Pondweed Read online

  ‘New Zealand?’

  He suddenly looks very pleased with himself.

  ‘In that caravan?’

  He’s practically at bursting point.

  ‘Are you fucking serious?’

  He tells me again to get in the car. He will tell me everything, but I need to get in the car.

  ‘Is this to do with Mia?’ I start to panic. ‘Has something happened? Is it Anthony? What’s he done?’

  My daughter will be fifty next month. Half a century and half a world away. Her being over there, in New Zealand, with one of my old flames, is the stuff of theatre.

  ‘It’s nothing to do with Mia.’ Selwyn pushes past me to go back into the bedroom. ‘I’ll explain everything in the car, but we really have to go. You need to get in the car.’

  If Mia was here now, she’d just tell me to go with him. You don’t deserve him anyway, she’d say, and don’t I remember how I gave her a map of the world and a box of drawing pins at eighteen and told her to go and adventure? This should suit me down to the very ground I refused to be rooted in. Like mother like daughter like daughter again, she would say. To know that you do not know everything about each other should be enough. And that none of us make our mistakes with such purpose.

  ‘Please, Ginny,’ he says it so sadly I wonder if he’s been given a diagnosis and three months. He coughs again.

  ‘It’s lung cancer, isn’t it?’ I imagine the next few weeks spent carting about breathing apparatus and being hoodwinked by reincarnation.

  He covers his mouth with his handkerchief. ‘I’m not ill, Ginny,’ and he even laughs it off. ‘But for me, for us, please. Just get into the car.’

  ‘Because we’re going on holiday,’ I say. ‘To Wales.’

  He nods his head, and lifts my suitcase off the bed with a stiff grunt.

  ‘You’re just taking me on a holiday. To Wales.’

  He says, ‘Is this everything? What’s in here, it’s all you need?’

  ‘Just a holiday to Wales,’ I say again.

  ‘Yes,’ he says wearily. ‘Just a holiday to Wales. Now, please. For the love of God, and whatever it is you think of me. Please. Get into the car.’

  I move towards him and take what he’ll let me of his hand. ‘Is it really such a terrible thing that’s happened that we have to leave right now?’ I try and make it sound like I’m asking if my lipstick goes with my blouse.

  His fingers curl around mine and for a moment I think I have him, and all to myself. No Louis. No bladderwort. No Val from next door. But he pulls his hand away and tells me to stop asking questions. ‘You can ask as many of them as you want as soon as we get into the car.’

  ‘Then what about your water butts,’ I snap. ‘You never leave your water butts.’

  He lifts up the suitcase, and at the same time lifts his head slightly so that our eyes should meet – there’s little more than an inch in height between us – but we both do what we always do which is remember who we were and not who we are now.

  ‘Okay,’ I tell his shoelaces. ‘I will get in the car.’

  He gives me the same sigh of relief as I make when I’ve finished the ironing. ‘Good. Thank you.’

  He leaves the bedroom with my suitcase and I suddenly want to ask him if he’s packed enough plasters. Selwyn’s blisters can be biblical.

  Then I remember my box, at the bottom of the wardrobe. A cardboard box and not at all heavy, but I will go nowhere without it when it is everything and nothing. I tuck the box under my arm and look out of the bedroom window and down on to our street. I watch Selwyn go into the caravan with my suitcase. I wait for him to come back out like he is always waiting for me. He waits and he waits and I still don’t truly arrive.

  A learner driver pulls up to practise a three-point turn. I watch Selwyn watch the car stall, the car start, the car be thrust into reverse. The car stalls again. The car will not start. The learner driver gets out flinging her arms – She can’t do it! She won’t do it! – and the instructor takes over. Like Selwyn does with me. Holds umbrellas. Opens doors. Licks my stamps. Tells me to put my purse away, he has enough. And, when I’d first arrived, he’d bought me a dress I wouldn’t wear, rusty chiffon with bouffant sleeves, to attend some wedding of a friend of a friend where he introduced me to everyone as his like-wife – like it was a thing we’d agreed to do, along with shopping on a Thursday and a run out on a Sunday that always ends with me following him around a pond. Where are you really going, old man? I think, as I straighten the net. This is not like you. This is not what you do. Perhaps I really don’t know you at all.

