Pondweed Read online

  ‘You were so angry,’ I try not to sound too relieved that he’s come to his senses. ‘And when we’re angry we do things. Monstrous things. We become monsters—’

  ‘I was raging,’ he interrupts me. ‘I’d never felt rage like it. My mother always said that it’s what lives underneath. And it takes just a moment to grab hold.’

  He sighs long and hard, and I wait for its full stop. When it comes, I wonder if this is when he’ll tell me he’s been a pillock and that he’s sorry to have put me through it, and we’ll go back home, laugh about it, take stock, and one of us will have to pop out for a pint of milk. We might even find out that Louis didn’t invest everything and there’s enough to tick us over. But all Selwyn does is stretch out his arms like Jesus and declare, ‘We have set out, at least, and setting out is the biggest battle, so on we go!’ Then heads outside to reprimand one of the men for taking a scourer to the bonnet.

  I sink deeper into the chair in the Portakabin and hold my head in my hands.

  This place reminds me of another Portakabin. The one that takes two buses to get there and sits in the dark at the back of the yard on the land Louis inherited from his father. Toogood Aquatics is full of plastic moulds and chicken wire, of contraptions that look like they’ve dropped from space. You’ll see that he’s branched out into concrete fountains and rickety troll bridges over there; that some of the ponds are now no bigger than a washing-up bowl and perfect for verandas. To the left are rolls of liners like new carpet. To the right are the metal scaffolds that house all the supplies to the trade. Above you, all the bulbs have blown in the halogen lights, so everything is sold in shadow.

  Which is perhaps why Louis seemed surprised to see me. His eyes were the same blue as a second-class stamp, the touch of his skin like algae. He smelt of fancy washing powder, of stale smoke and wet chamois, and his desk was littered with papers full of numbers that weren’t adding up. He was opening a bottle of wine – he is always opening a bottle of wine – and he couldn’t find a clean glass. Or a way out. I’d noticed that he’d stopped wearing his wedding ring and had even taken down the photographs of his kids. Under the harsh fluorescent lights, I could see how he’d been peeling the skin away from his thumbs so that they were sore and bleeding, and his suit, always in a suit; it was a nice one too. Pin-striped but blotched with wine.

  ‘For Christ’s sake, Louis. What have you done?’

  ‘Where did you even come from?’ he’d said. ‘How does someone like him get someone like you?’

  We’d parted looking like we’d just thrown snow at each other.

  I’m not sure he’d wanted to be saved.

  I get up from the chair and go to the window. Selwyn and the valet man are stood shoulder to shoulder by the caravan discussing the Toogood Aquatics branding. It occurs to me that I’ve never asked Selwyn why a business supposedly founded by two people only ever traded under the one name. Why not Toogood & Robby, or Robby & Toogood? Though it’d probably never occurred to Selwyn to ask either. You ask me such impossible questions, he’ll say to me. When it’s impossible for me to feel any more than I do for you. Where is it that you want to be, Ginny?

  Somewhere that is not in your head.

  I go outside just as the man takes a penknife to the lettering under the caravan’s kitchen window. Selwyn tells him no. It needs to be properly removed. I don’t think he wants it removed at all. Then he points to the soapy gutter at my feet and asks me if I can see just how filthy it all was. He pays the man in cash. And even tips. We get back on our way.

  Two miles down the road, and I start to feel carsick. I ask Selwyn to wind down all the windows. He tells me there are mint imperials in the glove box and to suck one, don’t crunch.

  ‘We need to properly talk about Louis,’ I say between deep breaths. ‘We still have to go back and have this out with him. It’s like he’s sitting on the back seat coming with us.’ I pause. ‘And there’s the thing about him, something, I don’t know what he was doing, I should tell you about it.’

  But the car behind has started to flash us. ‘There’s something wrong,’ Selwyn says. ‘Without that bloody mirror I can’t see anything right.’ He puts on the hazards and slows us right down until we crawl to a stop in a layby. He gets out of the car.

  We tell each other nothing that we should.

