Pondweed

by Lisa Blower

  Selwyn is doing something with a screwdriver and cusses it.

  ‘Do you know what coddiwomple means?’ I ask.

  ‘Nope.’

  ‘It’s what the woman in the café said of her life. It means to travel in a purposeful manner towards a vague destination.’

  I hear him stop doing whatever it was he was doing with the screwdriver. My eyes are still closed, but I don’t need all these mirrors to know that he’s looking at me and smiling, because he knows, despite everything, that the one thing I can do very well is go it alone. And that, finally, I am choosing not to.

  . . .

  I open my eyes. Selwyn says I’ve been sleeping and that we are here. I automatically assume Wales, but no. We’re at the trade fair – somewhere else – except it is not quite a trade fair but a social for caravanners, and they are everywhere. White tin squares over there, white tin oblongs over here, airstreams and motorhomes and straightjacketed in rows like one great big milking parlour all hooked up. We are asked if we are caravanning, or caravanners, by a man in a hi-vis jacket and gleaming veneers, because if we’re caravanning then we should have pre-paid. I don’t know what this means, but Selwyn has his wallet out and is taking things out of it: a business card and a sheet of paper that definitely wasn’t in there last night, and I can see he has signed it as well. At least four or five twenties pass hands, and the man pats the roof of the car and starts telling Selwyn where to go.

  ‘We haven’t just happened here, have we?’ I say, as we make our way through the tin-can alleys, and Selwyn pats my right thigh and says, no, not exactly, but we might have made it into paradise all the same.

  I smell fried chicken and candyfloss. And despair.

  I make two gin and tonics from the caravan’s optics to take outside while I take it all in. Selwyn has gone somewhere behind the caravan to hook us up to something and told me he’ll be back in five minutes, because he’s not sure if a fuse has blown or if he’s using the right cable. I sit on the caravan step and look over at the backsides of the caravans parked in front of us. How sheets of welded metal and jolly looking backlights can make a person feel so at home.

  We’ve been shoved up in a corner and next to a motorhome so enormous it makes our caravan look like its cub. I sit in shadow among the hawthorn bushes to our right, yet a woman still approaches me, in a red dress busy with blue flowers, and green wellies fill up her legs. There’s a gravy-brown cardigan and the rest of her looks made with gelatine. There’s something abnormally stiff about her hair.

  ‘Are you flogging, or snooping?’ she asks, in a voice as thick as her midriff, and she’s Welsh. ‘I don’t recognise the van.’

  But before I can reply, Selwyn comes around the corner with such large strides I wonder for the health of his groin.

  ‘Ilma?’

  She gasps so hard it seems to take up all her breath.

  ‘Selwyn? Oh, my Lord!’ Her cheeks flush, her knees buckle, and she cups his face with two fat hands. ‘Selwyn Robby! For crying out loud! Selwyn Robby!’ – and the hug they give each other is terrifying.

  ‘Never in a million years,’ he gushes. ‘I mean really, Ilma, what in God’s name are you doing here?’

  ‘What am I doing here? What are you doing here?’

  Though neither of them actually tells each other what they’re doing here because Selwyn is reaching for the two gin and tonics I’ve just made and parked up on the caravan step. He hands one to her and says, ‘The Highlands are what you want,’ and she laughs like it’s just the funniest thing and chinks his glass and says, ‘The highlands are what we want,’ and it’s as if I’ve just been erased. And I’m here again, faced with someone he knows but has never heard of me.

  ‘Talk about following your nose,’ Selwyn says. They’re still holding hands. ‘Honestly, Ilma, what are you doing here?’

  She starts to tell him about Duncan. You know, Duncan? He doesn’t know Duncan, and I don’t know why he’s looking at me because I don’t know Duncan either. ‘Duncan,’ she keeps on saying. ‘My son.’

  ‘You had a son?’ Selwyn looks gobsmacked.

  ‘1974, Ruthin village hall?’ And Selwyn clamps a hand over his mouth and goes, ‘Noooo!’

  ‘Afraid so,’ she tells him. ‘But you know me, Selwyn. Never could keep the bedroom window shut.’

  Selwyn wags his finger then shakes his head like he couldn’t be any prouder.

  ‘Everything built up from dust,’ Ilma announces, with her arms wide. ‘As far as the eye can see.’ Selwyn looks around him as if he’s just seen it for the first time and is possibly inheriting it too. ‘Always said my Duncan had it in him,’ she carries on. ‘Caravan mad, all his life. Obsessed!’

