Pondweed

by Lisa Blower

  For a long time, I had my own story. That I had left Joiners Square to give my mother the chance she deserved. Selwyn would’ve been good for her. All that steadiness might have straightened her out, and she would’ve married him like a shot. They might even have had another child. She would pink like pork when she saw him. Her ears, at the tips, would go blood red and she’d stiffen with terror that she might have to speak. When she wept, which she did a lot, it was because he looked straight through her. When he came into the butchers, she’d pack out his order with offcuts she said would only go to waste. I felt like I’d stolen her shadow.

  I went in the ambulance with Louis to the City General, where they wheeled him off with an oxygen mask. He looked frightened to death. They checked me out and then I called his wife, Marion, to tell her what had happened. She’d said, ‘Well, bugger me. I never thought it would be you,’ and put the phone down. So, I called her back and said, ‘Did you not hear me? Your husband tried to burn everything down. And probably himself with it!’

  ‘Oh, yes,’ she said, with a frostbitten voice. ‘I heard.’

  She didn’t come to the hospital, though I waited for over an hour, so I couldn’t explain that whatever she thought wasn’t true, and that this was nothing to do with me. In the end, I went and sat by his bed for a bit. I didn’t like the thought of him waking up with no one there, and he’s not a bad sort – you should see the flowers he leaves on his mother’s grave – he just thinks he deserves better.

  When he did come to, all sallow-eyed, sorry and humiliated, he made me promise not to tell Selwyn any of it. ‘Not about the money, or what I did, or you.’ And I’d said, ‘What do you mean, me? I was coming to talk to you about the money. I wanted you to give it him back, not do an insurance job, or whatever it was you were thinking.’ And he’d said, ‘Then why are you sat here?’ ‘Because I found you trying to burn it all down and I wanted to make sure you were alright.’ And he’d said, ‘That’s all?’ ‘Yes,’ I’d said, ‘that’s all. And make sure you tell your wife that too.’ And I’d felt insulted – how could he be that bloody arrogant to think that I’d stopped him for me? And he started to cry. I couldn’t do anything about that, so I left.

  I walked back from the hospital. It’s all main road down to where we lived under the flyover, and then I kept on walking until I found myself back in Joiners Square. It didn’t even look like a square, all its edges had rubbed away, and I walked round and round in circles and could not for the life of me remember if that was our house or if that was our house or if it’d been demolished and that was a new house in its place: number twenty-three was not where it should be, and number twenty-four hadn’t survived either. And when you do something like go back to the house you grew up in to find it’s not there any more, it makes you question if you ever lived there at all. Though there was something about that gap in the land that felt apt. A gap that only a six-foot chump with size ten feet and a heart of twenty-four carat gold could fill. It was a time and a place and then, it wasn’t.

  I walked round the block to where Meg’s butchers used to be. It’d been a mousehole really: three customers deep and the fourth would have to wait outside. She weighed every chop, steak and ham slice in her hands – feels like six ounces, it’s a good two pounds of brisket that – and took only what folk could afford to pay. Never once did she ask for a bit more than what she had in her apron pocket. I felt like I was behind the scenes of a play that closed early because no one came to see it. I flagged down a taxi and went home.

  That was Friday. And then it was Monday, and that’s when I got into the car.

  I reach for Selwyn’s hand and look down. I have no idea for where we are on the mountain and there’s a strong smell of wild garlic, of lavender, of diesel, but also of the rose petals he mulched in a jar, and when I look down, the wrinkles on our knuckles disappear. Our fingernails are pinker, sharper. Our skin is softer. Our fingers entwine until I can’t hold them tight enough. He is looking at me and he wants me to let go. I’m hurting him, squeezing him, my nails are digging in like ten tiny fish teeth and almost drawing blood. But I can’t let go because I’m his pondweed, up in this world, inside these clouds, in all this green, this echo chamber; as he is mine. Look up to the sky and there’s the greatest pond you’ll ever see.

  ‘Don’t let me go,’ I whisper.

  A feather lands on my lap. But it is not blue. Bluebirds don’t really exist.

