Seahorses Are Real

by Zillah Bethell

  It kills me too, David said to himself, clinging on to her as if he might hold her up with his own arms, seeing you like this, dying away a little more each day, no matter what I do. But aloud he said: ‘You don’t know that,’ lightly, gently, because he knew she knew or at least thought she did; but he wanted to hold out a little piece of hope for her to latch on to if she would; and surprisingly, tentatively at first, hands out and palms towards the ceiling in an almost prayer-like gesture, she did.

  ‘We-ell. I suppose I might be alright, one day. It’s not impossible.’

  ‘Course you will,’ he leapt in, sensing his advantage. ‘You’ll be fine, one day, see if I’m not right.’

  ‘I’ll always get depressed though.’

  ‘Ye-es, you’ll always have that tendency, but you’ll deal with it better, that’s the thing. It won’t happen so often and you’ll have better coping mechanisms.’

  ‘Maybe I’ll have children,’ she cried then, almost wildly, hands clutching the sheet. ‘Live by the sea?’

  He kissed her warmly. ‘Course we will. Think of some names,’ he added, knowing how much she liked thinking of names.

  ‘John,’ without hesitating. ‘John’s a good, strong, masculine name.’

  ‘I’m rather keen on Neville myself. Neville’s got a good sort of ring to it.’

  ‘Neville!’ she spluttered.

  ‘And Petunia. Petunia’s a good name…’ but he had lost her again to the stillness – that strange stillness that came over her when she was leaving him – and the faraway look in her eyes. ‘Petunia,’ he repeated, nudging her.

  She gave a bitter little laugh. ‘Who am I trying to kid? I can’t even look in the mirror.’ And she added, as if suddenly remembering, though he knew she’d simply been resisting the temptation to ask: ‘How’s my cheek?’ and thrust her face, tongue stuck out to see if it hurt, towards him.

  ‘It’s fine,’ he assured her. ‘Perfectly fine.’

  ‘You can’t see in this dark,’ she reproached him; and he thought for one horrible moment she was going to take him round to the landing light where he stood, often for minutes on end, squinting, staring, straining his eyes to see some imaginary or minuscule growth or blemish that had suddenly come up on the side of her cheek. (Was it like that yesterday? Is it worse than that thing I had in Birmingham? Will it go?) ‘I’ve got magic eyes remember,’ he smiled.

  ‘Will it go?’ she insisted.

  ‘Course it’ll go. It’s saying ‘Au revoir la monde’ this very moment!’ He waved his hand in a comical gesture above the sheet.

  ‘La monde.’ she half laughed. ‘You sure?’

  ‘Hundred per cent.’

  ‘Positive?’

  ‘Posidrive. Your Uncle Dave’s got magic eyes remember.’

  ‘I remember,’ she sighed; and he, trying to steer the impatience out of his voice (for fear, at this time of night, of the endless and inevitable recriminations and accusations on her part, cajolings and reassurances on his if he didn’t), said quite firmly, ‘Honestly, it’s fine,’ but some nuance must have escaped or betrayed him, at least in her imagination, for she turned quite suddenly and violently away from him towards the wall, childishly dragging the blanket along with her.

  He lay there, partially uncovered, gazing a little abstractedly at the stars Marly had pasted to the ceiling and arguing the toss whether to turn round and comfort her. It flickered through his head that he had GCSE coursework to mark in the morning, and he thought for the first time how oddly the stars were arranged: great clusters then nothing, great clusters then nothing and he began systematically to straighten them out in his mind’s eye, each and every one, until they lay more evenly spread. She was making little mewing noises now, strange huffs and snorts that meant (at least he always thought they meant) he should turn round and comfort her; but he lay quite still, cold and gazing at the stars. How stupid that little one looks, he thought angrily, alone and peeping over the wall like that. No spatial awareness, she’s got no spatial awareness at all; and he thought, at that moment, how close he came to hating her sometimes with her proud little head turned away and her little legs thrashing to keep herself warm. (Cold hands, warm heart, he’d said to her once, but it wasn’t true. She was vicious and pitiless as ice inside too, a splintered, fractured chip off an old, hard, glinting and very dangerous glacier.) But he knew, at the same time, that this feeling close to hatred was simply the obverse of his love for her, the same coin, the same feeling. It never went, it never went, stubborn as mud that love never left him, that feeling. It would go on, he thought now, to eternity, until his bones were dry; and it boomed suddenly in his head, reverberating like the acoustics in an empty room, that he loved her, that she was suffering and, that being all that mattered, he turned, enfolded her in his arms and said fiercely in a challenge to the dark and the doubts that surrounded them: ‘I love you Marly. I love you terribly. I always have and I always will.’

