Pondweed Page 9

  ‘Don’t you dare twist this! That was the circumstances when we met.’ And I reel it all off again as I strut up and down – if not to reassure him, to reassure me – because to catch a fish you need to start with a fish and, a month before we’d met, the Parkinson’s had got so ugly that Caro – for whom I’d worked for almost twenty years – could no longer bend down to tie a bow. I went to the bank. They called me an unsuitable candidate. I had no collateral and no credit rating. I’d pointed out that I’d always lived well within my means, however meagre; always had a job, never not worked, and paid in my stamp and that’s why I couldn’t be found on any blacklist.

  ‘I’ve never had a mortgage, credit card, or passport,’ I’d announced proudly. ‘Never went to university. Never taken out a loan. Neither lender nor borrower be.’

  The bank said that without evidence of previous repayment schedules they had nothing to advise me on my suitability and sustainability. I was also knocking on the door of sixty-seven and dealing with the fallout of Mia’s divorce. I called her from a phone box on the street and said, ‘My Daughter’s Shoes has a nice ring to it. What do you think? New start for us both.’

  She said, ‘I’m a nurse, Mother, and money is not why I do it.’

  So, Caro’s sister-in-law bought it, and the last time we walked past it was a charity shop.

  ‘If she could have given it to me, she would’ve done,’ I finish, thinking of all those women’s voices telling me their stories as they tried on new shoes – all those stories that weren’t mine to own but I did anyway when so much had never happened to me. ‘It was a solid little business. It knew what it was. Why couldn’t you see that?’

  He says, ‘I’m not the enemy here, Ginny. And I’m not your husband either.’

  I grab the caravan key from the fruit bowl and flounce out of the room.

  I SPEND SOME TIME feeling the cold metal panels of the caravan’s exterior with the flat palms of my hands to simmer down, occasionally stopping to rub over the nuts and bolts that hold it all together, as if feeling for its bones. I did the same thing when I first went inside Selwyn’s house under the Queensway, hoping that my fingerprints would spell something out that would assure me I’d come home. Because it was an exact replica of his house in Joiners Square. In measurement. In smell. In its lack. Only breadcrumbs on the breadboard gave away that someone lived there. And a pair of trousers slung over the radiator to dry. What I could smell most was moss. And the tomato plants on the living room windowsill. In the dining room, the same table and four chairs in the darkest wood, and his mother’s lace tablecloth browning across the top. I’d told him I remembered the tablecloth and the dining chairs. And some of the porcelain knick-knacks too. He’d put his arms around my waist from behind and asked if I remembered him enough to forgive the old skin. And that perhaps I’d like to redecorate.

  I go inside the caravan.

  The main thing about living under the Queensway flyover is that it reminds you every day of where you are not going.

  Louis had bought the caravan to take on the road. Expand the business, he said. Think global. Exhibitions. Festivals. Rudyard Lake. School fetes. Laybys. He’d park it anywhere he could to flog a pond pump.

  And then the phone ringing, late at night. The jangle of car keys. Selwyn putting on his coat. Louis had got the caravan wedged against a wall; he’d misjudged a corner; drank that second bottle of wine; been clamped in a layby that forbade overnights. He needs me to tow it back to the yard, Selwyn would say. I said I’d go and get him.

  I should answer when Selwyn tells me things, but when he tells me things like this, I have nothing I want to say. At least, I’ve remembered that Selwyn had had a tow bar fitted to his car all along.

  I park up on one of the screwed-down leather bar stools and see that each of the four optics are full. Smirnoff. Plymouth Gin. Jim Beam. Courvoisier. A fridge, to the underside of the bar is fully stocked with mixers and six bottles of white wine. On the shelf at the back, a basket of complimentary salted nuts. A stainless-steel sink as big as a man’s hand. It’s a burnished mahogany bar, bespoke and expensive. The two settee beds have been reupholstered with an emerald-green leather to resemble Chesterfields, and are punctured with gold studs. Two single mattresses live under these beds, which come together with a single zip. There’s a smell that reminds me of horse trailers. Behind me is the restroom with a porcelain toilet bowl with wooden seat. A washbasin – its pedestal a rectangular fish tank full of tropical rainbowfish, which still swim.

