Pondweed Page 8

  He says, ‘Sometimes, Ginny, I’d rather you didn’t say anything at all.’

  To that, I jolt forwards in my seat and even point a finger.

  ‘But before you get your hackles up,’ he carries on quickly, ‘I’m just saying that sometimes it’s best to let things pass.’

  The muscles at the back of my throat contract. ‘So, I’m to let you flirt and only speak when spoken to?’

  ‘That’s not what I said either. I’m just saying that sometimes,’ but he stops. Sighs. Sighs again, and even sneaks in a third for good measure. ‘I don’t know what I’m saying either,’ he eventually says. ‘So, let’s both of us not say anything and just enjoy our dinners.’

  The smile he gives me is half-baked and crumbles quickly, but it will do. For now.

  We leave the café to a thunder rumble. We both look up. Blue sky above us, but rain coming in from over the hills. ‘This will be interesting,’ Selwyn says. ‘There might be sturgeon.’

  I roll my eyes and zip up my jacket. He may as well be speaking a foreign language. ‘Please don’t make me walk around those ponds again,’ I say. ‘Especially if it’s going to rain.’

  ‘Anyone would think you didn’t have feet for how little you actually travel,’ he said. ‘You’ve got to keep the blood pumping, Ginny. What do you do all day while I’m at work?’

  He had no intention of listening to my reply. Too busy waterproofing himself and looking for carrier bags. A second thunder rumble, a little closer than the first, but he heads off into the wilderness all the same.

  I lay down on the back seat of the car stewing and grinding my teeth.

  What do I do all day?

  The arrogance of What do I do all day?

  What do you do all day?

  Because all I know is that you leave the house on the dot and come back on the dot, come in through the front door and head straight out the back door where you do things in the yard with your bloody tin buckets and your back to me. Have you touched them? you’ll sometimes accuse. The water looks jellied. I tell you that I’ve not paid them any attention. I’ve been busy, I say. But you don’t look at me, just back down at your watery little allotment with its slippery fish-fingers of algae and other bits of green that smell of the sea.

  I say, Selwyn? Would you like to eat? And though I’ve set the table, cooked a meal, tidied your house, you eat it lukewarm on a tray on your knee in the front room with the big light on like we’re the local takeaway, and pay attention to the telly like it’s a vital organ.

  Selwyn, I sometimes say, don’t you want to talk?

  And you give me that serious smile you save for moments like this, and say, Sorry, Ginny. I’m so used to being alone, I forget you’re there.

  What do I do all day?

  I’ll bloody give you what do I do all day because I think that’s the first time you’ve asked.

  Pointless. That’s how I feel all day. Waiting for you to point me in the right direction.

  What do I do all day?

  What do I do all day?

  I think.

  I give it some more thought.

  When friends drift away and you can’t call them back.

  When your daughter heads off to the other side of the world and the house is clinically clean.

  When you open your purse and think enough for a fancy loaf, half a pound of back bacon, a dozen eggs, and bleach. He always needs bleach.

  When you think of the time when you had no time and wished you had all the time in the world to do nothing. And then you have it, all that time, and you realise you’ve been so busy working, treading water, keeping afloat, that you can’t remember what it feels like to catch your breath. And then it comes, that time – the time to ourselves, for ourselves – and you don’t know what else it is you do; where it is all the other old women go. I’d been travelling at a hundred miles an hour in a single direction. The world has passed me by in a smudge.

  What do I do all day?

