by Lisa Blower
I will never forget that man’s face. Or his thoughtfulness. I thank him over and over. Not for stopping, but for not being Louis. I tell him that I’m waiting for petrol. That we’d misjudged how far we had come. The man drives away. I look down at the box at my feet and start to shift it slightly – further and further and out into the road, so that it is in the way of everything that drives past. A lorry is coming towards me flashing its lights, but only I step out of the way, and I start to walk in the direction of the traffic. I need to find Selwyn. Behind me, I hear the lorry hit the box.
Before you can get anywhere you have to remember where you’ve been, and I find Selwyn in one of those roadside diners you see marooned in laybys, a jog trot from where he’d abandoned me. All corrugated iron and welded metal sheets – It’s the Snax! it says, on the outside panels in black gloss paint – a container of sorts, given a new lease of life. I wonder who towed it here to this very spot and applied the brakes. Here, they might’ve said. Here is good enough. Perhaps why it smells of fried eggs and spilt milk, of unfinished arguments and tea, the colour of woodchip, in Styrofoam cups. Meg often dreamt of selling hot dogs from a roadside van. She said she would appreciate the calm.
I go inside and Selwyn is sitting at a single white plastic table and sipping from what looks like a bowl of hot milk. He doesn’t look at me, yet I am the only other person here, other than the owner who bristles when he sees me – as if I’m spoiling things – and asks if he can get me something. He has skin like leftover sauce brought to the boil for a second time. His hair is slick, black, well-cut, and he wears a tie under his apron, as if he can’t sweep aside who he used to be. I look back at Selwyn and see that he is also wearing a tie. I can’t predict him any more. Be careful what you wish for, as they say. This one’s a livewire.
I ask for coffee, as it comes, and help myself to the seat opposite Selwyn.
‘You look terrible,’ I tell him. ‘Are you feeling alright?’
‘And you’re surprised by that?’ he snaps. ‘It’s not as if you’re looking your best either.’
My hands instantly reach for my face. ‘You’re right,’ I say. ‘But then I’ve stopped looking at myself. In fact,’ I pause and screw my eyes up, ‘I can’t remember the last time I looked in a mirror.’ I think briefly of the convex wing mirror and the view it has given Selwyn. ‘It’s like I’m only ever looking at you.’
The owner comes over to the table with my coffee. He asks where we’re off to. I tell him Wales, then look down at his bright white trainers slippery with grease. This is not a place where anyone lingers, and neither does he. He goes back behind his counter to check his phone.
‘Another stranger from a strange land,’ I say, turning my cup around. ‘Do you know him too?’
‘Anthony.’ Selwyn spits it out and it startles me.
‘His name is Anthony?’
‘Anthony Cadman.’ Selwyn is now practically spitting on the table. ‘The cobbler. You did it with the cobbler?’
‘Oh. I see.’ I turn my cup around again, in case it will turn back the clock. Cobblers was what Meg called the leftovers. We had it when the larder was bare. ‘That’s what this has all been about. You looked in my box.’
He puts his mug down and stares into it. ‘Is it the truth? Did you and Anthony really…?’ He pauses, grimaces, pulls back his eyebrows. ‘For crying out loud, Ginny. Do I put nothing past you?’
‘What do you want to be the truth?’ I lock my hands together on the table as I say it and perch my chin upon them.
He looks at me. Then looks away. Looks at me again. He shakes his head. Then lowers it. ‘Jesus, Ginny. He was twice your age.’
‘And I was sixteen, and it was one time. He promised me things a sixteen-year-old bored out of her mind wants to hear, and I fell for it. Hook, line and sunk very deeply.’
‘Did I not make those promises?’ he leans towards me. ‘Did I not love you enough?’
I bite my lip and look away. There’s a calendar on the wall. Cheap paper with white blocks for days crossed out with a red pen. There is a date I will always remember, and my suitcase had looked so little out there on the street. So full of hope, there was barely anything in it. It was like something you’d pack for a doll. I’d used it as a step, in the end, to peer into the window of where he cobbled and shone shoes when no one had answered the door. ‘Come before six,’ Anthony had said, after he’d rolled off me. And I did. At ten to six, and he’d already left. No note. No ticket. Nothing. I went home, hid my suitcase under the bed, took off my coat, and no one was any wiser since I’d told no one I was even going.
