Seahorses Are Real

by Zillah Bethell

  She scrambles up onto the sofa, tucking her feet under­neath and arranging the cushion within easy reach. She is full of plans and she jots them down one by one on a little scrap of paper: jobs to apply for, trips to be made, skin regimes to try, books to read, music to listen to, a hundred-and-one little chores about the flat; childish dreams and ambitions to fight for. A smile hovers moth-like about her lips and now and again she dips at random into one of the library books, mouthing the words of a sentence she likes or writing it down on a separate piece of paper under the heading ‘Spiritual Growth’; her mutterings and exclamations of excitement and surprise entirely lost on David who carries on reading regardless.

  ‘‘‘A man cannot stand in the same river twice.” Hmm.’ She sucks on her pen, thinks for a while then painstakingly writes it down in her open, angular handwriting. She turns a page. ‘‘‘If you want to know the ending, just look at the beginning.’’’ She repeats it louder for David’s sake, half thinking it may be pertinent, half teasing him. ‘‘‘If you want to know the ending, just look at the beginning.’’’

  ‘Ah.’ He smiles vaguely without turning and then, hearing her laughter, looks up. ‘What?’

  ‘You...’ she ruffles his hair with a smile that belies the look of reproach in her eyes. ‘I tell you what... you know when I was in the bath....’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘I could swear I heard Ratty scampering about in the kitchen.’

  ‘Probably.’ He shuts his book and a playful gleam enters his eyes. ‘He was trying to get a gander at the fireworks through the window. His little feet were hopping about near the cookie jar. I heard him squeaking “Send ’em up, Mister! Send ’em up!” I says to him, “Look here now Ratty. There’s this beautiful bird what lives in this flat – beautiful bird she is – and she ain’t too keen on your meddlin’ ways.” Well, he did something then, I won’t say what it was but it wasn’t nice, it wasn’t pleasant – got me dander up a bit to be honest. So I says, “Whoa there little fella, whoa there now. I’m a giant peace-loving sort of rat, but you’re starting to stress my head up.” He got a bit uppity then, started weaving about the table aiming little kicks at the cookie jar. I took it to mean he was goading me on, egging me on to give him a pop, so I stepped up to the table – eye to beady eye we was – and I don’t exactly know what happened but the next thing I knew he had me in a half-nelson. And, well, to cut a long story short... he’s got the run of the kitchen.’

  ‘How come I didn’t hear any of this?’ she enquires dryly, raising an eyebrow.

  ‘You were too busy lathering yourself up and whatnot. Besides, the whole conversation was conducted in Italian.’

  ‘Italian? You can’t even speak French!’

  ‘Je suis... je suis une voiture. Oh ’eck.’

  ‘Oh, go and have your bath!’ She lobs her old pregnancy book at him and he dives off the sofa and out of the room in what is presumably an assassin-type roll.

  ‘Poor old Cheyenne,’ she shouts after him, puffing out air to stop herself grinning. ‘Dear oh dear, she dies in the end, doesn’t she. Poor old Cheyenne.’

  ‘Spoilsport!’ he shouts through from the hallway, pretend glum fashion. ‘Spoilsport!’

  Stretching herself out in his warm, vacant space she goes back to her books and her lists. These words. These words that will transform her life if only she can believe hard enough. These words, these lists, these bits of dreams on paper like caraway seeds in cake; if only she could utilise them, swallow them down in soups and stews and cassoulets, string them bead-like onto a necklace, tie them up with her laces and hair, imprint them on her very soul in delicate silvery lettering. These words, how they tempt her into a future, twinkling with vistas of hope and happiness. These good, fine words that will banish the bad from the dark, grey lining of her soul. She scribbles them down as fast as she can, for the more good words she knows, the more the bad ones will fade and disappear – it stands to reason. It says so, more or less, on the back of the book: Transform Your Life in Five Easy Steps. No need any more for doubt or despair. No need to escape into childhood books where good and bad are washed down with ginger beer and midnight feasts, lacrosse and the French mistress Mademoiselle Dupont, baked apples and ponies that win rosettes at Wembley for the show-jumping class and Best Turned Out. Those words are of the past, of solace, retreat. These words, these good fine words she is reading now are the magic incantations of the future. Her future. Her cake filling up with caraway seeds.