  Charity shops, he’d said. They’re always looking for volunteers. You could talk until your mouth ran dry. I thought about an exercise class. Spent the day swatting flies and felt energised enough. I dusted the figurines. I recognised some. From when he and his mother lived next door in Joiners Square – hassling every shelf, nook and cranny. I cleaned out the kitchen cupboards and found out-of-date tins. I made a list of things I knew how to cook. Made another list of things I’d like to cook. Cooked none of them. I took down the curtains in every room, washed them, dried them, and pressed them into pleats. I picked fluff off the rugs until I had a small ball of wool. I thought about learning to knit with it. Knit and natter. I’d heard about that. I went to the library, but got stage fright and never went in. I doodled in the margins of the free newspapers and found my fingers hovering over the telephone numbers in adverts telling me to solve the hangover of life with a call to God. I cut up old bed sheets for dusters. I looked out of the bedroom window and hoped for exciting strangers walking past. If the postman ever rang the doorbell it was a big deal. I kept the telly on. I began to have conversations with it. Then I got sick of the telly’s backchat and turned on the radio. Listened to a documentary one day about The Little Mermaid. Fairy tales and once upon a time, and my mind had wandered to circa 1958 when I’d told Mrs Galley that I didn’t need to come to school any more because I was going to be a mermaid. A divine and beautiful underwater goddess. Mrs Galley was a woman of much patience and vocabulary, and told me that there was a big difference between ambition and Stoke-on-Trent. I left the classroom accepting my position in the world and vowing not to jump in the canal just to check I didn’t have gills. I turned off the radio. It was exhausting listening to all those things I didn’t know. I began to understand the meaning of the elephant in the room. It was me.

  What do I do all day?

  I did a lot of things, Selwyn Robby. Then I moved in with you and you gave me nothing to do.

  I must’ve fallen asleep, because I’m woken by Selwyn knocking on the windscreen and rustling his carrier bags at me as if he’s found treasure.

  ‘Did you hear that thunder crack?’ he shouts through the glass. ‘Sturgeon, Ginny. Right on the ripples. I could’ve kissed them.’ He blows out his cheeks to show me how blown away he is. ‘The ecosystem here is out of this world.’

  I get out of the car and immediately start up, ‘You were out of order. You let that woman shame me. You never, ever stand up for me.’

  He cocks his head to one side, as if my words have whipped his cheek. ‘Why won’t you marry me?’ he says, bending down to untie the laces on his walking boots and kicking off the mud.

  I roll my eyes. ‘You’re lucky I even got in the car.’

  He looks hurt. ‘Don’t you remember anything about us?’

  ‘We’re here now,’ I say flatly. ‘Hanging out in stately homes like other old couples.’

  He’s putting on his clean shoes like someone without thumbs. ‘Why can’t you make the most of things right now?’ he says.

  I glare at him. ‘What? Happen upon places and hope they have a pond? What happens when you run out of things to sell?’ I pause. ‘In fact, what do you even keep on selling?’

  He seems to be swilling his mouth with his own saliva. ‘Okay,’ he says. ‘The reason I’ve been gone for so long is because I’ve been discussing some work.’

  I suck in my breath as if pushing his words through a sieve. ‘Okay.’

  ‘How do you feel about staying here for the rest of the week?’ He goes on to say that that woman – Rachael – has propositioned him. She’d like him to talk at their Spring Fayre on Saturday. Something along the lines of the great necessity of ponds, she’d suggested. To encourage the creation of a million ponds. And one of their gardener’s has gone down with a vomiting bug.

  I feel the colour draining from my face. ‘Did you plan this?’

  ‘Perhaps I was meant to be here, such is the nuance of fate,’ Selwyn says, thoughtfully. He is using words now that I�
�ve never heard him use before. If the carp started talking, I would simply reply, ‘Yes, thank you. I’m fine,’ and appreciate the sane conversation.

  ‘I’ll get paid,’ he tells me. ‘Rachael says the Lord is very generous.’

  ‘We’re here now because of the fucking Lord?’

  ‘For God’s sake, keep your voice down,’ he seethes. ‘I’ll be talking about the necessity of ponds, not the Garden of bloody Eden.’

  I hold up my hands and feel my whole body start to vibrate. ‘I don’t know what is happening,’ I stammer out. ‘You’re sending me demented. I don’t know what we’re doing here. I feel like I can’t breathe.’

  He just smirks. ‘Well, only the good Lord will know that for sure.’ But I can tell by the rest of his face that what he’s really asking is for me to start believing in us.

  The Fourth Day, and then the Fifth

  ‘Freshwater habitats are within reach of most of us. In many ways, they are, like us, interdependent on one another and will do what they can to reach out and merge, creating a larger pool from which life can evolve.’

