Pondweed

by Lisa Blower

  And then there are the ponds. There are ponds everywhere and as far as the eye can see. Loggerheads had a pond. Trentham Gardens had a big pond. Hodnet had many ponds and the Corbet Hall had a death pond. Now there is another pond full of carp. Which Selwyn is here to measure, and which Selwyn knew he was here to measure, and I slap down the twenty-pound note on the trestle table and tell Gavan to keep the change.

  I storm back to the caravan where I find Selwyn under the awning watching a pot of coffee brewing on a camping stove that he’s parked up on an upturned cardboard box. He’s sitting on a deckchair and I see there is one for me too. I have not seen these deckchairs before. His is red-and-white striped. Mine is green-and-white striped. Like toothpaste.

  ‘You’re measuring the carp then?’ I sneer. ‘When were you going to tell me that you are here to measure carp?’

  Selwyn’s response is to ask me if I found anything interesting in the shop. I show him the wine. He says, ‘And what about to eat?’

  ‘Bread and cheese,’ I say. ‘Gavan said you’d organised this a month ago.’

  Selwyn leans down towards the coffee pot and lifts the lid. ‘I’d forgotten I’d packed this,’ he says, sniffing the fumes, not listening to a word I’ve just said. ‘I can’t remember when I last used it.’ He leans back in his deckchair and puts his arms behind his head. ‘This is the life,’ he says, sprawling out his legs. ‘The open air. Pot of coffee. We should’ve done this years ago.’ He squints up at me as if I’m about to puncture his second wind. ‘What?’

  ‘Why didn’t you tell me that you were here to measure the carp?’

  ‘In case he didn’t want me to,’ he replies. ‘I thought he’d looked up someone else to do it.’

  ‘He says you’re playing hardball,’ I say. ‘Negotiating on his behalf.’

  ‘It’s my job.’

  ‘You sold pond supplies.’

  ‘I still sell pond supplies.’

  ‘And suddenly measure carp. Play hardball. Why have you never told me that you know how to measure carp?’

  ‘I didn’t want to jinx it,’ he says. ‘This could be a windfall. I’ll get twenty-five per cent. The size of his carp. They’re worth thousands.’

  ‘You made out to Walter that you’d never heard of this place.’ I remind him of their parting conversation this morning. ‘He drew you a map. Now you’re measuring carp.’

  He looks at me wearily. Says no, he has never been here before, but yes, Gavan did call him up a few weeks back to enquire of his availability. ‘Seriously, Ginny. It’s been no more than that.’

  ‘I thought we were on a clear road,’ I persist. ‘That’s what we said. A clear road from now on.’

  He sighs. This one could quite draw blood. ‘Ginny,’ he begins, ‘why don’t you just take a shower?’

  ‘Why didn’t you measure the caravan fish?’

  ‘I couldn’t get at them to measure them. Besides, they’re aquarium bred. Carp are freshwater. Clever buggers. They grow only to the size of the pond. That’s why you need to move them, to somewhere bigger, let them really grow.’

  ‘Is that fair?’

  ‘It’s nature.’

  ‘But you’re asking them to keep growing. It’s fish obesity. And cruel.’

  Selwyn snorts with laughter. ‘What is cruel is the way that tank was installed in the caravan.’

  ‘And you are in no place to laugh at me, Selwyn Robby, when we are in this bloody field because you lied again.’

  He holds up his hands. ‘I didn’t lie, Ginny,’ he says. ‘I didn’t know if he needed me or not. Like I said, I was late.’

  ‘Are you late for anywhere else?’

  He gestures to the field in front of us. ‘Gavan says there’s still wild boar in that field. Hares. It’s that time of year.’ He pauses, screws up his eyes.

  ‘For what?’

  ‘Mating,’ he has a very serious look on his face as he says it. I slump down into the deckchair and look across at the field. I can see neither boar nor hares, just a lot of long grass and a wood. Very small. And that’s as far as my eyes will see. It is also dropping cold.

  ‘We’re here, aren’t we?’ I say in an ugly mood. ‘This is Wales, isn’t it? This is it.’

