Pondweed Page 10

  Again, that look. I exasperate him for not understanding. And he disappears behind his words: Stagnant water is a breeding ground for parasites. They worm into the intestines. Have you ever watched a drowning hedgehog in pond scum, Ginny? Algae is an iceberg without an irrigation outlet, a fifty-foot phosphorous buffer, a sewage pipe. It’ll resist treatment and spawn. It gets into your very pores.

  Then why are you so obsessed with them if you think them so dirty? I’ll ask.

  And he’ll back away from me, as if he’s about to fall apart.

  I am taking off my shoes and socks and edging closer to where the water laps against the banks of this stately pond with its bulrush verges and lily pads the size of hearth rugs. There is glitter on this pond. It’s like a magnet. It even winks.

  After the kippers and the fishman, Meg and I knocked on the door of number twenty-four, Joiners Square, to greet our new neighbours properly.

  ‘As fresh and fat from the fields as if I’d shot ’em myself,’ Meg had declared, offering up a silver platter of sirloins to a horror-struck Sarah Robby and the man who came to count my hiccups through the walls. I don’t remember the rest of the conversation – if anything else was even said – just that Sarah Robby, with her flaming red hair and black-grape eyes, looked straight through Meg and bore into me. ‘You still live,’ she’d yelled. I’ll never forget it. She’d looked as if she was about to sink her teeth into me. ‘What do you want? What is it that I didn’t do right by you?’

  Selwyn was aside of her, soothing her, like she’d tumbled over the handlebars of her bicycle. He brushed her hair away from her face.

  ‘You are very kind,’ he’d said to Meg. ‘But my mother is not herself today, the little winged-thing.’ And he’d shut the door.

  ‘Like slammed that door in my face!’ Meg came to wail at the Bluebird, as we returned home with the two steaks that Meg then declared no fit for a dog. ‘Any closer, an’ he’d have taken off my nose!’

  ‘Oh, Meg,’ the Bluebird’s turn to soothe. ‘She was just a child.’

  ‘Aren’t we all?’ Meg’s retort and sulking then. As much as she didn’t need people, she still wanted them to like her. It was like being mothered by a toddler.

  My right foot dangles into the pond water below. I’m surprised for how sticky it feels. How warm.

  ‘There is a great necessity to create ponds in our lifetime for the generations we will never meet,’ is how Selwyn’s talk begins. ‘Our country needs them. A pond is the most diverse source of life. It begins with no history and focuses only on its future self.’

  My right ankle is deeper inside the pond. It calls to my left. Come in! The water’s lovely!

  I feel like I am entering his world.

  I’m standing in the pond shin-deep. I try not to think about the two thousand odd species Selwyn tells me can live in a single pond. Species that are alien to me. Things that would make me squirm and gag and probably scream at the top of my voice. But why didn’t he want me there? Is there something he doesn’t want me to hear? I can listen. I can support. I can be proud. I won’t laugh. I might even have learnt something. Jesus! What was that? Selwyn says that grass snakes sip from ponds just like cows.

  He’ll have to explain you though, when you can’t even explain yourself.

  The pennies dropping are like rockfall, and the water seeps into my skin. I concentrate on what’s above me. Magpies, being awful playful. I count six for gold and cannot feel my toes. There is nothing else around me, only what I’m ignorant of. Yet, I am wading, further and further in, and, as I wade, I sway, as if in a dress made of silk and not a pair of burgundy cords and an unravelling navy sweater that is raining cheap pearls. I can hear them plop into the water as the stitching comes loose. Plip. Plop. Like hail, and just before it thunders down. The water is finding the corduroy ribs and using them as channels, making streams. Selwyn is right. Water does flow both ways. The feeling is enveloping. I am breathing like a fish.

  I turn to look back towards the bank. Look for where I have left my shoes and socks and real life. I can see just two black spots that don’t even look like shoes any more. Specks of me. That’s all. I’m in deeper than I thought and I cannot swim a stroke.

