Seahorses Are Real

by Zillah Bethell

  ‘Alright,’ she replied a little reluctantly. ‘I’m thinking of moving.’

  ‘Oh?’ He sounded surprised. ‘When?’

  ‘After Christmas. Somewhere by the sea.’ And she added inanely into the lengthening silence, as if it might make a difference: ‘I love the sea. I was born by the sea.’

  ‘Have you discussed it with David?’

  ‘Oh yes. He knows I love the sea. He’s always known I wanted to move.’

  ‘Only, if you don’t discuss it properly,’ Terry went on mildly, ‘it could cause devastation.’

  Marly smiled at the word. ‘Oh, he doesn’t like the idea of course, but he’ll go along with it for my sake. He’s very supportive. He just wants me to be well.’ The implication being, of course, that she would be well far away from the noise and traffic, fumes and pollution. I even had a dream, she wanted to say, where I was skiing down the slopes at Val d’Isère, in a bikini made out of sugar and exhaust, my hair different every time – though she’d never been skiing in her life before.

  ‘Well, just so long as you talk it through together.’

  ‘Oh yes.’ Marly dismissed it as a given.

  ‘I nearly went to New Zealand,’ he confided suddenly, the way he did sometimes, ‘but I got married and moved to Orpington….’ He shrugged his shoulders. ‘Sometimes I think I’d like to retire to the country but my wife says it’s a bad idea, we have our friends here, our work. What’s the point? Seems a shame, after building something up for twenty years, to let it all go and start again somewhere else.

  ‘Yes,’ Marly nodded, a little uninterested, thinking he was an idiot to stay twenty years in a place like this and thinking, too, that June, his wife, was evidently a meddler, too busy with her candyfloss and wok.

  ‘How about having a holiday by the sea?’ he suggested then. ‘It’s not so drastic.’

  ‘Well, yes, I could do that,’ Marly answered politely. ‘I’ll have to see….’

  ‘Think of it as being, say, a minister in a place like Tower Hamlets for ten years, then suddenly getting a job as Archbishop of Canterbury. Adapt to a place, make the best of it... anything can happen.’ He opened his arms wide as if to encompass that anything.

  ‘Oh yes I see, that’s a nice way of looking at it,’ Marly smiled, though she sensed his disapproval and was piqued. Wasn’t she meant to wrench destiny her way for a change? Hadn’t she lived long enough in squalor and green mould? Wasn’t she meant to follow her dreams? Simple ones at that: to live in a house by the sea, grow turnips and rhubarb, radishes and sweet peas; walk through sunflowers and sea mists, green lanes and bluebell woods; swim in the rain before breakfast, maybe keep a pet cow... I’d call her Moon, she told herself now, my very own pet moon; then she stopped as an image of her own small, battered, insignificant self came back to her and she felt herself going down, ridiculously, like a lead balloon or a bad joke. ‘I just want to be well,’ she all but pleaded with him, ‘so I can do these things.’

  He nodded gently and leant forward with his hands on his knees. ‘How have you been?’ he asked again. ‘You seem a bit better to me.’

  Her mind turned against him. How could he pre-empt her like that? How could she say now that her life was bad, that she had no life, that the pills he gave her didn’t work, made her worse, made her feel like she had no future, made her want to tear herself up. And she sat there grinning at him, a gentle thing so full of rage, not telling him, never telling him about the sheet lightning that shot out of a clear blue sky in their cramped little rundown flat where the mice played hide and seek and the green mould grew to gigantic proportions, except in euphemisms of ‘I hurled a cup’, ‘I got a bit angry’, ‘I even stabbed the breadboard’. (My spider-killer, she called him. An ironic name as it turned out: he kept her under the floorboards wrapped up in a web of his own. Can you play Alice where art thou? Ave Maria, a Clementi sonatina?)

  ‘Not so bad,’ she sighed at last, ‘though sometimes I feel like it’s a desert behind and a desert in front,’ and she saw the corners of his mouth lift a little as he wrote something down and thought that it probably did sound funny, in an objective way, to a man who’d lost his heart near Wormwood Scrubs.

  He put his pen down. ‘You’ve been going like this,’ he explained, waving his arms about like a windmill or a drunken bird, ‘and we need to get you like this.’ They were straight out then like an aeroplane.