  ~ The Great Necessity of Ponds

  by Selwyn Robby

  WE ARE STAYING IN the Piggery. A cottage that’s hidden away from the rest of the world, in the undergrowth of Hodnet Hall Gardens’ damp valley, that’s not so much spick and span but sparse and sparing on natural light. The walls are the colour of an old two-tone cardigan, the bed is almost in the kitchen, and there’s one armchair, which we fight over. The smallness of the bathroom intimidates me and all the curtains are tangerine. If this is what woodworm smells like, then this is what woodworm smells like, yet people actually part with money to stay here and call it a ‘retreat’. Precious quiet, they say. The sort of quiet only a new mother would pay for.

  I think of that young mum back in Loggerheads and wonder if her baby is still crying; how Meg used to say that the squeal from a dying pig is not for her life but for her piglets to run.

  Last night, Selwyn met the Lord and ‘took sherry’ – the Lady is in Fuerteventura on a walking holiday – leaving me to get things straight in here, as he likes to say, as if I enjoy playing house and putting things in straight lines. He hauled my suitcase into the Piggery’s oblong bedroom and said, ‘Perhaps you could see if you do have everything you need in here?’ I looked at the double bed and asked him why I couldn’t take sherry? He tapped his nose and said, ‘Business, Ginny. Pond stuff. It’s a serious negotiation.’ He’d sounded like a megalomaniac.

  He ambled in, flushed and rambling, around eleven o’clock, with his pockets full of seeds. He’d been gone for the best part of three hours – ‘So forgive me,’ I said, ‘if your seeds aren’t very interesting.’ He slumped into the armchair, his head in his hands and asked for a bucket.

  I’d said, ‘Carry on drinking like you are doing and you’ll be kicking the bloody bucket. That’s two nights on the trot.’

  I went to bed and listened to him dry heave.

  Swearing he’s not hungover but perhaps a little carsick, when towing a caravan takes such intense concentration, Selwyn is now reading to me from his notes for his talk on Saturday. He is very nervous. He keeps stopping to change a word. He reads to me like I’m five. I have long zoned out, and he sips his coffee, carries on reading aloud at me, and occasionally looks up in between sentences for nods of encouragement. I offer him the same nod of encouragement I used to offer people in the laundrette when they struggled to identify the correct slot for the washing powder. Back when we worked with wicker baskets that were perfect cribs, and Mia was not even crawling. It amazed me how many people tried to drown receipts and bank statements, losing betting slips, and in one pocket I found a suicide note. Later, I would sit in that laundrette just to kill time. There was something soothing about the smell, the tumbling around of clothes, and I’d imagine the stains and the scuff marks floating away like fairy dust. Clean clothes. Dissolved mistakes.

  ‘I might move this part on enzymes to earlier on,’ Selwyn says. ‘What do you think?’

  I nod with encouragement. He carries on. As did I, as young mothers alone must do, because, after the laundrette, I took on a housemaid’s position in a downtrodden B&B with velvet wallpaper that used to smell of men coming home with sick on their shoes. I’d find forks in the bedsheets. Underwear. Dead insects. A bag of screws. They were kind enough to give me a key to room thirty-one, in the attic, with a black and white TV, when our poky little Fenton flat, with its glistening slug-lines on concrete floors, had mice. Mia and I both cried when we were told we could go home. It was the busyness of the B&B that we liked. The comings and goings and the losing of ourselves in other people’s lives: the warmth. Then my little girl went to school.

  ‘Will you pass me a pen?’ Selwyn asks. ‘I’m repeating on myself like cod liver oil.’

  I look for a pen.

  Like I’d stand on the other side of the school railings looking, wishing my daughter had been born a boy. Boys seemed to sort things out with a ball. Girls were catty. One another’s downfall. They left her out. This is a two-person game, they’d say. It’s a game for us, not you. I’d tell her, It won’t always be this black and white, and I’d will the world to change quicker. She still punctured herself with a compass one day to prove that she, too, bled red.

  I hand Selwyn a Biro that I’ve found idling in a fruit bowl, where he’s also left the caravan key.

