Pondweed Read online

  ‘And you didn’t have to go downstairs and keep running,’ he shouts. ‘But you did.’

  ‘I was sixteen! And I made it two miles down the road to Stoke station. Watched all these trains leave and never got on one of them.’

  But I did go to the edge. Where the platform falls away. I was listening to the echoes of the train on the tracks. Have you ever really listened to the echoes on the train tracks? They can take you miles.

  ‘And then I came back.’

  ‘And never again acknowledged me, like you couldn’t even see me, until one day you completely disappeared. Like you’d been rubbed out.’

  ‘I’d started to show. I had to.’

  It wasn’t like Meg asked me to go. She never used the words, but closed doors on me instead. Something she’d never done. She was kind enough to loosen darts on dresses and let down hems on skirts, but I came to realise that she’d been in love too. Then, this one morning, I woke up and there she was standing at the end of my bed, and she told me she was going to go and think somewhere, and it would be no bad thing for me to do the same. ‘Don’t have my life,’ she’d said. ‘I brought you up better than that.’

  She’d left me money on the kitchen table, in one of her brown envelopes, and I ran to the butcher’s shop because, if nothing else, I didn’t want her to leave me. I’d never once been on my own. And she’d done it alone. Why couldn’t we? There was a sign gummed to the door. Closed to take stock, it said. And I just threw up. Couldn’t help it. Couldn’t stop it. Threw up so much I gave myself a nosebleed. It was all up the door – my sick and my blood, like my insides had just splattered out – and not a single person walked past to help me. I felt as if all that lace and cotton wool I’d been wrapped in for sixteen years had been unwrapped and there was absolutely nothing there, inside, and nobody around to wrap me back up again.

  I went home. Took the money. Pulled out my suitcase from under the bed and did that same walk down to Stoke station. And I meant to get on a train. I watched the trains ticker past thinking there or there or even there? Out of the corner of my eye, the Bluebird had come to wave me off. Good riddance to bad rubbish, and steaming up like a pressure cooker. I realised then that she’d arrived for Meg, never me, because I was always going to leave her behind. Not the other way around.

  Her name was Sylvia. She waited on Stoke station for girls like me.

  At that, I realise I have not said her name in a very long time and struggle to remember her face. What I do remember is the phone we fed coins to in the hallway to call boyfriends and worried mothers and mothers like mine who wouldn’t answer because there was never a phone to call. I used to pretend anyway. The dialling tone reminded me of those echoes in the train track. Then the door opened for another girl to leave for a wedding ring and closed as another one was brought in off the platform. A revolving door for the ashamed.

  I don’t know how, but Meg knew where I was. She left me packages on the doorstep full of the things I’d left behind. I put them all in a cardboard box and shut them away. She’d got someone else to write my name on the brown paper. She was a whizz with figures and knives, but could barely write a single word.

  I took a secretarial course and a maths course at night. Shared a room with single beds and pink walls with a girl called Hayley with a cruel father and who was probably older than she said she was. No idea what happened to her. She used to iron her hair with egg whites and worked in the cloakrooms of the various nightclubs up Hanley, until her light fingers got the better of her. We planned on going to London. And then my waters broke. A month before I was due.

  I pause to skip five decades.

  ‘You know the rest, and here we are. An ordinary story at best. It happens to lots of us. And life trucks on.’

  But he’s not listening. He folds into himself and starts pulling out clothes of mine that he has hung on various wireframe coat hangers. I realise he has unpacked my suitcase.

  ‘What’s this coat?’ he asks.

  ‘It’s a cape,’ I correct. ‘And you’re angry with me, so please don’t do this now.’

  ‘Do you need it?’ he asks, trying to make sense of it.

  ‘I don’t not need it,’ I say, trying to remember the last time I wore it, because it’s not my colour at all. Mustard really. A condiment I don’t like, along with horseradish and mayonnaise, and this cape is a battle of those colours. Selwyn is looking at the label inside of it. He brings the washing instructions closer to his face.

  ‘This is dry clean only,’ he mutters. And he’s disgusted by it. I can tell. He holds it out to me like it’s a pair of wings I’ve been hiding from him.

