Seahorses Are Real

by Zillah Bethell

  It was her turn. She stepped up to the desk and handed over her UB40 card. (Marlene? After Marlene Dietrich? No actually, but she might as well have been for all the signatures she had to write. Once a fortnight for thirty-seven months. How many signatures – David would work it out for her – was that?)

  ‘Have you done any work since you last signed?’ The girl had long plaited hair and eyes like small brown beads. Nicked no doubt, Marly thought ridiculously, off her grandmother’s best necklace.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Well,’ said the girl as Marly wrote M. Smart under­neath the rest of the sprawling, spasmodic, ever so many M. Smarts, ‘let’s see what we’ve got.’ She tilted the computer for Marly to see. ‘Care Assistant at the Limes.’

  ‘Oh.’ Marly’s heart sank. The Limes was a psychiatric institution a few doors down from where they lived; she passed it every day on her way to the lake. A long, low, sloping building set away from the road behind some trees and a little electricity transformer covered in graffiti and signs saying Danger of Death (which David found amusing in his rather pedantic way, there being no danger in death itself, so he said). One time a woman had appeared like a phantom from behind the trees and asked Marly if she’d seen a man wandering about in a pair of furry slippers; then she’d said suddenly: ‘Where’s the parade?’ Marly had replied that she didn’t think there was a parade that day and the woman had gone back in, sighing and wringing her hands. Marly had an idea Rasputin came from the Limes; she also had an idea she might end up there the way she was going. ‘What does it involve exactly?’ she asked cautiously. ‘I suppose they want experience,’ she added hopefully.

  ‘No, training will be given. To help with elderly residents, serving breakfasts, lunches etc. To help residents bath, wash, toilet, dress etc. Uniform supplied. £4.55 per hour. Duration: part-time permanent.’

  ‘Ah.’ Marly tried to feign enthusiasm. ‘I could give it a go.’

  ‘There’s another one here delivering fish to local area. Applicant must be willing to handle cold wet fish.’ The girl made a face. ‘May have to lift up to 25 kilograms.’

  ‘What, is that a shark or something?’ Marly grinned after a few moments hesitation while she’d been thinking up the joke and wondering whether to say it; and she thought of the glistening eyes seeing through a super­market glass darkly; and Ivy’s eye like an agate ready to be pocketed (they’d got her rings for sure in the crematorium). ‘They’re not really dead,’ David had joked with his fish and chips, ‘if you can’t see their eyes.’

  ‘Oh yes,’ the girl smiled back. ‘Exotic foods are very trendy these days aren’t they. Me and my boyfriend went out the other night to the Papermakers’ Arms. D’you know it?’

  Marly shook her head.

  ‘Just down the road by the garage. They’ve got a new menu full of things like wild boar and venison. We had ostrich burgers! They’re a bit like chicken only greasier.’

  Long necks in tutus, thought Marly, and they always looked so ungainly – though nothing deserved to end up in a bap.

  ‘Must have knowledge of local area,’ the girl added. ‘The last one had to keep stopping to look at the map apparently.’

  ‘Oh dear,’ Marly smiled with relief. ‘I haven’t got that I’m afraid.’

  ‘Well, no,’ the girl agreed, ‘if you didn’t know the Papermakers’ Arms.’ She made it sound like that was the be all and end all and she clicked the mouse quite firmly to see what else was available while Marly looked earnestly at a Back to Work leaflet, though she couldn’t see much of it without her glasses on. ‘That’s all we’ve got today,’ the girl said at last, clicking off and sitting back.

  ‘Ah well,’ said Marly, getting up and making a bit of a thing of putting the Limes application form very carefully into her rucksack, as if it were something quite precious, ‘goodbye.’ The girl smiled in return by pressing her lips together and for a moment her eyes gleamed as though someone had breathed on them then polished them up.

