Pondweed Page 5

  Later that night, my mother tells me that the anaesthetic made me say things, and not the sort of things you’d expect from a sixteen-year-old girl. I was lying on the settee with a pillow behind my head that was stuffed with a hot water bottle. My mouth was still full of cloves and my nostrils filled with Christmas. There was a stabbing throb around my jawbone so persistent that I couldn’t keep my eyes open, and my gum was still bleeding. We’d run out of handkerchiefs and Meg was now mopping me up with the same serviettes she used in the butcher shop to display the meat.

  ‘You said things,’ Meg began again. ‘Things you shouldn’t be saying. Not ever. Do you understand? You are a child, Imogen. A child.’ Then she turned around to the someone else in the room that wasn’t the Bluebird and told them, too, that I was still a child.

  And I want to be sure – sometimes when I remember this, I am very sure – that the person she turned around to address was Selwyn, and that she was banishing him for something, something he was insisting that he would not do.

  ‘Because this is a child,’ she kept on saying. ‘Do you understand? She’s my child.’

  I run my tongue across the empty gap and find a little piece of meat stuck in my gum now. I look across the table at Selwyn.

  You are always there, I think. You come out of nowhere, yet you’ve always been there. You smother me by being everywhere. In my thoughts. In my memories. In my longings. In my way.

  And it was you. Of course, it was you. I dreamt about you. You’d saved me from drowning in the sea and I’d asked you to swim inside of me. But I’m already in there, you’d said in my dream. You were swimming inside of me with a fierce front crawl.

  ‘What?’ Selwyn says. ‘What have I done now?’

  But here is the waitress again, asking if everything is okay with our food.

  THERE’S A ROOM TO the right of us, a conservatory, that’s crammed with people wearing black. A wake, and Selwyn is absorbed. If there’s one thing I do know about Selwyn Robby, it’s his galactical fear of death.

  A waitress is busy peeling cling film off trays of sandwiches and, for some reason, I find myself mourning the salad garnishes that will be left behind on the silver platters. A trug of chicken thighs is brought in and the people swarm. A plate of ribs next. A vegetarian is shown a cheeseboard. We start to hear a woman complaining to the waitress: she has not brought out all that was ordered. ‘There should be more meat than this.’

  Selwyn stares and does not blink.

  The woman says it again, ‘This is not enough meat!’

  Selwyn gets up from the table and lets his napkin fall from his knees. He doesn’t pick it up. There’s still a lot of steak left on his plate. This is not like him. He does not waste things. He does not litter. He will not owe. He pushes his chair against the table. He mutters something about needing air and loosens a couple of buttons on his shirt. He looks up at the ceiling and wonders for the watt of the light bulb above us. ‘It’s throwing off a lot of heat,’ he says, wiping his brow with the back of his hand. ‘Can’t you feel it?’

  He looks across at the mourners again. The woman is still dressing down the waitress who is checking a list. She is sorry, but that’s all the kitchen has made, what she had ordered. I realise Selwyn is walking towards them, holding his plate.

  I call after him– ‘Selwyn, what are you doing?’

  But he’s already face-to-face with the woman and giving her his plate.

  ‘Here,’ he is saying. ‘If that’s all that’s important to you, have mine.’

  I am behind him holding on to his arm. ‘Selwyn, come away.’

  ‘Go on,’ he instructs the woman. ‘I want you to have it.’

  The woman is looking at him and then at his half-eaten steak on a plate streaked with mustard and ketchup and blood. Her dress is expensive – I can tell by the darts, the way it fits her like a glove – and she wears her hair in a French pleat, with a look of acceptance that the world is this unjust. A man now, aside of her, wants to know if Selwyn has a problem. He nudges the plate into Selwyn’s chest and tells him to have some respect. Selwyn says he has plenty. ‘So much bloody respect.’

  I pull on the back of his shirt and tell him to, ‘Leave it, please,’ and then apologise to the man and woman. ‘It’s been a really crap day,’ I say, and she raises her eyebrows at me and says–

  ‘Not that crap. You still have your husband.’

