Pondweed

by Lisa Blower

  Selwyn pulls the empty deckchair closer to him, and says, ‘Come on, Ginny. Sit down.’

  I look at the empty deckchair and think of Meg. Can’t you see someone is sitting there? Not so much an imaginary friend as a second stab at life. I sit down anyway, and feel as if I’m bundled up on her knee. I can smell lamb fat. She’s baking one of her plain cakes, rustled up with whatever she’s found in the larder, and her arms are dusted with flour. The kitchen’s a mess, but she needs a sit down and she starts to say things about her own mother – my grandmother – who made things and cooked things and cleaned things and worked hard at things and kept all that she’d made in one of her bed socks which she gave to me and you. It’s where our height comes from, Imogen. Your two left feet. Our strength. We called her the lighthouse. She saw everything coming and stopped it. Meg’s father was another story bare in plot. He came into the room and the children were made to leave. She knew him only through the door cracks and his footsteps as he limped from room to room, humming and hunched. When I look at her face, it is streaked. She’s doing her best, she would tell me. But it’s just not enough.

  It’s right when they say that you don’t know your own mind. My mother had an imaginary friend. I have her ghost.

  We pass some time watching a family dismantle their tent. A holiday over. The kids already waiting in the car wanting to go home. Pegs pulled out of the earth. The canvas goes limp and lies down on the grass. Everything back in boxes. A binbag of damp washing. Postcards not sent. Home is where the heart is, and the plasma-screen TV.

  ‘Marry me,’ Selwyn suddenly says.

  I shake my head at him. ‘It isn’t the answer, Selwyn.’ I haul myself out of the deckchair.

  He says it again, ‘Marry me.’

  I start walking away from him. ‘You got me in the car under false pretences then lied, lied, lied!’

  This time he shouts it, ‘Marry me!’

  I quicken my step. He catches up with me. ‘Marry me. Stop begrudging us a life together.’

  I swing around to face him and he puts his hands on my shoulders as if I’m to carry his world with mine. ‘Marry me,’ he says again.

  The boots on my feet are giving me blisters. I realise they won’t take me as far as I want to go and that I don’t want to go backwards any more. Selwyn has bandages in the caravan. A salt-bath. He’ll think if I walk away from him it’ll be just another stunt. But he loves me under false pretences, thinks me someone I am not. The bandages he has will not be big enough to patch us up. Not this time. And then I realise I am buried within his arms and I don’t want him to let me go.

  I SIT. TO MY left, a great blanket of dark sea, black and troubled, holding off an army of rainclouds. To my right, two old dears deliberately trying to get Selwyn’s attention by talking about their dead husbands.

  Selwyn sits in front of me, swapping his knife and fork around, looking as if he’s dislocated something – he’s wincing and rubbing at his left shoulder, blaming the unhinging of the caravan from the car on the only gradient in the car park, where he literally seemed to hold it from running away with his shoulder blades. Another F has also dropped off. Or our pond lie and beyond, it now says. It makes me think I had a choice all along.

  Selwyn is yet to convince me that he doesn’t know Audrey White who owns this B&B on Llandudno’s seafront, when that’s most definitely not a twitch in her eye but the suggestive wink of a woman who’s not yet done. She’s also one of those snippy sorts who thinks me looking at her shoes is me pointing out her skirting boards are laced with cat hairs and that there’s hoofmarks on her rugs. But I won’t complain when we seem to be finally getting somewhere, and we’ve been given a room with a sea view and a teapot, and one also big enough for us to spend the afternoon on opposite sides: Selwyn at the table by the window doing the sums, me sprawled on the bed with the map, tracing how we got from A to B and all the detours in between.

  I say, ‘As the crow flies, we have barely gone a handspan.’

  He says, ‘My grandfather would walk it. Every Sunday night. Wrexham to Etruria. For work. What we’ll be doing at this rate.’

  He doesn’t look as if he’s joking. But he is looking down at my walking boots all the same.

