Pondweed Page 3

  ‘No, Ginny. We have a renovated Conqueror with fully stocked bar and leather seats,’ he corrects. ‘Collectors will salivate over it.’

  ‘Stop the car.’

  He takes his hands off the steering wheel because the car is still stopped in this traffic jam.

  ‘You wanted me to tell you everything, and I am telling you everything,’ he says. Then he drops his eyebrows and asks me why I’m so angry when it’s not my money. ‘This is all coming from the woman who hates being still.’ He starts to mock. “‘When are you going show me the world, Selwyn? Why don’t you and me just take off? What are you waiting for, Selwyn? What do you think is going to happen if you stick around?’”

  ‘But not like this!’ I fold one lip over the other to stop anything I might regret coming out of my mouth and see that he is the doing the same. I start to wonder if this is what rubber bullets feel like.

  ‘Well, this is it,’ he suddenly says. ‘This is me showing you my world.’ And just like that, the traffic starts moving and so do we.

  Strictly speaking, we met because of kippers.

  A man with a cart with his sprats and dabs and winkles from the west would wheel down the road every Friday – Meg would send me out for a cod head, and to make sure it still had its eyes.

  Picture the scene: Joiners Square, Stoke-on-Trent, circa 1966, the year of the Barclaycard and hovercrafts. We spluttered and strutted under smog on the slag, workers but not earners, walkers but not explorers, side by side and hand-to-mouth in a wedding ring of terraces werriting about the weather – to peg out, or not to peg out? – and what we had left over in the larder for our teas. There were gamblers and grafters in numbers one to ten; hoodlums and hairdressers from eleven to twenty; then Nora the war nurse and Teapot Marge who’d read your tealeaves for a tanner but chuck her another and she’d have you think you were going to change the world. Across the way, Tracy Spooner pushing her phantom baby, and always with her mother, wicked Ethel, who’d grow parsley the size of a hedge. We lived in twenty-three with new neighbours in twenty-four, and no one knows any different and less is definitely not more, but it’s Friday which means the Social Club, Babycham, fags, and necking and a cod head for our tea. And we were the lucky ones.

  We is me, Meg, and the Bluebird. One mother is a butcher, the other never leaves the house – we don’t talk of a father but believe in miracles and storks – and I’m a sneeze off sixteen, caring for nothing but boys and petticoats. My hair has never met with scissors, so it’s as bushy as a squirrel tail and a weird mushroom-grey. I wear it like a cape that hides the unfastened zips or missing buttons on the backs of dresses my mother makes me wear – woe betide I ever forget that I’m a girl – which have been someone else’s and fitted them better. She’s a brontosaurus of a woman who casts shadows in the street, and I’m not allowed to call her Mother, Mum, or even Ma. She is only Meg. As if we are roommates. And she calls me Imogen Dare because, goddamnit, I will. Yes, I have to pay her board and lodgings, which I do by working in the butchers with her on weekends, and she even puts the coins in an envelope and gets me to hand it her back like we’re traders. My other mother says nothing, yet sees everything, drifts from room to room as if on casters, and blends into the walls.

  And it really was a wooden-slatted cart filled with wooden ice boxes. The fishman would be looking at me as I’d be looking at the fish who’d sometimes be looking at me and sometimes not, and when they weren’t looking at me – which meant their eyes had been plucked out – then I’d look up at the fishman and say, no thank you. Except, this one Friday, the fishman has nothing but kippers and he’s trying to get rid of them by offering them at half their price. So, this man appears – and Selwyn is a man, even at twenty he had a face like a barbed-wire fence, all twisted and crinkled like he was permanently puzzled – and he looked too old to be living at home, which he was, our new next-door neighbour at number twenty-four. He’d moved here with his mother and been very vague in where they were from. There was something about them both that made you wonder if snow had fallen and frozen solid – their lives seemed so still.

  So, I was looking at the fish which were looking at me and also at the fishman who was looking at me along with this other man, being Selwyn, being our new next-door neighbour in number twenty-four, and Selwyn asks the fishman for how far the fish have travelled because he’s not yet found a pond. And he doesn’t talk like us, not at all, but with a Welsh lilt that makes the fishman ask him what he’s doing round here. Selwyn says something about settling his old dear and he’d be much obliged if the fishman knew of any ponds, lakes, or streams nearby.

