Pondweed Read online

  ‘The plug?’

  ‘The way it’s designed,’ Selwyn says, ‘the basin has been welded to the tank. There must’ve been a plug. A way to get at the fish. I don’t know how it was installed.’

  ‘If we can’t get at the fish does that mean they’ve never been fed?’ I ask.

  ‘No, there’s a way to feed them, and I have been feeding them,’ Selwyn insists, twisting his mouth. ‘Just not a way to release them. To get them out.’

  ‘How many are still alive?’ I ask.

  ‘How many were put in and how were they put in?’ he fires back.

  I look disgruntled. ‘Why are you asking me? I don’t know.’

  ‘Because the pedestal has been welded to the basin.’ Selwyn is properly ticking me off. ‘We need to get at them else they won’t survive.’

  I look around me. Walter doesn’t seem to be coming back.

  ‘He’s not phoning the RSPCA, is he?’ I say. ‘Walter, I mean. He’s not reporting us to the authorities?’

  Selwyn looks blank. I look down at the cat and wonder how many lives it has left.

  ‘What about the money?’ I ask. ‘Will Walter still want to buy them?’

  Selwyn frowns. The fish are conkers.

  ‘So that’s it?’ I ask. ‘Journey over?’

  Selwyn looks over me.

  Walter is back. With a mallet.

  Salesmen are strategic creatures. If there’s a problem there has to be a solution, and to find that solution you have to work through the problem. The problem, however, is not the washbasin pedestal full of tropical rainbowfish and a doppelganger that isn’t what we thought it was, but the fact that we cannot get at them to sell them. We cannot find a way to get them out. There’s a small window to drop food through at the top, but this is no more than a fingerhole, and even Walter’s fingers are too fat for it.

  Another problem is that the basin has been welded to the tank. This is cruel. Walter has mentioned the word rehydration many times, that is, when did you last change the water? Selwyn has had to admit that the caravan was Louis’s domain and he looks at me as he says it. This is animal cruelty. The problem with animal cruelty is that you can be put in prison for it. The fish, if we are not careful, will begin to eat each other. We are also at each other’s throats.

  I make a suggestion: perhaps there is something outside of the caravan in the exterior panels? Or maybe something underneath?

  Selwyn shines a torch underneath the caravan. The two men look and then both settle back on their haunches. There is something here, Walter concludes – not a plug, but most definitely a tap, and something else. They give the something and the tap some thought then look under the caravan again. Selwyn asks for a piece of paper and a pen, and, like the secretary I never became, I oblige him with a small jotter pad and a Biro from my handbag. He starts to draw and occasionally Walter shines the torch under the caravan again and informs Selwyn where his drawing is wrong. Selwyn tears off the piece of paper from the notepad and starts from scratch.

  Time passes. It is dusk, and I am wearing my cape.

  Walter is wondering about buckets. Selwyn says that buckets are too big and what’s needed is a tank, of sorts – something that the fish can drop into in a gush. Walter disappears into one of his many ramshackle outhouses. I think about the farmhands who once lived in them. I think about calling an ambulance. I don’t know why.

  Without Walter, Selwyn and I don’t speak. It occurs to me that Selwyn and I work better when we don’t say anything. I can hear his heartbeat then, and he can hear mine.

  Walter is back with three washing up bowls and a roll of bin bags. He tries the washing up bowls for size and they fit. The two men pat each other on the back as if this is the solution.

  ‘Good thinking,’ Selwyn says.

  They spend some time opening the bin bags and putting the washing up bowls inside of them and then they slot them underneath the caravan. Selwyn checks his drawing again.

  He says, ‘I guess we turn the tap then.’

  He looks up at me and tells me to go back inside the caravan and run the tap in the washbasin. They need a flow of water to maintain the air.

  I say, ‘Just out of interest, where does the water go when we run the tap? Does it go into the tank, or somewhere else?’

  Selwyn clicks his fingers and gets up. He opens a panel on the outside of the caravan and gets Walter to shine his torch inside. There are pipes, like intestines, and when I look I see that the water goes down the pipe and must end up on the ground.

  ‘So, the basin and the tank aren’t connected then?’ I say. ‘Else we could get the fish to swim down the pipe.’

  Selwyn shines the torch in my face and tells me that the washbasin has still been welded on to the tank, which means the tank has a lid, which means smashing the washbasin off will fracture the tank and, if the tank fractures, it’s likely to burst. He tells me to run the tap. I go inside the caravan and do exactly what I’m told.

