Pondweed

by Lisa Blower

  ‘And what’s that supposed to mean?’ I shout. ‘You think Meg would make it all up?’

  ‘Who was the Bluebird, Ginny?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Who was she, really?’

  I bite my tongue and taste blood. ‘Don’t do this, Selwyn. It’s not what you do.’

  ‘But who was she?’ he repeats.

  I look over my shoulder to see if anyone can hear us.

  ‘Who was she?’

  I shake my head at him. Something is burning down my cheeks. ‘You have no idea what loneliness can do to a woman,’ I begin.

  ‘But I know what the death of a child can do,’ he says slowly. ‘And then there’s the birth of a child too.’

  He reaches for me from his deckchair, like I’m a long way away and possibly in a hole, but I move further away so he can’t touch me. He tells me we were neighbours, don’t forget, and those hope-thin walls of Joiners Square were stuck together with Sellotape. ‘I could count your hiccups,’ he reminds me. ‘I could hear every word said.’ And he holds up two fingers. ‘Two voices, Ginny,’ he reminds me. ‘Two voices, never three.’

  I wipe my nose against my jumper sleeve and leave a line that glistens against the fire.

  ‘I don’t want to do this,’ I mutter. ‘I don’t know it all and I don’t want to anyway.’

  He grabs my hand and his skin welds into mine. He tells me he is here. Right here and going nowhere.

  ‘Do you hear me?’ he says. ‘I am not going anywhere.’

  I pull away from his hand and stand up. I don’t know why. I don’t need to perform. I look down at my new walking boots. Some other woman’s shoes, some other woman’s life. Living in squares and going around in circles. I pace back and forth and wonder where to stop, to start. ‘I played along,’ I tell him in a stagnant voice. ‘How could I not play along when I’d go on and on about family and where were they all and why didn’t we have any? And one day she said to me, “There are birds in the trees and rabbits in the burrows but not only the foxes leave their dens at night. You are my family now.”’

  I pause. I don’t know why.

  ‘She was only manly because she’d had to be manly. I was womanly because she didn’t want me to be manly. Then we both became women, and almost at the same time, and one of us grew up and the other invented an imaginary friend. What did it matter? It filled all the emptiness until I imagined it wearing clothes and telling me things too.’ Again, I pause, as if I’m telling it all in chapters and I’m waiting for him to catch up. ‘Look. Boys got paid to work the farm. Girls stayed at home until they were distractions to farmhands. Those were your laws of the countryside, and they needed the money. They were scratching in the soil. So, they cut her hair and dressed her otherwise. Desperate times. Isn’t that what Linda said? She spent the rest of her life peeling away at that country skin. I spent the rest of my life hardening mine.’ I pause again, drink more wine. ‘You pretty much know the rest of it from there.’

  I think of the three faces in the photograph, two uncles I never knew. I can hear an owl. Something scuttling. Nature is always more scared of us, Meg used to say. And it should be, because we are vile creatures. We only know how to torment. I look over at Selwyn who is looking at me without blinking.

  ‘I know where Grogan took you that day back in Loggerheads. I know that Mucklestone pond. Meg used to talk about it. It’s full of the unbaptised.’

  He starts shaking his head at me. His face burns against the fire and he rubs his whiskered chin with the heel of his hand. ‘Are you telling me what I think you’re telling me?’ he asks.

  I look away and into the night which is closer than I have ever felt it.

  ‘She never told me a thing about who he was,’ I carry on. ‘I suspect he was some farmhand or other making promises he couldn’t keep. I learnt not to ask in the end. All she’d say was that I had his nose and that her mother gave her enough bus fare for her to leave and find a new life for her and me.’

  ‘But you didn’t have to run away,’ he says. ‘Times were different. And I didn’t want you to run away.’

  My face feels clotted in false smiles. ‘I didn’t run,’ I say. ‘And times were not that different. Meg could’ve brought me up in Loggerheads. I could’ve brought up Mia in Joiners Square, but both of us knew we had to find something that was just that bit better, you know? It would’ve broken Meg’s heart to watch history repeating. And she left me money, don’t forget. Just as her mother gave her money. Two options. Run or get rid. It was the shame I couldn’t deal with, yet shame is in our blood.’