  David whistles in the bath, topping her dirty water up with more hot and she smiles and listens for a moment or two, her tight cold heart expanding a little in this soft, safe, bright night where the fireworks are flying over candyfloss crowds with a snap, crackle and pop. It is quiet apart from that, sealed up in their cramped little rundown flat where the rats play Monopoly under the pipes and the yellow-green mould draws sunflowers on the ceiling (though by next week, even tomorrow, they may be manholes or hollyhocks). But not tonight! Tonight they are sunflowers bursting with life, and she jumps up suddenly in her old pink dressing-gown, kicks off her slippers and dances across the room, her shadow gigantic over the walls and astride the pin-tacked world map. She stops before it, closes her eyes and twirls her finger just for fun and just to watch it land again on some ancient green island in blue paper seas, some black dot on the horizon of a foxing yellow continent, some unknown destination in a faded pink metropolis; then goes spinning back like a top across the room to peep behind the curtains at the smoke-filled night and shake the snow world just for fun and just to watch it settle again in a blanket soft as cocoa-filled dreams and deep as a sleep of enchantment. David is singing, now, in the bath; she takes a pen, leans over the table and writes in her gratitude diary:

  World Number 426 is just fine.

  I will transform my life.

  Cape Hope it is then. Cape Hope first and then the world.

  She stops, suspended for a moment as David’s voice comes bellowing like a foghorn out of the bathroom.

  ‘A room with a view and you,’ he sings affectedly, deliberately – she knows it – to make her smile.

  ‘And no one to worry us

  No one to hurry us...’

  She changes her mind for number three, crosses it out and writes instead: I love D very, very much.

  The fireworks go out with a chitty chitty bang bang, stream of red arrows, snap, crackle and pop blaze of glory; and darkness descends once and for all on the little flat.

  Nine

  David approached the house with trepidation. No lights were on. He’d rushed up East Hill like a bat out of hell, checking his watch every second or so, worried in case she was fretting, fearful, waiting for him – the meeting had gone on so late. To make matters worse he’d stopped off at the flower shop on Watling Street and the old woman had taken an age wrapping up the flowers, snapping off the stalks with her red swollen fingers. ‘Are they for me?’ she’d cackled once or twice; and he’d smiled a little despairingly and entered into the thing: ‘Not tonight, I’m afraid. Not tonight.’ And then: ‘Is she bonny?’ ‘Oh, yes,’ he’d replied, ‘she’s bonny alright.’ And she was. He’d give up the world for her if he had to, and she knew it, which was probably why she treated him so badly. Not even married yet and henpecked half to death... he wondered what sort of a mood she was in tonight. No lights was a bad sign, no smell of dinner cooking in the oven. He was surprised how much that annoyed him, after all there was often no dinner – the rats ate better than they did. But after such a good spell it was all the more distressing, frustrating to see her regressing, reverting to type. He sighed and entered the cold, dark silence, almost creeping up the stairs in the thick boots she hated, laughed at, the roses in one hand, his briefcase in the other. He felt a somewhat shambolic figure with his windswept hair and shabby jacket, his shoulders drooping forward a little under a sudden feeling of weight. The meeting had gone on so long and nothing had been accomplished, nothing was ever accomplished. Just meetings about
meetings about meetings transcribed into minutes about minutes about minutes. Old Bilberry had the right idea, perching himself by the door like that, ready to make a quick exit. He felt, more often than not, like a cog in a machine, a machine that was at worst corrupt, at best useless, churning out homogeneous little people like pork chipolatas; rendering anything you did ineffectual. Just a cog, just a clown. ‘Are you the clown?’ the Head of Department had asked him once in a dream. ‘Are you the clown, Mr Morrell? Are you the clown?’ Too young to be taken seriously, too old to live as irresponsibly as he might have done – if he had dared to, if he had ever dared. He wasn’t sure now that he had ever dared.