  Sometimes, when I watch the traffic up on the Queensway flyover, I think of all those people who’d missed their turn and had to go all the way down the dual carriageway to go all the way around the roundabout to come back the way they came. I liked to pass the time imagining the arguments they were having.

  The constant thrum of traffic on the flyover can sound just like the sea.

  I kneel down on the caravan floor aside of the washbasin and count how many tropical rainbowfish swim in the pedestal tank underneath. Selwyn once told me that they were worth a hundred pounds each. I’d said, ‘It’s so cruel. Can they even properly breathe in there?’

  Sometimes there are accidents on the Queensway flyover. Someone driving too fast. Someone cutting up another. The gleam of the sun. A wet road. Too many idiots driving their cars like tanks. Some days, I hold my heart in my mouth until I hear Selwyn’s car park up outside the house. But when I come to put my heart back where it should be, it no longer fits.

  I turn around to open the four floor-to-ceiling built-in cupboards in the caravan and find meticulous packing and starched shirts on coat-hangers. I open another door and wish I hadn’t. Open another, close that too. I return to my bar stool and stare at the cupboard doors as if they’re about to ignite.

  Selwyn has stolen a lot.

  He is suddenly behind me. I can smell him. Selwyn does not smell like anyone else. I tell him things like this when we stand aside of each other at the bathroom sink brushing our teeth. You have this smell, I will say. Something mausoleum. He spits, I spit. He uses mouthwash. Spits that out too. I say other things, like, We could do a drinks thing, you know. With the neighbours. Like Val and Alan. So they don’t think anything untoward. She still thinks I’m your cleaner. He will say, Ginny. Let tomorrow be tomorrow and us get used to us. He swills out the sink then, with a mixture of hot and cold water, like it’s his job to do that. Like I don’t do it right.

  Now, he says, ‘I give you any more time in this caravan without me and you will leave me for sure.’ He’s wearing his fishing garb, his waders, his wellies, and I think what I always think – where have your hands just been?

  ‘I guess you needed to do what you needed to do,’ I say, pointing at the open cupboard doors. ‘Now I need to do something else.’

  ‘I don’t regret it,’ he murmurs. ‘But don’t leave me because of this when I’m owed.’

  I gesture wildly at all the stolen pond equipment in front of me then tell him that I want to go home. ‘But it’s not even my home, is it? Not my trip, not my home. Everything is yours.’

  ‘Then we will keep on going until we find what is ours,’ he says, resting his hand on my shoulder.

  ‘But you’re a thief,’ I carry on muttering, as if my voice has been anaesthetised. ‘And a liar.’

  ‘Was it you?’ he suddenly asks.

  ‘Was what me?’

  ‘Who he was doing it with. Doing it for. Was it you?’

  I glare at him.

  He glares at me.

  We glare.

  Like we have never glared before.

  ‘How dare you!’

  ‘Was it you?’ he asks again. ‘Because there was someone, Ginny. There was someone else he was doing it all for.’

  And he’s in my face and I can smell how much this matters to him. Because it is me, it is always me, and here I am again, being me.

  ‘No,’ I say, flatly. ‘It was not me.’

  WE SIT ON THE bar stools side by sid
e, our thighs bristling with static. Selwyn is showing me some spreadsheets. He has plenty of them. His mouth keeps moving, like he’s blowing bubbles. There are words, but I’m not hearing them. He’s telling me all he has worked out and has been working out. This multiplied by this. This divided by that. What he knew. What he didn’t. Everything is top-drawer in pond equipment. Stately homes, Hodnet Hall Gardens. A prototype pond filter from Trentham Gardens.

  ‘And a buyer,’ he ends, ‘on Anglesey.’

  ‘I see,’ I say.

  ‘Do you?’ and he assures me again that Rachael was a bolt out of the blue and he’s not going to turn his nose up at three hundred quid, cash in hand, for what he can do with his eyes closed.

  ‘This much preparation,’ I say. ‘You’ve known all along, haven’t you?’

  He nods.

  ‘And the caravan. Louis gave it to you, didn’t he?’

  He twists his lips. Cocks his head to one side. ‘He didn’t stand in my way,’ he says.

  I sigh. Then sigh again because the first one wasn’t enough.

  He holds up his hands, and says, ‘I have nothing more to declare.’

