Seahorses Are Real

by Zillah Bethell

  ‘Oh don’t say that,’ Marly said lightly but meaning it. It wasn’t what she wanted to hear. She wanted to hear that some people were different, exceptional. ‘Sometimes I see it all laid out and it’s fine, you know, children, a little house, very secure... and then I get scared, think it’ll all go wrong. I see couples in the supermarket with kids and it all seems so impossible… seems so impossible that I could ever do that.’

  ‘You see the rainbow for a moment and then it’s gone.’

  ‘Yes, that’s it, that’s it exactly. And then at other times – when I’m really bad – I don’t think like that anyway. I’m just grateful to be looked after, to be fed.’

  ‘You’re lucky you’ve got someone like David,’ he said gently, ‘who’s going to be there.’

  ‘Yes, I suppose I am.’ She thought of the boots kicking her in the ribs, the boots that should have been sent away many moons ago to Dr Barnardo’s. ‘I suppose I am.’

  His beaky nose dipped over a new sheet of paper as he wrote in his forward-sloping writing, curling up his lower case stems, no doubt to prevent disease creeping in or perhaps some sudden heart attack. Everything was quite caricatured to her today: the picture of the girl in the shape of a cross, her green eyes bulging like gooseberries, the children sniggering behind her back, smiling at her crucifixion; the figures on the vase on Terry’s desk, having a ball in perpetual motion, chasing each other round and round, almost seeming to be doing the goose step; and the book of dreams described and analysed Victorian style, laid out on the window ledge. She wondered if it had anything under ‘shrinking kitten’: sometimes she had a dream of a tiny kitten, harder to find than a needle in a haystack, though when she did she always realised it was far too tiny to exist. The doorbell went suddenly, making her jump and Terry raised his head to stare gloomily out at the black car squeezing past his far, far too red one in the driveway. ‘They’re always trying to sell me the Reader’s Digest,’ he muttered irritably and Marly smiled weakly in return. ‘The problem is,’ he added, his eyes trained on the black car, ‘you leap ahead and imagine the worst.’

  ‘I do do that, yes,’ she agreed.

  ‘Which when you come to think of it,’ he sighed, ‘is a terrible waste of energy. We don’t know what’s going to happen... we only really have the moment.’

  ‘That’s true,’ she murmured though it went against the grain. What if the moment was too bad to live in; then what did you do? The moment stank! The moment was overrated. You could only live it second by second whereas dreams could be spread quite thinly over the day like margarine or Philadelphia, memories crammed into a minute. And how did you live in the present anyway, with all those past lives ganging up on you?

  ‘I’ve been reading a book,’ she began conversationally, as he delved in his suitcase of poisons, ‘about past lives.’

  ‘I see.’ He always said ‘I see’ like that, his head very straight when he didn’t want to commit himself or come down on something like a GP or a politician. When she’d first asked him how long it would take to be well he’d coughed and spluttered, hummed and haa’d and said he was sounding like a politician and she’d had to reply that he was a bit.

  ‘My mother’s friend, Maureen, said my mother must have done something very bad in a past life to end up the way she did.’

  ‘That was a very irresponsible thing to say.’ The bottles clinked as he searched amongst them, his long, twisted fingers rooting around remedies for bee stings, athlete’s foot, syphilis and gingivitis.

  ‘No, but anyway, she kept getting these messages from Ivy in heaven. Apparently my mother wanted her to get a plant for the rhubarb patch, so she went off and bought a plant but when she got back the car boot wouldn’t open. She kept bringing back these different plants but the boot wouldn’t open for any of them. In the end she got this huge white rhododendron and the boot opened for that one so she concluded that was the one Ivy wanted for the rhubarb patch! It was huge, beautiful, very expensive – about thirty quid apparently.’

  ‘I see.’ He kept his head very straight but his mouth appeared to be twitching.

  ‘David said that she’s going to get very sick of Ivy’s messages from heaven if they cost her thirty quid a time!’

  ‘You’re much better you know,’ he smiled from his chair, taking two brown envelopes from behind the book of dreams. ‘Daily’ he wrote on one, ‘Wed & Sat evening’ on the other, curling up his lower case stems again to prevent some virus getting at him or maybe an airborne pathogen. ‘From where I’m sitting you’ve got much more energy than you had, say, a year ago.’