  ‘Angler, are you?’ the fishman goes. ‘Eater or sport?’

  And Selwyn says, ‘I’m not fishing. I’m interested in the weeds and what’s submerged.’

  Except I start to realise that Selwyn’s not telling any of this to the fishman but to me. He can’t stop looking at me, as if he’s shocked by the look of me. So, I look back at him, and almost straight in the eye because I’ve got that tall, and he says, ‘Do you mind all those bones, in kippers? Because if it’s not what you want, you mustn’t let him persuade you. You keep to what you want.’

  And I just keep looking at him because there’s something familiar about him, something I can’t put my finger on. Because we’ve met, haven’t we? is what I wanted to say. You and me. Somewhere, somehow, we’ve been together. And that’s when it suddenly occurs to me that there are all kinds of truths, and I could have this all wrong, when Selwyn is more than capable of diddling Louis.

  LOUIS TOOGOOD IS A corny, smarmy sort who’d sell you the sunshine if he could. He spends the bulk of his life under the harsh fluorescent lights in his Portakabin, parked at the back of the Toogood Aquatics yard on a blot of land he’d inherited from his father, who for years kept it as a car park for an office block across the way. Louis and Selwyn had met as boys fishing at Rudyard Lake, thrown together in a thunderstorm so fierce they were forced to camp out in a disused fisherman’s hut and eat what they’d caught with a fire they’d started by rubbing sodden twigs against a breezeblock. When they ever talk about this night, they make it sound like they’d endured trench warfare and eaten each other’s legs to survive. Because that’s how Selwyn behaves around him – like he and Louis have drank each other’s blood. And like he has no mind of his own.

  Selwyn would call Louis Toogood a hybrid species: one of us who wants to be one of them who wouldn’t be seen dead with him because they see nothing but themselves. Still, God loves a trier and Louis does nothing but. He tries and he tries and then he tries some more.

  I first met him four months back. I’d not long had a bath and was coming down the stairs in my dressing gown all pink and woozy, and there he was, stood in the hallway in a cheap navy suit, starched white shirt and holding a bag from the Chinese takeaway.

  ‘Oh,’ I’d said. ‘I didn’t know,’ and asked for five minutes to go and get dressed. But Louis was already bulldozing his way up the stairs to meet me and, before I knew it, he was on the step below me, leaning in to kiss my cheek – God, it was good to meet me, finally, and did I like Chinese?

  His aftershave took my breath away. He’d already been drinking, and the coarseness of his stubble could’ve struck a match. I concentrated on the dandruff in his hair.

  By the time I came back downstairs, he’d hammered his way through a bottle of red and was enquiring of a second. I wondered for his leash. I’d known wives like that. And also drunks. They’d laid out the Chinese on the dining-room table and both of them were eating out of the silver trays and sharing curry sauce by the spoonful. Louis talked so fast he spat rice. Selwyn agreed with everything he said and didn’t look at me once.

  ‘Share, or nothing,’ Louis kept saying. ‘It’s what it’s come down to, old boy. Share, or nothing.’

  That was the moment when Louis Toogood offered Selwyn a partnership. Until then, Selwyn had been his sole employee and was thinking about retiring. He’d not long celebrated
his seventy-first birthday, with a teenage thirst that’d led to a hangover the size of a Burslem Bobby, and had recently recovered from a ruptured hernia he’d had removed from his groin. A month later and he bumps into me in the garden centre where he’d been working the odd weekend as a favour to someone he’d known for donkeys, but now can never remember his name. As far as I could work out, Louis had founded Toogood Aquatics, but Selwyn had had a thirty-grand stake in it that, it’d been agreed – on a handshake and two bottles of red – would be returned with interest on his retirement, along with a small pension that Louis had supposedly set up as separate to Selwyn’s piddle-pot of a council pension from his time as a gardener.

  Except Louis had come to the house to ask Selwyn to not retire. Rather, he could re-invest his thirty grand back into a capsizing business to keep it afloat, this time as a partner. And, no, that thirty-grand stake had not made any interest, old boy, when austerity has had us by the nuts.