  The village used to be known as the Three Loggerheads, or the Three Fools, before it dropped the Three and became just Loggerheads. Or, so I’ve been told. It has a Telford postcode and a Shropshire address, but comes under Staffordshire council. Essentially, it is everywhere and nowhere and where Meg was born.

  ‘I’ve just never been here before,’ I tell Selwyn, who’s currently working out how to jack up the car to change the back tyre that has not fully blown but has most definitely been deflating with the weight. No, he did not weigh the caravan. He does not know the weight of the car either. He looks at me.

  I say, ‘Don’t you dare.’

  This will be one of those journeys that’ll be appreciated a long time after we get back.

  There is a spare and four hands would make lighter work, but Selwyn persists in working solo. Salesmen are rarely team players but very good at delegating tasks they don’t want to do, and he insists it would be better if I knocked on that house over there to see if they might lend us some tools.

  I point out that salesmen are better cold callers and can get inside a house better than anyone, and anyway, ‘I don’t understand what we need.’

  He looks at me like I’m a disappointing heirloom and says we can go nowhere on three tyres.

  I slap on my best smile and knock on the first door I come to, which is a chipped bright blue and has no number or letterbox. I hear a baby bawling, immediately regret it, and start to walk away when the door suddenly opens. I’m greeted by a girl thin as a shin bone with what sounds like a baby with colic in her arms. The girl looks exhausted and implausibly pale. She asks me what I want.

  I try and put from my mind that she looks little more than sixteen, like she lunches on dust, that it’s like looking in the mirror, and that there’s so much I could tell her about what she’ll come to know, but instead I point behind me at Selwyn who has managed to get the spare tyre out of the car and is rolling it on to the grass verge.

  ‘We have a flat tyre,’ I explain.

  But she has no tools, not even a spanner, or an ounce of goodwill, and I’d be better off trying next door because Grogan has motorbikes. All the while she talks, the baby never stops crying.

  ‘And don’t look at me like that,’ she suddenly snaps. ‘I didn’t have to have her, but I did.’ She slams the door.

  Lives and lies and lands apart, the sudden urge to hold my own daughter has me almost in tears. In fact, I want to grab hold of her shoulders and just shake and shake and shake. Then, just like that, it starts to hail.

  Much later, when this journey is all over, I will remember this hailstorm more than I will remember the missed turns and dead ends that were never on the map. We were at Loggerheads, I shall tell people, and it hailed.

  BARNARD GROGAN IS A generous man with a well-ordered face, the arms of a bell-ringer, and is buying another round of drinks. He wears an old rugby shirt, leather jacket, and trousers with so many pockets I wonder if he lives hand-to-whatever he finds in them. He and Selwyn are deep in conversation about a municipal pond nearby that Selwyn has never heard of, and he’s flabbergasted. I sit to Selwyn’s left and Barnard’s right, not exactly in the middle when we’re all in the middle of each other, and they’re always in the middle of a conversation I don’t belong in. At one point, I quip – ‘Selwyn can tell the size of your pond just by looking at you’ – but neither of them even look at me. I wonder how many other ponds we will happen upon that I shall lose another part of Selwyn to.

  We’re staying the night here in Loggerheads because the tyre is flat and so is the spare. Barnard has offered to drive Selwyn to a garage to buy two new tyres in the morning. He’s also taken
it upon himself to keep us company in the bar – a pub also called the Loggerheads – and Selwyn has already told him that I hail from here.

  Barnard says, ‘Really?’

  I say, ‘No, not me, my mother.’

  And he asks for her name.

  I tell him, ‘Meg Richer, and it was a long time ago.’

  He says, ‘Not from the farm up Mucklestone way?’

  I shrug my shoulders and tell him that I’d rather soaked off the daughter label fifty years ago and my mother was never much for a past anyway. This does not put him off, however, and next thing he’s calling over Linda who looks like she knows joy and suffering in equal measures. She puts down her gin and tonic and straddles a stool. She has a lot of wicker-coloured hair that she wears hoisted up with hairspray – glamourous, garrulous, mutton, because she speaks as if everyone around her is stone-deaf.