  And we’re all looking at each other like we want to hurt each other, and the other people about us go quiet and turn around to look at us. I start apologising again–

  ‘I’m so sorry, so very sorry for your loss.’ And I pull on Selwyn’s shirt tails once more. ‘Come on, Selwyn. Please. You don’t know what you’re doing.’

  He turns to look at me, but looks straight through me, like his eyes have been glazed with honey. Then he looks back at the woman, swallows hard, looks down at his plate and says, ‘I’m really sorry. But I’m grieving too.’

  He walks back to our table, puts down the plate and abandons it.

  THE ROOM IS DISSATISFYING and small. The door opens on to the double bed with its feeble white duvet, and there’s a window above the bed, with curtains that don’t meet in the middle. On the wall are two aerial photographs of when this place was all fields. Selwyn, wearing his reading glasses with the thick black rims that make him squint, is looking at them intensely.

  ‘You should’ve got rid of all that lettering on the caravan,’ I say, as I peer around a folding door at the en suite. The toilet is low. The wash basin would not bath a baby, and the extractor fan is lawnmower loud. I fold the door shut. ‘You should do it before we start again. It makes us a laughing stock.’ I pause. ‘Unless, of course, you’re going to return it.’ I stand aside of the tiny bedside table and try the lamp. ‘Perhaps enough is enough. Perhaps we don’t need to go anywhere at all.’ The bulb in the lamp is massive and gives the room a dirty glow.

  There’s an ant crawling up the lampshade. I watch it. It’s so busy, so fast, so adamant in its direction. It hurries up to the top of the shade and I peer over to see what happens next. It goes down the inside, and pops up back where it started, heads in the same direction.

  Behind me, Selwyn still has his nose against one of the photographs of a time when the Swan with Two Necks was a farm. Photographs like this excite him. He’ll show me a grey blob in a minute and tell me it’s a yesteryear pond; that agricultural drainage systems have a lot to answer for when they’ve slurped it up for crops. He will tell me things like, ‘A natural pond is like a Turkish bird bath,’ that the living organisms within them feed the flies, and that we need the flies to survive. He saves coffee jars to fill up when he stumbles across a manmade lake, then studies each one on the kitchen windowsill waiting for what he calls ‘violent agitation’. I tell him that I am violently agitated when I find more jars in the airing cupboard, or when he scoops out my bathwater from the outside drain for skin cells to feed gnat larvae. He tells me he is saving the earth. He has a water butt in the backyard, that collects rainwater, where he’s growing something alien called bladderwort, which he swabs with cotton wool. When a brook runs orange, he calls the council to inform of a bust lead pipe that will poison the voles. After the washout of the Garden Festival back in ’86, he submitted a document to the Town Hall that was never read because they built on the site anyway. When we argue, he tells me it’s to be expected. I live unheard, is what he says.

  Selwyn stops looking at the photograph to fidget on the top of the bed. He takes off his glasses and closes his eyes.

  ‘Oh, God,’ he murmurs. ‘That poor woman. That was unforgivable.’

  He lies there with the flats of his palms over his eyes as if he cannot bear to watch what he’s being reminded of. I tell myself to say nothing. Then he turns away to face the wall and from the shuddering in his shoulders, I wonder if he’s crying.

  He told me that, on the day I left Joiners Square, he wept so hard his mother slapped him to stop. It wasn’t wor
th it. He told me that he stayed where he was, in case I came back. That girls chased him. That girls called and giggled on the phone. That he looked the other way because he was still looking for me. He was a year off thirty when he left for the house on the right side of Hanford, under the Queensway, and took a job gardening, up Hanley Park, where he dug, raked and found things – needles, tramps, an old tumble dryer, a carrier bag of baby clothes, once, that tore into his heart. He tamed the laburnums and planted elms, cut back the roses and battled the bamboo. Made birdboxes that got catapulted, and found one being used to deal drugs. He disagreed with Keep off the Grass – a public park was a public place for a public to roam – but litter hurt his feelings, and his fuchsias were often dug up. It made him awful philosophical about human nature: the willingness to destroy. When he told me all this, I felt a stirring, like a spring being unwound, but it wasn’t quite enough to shed clothes.