  ‘Not because you trade in the dead niche market of pond supplies in landlocked Stoke-on-Trent,’ I’d said. And I know I shouldn’t have said it but I couldn’t help myself. They’d been getting on my wick with all their sentimental bird droppings and whatnot, and so Louis glared at Selwyn who properly glared at me and I looked down to glare at how much rice had been spilt on the table, and we’d all got our fingers on triggers as we weighed each other up, until Selwyn buckled first and fetched out the whisky and two glasses.

  ‘Be a poppet and get us some ice,’ Louis was a sharp as a pistol and pissed. I shot him a filthy look and he slung me one back and said, ‘On the rocks already, eh? Dunna yer worry yourself, duck. I prefer things neat.’ It was like being cursed. He looked at me as if I had no face. I’d left them to it.

  Later, as Selwyn and I cleaned our teeth at the bathroom sink, I told him that I didn’t trust Louis, ‘Blood brother, batman, whatever it is that bonds you, you can’t put a penny between his eyes and he wears grey shoes.’ Selwyn looked miffed and said he would trust him with his life, as he had done many times before, and that this was a full-blown partnership.

  ‘But this isn’t what we agreed,’ I’d said. ‘You promised me when I moved in that you’d retire. Time for us, you said.’

  ‘I’m not just dabbling about here,’ he’d said. ‘And it’s not like we have grandchildren.’

  I’d said, ‘If that’s aimed at me, then I’m going right now.’

  He’d said, ‘Be fair, Ginny. A lot of my life has happened without you in it and something like this is not really your decision.’

  I’d said, ‘The point of being a couple is to decide together. The only couple sat at the table tonight was you and him.’

  ‘And the closest we get to being a couple is when we clean our teeth together at this bloody bathroom sink,’ he’d said. ‘Because what about sleeping, Ginny? Can we decide about that?’

  Only in the morning did he apologise about the grandchildren thing. ‘Sorry,’ he’d said. ‘But I guess that’s something you’ll need to tell me about too.’

  Selwyn treats the car park of Trentham Gardens like some race track as we hit it at fifty miles an hour on what feels like two wheels. I don’t know what we’re doing here when it’s only a ten-minute drive from our house, but neither is this the Trentham Gardens I used to know when it’s bloomed into a coach trip battleground with a Premier Inn. Apparently, Johnny Crawshaw is Head of the Pond Brief at Trentham Gardens. I have never heard of Johnny Crawshaw. I did not know there was a brief about ponds. What does the Head of the Pond Brief even do?

  ‘Exactly what the manager of that hotel does,’ Selwyn huffs, pointing over at the Premier Inn we’ve just driven past. ‘It’s hospitality management. Food. Linen. Laundry. Unwanted guests. Do you never listen to a word I say?’ He gives me a look that could curdle milk.

  ‘But what are we doing here?’ I ask.

  ‘I have to see Johnny,’ he mutters.

  ‘Does he know what’s happened?’

  He tells me I can wait in the car. It’ll probably be for the best. He’ll be twenty minutes, at most.

  ‘Hang on. You’ve just had me leave the house at breakneck speed without packing a thing to drive us ten bloody minutes down the road and now you’re telling me you’ll be another twenty minutes and to wait in the car? What’s going on Selwyn?’

  ‘It’s not like you to be so dramatic,’ he says.

  ‘I’m not being dramatic,’ but I stop myself from causing a scene for the sake of causing a scene, tell him not to keep me waiting any longer than twenty minutes, and that he has a snag in his jumper. He seems to find this funny and says, ‘Now you know how I feel,’ and gives me the same look as he did when he realised the kitchen wallpaper had been pasted on upside down.

  I watch him walk away from me in the wing mirror until he turns a corner and I can no longer see him. Then I get out of the car, determined to follow him, and wonder if I’ve become a moll.

  I make it only as far as the caravan attached to us. I regard it in much the same way as I used to look at other mothers standing at the school gate: the ones who would look at me and then at Mia and think their thoughts like slut. A friend said they didn’t think just that. Some were probably very sorry for us. ‘Why on earth would they feel sorry for us?’ I’d asked. ‘Do you feel sorry for us?’ We were no longer friends after that. I saw her occasionally with the other mothers, looking sorry, but then Mia asked me not to walk her to school any more. ‘I’m not a baby,’ she’d said. ‘And everyone thinks you’re my sister.’