‘And I don’t know why, I’ve thought and thought about why until I’ve almost thrown myself in the bloody canal, but I needed to get out – I couldn’t be in that house any more, in Joiners Square, it was so crowded all the time, no privacy, and yet I was so alone. And there was your mother out front scrubbing the step and she said you were upstairs. “He’s upstairs, if you want him,” she said. So, I went upstairs.’ I pause. Drink some coffee. Feel sick. Wish there was a different version. ‘For some, it’s a bed of roses and the promise of being a wife. For me, it was twice in one day.’ I look over at the calendar again. ‘So now you know. And you don’t need to be disgusted. I’ve been so disgusted with myself that I’ve torn myself to shreds until there’s not a part of me left to like. I know I devastated lives, but Mia has had a good life, I’ve held it all together on shoestrings and have never been ashamed of her. Not for one second. You need to know that, Selwyn. She’s been the love of my life.’
He keeps his head low. Sighs like he does when phoning a customer services hotline. He spends a long time turning his mug around. He makes to get up from his chair, then thinks better of it. Judders instead. Makes a retching sound. I wonder if he’s going to throw up. He looks down into his mug again. He’s working out if he still has enough love for me.
‘This is about me and you, though, Selwyn. Not her,’ I say it really quickly, as if brushing away the decades with the crumbs on the plastic table.
‘There are still two birth certificates in that box,’ he hisses at me. ‘One of them has my name on.’
‘And the other has Anthony’s name on.’
‘To hedge your bets? Heads she’s his, tails she’s mine?’
I shrug.
‘How did you even get two birth certificates?’
I suck in my lips and make myself small. ‘Maybe I didn’t want someone else. Maybe I just wanted to do it on my own. Maybe I wanted it to be both of you. Maybe I cut my body in half. Maybe I wanted her to choose. Maybe I can’t give you a straight answer.’ I take another gulp of my coffee and find, this time, it scalds the roof of my mouth. ‘But you dislodged that box to come between us, Selwyn. Not me.’ I run my tongue across the roof of my mouth and feel the blister, the tag of skin coming away. I watch Selwyn’s face and try to read it. A man this broken can do stupid things. ‘I don’t know why you’ve never put two and two together and asked me before,’ I carry on. ‘You’ve seen her in photographs, met her on the computer. I thought you’d just worked it out. And I would’ve told you if you’d asked.’
He makes a noise, like an owl tearing up prey, then starts to murmur very slowly, ‘I have loved you from the moment I set eyes on you. Why won’t you love me? Why haven’t you let me love her?’
We look at each other. I concentrate on the bridge of his nose, which makes him think that I’m looking at him – a sales tactic I have learnt from him – and I think of him as that twenty-year-old man who moved in next door with his mother and his buckets, and complicated everything.
‘What would you have done, Selwyn? Would you have been able to love her?’
He closes his eyes. I know he understands the question. I know how much it asks of him.
I think about the box, caught under the lorry’s wheel and how it should be the end of everything. No father. No claim. No past lives to remind us of what we did and who we once were. ‘Getting on that boat w
ith Anthony was the only way I could see of getting out. I had no talent. No looks. A mother who was scared of her own shadow. I was factory fodder. Pigswill. A butcher’s girl. Meg would take me to market and I’d look at the cows in their pens and think, that’s my life. Except it’s not even that because no one looks twice at me.’
‘I was right there in front of you!’ he shouts.
‘No, you weren’t,’ I say quietly. ‘You were behind your mother’s back.’
Now he does get up from the table.
‘Where are you going?’
But he doesn’t tell me. And when we get back to the roadside, the box has completely gone.
‘THE TROUBLE WITH CHILDREN is that you want them to have everything you haven’t,’ I shout above the traffic. ‘You want them to do everything you don’t, be everything you’re not. The problem with my everything is that it’s been nothing. And the trouble with Mia is that she is me. She only knows how to keep going. And that’s what you have to do to get anywhere. You have to keep going. Selwyn. Please. Stop!’