  He switched the landing light on with his elbow, put down his briefcase and went into the sitting room. There she was on the sofa, curled up in a little ball, spines sticking out and at the ready he supposed. He took in as much as he could as quickly as he could: unopened junk mail, bills, letters, a subscription to a donkey sanctuary – he smiled a little wryly at that, the way she spent his money willy-nilly on good causes – two dirty mugs, lunch plate, television point on, CD point on, her pregnancy book folded up at her feet, red sleeping bag over pink dressing-gown over listless body, atmosphere thick enough to cut with a knife, nothing moving in the room except those eyes. Those eyes. He turned and glanced out of the window for a moment in order to prepare himself. A double-decker bus rumbled by; brightly lit and brimful of people going home. Home. He blinked, faltered, turned with the flowers.

  ‘What’s that you’ve got?’ she suddenly demanded, her curiosity getting the better of her.

  ‘For you.’ He knelt, smiling, relieved, pressed them up to her nose. ‘God, that meeting dragged. Would you believe they still haven’t sorted out Application of Number. Bilberry did his usual thing, of course.’ That usually nettled her, the way Bilberry buggered off halfway through meetings with the paltry excuse that the traffic got bad near Croydon, but tonight she remained unmoved.

  ‘I’ve eaten,’ she replied with emphasis, her violet eyes opening a little at the scent of the roses, the left one swooning away the way it did when she was lying or surprised by something. It was amazing, he thought, how her eyes spoke the emotion her face and voice did not. The rest of her could remain still as a statue while the eyes collected, reflected everything – like that book about the tosser who went round opium dens, his life going into a picture. She was like a person trapped in a glacier, only the eyes ever wanting to get out.

  ‘It’ll be cold,’ she muttered as though reading his thoughts before waving him away to the table. ‘You better put them in that,’ she added unnecessarily because there only ever had been one vase in the flat. He plonked them in a little askew, arranging them clumsily, carelessly on purpose; and she hemmed and fretted from the sofa, asserting herself with little sighs and oh dears and ‘no no not like that’ and ‘I think they need something smaller’. She was pleased though, he could tell, her bossiness just a facade, just a disguise to hide it. He smiled, took off his jacket, went through to the kitchen.

  The place was a tip. It looked at first glance as though a bomb had hit it, though on closer inspection it was simply a surface disorder: things left out, tops off bottles, crockery and saucepans piled up in the sink, banana skins, orange peel, teabags on the draining board. He rolled up his sleeves and set to work, methodically putting things away, tidying things up, washing and drying a couple of plates, turning the oven on to heat the dinner up, keeping an ear open for sounds of movement in the sitting room, waiting for the roses to tempt her out of inertia. She wasn’t as bad as he had feared. She was somewhere in the region he defined as the cobwebs and the blues. The cobwebs and the blues weren’t all that serious. He could play a song on his guitar about the cobwebs and the blues. He rinsed two glasses and chopped some garlic for the garlic bread, and by the time he had the riff down pat in his head the sofa was creaking, her feet padding over the floor and, yes, there she was by the table, her head bent over the roses, muttering to herself about the length of the stems.

  ‘They’re all wonky,’ he heard her cry in dismay. ‘What kind of simpleton cut them all ’culiar like this?’

  ’Culiar – the abbreviated word was an offering, a titbit, a sign that she was almost herself again, almost at peace with the world. He thought of the old woman who’d leapt from the back of the flower shop, scaring him half to death and cackled like a ghoulish parrot: ‘Is she bonny? Is she bonny? Is she bonny?’ He poured himself a drink, leant back against the table and watched her across the landing, her long blonde hair falling over her face, her delicate, sensitive fingers guiding the flowers into place. She must have felt his eyes upon her for she turned suddenly and came to the doorway, holding the vase in front of her.

  ‘That’s how you do it,’ she smiled triumphantly, her face lighting up like the double-decker bus, the roses sticking out all higgledy-piggledy, some tall as poppies, some short as buttercups. He held an imaginary camera to his eye and snapped her there, framed in the doorway, his goddess in blue jeans under an old pink dressing-gown, clutching a Grecian urn of flowers to her chest.

  He nearly choked on a kidney bean when she started going on about old Bilberry. The roses had exhilarated her apparently. She was chewing fast, her face flushed, the words coming out in a torrent.

