Pondweed Read online

  As we drive away, I start to unravel the map on my lap and try to locate where we are right now. Selwyn says, ‘No need. I know where I’m headed,’ and there it is again: his pronoun, not ours. And then he smacks the dashboard with the palm of his hand and calls himself stupid, a sucker. He should’ve known that he was pulling a pup. Why else would Louis have been so quick to let him tow it off as he did? It was supposed to carry our burden, not be the burden. I feel my face twist as I dare to ask about the pond equipment.

  ‘Has any of that survived?’

  The pieces of his face slot together enough to form a small smile. ‘The beauty of pond equipment is that it’s waterproof,’ he says, a bit too sarcastically, then asks me to look in my handbag in case there are some paracetamol to be found. His head is thumping. I reach down for my bag and begin to root half-heartedly.

  ‘Good that we still have the pond equipment,’ I try and encourage. His smile remains awkward. ‘Isn’t Wales full of stately homes with ponds? All is not completely lost, surely?’

  He stops at a red light. A hole in the lane and three workmen in hi-vis jackets and hard hats are looking into it.

  ‘Did you find any tablets?’ Selwyn asks.

  ‘Why don’t you want to talk about it?’ I persist. ‘What are you so afraid of?’

  He covers his face with his hands and rubs his thumbs against his temples.

  ‘Must we do this now?’ he says.

  The light turns green, we are good to go, but Selwyn does not move, like I’m asking him to go down a road he’s never been down and needs to consider his options. There are always options to selling, Selwyn will say. You never go in with one deal to make.

  ‘You must think there’s something to salvage from the caravan,’ I start up again. ‘Else why would we be going to some campsite to air it out? It’s not like you’ve decided to drive it back to the yard.’

  He angles his head to look at me. ‘What do you want me to say, Ginny? I failed. It failed. Is that what you want to hear? That I tried and couldn’t do it?’ And then, because he’s feeling spiteful, ‘Is that why you ran away? Because you thought I couldn’t be a good enough father either?’

  I blow out my cheeks and look out of the window. ‘That is not nice,’ I eventually say.

  He apologises. Then apologises again. ‘We’re in hell enough,’ he says.

  ‘You know what your problem is?’ I begin. ‘You dug your own pond. One hundred per cent watertight, even in swell. No unknown species. No predators. No spawn. You cultivated it to never fail you. A ponder’s pond. Except it’s been there all the time, hasn’t it? Lurking underneath, all secretive and sly. Something has been there that you’ve let grow and take over.’

  He turns away. I’ve hit a nerve. If not all of them. The traffic lights have yet again gone back to red and there’s a car behind us frustrated and flashing its headlights, clearly in a rush to be somewhere when we are not. I watch him wave his apologies at the driver behind in the convex wing mirror. Then he looks at me.

  ‘There is something you need to see,’ he says. ‘Something I haven’t told you.’

  ‘Okay.’

  ‘Now have you got any paracetamol, or what?’

  I put my bag down. ‘No.’

  He sighs. The lights turn green. We get on our way.

  And yet we drive all but a mile before Selwyn branches off to the left and then stops at the gate of a church. This troubles me. A country church built for church mice. Blocks of grey stone and a little pebbledash; a slate roof and just three windows. A short steeple with a weather cock that is slightly bent and heading south. It’s an ancient graveyard too, mossed and entangled in blackberry vines, and all approached through a little wooden gate that hangs off its hinges. It makes me want to both burst into tears and shout up at the sky, I’ve been a good person!

  Selwyn takes the keys out of the ignition and looks down on them in his lap, as if he’s about to throw them away. He tells me to get out of the car.