  I know you like an under-sheet with hospital corners on your bed; an eiderdown, four pillows, a valance that I refuse to iron. That you talc between your toes and sleep with your eyes open, like a fish; that you and Louis have been the sort of chums that might share kidneys. So what has he done to you, Selwyn? What has happened between you for you to behave like you’ve disturbed a snake pit?

  I close the bedroom door and head back downstairs with my box. I see that Selwyn has left the front door on the latch for me. A slight wind catches it. It opens. Out. It closes. In. It opens again. Out. Enough of a gap to squeeze through. Another breath and out again, wider. I have left other places with that suitcase and less thought. I have left and left again, from one rut to the next, and not looked back. When Selwyn sleeps with his eyes open, he is beautiful.

  I close the front door behind me and look down at my feet. I do not know the name of this particular species that wraps itself around my ankles, ties itself into a tight bow and pulls, but it’s pondweed all the same. I close my eyes and let it take me towards the car.

  And so, on the First Day

  ‘There is a great necessity to create ponds in our lifetime for the generations we will never meet. 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.’

  ~ The Great Necessity of Ponds

  by Selwyn Robby

  SELWYN STARTS THE CAR and straps the seatbelt across his chest like he means it. He has both hands on the steering wheel, his heart in the right place, and driving gloves. He is an unknown species. One that bites his nails to the point they’re no bigger than a battery hen’s claws. When he talks about his work in pond supplies, he can be as interesting as a dead phone. I have long accepted that if I was a puddle, I’d be of more use to him. And though he insists that this is the beginning of something, when it’s way past that and nearing the end, we are going somewhere, and there is something to be said about that. Then he remembers to release the handbrake.

  He says, ‘It can only ever happen to us, Ginny. Luck favours the wicked.’

  I tell myself not to look at who I am but to remember who I’ve been, and I concentrate on my hands. I settle on the bit between the life line and the love line and the creases that tell you how many children you’ll have, which doesn’t so much as make me feel disappointed, but reminds me that I know all my lies like the back of my hand. We set off in a shell-shocked silence that neither of us will interrupt.

  Selwyn slams on the brakes.

  Val.

  ‘WHAT’S TO-DO HERE THEN?’ Val coos, gesturing towards the caravan. ‘Going anywhere nice?’

  Val is our next-door neighbour, not attached. A master of bereavement who makes a fortune out of dead pets, yet she lives like she’s only doing a paper round. She’s one of those who’s always got something wrong with her and, if she didn’t have something to complain about that day, she’d be expecting it by the end of the week and probably up at A&E. But her ailments she saves for Selwyn, and for me just sneers and grunts. Most times, she looks straight through me and will even cross the road before she will look me in the eye and say hello.

  She chuffs gamely on a Consulate, filling the car with smoke. I cough for effect. She has her arms folded, a polo neck of maroon velour, and looks at me as if measuring me up for a coffin. There are moccasins on her feet. Bunions, I expect. Splayed
toes.

  ‘Just a little holiday,’ Selwyn offers, as he gets out of the car to speak with her. ‘Hardly running off to the other side of the world.’

  Yet now we seem to have all the time in the world.

  There are many things I want to say to Val but none of them come to me. Instead, I pass the time trying to guess her weight in telephone directories.

  Val is a different species entirely. I know only three things about our next-door neighbour, not attached:

  1. She’s been with her husband Alan since she was twelve, celebrating more anniversaries than the Queen. Rumour has it that they even cut each other’s hair at the kitchen sink.

  2. She’s one of those who’s stockpiled for the apocalypse and learnt how to use a gun, while you’re still battening down the hatches. The contents of her chest freezer will take your breath away.

  3. She spends hours on her hands and knees in the backyard peeling the labels off the tins for the recycling, as if hiding what they eat.

  It’s not healthy for two people to be together as much as they’ve been, but Selwyn disagrees. ‘We could’ve made it, too,’ he told me. ‘If you’d tried.’