  He is still shaking his head at me, but if ever there were a truth it is that. And if folk didn’t think it a shame – those poor young things that look born together, not seventeen years apart – because to cart about that much shame is surely why she wore so much black – then it was a crying shame that no man ever found it in his heart to parcel us up for keeps.

  ‘You keep her shoes, don’t you?’ Selwyn asks. ‘Those black boots, at the bottom of the wardrobe that you don’t even wear.’

  ‘Unless you walk a mile in another woman’s shoes, how are you ever supposed to know where she’s been?’ I stretch out my arms as if it’s the first time I’ve been able to do so and feel my backbone rise like bread. ‘I don’t try and understand the past, and, to be perfectly honest, leave it be. It’s of no use to me. But I opened the door one day and there they were. Just sat there on the doormat as if asking to be let in. Next thing I knew, Marge was telling me she’d died. There is no more mystery to them than that.’

  We watch the fire.

  ‘Do you miss her?’ he asks.

  ‘Yes, I do. But I mourned her many years ago. Now, I want to let her rest.’

  ‘I used to hear her shouting,’ he presses on. ‘Really yelling at herself. Smashing things up.’

  ‘The Bluebird could give as good as she got,’ I smiled. ‘She kept my mother sane.’

  ‘And yet it didn’t keep you,’ he murmurs. ‘That’s the saddest part.’

  ‘Well, I dragged the past back in, didn’t I? Made the big mistake when she’d been clever enough to avoid the pond.’

  ‘Did she tell you that?’

  ‘She didn’t have to.’

  He pours me more wine and offers me a smoke. I take both and ask him again about the pond back at the Corbet Hall. What did he think he would find there?

  ‘Answers,’ he says quickly. ‘I’m only ever looking for answers to why people suddenly give up.’

  I cough a little on the cigarette. ‘It’s why I didn’t want that photograph,’ I start up again. ‘Meg hated that part of her life. It was so primitive. You’d hardly believe it. She couldn’t wait to get out. Blot it out. Forget it ever happened. Though, I do sometimes wonder if she forced me to happen, you know?’

  ‘And did you blot me out?’ he asks. ‘Is that what you did with me while bringing up your daughter alone?’

  I blow a little more smoke into the night air and then spend a long time rubbing at my face, wondering how he got me talking like this. Salesmen only ever hit targets when you’re out of arrows and you need to buy some more, and my body has taken enough arrows over the years. The scars they leave behind just won’t heal.

  ‘Look, Selwyn,’ I begin, ‘I come from dirt-poor people who wanted that little bit more. That is all. Just as you and Louis thought you could have that little bit more.’ I pause to collect my thoughts. ‘Here’s how I see it. Some people can’t get enough of life. Some people live in the wrong life. Some don’t make the most of it, and some get a second chance at it, and that’s why this is about us, Selwyn, having a life now. Not the one we should’ve had, but the one we’re having here, in the car, by the church, then in this field in Wales.’ I pause again, bite my lip, keep on going because I have to say this. ‘We can’t just be together based on two versions of a past that don’t fit. You saw things one way, I saw them as another, but neither of them exists any more. I don’t need answers and photograp
hs, or to be driven back into a past I don’t belong in – history is not happening now – but I can’t be what you’ve been imagining me to be. My version of love is different to that.’

  The look he gives me now is as if he’s found those keys, but he doesn’t want to go inside in case he doesn’t recognise it and someone else is sitting in his armchair. He looks over my shoulders, as if expecting something to take shape – the ghost of all our losses maybe, mating hares, perhaps his sister’s smile; Meg.

  He says, ‘The problem with regrets, Ginny, is that they arrive in the future with you. It’s why you don’t have to forget the past in order to forgive it.’

  ‘And Meg just had an imaginary friend,’ I finish. ‘Which is no different from what you’ve been doing when you lost a sister and tried to replace her with me. But you must let them both rest, Selwyn. Let them rest in the peace that they found.’

  I throw my cigarette into the fire and watch the little spark of light it makes.

  ‘You must do the same with the Corbet Hall,’ I say. ‘That place needs to rest. Now, where are we sleeping tonight if we’re still airing the caravan?’