  ‘There was a family of Richers up Mucklestone way,’ she immediately declares, like a tour guide. ‘Farmhands mainly, treacherous lives. Cousins marrying cousins. That sort of thing. Poor souls. Common enough. No one lived beyond forty,’ and she’ll check the sanitorium records because most of them had TB.

  I feel my pulse quicken, and flush for no reason.

  Selwyn says, ‘What records?’

  Linda explains that she’s from a generation of sisters stationed at the infirmary that was once here, when fresh air was penicillin.

  ‘There might even be photographs,’ she threatens. ‘Who’s asking, anyway?’

  Barnard and Selwyn both point at me.

  ‘Imogen here is a Richer,’ Selwyn offers.

  I glare at him. ‘You watch your mouth,’ I snap. ‘My name is Imogen Dare.’

  Now, he glares at me. In fact, the whole pub is glaring at me. Between us, Linda cocks her head and concentrates on a beermat. Barnard excuses himself to go to the gents. Selwyn looks embarrassed. He wants me to be embarrassed too, but I don’t care what these people think. It’ll give them something to talk about. I stare up at Selwyn as he swaps one look for another and settles on the one that always reminds me of someone who’s just missed their flight. He slugs down the rest of his pint, asks Linda if he can get her a drink.

  ‘Doing the genealogy, are you?’ she asks.

  My heart is hammering, though it’s a sensible question. I shake my head. ‘No. We have a flat tyre.’

  ‘But stopping here?’

  Selwyn tells her yes. ‘Just for the night.’

  ‘I’ll bring my books tomorrow morning then,’ she offers. ‘Bag full, I’ve got. Photographs of all sorts. Might be a trip down memory lane.’

  ‘Please don’t,’ I say, so quick it’s rude. ‘Trouble yourself.’ Though I want to tell her to stuff it – I really don’t care and actually things like that should really be burnt. But because Selwyn has left me alone with her and gone to the bar, I start to yawn theatrically and mutter something about my lustreless walking legs starting to ache, and even roll my Rs.

  ‘Well, goodnight,’ I say. ‘It was nice to meet you.’

  ‘Goodnight,’ she says, x-raying my body language for fibs.

  I take myself off to bed upstairs in a room that smells of neglect and is wary of guests.

  I am starting to think that we have broken down here on purpose.

  There is no species to define my mother. Meg was one of a kind. A six-foot chump with size ten feet and a heart of twenty-four carat gold – as a child, she told me she could touch the sky and pull down the clouds, and that’s what made cotton wool. As for the rest of her, a natural fatness over elephant bones which she swathed in black smocks and blood-stained aprons; it was all hidden and folded away. She smelt of boot polish, of animal blood and tar, but on Sundays, of perfume – two or three squirts from an expensive bottle of something she would travel to Manchester to buy. Her hair was kept swimming-cap short and wispy about her ears, and when kids called her a man I thumped them. Jewellery. She loved jewellery, and stored it away like a magpie. She never wore any of it.

  She lived in two places: the butcher shop by day, and the back kitchen by night, and both had clinical white tiled walls that she’d buff up with a nailbrush. She stopped going to bed when I was too tall to sleep aside of her, and instead snatched her sleep on an old mahogany velour armchair next to the kitchen stove. You’d think a woman of her size would have a face full of stories, but Meg was featureless. A face trained to give nothing away.

  She did have four wisdom teeth that she refused to have removed, so was always chewing on cloves, which made her smell like she was constantly stewing fruit for a Christmas pudding. She talked of the deceased as if they were in the next room, and was never more than an inch away from a dead animal, which she could butcher and trim with her eyes closed. Jars of aspic fermenting on our windowsills – calf’s foot jelly, she believed, cured sore throats. Though she wouldn’t touch liver. Or hearts of any kind. And she’d only sell pork from a heritage pig and would even go and inspect their sties. A pig is not dirty by nature, she’d say. Only nature dirties the pig. When I was tiny, she’d hold on to my little finger in her sleep, but if I ever came in sobbing from a bicycle fall, a punched arm or bruised ego, she went into the other room and let me deal with the crisis myself.

  Believe in all your lies, she used to say. One day you’ll have to explain them.