  Bernie Mungo was standing outside smoking a cigarette; he looked very thin in his navy blue uniform and Marly wondered if he was cutting back on food so he could get to Jamaica all the sooner. She gave him a faint smile, which he didn’t appear to notice, and cut across by the Daisy launderette where a little girl sat with her nose pressed up against the window. What a name for a little girl Daisy would be, she thought, like something out of the twenties. Daisy, Poppy, Rose and Lilibet doing the tango and the two-step, with their bright, bobbed hair and their sleek red tunics; though Poppy at the age of forty would have a faintly ridiculous ring to it and then, of course, there were the soldiers.... Marly stopped abruptly by the memorial for the dead and readjusted the straps of her rucksack. People were pouring into the library from all directions with piles of books, videos and music tapes; and the gardener’s truck was stuck slap bang in the middle of the front gates – one man suffering under a load of Disney videos and a massive tome entitled Collectors Guide to Inkwells veered round it with a menacing expression on his face and Marly turned and hid a grin as she inched past it herself in the opposite direction. It was full of flowers, she noticed, like feverish faces in hospital beds – red, green and bluish-tinged to match the seasons and celebrations or after-effects of celebrations (colour co-ordinations even Ariel couldn’t mix, trapped as he was inside his pine). Though the brain itself, Marly decided, trudging into the park, had its own seasons: its own awakenings and dormancies, witherings and evergreens; its own acorns and tulips, brambles and perennials. To her it was always an agonising spring (someone had said April was the cruellest month and it was true) where dragonflies darted around you like fish and the April rain lost everything to death and decay in a banquet of shy peeping bluebells while she, Marly, stood ready and waiting to ripen out of something quite green, though she was already quite ancient. As ancient as the soldiers for whom it must always be poppies and forget-me-nots, like the poem she’d read once: Steffi. Vergissmeinnicht. Steffi. Forget-me-not.

  She came across the gardener quite suddenly round the corner, weeding with one hand and holding her hair back with the other. It was extraordinary to see someone doing such a thing and Marly almost stopped dead in her tracks. She wanted to shout out, in David’s voice, ‘Tie it up Missis, for Christ’s sake tie it up’; but instead she sat down on a bench a little way away, partly because she wanted to watch the extraordinary gardener and partly because it was a rule of hers to spend at least two hours outside out of every twenty-four – otherwise she got stuck in their little rundown flat like a small round vegetable in a cardboard box, peeping out at the ceiling or Oprah Winfrey shows and waiting for David to come home. She fished her glasses out the better to see the girl and spread the Limes application form out on her knee lest anyone should think of approaching her. It didn’t do, she’d discovered over the years, to sit on a bench all alone and stare into space, unless you were Leslie Finch waiting for a kid. You needed a dog, a cigarette, reading material or a sandwich to disguise your solitariness and keep the buggers at bay (though once she’d made the mistake of smoking and eating at the same time and she’d been rumbled) else they came right up with their Labrador dogs and said things like ‘Cheer up love, it might never happen’. Did they want her to shout at them? Did they want her to beat the living daylights out of them? ‘My mother’s just died an agonising death, I can’t eat, can’t sleep, can’t get up, can’t go down, can’t live, can’t love, can’t look in the mirror, can’t do this, that or the other and you’re telling me... I’m reduced to the state you see before you now: unkempt, old boots, David’s pants, thin legs, fidgeting, hiding away from your inquisitorial eyes and you’re telling me.... I’m one stage away from beer cans and insanity, on the scrapheap, the dungheap, clapped out, down and out, finished, kaput, one foot pushing the daisies up, the other pirouetting about my neck and you’re telling me it hasn’t happened yet, you silly old bastard, you silly old fart. Once I played Ophelia in a small town theatre. Look at me now. Once I read poetry.
Now I just want to beat the living daylights out of you with your ‘cheer up love’ and your Labrador dog.... (Those are the things she might have said; but she always mustered a smile in reply and patted the dog on the head.)

  The gardener’s hair was electrifying, strangely volatile, it seemed to Marly, as she shifted uncomfortably about on the bench which was slightly wet and tried to dry it out with the bottom of her anorak. It looked as if it might fly off at any moment with the pigeons that raced around the top of the Tudor church or lined up on the tower disguised as battlements. Even the nimbus of a saint it could have been, the way it sprang away from her round ruddy cheeks, though it wasn’t golden the way a saint’s would have been but the colour of the mice that slipped into the kitchen for crisps and crusts of bread. The colour of Marly’s to be exact – mouse brown – though she’d often tried to brighten it up with lemon juice, chamomile flowers and (one terrible time) household bleach. David sometimes flattered her by saying it had flecks and shades of autumn in it. Flecks and shades of autumn indeed! Marly snorted in delight. Almost a name for a horse: Shades of Autumn, Autumn Velvet and a filly foal Autumn Butterfly by some great Arab stallion who shared tents in the desert with sheikhs and silver stars. What a lineage! What a descent! Nicking their dam’s taffeta dress as they went and their sire’s love of empty spaces. David’s hair, she reflected now, taking her eyes from the gardener to the lollipop sticks, ants and cigarette butts about her feet, had flecks and shades of winter in it. Ridiculous really, at his age.... She kicked at an ice-lolly stick, trying to turn it over, wanting to see if they still had jokes on the back but it was stuck firmly to the ground and a couple of ants appeared to be sucking the last few dregs of sucrose and caramel off it. What did the big ant say to the little ant? You’re too young to suck off so fuck off.... Even the ants, she thought angrily, had some fucking purpose; and feeling a sudden surge of restlessness, though she’d been sitting there less than a minute, she got up, threw the Limes application form into a bin and started off at a rapid pace around the flower garden.

