobby phone. I called again. And then another three times, just to make sure I wasn’t being ignored.
Status. He has craved status. And when it came, it broke him into a thousand little pieces that we have slowly begun gluing back together.
The Eighth Day
‘True water plants, or hydrophytes, when taken from water become limp, weak and pale. They are quite unable to support themselves. They lack the tough fibres which enable them to grow upwards, towards the light.’
~ The Great Necessity of Ponds
by Selwyn Robby
AT BREAKFAST, OVER SCRAMBLED eggs, he says, ‘I’m sorry for storming off to bed. I hadn’t really slept the night before. It was a lot to take in, you know? A lot that was asked.’ He pauses. He looks like he hasn’t slept at all. ‘Did you sleep okay?’ he asks.
‘Not really. I tried to call Mia, but there was no answer.’
He fiddles with his cutlery. Something is agitating him. ‘I mean, where would you start?’ he begins. ‘There’s no central heating. No gas. The place has just been left to crumble. And you can’t blame them. No.’ He shakes his head at me and starts to butter a piece of toast. ‘Sometimes, you have to let things go to earth.’ And he’s nodding at me as if he’s agreeing with me. ‘Yes. I was right to say no.’
I put down my knife and fork. ‘Okay,’ I say. ‘You’re having a conversation with yourself here.’
‘I mean, there is no one else. They’ve not seen anyone else. It’s been years. No one knows where anyone is to ask if they’d even consider it. So it’s only right they asked. I don’t blame them for asking. But when you are asked, and it’s not like I’ve not thought about it, but it’s not right, is it? It wouldn’t be right. Not even legally.’
‘Again. This is not a conversation you are having with me.’
He narrows his eyes. Dislodges a piece of toast he has stuck in his teeth. ‘It’s not really inherited, you see,’ he carries on. ‘There’s no deeds, no paperwork, no rightful owner as it were. And those rights, what they were then, well, I don’t think they count now.’
I wipe my mouth with my napkin and then slap it down on the table. ‘Are you telling me what I think you’re telling me?’
‘You’d hate it,’ he says. ‘You did hate it. You were horrified.’
‘Okay,’ I put up my hands defensively. ‘You need to use actual words, Selwyn. Talk to me.’ I thump my chest as I say it. ‘I’m here. Talk to me.’
He swallows hard. ‘They asked if I wa
nted it. And if I did then they would will it to me. But that would mean legalities and—’ he holds out his hands and bites down on his bottom lip. ‘It took me by surprise.’
‘Okay.’ Now, I swallow hard.
A waiter hovers over us with a coffee pot and refills both our cups even though we’ve both been drinking tea. But it doesn’t matter. We wouldn’t notice the difference anyway.
‘Is it worth anything?’ I have to ask the question. ‘I mean, it doesn’t even have a compass direction.’
He shrugs at me. ‘It’s whether it’s worth it,’ he says, lowering his voice. ‘It would take years to rebuild. Would I have enough time to do it and see it rebuilt? And could we cope with the rebuilding when rebuilding anyway?’ He shakes his head as if bothered by a sound that only he can hear. ‘No. I’m going to have some bacon. Do you want some bacon with your eggs?’ He flags down a waiter as if landing a plane.
A young girl heads over and we have to repeat to her twice that I don’t want bacon but Selwyn does and we are drinking tea, not coffee, so might we have new cups, please? And Selwyn would also like two slices of white bread and they can come on the same plate as the bacon, save the washing up.
‘Is it really that complicated?’ I say to Selwyn after she flusters off. ‘At the end of the day, we’re just asking for bacon and bread.’
He says, ‘Please let’s not start the day on the backfoot.’
‘Then let’s stop going sideways,’ I say.
His reply is to take out forty pounds from his wallet and tell me to treat myself to some decent shoes.
‘Why would you be telling me to buy shoes?’
‘Because you need some decent shoes,’ he says, securing the two twenty-pound notes to the tablecloth with a fork.
‘What I need is for you to stop telling me what to do and tell me exactly what happened at the Corbet Hall.’
‘I see.’
‘No, you don’t. You don’t even have the right mirror to see.’
He gives me his mother’s broken-winged bird look then, tells me that there’s a hardware store nearby that he’s been recommended and it’s likely that they’ll stock convex wing mirrors. Not having one is weighing heavy on his mind, and he’s worried about the tow-bar too. The dirt track back at the Corbet Hall might have damaged something. He had felt a curling, like the caravan was resisting him. But I’ve already left the table by then. And left his forty pounds on the table too. I don’t want his money. It has never been about the money. Then I think better of it, and walk back to the table.
‘Why are we here, Selwyn?’ I am trying not to raise my voice. ‘In Shrewsbury. Is something going to happen here?’
He looks at me as if I’ve just asked him what the capital of Bolivia is, wipes his mouth on his napkin and tells me he’s going to find this hardware store and how long do I need?
‘For what?’
‘To buy shoes,’ he says.
I snatch the forty pounds from his hand – tell him that this time, he can wait for me.
I head right away from him, as far as I can, and up a winding hill that takes me into the town centre. I walk into shops not knowing what shops they are. I browse paperbacks then underwear; wander through clothes aisles and try on hats; spray various perfumes on my wrists until they all bleed into one. The two twenty-pound notes burrow deeper into my pocket until I can’t remember if I’ve been here before, because not looking is what I do best and then I’m so lost I’m easily found.
A sign for a café calling itself ‘quirky’ and I head towards it, ask for a table for one.