  Selwyn reaches for my hand and squeezes it so hard that the rush of blood to my fingertips makes me faint.

  Second chances. Sometimes you just don’t want them.

  To pass the time, I watch a woman haul herself from out of a tent over there and hear the words ‘hairdryer’. I then turn my deckchair to face another way and see there are tents dotted everywhere. Some look like fallen pods from satellites, others are the size of retirement bungalows. I become preoccupied with an arriving family and watch their procedure from start to finish in a state of shock. There is so much negotiation to be had over tent poles and tent pegs, which go where and why, then out come the mallets, the curses, the bruised thumbs. Selwyn leans over to tell me that good tent erection is all in the strategy, but I’m exhausted just watching. Because once the tent is up, there’s all this adjustment going on. Tightening up this. Slackening off that. Then the car boot is opened and out drops the rest of the stuff: blow-up mattresses, sleeping bags, duvets, pillows, cookers with gas bottles, kitchen shelves, pans, then a box of food. A folding table. Four matching chairs. The mother spends much of her time hitching up Christmas tree lights and flags, then here come the candles and tealights, the burgers and umbrellas. Wine is opened. Windbreakers go up. The kids have swingball, shuttlecock, boules and scooters, but all lie abandoned in the drizzle while they shelter in the car fixed on screens. An argument breaks out. Someone has forgotten to pack the tin opener, the tomato sauce. I overhear an argument in another tent so vicious I can’t repeat it. Camping, I declare to Selwyn, is a test of human endurance, survival of the fittest. We watch the arguing family pose for photographs that they take themselves with outstretched arms. Everyone smiles for the camera. Then all those smiles fade and one child kicks the other in the shin.

  I smell sausages sizzling in a pan and wonder how awful they’ll taste. Meg used to sing hymns when making sausages. She’d do them with belly pork and stomach lining, a grind of salt and pepper. Then she would massage them. Cook them in hot oil up to their hips.

  ‘I thought you were going to take a shower?’ Selwyn says. He’s pouring coffee into an enamel mug. I see that he only has one mug aside of him. It is a one-person coffee pot. Like sausage making was a one-woman job. Like mothering. Like measuring a child’s feet. I look about me.

  ‘Where do you go and do that?’ I ask.

  Selwyn points to what looks like a tin barn.

  My heart sinks.

  ‘I’ll get my towel,’ I say.

  Outside the showers, at a pair of stainless-steel kitchen sinks, I find that the woman from the arguing family is stood aside of me. She smiles at me in the mirror, apologises for her screeching swarm, and asks me if we’ve just arrived. I tell her yes, and that I’m a little out of my depth.

  ‘Three nights and counting,’ she tells me, squeezing toothpaste on her brush. She has a very big mouth for the size of her face. ‘It’s our eldest’s birthday, this is what he wanted to do and, God, it’s a travesty. We should be on a plane.’ Still, the boys are having a ball and she supposes that’s what it’s all about and that’s why she must suck it up. She cleans her teeth, as if she’s angry with them too, and I think of how Mia would ask about holidays and I’d tell her, next year, for definite. You said that last year, she’d reply. It had never occurred to me to buy a tent.

  I dry my hair on my sodden towel and ask if there’s a hairdryer.

  She says, ‘Not in this field,’ and gives me a soapy smile. She looks as if she’s waiting for something incredible to happen, a small jot of thanks, perhaps, would do, and I don’t know what to tell her that she doesn’t already know. She asks me if we’ve come far. I realise that my answer to that question is, ‘Yes. So far that I can’t remember where we even started. I couldn’t eve
n tell you how long we’ve been away.’

  She smiles again and asks me if we’re retired. ‘You’re in that caravan, aren’t you?’ she says. ‘It looks quite the novelty.’

  ‘Yes, but it’s airing and useless. We had a small accident last night.’ I cover my fish-slapped cheeks with my hands in case they give me away.

  ‘You’ve got a roof over your head and it’s going to thunder down later,’ she says, wiping her mouth on her sleeve, and her smile is both loose and forced. ‘Appreciate the trees, isn’t that what they say?’ She looks as if she’s said something aloud for the first time. I watch her move her tongue around her mouth, as if she’s something stuck in her teeth. ‘Just wait until the owls start,’ she warns. ‘And then the foxes. It’s brutal. And they call this a quiet campsite.’