  ON THE TOP, SELWYN says, ‘This is it for me. This is the panoramic view.’ He turns to look at me. His smile has the sort of girth people get stapled for. So irritatingly handsome, so steady, so Selwyn. He was born for heights, I think. He has pulled up all his roots, cut away those branches from around his heart, and he seems so weightless he could quite fly away. He breathes in the mist and breathes out the last of the fog. All that we have said, and now all things done, what does it really matter when you find yourselves on the top of the world and exactly where you belong?

  ‘You really did show me the world, Selwyn Robby,’ I say, still holding on to his hand.

  ‘That’s good,’ he says. ‘Because I have something for you.’

  He let’s go of my hand and pulls something out of his back pocket. It is not the box the size of a wedding proposal that I’ve been expecting, but an envelope.

  ‘I thought about wrapping it,’ he starts to tell me. ‘But then it’s not really a present,’ and he hesitates, as if he doesn’t want me to look inside, after all. I clutch his hand again and tell him it doesn’t matter, whatever it is, I don’t have to see, because I’m starting to wonder if what’s inside of that envelope is news, and bad news, a diagnosis perhaps – all those pills, that cold shoulder – and I tell him to put it away.

  ‘Throw it away,’ I tell him. ‘I don’t want to know. Not when we’ve got here.’

  He looks confused and tells me it’s something he’s been thinking about for ages and that he should’ve wrapped it, that’s all, and he hands it to me, steps back from me, covers his mouth with the palm of his hand. I start to open it. The contents are made of paper. One is a passport application. The other is a plane ticket. Auckland. One way.

  I look up at him and look down at what’s in my hands.

  ‘These are for me?’ I ask. ‘You’ve done this for me? Where are yours?’

  He takes his hand away from his mouth and chews his top lip.

  ‘You’re not coming with me? You don’t want to go?’

  He drops his shoulders and looks up at the sky with a deep sigh.

  ‘She’s your daughter, Ginny,’ he says. ‘Let her remain as so.’

  ‘But I want you to come with me,’ I say, putting the passport form, the ticket back into the envelope and giving it him back. ‘I don’t want to go without you.’

  ‘You’re not,’ he says. ‘Because you’ll come back.’

  ‘But there’s no return ticket,’ and I’m shaking the form, the ticket on to the ground on the top of Snowdon – let the north wind do its thing, I wish. Blow them both away. ‘It’s one-way, Selwyn. It’s like you’re sending me away and I don’t want you to send me away. I want to go with you.’ I pause. My mouth has gone dry. ‘I love you.’

  ‘And you know what I’d really love right now?’ he says, smiling. ‘A cheese and pickle sandwich.’

  He is bright with cold and it’s making his eyes water and if he wants to jabber on about his pondweed and bladderwort as we eat our sandwiches, then let him jabber on and I will listen. Not half-listen but completely listen, until I’m entranced. If he still wants to work when we get back, he can, and I will wait and I will make him shepherd’s pie, and we will sit in our armchairs and remind each other of when it hailed in Loggerheads, when he took a mallet to the fish, when we stood on the summit of Snowdon and entered space. There’s no place for us in New Zealand, I think. Me and Selwyn Robby, we’re doing just fine right here.

  ‘Fine,’ I say. ‘I could do with the loo anyway. But I’m not going without you, Selwyn. I w
ill only take these if you have one too.’

  He nods and reaches into his shirt pocket, pulls out a twentypound note.

  ‘I’m so glad we did this, Selwyn,’ I tell him. ‘And I don’t care about the caravan, or the carp and what they’re worth…’

  But he tells me to shut up. We have all the time in the world.

  I head off towards the café and will always regret that, because by the time I get back, with two packets of sandwiches and a bag of salt and vinegar crisps to share, nobody can tell me for sure whether he fell or if he jumped.

  One Month Later

  MY DAUGHTER IS ON the phone talking to someone about pork ribs. They have to be Orrison baby back, she is saying. Riblets will not do. She motions towards the teapot on the table and hands me a mug. She’s wearing dungarees, a white T-shirt, and her skin, usually the colour of fudge, is almost as dark as her father’s. Her hair is short now, it feathers into her neck, and she sweeps her fringe behind her left ear. She’s had her ears pierced again. Is barefoot, despite me bringing all those shoes for her. A cat circles her ankles. She’s not allergic to them, after all. As I’ve said, it was easier to say that than tell her that it was another mouth to feed. I sit down at the table and pour myself a cup of tea.