I am not, however, led to a table for one, because this is a community café and customers are encouraged to share tables.
‘And no mobile phones,’ says a girl with wild red hair and a strange looking jewel on her upper lip. ‘We want you to chat and make noise in the old-fashioned way.’ She laughs like she doesn’t care whether I find her funny or not.
I think, we had nothing, this lot have everything, now they don’t want any of it and that makes them quirky – but I’m also distracted by a woman sat alone in a pale-blue duster jacket with buttons as big as her eyes. I might be lost, but she is absolutely lost without whomever it was she’d just lost. She gestures towards a chair and shows me a little line of baby teeth that slot neatly behind her lips. I realise how I’ve been sat at a table with Selwyn who hasn’t been looking at me either, and that, one day, one of us really will be looking across the table at an empty chair. The buttons on her coat are very tightly stitched.
‘Thank goodness,’ she says, as I sit down. ‘I can’t read the menu. I’ve left my glasses in the car.’ And out of the corner of my eye, I see that’s a foam-based heel on those burgundy slip-ons she’s wearing and not the leather uppers she’s been sold.
As I read from the menu, she tells me that the broccoli and salmon quiche is always nice and she’s up for sharing a pot of tea. Then she starts to tell me about her life, which is one of those stories about a woman who once lived, did some things like teaching and mothering, then found an abscess under her tongue. It is this that takes up the bulk of our conversation, because the abscess, though nothing sinister, is very uncomfortable and certain foods – which she spends a long time listing – make it sting.
I eventually realise that I’ve drank all my tea and eaten the quiche and not been asked a single question, other than where are you staying, and yet I have so much that I want to tell someone. So, I do. I start to tell her.
‘Eight days ago,’ I begin, ‘I was told to get in the car – our car that was towing a caravan that Selwyn thinks is worth what he’s lost – and that we were going to Wales. For a holiday. And we haven’t got there, because we keep going to these other places and all these things keep happening and right under my nose, but I don’t see it happening and he can’t really explain why it’s happening because he’s so afraid of me thinking that he might be someone else to the someone I once knew. And now, just this morning, it turns out that he’s being willed some rundown stately home in the middle of butt-fuck nowhere, but it’s somehow my fault that he doesn’t want it.’ I pull my coat around my shoulders then take one of the twenty-pound notes out of my pocket. ‘So, I’m really sorry about your abscess and all those things you can’t eat. But at least that makes sense. That’s normal life.’
The woman looks down at the money on the table then breaks into an enormous smile. ‘Oh, how kind,’ she says. ‘I didn’t expect you to buy me lunch. That is so lovely of you. Thank you.’ Then she reaches down to take a pair of glasses out of her handbag along with a pen and paper. ‘You said you were staying down Wyle Cop?’ she checks. ‘Right then, let me draw you a map back so you don’t lose your way.’
Meg used to take me to a lot of funerals when I was little. Not because she knew a lot of dead people, but because she seemed to know which dead people were disappearing without a trace. I’ve stood aside of her – and I mean just me and her – more times than I can remember, watching a coffin be lowered into the ground with absolutely no idea for who was inside. Occasionally, they’d be distant relatives Meg would suddenly claim to know, or a neighbour from the Square, and then she’d pretend a friendship that went way back, and we’d be invited to someone’s house somewhere to mourn a bit more because the dead, said Meg, helped us to live.
Other stock phrases Meg used at funerals:
1. For your soul to have to work this hard in this life, you’re not telling me that it doesn’t go on somewhere better.
2. The dead can’t hurt you. It’s the living.
3. No one’s ever lonely in death. It’s life that takes everyone away.
4. It doesn’t matter who you are at a funeral. People are just grateful for you coming.
I make my way back to the B&B feeling like I’ve just turned a very curvaceous corner, and find Selwyn sitting in the lobby with a box on his lap and reading a glossy caravan magazine.
‘How long have you been sat there?’ I ask.
‘As long
as you needed me to be,’ he says, and that he’s settled us up. ‘You didn’t buy shoes then?’ he asks, looking down at my feet and then at my empty hands.
‘No. I bought someone lunch.’
He briefly raises his eyebrows, but I don’t know what to tell him when I’m not sure who felt most sorry for who.
‘Selwyn,’ I say. ‘Are we lost?’
He folds his hands over the top of the box and looks me straight in the eye. It’s not for long though, and he shakes his head.
‘No, Ginny. We are not lost.’
He also has the mirror he wanted. ‘And would you look at this?’ He passes me the magazine and shows me an advert. ‘Trade fair. One day only,’ he starts to shake his head as if he cannot believe it. ‘Today. Of all days.’ He smiles. Laughs.
I cannot believe it either.
Selwyn sets about attaching the convex wing mirror to the actual wing mirror on the driver’s side of the car, so that one mirror reflection reflects into the other mirror reflection. I sit in the passenger seat and pull down the visor as it’s suddenly sunny, and there’s another mirror reflecting what all the other mirrors are reflecting, as if I need to be reminded three times. We have also lost a Y somewhere. So what used to say, For your pond life and beyond, on the side of the caravan, now says, For our pond life and beyond. I wonder if Selwyn has removed the Y on purpose, so I no longer think this journey is just his.
I close my eyes and start to tell Selwyn about the woman I ate my lunch to in the café. How it was a community café where you had to share a table with someone and talk like it was something just invented; how this woman had practically guilted me into sitting with her and had pretended she couldn’t read the menu when her glasses were in her bag all along.
‘She never took her coat off,’ I say. ‘It was like the world was only about her.’