  I start to wonder where I would go if I really could wear those wings, and if they would be strong enough to get me to New Zealand. There are birds that fly that far. Migration. Hibernation. I realise I’ve been wearing wings for most of my life, and place my hands on the small of my back where they used to sprout. I was a moth, once, I think. I used to be able to see so clearly in the dark.

  ‘Are we really heading for the other side of the world?’ I ask.

  Selwyn looks as if he’s about to say something. I will him to say it. But he asks, ‘Do you have an anorak? An anorak would be much more practical than this.’ He throws the cape on the cushion aside of me and returns to the cupboard to rifle through my clothes again. ‘And what about jumpers? Is that the only one you have?’ He gestures to what I’m wearing. A grey cable-knit that grows with every wash. I reach over for the cape and put it on over my jumper. It’s unflattering, because it widens me, drowns me, and I suddenly regret not giving it to Maisie. She’d been as cold as the dead.

  ‘So many women whose clothes I would’ve liked to have snatched off their backs,’ I say, smiling, but Selwyn still won’t look at me in the cape, as if he knows something I don’t. Instead, he looks at my other clothes, sorting through them by clutching on to hems and sleeves, and feeling them for warts and blemishes, hard skin and infections. He seems to pick out a dress at random. It’s navy blue with an A-line skirt, the faintest polkadot, with the sort of pockets that resemble holsters.

  ‘You’re unpacking me,’ I tell him. ‘Don’t make me feel like I shouldn’t have told you. You wanted to know it all. Selwyn, please.’ I try and grab his hand, but he pulls away. ‘Am I to be thrown out too?’

  ‘I told you that everything had to have a place,’ he retorts. ‘Nothing can be too heavy, too light. You’ve seen what happens when the balance is off.’ He folds up the navy dress and puts it on the bar. ‘Have you any other trousers other than those jeans?’ He points at my legs, which makes me look down.

  ‘I have a black pair,’ I tell him.

  He looks back into the cupboard, as if trying to locate the black pair of trousers.

  ‘You know my clothes aren’t the answers to the questions you want answers to,’ I say calmly. ‘But it’s only fair that I get to sort through yours after you’ve sorted through mine.’

  Selwyn sniffs loudly to this, and removes a floor-length floral chiffon dress, with an exuberant pussy-bow, from its hanger that I have never worn but keep in the suitcase because it’s one that Meg gave me. She’d left it on the doorstep at Sylvia’s, like she wanted me to remember that, even when a mother, I was still that little girl.

  ‘This can never be yours,’ he says aghast, holding it up to the light so I can see just how translucent the material is. Appearances are always deceptive, I think, but I still stop myself from making a quip about seeing right through me.

  ‘She had me in dresses and gowns from the moment I was born,’ I say. ‘I don’t know what else to wear.’

  I think about the hair shirts I’ve dressed Selwyn in; how might he feel about sacrificing some of them to retain the balance? What about your wellies, your waders, all that heavy weatherproof gear? All those things that you need, and all those clothes you don’t wear. We are blaming each other for so much. But, instead, I settle for reminding him that I am simply a woman with a past, as he is
a man with a past; that our future might be as uneven as the road that has almost unhitched the caravan and forced us into this layby, but we have got this far. There’s something to be said about that.

  His reply is to hold up a ribbed burgundy polo neck two sizes too big that I am pretty sure is not mine. He remarks, ‘Finally, something mindful of where we’re headed,’ and folds it neatly on the top shelf.

  ‘Selwyn,’ I say, ‘it was fifty years ago. We can’t let it weigh us down when we’re already weighed down by all this bloody stolen pond equipment. All those fish.’

  He looks at me, wears the sort of expression you have when you’ve found old Christmas cards from those no longer with us. He tells me that’s why we’re heading to Wrexham. ‘I’ve told you before,’ he says. ‘Judd will tell me what to do.’

  I’m not following him and tell him I’m not following him.

  He says, ‘Then nothing’s changed.’

  ‘Good,’ I say quickly. ‘Because things are just fine and dandy, aren’t they?’