  I let him walk ahead of me, though he walks so slow and thoughtfully that an immense feeling of dread overcomes me. We walk silently through gravestones, partly sunk and toppled, so mossed they’re barely readable, and drowning in dead leaves. The inscriptions have long been erased by the seasons and nobody, sadly, leaves flowers any more. It’s how the past should be, I think, clipping at Selwyn’s heels. Not nurtured, not revisited, but left to return to earth. Let the harsh north winds do the rest. Then Selwyn suddenly stops and kicks at the grass beneath him. There is a small stone, weathered and mottled too, but here the engraving is very clear:

  Sioned Robby

  Born 14.04.1946 Died 24.12.1963

  I look at Selwyn.

  He says, ‘This is why we left the Corbet Hall.’

  HUGH STRINGER – THE ELDEST son of Hugh Stringer Senior – and Selwyn’s father had met at a livestock market and traded pigs. So grew a friendship that eventually led to Selwyn’s father – John was his name – uprooting the family from Wrexham to live at the Corbet Hall just outside of Wroxeter. John, Sarah, Selwyn and Sioned.

  Selwyn describes her as if she is me. She was almost too quick for the eye, he says. Yet she filled up spaces he didn’t even know were there. She was someone who was everything and didn’t know she was. Someone who could’ve been, but never found the way.

  His sense of loss is so easily recalled and I can see it now, it practically bounces off his skull. This is what this has all been about.

  For a long time, his mother thought me her ghost, we were so alike.

  ‘She couldn’t bear to look at you,’ Selwyn tells me. ‘She thought you were there to punish her. “Of all the houses they could’ve found us,” she’d say. You had exactly the same hair.’

  I try to say that faces change and do so much – they are never trapped in time, and that is a woman’s downfall. That grief, as Meg always said, could become such a darkness that nothing is ever seen in light again. ‘I wasn’t the only long-haired dolly in Joiners Square,’ I add.

  Selwyn says not true. Even our bodies moved the same way, the angle of our hips, the turn of our feet. Sideways on, I was Sioned’s silhouette.

  ‘It was a relief when you left, truth be told,’ Selwyn says. ‘And you’re right. The darkness then lifted.’

  It occurs to me that all that black Meg wore was to mourn an old life too.

  He sits down to tell me the rest of it and rolls cigarettes. As he talks, I concentrate on how he makes them and watch the way his smoke twists and curls into the air. He rubs his earlobes a lot. He shivers at certain words. The story is short, but feels long, and then it comes to an end. His sister drowned in the pond.

  He blames the pondweed. There was so much of it down there, like an iceberg; it was always going to cause tragedy, eventually.

  ‘It starts to stick like adhesive,’ Selwyn tells me. ‘It’s a myth that it’s just congealed algae on bladderwort. It has spines. They seek to attach themselves, to propagate. And the pond was saltwater, the remnant of an estuary. Those things were not planted. They’d evolved.’

  It took hold and kept her there. No one knew what she was doing out there, if she’d fallen, waded in, or if she were pushed. By the time they’d pulled her out, one of the children thought she’d been killed by an octopus. You could barely see her face.

  Selwyn stands up and rubs out his cigarette, tells me he should have brought flowers.

  ‘You must understand,’ he says, ‘I had to go back, to the Corbet Hall. I just wanted one last look at the pond. There was something about that pondweed that was different,’ he is looking up at the steeple as he says it. ‘I’d never seen anything like it. Especially in saltwater. It made no sense. I studied it for years.’

  I remember all the buckets in the backyard and imagine Selwyn poring over nature books in libraries in his shirtsleeves, rubbing his hand through his hair in frustration when the pages will not tell him what he needs to know. I try and tell him that sometimes death is not always scientif
ic and it’s probable that she wanted to die. I knew shame in abandonment. I can’t say it didn’t cross my mind when the start of a new life feels like the end. Especially when you’re responsible for it. Selwyn glares at me, as if I was the one who’d given his sister the rocks to put in her pockets. It’s the same look his mother would give me. Like I was to blame.

  ‘Why are you looking at me like that?’ I ask. ‘When there’s death without explanation, you seek explanation all the same. I get it. I do.’

  ‘But you think I should go back there, don’t you? Bring it back to life.’