  ‘I don’t know why I agreed to do this,’ he says. ‘Who’s interested in what I have to say? I’m boring myself.’ He scratches at his forehead and leaves dents, pops another two pills – that makes four this morning – and pulls at the grey hairs around his mouth. He has stopped shaving.

  I carried on putting one foot in front of the other and found myself in shoe shops. Measuring little feet and finding perfect fits to go off and conquer the world – I had a knack for reading lives from the feet up. Lived my own on the basis that a lie can travel around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes.

  ‘I’m not going to do it,’ Selwyn says. ‘It’s ridiculous. No one will come anyway.’

  Mia’s tenth birthday and only three children came. Do not let them see you cry. You must never let them see you cry.

  Mia’s sixteenth birthday – drunk on Martini at someone else’s party and brought home by someone’s father like a wilted flower. Being told, ‘She came with it in a flask.’

  Mia’s eighteenth birthday – a map of the world and a box of drawing pins. ‘Go and adventure,’ I’d said. ‘Anywhere and everywhere and far away from here.’

  And she did. Straight down the A14 to its Ipswich tip, where she trained to become a nurse. Three years later, she came back up the A14 and had the gall to tell me that I hadn’t moved an inch.

  Being a mother. That was what I did. Clothing her. Feeding her. Keeping her warm. Consoling her. Arguing with her. Explaining her. Sticking around for her. Paying for her.

  ‘No fool like an old fool,’ Selwyn mutters from the armchair. ‘Who am I trying to kid? Who’s going to sit there and listen to me?’

  All those things I did, and she never listened to a word I said.

  I know you’re afraid to depend, Mother, my daughter’s voice. But you can’t be my father as well.

  My girl in a photograph; an image on a screen. Her voice dipping in and out with failed satellite connections. What’s that, Mother? I didn’t hear you. My little bird. My little bluebird fluttering away to the other side of the world to a man she so desperately wants to be her dad. Let me just know what it’s like in the time that we have.

  ‘No, I’m going to start again,’ Selwyn declares. ‘Approach it differently. There’s small fish in big ponds, and then there’s minnows. I’m going around in circles. I need it to bite.’

  ‘Yes,’ I say, without thinking. ‘It could’ve all been so different if it’d been the other way around.’

  Selwyn drops his eyebrows, reminds me why he’s doing this and what he’s going to be paid. ‘This wasn’t
planned,’ he tells me. ‘To be honest with you, Ginny, I didn’t plan for any of it.’

  ‘So you keep saying. Yet here we are.’

  He gets up from the armchair and comes towards me. Grips my shoulders like he likes to do when he needs the upper hand. He tries to get me to look at him. ‘Look,’ he murmurs into my hair. ‘We’re only here till Saturday. In the scheme of things, that’s no time at all.’

  I carry on looking down at the carpet and see where two pieces have been botched near the skirting board. Cut from the same cloth, yet when seamed together they look odd.

  ‘It’s just that I’ve done all these things yet never have anything to offer,’ I say, my forehead resting against his chin. ‘Nothing to show for what I’ve done.’

  He plasters on a smile for me. ‘Then who is Mia?’ he asks.

  ‘I just can’t help thinking that if you’d put that money down on the shoe shop…’

  His hands go up as they always go up when we have this conversation. ‘Not this again.’

  ‘Yes, this again. We would’ve had something to fall back on.’

  His head sinks into his shoulders, tells me it wouldn’t’ve made any difference. ‘And we’d have a mortgage,’ he says. ‘At our age.’

  ‘It was a good business that had found its feet,’ I shout. ‘We had some really loyal customers. Everyone needs shoes. Not everyone wants a pond.’

  ‘And what it is now, Ginny? Remind me. What is it now?’ He always does this. He can’t help himself. Salesmen love one-upmanship. It’s the mallet of their trade. ‘That’s where your loyalty would’ve got you,’ he says. ‘Bankrupt.’

  I start to laugh. ‘Your loyalty has got you bankrupt,’ I shout a bit louder. ‘I needed a thirty-grand down payment to secure that loan. Instead, you gave that money back to Louis.’

  ‘Oh, I see.’ He slumps down into the armchair. ‘You moved in because you thought I had money to give to you.’