  ‘I’d love to see him,’ Selwyn mutters, which makes me wonder if he knows Duncan more than he is letting on. ‘Is he here? Can I see him?’

  Ilma’s hand arrives on top of Selwyn’s, though I’m not sure their hands have ever parted.

  ‘He’d love to see you.’ And something fizzles between them.

  I stand up and thrust out my hand. ‘Ginny,’ I say, unnecessarily loud. ‘It’s nice to meet you.’

  They both look at me, as if astounded that I’ve stuck around, then look back at each other. Something else passes between them – something I can’t put my finger on when it’s all in the blink of their eyes – and Ilma eventually pulls away to shake my hand. She looks at Selwyn, and says, ‘Married?’ as if she can’t quite believe it, then drops my hand quickly. Even her handshake felt disappointed by me.

  ‘Oh, no, no,’ Selwyn tells his feet. ‘But yes, this is Ginny and, Ginny, this is Ilma Cheadle. A very old friend, who I cannot believe is actually here!’

  I go to say something, but Ilma is already talking about dinner – she’s making veal pie, figgy crumble – ‘You don’t still make figgy crumble?’ – ‘Of course I still make figgy crumble! About seven?’

  She has a bungalow. And then they’re suddenly mid-gas about pond lining, because it’s only idling about the yard. ‘Carrier-bag thin, won’t hold spit,’ Ilma says. ‘But take it, please.’ Selwyn winks and tells her that moulds do little more than shape the ground; it’s the lining that brings a pond to life. To which Ilma grips on to him again, and says, ‘Sometimes, old friend, what we don’t know keeps us going.’ And then they’re hugging again, like hugging again, and oh, I could’ve caused a scene. Said things. Done things. Thrown a glass. Stomped off behind the caravan and dramatically unhooked us and demanded Selwyn to remember me. I am here too. And we are going to Wales. That’s how it should’ve played out.

  I could’ve said that I was going to take a nap and listened to their figgy reminiscing from behind the caravan walls. Don’t mind me, I could’ve said. Pretend I’m not here. No one knows I’m here anyway.

  Instead, I tell them that I think I’ll go take a look around. ‘Let you two catch up.’

  Ilma smiles. Though it is the same smile I would give Meg when she’d tell me to set the table for three.

  Caravans, caravans everywhere and not a place to think. Mobile homes and home from homes. I mooch about browsing accessories and gimmicks for storage solutions; one veteran asks me if I’d like the ‘touch-feel-see’ experience, but I tell him I’m fine, thank you. I contemplate buying a lipstick at twice the price and perhaps a pair of green leather gloves. So, Selwyn has friends, I think. He always talks of friends, but I never meet them. They are people he meets when he’s on the road. I saw Jim, today. I ran into Reg Collingwood. Someone he knows. Someone who knows him. Kay Cox. Rachael. Women who act as if he’s been missing in action. There are his neighbours, of course: Val and Alan next-door, Tony and Rose from across the way, and we stop for a chat and chew the fat – the weather is terrible, the bus is late, will they ever finish whatever they’re doing to that flyover? And Louis. The BIG friend.

  When I left Joiners Square and found myself elsewhere, I realised that I’d been so used to neighbours just being there that I didn’t know how to make friends
. I’d chat to my new neighbours – to Lizzy and Freda, to Jack and Betty Smalls – and I’d borrow things and enquire of things, and there were people I worked with and liked. People I worked with and didn’t like. I lived in places where you wouldn’t ever want to answer the door. Had neighbours who never wanted to know more. Another place. Another flat. Caro took me on at the shoe shop and I guess she was a friend. We never went anywhere as friends, but I told her a lot.

  Eventually, I wander back to the caravan and find that Selwyn is talking to a man with savage eyebrows and a cheap grey suit.

  As I walk towards them, I hear this man offer Selwyn thirty thousand pounds, cash in hand, for the caravan. Selwyn is sitting on the caravan step in his shirtsleeves and smoking. He thumps the side of the van and says the metal alone is worth that. I do not know when Selwyn started smoking, but he does so like he’s done it before and with dignity. The man asks for the reconditioning papers. Selwyn says he has them inside – he does nothing that isn’t above board – and then looks away. The man shifts from one foot to the next and peers over Selwyn’s head into the caravan. Selwyn moves slightly so the man can get a better view, though I can tell that the man has seen inside already, that this has been a long conversation and Selwyn has run out of tricks. He says something about the fish in the pedestal in the toilet that I can’t quite hear. Selwyn tells him firmly they are not for sale. The man says, ‘But you are selling, right?’