  My daughter was married to an architect ten years her senior. It outlasted all my expectations. He was forever renovating their rooms and giving them new labels. His work was never finished. Rooms never stayed put. Stand still long enough and you’d be given a lick of paint. ‘He’s never satisfied,’ Mia came to complain. ‘He’s either colouring me in, or washing me out.’

  They tried for children half-heartedly, and never with any success. ‘Don’t be too disappointed, Mother,’ Mia once said to me. ‘I’m not. And I’m sure, if you had your time over, you’d have chosen otherwise.’

  ‘Oh, Mia,’ I’d replied. ‘I have wanted my life to be exactly how it was.’

  She would visit me. Once every couple of months maybe. I’d make her bed up on the settee and she would treat me, as she called it, to pub lunches up Endon way, or we’d walk around Finney Gardens remembering the peacocks. Sometimes, Stoke Market – taking her arm in the drizzle as we rummaged, and relishing in the few seconds she allowed me to keep my arm linked in hers. I’ve dedicated my life to you, I’d be thinking, as soon as she pulled away to– Oh, will you look at that? I’ve been looking for an old-fashioned sink plunger. Me left on one side of the market. Her on the other side and holding back.

  She’s ashamed of me too.

  My hands are in the water now and spinning whirlpools, like little doorways, in the scum.

  Mia would send an envelope of train tickets to make me visit her. For a change, she’d say. It’s like you’ve shrink-washed your world. Where’s all that confidence you used to have? I found the journeys long and tiresome; the weekend breaks, as she called them, unlovely. Silence wallpapered every room we sat in, while her husband redesigned other rooms. I dreaded the words, I’ve booked us a table for seven thirty. We had more to say to each other on the phone.

  I have never known water to be this alluring. I could walk for miles.

  It began with noticing things. Just small things, but still. They were quarrelling a lot, Mia said. Her and her husband. And not just about rooms. Nit-picking, she called it. That she cooked for him and slept aside of him, but everything else they did was done in separate rooms. When she told him it was over, he wasn’t a bit surprised. A week later, a Thank You card in the post from him to me. Which was all it said. Thank you. And his name, signed, as if he was signing off on a project he was glad to be shot of.

  Our bodies are more water than blood, Selwyn says. We are as ruled by the moon as is the sea. It’s why we howl. Why we bicker and bloat. At full moon, in a pond, creatures will suddenly change direction as if, all this time, they’ve been going the wrong way.

  After she left her husband, Mia came to stay with me – three or four days was all – and lay sleepless on my settee mulling it all over. By the time I properly knew about Anthony, there was nothing I could do or say to dissuade her. She’d been planning it for years – nothing can be hidden any more; everyone can be found – then talking to him for months on the phone – her noon, his midnight; her midnight, his noon – and, eventually, his invitation to enter his world down under.

  ‘The thing is, Mia,’ I’d tried to say. ‘There was more to it, and certainly to that day.’

  But she was already at boiling point and using the word ‘jealous’ – ‘Are you jealous because it was meant to be your journey?’

  It took me a very long time to answer that question. And when I did, all I said to her was, ‘It is your journey. Not mine.’

  So much water under the bridge, we collapsed.

  Then I hear it, in the distance: the applause. It cuts across the sky like a jet. Not just dull clapping, but a standing ovation for a man reborn, and I am not there to see it.

  I am guilty of devotion. I devoted my life to my daughter who then left me behind. I am guilty o
f parking my life up and putting the rest of me to one side so my daughter would never know doubt. But when she left home for the places where she blended in, I lost sight of her. Some days, I couldn’t even remember her voice when it is all a mother usually hears. By the time I’d rallied myself enough to jangle the car keys once again, the clamps had been on for so long, I’d neither the desire nor inclination to start again and move on. Then I looked in my purse and realised that I couldn’t afford the petrol either.