  Val stands with one hand on her hip looking like she can smell a gas leak. I wonder where Alan is when he normally exists behind her knees. Selwyn is telling her something that I can’t lip-read. She is listening. She has been listening through the drainpipes for the thirty years Selwyn has lived aside of her, and it’s a slippery relationship. I can’t fathom it at all.

  She’d mistaken me for his cleaner when I’d first moved in. She’d straddled the paving stones with her hands on her hips, hankering after a truth I couldn’t give her. She’d said, ‘Selwyn usually tells me everything.’ And I’d blathered away – we were next-door neighbours, fifty years back. We’ve met again. So, I’m here. It’d sounded like an ultimatum. She’d said, ‘He keeps that house spotless. Even that gas oven.’ And I’d agreed, ‘It looks brand new. I’m scared to use it.’ In the fog of her fag, her eyes had narrowed. She didn’t believe me and she certainly didn’t like me. ‘Just you make sure you look after it,’ she’d said, flicking her cigarette over the hedge. I found myself assuring her that I would.

  I watch the two of them together. She nods at Selwyn. Selwyn nods at her. Val nods again and stubs out her cigarette. Then she steps towards him and hugs him. It is the most sincerely given hug I have ever seen a woman give to a man, or a man give to a woman. I expect to feel jealous, but I don’t. Selwyn gets back in the car.

  ‘She’ll keep an eye on things,’ he says.

  ‘You didn’t need to ask her to do that.’

  He pretends he doesn’t hear me. He does that a lot.

  ‘Did you tell her where we’re going?’

  He adjusts the wing mirror and mutters something about not recognising the place, it’s been that long, and that if he doesn’t go now, he never will.

  He turns the ignition. Val turns her back on us.

  I suppose this is where we finally begin.

  WE’RE SAT ON THE very dual carriageway I can see from our bedroom window. I can still see our bedroom window peeping out from under the flyover and realise that I’ve forgotten to draw the curtains and put the plants in the bath. The traffic is bottleneck because they’re doing something to the flyover that’s taking years to finish. Selwyn chose to live under the flyover so he can be on his way, as he calls it, when needing to get on the M6. Salesmen, I’ve come to find, do not like to waste time queuing on flyovers to get on to slip roads. They also keep properly clean cars. Which is why, as I shift my foot and hear the crunch of an empty crisp packet, I smell a rat.

  I look around his car and start to see other things I wouldn’t normally see. Like a smeared plastic lunchbox and empty sandwich cartons stashed behind the driver’s seat. There are blankets on the back seat, covering something large, aside of a body of files he usually keeps in a plastic tub in alphabetical order in the boot. There’s also a funny smell. Like hairspray. I turn back around and look out of the window again. In the car aside of us, I see a woman is on her mobile phone.

  ‘I’ve left my phone,’ I say to no one in particular. ‘At home. On the bed.’

  Selwyn’s reply is that Malcolm Gallagher bought a caravan with his redundancy pay out. They’re still in Spain. I don’t know Malcolm Gallagher. I’ve never been to Spain. ‘It’s what folk do with their nest eggs,’ he says.

  ‘Folk like us only rent the nest,’ I reply. ‘And this isn’t our caravan.’

  He tells me he’s just giving me perspective. I tell him I don’t want perspective. I want him to tell me what’s going on, and ask him to pull over. He tells me he will, as soon as we get going.

  ‘Going where in Wales exactly?’ I shout. ‘I still don’t know what’s actually happening.’

  ‘I’ve told you,’ he says. ‘It failed to yield.’

  I feel like I’m holding on to my temper with a paperclip. ‘You haven’t told me,’ I say. ‘I don’t know what that even means. What failed to yield?’

  ‘So, I took the caravan. Reckon it’s worth between forty and fifty grand with all the renovation of it. I did the sums.’ He pauses to look at me as if calculating what I’m worth.

  I tell him we’re having two separate conversations, make two fists and wonder what to do with them. I am so wound up I’ve given myself a stitch. I wonder which house in Majorca the couple put in an offer for on A Place in the Sun.

  ‘I don’t understand what you’re telling me,’ I say again.

  He asks me which part I don’t understand. I tell him all of it. He uses the words compensation, recompense.