  He was let go at forty-two, owing to council reshuffles, and took part-time hours in a garden centre. He treated it like a refuge. People wanted his plants. He became a salesman there quite by chance: a regional manager, checking stock, overheard a sales patter he knew he needed to get his hands on. Selwyn had to confess: he’d always had a fascination with ponds. He was sent on the road by the garden centre’s parent company. Up to Manchester. Down to Birmingham. Once to Blackpool. They went bust. There was no payout. He’d not long hit sixty and was having to start again. He filled out application forms – too pig-headed to sign on – and put up postcards in supermarkets advertising gardening services, when most people had concrete backyards and patios. Then, one day, a knock at the door and there’s Louis with his spit of ambition, two bottles of red, and a piece of land he’d been sitting on since he’d inherited it from his father, had come up with an idea: ‘Ponds, old boy. There’s nothing me and you don’t know about ponds. It’ll be the making of us. Hobbyists pooling expertise. Then we’ll retire the men we should’ve been.’ But the only thing that was different about Selwyn Robby was the way he parted his hair.

  The ant on the lampshade briefly changes direction. Stops. Looks left. Looks right. Re-joins its original path and starts again.

  I put my hand on Selwyn’s shoulder. He shrugs it away.

  We traded our life stories in the first few days of meeting again. They were such tatty tales, so basic, so brittle – they’d barely last out a pot of tea. Selwyn said, ‘Without each other, we’ve not amounted to much, have we?’ And asked me to move in with him straightaway. ‘We’re just wasting more time we don’t have,’ he’d said, sitting on the edge of the armchair in my flat on Wellington Road. ‘And I have a house, with two bedrooms. A big kitchen. It needs living in.’

  He sent a man with a van to come and collect me within the week. I had barely drawn breath, barely filled that van up. I really did have nothing much. We kissed a little in the hallway, neither of us really knew what to do with our hands, and I could taste the tuna fish bap he’d had for lunch on his lips. Two hermits becoming one and trying to create something out of whatever it was we once shared; he took my hand and began to lead me. Halfway up the stairs, I’d had to confess.

  ‘Now, don’t be making a big deal out of it. It’s just the way it is. And before you ask, I’ve seen everyone I need to see and it can happen again.’

  He’d said it was me who’d got the wrong end of the stick and that he just wanted to show me the back bedroom where I would sleep; that he was happy to get me a new single or a double bed – no matter to him either way – though it could all probably do with a lick of paint and some ladylike curtains. When he held my hand, I’d expected to feel the same relief as I did when they’d counted my daughter’s fingers and toes after she was born. But it wasn’t relief I felt. It was fear.

  ‘No,’ I’d said. ‘I have my own bed.’

  He went to make us a cup of tea – still three sugars in his tea – and I remember thinking, even if it isn’t love, it’ll still be enough.

  I do wash our sheets separately though.

  I see that Selwyn has fallen asleep, and on top of the bed fully clothed with his eyes open. That’s the other thing. I Googled it once. It was freaking me out. I’d think he was awake and be talking away. ‘Selwyn, are you listening to me?’ Nocturnal lagophthalmos, said the definition online. A phenomenon not fully understood. I’d asked my daughter about it on the Skype.

  ‘What does it even mean?’ I’d shrieked. ‘Can it be cured?’

  She’d asked for why it bothered me so much when we slept in separate bedrooms?

  ‘Because his face turns to stone,’ I’d said. ‘He looks completely dead. But what if I get it wrong and leave him there for days in the armchair thinking he’s just knackered?’

  ‘What does Selwyn say about it?’

  ‘I’ve never asked. I don’t want him to know that I know because then he’ll know that I’ve been watching him sleep.’

  She used the opportunity then to talk about Anthony, something that was freaking her out, just like she always did. Would he do this with you? Did he ever tell you? Can you remember the way he did this?

  No, I’d tell her. We weren’t actually ever really together like that… and I’d switch off the computer. Text her later to say that the satellites must be shifting on the bottom of the world. I’d wait for her to reply as I sat on the edge of the bed watching Selwyn sleep with his eyes wide open and fearing him already dead. Would I miss what I haven’t known? Sometimes, I would sit there in the darkness and tell him the dirty truth of it all. Sometimes, I would just sit. Mia would fail to text back.

