Seahorses Are Real

by Zillah Bethell

  And they all swept into the park, past the gardeners perennially deflowering the beds (they’ll come up again and again if you let them), the hot-dog van and the candyfloss stall (spinning its skeins of silken breath); babies bawling, kids skedaddling, teenagers dropping like flies (due to cider and aspirin); goldfish hanging like baubles from hooks (in their little plastic bags, too easily spilt) and the tent full of cards, spells, crystal balls and crones you wouldn’t ever want to meet in the dead of liquorice night. Glued-down toys and weighted hoops, metal hands that clutch thin air (not even the ear of a teddy bear) and an avalanche of glittering coins which never ever falls (like the wild boy surfing the waltzers, nonchalant and arrogant as the breeze) to the burnished god who stands centre stage, like a Colossus, astride the football pitch, juggling his people for the moon – only too-willing victims of sacrifice... up and down, round and round, he loves me, he loves me not.... Where Marly had stood (was it two years ago when it felt like ten?) almost touching the roof of air and counting stars as if they were smarties and smarties as if they were stars (what a lot of parties the gods must have), the daisy ring too big for her twiglet fingers but it might as well go as a noose around her twiglet neck... up and down, round and round, no at the bottom, yes at the top... Marly’s ring, Boethius’ ring. Where Leslie Finch had taken a kid (Surely not! A preposterous thought) to go find Mr Squirrel in his den and give him a hazelnut or two.... Dead drunk she must have been, on neon and moonshine, to say ‘I do’ up there at the top for all to hear, especially David, who grinned in delight and rubbed his hands as if he’d found his treasure at last, though the money jangled right the way out of his pockets as they hurtled back to earth.... (How could they go so high and so low?) And to write that night in her gratitude diary ‘I am alive’ for number five. ‘Truly alive!’

  And an extra one for number six: ‘IT’S SHOWTIME, LADIES AND GENTLEMEN, IT’S SHOWTIME!’

  Seven

  She pounced on David as he came through the door, not even giving him time to take his coat off.

  ‘Terry says,’ she launched in, bustling about the kitchen, ‘if I got more love I wouldn’t be thinking of moving.’

  ‘Did he?’ replied David, scanning the surfaces and sticking his nose in the air, doing his Sherlock Holmes thing with the dinner. Any minute now, Marly thought a little irritatedly, he’ll be taking a peek in the fridge.

  ‘Sausages,’ he ventured at last, taking a peek in the fridge.

  ‘No.’ She got the grater out and started grating some cabbage quite fiercely into a small bowl. David went past her into the bathroom and she heard him urinating through the thin walls. Familiarity, she thought as she always did, really does breed contempt.

  ‘He’s given me stuff to make me feel all bright and shiny,’ she called through. ‘Apparently.’

  ‘What?’ – over the flush – ‘Say it again.’

  ‘BRIGHT AND SHINY,’ she almost yelled it. ‘You’re deaf, you are… honestly, you need to see him more than I do.’

  ‘What!’ again, this time for effect. He came out with a grin.

  ‘Very good, very good. He’s given me stuff to make me feel bright and shiny – stupid bastard. Honestly, he hasn’t got a clue, sitting there with his books… I bet I could understand them better than he does. He hasn’t got a clue, that’s the problem, he hasn’t got a bloody clue.’ She scooped the cabbage from the back of the grater and almost flung it into the bowl, her fingers splayed. ‘And he said my plant’s flowering again like it’s some sort of sign or something. He said it deliberately, I’m sure of it.’

  ‘We-ell,’ David began doubtfully then immediately regretted it.

  ‘Well what?’ she burst out. ‘Course he did. He knows what I’m like in that way, that’s the thing. He knows how my mind works… at least he thinks he does. He hasn’t got a clue really – I’m too good at acting. And then again,’ she paused, amputated stump of cabbage mid-air, ‘I mean, the thing is, sometimes I am alright when I see him; it’s just the rest of the time he doesn’t see me – not like you do.’

  ‘No.’ David’s tone seemed to suggest (at least to Marly’s ears) that he was only too well aware of that rather dubious honour.

  ‘If I got more love,’ she repeated, ‘I wouldn’t want to move probably – that’s what Tezza says.’ (It didn’t seem so bad, putting it on to Terry, having him ask for love on her behalf.)

  ‘He didn’t ask you about your sex life then?’ David half laughed. ‘Dirty sod!’