  The water is nail-bitingly cold and makes me shiver. I do not know what is happening outside when I am inside the small bathroom with the door closed. It occurs to me that I should open the door in case there’s a rush of water upwards and I get soaked. I open the bathroom door and hear Walter use the word irresponsible. Selwyn keeps repeating, ‘I should’ve checked. I should’ve checked. Why didn’t I think to check?’ I try not to look at my face in the bathroom mirror, in case it reminds me that my future is very small.

  I hear a crack and shout out. No one answers me. I bend down and run my hand along the pedestal for hairline cracks and fractures. I can see nothing and feel even less. The water is cloudy and the fish inside of it dull, as if they’ve been switched off at the socket. As my eyes drift to the bottom of the pedestal to its seabed, I imagine uneaten bodies and mountains of tiny bones. We have committed a terrible crime.

  ‘Look at yourself. Just look at yourself,’ I say aloud. ‘Look at what you’ve done.’

  I force myself to look in the mirror. I tell myself this is not a punishable offence and I will not go to jail. Walter would not be going to all this trouble if he didn’t think there was something to be made from the fish. Still, I hear nothing from outside. Just the water running in front of me into the basin and down the plughole. Then the plughole gulps. An air bubble. A spurt of water. They have clearly turned the tap and it must be happening.

  I bend down to see if the water level is going down. I can see a rim, this time, like in a dirty bath, and I scratch my fingernail at it. I think how far we have come, and how far we haven’t, in the scheme of things, as Selwyn says, and, as the crow flies, we aren’t even fifty miles from home, and yet we are further away from ourselves than we have ever been.

  The water level is dropping. Slowly, slowly, but dropping all the same. The fish go with it, as if they know that they’re going to survive. I bite my lip and draw blood. I make scratch marks on my cheeks as I watch the water level drop. The water running from the tap is barely a trickle. I wonder how much time we have left to save them all.

  ‘Selwyn,’ I shout, ‘is it working?’

  I don’t hear anything, so decide to go outside. The two men are lying on their bellies with their heads and shoulders under the caravan. The torch has been propped up on a box and I start to wonder of this secret life of Selwyn’s that I’m starting to see in torchlight, the little flashes of his life on the road and the questions I have never asked of it.

  I see that both men have removed their belts, the buckles, perhaps, digging in as they work on their stomachs, and they’re grunting under the caravan, using the word ‘there’ a lot, and ‘here’. Here and there is where we go, I think, when there is where we think we should be when here bores us silly. I start to feel sick and enjoy the taste of my blood from my bitten lip so much that I bite myself again. What if this isn’t working, I think? What if we have committed murder on this grand and awful scale? What will Mia say when she is my one call from the cells and has to fly home? Is this how low you
will stoop to, Mother, just to get me home?

  All of a sudden, I am frightened of Walter Judd. He knows too much and has seen it all, too, and for one mad moment, I stare at the mallet that is lying aside of him. What if? I think. It would just be a quick blow and we could go, and he would get up in the morning for sure because I’m not that strong. It would barely cause a bruise. Mild concussion is nothing. Selwyn can give him a couple of his aspirin. My feet are walking towards the mallet and my eyes will not stop looking at it. I start to bend down. They’ve both forgotten I am there.

  ‘What are you doing, Ginny?’ Selwyn says, shining the torch in my face.

  I stand up quickly. ‘Helping,’ I say. ‘There’s hardly any water running out from the tap and the level is dropping in the tank. Are they still alive?’

  Selwyn tells me to go back inside. Is the water still running? How much water is left in the tank?

  ‘Do you want me to come back out and tell you, or stay inside and just watch?’ I ask. I feel like I’m repeating myself. Like I haven’t been told properly what to do. He shines the torch in my face again and tells me to take the mallet with me. They’re going to have to smash the washbasin off. This is not working as it should.

  ‘But we need to save the fish!’ I shout. ‘Isn’t that the point?’

  And that’s when it happens. Selwyn twists the tap. It comes off in his hands and we all start to scream.

  I have never swept up dead fish before. I do it with a scarf over my mouth – the smell is like rotting bodies. Then Walter makes a bonfire out of them. Not many were saved. But after the tap had released a sort of raging water backdraft, the pipe running from the washbasin down the side of the caravan burst and the fish shot out of that. I have red blotches where they hit me in the face. Selwyn has a black eye. I couldn’t catch them, no matter how hard I tried – even dead, they were slippery. I used my cape as a shield.