  He tells me, in the car. I can have the back seat. There’s plenty of blankets. I tell him that the woman I met in the showers said it was going to rain. ‘Like thunder down with rain.’

  He tells me to open that second bottle of wine. ‘Conk us out,’ he says. ‘Not feel the cold.’

  He hands me the bottle and, as I take it from him, I start to look at him, like really look at him, look so hard into him that I start to sway. My limbs hang heavy, lived-in and tired, they’ve been holding on to the wrong things, and the boots on my feet are like balloons of air. I am lifting, looking down on him, this man who claims to love me much better than I love him, and I’ve been sloppy, I think. Missing things, important things, driving by, letting him snoop. This is what drowning must feel like, I think, as my grip on the bottle tightens; this must be how the pondweed takes hold. We have said it all and there’s still more to be said. You have things to say, old man, but I don’t want to say any more. Because it’s not the answers from his sister that he’s been looking for. It’s the answers from me. This journey – it’s all been about me. And thirty thousand pounds worth of pennies drop from the sky.

  The Eleventh Day

  ‘Every organism, in time, dies.’

  ~ The Great Necessity of Ponds

  by Selwyn Robby

  MEASURING CARP TURNS OUT to be a long-winded affair that involves something called a spreader net to catch them and then a tub of silt water that mesmerises them still. Apparently, Gavan tells me, you don’t need to do either of these things, but that’s why he wanted Selwyn to measure his carp. ‘He doesn’t just do things right,’ Gavan whispers in my ear, ‘he does them right by the carp. See how compliant they are?’

  I watch as Selwyn measures from snout to the fork in the tail, before rubbing the fish moist and throwing them back. He then shouts out numbers to Gavan, a little like a dentist names your teeth. At one point, Gavan punches the air, as if he’s the champion, and I wonder if I should go over and renegotiate the terms, when a seventy-one-year-old man in body-length waders is doing all the hard work. Then I remember that Selwyn and I are not speaking and are unlikely to do so ever again.

  I walk the edges of the pond wearing my new walking boots in. At one point, I am asked to make tea by Selwyn, who is still speaking to me, and which I grumble at silently, because making tea in the open air takes forever and I am making a point of watching all this when all too often my back has been turned and next thing Selwyn turns up grinning from a sale and we are heading somewhere else because of that sale. I grind my new walking boots into the earth beneath me and feel planted. I wonder what it’s like to live here – right here, in the middle of nowhere, and scratching out a life from the soil – what goes around really does come around – but then Gavan looks up from his notepad and shouts up that there’s weather coming in and we should hurry up because carp will sink to the bottom in hard rain, like trout. I look up at the sky. It’s bleak.

  Selwyn hangs back over the tub again. For a long time, nobody breathes a word. I list all the things I hate about him in my head and have the urge to print them all on a leaflet and hand them out to my fellow campers. Tea. He makes mugs of tea he never drinks and leaves them just where I’m likely to kick them over. Jam jars. They’re everywhere. On the windowsills. On the radiators, fermenting. In the airing cupboard, drying out. In the oven, sterilising. He leaves toast crumbs on the butter. Dries his trousers by weighting them to the mantlepiece in front of the fire with two rocks. He sleeps with his eyes open. He does that thing where he pinches his nostrils together and sniffs. He fibs. Constantly. And then there’s the illegal fish tanks and a drowned sister, a rundown stately home, suddenly speaking Welsh, and measuring bloody carp. And don’t even get me started on what I think about the fucking great necessity of ponds.

  And then children, out of nowhere, with those fishing nets you buy at seasides, in blue and red, and a sinking feeling because now we must mind our language and remember our manners, except the children are squabbling about who has blue and who has red.

  ‘I chose red,’ says the one boy to the other boy, his cheeks like lamb chops, and he tugs on it, wanting it back.

  The other boy, slightly taller, far wirier, clings on to the red one and pushes him. ‘You always have blue,’ he insists. ‘You chose blue.’

  And though he’s smaller by an inch, the younger boy stands his ground, and jostles him back. ‘I changed my mind,’ he shouts. ‘I’m allowed to change my mind. And you said. You said!’