  I find myself wishing he had.

  ‘Don’t leave me,’ he says again. ‘You’re all I have left.’

  He reaches for my hand and I let him steal it too. Then I ask for the fish in the washbasin pedestal. What is he going to do with them? He tells me he doesn’t know yet – their value goes up and down – but the Candy Basslet should, if he cares for it well enough, go for over a grand to the right collector.

  ‘The Candy what?’

  ‘Come see.’

  He leads me into the toilet and we both crouch down in the tiny space. Selwyn presses his nose against the tank and points to what he calls the holy grail of marine aquarium fish. ‘I have the strangest feeling that it might be pregnant too,’ he says of what looks like a goldfish with a few sketched purple stripes from back to belly. ‘We’d double our money then.’ I try to see what he sees as he explains something about dorsal to anal fin. I burst out laughing. He says, ‘It’s not funny, Ginny. I’m being serious. That fish is our capital.’

  I stand up before my knees lock. ‘I’ve got to hand it to you, Selwyn.’

  ‘Except they’re not fully responding to the food I’m giving them,’ he carries on, pricking the bubble. ‘I’m wondering if they’ve got used to something else. A different kind of flake.’ He peers into the tank again. ‘Do you see? Where the water clouds in clumps? That’s congealed food. They’re not even fighting for it.’ He shakes his head as he starts to get up. ‘I’ll have to see Judd,’ he tells me. ‘He’ll know what to do.’

  ‘Who?’

  His smile is the size of a wheelbarrow, and he even looks tearful, but I have no skills when it comes to tearful men. So, I make a quip about our fish making us chips, and he cups my face and stares into my eyes for so long my eyes start watering too.

  We make our way back to the Piggery for our last night, holding hands. We don’t talk. Just look straight ahead. Like we know where we are going, and me, following him.

  The Sixth Day and the Sixth Night

  ‘Although some flagellates have clear affinities with the animal kingdom when they feed upon one another, it is worth noting that if too submerged in the pond, and kept in the dark, they will not survive.’

  ~ The Great Necessity of Ponds

  by Selwyn Robby

  I SELLOTAPE RAFFLE TICKETS to tins and cans, fish hooks, and bottles of cheap plonk for the Spring Fayre’s tombola. Rachael, who is never half a foot away from Selwyn, shows him the glossy leaflet she’s had produced, as if The Great Necessity of Ponds is about to be launched as a global bestseller. I notice that she has started wearing lipstick and her skirts are rising above her knees. She catches an earring on his jumper and there’s a kerfuffle between them. I peer over their joined shoulders to look at the photographs, mostly of Selwyn standing looking overcast and across Hodnet Hall Gardens’ many pools deep in thought. Here, Selwyn stands aside of the Lord convincing him to handover the best part of a grand for a Pond Jet Floating Fountain with twenty metres of waterproof cabling. Here, Selwyn wistfully lifts the weeping willow from his eyes to show the Lord what a gleaming pool that two-hundred-and-fifty-pound filter has produced. I don’t know when these photographs were taken, or why he looks so handsome all of a sudden. But he does.

  Rachael is intending to sell these leaflets at five pounds a pop, and is wondering what royalties he would like. Selwyn gushes. It’s been his pleasure, and for some reason this propels Rachael into talking about the swans. She tells Selwyn – not me, though I am here too – that there used to be a pair in the grounds, and they had one clutch of cygnets, five if she remembers right. But then came the terrible freeze of 2011 and the hen didn’t make it. They have never found her body. And because the cob has never found her body, he won’t stop looking for her until the day he dies.

  ‘We tried to introduce a new mate, but he’d already found his,’ Rachael says, tearfully. ‘So, he carries on looking for her. And that’s all he will do for the rest of his life.’

  Selwyn sniffs as if this is the saddest story he has ever heard. ‘Astonishing,’ he says, shaking his head. ‘We certainly do live in their world.’ Then he looks at me as if the story is about us.

  I rip some Sellotape off with my teeth and pull some skin off my top lip. I wince. There is blood. But no one notices. I realise I am a different species entirely. So, I look down at Rachael’s shoes, which today are neat silver plimsolls with black leather bows and already scuffed around the toes. She must’ve seen me looking because she asks, ‘Why are you always looking at my shoes?’