  Only one washing up bowl has enough survivors for it to have been worth it, but Selwyn won’t take Walter’s money. He is too ashamed. Besides, we find there is a plug – it’s like a little trapdoor in the bathroom floor at the back of the pedestal. Selwyn bad mouths Louis in a way I never thought I would hear, and Walter agrees. He is a charlatan. Selwyn says this isn’t the work of a charlatan but of a parasite who feeds on small fish.

  ‘I have been so, so stupid,’ he says. ‘Who did I think I was?’

  Walter says, ‘What do you want me to do?’

  Selwyn bites his lip and gives it a little thought. ‘You can’t drown what’s already sunk,’ he finally says.

  Walter makes us up a bed in what he keeps referring to as the ‘other room’ when the only other room I have seen is the small square we entered when we came in by the front door – a door to the left of us, a door to the right, both shut – and we all headed straight up the stairs in front of us like worn out children from a day at the beach. Nothing hangs on the walls to give him away, and it’s a great deal cleaner than I expected, with its white plastered walls and beige carpet underfoot. There’s a brass bedstead, two pillows, and an old-fashioned eiderdown covered in periwinkles on the bed. The rest of the room is stark, but for a single table with nothing on it but a lamp. I am surprised for how much I like it. Besides, the caravan stinks, barely habitable really, and Selwyn has declared fresh eyes in the morning will be for the best.

  Walter shows us the bathroom that we are free to use within the hour once the immersion has warmed up. He digs about in a woven basket and hands me a little bar of mauve soap, taps his bald head, and says, ‘Sorry. No shampoo.’ He points to where we can find extra blankets. He apologises for the curtains being thin. He gets down on his hands and knees and checks for spiders under the bed. He puts a bigger bulb in the bedside lamp and offers me a couple of Mills & Boon books from a shelf. I realise that we’ve been on the road so much we’ve forgotten about the niceties of a friend’s hospitality. The little touches. The things that make your toes curl in appreciation. And that it really doesn’t take much at all.

  He offers us drinks. ‘Hot milk, or something stronger?’ And then to me, ‘I have a hot water bottle, if you’d like? For your feet.’

  I tell him thank you, something stronger, and I’m very hot blooded. He tells Selwyn he will be downstairs in the kitchen. Selwyn tells Walter he’ll be down in a minute, then turns to me and says, ‘You look bushed. You should try and get some sleep.’

  I immediately take umbrage. ‘I am never invited, am I?’

  He says, ‘It’s been a traumatic experience for us all, Ginny.’

  ‘And Walter offered me a drink too.’

  The bruise about his left eye is yellowing. He’d also been hit under the chin and just aside of his right ear. He turns his back and punches out two aspirin from a packet and swallows them down without water. He looks like he’s been brawling, and not come out of it well. And tired. Really very tired.

  ‘It wasn’t my intention for us to be staying here,’ he says, with a small cough, like the pills are stuck in his throat. ‘But here we are and I’ve not seen Walter in a very long time. It’ll be boring for you anyway. What to do next and all that.’

  The unfairness of this makes me cough too. ‘What about what we will do next?’ I snap. ‘I thought we agreed no more boxes. We can’t keep letting things hang in mid-air.’

  Our eyes meet, and there’s that thing he does where he pinches his nostrils together and sniffs. He still can’t forgive me.

  ‘Don’t you see me?’ Selwyn says. ‘Can’t you see what happened to me?’

  He is struggling to remain calm. His eyes are so wide open I fear for what they saw. I tell him not to blame himself. Times were tough. Recessions are crippling. Small businesses, they don’t stand a chance.

  ‘It’s a niche market, like you said.’ And then I add, ‘But they’re just fish. We’re still okay.’

  Selwyn slams the bedroom door with such force, I fear Walter will kick us out and make us bed down among the bones and brine. He marches towards me so quickly, I back away.

  ‘You have no idea, do you?’ his voice rising. ‘I was that business, Ginny. And I was that man you ran away from.’

  ‘And I see that!’ I shout back. ‘You kept that business afloat, and he did you over, so of course you’re pissed off. I’m glad you’re pissed off. It’s about time you were pissed off. I’m just sorry that it’s taken a tank full of dead fish for you to see it. And yes, I ran away. But I came back, Selwyn. I found you. What does that tell you?’