  ‘Hope so.’ She shuddered to think what she’d been like, say, a year ago.

  ‘You’re really pretty good now.’ She watched him lick the top of the envelopes, his tongue darting in and out like the honeyeater she’d seen on a TV documentary – or was it an anteater? She shuddered a little and he looked her full in the eye. ‘How’s the job, by the way?’

  ‘Okay,’ she replied, smooth as silk. How easily the lies came up to her lips: white lies, black lies, pink elephants can fly lies. (A nocturne, a variation, an invention, an étude. Chopin, Schumann, JS Bach, Mendelssohn Bartholdy, even Debussy.) Anything to fit in, shift the guilt, protect herself or please someone else. He’d seemed so keen to see her well and she hadn’t wanted him to think his treatment had been altogether unsuccessful. Always so eager to please a man, young or old, fat or thin, except David, of course, who was far too close. Besides which, it had become a little embarrassing to be unemployed still after nearly two years... and so the little job of dental receptionist in Gravesend had come along quite suddenly, out of the blue, out of the backside of a bright pink elephant.

  ‘Any root canals recently?’ he joked.

  ‘Oh no, not for me,’ she laughed hysterically, licking her gums in apprehension. ‘One thing I have got is perfect teeth… which reminds me, it worries me not using fluoride….’

  ‘Oh, you don’t need that. They use that stuff in rat poison. Anything left over they shove into toothpaste.’

  ‘You don’t use it then?’

  ‘Oh no.’ He shook his head vehemently.

  ‘And you’re alright?’

  ‘Well, these are dentures....’

  Marly stared at him in astonishment, counting her teeth with the tip of tongue in agitation, not sure whether to laugh or cry.

  ‘... But I lost them way before, after the radiotherapy.’

  Ah yes... when he’d nearly died near Wormwood Scrubs. She smiled at him sympathetically. ‘My grandmother refers to hers as teeth not made by God!’

  He laughed and patted her arm. ‘You’ll be alright,’ he said reassuringly. ‘Keep off the sweets, cakes, chocs, colas... you haven’t got a sweet tooth have you.’

  ‘No, my mother had though, at the end – I think it was the steroids. She kept a bag of Maltesers and marsh­mallows in a drawer by her bed.’ (That cake is a magnum opus, he said to her once in sleep. Did you make it out of tripe? Did you measure the constellations? The teacup rattled on Scott Joplin’s nose and there were always crumbs on his top wet lip – the remains of a half-eaten digestive biscuit. Doing the Cake Walk, Sunflower Slow Drag, Elite Syncopations and Peacherine Rag. My heart stopped beating, did an intermezzo....)

  ‘We’re going on holiday next week,’ he remarked pleasantly, helping her on with her raincoat, ‘to Ireland. Looking for leprechauns!’

  ‘That’ll be nice.’ She felt a giggle rising like a hiccup in her throat, the way it had done long ago in school assemblies, detentions, always at the most inappropriate moments and she pumped his arm extra hard so as not to give herself away. He ushered her out through the stained-glass porch, his blue eyes twinkling like a merry widow’s sapphires and she grabbed his hand again in delight, the giggle opening up into a red hibiscus flower. ‘Hope you find one,’ she laughed as she squeezed her way past his far too red car; and he smiled back and said he was absolutely counting on it, laughing and waving back at her until she was
out of sight.

  (fingertips creeping ri... tar... dando.)

  Eleven

  ‘He thinks you’re vain and obsessive,’ she said to herself, standing in the queue at the job centre. The video showing today was How to become a Bus Driver; the sound was turned off and the buses kept going round and round on a little screen above her head. ‘And compared to him you are – a man who’d lost his heart and teeth near Wormwood Scrubs.’ What a fate for anyone – to have lost their heart and teeth by twenty-one! No wonder he’d never got to New Zealand; just ended up in his big white house behind his far too red car, eating the good stuff June prepared for him and consoling himself no doubt with the fact that other people’s heads and bodies were as screwed up, wonky and buggered as his own. Accepting it all – reality, fate, the rubbish God cared to bestow – out of trepidatious timidity. Trepidatious timidity – she knew about that; she inched herself forward a few steps in the queue and stared angrily at the man in front of her. ‘Look at him looking,’ she almost shouted to herself, ‘at that woman in the pinstripe suit!’ She hated the way men looked at women and hated it even more if they didn’t look at her. In the old days they would have done before… before…