  ‘Not at all,’ I say, feeling confused. ‘To be honest, I can see why you don’t want it. The place is pitiful. It’d take millions to rebuild.’ I start to laugh. ‘You do have a habit of inheriting what no one wants.’

  ‘Then what’s to become of it if I don’t look after it?’ He kicks up a tuft of grass as he says it.

  I go for his hand. ‘It’s a house, Selwyn. It’s not her.’

  But he turns away. I tell him to look at me. ‘Look at me,’ I insist. ‘You need to look at me because this is what is here, now. I am not inherited. I am here.’

  And he looks at me, with tears, and says, ‘Remind me when this became about you again?’ and heads back to the car.

  This is why Selwyn wants me, I think, as I watch him walk away from me. This is why we have arguments about the dishes, the bladderwort in the drain, about the burnt bits at the bottom of the oven that congeal and weld to the sides. I find a chip in a mug. A hairline crack in a plate. I put them both in the bin and Selwyn fishes them back out. Washes them. Uses them. Look, he says. Good as new. I use his toothbrush to scrub the bathroom sink out of petulance. Wonder why he doesn’t store memories like he clings on to paperclips and screws. I think we were neighbours for less than a year, we’ve been reunited for less than a year, and there are fifty years between those years, which is more than some get to spend on this earth, which makes those fifty years a lifetime. And that’s what we’ve both had. Two lifetimes. In different directions. We are each other’s loving memories, that is all. It was never going to work.

  ‘When you lose something,’ Meg said, ‘the first thing you do is think about how to replace it.’

  ‘Then what am I?’ asked the Bluebird.

  ‘The other me,’ was Meg’s reply.

  And that’s what this is too. Selwyn wanted his sister replaced, so he replaced her with me and bodged it.

  We get back into the car.

  ‘Look,’ I begin.

  But he interrupts me. ‘She was pulled under, Ginny,’ he says coldly. He’s looking right through me as he says it. ‘She was asphyxiated. Eel larvae can do that. Swarms of it. It would’ve buried her alive.’

  ‘Okay,’ I say.

  ‘And I had to go there. You do understand that. I had to go. One last time. But I couldn’t go in. Not inside. I couldn’t see her in there.’

  I put my hand on his leg and hold it there for as long as he’ll let me.

  ‘It’s okay,’ I say.

  ‘There was so much I wanted you to see there.’

  ‘I didn’t need to see any of it.’

  ‘It’ll be a graveyard,’ he says solemnly. ‘No one will ever know about it.’

  ‘But we will.’ My hand is stroking his thigh. ‘You have to let the past be past.’

  He holds on to my hand. ‘Isn’t that what we are?’

  I smile. He’s a tough old nut to crack. ‘Not any more.’

  And this time, when we kiss, it’s the most natural thing in the world, and we let it happen, right there, in the car, by a graveyard, in the middle of Wales, and afterwards we start laughing, because what in God’s name took us so long?

  THE CAMPSITE IS CALLED the Good Meadow and boasts four gold stars on a tin sign, which I instantly assume is for its behaviour.

  I have never been to a campsite before so do not at all know what to expect or what is expected of me, least of all what to do with myself while Selwyn hooks up a humidifier to a long thick blue cable. He then reels off chores I can do while he sets about raising the awning. This is not a word I know and I’m curious what the awning is. I have never seen one before and want to know what it does. He tells me it’s the overhang, like Meg had over the butchers to stop the meat from sweating in the sun.

  ‘We can sit underneath it and watch the stars,’ he says.

  I look disappointed and ask if there’s something more interesting that I can do than fetch water from a well, or see what’s in the site shop that we could have for tea. Both tasks make me feel like we are scavenging.

  I watch him unleash the awning and wonder why he can do this so ably when he weeps like a baby should the central heating be on the blink. I watch him align the left and right poles of the awning as if negotiating between where we are now and where he wants to be. There was also an equally worrying familiarity between Selwyn and the site owner, Gavan, especially in their handshake. I told myself that the best salesmen never don’t have customers.