  It’s not what’s in the pond now, but what began the pond that Selwyn wants to understand: those things that are there, but we can’t see. Then he and I can start to love each other in the simplest of ways.

  I don’t turn away from the water. I don’t even want to leave it. Ponds are complicated. We are complicated. But we can learn this living and loving together. Sometimes, it’s better not knowing what’s just nipped at your ankle bone and slid around your shin. Especially when it’s already slipped away.

  I back out of the water, thanking it, and slowly. So much I will never understand even when this pond is as clear as day and as warm as toast.

  I’M COUNTING OUT SELWYN’S wages by the light of the glovebox. ‘So, three hundred for your work and talk, and what did you get for the fountain and filter?’

  ‘Grand and twenty-five.’

  I do the sums. Recount the twenties again, just to check.

  He says, ‘You found things to do then?’

  I tell him I took a walk. I did not tell him that I waded into the pond and right up to my waist where the pondweed underneath turned into step ladders going down. That there was something in that water that called to me and seemed to make a lot of sense. But I did tell him that I heard the applause.

  ‘See,’ I say. ‘What you do does matter.’

  ‘To fifty people,’ he says.

  ‘Which is fifty more than have ever listened to me,’ and then just like that, I tell him about Rachael and what she said to me in the kitchen. How she said it, as if asking me if I’d like it hot or cold, with chips or mash. ‘Do you want him?’ she’d asked. ‘It’s just that you don’t wear the look of being the luckiest woman in the world.’

  I watch his face as closely as I can in this dim light. I want to notice everything about it and see it change. But it doesn’t. Nothing does.

  He just says, ‘That’s quite a hair shirt to wear,’ and does that thing where he pinches his nostrils together and sniffs. This is the self-deprecating veneer of the salesman. Underneath his skin, he is singing and still lost in the adulation of fifty-odd people clapping his talk.

  ‘There’s been a lot of Rachaels in your world, hasn’t there?’ I say.

  He clips in his seatbelt and clears his throat. His mouth curves, but he avoids smiling. ‘But no particular Rachael,’ he replies.

  I close the glove box and look out of the car window thinking of this last Rachael; how I’d told her that this was the furthest I’d ever been from all I’ve only known. That I’d spent the past sixty-seven years lost in the same place, going around in circles, living in squares, neither here nor there or even changing my hair, just hoping to get by unnoticed.

  ‘So, I thanked her for seeing me,’ I tell him, looking down at my hands on my lap that still smell of my pond dipping, like damp pine and wet sand. ‘Because even if she couldn’t see me with you, she still saw me.’

  But he’s muttering about the lack of mirror again and that everything behind him is a blur.

  ‘IS THIS US ON our way to Wales now?’

  We have been driving for over an hour, but now Selwyn is slowing down to peer over the steering wheel like we’re lost. It’s not just night but the depths of night. I ask him what he’s looking for and he says, ‘Nothing.’ He’s not looking for anything.

  ‘Then why have you slowed down?’

  He is adamant he hasn’t and, to prove his point, speeds up again. I feel the pull of the caravan behind like a magnet pushing away from us. Perhaps it’s the caravan that’s slowed down, and not Selwyn.

  ‘Are we going somewhere else before Wales?’ I mutter at him. He’s concentrating so hard the blood vessels in his neck are protruding. He starts to indicate, thinks better of it, flicks the indicator off. So, I tell him that I was listening to the radio the other day and that on this programme they were talking about getting lost and this guy came on, some psychologist or doctor, and, apparently, we spend almost two weeks of our life completely lost. That if you add up all the times you take a wrong turn, or find yourself somewhere you don’t want to be, it equates to fourteen days of essentially being missing.

  ‘But it hasn’t been two weeks,’ he says. ‘It’s only Saturday.’

  ‘I’m not talking about now. I’m talking about in the whole of our lives.’

  He’s thinking about what to say to me. ‘People get lost for a reason, Ginny,’ he begins. ‘We no longer live in a world where you can be lost. There are signposts everywhere. GPS tracking and electronic chips.’