  The caravan does not look like it’s worth as much money as Selwyn says. I don’t understand what made him take it. He used to call it a desperate gimmick. A tin can albatross. He’s resourceful, I’ll give him that – practical and steady-minded, and he fixes things, hoards things, those natty bits and bobs that will come in handy, because in Selwyn’s world everything will come in handy. He’s like an ant carrying twice his bodyweight in other people’s rag ’n’ bone. And whether he’s taken it, stolen it, thought himself entitled to it, attaching a caravan to a tow bar is surely no quick thing to do. I didn’t even know our car had a tow bar. Did it always have a tow bar, or had he fitted one, had one fitted? Which would mean that he was always intending to take it. In which case, he must’ve known everything. Compensation. Recompense. Thirty thousand pounds. That dribble of ambition, share or nothing, one last shot. It was obvious there was only one lifebelt between them.

  He did something for me at a time when no one else would, as Selwyn always says when I’m busy seeing red about him not retiring. He still valued me, Ginny. He didn’t wash me up.

  But he did, Selwyn. And it’s far from poetic or just.

  I stride across the car park with such a pace, I can’t even keep up with myself.

  I HAVE NOT BEEN to Trentham Gardens in a very long time. It used to be a courting place, back in the day, and a place you got caught when you went AWOL. Meg said they found many a broken soldier hiding out from war in the trees, and a girl, once, with a baby so peaceful it no longer cried. It was our nearest countryside, green and leafy, somewhere to fill our smoky-Stokey lungs with fresh air, and we’d stroll round in three-piece suits and best frocks. We used to come here to sit on deckchairs and eat ice cream. It was the closest we ever got to a holiday, watching the boat on the lake go up and down; us waving at the kids who could afford the ticket, while Meg sneered that it was better to look out at others than have folk look in at you. I remember the fountain mainly. Some primaeval god or other holding Medusa’s head. And all those people that would ask if we were using that third deckchair. ‘Can’t you see someone is sitting there?’ Meg would bellow, the rhododendrons triggering her allergies before hay fever was a thing.

  Now, it costs £12 to get through the turnstiles. There’s a woman with a zapper and a lanyard and plenty of bees in her bonnet, and she won’t let me through, even though I’ve told her I’m not wanting to be in Trentham Gardens when I’ve been to Trentham Gardens, and many moons ago, and
that I just want a quick word with Selwyn.

  ‘Do you have ID on you, shug?’ asks the woman with the zapper and the lanyard. ‘Pensioner discount, ten pound.’

  I tell her that I don’t need that many words. And no. I don’t have ID. My handbag is in the car. I see from her name badge that she is K A Y C O X, but she is far bigger than the six letters of her name.

  ‘Who do you want to see, shug?’ I’m asked again.

  ‘Selwyn Robby,’ I repeat. She’s making me feel like I’ve been eating onions. ‘Just a really quick word, that’s all.’ Except she breaks into such a massive smile, I fear it might tear her face.

  ‘Oh! Is Selwyn here? How have I missed him?’ She calls over to the woman manning the ticket desk. ‘Selwyn’s here!’ she exclaims. The woman manning the desk looks up and parts the sort of hair that belongs on a Shetland pony to reveal unfashionable glasses and a face that reminds me of how skin bunches around a too-tight watchstrap.

  ‘Is he?’ she replies. ‘Since when?’

  ‘I was just saying. Not like him to walk past without saying owt.’

  ‘Not like him at all,’ the woman behind the desk says. ‘I’ll be having bloody words.’

  ‘Well, that’s all I want to do,’ I interrupt. ‘He’s gone to see Johnny Crawshaw.’

  They both look at me as if I’ve just clobbered them with a wet fish.

  ‘Johnny?’ asks Kay Cox.

  ‘Yes, Johnny,’ I repeat.

  The two women look at each other in the way you can imagine two women looking at each other when they don’t believe the woman in the middle of them is telling the truth. Part of me wonders if they’re hiding something from me, because, let’s face it, we’re no longer spring chickens and they’ve still not cured cancer; Selwyn charms for a living and swabs his bladderwort in the backyard with cotton wool. A more sensible part assures me that Trentham Gardens, always so waterlogged with its lake and ponds, has been a client of Selwyn’s for more years than he’s ever let on, and, what with it being a stone’s throw from where we live, he’s bound to come here more regularly than I have ever thought, given that I don’t ever think about Selwyn’s work as a pond supplies salesman when it is ever so dull. Kay Cox comes closer.