  Halloween faces popped out at her at intervals – witches, trick-or-treats, pumpkin masks and toffee apples – though they may have been dahlias and hyacinths for all she knew, even a premature Catherine wheel. The gardener, she noted, had just been joined by a young man in blue overalls; and they were pointing and gesticulating at a newly dug piece of earth where a couple of magpies (two, thank god, for joy) were hopping around, like Pegleg Pete, after worms, snails and objets d’art. Why does the early bird catch the worm? Because the night-time’s damp and the worms come to the surface – she’d read it on the back of a cereal packet the other morning while David was brushing his teeth. The gardener was stamping now as though willing up a rainstorm and her hair was going like a whirling dervish; Marly got a little closer and slowed down a bit.

  ‘We’re not planting edelweiss or rare orchids. What did they teach you up there? We need hardy little shrubs that’ll withstand the cold, bikes, tatty little children chucking their shoes up for conkers – see that pile of branches over there, that’s kids going for conkers that is – not to mention black crows. Did you get my samosa?’

  The young man, who seemed to be wilting under her gaze, brought a little parcel out of his dirty overalls and held it out to her as though he were begging for gold.

  ‘You’re a good lad,’ she beamed. ‘Go and get the beds then. And forget Liverpool.’

  Marly stood stock-still, marvelling at the conversation, feeding off the bits of information like a vulture and storing scraps away for her mind to pick clean later. So lonely had she become that other people’s conversations fascinated her; and she looked at strangers for company and occupation while David toiled away all day in his pale blue tower. Edelweiss! Orchids! Liverpool! Her head swam and she almost clutched the stem of a toffee apple for support. How huge the world was and alive. Overwhelmingly alive. Why could she not explore it? She stared hard at the gardener: it certainly wasn’t a saint’s face. It was a sort of primitive-looking face if a face could be such a thing, hewn out of granite by a craftsman with bad eyes and a blunt instrument, though he’d pinched a bit of blue sky for her eyes and crushed a rosebud for her mouth which was now, at this very moment, stuffing down the samosa. No, not a saint’s face, but a jovial monk’s perhaps, like Friar Tuck. David’s face was a saint’s face and Ivy’s too for that matter (bordering, in her case, on martyrdom): aquiline, defined, chiselled out of porcelain or cut-glass crystal with eyes – goodness me – they must have searched far and wide for those eyes.... Whereas mine, she thought, sighing and stooping to sniff a trick-or-treat, was cobbled together like Frankenstein’s by a craftsman on speed! (What d’you think you’re looking at? Can’t quite make out. D’you want a photo or summat? No ta, it’d break the camera.) Mind you, she added, changing abruptly to the ‘you’ form which she did sometimes when talking to herself, you were lucky enough to be given the feet of a water nymph; and she smiled to herself with bitter irony and clumped out of the flower garden in her shabby old boots, her neck poking forward like a witch’s hat or a dunce’s cap.