  ‘That your daughter had left you.’

  ‘What?’ I cover my eyes with my hands. ‘What the hell does that mean?’

  ‘You said it yourself. You hate being on your own. You devoted your whole life to Mia and then she leaves you and goes to him. Doesn’t come back. I think you knew where I was, Ginny. I think you always knew where I was.’ He stands to hold on to the bed to keep his temper steady.

  ‘Oh, my God. Do you have any idea what you’re saying to me?’

  But then I realise that I want him to be angry. I want him to cry. For the fish. For the years. For the money. For the lies. For me. I want him to cry so loud it wakes the dead.

  ‘I knew what Louis was doing. But you?’ he shakes his head back and forth.

  I am moving towards him and I am moving my lips but there are no more words to be said and he is trying to forgive me, I tell myself. He’s trying to forgive himself too. I cannot ask for any more than that when catapulting fish have smacked us both in the face.

  So, I kiss him. And I do so like a teenager, groping about. He kisses me back. I claw at his neck. I feel it. It could happen, the next bit. There is a bed. There is us. His hands beneath my jumper and around the small of my back pulling me in, closer, to feel him. Then he pulls away. Him, not me. Not here. Not now. This is not for now.

  I let him go.

  He will drink cider with Walter. The cider they drink will be both medicinal and too strong. Come morning they will stink of booze, not feel their legs, and w
ill have slept in their shirts. They will have picked and plucked at Louis like vultures and Selwyn will have asked Walter why he doesn’t see things happening under his nose. Is he too trusting? Too naïve? Why does he let so many people swim in his water? Walter will have asked Selwyn what he’s going to do next. Their voices will rumble like trains underneath me, like traffic on the flyover, as I lower myself into such a scalding hot bath that my skin glistens with scales. Our bodies might not have come together but our minds have known no one else and let no one else come near. I have been fighting it. I have loved him all along.

  I sleep so soundly that I thoroughly believe in my dream where we make it to New Zealand on the backs of tropical rainbowfish and I don’t even have to wear goggles the water is so clear.

  The Tenth Day

  ‘Water beetles can fly, and they readily leave the pond, usually at night, to indulge in long flights in search of possibility. During the course, they occasionally mistake the wet road for a stretch of water and come to grief.’

  ~ The Great Necessity of Ponds

  by Selwyn Robby

  SELWYN REACHES OVER ME to look for painkillers in the glove box. He’s sure he had some stashed in there. Because I’m sulking, and my face is awful sore, I don’t help and tell him I have no sympathy when he’s nursing yet another hangover, from his boozing with Walter last night. I am no doctor, but the succession of painkillers he seems to be taking is doing nothing for his stomach lining, or his liver.

  ‘I have never seen you drink so much,’ I chide.

  He tells me to wind my neck in and be fair – this has not been the trip he’d planned. I roll my eyes and wave to Walter who is now in possession of twenty-two Parkinsons and an unidentifiable Basslet that will, if properly revived, make him a grand, and we can’t even say, ‘all in a day’s work’, either.

  We’re now heading for a campsite on the other side of Wrexham that Walter has directed us to where we can air the caravan for twenty-four hours then properly calculate the extent of the damage. I won’t say that it stinks of fish because that is not the smell. Rather, it’s castor oil, salt and vinegar, like something you might drizzle on a salad. Or pickle. It’s both disgusting and so enveloping that it leaves you with something gelatinous on the back of your tongue, which has already made me gag and regurgitate my cornflakes. Ever the resourceful salesman, Selwyn found two face masks, which he and Walter wore to disinfect the van again while I sat on a rock and petted the cat. To my right idled what was left of the washbasin that Selwyn, channelling decades of pent-up frustration, ripped out from the caravan wall with Walter’s rubber mallet and some sort of massive chisel. There is no pipework under the caravan any more either, so both toilet and bar sink are defunct. The mock Chesterfields are so mottled and stained you’d think we’d used them as human shields. Even the mattresses were not saved by their plastic body bags, just as some of our clothes and shoes on bottom shelves are riddled with watermarks and reek of gutted fish. Only the mermaids on the curtains, marginally higher that the Chesterfield beds, have escaped complete disaster. The rest of the caravan is intact, but soiled, a little like me. Its depreciation is such that not even the metal will provide enough kindling to light the light at the end of our tunnel. We are both broken and broke.