  ‘For what?’ I ask.

  He tells me I’m not listening. ‘The problem with you, Ginny, is that you never listen.’

  ‘I am,’ I say. ‘You’re just not telling me anything that makes any sense.’

  ‘Dennis Glass,’ he says. Dennis Glass is someone else I don’t know and will not ever know because he died, exactly a week after retiring, from a clot in the leg. ‘Joe Salt,’ Selwyn presses on. I don’t know Joe Salt either. ‘He got the cancer as soon as he stopped work.’ I try and persuade Selwyn that Joe Salt probably had the cancer before he stopped work, just as comparison can root like cancer if you let it. ‘Peter Hale.’ Again, I’ve never heard of Peter Hale. ‘Saves up for a holiday of a lifetime, never comes home.’

  I’m starting to feel disaster weary.

  ‘Selwyn,’ I say solemnly, ‘death at our age comes with a free bus pass, but that doesn’t mean it’s going to happen to you. And this isn’t you. You don’t do things like this. You don’t let things like this happen. You would not have let whatever has happened happen.’

  ‘And you of all people can’t really be thinking that I should go back as if nothing has happened, that none of it matters,’ he says. ‘I’m taking a stand, Ginny. Isn’t that what you’ve always wanted?’

  ‘No,’ I reply quickly. ‘It’s not what I wanted at all.’

  ‘Then what was I supposed to do?’ he snaps back. ‘What would you have liked me to do?’

  ‘I don’t even know what he did, Selwyn. What did he do?’

  He looks out of the window on his side of the car.

  ‘I’m asking you a question!’

  He punches the steering wheel. ‘Goddamnit, Ginny! He invested everything and lost it all. All of it. It’s gone. There’s nothing left.’

  ‘What do you mean he invested everything? What is everything?’

  He takes a deep breath and pulls his chin into his neck. ‘What bit I had in my pension. And that thirty-grand lump sum.’

  ‘Oh, God.’ I clutch my chest.

  ‘Which is why I walked out and took what I could.’

  Selwyn has never walked out on anything. Not even me, despite me.

  ‘Well, walk back in,’ I say. ‘With a lawyer. Haven’t you got grounds for embezzlement?’

  ‘Not when I’m in possession of stolen property. No.’

  ‘What are yo
u talking about? It’s not stolen. You were his partner. Did he lose all his money too?’

  ‘Of course he lost his money.’

  ‘What the hell did he do?’

  ‘What you have to understand, Ginny, is that sometimes, when an offer is a put on the table that glows gold, you have to take it.’

  ‘You knew about it?’

  ‘I didn’t know all of it.’

  I find myself looking for sharp objects. A biro. Even a hairgrip. I once read that you can kill a man with a single blow to the temple with a frozen sausage. ‘This is not happening,’ I mutter into my lap. ‘This cannot be happening.’ I duck my face into my hands. ‘For fuck’s sake Selwyn. How the hell did you let this happen?’

  ‘Will you please stop swearing at me,’ he asks. ‘I hate it when you swear. It makes you sound like a trucker.’ He unbuckles his seatbelt then and slumps over the steering wheel. Remorse is a great tactic of the salesman. When the patter has failed, that look of astronomical exhaustion – well, that’s that then. It all comes to nothing in the end.

  ‘Why didn’t you just retire when you were supposed to retire last summer?’ I try to sound like I’ve just asked if he still wants three sugars in his tea. ‘You had a pension, Selwyn. A thirty-grand lump sum. I told you to take it.’

  ‘And the only way this is going to work, is if you put our future in this caravan and not any of our past.’

  I know this is pillow talk but– ‘Bollocks. You should’ve taken the money when he had the money, instead of pretending you still had it in you. The money was there. It was right there, offered to you on a plate, and I said to you, ‘Take it. Please. Take it.’ You are seventy-one, Selwyn. Retirement is there for a bloody good reason.’ And I am so angry I am punching my own knees. ‘But you didn’t take it, did you? Too bloody-minded to take it. Thought you still had something to prove. Well, here’s your proof, because now we have no money. Sod bugger all. And you have us running off to Wales with a mobile fucking pub.’