  ‘Perhaps,’ Selwyn says. ‘Eventually.’

  He makes no eye contact and the man gives him a card. ‘That’s me,’ he says. ‘When you’re ready.’

  Selwyn nods. No deal. The man walks away. He doesn’t seem to see me either.

  Selwyn drags on the roll-up and blows smoke in my direction.

  ‘You’re smoking,’ I say. He looks at the roll-up.

  ‘Yes,’ he says. ‘I am.’ He drags on it again. Even blows a smoke ring.

  ‘Does Ilma smoke?’ I say it very cruelly.

  He raises his eyebrows at me, lowers his chin into his neck, and goes, ‘Really?’ Like it’s all very boring for him. ‘We’re going over there for dinner, Ginny. That’s all.’

  ‘That’s not what I asked.’

  ‘And what you’re asking is what you’re thinking, which isn’t true,’ he pauses to take the last drag on the roll-up. ‘Ask her what you like. She’ll tell you. She’s nothing to hide.’ He rubs the roll-up out under his boot and gets up to go into the caravan. I call after him.

  ‘Why didn’t you take his money?’

  He shrugs, shoves his hands into his pockets, does that thing with his nostrils and sniffs.

  ‘It wasn’t enough,’ he says.

  ‘Thirty thousand pounds isn’t enough?’

  He shakes his head. ‘Not at the moment, no.’

  He turns his back on me again and heads into the caravan. I follow and raise my voice.

  ‘Take his money,’ I demand slapping my hand down on the bar. ‘Then let’s just go home.’

  He glares at me.

  I glare back.

  We glare.

  We’ve got good at glaring.

  And then that smile. Like a half-risen moon. Like a shield.

  ‘We’re not even halfway and you already want to go home,’ he says. ‘But if you want us to go home, then we will go home.’

  A cold tunnel of wind passes between us. Words form, but make no sense. My eyes glass over until waterlogged. My arms go limp as his strengthen around my neck. He holds me. Coils himself around me. Holds me until he checks his watch behind my head. Tells me it’s ten to seven and he’d just like us to have a meal with an old friend. That is all.

  I pull away, wipe my face with my sleeve. ‘Is he your son?’

  Selwyn shakes his head and only half of that smile appears. But it is enough.

  ‘We all make mistakes, Ginny,’ turning away from me. ‘But no. He’s not my son.’

  . . .

  ‘I know everything about you and nothing at all,’ Ilma says to me, as she bustles us both into her bungalow barefoot. ‘Come in and tell me everything!’ But she immediately starts talking to Selwyn. Where has he been? as we walk through the hallway. Why hasn’t she known? as she leads us into the kitchen. All this time, yet it feels like no time at all. Stirring something on the stove. I lean against the kitchen wall of her bungalow, waiting to be told what to do when never a visitor but hardly visited. I notice the ceilings are very low when she is very tall, and she’s partial to cheap gold frames for photographs. The absence of Duncan’s father is notable. I wonder if I should take off my shoes.

  I can smell the veal roasting in bone broth and sage. Selwyn had told me that Ilma was farmstock, and she cooks on Aga hotplates with heavy-iron pans; that her largeness is Swedish blood. As we weaved through the caravans to get here, Selwyn filled in a gap: they’d known each other as children, that’s all, and she was one of ten. He talked of her father’s farm as if it existed in the last century. He and one of her brothers liked fishing and she’d trail after them carrying the maggots. I butted in with, ‘Why haven’t you told me this before?’ His reply was, ‘It was just a farm under a very big sky.’

  Ilma forks a potato then drains the water into a larger pan. The boiling water slips over her fingers but she doesn’t wince once. She reminds me of an old grandfather who hoards pencils. She instructs Selwyn to pour wine and loosen his tie, asks him to start at the beginning because she’s struggling to believe he’s been where he’s been all this time.

  ‘We’re talking almost fifty years,’ she says; half a slab of butter and starts to mash. ‘You in a house, in a city, and on the road,’ she clicks her tongue. ‘It’s just not you.’