  ‘Those eyes,’ someone had cried admiringly once, on a train, on a bus, under the bedclothes perhaps, ‘don’t need anything.’ Did David know he was with a woman whose eyes didn’t need anything, not an inch of kohl or a dash of mascara? It was imperative somehow that he know, that he be told. The fewer compliments he gave her the more vociferously she voiced the compliments of others. He knew all about Imran and the cashew nut. She’d regaled him with every last detail of his silken curling moustache, his shiny shirts and the lines he’d written in a poetic trance about her goblet neck, soft bright heart and dancing peacock steps. ‘The problem with him,’ David had said a little drily, ‘was that he needed a television; he obviously had far too much time on his hands!’ Funny man. Funny man. Weren’t they all such funny men! Look at him looking at that woman in a pinstripe suit. Human trait, my eye, there was nothing remotely human about men. ‘Shall we go to Swan-Sea?’ Imran had asked her, twirling his curling silken moustache and defrosting a chicken at halfway past midnight in an effort to seduce her. ‘Shall we go to Swan-Sea?’ Trepidatious timidity. She’d go now, like a shot, if she were well. Everything was do-able if you were well: riding Appaloosas over the Andes, racing alligators up the Blue Danube. Fly away, said a voice more than once in her head, when you have got through the chrysalis stage. She was saving up time in a savings account and when she was well she would spend spend spend it, though Terry had said she must live for the moment, face the here and now of her reality. Funny man, funny man – sitting there in his black leather chair, chewing on the dead wood in people’s heads like a ruddy woodworm, burrowing into their cobwebbed and creosoted secrets. No wonder he went off looking for leprechauns, he probably thought if he made a wish they’d give him back his heart and teeth. The secret of life, he’d confided once in his room where dreams were tied up in books and books were tied up in dreams, is to find excitement on your own doorstep. Marly didn’t know if it was the cry of a wise man or a defeated one. To find excitement on your own doorstep. How on earth did you do that?

  ‘Too true,’ the man was busily saying to the woman in a pinstripe suit. ‘They have six men now to do the work of twelve – that’s how I did my back in. No one would help me lift the tyre. They were all too busy having their tea break.’

  ‘Oh dear.’ The woman’s eyes were completely glazed over and she flicked an invisible speck from her sleeve. She hadn’t been out of work long, Marly thought. There was still too much of a clean sheen about her. Give her a few months and the suit would go, the heels would go, the highly coiffured hair would go and by next spring there would be nothing to show but dark roots and last year’s wardrobe. And she would be glad, moreover, to talk to a man who’d done his back in lifting a tyre.

  ‘There aren’t many people,’ the man added mulishly, staring about at the empty desks in the review section. ‘They must be all on their tea breaks!’ He glanced at his watch and tutted in exasperation as if he had an appointment. There was no appointment, Marly decided. It was simply the final act of defiance. There was nowhere to go and nothing to do but you didn’t want to be held up nonetheless. It was like being kept waiting at the door of eternity – the good lord might be off doing the rounds of Jupiter, Neptune, up Uranus, playing chess with an archangel or toasting his crusts in the light of the moon; but you wanted him to get a wriggle on and open up so you could go through and sit blissfully on the other side of the door. She wondered whether her mother was sat waiting blissfully somewhere in Paradise, the way she’d waited in hospital waiting rooms to be led into smaller waiting rooms to wait to be led into smaller waiting rooms until at the end she got to a room where a doctor the size of a pea carved her up into missing nonentities. There was waiting and there was remembering and there seemed to be nothing much in between. Marly had waited most of her life though she wasn’t quite sure what she’d been waiting for: waiting for life to begin, for death to end, for the bell to go, waiting for her favourite television show, to be rid of the wart on the end of her nose, for David to come home, in queues at desks, at checkouts, at interviews, in the early hours for the dawn to break, for the clock to strike midnight and she be transformed out of a pumpkin into something truly audaciously great or at the very least something reasonably okay (like the newspaper cutting about Mr Right. How you had to make do with Mr Reasonably Okay!) Living in a subjunctive case, in a future-perfect tense and speaking out of parentheses – like Michael effing Angelo who butted in on the phone from his easy chair like an old ram with lumbago. Waiting for the fanfare and the parades that had passed long ago or were still to come in a gleaming tomorrow, though Terry had said they were here right now in her ear this very minute if only she could hear them – silly fool, looking for leprechauns in Ireland of all places.... Why doncha just look in the mirror, mate. Save the trip!