  ‘This buyer then, on Anglesey,’ I say, looking at my reflection upside-down in a spoon as we sit for dinner. ‘You know it’s famous for its puffins, mussels and stone circles?’ I pass a leaflet across the table, showcasing a caravan site called Red Wharf Bay, that I’ve found in the B&B’s reception. ‘This has five gold stars,’ I say. ‘And a laundrette. Perhaps it’s my turn to find some work. Launder it all back to normal.’ I give a small laugh.

  He tells me we’ll be in and out. And perhaps not coming back out with the caravan. More circles and these ones are made of stone.

  ‘We’re really selling it then?’

  He shrugs and grimaces with a pain in his right shoulder now. ‘We need the money,’ he says. ‘And it stinks. We’ll never get rid of the smell.’

  I think of the man with savage eyebrows at the trade fair and how Selwyn had rebuffed his offer of thirty thousand pounds. The tree had been bearing fruit back then. And Selwyn had been greedy. That little bit more, I think. We all just want that little bit more.

  ‘But you’re selling carp,’ I remind him. ‘Playing hardball. Taking twenty-five per cent.’

  ‘I can’t rely on that,’ he mutters at his cutlery. ‘Look at what happened to the fish. They made us nothing and have made the caravan worth less. It’s time to flog it. Get what we can. That was always the plan anyway.’

  ‘I thought the plan was New Zealand?’

  He shrinks from the question as if it’s hurting him. ‘I don’t think that’s going to happen now, do you?’

  ‘It depends on whether you want to go or not,’ I fire back, but he looks up at me as if he really can’t be bothered any more; like he and I were never meant to know this much about each other when he’d thought himself made of the same stones he sets the past in.

  We have no other company in the B&B’s restaurant, apart from the two old dears clucking about the cheap margarine for their bread rolls, and it’s barely six-foot across, if not the same long. The other three tables feel as if they’ve been sat empty since 1974.

  It isn’t a very interesting place. Pink walls. Pictures of flowers. Over-pressed tablecloths. It doesn’t feel filled with stories of customers old and new, but instead makes me think about what I might look like as I get older, and how soon that will be.

  Age, the one that thing that outwits us every time.

  I sink back into my chair and look out to sea again. I thought I was going to rush at it, but I just felt disappointed. And that whatever lurked beneath its waves would eat me alive. There are people on the beach skimming stones, walking dogs. I wonder for when Selwyn’s spreadsheets stopped working out; if that convex wing mirror really did give him a better view, or blinkered it. I tell him it’s no good losing his nerve right when I’ve found mine and I’m not mustard keen on going back to the monotony of making those ends meet when they never do, but here’s Audrey with our food. She places Selwyn’s plate in front of him first. A lamb rack with mash and red cabbage, and then steak for me – a medium-rare sirloin, that looks from the hind of a Welsh bull – that fills the plate, with chips she’s crinkled herself. And I have a sudden image of Selwyn being here before – the way Audrey looks at him, and the way he looks at her, even the way they curve their mouths is the same, and I find I’m scrutinising his collars and cuffs for lipstick marks, imagining his slippers on her hearth. He was very specific about us coming here, to Llandudno, though palmed it off as the good night’s sleep we didn’t have in the car last night. He’d also left the room to call Stuart Fury ‘to make a meet’ as he called it, when there is a phone in our room. And I have not said yes, but perhaps, possibly, let’s just see.

  But then Audrey settles it by putting the tray under her arm and asking us what sauces we might like. She has ketchup
, French and English mustard, and horseradish, which she makes herself, and there was a guest last week who took his chips all fancy with garlic mayonnaise, or perhaps you’d like mint sauce to go with your lamb? And I realise that it’s her job to pretend to know us – this hospitality, this desire to please – just as it was my job at the B&B to welcome everyone as if they’d just returned from war. But Selwyn has made me doubt and jump to conclusions, to fear the worst and feel weighted down with suspicion – Hugh and Maisie, Walter Judd, Rachael, Gavan, and Ilma Cheadle – so what leaves my mouth without thinking is – Sioned.