  Riding bareback into the waves, she thought, riding bareback into the waves. Seahorses were real in my day, seahorses were real… (They do a good snail soup at the Champs Elysées. Half price on Fridays.) and her head drooped a little as she answered his questions on diarrhoea and flatulence, blood, pus and guts. Any blood? No, nothing: it raced around her but never out of her. Any pus? Yes, lots of it: spinning out of her like cow’s milk. Any guts? No, none; they’d left her along with the plane ticket out of here bareback into the waves. She sat with her elbows resting on the edge of the old piano, stubborn and shy (as the little boy she’d seen in the supermarket shouting fuck fuck fuck at the broccoli, his head jerking from side to side,) feeling humiliated, embarrassed, pried into, pried open.

  ‘You said last time,’ Terry went on, shuffling his notes like a fly shuffling its legs, ‘that you were suffering from irrational thoughts. Any more of that?’

  ‘Did I?’ cried Marly, surprised. So that was how he transcribed her thoughts. Irrational were they? Irrational my foot! Well, of course, she was a woman wasn’t she, they were bound to be; men, on the other hand, were deeply logical – David had taught her that – with their statistics, their percentages, their little Venn diagrams. Women were weathercocks, chameleons, what about daggers at dawn – how rational was that – for the hand of a fair lady? Men! Huh! The word was a joke. She spat on it, rolled it into a ball, then flicked it somewhere for someone to tread on.

  ‘Not so many. I still look at my cheek a lot – I feel most of the time like a piece of trash – and the kettle has to be switched off.’

  His mouth twitched again but his forehead frowned. He consulted a book for a moment in silence then jotted one or two things down while Marly stared blankly out of the bay window, feeling a bit like a goldfish. Then he got up, went over to the suitcase and tapped a few pills from a vial into a small brown envelope; she didn’t bother asking what they were any more, she just sat there accepting, taking her medicine, hoping, despite all, against hope that they would help. ‘These’ll make you feel bright and shiny,’ he told her, licking up the envelope.

  She gave him the money David gave her to give him.

  ‘Now remember,’ he admonished her, helping her on with her raincoat, ‘don’t make any rash decisions. Take a holiday!’ His arms waved airily like twigs in a dry wind. ‘Enjoy yourself! That plant of yours,’ he added, ‘is flowering again, after a barren patch it’s got some blooms.’

  Pushing her arm through the elasticated sleeve, she eyed him suspiciously, not trusting him an inch, thinking he was saying it to make her think she would be flowering again, blooming again after a barren spell. (To a Wild Rose, Romance sans Paroles. Flowers for a flower, he said; and his heart went like a piccolo.)

  ‘I am glad,’ she said with nervous animation, fingering the brown envelope in her pocket; and she made her way to the stained-glass porch, reminding the little girl (who was still reading Black Beauty) as she went, about the Black Stallion series, with a faintly ridiculous waggle of the head.

  Six

  It was cold outside; and a yellow wind blew hard from the factory, or was it Littlebrook D, Marly didn’t know exactly. All she knew was that the sharp east wind brought the smell of burnt toast along with it and now, ridiculously, the echoing sounds of ‘Yankee Doodle Dandy’ from an ice-cream van. It stopped a little short of macaroni. It always did. You never heard the whole thing; only snatches of ‘Greensleeves’, ‘Doodle Dandy’ and sometimes ‘Danny Boy’ – what a tiny repertoire they had, to be sure – as if the van had come to a halt in the fog and yellow wind a
nd the song had melted away into the ice creams. She thought about the girl with the little freckled nose and wondered if she played the recorder. That was probably an irrational thought. ‘Enjoy yourself’ she muttered, kicking a few leaves off the pavement and wanting to shout ‘Bloom’ at them. It was alright for him with his blueberry muffins, his peppermint tea, his bright red car and his very own pet star. Didn’t he realise she was on the verge of suicide? Didn’t he realise she could kill herself in a trice? It was no laughing matter, his mouth twitching away like that. Did he think she hadn’t seen him? She pulled her hood close and shuffled on down Miskin Road, past her landlady’s house – what a monstrous spectacle of extension and accumulation and they couldn’t even provide a decent Hoover – and peering up now and again through the half-hearted trees at the pale blue tower where David worked. She imagined him leaning out of his pale blue tower and waving at her; but of course he wasn’t. He was probably hidden away in the prep room off the maths department, surrounded by corrosives, combustibles, beef suet and magnesium. He sat there and phoned her sometimes when he was going to be late, making a little joke about something being inflammable then breaking off with a shout, then silence as if he’d gone up in flames. Absurd how he laughed at his own silly jokes. She was surrounded, it seemed, by laughing men. Bright and shiny indeed... she would ask him then if he could find the pickled baby, the pickled baby in a jar, there was always one in a prep room, at least there was in her day, locked away and under key in case it escaped and brought out now and then like a beautiful freak for kids to have a laugh at. ‘What the fuck is that?’ ‘That’s your twin brother that is, Jabba!’ ‘Is it alive, Miss?’ Mock horror, mock disgust, playing it up for laughs and you, somersaulting now for the crowds. Pickled egg, pickled prune, pickled ship in a bottle, marooned on an untidy bench amidst tripods and Bunsen burners, a row of sharks with bits in their teeth, playing jacks and saying ‘ace’. You were ace with your tiny hands and your overgrown head; there was obviously something quite wrong with your head. I wonder what you wanted to be: a dancer, a fireman, a film star; a business tycoon. You might have grown to be a kid who shouted fuck fuck fuck at the broccoli; you might have ended up just skeleton and teeth – or even, worse luck, behind a hedge with a shoe missing, your clothes ripped to shreds. Your soul must be very old, preserved in that little bottle, like Ivy ever bottling between a rock and a hard place, between jams, pickles and gooseberry fools. You must be older than Tiresias.