  ‘Next please.’ The voice sounded harsh and a little impatient and Marly almost stumbled over to the empty chair, past the poster of the girl with the biggest smile in Britain, having recently landed herself a job. Unbelievable! She dumped her rucksack down on the floor, pulled her chair close and smiled an innocuous smile at the woman with the bunched-up mushroom hair.

  ‘Have you got your card?’

  ‘Oh… yes… ’ Marly scrambled about in her pocket, pulling out her mother’s old shopping list, one of David’s handkerchiefs and a few ancient receipts in the process, while the woman drummed her nails impatiently on the desk – they were red today and diamond-encrusted as though she’d fallen from the sky, scraping stars as she went. Marly stared at them a little aghast as she handed over the dog-eared card.

  ‘Have you contacted at least three employers in the last week?’ the voice began in peremptory fashion. Most of the advisors had the grace to appear bored when they went through the list but the woman with the bunched-up mushroom hair did everything ‘most emphatically’ by the book, jotting down ticks to Marly’s answers and scrutinising her face as she did so.

  ‘Yes.’ (Tick)

  ‘Have you visited the job centre at least twice in the last week?’

  ‘Yes.’ (Tick, eagle-eyed look)

  ‘Have you consulted local, national and international magazines, journals and newspapers?’

  ‘Yes.’ (Tick, sliding glance)

  ‘Have you sent your CV off to employers on spec concerning work?’

  ‘Yes.’ (Tick)

  ‘Have you liaised with relatives and friends concerning work?’

  ‘Er no, not this week.’ It was best to fake honesty at some point. Being superhuman wasn’t entirely convincing or believable. The art of lying dictated that one or two threads of truth had occasionally to appear.

  The woman’s pen paused over the tick and her face went zing as if she’d stumbled on too much mustard in her ham sandwich or gobbled down a red-hot
chilli too quickly. ‘You must leave no stone unturned,’ she admonished, ‘in your search for employment. When you’ve been out of work as long as you have, you’re eligible, briefly, for almost anything.’

  ‘No… er… yes,’ Marly muttered vaguely. She was often quite vague in the job centre. At first it had been a ploy, a ruse – if they dismissed you they didn’t notice you, if they didn’t notice you they couldn’t judge you – but now it was all too familiar a feeling to have a brain like a bowl of porridge – home-made, no treacle – and to take each thought day by day, step by apathetic step.

  ‘It says here the Limes never received an application from you.’ The blood-red nails drummed like stars over the keyboard. ‘Nor did Argos... nor did the Crayford Nurseries: Roger Short, Manager of Shrubs, says he most emphatically did not receive an application from any M. Smart.’

  ‘Oh dear,’ Marly replied with genuine sadness, though she knew quite well she’d never applied for any of them.

  ‘Do you have an explanation?’ The woman’s eyes almost seemed to be popping out of her head in disapproval and the mushroom bun was starting to wobble, ‘briefly, for why your forms did not arrive?’

  Not briefly, thought Marly, staring blankly at her hands, her feet, the buses going round and round, the powdered creases in the woman’s face. ‘The post is bad,’ she mumbled at last. ‘Several things have gone astray. My father wrote to me once, I think, but it never arrived....’ The girl smiled mockingly from her clean white poster and Marly’s heart shrivelled up in her long dark raincoat.

  ‘I see.’ The voice seemed to suggest that it wasn’t born yesterday and didn’t suffer fools gladly but something in Marly’s face must have softened it a little for it changed tone and added almost kindly for once: ‘Would you like another form for the Limes – the post hasn’t yet been filled.’