  ‘I live under a flyover,’ I say. ‘Quiet is not something I know.’

  She half-smiles, half-frowns. ‘Well, sleep well,’ she instructs, as if she’s older than me.

  ‘Is it night time, already?’ I’m confused. I wonder if I’m feverish. I place my hand on my forehead and can’t decide if I’m hot or cold.

  ‘You have been away a long time,’ she says tying her hair into a low ponytail. ‘What a lovely state to be in. That gives me hope.’

  I go to tell her that it is not lovely, not lovely at all, because at this age you just want to keep the blood pumping and your bowels moving rather than driving about Wales looking for the roots of whatever made you and trading past regrets. But she’s walking away from me like what I have to say doesn’t matter.

  I suddenly feel something twist around my legs, call it swimmer’s itch, like something is dragging me towards the edge of a cliff, because that woman was snubbing me. Just like that young girl in Loggerheads with her troubled baby. And that woman in that quirky café back in Shrewsbury, who’d conned me into buying her lunch. Giving me Coddiwomple and all that. ‘Hang on,’ I find myself shouting. ‘Just you hang on a minute.’ She turns to look at me as if I’ve attached kick me to her back.

  And perhaps I have, because that’s what I want to do. I want to kick something, the thing that’s been in my way. That teenage girl dressed in lace and wellington boots flushing the blood down the drain while her mother trimmed a pork shin and made eyes at a man that she wanted too. My mother was always in my way blocking my daylight. But then so is that teenage girl. She won’t ever go away either. And I want to kick her and beat her and hold her by the throat, because I’ve called her the names, sat her down, made her recite all the bad things that happened – number one, number two, number three, four, five. But she doesn’t listen, doesn’t want to admit to it, wears polo-necks, long sleeves, jackets that button up to the neck, and trousers, these days, always trousers, manly, and morphing into her mother. But when this woman asks me, ‘I’m sorry. Have I said something wrong?’ I bottle it and tell her that I like her boots.

  ‘They look very sturdy, even from behind,’ I say, appreciating the thick soles and heels that look as if they can stick to the slickest granite. She says they don’t quite fit and make her ankles sweat. I say, ‘I could do with a pair like that.’

  ‘What size are you?’ she asks.

  I tell her a seven. And a half.

  She bends down and starts to unlace the boots. Then she walks back over to me with the sort of smile my daughter would give her mother-in-law’s roast chicken.

  ‘They’re yours,’ she tells me, as I look down at her sodden socked feet on the bare concrete floor. ‘Then I’ve no reason to ever come out here again.’

  After she’s gone, I pluck up the courage to look at myself in the mirror in front of me. When you’ve stopped looking at yourself, you don’t really think about yourself as something to look at, and that’s what I was afraid of. But when I do look, and it’s barely for a second, I don’t see her, the one that’s been mattering, only me. And I will go on mattering no matter what.

  By the time I get back to the caravan, Selwyn has got a fire going. A few sticks, a log, in a pit. Another thing I didn’t know we had. He has got us blankets and he goes to wrap one around me, like I’m an old woman, but I tell him I need to change my clothes. I’d not taken a fresh set with me to the showers. He is still smoking, which makes that one roll-up number fourteen, if I’m not mistaken, which means he has smoked four more than yesterday and is therefore getting into the swing of it. I go into the caravan holding my nose. I realise that we have unhitched ourselves from the caravan and for a second or two, I feel weightless. Then I see that Selwyn has laid out clothes for me on the back of the cupboard door. A pair of khaki trousers, fresh underwear, a black fleece and socks. A good salesman will sell you not what you think you need but what you actually want. I open the cupboard doors to look for something I want to wear, and try and put the caravan’s smell from my mind. I see that another shelf is empty. I can’t remember what was on the shelf and so poke my head out of the door and ask Selwyn, ‘Have you sold something else while I was in the shower?’