  ‘Bloom!’ she wanted to shout again at the leaves spreading before her like a patchwork quilt right the way down the street; what had happened to the leaf sweeper? Did he prong them with his fork then curl up in bed or was he extinct like the chimney sweep; and were they left to decay, those leaves, or fall down manholes – and she vaguely wondered if the queue would be very long in the job centre. It usually was, stretching away like the leaves to the big glass door where the guard sat, between naps, looking at his fingernails and counting his rings. He even had one on his thumb, a little to Marly’s disgust. What good was a security guard with a ring on his thumb and a little Saint Christopher round his neck – unless there were rivers to cross in the Department of Social Security. Bernie Mungo, unofficial pilgrim of the DSS. Bernie Mungo, counting his rings like lucky stars amidst petty gods, Samaritans, tax-collectors and Pharisees. There’d been a disturbance once in the review section and someone had shouted out ‘Get Bernie Mungo!’ though he was right there in front of them by the big glass door, looking at his fingernails and waiting to intervene. Sometimes he stroked his moustache or got up and walked around, looking at the jobs as if he didn’t have one. She’d heard him say, in a low soft murmuring voice, that he was saving to go to Jamaica; and she wondered if, when he counted his rings, he was reckoning on the rivers he had to cross before he got to those deep, glowing coral reefs, those frangipani trees; the talcum sand that burnt your toes and the warm and oily mangoes. What a name for a girl Frangipani would be. Frangipani Mungo: tall, dignified, shading her eyes across the wide, blue Sargasso sea. Did he think of her, on those cold grey days, when the petty little gods were shouting ‘Get Bernie Mungo’ at him?

  The man who’d caused a disturbance in the review section was a trained joiner, so he said. He’d been laid off after twenty-five years he said – ‘You wouldn’t treat a dog like that’ – and was suffering from psoriasis. They were offering him a job as salesperson in the burger bar on the High Street and he was saying that it was silly pay, that he was a trained joiner, that he’d got his apprenticeship at fourteen, that he was under the sunlamp most days and he wasn’t going to put on a hat and sell chips.

  The woman, whose hair bunched up at the back like a little mushroom, replied: ‘You will most emphatically be doing more than selling chips. Briefly, (as well as ‘most emphatically’ she kept saying ‘briefly’ the way people do to get you off guard before launching into an account of their grandmother’s boils) briefly, ‘salesperson’ covers a multitude of tasks: clearing tables, emptying bins, keeping the oven in good order, operating the milk-shaker, the cash register and customer relations. Flexible hours to suit applicant. Experience preferred but not essential as training will be given. Good career prospects for enthusiastic applicant. Applicant must have a neat and tidy appearance as job involves liaising with the public. Uniform provided.’

  ‘Oh good,’ said the man a little sarcastically. ‘Thanks very much. This is forcing me to go out thieving, this is.’

  The woman ignored him. ‘Taxi service provided after hours for female members of staff.’

  ‘Oh well, there we are then,’ said the man, getting up, and his fingers were shaking holding the application form. ‘I should be retiring now, I should be going round America in a camper van,’ he half laughed; and Marly had recognised that hopeless humour wherein a dream is revealed, or something true or very dear, behind the joke. ‘You, all of it, the whole thing’s just forcing me to go out thieving.’