  When she cleaned, she swept the dust into a corner, just where the slightest breeze would blow it all back into the room – yet kept the butcher shop clean as a pin. She hung no pictures in any room, and certainly no photographs, but, occasionally, something pretty and bovine caught her eye and she’d stick it to the wall with chewing gum and unframed. What knick-knacks and trinkets we had on a dresser were the soils and seconds of the potbanks, collecting dust. I remember I’d have to jump from one rug to another to avoid the stone-cold floors. That our sitting room, or front parlour, as she called it, was a room we passed by on our way to the kitchen. Other than her perfume, she spent nothing on herself, only me. Dresses. She had me wearing all sorts of dresses, even bridesmaids’ dresses. I have some first memory of being dressed only in christening gowns until I was two. Lace – she had an awkward love of lace, which she sometimes attached to hats like a veil. And nightgowns. The sort you imagine hysterical women wearing when institutionalised. I have no idea where she got them from, but she brought them home and dressed me in them.

  Kisses. I can never remember her kissing me. Ever.

  And yet the neighbours came to her for everything. To treat a wound. To mend a heart. To beg a bacon rasher for a last fried egg. A wad of lard. To listen.

  I was ten when the Bluebird came out of nowhere. I didn’t understand it all.

  ‘Get used to it,’ Meg said. ‘She’s not leaving.’

  So, I did.

  Until three became a crowd.

  And then three threatened to become four.

  As I toss and turn on a lumpy mattress that smells of spilt coffee and failed affairs, I try to remember if I did know anything about Loggerheads other than Meg’s stock phrase that nothing was ever worse than Loggerheads.

  Eet canst get any worser than the Logger’eads, she’d say, which I grew up thinking was just another one of those sayings we had that no one beyond spitting distance of Joiners Square had ever heard of. I only realised it was an actual place when given a map of the county in Geography when I was probably ten, and I spotted it on the western border, on the way to Market Drayton. And I only knew about Market Drayton because of another neighbour who’d married a gad-about from there who eventually flit back because ‘his mother was such a worrier’. And then the saying went, well, he’s got more nounce than ’im from Market Drayton – which meant he wasn’t a bigot with a second family.

  She was farmstock. That’s all she would say. Barrel scrapings. Chicken feed. Too many mouths and not enough for their stomachs. She’d left this place behind a graveyard. Farmhands with treacherous lives. Cousins marrying cousins. Poor souls. No one lived beyond forty.

 
There’s no bigger kick in the teeth than someone knowing more than you.

  And then, suddenly, Anthony saunters into mind, as he always seems to do when I’m dragged back and go too far back: he walks into the butchers, Saturday morning, his trilby askew, and with another pair of re-heeled shoes for me, good as new. Meg pays him in pork loin, a couple of kidneys, goat. They are friends. I think we’re friends too. I check the way I’ve done my hair in a silver platter from the back shelf. Remind myself to sneak brighter bulbs into the light fittings above when I can barely see if I’ve mascaraed both eyes. Beneath my apron, I fold over my skirt once, twice, about my waist because I’m at that age now when I’m aware I’m being looked at, and wish I could kick off the rubber boots Meg has me wearing, with their toughened soles and lard spats. I’ve been practising what to say to him; how to flicker my eyelashes and bite gently down on my lip as if I’ve eaten too much salt. I turn around, hoping to look like I’ve just dropped my bath towel, but meet only with his back as he leaves the shop.

  Selwyn suddenly staggers into the room claiming he’s got a throb behind his left eye. He asks me to look for a cancer and if any blood vessels have burst. I ask how many pints he’s had and he says three. I disagree, and have no sympathy. He goes to the bathroom and locks the door. I hear him throw up.

  Eet canst get any worser than the Logger’eads.

  The Third Day

  ‘When choosing between a pond complex or multiple pools, one must consider the permanence of the pond, before concluding its area and depth, and treat each one as a single water body with its own undulating drawdown zones. To minimise future problems, it is worth contemplating how the area will be used by people and animals, because ponding is planning for the long term, rather than the aesthetics of trend.’