  ‘No.’ She felt a surge of anger at his sidestepping and, after a few moments pent-up silence, she flung the grater down. ‘Look at it, it’s rubbish, it can’t even grate properly – I nearly cut my finger off. It’s rusty, that’s the trouble, it’s rusty because somebody, SOMEBODY keeps leaving it out on the draining board and not drying it up properly.’

  David felt his stomach tighten – it was going to be a bad night. She was stressed, her movements awkward as if she’d been fashioned out of wood, her shoulders up round her ears – all signs that she was fast approaching what he privately termed the ‘electric fence’ stage. (Programmes included, his mind silently articulated: men as a four letter word; leaping and bolting at the least little thing; taking everything he said amiss; red-raw nerve action; and throwing things with the force and accuracy of a Valkyrie. Modus operandi: keep your trap shut or else and take over the sorting of all practical matters.) He took the grater off her carefully, gently nudging her out of the way.

  ‘Here, I’ll sort it out. You go put your feet up, watch Oprah Winfrey or something.’

  She leapt onto the little step that separated the kitchen from the tiny hallway, her arms folded like a little old schoolmarm, her eyes glinting wildly behind the lenses of her tortoiseshell specs. She put them on, he sometimes felt, just so her eyes could glint a little wildly behind them. ‘Oprah Winfrey’s not on at this time,’ she said as if he were an idiot, elongating words and emphasising syllables the way she did when she was unravelling at a rate of knots.

  ‘Have we got mayonnaise?’ he asked to distract her.

  The folded arms shrugged. ‘I don’t know. How should I know. I don’t know anything any more.’ (Oh lordy, he thought. Red alert, red alert. EF proceeding to dumbshow in a matter of a microsecond. Modus operandi: snap her out of it sharpish.) ‘Well, you should,’ he said too firmly – Oh David you fool, you fool – far far too firmly.

  The wooden frame that was now Marly bent from the waist to the fridge and the voice that came out of her was sharp and dangerous as a knife against stone. ‘Well, let’s see shall we?’ Three jars came out in quick succession, each with a bang more furious than the last. ‘Curry dip, chilli dip, red-hot pepper dip – more dips here than the Eastern Eye... and yet – how bizarre – they’re practically empty. Most people, you would think, would rinse them out and put them in the recycling bag or the bin but Davey boy, little Davey boy (how her voice set his teeth on edge) puts them back in the fridge, for safekeeping I suppose.... No mayonnaise though, I’m afraid, alas no mayonnaise.’ The fridge door slammed shut.

  ‘It’ll be foul,’ he muttered with genuine displeasure, ‘without mayonnaise.’

  Her eyes gleamed malevolently and she straightened up at her post like a sadistic little sergeant. ‘It’ll be fine, absolutely fine. You should be grateful you’ve got any­thing. People’d give their eye teeth for raw apple and cabbage. (It came, he thought, probably, that sadistic little bent, from childhood memories of being forced to swallow fat – for good manners – lump by glistening lump.)

  ‘I might go up the shop,’ he proposed, putting down the grater, ‘even so.’

  ‘No you will not.’ She practically barred his way, her arms and legs stretched out in an X, as if she were doing aerobics or bracing the walls for a Samson-like wrath. ‘It’ll do you good – Jesus Christ – to manage without mayonnaise for a change.... If that’s the only problem you’ve got – dear God... it’ll do you good,’ she repeated, stepping forward to poke wha
t she called his ice-cream, chicken-pie, chocolate-cake waist – though God knows why because he never got any; and then, as if she’d gone a little too far (though she was capable of a great deal worse than that), she turned and went through to the sitting room where the sound of her banging and cursing came through in snatches just loud enough (deliberately and infuriatingly loud enough) for him to catch: ‘Oh what a tragedy! No mayonnaise… BANG... poor little Davey boy can’t live BANG BANG without it!’

  Marly looked at their reflections, far off on the TV screen: her own, tall and unyielding, the plate teetering on the edge of her knees; David’s smaller, shrunken against the sofa, as if he had no torso, the plate in the middle of his lap, already half empty of course – the way he shovelled it into his mouth, like a forklift truck – eating around the sausages, saving the best till last like a little boy taking his medicine first. She sighed excessively and eyed his plate disapprovingly several times, in between small bites.

  ‘What?’

  She sighed again and shook her head and stared at his plate again. ‘I don’t know, I really don’t know... guzzle, guzzle, guzzle!’