  ‘God, he’s a meddler though, shooting out halfway through. How does he get away with it? Doesn’t anyone complain? How old is he, for God’s sake? Didn’t you say he had a sports car?’

  ‘Coming up for retirement I should think.’

  She tipped her head back to laugh, her teeth gleaming. ‘Don’t they call him the Honey Monster? Don’t the students call him the Honey Monster? Why is that? Are his shoulders up all hunched? Maybe that’s why he needs a sports car – to fit his shoulders in. You’d think he’d whizz back to Croydon in a sports car.’

  ‘No idea. You know what students are like. There’s this one kid, Gary Cooke, nice kid actually, wouldn’t hurt a fly. Said Bilberry should have his own canteen. He said the way Mr Billerey eats a bacon roll, he should have his own canteen. Puts him off his food!’

  ‘That’s appalling. Have you ever seen him eating? Have you ever seen him eating in the canteen?’

  ‘Well, no. I can’t say I’ve made a particular study of his masticative habits! I mean, you know, I may well have got a glimpse of him nibbling a mint imperial in the staffroom, but I can’t say it did anything for me.’

  ‘You should though. You should offer him a sandwich tomorrow for lunch.’

  ‘Oh yeah, I’m really gonna do that, aren’t I. Oh, hiya Alan, d’you want a bit of my corned-beef sarnie only my girlfriend wants to know if you dribble when you eat.’

  ‘Well,’ she said laughing, ‘I don’t know how he gets away with it, though. I mean, it’s only in teaching that that would happen. You wouldn’t have that happening in business. Can you imagine my brother going off halfway through a business meeting?’

  ‘No,’ a little irritatedly. He almost wished he hadn’t mentioned old Billerey, not if it meant bringing up a comparison with her brother. Her idol. Her square-jawed action man comic book hero who earned a six-figure income, collected ambassadors and sent her postcards that said things like: in Tunisia on business. Just had a massage and a swim! It needled him the way she held him up as some sort of yardstick; and he ate sulkily for a moment or two, staring at the bills and the donkey sanctuary subscription at his feet. ‘You’re not going to do that again are you? Which one are you going to adopt this year? Mustapha or...’ he kicked over the magazine... ‘Chocolate Brownie – found in garden shed in pitiful condition, amidst pitchforks and garden shears, two teeth missing.’

  ‘Not sure yet.’

  ‘I think you prefer animals to people,’ he teased, spearing a kidney bean with vicious intent.

  ‘Animals can’t defend themselves. Like children.’ Her eyes began to fill with tears. ‘Old Bilberry’s got a tongue in his head, hasn’t he?’

  ‘Billerey has,’
he agreed.

  It was always the same, he thought, chewing on grimly, watching her put her knife and fork together, her unfinished plate down on the floor, her turning on the waterworks like that, at the drop of a hat. Her so-called compassion always ended up coming back to herself. It might start off with a mistreated horse, an abandoned baby, a boozing old tramp, but it always had the knack of getting back to Me Me Marly, one of her own little crises. Her empathy, her sensitivity to the sadness of others, he had always felt, was at root a selfishness, a sadness about herself. Still, he wished he could give her a year’s subscription to a donkey sanctuary, buy her the wretched sanctuary, buy her a horse to ride, a yacht to sail, a house far away by the sea with an orchard full of apple trees. All he had was his love and his tales of old Bilberry and the students, his make-believe stories of fairies, feathers and Quality Street. All he could do to amuse her was elaborate on his mundane prosaic little day, make a joke about the rats, play a song on his guitar. He felt quite keenly that it wasn’t enough, that it never would be enough.

  ‘At least I managed to get some reports done before the meeting,’ he stuttered after a while at her savage little profile. ‘It was a job knowing what to say for half of them. You know that girl, Karen Lang, the one whose assignment consisted of four blank pages and a graph, the one who gives really long-winded excuses for not turning up – I didn’t know what to say about her so in the end I said she was very unique.’

  He was startled by the violence of her response: withering scorn when he had expected a pat on the back. ‘What a stupid thing to say! That’s the most stupid thing to say. D’you know what the word means? Everybody’s unique. You’re unique. I’m unique.’ Her voice trembled. ‘It doesn’t make any sense at all to say someone’s unique.’