  ‘Sorry,’ Audrey says, looking disheartened. ‘I don’t think we have that one.’

  Selwyn glares at me from across the table. He waits for Audrey to leave the room to find him mint sauce, before he asks, ‘Was that necessary?’

  ‘Very much so,’ I reply, happy to see blood ooze out of my steak. ‘We’re knee-deep in Wales and I want to be one step ahead of you from now on.’ The knife slices into my meat as if it were butter. This is certainly a woman who knows her meat. ‘Shall we have wine?’

  Selwyn shakes his head. ‘We need to start being careful,’ he says. ‘I want a clear head to recalculate.’

  Audrey returns with his mint sauce. I tell myself that the tables haven’t turned and times aren’t that different, after all. Yet he is sparing with the mint sauce. He usually dollops.

  The Twelfth Day

  ‘There is always a space between two parts, however shallow the water, for the reeds to bloom.’

  ~ The Great Necessity of Ponds

  by Selwyn Robby

  I CALL MY DAUGHTER after breakfast, try to picture her pretty tanned face strained with relief. ‘Christ, Mother,’ she says angrily. ‘I’ve been calling and calling. Where the hell have you been? I’ve been worried sick!’ And I tell her. How we got here from there and those places in between. But there is no reply – the phone rings and rings – and her face fades. The distance between us is growing. I can no longer picture where she is, and yet she is my world.

  I try the number again. As I do, I scold myself for not sending her postcards, from every place and every stop with airmail stamps. Where to next? The last postcard would read. Or perhaps, We are getting there, slowly, and almost on our way. I wonder if she has emailed me, if she has been calling my mobile and leaving messages. We talk all the time, and yet don’t talk at all, and perhaps our silence, these past few days, has done us both good, because now I really do have things I want to say.

  Selwyn comes in the front door with oiled hands, blackrimmed fingernails and dark circles under his eyes. He’s been reattaching the caravan to the car again and it’s clearly getting harder every time. He tells me that he wants to go up Snowdon. ‘We can head into Llanberis off the A55. It’s on the way to Anglesey. Of a fashion,’ he says. ‘Can’t come all this way and not go up Snowdon.’ Besides, Stuart Fury’s suggesting a six o’clock meet somewhere outside of Beaumaris. I say fine, and wonder if this is what being a wife is really like.

  Here’s another thing I did not know: I did not know there was a train going up Snowdon. Selwyn didn’t know that either. The train goes up and the train comes back down. It has been doing this since 1896. There is a café up there, too, right on the summit. We both look up at the mountains in front of us – thrust into the air by volcanic action, so the information booklet says, this is an experience above everything else – and then at the Mountain Goat already whinnying steam. We both appear so shocked at this level of industrial revolution that the man inside the kiosk starts laughing.

  ‘You really didn’t know?’ he chuckles. His cheeks are very round and sunburnt. ‘Where on earth have you two been?’

  We look at each other. Where on earth have we been?

  What I have realised is that it is completely true that we do spend around fourteen days of our life lost. That when you add up all the times you take a wrong turn, or find yourself somewhere you don’t want to be, it really does equate to a fortnight of essentially being missing. And then you see something familiar, something you recognise, something that gets you back on track.

  We sit aside of one another in the train carriage on hard seats, our thighs touching, and Selwyn lets me sit by the open window so I don’t miss anything.

  ‘It’s important for you to see everything,’ he says, and I wonder what this salesman will sell me now, and realise how much I want it.

  We start to move. There are people waving to us as if we’re off on some big exploration with just our fingers crossed, and it’s touch-and-go that we’ll make it back in one piece. A little girl on the platform – it’s always a little girl isn’t it? The pigtails, the pout, the polka-dot dress, the pinching of her little brother’s arm so she can sit further forward on the bench and see it all first – I ready myself for her smile, her poignant wave, or thumbs-up, how I will look at her and think of me, of Meg, of her Bluebird and how it’s all caught up with me, but she sticks her tongue out and blows a raspberry.