  ‘Gavan needed a pond hydrator,’ Selwyn says. ‘The algae’s been suffocating some of the smaller carp.’

  I start to wonder if he is speaking in code, that all his sales have been code for something else, something he cannot talk about – it’s not the first time it’s crossed my mind that Selwyn is ill, but I’ve talked myself out of that notion before and talk myself out of it again. They’re only paracetamol. Just indigestion tablets. Aspirin.

  I drip-dry my hair by the fire, wearing my new walking boots, and snip at the split ends with nail scissors in the faint hope of appearing tidy. I am also watching my clothes burn. The jumper I’d been wearing since Thursday. The trousers that’d felt varnished on to my legs. I throw in the bra for good measure, and find this apt. Selwyn told me not to burn my clothes and that we would find a laundrette when we got going again, but I felt like I’d been wearing that jumper and those trousers for so long that burning them was the best I could do for them. I wonder what else I should burn – it’s very addictive – and think of everything I could’ve burnt, if I’d just had time to pack it; if I’d had my time over and been prepared. I might even have burnt my box and got rid of that too. I see Selwyn looking down at my boots.

  ‘Where are those from?’ he asks. ‘I thought you didn’t buy any shoes?’

  ‘They were a gift.’ I point at the tent that’s been zipped up. ‘She gave them to me. They fit like a glove.’

  He seems perturbed by this. ‘Does she know you have them?’

  ‘She gave them to me,’ I tell him again. ‘She didn’t want them.’

  His expression deepens and his chin locks on to his chest. ‘Why on earth would you not want boots like that?’ he asks.

  I shrug. Tell him to never look a gift horse, and lean down to hack at the bread as if cutting it with a chainsaw.

  As we eat cheese sandwiches and gnaw on stale crusts like goats, I ask Selwyn about his sister.

  ‘Don’t tell me about her death,’ I say. ‘Tell me about her life. Who she was.’

  Perhaps the wine has loosened his tongue because, at first, he talks a lot and I don’t interrupt. An older brother, a younger sister, one protects the other, as the other looks up to the other, and he never worried because she was never out of his sight. I notice that when he talks about her, he does so in context of himself, like he was never not there. He stretches out a memory of them both shelling peas at the kitchen table, and remembers the pattern on the tablecloth; how their mother would rag her hair until the ringlets were permanent. Like all mermaids, she’d been learning to play the harp. She’d been clever, and could’ve been cleverer, but books just weren’t her thing. She didn’t want to live through other people’s words but find her own stories. Then he stops talking and there is a strange quiet between us, as if the story he told isn’t quite finished and the end is yet to come. I wonder if he’s stopped talking about her to talk about me.

  He says, ‘You’re really not that interested, are you?’ and gives me the loo
k of a man who can’t find his keys and doesn’t know how to tell me. ‘There’s not a sympathetic bone in your body.’

  This gets my hackles up. I tell him that sympathy goes both ways and comes around again when someone deserves it.

  He says, ‘Then what about that photograph back in Loggerheads and how you ran away from it? You tore open your leg doing so. Given half the chance, you would’ve ripped it to shreds and burnt it.’

  ‘I didn’t want it,’ I try to explain. ‘That Linda woman should never have had it. I don’t know what she was doing with it. Meg would’ve been horrified to know it still existed.’

  ‘It’s only a picture, Ginny.’

  ‘It’s not only a picture, Selwyn.’

  ‘She was your mother!’

  ‘And she had the colour bleached out of her because she became my mother! Do you think I want a photograph that reminds me of that?’

  He frowns. He is looking at me, looking for me, looking into me, trying to find me out, as if I’m lost in that tiny little wood over there and screaming to be saved from trolls. He does that thing he does with his nostrils and sniffs.

  ‘I wish you’d stop doing that,’ I snap. ‘It’s disgusting. You’re going to burst a blood vessel.’

  He says, ‘The problem with you, Ginny, is that you’re actually made of glass.’

  ‘And glass shatters,’ I say quickly. ‘So don’t throw stones.’

  He says, ‘We’re all guilty of fabricating our lives when they don’t seem exciting enough.’