  And she, hearing the echoes in his mind, spun round almost as violently as she’d turned away from him and nestled her head to his chest, her voice coming up strangely muffled, as muffled as his had been echoing: ‘How much?’

  He pondered a while, drawing inspiration from the ceiling. ‘See the distance from the earth to every single star in the galaxy?’

  ‘Yeah?’

  ‘Multiply that by infinity and you’ve got it!’

  ‘That’s not much!’

  ‘Why I oughta just…’

  ‘Will it be alright?’ she interrupted him eagerly.

  He cradled her gently in his arms, seeing her now soft, shy and fleeting as a robin or a drop of rain. ‘It’ll be perfect,’ he smiled.

  ‘Tell me how it’ll be,’ she pleaded, ‘in our cottage by the sea.’

  He stroked her soft-as-featherdown hair and, seeing his way clear again to helping her, said: ‘It’ll be like this….’

  Four

  ‘You’ve got your own little shop,’ he began in his Jackanory storytelling voice, ‘on the seafront.’

  ‘I’ve never had a shop before,’ she interrupted him a little anxiously.

  ‘Well, you have now. Picture it. You can hear the seagulls croaking away there you can and you’ve got a little shop on the harbour front with a green door and those little sort of Victorian windows coming round; and all the kiddies come up and press their chocolate-smudged lips to the window, looking in, peering in through the frosted panes.’

  Marly giggled. ‘Thinking of yourself now, ain’t you: chocolate-smudged lips!’

  ‘I am thinking of myself, yeah. Thank you very much, yes! Anyway, there they are and they’re smeary and they say: “Mummy, mummy, what’s that shop over there; it’s ever so pretty.” Like that, see.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘And then the parents come over and they’re bedazzled – they’re bedazzled by the little shop, they are. They look in the window and their breath is taken away.’ David made a noise like a cross between a snort and a sigh – ‘like the wind taking their breath away’ – and Marly smiled in the darkness. ‘They go in, you see, and all your shelves are up, you know, with all your... wondrous things.’

  ‘What wondrous things are they then?’

  ‘Oh, pebbles and shells you’ve collected and decorated in your...’ he looked up at the stars, ‘uniquely artistic way. It’s a lovely painted room,’ he added quickly, ‘nice big room with a wooden floor.’

  ‘Oh, I likes a wooden floor,’ Marly playfully entered in.

  ‘As you walk across the floor it creaks in that nice way, that sort of reassuring way of creaking.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘They come in, they do, and they look at the array of your wondrous things and they say: ‘Ooh, this is just right for Uncle George this... that’ll do nicely for Aunty Beryl… your mother would like this, John!’ And they scoop things up and rush to the counter and pretty soon word’s getting around, you see, spreading like wildfire… and all the people from all over the country, from
John O’Groats to Newcastle to Land’s End to the Isle of Wight… they’ll all be coming over they will, to see your little shop. They have to bus ’em in they do, there’s so many,’ he added and she laughed delightedly. ‘There’s like a special bus service to get ’em in, and they all have to queue up outside. You’ll be outside saying: “Single file please, single file please. There there, don’t push now... plenty for everyone!” See that? And all the shops down the street, the little people who run them, they’ll be sticking their heads out the window saying: “What’s going on here?” They’ll say: “That’s a very big queue for a little shop, that!”

  ‘There’s loads of ’em,’ he went on, blowing his nose on a little piece of lavatory paper, ‘hundreds of ’em, different people from all over the world.’

  ‘All over the world now is it?’

  ‘Course it is... from Buenos Aires… Philadelphia… and, you know, you got magnates, oil magnates from Dallas coming in saying, “Gee, what a cute little thing.” And you’ve got a little nun in there, a little Irish nun saying, “Oh Mary, me lord Jesus, Bejesus! Oh, look at them, they’re so beautiful. My word, I’m torn, torn I am!”’ And then there’s another little Irish bloke,’ he went on, raising his voice above Marly’s laughter but deepen­ing the accent, ‘who says: “Don’t you worry you little in the veil fella…’’’

  ‘In the veil fella!’

