Seahorses Are Real

by Zillah Bethell

  ‘No, but anyway,’ Marly continued as they settled into their food, ‘it’s like I’m a fugitive from my own lies, my own life. I sat here for ages waiting for her to go and then I thought, you know, I’m meant to be at work – she must have thought I was a right mess – so I went up the cemetery.’ She didn’t tell him about the boys with a ball like an old moon. At first she’d told him everything – it’d been like a burden being lifted from her shoulders – babbling away the stored-up years, every little secret, every last dream, until she was emptied, serene, ready to be filled again with his love. Now their communication was deeper, less tangible – an intimate code of intercepted utterances, delicate tappings, invisible springs and hieroglyph smiles that affirmed their knowingness, their habitual togetherness. Marly sometimes felt that the code half stifled them and it was then she babbled away as in the early days while he, puzzler that he was, took refuge in trying to decipher her heart.

  ‘You’re a poor little thing,’ he said, smiling a little between forkfuls.

  ‘I am a poor little thing. And the sooner you realise it the better.’

  ‘I do realise it,’ he said, sadly this time.

  Marly stiffened. Poor little thingedness was all very well for getting sympathy but not pity. Self pity was alright but pity from others she didn’t like. ‘I caught a bit of Oprah,’ she said, changing the subject. ‘It was terrible….’

  ‘Caught a bit,’ scoffed David. ‘You had a lovely old time of it, sprawled out here with your feet up.’

  ‘No I didn’t,’ indignantly, ‘I told you I was up the cemetery.’

  ‘I know, I know. I was just having a laugh with you.’

  ‘Well, anyway,’ Marly went on, irritated a little by his effervescence, ‘there was this kid who’d been attacked. It was ninety degrees apparently and the puppy had a seizure. It was so bad they couldn’t show the pictures – he was just skeleton and teeth.’

  ‘Jesus,’ David muttered appropriately, not yet having a clue what she was on about.

  ‘They made a face for him out of his arms and legs – like me mam, d’you remember, when she had her neck grafted with fat from her bottom. She said her backside afterwards looked like a wrinkled elephant’s. Oh dear.’ Marly lapsed hysterically into a giggle.

  David nodded, remembering. ‘It’s alright, my love.’

  ‘They’ll be transplanting faces soon apparently. They had this monkey – it was horrible – with a transplanted head. They said, “It’s so exciting, his eyes are tracking us.” They kept going on about how marvellous it was they’d saved this kid’s life and everything with this miracle surgery but... I mean... you should’ve seen him. He looked terrible.’

  David rolled his eyes in mock despair. Here we go, he thought.

  ‘I mean it’s hard enough for most people to live, to exist, let alone a kid with a face made up of arms and legs. What sort of life’s he going to have?’ He’ll miss out on the adolescent vitamin for sure, she thought. ‘I don’t know, it should be wonderful, the fact that he’s alive and that but… it might’ve been better... people have such terrible lives.’

  ‘That’s true,’ said David tonelessly.

  ‘It’s like the bit of an end of a documentary I saw…’

  ‘Yeah, yeah, bet you saw the whole…’

  ‘No, seriously, when you were at your evening class. There was this Russian woman who had to sweep the streets from ten thirty at night till four in the morning and she only got paid three quid for it. We don’t know we’re born,’ Marly added.

  ‘That’s true,’ agreed David and then quickly, ‘I love you,’ because it was his job, he felt, to nip things in the bud, to bring her back before she was anywhere near close to the brink. ‘I think you’re marvellous.’

  ‘Am I?’ she cried, falling as always – childishly eager – into the trap. ‘In what way am I marvellous?’

  David put his finger to his chin as if pondering the question for the first time. ‘Every way. Ironing shirts, washing socks…’

  ‘Horrid!’

  He laughed and opened his arms wide. ‘You’re beautiful and soft and gentle and,’ stupidly, ‘you’re a poor little thing.’

  ‘I’m alright,’ Marly pushed back at him, sealing up the vulnerability, pleased to hear she was such things yet feeling none of them.

  He put the television on then, flicking through the channels with a cumbersome grace, his arms still close about her.