  Yes, I think. That’s exactly what I would’ve done.

  There’s a man telling us things as we go up. His voice drifts in and out with a loose connection on the microphone, and I listen to his scree facts, agree with the subdued browns of the rock. I look for the rare Snowdon lily and its fossilised cousins as you do for a four-leaf clover, and raise my eyebrows when he says that this was Edmund Hillary’s training ground for Everest, and that we’ll be three and a half thousand feet above sea level when we summit – which is what he keeps saying, like the experience will heal us – when we summit. I look at Selwyn and realise that he’s fulfilling a dream.

  The man on the microphone now points out where King Arthur lies, under a cairn of stones, and here’s where his knights in full armour lie beneath him.

  I say, ‘That man has more burial chambers than Tutankhamun.’

  Selwyn mutters something about little pieces scattered everywhere, and I wonder if, when we do summit, he’s going to tell me something else – that we’re going to have that conversation about what we want when we really do finally depart. Or arrive.

  ‘I don’t have a bloody camera,’ Selwyn says, and there is definitely something about this train, the way it chugs and steams, this old-fashioned carriage full of those too old, too weak, too idle to make it, this journey, up Snowdon that makes me wish I had taken that photograph from Linda in Loggerheads, when I have no photographs, not a one, and that everything I remember is fading. I look at Selwyn aside of me who is transfixed: his right eye and his left eye snapping every shot they can – photographs we should be pinning to the fridge.

  The man on the microphone talks about the slate. There’s a lot of it. It’s been mined for every roof, but it should be treated like a precious stone, because we can’t keep taking it.

  ‘There’s something I need to tell you,’ I say to Selwyn. ‘It’s one last thing. When something happened.’

  And we are so close right now, so very close to understanding why we came together and have come back together, that I cannot tell him. I should tell him. There cannot be any more boxes.

  ‘Selwyn,’ I begin. ‘There was this time, a week ago, no, two weeks ago, when I went to see Louis.’

  He shushes me. ‘Don’t talk,’ he says. ‘Just look.’

  ‘But this thing happened that’d already happened.’

  And he shushes me again. ‘Then leave it on the mountain,’ he says. ‘Don’t take it up with you and don’t bring it back down with us.’

  But I’m reliving it anyway and opening the cast-iron gate to the Toogood Aquatics yard, which is not padlocked, as it should be at this time of night, when I told Selwyn I was somewhere else – in my mackintosh and headscarf, because the rain had caught me out. The gate grinds against the concrete and leaves a perfect white arc and the light in the Portakabin is dazzling. I walk towards it – perhaps he is expecting me – and I’m planning everything I’m going to say – I have written it down so many times I know it off by heart.

/>   And still this train goes up. And we are surrounded by another world, a watercolour world, a superior world, and it stretches further than my eyes can see. I strain to see it all, in case I miss something, because I have never, in the whole of my restless little life, felt this size, like I could be flicked away any minute. In the scheme of things. God, you have to wonder. Because none of this is to do with us.

  It stunk of petrol inside the Toogood Aquatics Portakabin. It took my breath away and I coughed. I had to use my headscarf as a mask. I don’t know how much Louis had been inhaling, how long he’d been filling the Portakabin with it until the fumes took him over, or if it was a passing thought he was now trying to sick up, but I could hear him retching even before I opened the door. He was conscious enough to seem surprised to see me. His eyes were the same blue as a second-class stamp, the touch of his skin like algae. He’d stopped wearing his wedding ring and had even taken down the photographs of his kids. I found three empty jerry cans and lined them up with the wine bottles, took the matches off him then called 999.

  ‘Where did you even come from?’ he’d said.

  I’m not sure he’d wanted to be saved.

  I have not dared to do anything much with my life. We imagine all these different lives we could have had, could be living, and none of them are real. Though even when a life is real, we can barely believe it. No one is that poor, I’d say to Meg. You make it sound like you were living like pigs. You make things up to tease me. And she’d look over at the Bluebird and say, We know it’s true, don’t we? And the pigs were treated like kings.