  I watch him let an orange knitted scarf, that I swear I have never seen before, snake through his fingers and drift to the floor. He looks down on it, as if it’s something he can’t save when a salesman’s job is to persist. ‘Just remember that I have been the only one to never let you down,’ he says coldly. ‘And I’m still here, Ginny. I am still here.’

  ‘I know,’ I say quietly. ‘And that’s why I still want us to go to Wales.’

  I move towards him and I take his hand. His skin is hard and his knuckles protrude like fungus growing on trees, and I wish he wouldn’t bite his fingernails as much as he does, but they do wrap around mine, his fingers, and when I look down at our hands, our skin is soft, and we blend, like butter and sugar.

  ‘From the moment I met you,’ he murmurs.

  ‘You were the boy next door,’ I say quietly, honestly. ‘I just wanted to know that there was more than the boy next door.’

  He lets go of me, looks at me.

  ‘But there wasn’t, was there?’

  ‘No.’

  We lean into each other and touch foreheads, stay there for so long we have aged beyond who we are. We are a tangle of stories, Selwyn and I. Entangled and entwined and even in other stories that don’t belong to us. But we play our part in them, all the same, and here we are.

  ‘There’s something I want to show you,’ Selwyn says slowly. ‘Something you need to see. But I need to see Judd first, sell the fish.’

  I nod and let him lead me by the hand. We shut the caravan door behind us and get back in the car to carry on.

  We almost miss the turn, for a sign I paid no attention to. I am supposed to be navigating.

  ‘You make me feel like I’m driving in blinkers,’ Selwyn chides. ‘I used to know these roads like the back of my hand.’

  He asks me, left or right? There’s a roundabout coming up that wasn’t there before, he mutters. I tell him right. It’s just a hunch because I’ve lost my place on the map, which is one of those that takes a degree in origami to fold back up. He indicates. Takes a crumpled piece of paper out of his shirt pocket and tells me that we don’t actually go into Wrexham itself because it’s on the outskirts of the Erddig estate, but the lane is hard to spot. You’d quite mistake it for a dirt track. I remind him of what happened last time we went down a dirt track. He says, ‘Surely there’s nothing else to declare? What haven’t you told me now?’

  I hold my tongue. Selwyn will come back as a buzzard. He cannot leave a bone alone when he knows there’s still meat on it. I look down at the paper he’s given me. The writing isn’t very clear – the pen seemed to be running out of ink – and I can’t pronounce the words when written in a language I do not know. I wonder if he’s made the words up to pretend like he’s never been here before, when he has. I know he has. His driving has never been more assured.

  Still, I wish I’d paid more attention in Geography. Seen where all the roads lead and which had the most diversions; understood how rocks can be split and life found inside. In History too. Not all battles are meant to be won. Losing is often no bad thing. Meg would say, When we can’t find the wood, we take a digger to the trees. The problem with you, is that you think you should know everything when there’s nothing there for you to know. And she’d be wringing her hands in her apron. But it cannot be just us! I’d wail. Because where were my uncles and aunts, my grandparents and their parents before them? She made me feel like our history began and ended with her. ‘Aren’t I enough?’ she’d yell. Then, later, I’d say the same thing to Mia. ‘Aren’t I enough?’

  I think of that photograph again, back in Loggerheads, those farmhands from up Mucklestone way, poor as crows with childhoods snatched by TB, and murmuring at me to find them, to not be kept closed away in a book. I think of that wake back in the pub and the distress we caused as Selwyn tried to give the widow his plate of tough meat; how I’d bumped into Teapot Marge from Joiners Square at the bus station with Mia. How Marge had looked down into the pushchair, then at me, and said, ‘She’s dead, you know? Pauper’s grave because of you.’

  ‘Ginny,’ Selwyn snaps me from my thoughts. ‘If you’re needing to say it, then say it.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I say.

  He says, ‘Why are you sorry?’

  And then he grimaces, like I’ve nicked him with a compass, swerves to dodge a pothole and comes to a sudden stop.

  ‘We’re here,’ and he gets out of the car.