  I remove Selwyn’s glasses as he stares up at the ceiling, take off his socks, and lie aside of him on top of the duvet, just as I have begun to do at home. Outside, the mourners from the wake in the car park shouting drunken goodnights. In here, his breath aside of mine and falling in sync. I wonder if Selwyn’s having a breakdown when it happens to the most capable of people. I wonder if it was him who scattered the ashes of Johnny Crawshaw into Trentham’s lake. I wonder if Louis will come looking for us and how Selwyn could’ve been so devoured by money. And right before sleep, Mia. Always Mia. Her radiance is why I sometimes don’t sleep a wink.

  Headlights swamp the room as car doors slam shut with the last of the condolences. I turn the other way. Wonder if I can sleep with my eyes open, wonder if Selwyn ever really sleeps, until I wake to the sound of the shower and I’m not sure if I’ve slept or not. There is something heavy in the corner of my eye, and it’s my suitcase. I do want a change of clothes, to see something different out of the corner of my eye. I look at the lampshade. I cannot see the ant.

  The Second Day

  ‘Ponds are communal, highly-forgiving, hugely welcoming neighbourhoods for virtually every single major group of animals on the planet. With this philosophy, a new pond can, within less than a year, become as valuable to the ecosystem as if it had been in existence for fifty. We, as a species, could learn a lot.’

  ~ The Great Necessity of Ponds

  by Selwyn Robby

  WE HEAD OUT AFTER a fry up so greasy it oils all our major organs. Go left and left again.

  The road winds. Fields both sides. Lime green. Bottle green. Bruise green. Nature’s green. This is more green than I’ve ever seen in my life, and so many sorts of green I go colour-blind. Selwyn goes no faster than forty miles an hour, and the cars behind us wait for stretches of open road to overtake us. As one car does, its driver flicks us the bird, as if we’ve held him up, cost him his job, his affair, then his marriage and years in child maintenance. I tentatively ask Selwyn if Louis has been in touch and he starts off by saying he thought we would have had this conversation last night, as if he can only talk about it in the dark.

  ‘Anyway, he took my phone,’ he says, dropping below twenty miles an hour as we approach a roundabout.

  ‘What do you mean, he took your phone?’

  ‘It was a company phone,’ Selwyn says, all matter-of-fact. ‘He was within his rights to ask for it back
.’

  ‘And you just gave it to him?’

  ‘We need another mirror, a better view,’ he says, pointing to the wing mirror on his side. ‘I can’t see it all. I didn’t think.’

  Two miles later and we pull into a garage forecourt that’s now a hand car wash manned by five pairs of blue overalls. A man greets us with a black bucket brimming with the bits and pieces that will clean us up. Selwyn opens the window and asks where the nearest garage is.

  The man says, ‘You want full valet?’

  Selwyn says no. He thought it was a garage. One that sells convex wing mirrors to see caravans.

  ‘We do express valet. While you wait,’ the man says. He stands back to look at the size of the car. ‘Forty pounds.’

  He talks with clipped English, a tinge of Eastern Europe. He flashes good teeth and wears earrings in both ears. He shows Selwyn his chamois and gives it a squeeze.

  ‘I do windscreen,’ he says.

  Selwyn relents. Yes. That would be good. He looks at me and shrugs. ‘There’s a lot of dead flies,’ he says.

  We get out of the car and go into the dreary innards of a navy-blue Portakabin to wait, while the man with good teeth and diamond earrings express valets the car with a Henry Hoover. Selwyn plays with the coffee machine and feeds it more coins than it needs. We share one black coffee that tastes like soap and sit on two orange plastic chairs aside of a two-bar electric fire that smells of fried insects and burnt carpet. Selwyn stands by the window with his hands on his hips. He is head to toe in thick corduroy and smelling of a good night’s sleep. Then he tells me he is sorry. He should’ve thought this through more. He doesn’t know why he failed to tell me about Johnny. ‘That wake yesterday,’ he says. ‘It felt like mine.’