  Anthony comes into the kitchen. He leans his stick against the table and removes his cap. The sun burns his head these days, and he rubs at his skin up there, scratches where it itches. He’s just been stung by a bee, he says. He holds out his thumb to show me, but I can see no redness on his exotic black skin. I tell him there’s tea in the pot and to stop being a baby. He sits across from me and smiles, as he tells me his cows smile, but I can never see it. Cows, to my mind, do little more than graze the earth. And then we eat them. I look away. I’ve not come to see him and, once my daughter’s birthday is over, I’m going back. I have things to sort out. A caravan to flog. A life still to live.

  Mia puts the phone down and looks at us both. For a minute, she is Meg. She has her way of looking at me from under her eyebrows, as if she cannot believe we share blood – and though Meg was frightened of colour – brown, red, anything but black – Mia might’ve been her bluebird, if I’d chosen a different way. Still, there’s no mistaking whose daughter she is. Selwyn was a lot of things, but he wasn’t daft. I think he knew it from the moment he’d heard her voice.

  ‘Happy birthday,’ I say.

  She says thanks. I ask her again if she’s really fifty, because time is a jet plane down here.

  She tells me to stop being smug, ‘Yes, Mother, you are not yet old,’ and hopes I haven’t got her a present.

  ‘Actually, I have,’ I say, and she frowns. She had specifically said no presents, no cards. ‘But this is neither,’ I tell her. ‘I’m giving you something back.’

  It’s wrapped in brown paper and string. Just as it was when it was first given to her. I almost can’t watch her open it. It falls into her hand.

  ‘My bluebird!’ she shouts. ‘Look, Anthony. It’s my bluebird! This is as old as me! Oh, my word. Look at it! It really is my bluebird!’

  Mia had given it to me the night before she’d got married. No husband wanted to share his bed with a soft toy, she’d said. Until then, it had never left her side and, from then on, never left mine.

  ‘I used to tell this bluebird everything,’ she says.

  ‘I know.’

  She glares at me.

  ‘Little birds can’t keep secrets.’

  We hold each other.

  We hold each other like it was the last time, the first time.

  Then…

  I let her go.

  To this day, I do not know where that bluebird came from – a small ball of kingfisher-blue fur that chirruped when you shook its beak – but it was there and given to her on the day she was born.

  ‘I think this is for you,’ said the midwife who’d delivered my baby girl. All she would say is that it was found, at the bottom of my bag, wrapped in brown paper and string. ‘I was actually looking for clean underwear,’ she’d said.

  I do not know how long we all look at that old bird. But we do. And time stops.

  Mia gathers herself and tells me that the butcher has let her down. She has almost fifty people coming and no meat. I don’t know why I find this so funny, but I laugh until I cry, and eventually Mia comes to hold me again, entangling me within her arms. We stick to each other. Like glue.

  She is not coming home with me as I’d hoped, but staying. She has come here to learn, she says. To learn how to farm. To love. To be. It’s all been willed to her. And there’s so much room, she keeps on saying. So much to do here, so much to see. We never wake up to the same sky.

  ‘We’d better Skype Selwyn,’ she says, looking down at her watch. ‘It’s already ten o’clock.’

  ‘Oh, he’ll still be up,’ I tell her, giving her hand a last squeeze and wiping my face with a roll of tissue. ‘Besides, he goes nowhere very fast on those crutches. It takes him over an hour to get up the stairs. It’s like living in an old people’s home. He rattles with prescription drugs and never stops complaining. I should’ve left him up on the mountain.’

  She smiles goofily and says she’ll fire up the computer. Anthony nods his head, as if he’s just agreed to something he’s not aware of.

  ‘What was he doing?’ he asks me for the umpteenth time.

  I had not expected Anthony to be this old. He rattles too. Looks not dissimilar to a wise old eel and made up of the things that the tide leaves behind.

  ‘Pondweed,’ I say. ‘He was looking at a plant that looked like pondweed. Swears it’s the stuff in a pond that we know.’ I stop. I am making it seem like the pond is a very good friend who’s just discovered they’ve got gallstones.