  I clench my fists and look out of the passenger window and see it’s started to rain. I glance at the outline of Selwyn’s face and wonder if I’m just his shadow and that’s why I can’t ever leave. Then it occurs to me that everything we’ve done since he came home with the caravan on Monday has been agreed on glances and brief nods alone. It occurs to me that I have not been the one delivering the glances. I don’t ever remember nodding my head. Yet, here I am. Somewhere. With him – deliverer of glances and brief nods – and with curious consent.

  ‘There it is!’ Selwyn announces, and he flicks up the indicator again to take us down some potholed waste-bucket of a lane, where we swerve more than once into the hedgerows as if we’re driving on thin ice. It is absolutely pitch black.

  ‘What are we doing down here? This isn’t even a road.’

  ‘There!’

  I look out of the windscreen. Selwyn swears it is there – he cannot understand why I can’t see it – but, even as we edge closer to what he says is there, I still can’t see the faint dot of light he tells me we’re heading towards.

  The dot turned out to be a single outside light, on a house somewhere so nowhere it clearly does not want to be found. While it occurred to me that a house this nowhere could only be found by those in the know, who had been here before, Selwyn had stopped the car and got out. Two figures were there. Like there. Small figures. Hunched figures. I swear they were cloaked. Selwyn knew these figures. He threw himself on to them. They embraced him like he was something magnificent. They were all crying. Loud crying. I started thinking, are his parents still alive?

  I got out of the car. I wanted to be part of this. Something was happening. But in the brief moment it took me to get out of the car, Selwyn and one of the figures disappeared. Like disappeared. I checked for my stomach. I felt like it’d dropped through the floor.

  Now, there is only one figure left and it does not embrace me. I move closer. It seems to be of womanly shape, and it speaks.

  ‘Come with me.’

  She has the voice of a small child, but what to do but follow her when all I have done is follow? And we are walking on gravel that crunches so loud I wonder if it’s a path of bones. I keep asking who she is and where we are and, ‘I’m sorry. But how do you know Selwyn?’ and when she doesn’t answer me, I remember my manners and say, ‘Please. I don’t understand where I am.’ I also state the obvious: ‘It’s very dark.’ And then, ‘Bloody hell. This is proper dark. How do you even see anything?’ And, ‘Do you actually live out here? It’s the arse-end of nowhere!’ And I’m blinking wildly in case I can see something before it sees me. At one point, I come out with, ‘Are you Selwyn’s mother?’ Because some long lives defy science. And there is nothing to tell me the time.

  I realise that I’m frustrated, rather than scared. Selwyn tells me that frustrated people make other people frustrated because frustration, he says, when it detonates, becomes panic. And when people panic, he says, because of the things they don’t think are happening,
they try and make it happen and spoil it. And that just means more frustration, because it’s not how they imagined it to be. Salesmen are very adept at creating vicious circles, I find.

  Eventually, she opens a door and finally there’s light, from a washing line of dangling bare bulbs of all different watts in a kitchen of exposed brick and it’s cold, really bloody cold. There’s an old Rayburn in the chimney recess with a large tin kettle hanging above it, and a rabbit, skinned and hanging from its ears. Over there, in that far left-hand corner, is a bucket full of enamel plates still mid-meal on a cracked stone floor. But then in the other corner, where the bulb is so dim, I can’t make out what’s in the sink and if it’s a crack or really does crawl. So, I start to tell her that when you skin a rabbit you take out its legs first, which makes it far easier to yank the fur from over the neck, and that it’s also worth cutting off its feet, though you don’t have to. ‘You don’t even need a knife. Just your finger.’

  But she’s not at all interested, like I wasn’t interested in Meg’s bleak butchering advice, back when I just wanted erotic: a boy with a knife.

  This is how my mother’s life had been. She had lived like this. Selwyn has brought me here for a reason.