  ‘‘‘Don’t you worry you little in the veil fella. We’ll have a bit of a pact, you know, a bit of a pact if that’s not the wrong sort of word to use with a nun. I won’t say anything about er Sister Mary who’s in the family way as we all know, we all know that. Now, come on, don’t deny it.’’’ David tapped the side of his nose. ‘‘‘I’ve got a little bit of a flutter on Run like the Wind in the Kempton Park at 3.45 this afternoon… fol diddly fay...’’’

  ‘Fol diddly fay!!’

  ‘Anyway, there’s the Prince of Persia or someone behind,’ David went on, getting a husky Arab voice ready, ‘and he says: “Ah, that is my horse. I own that horse. It is mine. It will win.” See that? They’re all in the queue waiting, all waiting to get their trinkets off you see. There’s even men from the BBC,’ he added, with a flash of inspiration.

  ‘The BBC?’ Marly exclaimed.

  ‘They come down they do, the men from the BBC, come in their big van. They pull up on the front, they do. There’s Alan Titchmarsh or someone coming out, you know, he’s presenting it, he’s putting his tie on; and they come and they shake your hand and they say: “Look, we’d like to make a documentary about you, we’ve never heard of such a phenomenon. Everyone’ll be very interested in this, this is gonna be a top programme this, you know, we’re gonna have viewers from all over the world tuning in just to see how you get on with selling your little things here.’’ He paused, looking at Marly, then added in a softer tone, ‘So he has a little interview with you see.’

  ‘Does he?’

  ‘Oh yes, he has a little interview with you...’

  Marly lay still, waiting for a while, before asking almost impatiently, ‘What’s he say then?’

  ‘He says,’ David began, holding up a pretend microphone, ‘‘‘Well, Marly, how long have you been working in this er little shop then?’’’ He paused before pushing the microphone towards her. ‘What will you say?’

  ‘Oh, just a year now,’ Marly muttered reluctantly.

  ‘‘‘Just a year is it? Just a year? And in that year I suppose you’ve seen business boom?’’’

  ‘Oh, I ain’t done so bad, no.’

  ‘‘‘Ain’t done so bad? Well, the queues in the street… I mean, we had trouble as soon as we hit the M25. We’ve just been in traffic since the M25, you know, two hundred miles away. It’s just, I’d hardly say it was, you know, not doin’ so bad. I’d say it was doing very well.’’’

  ‘Yeah, I s’pose. Ain’t done so bad.’

  ‘‘‘Well, you’re doing marvellous, marvellous ain’t you?’’’

  ‘Yeah,’ reluctantly.

  ‘‘‘Yeah?’’’

  ‘Yeah, not so bad.’

  ‘‘‘You must be raking it in.’’’

  ‘We-ell.’

  ‘‘‘You must be…’’’

  ‘Keeps the wolf from the door.’

  ‘‘‘Keeps the wolf from the door? I should say! Keeps the wolf from the door with all that lolly.’’’

  ‘Yeah...’ then suddenly: ‘It’s better than when I was living in Dartford.’

  ‘‘‘Oh right. I see.’’’ David eyed her warily.

  ‘Got a bit more money than I had then.’

  ‘‘‘Got a bit more money, yes. Very nice. Yes and…’’’

  ‘Had a terrible time of it there I did.’

  ‘‘‘You had a terrible time? Why? What happened? What happened then?’’’ David, alias Alan Titchmarsh, asked a little wearily.

  ‘Well, I was very unhappy. I was very ill. I’ve been very ill I have.’

  ‘‘‘But you’re not now though are you,’’’ very firmly. ‘‘‘You’re now…’’’

  ‘No.’

  ‘‘‘No, you are fully recovered, fully recovered you are now,’’’ hurriedly, ‘‘‘and rolling in it as I can see. Well, I’ll shake your hand there Marly. This is Alan Titchmarsh reporting from…’’’

  ‘Thank you for coming down.’

  ‘‘‘My pleasure Marly…’’’

  ‘Yeah,’ triumphantly.

  ‘‘‘…to see such a phenomenon… and, I tell you what, can I have some of those little trinkets over there please?’’’

  ‘Oh yes.’