  ‘You don’t care do you?’ she remonstrated, breaking free, feeling there was still some point or other to be made, that the depth of their discussion wasn’t up for grabs, didn’t warrant the usual crisp-packet-in-the-cinema routine which he employed for effect in moments of high seriousness. ‘D’you want a crisp?’ he’d whispered once, loud and rustling into the dark, tense, tenterhooked silence, much to Marly’s amused embarrassment. ‘D’you want a crisp?’ She eyed him suspiciously now but he was innocent enough, his face sad, angry even.

  ‘It’s because I care. To distract you. Stop you moping about.’ And it was true he’d turned it on to distract her, as well as himself, from her misery, her unrelenting misery that brought him down, sometimes, as low as she. I work hard all day, he thought, and come back to this.

  ‘I’m not moping,’ she muttered sulkily, sitting very straight on the sofa and opening her book at ‘Lilian’s Caesarean Section’, tears welling up in her eyes. He’ll never understand, she thought, it’ll never work, and she read a sentence blurrily over and over: ‘I felt I’d missed out on the real thing, having a Caesarean. I felt I’d missed out on the real thing, having a Caesarean. I felt I’d missed out on the real…’

  David chuckled and nudged her. She focused even harder on the sentence though her ears, in spite of herself, were listening. ‘I felt I’d missed…’

  ‘In a tropical jungle like this one,’ came an excited little whisper from the television, ‘bright colours signify genuine nastiness.’ Marly looked up and saw a man in shorts and a Panama hat. ‘But this little humdinger of a treecreeper’s got everything he wants right here under his very nose, a veritable cornucopia right under his nose. Figs! It’s all he eats. He relishes them, can’t get enough of them.’

  ‘Relishes ’em,’ spluttered David. ‘I bet he’s sick to death of them!’

  Marly giggled and put down her book. ‘You’d be off for a slap-up curry,’ she teased, sarcastically enough to sound as if she hadn’t quite given in yet. ‘With ketchup,’ she added.

  ‘What, what!’ David obliged, being the proprietor of Mariners where he – she never let him forget – had had ketchup with everything. Mariners, where they’d stayed two nights for one of his interviews, where Marly had laughed and smiled at the sea view, the little sachets of hot chocolate, the bourbons and custard creams; and the proprietor who’d looked like a toad, made his own clocks and gone about saying ‘what what’ all the time. ‘“Full English breakfast is it again sir? With ketchup? You’re a brave man sir. What what!”’

  ‘You scoffed all the custard creams,’ she reminded him delightedly. ‘Remember that china dog on the mantelpiece you said looked like it had worms!’

  ‘Well, it was the position of its legs,’ David explained for the umpteenth time, knowing how much it amused her. ‘It was uncannily like our old dog Rosie when she slid her bottom….’

  ‘Yes yes, thank you very much. I think we’ve heard quite enough about that. Mind you,’ Marly’s eyes glimmered, ‘I had a worm remember, when I was little.... It kept sliding back up my…’

  David leapt up and ran out of the room, pretending to be horrified at the story.

  Marly giggled and he came back in. They sat together in happy silence, holding hands beneath the red sleeping bag and watching television. ‘At least he’s passionate about it,’ Marly said after a while, meaning the man in shorts and a Panama hat. ‘I bet you wouldn’t mind a few students like that.’

  ‘Well, I don’t know,’ David grimaced. ‘It’s not normal to be keen at their age. I
think I prefer Ross Newman’s belching. Honestly, that’s all he does: leans back on his chair with his can of coke and belches!’

  ‘He doesn’t!’

  David perched himself on the edge of the sofa with a dopey expression on his face. ‘“Do we need our books today sir?” Every bleeding lesson he says it. “Do we need our books today sir? Do we need our books on Friday sir?” I said: “Bring ’em anyway, it’ll keep you fit!’’’

  Marly rested her head on his shoulder and listened to his anecdotes, knowing he was making an effort and grateful, too, for every last detail of Ross Newman’s belching, of Anton the French teacher who always said ‘Bonjour Class’ and whose students ran amok and sent messages to each other on their mobile phones, because these were things that connected her back to a world she was drifting away from further and further each day, swinging out into orbit; and only David’s arms, she sometimes felt, (he being the only one she trusted) could clutch her back.