  ‘We are most emphatically not forcing you to go out stealing,’ huffed the woman. ‘We are, briefly, offering you a position as salesperson in the fast food establishment on the High Street.’ And she began reading off the card again, very precisely, very officiously; the man began shaking even more violently. He was shaking so much he was almost quivering the way very old people do, who are soon to return to inanimate matter which quivers, apparently, almost invisibly. (That’s when they called for Bernie Mungo.)

  ‘What else am I supposed to do?’ he ranted. ‘I haven’t got no other option but to go out there thieving... twenty-five years! They won’t get nothing out of me now. You can’t survive on silly pay; I’ve got responsibilities in Basingstoke. You wouldn’t treat a rat the way I’ve been treated....’

  Everyone was holding their breath by this time and that’s when Bernie Mungo stepped in, quietly ushering him out with an arm about his bony shoulders – he seemed quite grateful to be taken away. The woman slumped back with a look of relief, though when Bernie Mungo came in again she leapt up and collared him with her peacock-blue nails. ‘Couldn’t you see,’ she screeched, jabbing at his Saint Christopher, ‘couldn’t you see he was leaning over me in an aggressive tendency?’

  It was tempting, Marly thought, awaiting her turn to sign on, to lean over everybody here in an aggressive tendency. Either that or you became very grateful for anything anyone did for you; or a mixture of the two like the man with responsibilities in Basingstoke. Something about the place was catching, like a dose of the flu. At first you sailed through the motions, inviolable, intact, supremely aware that you weren’t meant to be here, that you were just passing through and then, bit by bit, as week turned to month and month turned to year, you suddenly found out you’d caught the cold for good. You were the shifty one at the back of the queue in socks and sandals, eligible for any old job under the sun you’d been unemployed so long; adept at lying, at making up excuses on the spot, at hedging, evading, at putting on the grateful face, the ‘Oh really I didn’t know that, I’m so
sorry’ face, the simple face, the interested face – so many faces even Worzel Gummidge would have a job screwing them on. And, worst of all, you never quite understood how you got to be that shifty-looking one at the back of the queue, never saw the slow degradation (except in the eyes of passers-by which you avoided), never felt the silent virus creeping up on you in your unwashed hair, your unmade-up face, your unclean clothes, your unpolished shoes, until it was far too late. (It was like knowing someone was dying yet never fully realising it until they were dead.) And though you still went through the motions and put on different faces, you weren’t quite sure who the faces belonged to; the spark of defiance you’d kept inside had been snuffed out somewhere along the line – they’d snuffled it out of you like pigs after a truffle, gobbling through your heart and lungs to get at that little truffle (and they stank as bad as you); or in the end you gave it up willingly enough, sick and tired of the struggle, and laughingly watched them share it out and maul it about like children with birthday cake – horrid little trotters...

  Marly wasn’t quite sure who ‘they’ were exactly but she thought of ‘they’ as an amorphous somebody who kept you in the dark and told you half truths about the films you watched, the books you read, the food you ate and the lives you led; who fed you gobbledygook about war crimes and UFOs, GMOs and nuclear waste; who made decisions above your head, leaving you bewildered and constrained – waiting for a hip operation or mummified in red tape; who fudged and dodged behind a sugar mountain of lies, so many lies you couldn’t even recognise the truth when you stumbled upon it, so many lies even Pinocchio would have died from his nose out of sheer embarrassment. (How well she understood ‘they’!) It was a world of make- believe, they should have said, with everyone so scared they didn’t fit into it: not good enough, not clever enough, not pretty enough, not rich enough. Even the good, the clever, the pretty and the rich ones were scared in case somebody gooder, cleverer, prettier or richer came along to topple them off their golden throne. And so we all clung on to a time when we had been good enough, clever enough, pretty enough and rich enough, even if it was one night twenty years ago when we’d had some champagne! That night I was sensational, the world at my fingertips, the world my piano. I could trill and thrill upon it with my arpeggios, my chromatics, my scherzos, my vivaces, my little diminuendos, my great roaring crescendos... like a lorry going up and down the length and breadth of Britain, through Glasgow, Felixstowe, Heathrow, Walthamstow... all England, my arpeggio! The world, my oyster shell! That night when I wore my sea-pink dress and you told me I looked sensational....