  ‘‘‘Just the little blue ones. Lovely thanks.’’’

  Marly put her palm out. ‘These are made out of... of…’ with inspiration, ‘scallop shells.’

  David took the imaginary object. ‘‘‘Scallop shells? That’s very inventive, I must say. Very inventive. Genius. Yes.’’’

  Marly added, almost animatedly, ‘Would you like a bit of pasty I’m cooking up in the back kitchen?’

  ‘‘‘Well, I’d like a bit of pasty thank you very much, yes. Have you got brown sauce?’’’

  ‘Yes I…’ Marly collapsed into a giggle.

  ‘‘‘Are you sure it’s alright to leave your boyfriend dealing with all these customers here? He seems very busy… look at his little arms going up and down like…’’

  ‘He’ll manage.’

  ‘‘‘...flashing blades, they are.’’’

  ‘He’ll manage,’ Marly laughed again.

  David paused a moment and kissed the top of her head. ‘So he makes a little programme see?’

  ‘Does he?’ she asked, her eyes very round.

  ‘A little programme about you.’

  ‘Oh, that’s marvellous that is.’

  ‘And…’

  She rushed in. ‘I bet everyone sees it. I bet the Queen sees it!’

  ‘Oh, the Queen sees it. She says: “Philip, Philip, come in here. Look at this.” And she gets down the shop see. And you’ll have sales, you know, you’ll have a proper little shop.’

  ‘I bet, I bet. Will I go to lots of parties and that?’

  ‘You will probably.’

  ‘Will people want to see me at the parties and that?’

  ‘Well, like I said, you know, you’ll have your princes coming down… they’ll probably take you to royal balls and galas. They’ll say: ‘It’s only for very special people this.’ And you’ll stand in the great ballrooms next to the enormous paintings which are fifty foot tall and thirty foot wide... and the great draperies, the great drapes hanging down the walls, great silken drapes worth a million pounds each one they are, see. And the great chandeliers, you know, that sparkle like all the stars shoved into one spot. See that?’

  ‘Yeah,’ Marly replied, her eyes glistening in the dark.

  ‘You’ll dance with princes and dukes and earls. And even the Queen will break tradition just to have a quick scoot around the floor with you!’ He smiled tenderly. ‘You l
ikes that don’t you?’

  ‘Oh, it’s nice.’

  ‘That’s right. And, you know, you’ll have your own little cat and dog.’

  ‘Will I?’

  ‘Oh yeah, you’ll have little Snowdrop.’

  ‘Aaah!’

  ‘Who’ll get fed bits of... orange from the man from Delmonte, cos he’s in the queue with his little hat on. And his white suit!’

  ‘Nice that.’

  ‘And er...Tipperary, the little cat, who sits in the window of the shop on his purple and gold cushion.’

  ‘That’s lovely that.’

  ‘Keeping an eye out on the old fishmonger down on the front there, flapping his fish about.’

  ‘What’s the front like then?’ Marly asked curiously, propping herself up on her elbow.

  David thought for a moment with his eyes closed. ‘Well, you’re on the harbour where you can see all the little white sails cos all these businessmen, they come in their boats, you know, and hop off to get your trinkets. There are lots of little shops on the front there, too, but none of them are doing half as blinking good as yours! See that?’

  ‘I likes that.’

  ‘That’s right. I know you like it.’

  ‘Good, that is.’

  ‘Well, it’s the truth. It’s the truth see. And they get a bit jealous… and one or two of them, they have to kind of shut up shop and move somewhere else.’

  ‘They do?’

  ‘Cos they can’t cope with all the customers queuing up, you know, they just sort of stand past the windows, they don’t go in their shops.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Just queuing up past the windows, they have to push past them in the mornings, they do.’

  ‘Oh dear,’ gleefully, ‘that’s terrible.’

  ‘That’s right. But, you know, what you do is, on the quieter days, you have a bit of lunch or whatever and you shut up shop and take a walk down to the little front and watch the waves sort of lapping in gently.’

  ‘Oh, that’s nice that.’

  ‘And you look around at all the people there. There’s a woman reading her Jackie Collins novel, engrossed, great big hat on her head, great big sunglasses, you know, you can’t see her face. She might not have a face; it’s just buried in her Jackie Collins novel. And, er, there’s a couple in the water...’