  It was getting colder; and the park was almost deserted except for a few people walking quickly into town and a young boy with his hands in his pockets, obviously skiving off school. Marly pretended not to notice him and made her way, as she always did, along the little path beside the Darenth stream. Luckily it was brown today and full of debris so she couldn’t see her reflection broken up and tumbling among the clouds and the trees; it must have passed invisibly beneath the stones and grey fish, silent as a secret. Her head ached with the wind and the fumes drifting like smoke above the trees from the burning tyres on the old Canterbury road; and as she made her way along the same old route she trod around the same old thoughts in her head, never budging an inch to the right or the left. Did he love her enough for her to love him back? Did he love her enough for her to take the risk? It didn’t do to go left when she always went right and it didn’t do not to stop at the old oak tree where no yellow ribbons ever decorated the boughs, only yellowing leaves which were flying now, like butterflies, to the ground. She wanted to catch one and make a wish and for a few moments she leapt about like a small child, her face breaking into a smile, here and there, up and down, hands out and eyes to the sky after the catapulting leaves; but a capricious wind blew them near then out of reach, like all wishing things, (what a lot of bellows the gods must have) or she guessed wrong and lunged in the opposite direction. Please may I be well, she whispered prematurely each time, her fingertips brushing the edges of discoloured and decaying things spinning down and down; and then, as the rain fell, she gave up and sheltered beneath the heavy old boughs. It must have seen all sorts, she thought, staring at the scaly bark ravaged and filleted by lightning and penknives, axes and naturalists. It must have seen the equivalent of hundreds of Oprah Winfrey shows: freaks and spiritual gurus, tramps and madmen, lovers and serial killers. Bohemia must have wrung her hands beneath these very boughs, bewailing and repenting her vows; even Waltzing Matilda may have squatted here just the other day in the hope of something better than ducks and broken bread. It sat there impassively and never moved a muscle, watching the world pass before its eyes like a giant TV screen. It must have witnessed the sublime and the ridiculous: bombs and hula hoops, hotpants and shooting stars, petty squabbles and Sunday fêtes (in the commercial breaks). Once it was an acorn and now it was very old, older than her grandmother – who was really quite ancient – older, even, than Tiresias. Its soul, if it had one, must be older than the hills. Did it feel the burden of having remained while everything else decayed, matriarch of the Dartford park? Did it creak down the middle and fart at parties? Had its heart been coppiced too many times to keep going strong; and did it rattle and shake in the breeze just for the sake of it, dead as a dead wood coffin inside too? What if he stopped loving her at fifty-two when she’d invested her life, her soul, her heart in him?

  The thought didn’t bear the thinking; a
nd she circled round it as she circled round the park, letting the rain fall softly onto her face and hands, misting up her glasses and blurring her vision a little. The fair would be coming soon, as it did every year for Halloween and Bonfire Night, like some ancient pagan rite that signified the end of summer and the start of the crispy, crunchy, pinch-your-cheek months – the Ferris wheel a burnished god propitiated, in time-honoured tradition, with red-hot beating hearts and, depending on your ‘cool’ credentials, muffled or blood-curdling screams. The town, at this time, acquired a faintly carnival air: the market stalls crackled with life – slasher movies were up for grabs; supermarkets abounded with scary masks and black trees, bats and broomsticks; even the little bakery at the top of East Hill binned its currant buns and elephant toes and brought out new lines in ‘petrifying pumpkin’ muffins and sugar-coated ‘ghastly ghosts’. People hustled and chafed, bustled and brrr’d, vivid as autumn leaves or a sun that seems to blaze most intently the moment before it goes under a raincloud. They craned their necks for the floats that crept at a snail’s pace round the ring road (even the boy racers in their souped-up jalopies and stolen Orions took a back seat that night, the night the clocks went back) and strained their ears for the drums and tambourines that sounded like far-off distant thunder. ‘IT’S SHOWTIME!’ the mayor shouted into his crackling mike from his platform by the memorial for the dead, sucking on innumerable lozenges in case his voice went or, more often than not, having just got out of his sickbed. ‘LADIES AND GENTLEMEN, IT’S SHOWTIME’ – miles before the first float appeared, like a tardy bride, decked out in flowers and colours and bright motifs, with her endless train of courtiers and clowns, jesters and majorettes swinging their batons out of step and shivering in their miniskirts; t’ai chi experts who feigned and bowed to the cheers of an illuminated crowd; boys in their paper-made flying machines, faintly ridiculous, just sprouting beards; grannies in aid of Alzheimer’s disease (unless they were waiting for the parade somewhere else); dragons who breathed a fairylight fire with slayers that came in their wake complete with fake, wobbly swords (manfully manned, of course, by a spinstered headmistress); and last but not least the little princesses, vacant, yawning, late for bed, who waved their little hands above the wrist like puppets on a sad production line or bona fide royalty doing the rounds....