  They read their books after that, drifting off into other worlds yet side by side beneath the red sleeping bag, shoulder to shoulder, thigh to thigh, heartbeat almost to heartbeat, nodding off now and then like an old married couple or stopping just to peek at where the other was at. This was Marly’s refuge, her retreat from a world that lay beyond the confines of their cramped little rundown flat, where the rats played and the green mould grew. She sat reading books amidst the refuse of her life, books she’d read as a child over and over, dear and familiar like a pair of old shoes, the woman who lived in a shoe. Trying to regain a part of herself she’d lost, a part that had burnt out, died. Striving to resurrect herself, ghostly, in those ridiculous too-tight shoes. Whittling time away to bone washed up on ancient beaches, to daylight dimmed in the eye of an ant. There was no need for any other, no world to let in here. If I could shoot the world to bits, she sometimes thought, we might just make it.

  She wrote that night in her gratitude diary:

  Saw a ball like an old moon.

  Slept ok.

  Didn’t check cheek.

  D told me about R. Newman.

  I am alive.

  She always wrote ‘I am alive’ for number five, not because she was always grateful for being alive, but because she thought that if she didn’t, something worse might happen.

  Three

  She had one of her nightmares that night. It started off pleasantly enough – they always did – with her and David skimming stones from the pebbly bank of a swollen river, the softly slanting rain dribbling down their noses and between their toes. The river was brown and swirling bric-a-brac, dead wood and submarinating trolleys; and on the sandy bank opposite was a little forked set of bird-prints, like arrows. (When you saw only one set of prints, came a voice in her head, that was when I carried you.) ‘Here’s a good flat one,’ said David. ‘Try that.’ And she flung the stone bouncing – once, twice, thrice – across to the sandy shore, like an India rubber or little superball. ‘What must we be to the fish,’ she decided, all knowing and omnipotent, ‘in their watery mirror but glowing ghosts or wide-awake trees’; and she spread her arms wide in an arc to encompass the small green field by the pebbly bank and said to David with great serenity or was it solemnity: ‘I shall grow vegetables here. It will be like a garden of Paradise. There will be birds and flowers and all beautiful things. All bright and beautiful things.’

  ‘You’re a bright and beautiful thing,’ he replied, holding her, before turning into a small flat stone in her hands which she flung bouncing – once, twice, thrice – across to the sandy shore, like an India rubber or little superball.

  And then she turned, herself, into a short fat farmer from Idaho and said to herself (for she was both the short fat farmer as well as the painted lady hovering in front of his nose in search of cabbages): ‘you’ll grow no watermelons here no more. I used to grow 30lb Jack in the Beanstalk watermelons afore the river changed its malignant course.’

  And she saw, with her own eyes, that the top of the precious field, where she was to grow all the bright and beautiful things, had been nibbled away by the hungry river, great clods and chunks of earth – still growing grass and golden buttercups – sitting halfway down the animal’s throat; and the beach where they’d skimmed stones was really the great naked pebbly belly revealed as the beast swerved out again. ‘How disgusting,’ she said as the sweet-toothed Ivy sped down with the current on a little dead wood tree, her arms flailing. ‘You, you,’ she pointed and screamed. ‘Left mammary. Your fault.’ And her father’s purple fingers curled up through the dead wood branches, like some maleficent river god making a grab at its pretty queen.