He’s marching just feet ahead of me. We’re marching on the grass verge away from the caravan, the traffic floundering towards us like it doesn’t expect two people to be arguing in its path.
This is no place for an argument, but we are arguing all the same.
‘But you didn’t have to keep going,’ he is shouting back at me. ‘I would’ve looked after you. Both of you. I wanted to look after you.’
‘And I didn’t want to be looked after!’ I cry over the traffic. ‘You look after, or you’re looked after, and when you’re looked after that’s the end of it. Finished. Don’t you see? I wanted the world!’
He pulls me into the hedgerow as a lorry practically scalps us. ‘Goddamn you, Ginny!’ he shouts in my face, as he holds on to me tight. ‘I would’ve given you the world!’
‘You would’ve kept me, Selwyn. Right there. In Joiners Square. Like you keep me now. In a box. Going nowhere.’ I am yelling, trying to free myself from his grip. ‘Look at you,’ I flip my hand on his shoulder. ‘Look at what’s happened to you! You’re not even a hundred miles away from your own backyard going to where you came from, and you are completely lost!’
‘You have never gone anywhere either!’ he shouts. ‘You’re panicking at every bloody road sign we pass. I am trying to make us a new life. A right life. One that is going somewhere.’
‘But it’s not your place to put things right,’ I shout back. ‘My wrongs are not yours. Your wrongs are not mine. And I know there was a dream. Of me. Of money. Whatever else it was that made you agree to that stupid bloody gamble with what little you had when it wasn’t needed, Selwyn. I didn’t want it.’
He grabs on to me again and tighter. ‘I did it for you,’ he says, digging in his fingernails. ‘To keep you. For us.’
I pull away from him. He knows what he’s said – his body pulses with the words – but I remind him anyway. ‘There it is,’ I say, calmly. ‘There it is.’
‘There is what, Ginny?’ he snaps. ‘There is what?’
But I cannot say it again.
When we get back to the caravan, him now behind me, there is something else missing. The F has now gone. For our pond lie and beyond, it says. I point it out to Selwyn.
‘We’ve lost the F from our life,’ I say, tracing my fingertips over the empty space. ‘Or we’ve been found out.’
He looks at me.
I look at him.
He said.
She said.
Is there really anything more we should say?
‘Ginny,’ he begins.
But my mouth on his means nothing more is said, and we start to kiss in a way we never have, as I never thought I could: our mouths glued so tightly that when we pull apart, our lips rip.
We sit side by side in the caravan as still as statues. For a moment, I wonder if Selwyn is still breathing and fight the urge to check his pulse. I have my arms folded and my legs crossed: I could not be more caught up with myself, so astonished by myself that, if I don’t say it now, it will never be said by the woman who has just performed a personal miracle. I am all in with everything lost and nothing to lose, right here as we are in this caravan, unhitched on the side of a dual carriageway, and somewhere between England and Wales where the borders start to blur.
So, I begin. And it begins where I always begin.
With Meg.
And shoes.
I never had new shoes, but shoes that were forgotten, or left behind by someone with so many shoes they’d lost count. Anthony Cadman was the thick-necked leather-skinned cobbler who came to see Meg to buy goat. An English mother. A Jamaican father. He was the most exotic thing I’d ever seen. He’d tell Meg his stories while I’d be hosing down the butcher’s yard out back. Stories she lapped up as she mangled and minced; stories I wanted to be part of. He’d say, the lifespan of a shoe depends upon the kindness to the hind. The bull was a rich animal to him, to Meg. He could twist a chicken neck with two fingers. He talked of blackness, of whiteness, and where he put his dreams in between. I didn’t want Meg to have him.
He gave me shoes. Three months he’d give a customer to come back for what he’d cobbled and fixed, and, when they didn’t come, he gave them to me. My feet didn’t grow like the rest of me. He’d say, If the shoe fits. I thought I was Queen Bee.
He used to call me a fidget. He said I couldn’t sit still. ‘The world won’t be big enough for you,’ he said. ‘Yet you’ll race through it without looking at it at all.’