  ‘You’ve got to,’ he joked, ‘before the other animals get to it!’

  She stared at the shrunken gnome on TV and the tall ice queen by his side, wondering what they were going to do. It was like that sometimes – she glimpsed the possibilities, probable outcomes, consequences of the things she said and the things she did but it never seemed to make any difference – the hag always rose, bubbling with lava and the ice queen froze mid-air. Her eye fell distractedly on the world map pinned to the wall like some sort of Holy Grail and she wondered if she’d ever get to Novorosysk, Corsica, Shangri-la.... The meal really was quite foul – a joyless, perfunctory little meal, the way it had been made; and she felt a weary sense of futility wash over her, something close to despair. No hope, no good, ever before and ever after... just endless repetitions of this feeling inside her. She grimaced and took a sip of water. ‘We are not Neanderthals, we are not living in the Stone Age. We are civilised, with table manners. There are no animals here to take our food,’ she went on with a bitter little sense of her own irony. ‘Look at the way you hold your knife – all la-di-dah like a pen, yet you shovel it in like there’s no tomorrow (though there is a tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow her mind said, and the ice-queen’s voice came cold and distant as ice floes, starlit nights, thin chill silvery steppes and golden-mountain oceans). ‘Did your father teach you that?’

  David took the remaining sausage in his hands, swallowed it in two fierce gulps then licked his fingers one by one, with a slightly theatrical, pugnacious look on his face.

  ‘Course not! He eats with his hands, he does.’

  She decided to ignore him. ‘Most people have scintillating conversation over the dinner table. They talk about ideas, things they’ve done during the day, their plans and hopes for the future – but I don’t suppose,’ she paused for a sarcastic little laugh, ‘we’ll get any of that here.’

  ‘Alright then.’ David leaned forward (and the gnome’s face ballooned on the TV screen). ‘How was your day?’

  ‘It’s not for you,’ she burst out, ‘to be asking me about my day, it’s for you to be telling me about yours. It’s always the same – me taking the initiative, me taking charge.... Without me,’ she concluded with an angry little bite which made her even angrier because she thought she might’ve chipped a tooth on a metal prong, ‘everything would fall apart.’

  ‘There’s nothing to tell,’ he said quietly. ‘It’s all so mundane and trivial – too trivial to mention, to remember even.’

  ‘You never do,’ she cried. ‘You spend half an hour on the phone with your mother and there’s never anything to tell – you can’t remember. You spend eight hours a day at work and there’s never anything to tell – you can’t remember. You spend six hours down the pub drinking yourself silly and there’s nothing to tell – you don’t remember. Is there anything at all you do remember?’ she asked in a whine, munching solidly all the while as a foil to her rising voice and the hag that was rising within her – oh yes, she was rising alright – rising like new bread from blackened dough; rising from the wrong side of a festering bed; rising in the east like an old old old cantankerous old sun, rippling on the surface like a pond, bubbling with old sores, old hurts, bitter regrets, burning the naked eye.

  And she rose, herself, and went over to the curtains, flicking them open to look at the little grey street where the little grey people (she being the littlest and greyest) went up and down, up and down ever after Amen, stumbling over roots that cracked the pavement open and brushing their way past dust-coloured leaves (How could they grow so close to the road?), peering into holiday brochures and calling their crumbledown houses ‘Valhalla’, ‘Heart’s Rest’, ‘Bedouin Cottage’, crushed, squashed, entombed together. She licked the edge of her teeth in silent agony. She was crushed, squashed, entombed in a town, in a flat, in a body, in a mind, in a man she half loved, half despised who sat on the sofa still and opaque, as if he had no soul, who dwindled and loomed, dwindled and loomed, a shrunken or voluminous gnome; and more than that, worse than that, deep down, much deeper down a glimpse too, that if she ever got to the edge of the town, past the tulips and pretty cottages, bright fences and small dogs, if she ever got to the glowing coral reefs and bluebell woods, the frangipani trees and the Shangri-las – or anywhere else for that matter – she’d still be imprisoned in a body that had stopped at the doll’s house and a mind that groped and spun in vain, like a rat in a cage.