  ‘I used to work in a shoe shop that should’ve been mine,’ I tell her. ‘It was a little goldmine, truth be told, so I can’t quite quit the habit of seeing a woman from her feet up.’

  Selwyn pretends he hasn’t heard us squabbling and instead starts up a conversation about cows. Something he once read to do with a couple of bulls who slept with their heads resting on each other’s shoulders.

  ‘We cannot not be a pair,’ Rachael tells him earnestly, her fingertips briefly brushing his sleeve. ‘And nature’s daughter at best.’

  ‘Except one ends up in the abattoir,’ I suggest, with a beaming smile that neither of them reciprocates. ‘Daughter of a celibate butcher,’ I specifically tell Rachael, tapping my nose. ‘So, I know a lot about hard faced cows.’ Then I lick the blood from my lip and ask if anyone would like a cup of tea.

  Except while I stare at the kettle waiting for it to boil, Rachael comes to stand aside of me and asks me outright if I want him.

  ‘It’s just that you don’t wear the look of being the luckiest woman in the world,’ she says. ‘And you are. Selwyn Robby is one of nature’s saints.’

  THERE ARE STALLS AND people grinning as if they’re having the time of their lives. A lot of pushchairs. Cake. It’s one pound for this, and you get three goes on that, and Selwyn’s talk on The Great Necessity of Ponds is on at three o’clock. I watch a child take a mallet to a coconut rat coming down a drainpipe. An ice-cream van has a long queue. Rachael had already set out the room with rows of hardbacked plastic chairs, and has been dusting some, wiping down others with a damp cloth. Occasionally, I take one away claiming to even things up. Selwyn is to stand at the front to give his talk, behind a lectern that he and Rachael carried in together, and I notice he is wearing cufflinks. Brassy-looking and probably hooking through the buttonholes with fish bones. He’s fiddling with them as his mouth tots up the forty empty seats when it’s only ten past two. I consider taking away another couple of chairs to make him feel better. Perhaps less watched.

  I have never seen him do anything like this. I’m not even sure I want to see him do this.

  ‘You mustn’t be nervous,’ Rachael suddenly says, striding towards him. ‘This is your second nature.’ She has a hand on his shoulder as he looks at her sheepishly. ‘I absolutely assure you,’ she carries on. �
��Everyone is coming because they’re interested in what you have to say.’

  I should be saying this to him.

  ‘Just think of them in water,’ she says. ‘Don’t look at them. Look into them. That way, they will come to the surface to investigate you.’

  Why don’t I have words to say like that? It makes me want to slap off her smile with a fish slice. Her lips are so red they look full of blood. Nourished. She is someone who nourishes.

  ‘Thank you,’ he says. ‘I needed that.’

  She moves away and there’s a space for me. I tap him on the shoulder and go to say something encouraging, but he tells me right away that I don’t have to be here if I don’t want to be. I could go do things, perhaps get myself something nice. He has seen a stall selling shawls.

  ‘Oh,’ I say. ‘Would you prefer it if I wasn’t here?’

  He fiddles with his tie and does that thing he does with his nostrils and sniffs. Then he reaches into his wallet and hands me a twenty-pound note.

  I walk as far from the fayre as I can, until I’m not sure what is bustle and what is birdsong.

  THERE IS A POND. THERE is always a pond. When there is not a pond, Selwyn fashions one. Then he will bore me silly with the burgeoning ecosystem of plankton in a rainwater butt. Ginny, he’ll say. Come see. It’s fascinating. Just look at the way it’s flagellating. To show willing, I’ll put on my glasses in the hope of witnessing some gnat larvae whipping another with its lashing hairs, but no. It’s just a pool of muddy dishwater on the manhole and Selwyn’s dirty finger poking about. Then he’ll suck on his finger and tell me, Moss. Already. Astonishing, and stir up whirlpools in the puddle. Showing me his world within the walls of our backyard in his sensible shoes. I’ll say to him, Why didn’t you live somewhere with a garden? Where you could have had your own pond. He looks at me as if the idea has never crossed his mind. The house is council, he says. Was council, and now there’s a landlord I’ve never met. You’ve earnt money, Selwyn. You could’ve owned your own place. Dug out your own pond.