He wore a three-piece suit with a tie and a leather apron, and you’ll remember his bowler hat, won’t you? With the feather. So smart it was arrogant. He took it out and stroked me with it as if he’d picked me out from the crowd. ‘Well, ain’t that a thing. I’ve turned you into ice,’ he’d said.
I told him I was older. He said I couldn’t be. Meg had told him I was sixteen. I reminded him my mother was still older than me. The younger the calf; mutton dressed as lamb. God, I served myself up on a plate! And Meg forgets things, I’d said. Makes stuff up when her life isn’t exciting enough. Ask the Bluebird. She’ll tell you the truth. He’d said, ‘Who?’ So, I told him, and he started to laugh. We both laughed. ‘That’s actually very sad,’ he’d said. ‘Don’t you think?’
I’d seen his ticket. Pinned up on the noticeboard behind the spanners and the drill. He said that ticket was glued on his soul and he was going no matter what. I asked him how much it would cost me to go with him. He said, ‘I only want to take my wife.’ I thought he meant me.
I remember the telephone ringing all the time we were upstairs. Someone was trying to get hold of him. I often wonder who she was. I found out that there was a girl – much older than me, and wearing his engagement ring; Anthony has since told all this to Mia – but she failed to turn up at the dock.
He said he’d stopped because he wanted to stop. It wasn’t right. I was beautiful. But it wasn’t right. But like someone who has witnessed a head-on collision of two cars travelling at the same speed. You don’t know whose fault it was.
I felt nothing when it was happening. There was something happening to him that wasn’t happening to me. I told myself I was in love, this is love, and tried, ever so hard, to unlock myself, to feel what you were supposed to feel – the fireworks, the light switch, the stars – I thought hammer and saw, isn’t that how this works? But all I felt was a dead weight. I don’t even think he looked at me once. Then he stopped and covered himself with a bedsheet and started to sob. Told me to go away. To get out.
I still went back to him, with my suitcase, and he wasn’t there. I told myself it was me, because of me, because of what I didn’t feel – like a pair of those left-behind shoes, worn only once and never broken in, I didn’t fit him. I was so angry, so revolted, so empty, so rubbished. That suitcase I dragged back home was solid with rage, a monstrous rage, and I hid it back under the bed and started to panic. This can’t be it. This cannot be it! This world won’t be big enough for me! I
ran back outside and there was your mother scrubbing the step. She looked up at me and she smiled. For the first time ever, she’d smiled at me – a mother’s smile, a proud one – and she ordered me to go to you. ‘He’s upstairs if you want him.’ It’s exactly what she said to me. He’s upstairs if you want him. Because that’s as far as I needed to go, up the stairs and right under my nose; when I wanted to find you hundreds of miles away in a somewhere else that was so far off I couldn’t picture it. Not next door where I felt it all – heat surges, electricity, firework after firework, and then this voice. I remember thinking, is Meg in the room? The Bluebird? Who is telling me that everything will just be as it was? And you asked me to marry you, remember? Straight after. You called me Imogen Dare, and said, marry me. And I wanted to tell you what I’d just done was not because I wanted you, but because I wanted to hurt him. Except it was the other way around, wasn’t it? The devastation of three lives because of me. And I knew you’d never forgive me.
‘The thing is,’ I come to end. ‘When all is said and done. I just wanted to see the world.’
At this, Selwyn stands up so assertively I wonder if he’s cracked vertebrae doing so.
‘Then we go no further until me and you work out exactly what it is you want now,’ he says, and he starts opening all the cupboard doors. I sigh loudly and tell him that I just need a bath. He frowns and tells me to look again so we might unhitch ourselves from what it is that is weighing us down. I remind him that a lot of what I’m looking at is his, not mine.
‘It’s mostly your stuff,’ I say, then add, because I’m feeling peevish, ‘Your stolen stuff.’
He reminds me that that stuff is keeping us on the road.
‘It’s just driven us off the road,’ I point out.
‘And you are driving us apart!’ he shouts.
I rub at my face hard. ‘You’ve just asked me to tell you, so I told you,’ I say. ‘I know you don’t like what you’ve heard, but you wanted to hear it and I can’t tell it any other way. But what is really driving us apart is being attached to this fucking caravan and you not telling me where we’re going with it.’