  ‘There’s a pond,’ I start again, ‘where Selwyn’s sister drowned, and it was full of a pondweed that she became entangled in. Selwyn has always said it was a different pondweed because the pond is saltwater, and he’s spent the best part of fifty years looking for it, trying to work it out, where it came from.’

  I stop again. Anthony looks grave. I realise he’s not wearing his hearing aids. I wonder if he even remembers re-heeling my shoes, gifting me those his customers forgot. I carry on.

  ‘Anyway, it was there, on the side of the mountain, and he went to get some of it. But he can’t remember whether he tried to make the jump, or if he mistook the length of drop, but one shattered shinbone, a fractured ankle, couple of broken ribs later…’

  ‘And was it what you were looking for?’ Anthony interjects.

  ‘He has it breeding in a bin in our backyard,’ I tell him. ‘It’s like living with an alien species. He’s got me buying salt like we’re gritting the M6. I keep expecting it to grab me by the throat. It’s ferocious. It grows like rhubarb.’

  Mia comes back in the kitchen with her laptop and I hear Selwyn’s voice. He sounds tired, drowsy with pills. Mia is showing him the bluebird. It chirrups. Still. I can’t catch all of what he says, just that he says, ‘It looks exactly the same as when she bought it.’ She turns the screen to face me.

  ‘Here’s the old fishwife,’ Mia slights, putting the screen down in front of me. ‘Charming and impetuous, that’s how Shakespeare wrote her, his perfect heroine created from a big mistake.’ She smiles at the screen and nips at my elbow, and I see Selwyn is sitting in his blue leather armchair surrounded by the paraphernalia of an old man, in knee-to-toe plaster with a map on his lap. I can tell that Val has been round, clucking and fussing. There’s a gravy-stained plate aside of him and the ashtray shows cigarettes shared.

  Simpering old duffer. I love him to bits.

  ‘You’ve got to be bloody kidding me,’ I say, pointing at the screen. ‘What are you doing with that map? I thought we were selling that heap of junk?’ He puts up his hands and asks me to hear him out. ‘No,’ I say. ‘That caravan is a deadweight. It has to go. What happened to your buyer?’

  He tells me again that he has never trusted Stuart Fury in all the ye
ars and is not going to start trusting him now.

  ‘But there’s somewhere I do want to show you,’ he says, and he breaks into what we now call the Snowdon smile. I realise that we’ve landed on our feet with the carp. ‘But I promise you, Ginny,’ he carries on, ‘this time I have it all planned out.’

  Acknowledgments

  Ten years ago, Ginny & Selwyn came to life in a different novel that didn’t work out but nagged away all the same. I must, therefore, wholeheartedly thank Professors Helen Wilcox and Ian Davidson for their continued re-reading and ongoing support, and with special thanks to Professor Steven Price and Dr Andy Webb who forgave me for not being where I should. This is why.

  I’d be lost for far longer than fourteen days if it wasn’t for Philippa Brewster who never fails to steer me in the right direction, and did so into the Myriad pond. So, to Candida Lacey, Corinne Pearlman, Lauren Burlinson, Emma Dowson, and Anna Burtt, thank you and with love. The water is, indeed, warm as toast. And to Vicki Heath Silk, a beady-eyed bluebird who feathered my words beautifully. Thank you, x.

  To my lifebuoys –- Jonathan Davidson, Kit de Waal, Kerry Hudson and Chris Power: What smashers you are and I am so very grateful. And to Phil and Becky; Debs and Neil; Ami; Hallsy; Len and Jim; Maz; the family Fenwick; Lord and Lady Moncrieff; the Norths and the Roberts and the Walkers; to Jackus; Petra; Auntie Sheila and Jim; Sandra and John Lane; Rachy and Pat; Dr Catherine Burgass; Professor Deborah Wynne; Tania Harrison; Cathy Galvin; Meg Hawkins; Luke Wright; Carl and Sam – a massive Snowdon smile to you all because you keep me afloat, x.

  As ever, I’d not be able to write a single word if it wasn’t for my mum, dad and Sarah who never stop filling my car with petrol. And to Dave and Nell, my pond life and beyond.

  About the author