  ‘What’s wrong?’ David’s fingers brushed her shoulder, lighter than feathers, softer than snowflakes. ‘What’s wrong, my love, what’s wrong?’ For a moment, just for a moment, she knew the possibilities, probable outcomes, consequences of the things she said and the things she did; but it was imperative somehow to shout him into loving her, taunt him, abuse him into it (a Pyrrhic victory but a victory nonetheless) – warts and all, boils and all he had to love her and yet, of course, she couldn’t let him love her like that – her desperate pleas wrapped up so beautifully the recipient could only stare at the paper in appalled fascination. ‘What’s wrong,’ she blurted out, ‘is you sitting there like a stuffed dummy, never opening your mouth, never saying anything. You’re incapable of any form of communication at all. Aren’t you?’

  ‘I’m gonna do the washing up.’ He turned away with a sigh and bent to pick up the plates. That was not what she wanted, not what she wanted at all. She pounded after him into the kitchen. ‘I don’t want you to do the washing up. I want you to open your mouth for a change.’ The sight of his curved back, his slightly round shoulders bent over the kitchen sink angered her even more.

  ‘What d’you want me to say?’

  She froze, mid-air, on the little step. The hag had risen – full glory, from the dead – and there was nothing to do but ride it out on that old nag of a nightmare until the sun sank into the west, burnt out; the bread was digested, acid and all; the bed was remade and remade and remade.... ‘Well, if you don’t know that,’ she practically spat, ‘you’re even more stupid than I thought you were.’ It was what he hated most of all – to be called stupid – it offended his male brain, his precious male brain that skipped and danced over puzzles and logarithms, tangential equations and algebra.... And he was going to go....

  She felt a fear clutch at her heart – for he was going – going to the bathroom where she heard him urinating through the thin, thin speckledy walls....

  He was going alright – to the banister, picking up his coat, checking for his wallet....

  ‘That’s it – run away as usual – spineless bastard. You’re pathetic – you can’t face any sort of confrontation can you?’

  There was really no doubt about the fact that he was going – down the stairs, at a run, two at a time, desperate to get away from her, the door sliding open with that strange shush shushing noise and...

  ‘If you go, I’ll break every on
e of your tapes.’

  ... he was gone with a bang of the glass front door, with the finality of a hammer at an auction.

  She stood, a little dazed for a moment, then began wandering aimlessly from room to room as if to reassure herself that they, at least, were still there; or to be utterly convinced that he was well and truly gone. Sometimes she went after him, depending on how she felt and what she was wearing – though one time she’d chased him into the night, barefoot, pyjama’d, in the bleak midwinter (that was before her mother had died. It had been going on, she thought now, even then) and never felt a thing. Everything that remained of him (being a tangible reminder of his absence) became a source of irritation; and she glared at the crumpled tea towel he always left on the kitchen table and the unwashed dishes in the sink. He didn’t even have the grace, she thought, to finish the washing up; and with a movement full of exaggerated disdain and an exasperated tut escaping her lips, she hung the tea towel back in its rightful place on the coat hanger hooked to the kitchen door handle. Two sausages sat, one burnt, one under­cooked, congealing in glistening fat on a little side plate and her eye lingered on them quite solemnly for a while as if they might contain the secret of the universe and any minute now spill the beans; though in the end all they seemed to convey to her was the fact that the stove, like everything else, was fucked. She was fucked, the world was fucked, everything in the fucking flat was fucked – she felt a faint sense of relief in the expulsion of breath and repeated several times: ‘Everything in the fucking flat is fucked.’ The fridge, the cooker, the effing bloody Hoover – stingy bastards, purple trousers, kerchief wrapped round her neck like some sort of Parisian, going on about snails, sitting there in their monstrous spectacle, that cancerous building that seemed to sprout a new tumour by the month... raking it in in their bakery, raking it in ONLY BECAUSE they economised on everything from paper bags to currants. Two, she’d counted in her last scone. And even they had sunk to the bottom. She stared morosely about her, at the painting from Athena that Helen had given her years ago, wondering why she’d kept it so long – probably because it reminded her of a time when everything seemed conquerable, even bad taste; the filthy-rimmed curtains Mrs M had put up (Parisian style no doubt, so no one could see in but you could see out); the peely, patchy, speckledy-hen walls (looking as if they’d been spattered in piss); the mousetrap filled with tempting delicacies – morsels of cheese, peanut butter, ravioli and anchovies (apparently they couldn’t resist tinned anchovy); and the infestation of grime that twinkled and winked from every crack and cranny as if to say ‘Come and get us if you’re hard enough’. She wasn’t. She gave the fridge another dent for good measure with the toe of her boot, went into the sitting room and threw herself in a little heap on the sofa.