  She screamed in her sleep and woke up sweating and clinging on to the last few shreds of the dream. How ridiculous to feel such agony in such a thing as a dream. How ridiculous the mind can be, she thought, and lay trembling and watching the headlights of cars as they passed like illuminating beacons across the curtains. ‘I hope it is cancer,’ she remembered herself saying so many years ago in a similar room, enraged little fists pumping the pillow of a toy bed by a toy chair, toy bookcase, toy Tobermory lamp. How she wished she could get up now, touch every last poster – Duran Duran, Blondie, Adam Ant, Spandau Ballet – and make it alright again. That magical sequence of cause and effect and that perfect little ego at the core of it. Believing, in those days, that touching posters, watching magpies and stepping on lines could alter an iota, a destiny; a life even. Stranger still to think that these things lingered in the adult mind, mushroomed, even though no longer believed in; the ego so battered by cause and effect that it clung on to the slightest, littlest, remotest hope that it still had control of cause and effect through the arbitrariness of magpies, posters and stepping on lines – though Ivy, of course, had died. No amount of stuffing cushions into covers could keep her soul in place. Bleak news, I’m afraid, the doctor had said. (They were always afraid.) She’s got five years at most. What a lot of rot they talked! She’d gone on for ages after that – the everlasting Ivy, the sweet-toothed Ivy, the one-breasted Ivy. Stuffing marshmallows into her neck until they oozed out of her globulous eyelids. Biting into her marshmallow arms, even her marshmallow legs. Delusional, hallucinatory; sinking slowly in fits and starts – a death of agonising slowness bit by bit – into that banquet of bluebells. Better to go, Marly decided, touching posters in her head, in one fell swoop; and the cells proliferated like the fungi in the bathroom, the rats in the kitchen, giving each other a leg up. UB40. What am I gonna do? Sign on. See Terry. What am the fuck I gonna do?

  She woke David up then, before her thoughts spun too far out; and told him about the dream, exaggerating details here and there to justify having woken him.

  ‘Typical!’ he muttered, smiling sleepily, the tip of his aquiline nose (how like her mother’s) and the whites of his eyes just visible in the strangely illuminating darkness. ‘That’s all I am to you, a stone, to be flung across a river.’

  ‘Don’t be stupid,’ she replied crossly, sitting up. ‘It was horrible.’

  He kissed the top of her head to show that he under­stood and said: ‘I had a strange dream too. Rasputin was after me – I was running like a maniac round the launderette – and then I had this brilliant idea of hiding in his havers…’

  ‘Let’s just go,’ she interrupted, suddenly clutching his arm. ‘Anywhere. Away from here.’

  ‘Anywhere,’ he agreed with a mock shudder, ‘to get away from that nutter. Honestly, he was shouting…’

  ‘No, really. We could, you know. Somewhere by the sea. I’d be well, I think, by the sea. I could work again; you could find a job.’

  ‘What, like Bonnie and Clyde,’ he suggested with a touch of sarcasm. ‘Start robbing banks?’

  Marly sighed and felt herself detaching from the man at her side, the man who loved her, cared for her, did almost everything for her, except go along with her dreams; and her mind dropped (as it too often did) like an injured animal, into its cold, dark, lonely lair while the rest of her carried on with
the daylight. ‘It doesn’t matter,’ she said impassively. ‘You’ve got no soul anyway.’

  ‘And you’ve got no head,’ he responded lightly, kissing the top of it again before adding in a softer tone: ‘I love you, you know, Marly stole some barley Smart! I think you’re magnificent.’

  She lay without responding in the comforting warmth of his arms, listening to his words in the soft cocoon of his weaving, snug as a bug in a small green rug; and her mind crept bit by bit, almost reluctantly at first, out of its cold, dark, lonely place until all at once she was there back with him, her wounds wide open for him. ‘I can’t take any more. I can’t… really can’t… take any more,’ she sobbed.

  ‘I know, my love, I know.’

  ‘It’s like I’m on this road,’ she babbled, ‘and I can’t turn back. I’m trapped, cornered at the end of it. That’s what it feels like now, that I’ve come to the end of the road – I really have. I can’t see any future,’ her voice trailed off, ‘any future at all….’

  ‘Yes you can,’ almost sternly. ‘You’re in a tunnel at the moment, that’s all – it’s a blip. It doesn’t mean,’ he added in what Marly called his wise old Gandalf voice, ‘it isn’t daylight outside.’

  ‘Maybe not; but I can’t see it. That’s the business of the tunnel, not believing there’s anything else, however many times you’ve been through it. People say get help, but you can’t, you’re a vegetable, you can’t even pick up the phone – you’ve seen me. And even if,’ she went on, drilling it in to him, ‘I did believe I could get through it, even if I did believe that, I still know I’ll be back here again and again and again like some sort of stuck record, some sort of sick joke. That in itself,’ she added wearily, ‘is enough to kill me off, the fact that I’ll be here again, that it will go on like this forever.’