  Though what’s been said never gets said and all that is said is that he must stick with his choice.

  ‘It’s just a colour,’ says the taller one, the bigger boy. ‘And you’re spoiling things again.’

  I start to smile. I want to laugh. This tug-o-war of fishing nets between brothers – the sort of chums who might share kidneys – and yes, one’s red and one’s blue, but they’re exactly the same. Exactly the same. And both, if they’re lucky, will catch the same fish.

  A little more pushing and shoving and soon the nets are thrown aside for body blows, but Selwyn is between them to stop it getting to bloodied noses – he’d like to take a good look at these fishing nets, he wants to see the difference, he’s been fishing all his life – and the boys stop to look up at him as if he is someone who reigns in their kingdom. Selwyn takes the red net in his left hand and the blue in his right and, no, he says, no difference at all, but let me show you something you might like to see.

  He takes them to the edge of the pond. He bends down and does what I have seen him do a thousand times – in puddles, in ponds, in coffee jars – and makes a whirlpool with his thumb. And then the boys gasp because there, see? Only a baby carp, but curious all the same, and see how the circles make bubbles which make oxygen? And there’s another one. And another. And if you’re lucky, perhaps a diving beetle. On his haunches now, showing them what his father showed him, and he tickles the top of the water with his fingertips until he finds a water spider clinging to his thumb. It glistens. It looks made of glass. Further up the bank and Gavan tots up carp worth on his clipboard and smirks.

  Money isn’t everything. Wanting to live and with someone you love is.

  I go back to where the caravan is parked and start to pack.

  They walk towards me side by side like father and son, thick as thieves. Gavan acknowledges me with a nod and a lazy smile. Selwyn uses the words ‘Plan B’, there is always a Plan B, as there’s always fish in the pond, and I can see that the sprites in his eyes have reappeared.

  He says, ‘Pretty buoyant, by all accounts,’ and looks at me for approval.

  I look away. I don’t really care.

  He lights a roll-up and rolls down his waders. Gavan pulls cigarettes from his jacket pocket. He shares Selwyn’s match. He says something about money by the end of the month. He doesn’t say how much. S
elwyn doesn’t ask. I keep quiet and wear sunglasses.

  They sit in the deckchairs and talk about the carp again. In measurements. In volume. In their transportation to Anglesey, and as if they are politicians. They use words like strident, liberal, stump and flip-flopper. Selwyn tells Gavan about the fish tank in the caravan. He must transport them kindly, he says. Their worth can decrease by the minute and to remember what he said about silt packing. Gavan says, ‘Fucking gimmicks drive me mad,’ and he’ll get hold of an oxygenated tank for an overnight trip.

  ‘Less caravans holding you up,’ he says.

  He gives our caravan a small kick and asks Selwyn if he wants Stuart Fury to price her up. Selwyn checks his watch and reminds Gavan he has a train to catch. He looks over at me. Tells me that Gavan is heading back into Shrewsbury if I want to go with him. He’ll show me the bus station where I can take a bus back to Hanley. He fetches his wallet out of his back pocket and begins counting twenty-pound notes. As he does, he tells Gavan that he’s never trusted Stuart Fury, in all the years, and he’s not going to start trusting him now.

  ‘Just the carp,’ he instructs. ‘You take no less, and don’t be greedy.’

  They shake hands then both look at me like I’m part of the economics. Selwyn even puts on his battered reading glasses as if he needs to get a closer look.

  I stare down at the bag I have just packed in temper and left idling by the caravan step. I realise that Selwyn’s not offering me any keys and that I don’t have my house keys, because in the rush I didn’t think about how to get back in the house. I point to the bag and say, ‘There’s nothing actually in there, do you know that? You’ve hocked it all.’

  ‘Ginny,’ he says, ‘emptying boxes is what being a couple is all about.’

  There’s a long and awkward pause, dented only by Gavan pulling himself out of the deckchair and muttering something about it being nice to meet me. He does not mention the train back to Shrewsbury as he walks away. Something tells me he already knows that he’ll be travelling alone. Though he’s kind enough to bend down and fiddle with his bootlaces, just in case I change my mind.