  I’VE SEEN A LOT of new faces this past week, and here is another one greeting Selwyn like he’s survived a kidnapping, or a bout of typhoid. As I get out of the car, having watched some terrific embrace between him and Walter Judd that I want to disapprove of, I tell myself that the best thing to do is to start hating him. Then I can let it all wash over me and it won’t at all matter where we do end up. He said. She said. Neither here nor there. Whatever we try and be, we are not.

  Walter Judd is a sunken waspish man. Even I look down on his bald head and protruding ears that must get sore as hell if sunburnt. He has a lot of faces – I’ve seen the smiling one, the cautious one, the still-not-sure one – and he takes my hand, shakes it as if he can’t be bothered, and says he’s pleased to meet me. No, I’ve heard lots about you, or it’s good to put a face to the name, but like I’m a mystery to him. And unexpected. Everything he wears is brown – shirt, trousers, cardigan, boots – he’s like an earthenware pot, and he looks as if life has been pretty peachy on the whole, he won’t grumble, but still seems to be anticipating others to get out of the car. He then asks Selwyn for the road he used to get here, and did he mind for the state of the lane? They quibble a little about the A5, and Walter praises Shrewsbury’s ring-road system, and Selwyn agrees: it has made a big difference because he zipped through. Which is a lie. Walter then rubs his two little fat hands together – no wedding ring, I might add – and asks to see the wares. He’s been on tenterhooks all morning, he says.

  ‘I feel like a kid at Christmas only expecting conkers.’

  Selwyn looks at me and replies that he shouldn’t be too disappointed. We all walk towards the caravan and I have butterflies, as if any disappointment will be blamed on me.

  ‘So, you’re the fish man?’ I make conversation. However corny, I must fill this awkward silence. ‘Do you have a pond too?’ I sound like a child hoping to dip their toe in the water. He answers neither question, rather nudges Selwyn’s arm. ‘Selwyn tells me that you’ll know what the fish have been fed?’ I truck on.

  ‘Feeding is a tricky business when there’s carnivores,’ he responds.

  I try not to be repulsed and instead wonder what Walter really does to make ends meet, for this place is as dilapidated as the Corbet Hall. It reeks of missed mealtimes, unpaid debts, and damp washing. I pray that the Candy whatsitsface in the washbasin pedestal is what it’s supposed to be; that Walter’s got the cash and we can get on our way, for I hope to God that we don’t have to go inside and spend the night.

  Sel
wyn unlocks the caravan door and lowers the little steps for them to embark, because that’s exactly how I see it from where I’m standing: we are embarking on the adventure of our lives if that ugly great candy fish proves its worth. This makes me so nervous I can’t go inside with them. Instead, I choose to wait it out in the yard, counting pebbles underfoot like I’m trying to balance the books. Besides, Selwyn is the bargainer, the business smart, and if I’m inside with them I’ll get the blame if it doesn’t turn out to be what Selwyn thinks it is and I was right all along: a goldfish covered in purple felt tip.

  A cat turns up. Tortoiseshell. Quite pretty, actually. Large amber eyes like burning cigarette tips. It mews and curls its tail about my legs before rolling on to its back. I can see it’s both female and entirely placid, and, oh dear – that’s an open wound. I bend down and start to stroke its belly while I look at the scabbed hole on its underside and ask for what happened. ‘Has someone hurt you?’ I ask, as if expecting an answer. ‘Has someone had a go at you? Who came off worse, you or him?’ I pause, lean back on my haunches. I have a lot in common with the cat, I think.

  I look up as Selwyn and Walter disembark with grave faces. I don’t need to ask. There are no more fish in the sea, it seems, and certainly not any swimming with pound signs. I stand up as Walter walks past me. I look over at Selwyn and hold out my hands. ‘Is it not?’ I ask.

  ‘Whatever it is, it’s not pregnant either,’ Selwyn says solemnly. I ask where Walter’s gone. ‘To consult his books,’ he replies.

  ‘Has he offered us anything?’

  Selwyn looks at me like I’m speaking another language. He comes towards me. I fear the worse.

  ‘It’s a sprat?’

  ‘Ginny,’ he says gravely, ‘we can’t find the plug for the tank.’