  As Selwyn works on the awning, I ask him about Gavan and the pond.

  ‘Ginny,’ he says soberly. ‘You have got to stop being so suspicious.’ And then, perhaps owing to the look on my face, he adds, ‘I’ve had plenty to be suspicious about over the past ten months, but have you ever seen me looking suspicious?’

  He’s finished doing what he’s been doing with the awning then starts doing something else with a line of rope.

  ‘What can I do?’ I ask. ‘Surely, I can do something?’

  He says, ‘I’ve told you. Go to the shop.’ He lights a roll-up with such a wild flaming match he singes his nostril hair. Then he takes out his wallet and gives me a twenty-pound note.

  I leave him to it.

  The site shop is not a shop but a large shed that reeks of creosote and wood shavings. Inside are two trestle tables with stuff for sale, and there’s a lot of sawdust on the floor. I see they have sliced bread, eggs, butter, cheese, one pint of milk and some tins of chopped tomatoes and baked beans. It reminds me of the tombola at Hodnet and I wonder if I need to buy a book of raffle tickets and take pot luck. There is a fridge, in the corner, with a lead so long I can’t even see where it’s plugged in, and this fridge is empty, all but for two bottles of white wine. Which I decide to buy. Along with the bread and cheese. I’m not sure where you pay, there is no till and no one monitoring the tables, but as I start to walk out, Gavan calls me back with a whistle. I do not like to be whistled.

  ‘Just the wine, is it? That’ll be twelve pounds.’

  Up close, Gavan is rugged and rustling, grey and nasally. There is something stuck to his bottom lip, a cold sore? Food? And he wears a single silver stud in his left ear. The rest of him is as you would expect for a man permanently outdoors. The trousers are brown, patched and worn, the jumper has seen better years, and the shirt is a jagged criss-cross of buttons hanging on and falling off. I notice he has three Bic Biros poking out of his trouser pocket alongside a screwdriver. There cannot be a wife. Gavan looks unapologetically alone.

  I ask him if he might set us up with a tab.

  He says, no. ‘It’s all upfront, I’m afraid. Cash only.’

  ‘Has Selwyn already settled with you for the night then?’ I ask.

  He says, ‘He’s doing me a big favour measuring the carp.’

  I blink too many times for my eyes to cope with. ‘The carp?’

  ‘Big carp,’ he nods, as if announcing his American Indian name. He leans in. His breath smells of coffee. ‘And too big for the pond.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I’m shaking my head and pursing my lips, ‘Selwyn is here to measure carp?’

  ‘Those that’ve outgrown the pond,’ he says. ‘Then he’ll consult. Mediate. The guy who wants them plays hardball. I don’t play hardball. I’m in watercress.’

  I’m tempted to open the wine and down it.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ trying my best to not look like my retinas have detached, ‘but are you telling me that Selwyn kn
ew he was coming here?’

  ‘I should hope so,’ he laughs. ‘I’ve been waiting on him getting here for over a month.’

  This is like squeezing a stubborn core out of a blackhead – the root of this story is playing hardball too. I think of what’s just happened between us in the car, then of all the fish that have slapped me in the face. I close my eyes and let out a deep sigh. Gavan tells me he still needs twelve pounds for the wine and another three for the bread and cheese.

  If Selwyn were here, he would negotiate. He is the salesman. He is always the salesman and never really stops being a salesman because salesmen cannot be anything other than salesmen. Even when they’re not selling, they’re selling, and even when they are telling you a story of their drowned sister, they are only selling a version of it that you choose to buy. And boy, have I just bought it! This is where I’ve been going wrong, I think. I haven’t been negotiating. I’ve been thinking that Selwyn is only selling his pond supplies to keep us on the road, when what he’s really selling off are his lives. One after the other. He’s been positively selling them left, right and centre, and I’ve been trying to insert myself in every single one of them.