  Selwyn fills three glasses with a deep red wine, a claret, she’s already said. He hands one to Ilma, swigs from his, asks her why she’s counting, then gestures that the one on the table is for me.

  ‘Because you never kept in touch,’ she snaps. ‘Dropped us all like flies. We all thought you dead.’

  Selwyn concentrates on what Ilma is doing, which is mashing the potatoes with only a fork and she’s starting to sweat. She looks over at me – I’m trying to blend in with her wallpaper that’s a blue and white stripe – points her fork and says, ‘I’d blame you entirely, though it’s hardly your fault.’ Then she turns the fork on Selwyn. ‘You really do have some explaining to do,’ she demands, and I take a sip of my wine and allow myself a small smile.

  ‘Yes,’ I agree. ‘He does.’

  She has set the table for four. Duncan is coming. But then Duncan calls to say he’s not coming. He’ll do coffee in the morning, Selwyn is told, and Ilma looks disappointed. He’s more than the apple of her eye, and for the next five minutes she slats stuff about: the hospitality a chore, and she forgets to offer me peas. We’re all drinking quickly so another bottle is opened. I ask for water. She points and says, ‘There’s the tap.’

  While I’m at the sink, with my back to them, I hear her ask Selwyn if I know.

  He says, ‘No, and please don’t,’ and Ilma digs the knife into the pie so hard it clinks the plate beneath. I swill out the glass twice in case something else is said, but she starts up a conversation in Welsh. And Selwyn answers her. I almost drop the glass in the sink.

  ‘You speak Welsh?’

  Selwyn bites his lip and shrugs. ‘It’s been a long time,’ he says, though he’s looking at Ilma to remind her to please don’t, and Ilma says something else in Welsh before looking across at me and saying, ‘Tell me about you.’

  I fold my arms – I’m quick off the mark – and I tell it all to Selwyn. ‘Oh, Potteries born and bred, this is as far away as I’ve been. And yes, we were next-door neighbours for a year, perhaps not even that. That was fifty years ago. Then I left. I had a baby. Lived some other places. Amounted not to much. Never married. Had some chances.’ I pause. I’ve had too much wine. Even my full stops are drunk. ‘What about you?’

  Ilma stares at me, wets her lips, and even rolls up the sleeves of her c
ardigan. The only feminine thing about her are her eyelashes, which flutter, like she’s dust in her eye, and she inhales, as if about to deliver a long-winded life speech, but then says, ‘Farmer’s daughter. Farmer’s wife. Widowed at fifty. Did you enjoy the veal?’

  ‘Veal always feels too young, to be fair,’ I reply. ‘But then what else to do with bull calves not bred to mate?’ I take a sip of wine. Tell her that my mother was a great advocate of veal. ‘She used to say that a short happy life knowing only good was better than a long sad one knowing only want. “The calf is full of wonder,” she used to say. It’s why you can taste it in the meat.’

  Ilma looks vaguely anguished, then slaps her hands down on the table so hard it makes me jump. Then she slaps me on the shoulder. We have bonded over meat and she asks if I want a smoke as if we’re a pair of cowboys seeing the funny side after a shootout. She pulls a leather pouch out of her pocket and begins to lay all the paraphernalia on the table like a crack addict. She takes what she needs then pushes it towards Selwyn who does the same.

  ‘Can I roll you one, Ginny?’ she asks, pinching tobacco from a tin.

  I fear they’re going to go outside without me so I nod and say, ‘Why not?’

  Selwyn laughs. ‘You don’t smoke,’ he says, licking a paper. ‘She doesn’t smoke,’ he says to Ilma, who ignores him and sets about making me one anyway. ‘Why are you smoking?’ He carries on with the statements, as Ilma hands me the roll-up and then pushes the candle towards me to light my cigarette. ‘You really don’t need to smoke,’ Selwyn says.

  ‘You don’t know what I need,’ I reply, as I hold my hair back and lean into the flame. Then I drag as only smokers know how. I blow smoke across the table as Ilma lights hers then pushes the candle towards Selwyn. It’s clandestine, what we’re doing, finding all these things out, and by candlelight – I’m not even sure the bungalow has electricity – and Selwyn ices the cake by saying something in Welsh that only Ilma can understand. Then she looks at me and says, ‘What love is, eh? And how it waits.’