Seahorses Are Real (10 page)

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 one 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.

‘The gnome has gone out carousing,' she muttered hysterically to herself after a few moments' silent contemplation of the gas fire which glowed with coal but never sank to embers. ‘The gnome has gone out carousing – cheers mate, thanks a lot' (she toasted an imaginary partner mid-air) – ‘and the ice queen has to wait, WAIT WAIT WAIT in a freezing flat, for his return.' It was always the same. There was no point thinking it could be any different. He just couldn't face confrontation, couldn't face it at all. The slightest bit of agitation and he was off like a scalded cat. The only person you could rely on in this world was yourself. She fed herself a few medicinal green drops from her old-as-age-old, stone-encrusted bottle labelled ‘How not to get Hurt', ‘How to Survive' (there were many other bottles, colourful, haunting, glass-blown bubbles with hags and queens, suns, moons and genii in them, but they were uncontrollable) then stoppered it up with a sigh. He wouldn't get away with it. She expected it of him but he wouldn't get away with it. It crossed her mind to phone his mother, which she'd done once or twice in moments of high dudgeon, recounting the episode with a terrible glee, putting herself in the best light for all she was worth.

‘Yes, I provoke him – no doubt about that – but nothing justifies his going out for six hours at a time and coming home drunk. He just will not stay put and have it out.'

‘That's right,' his mother always said in her pretty, lilting Welsh voice. ‘He's deep, tha's what it is. Always was.' (It had made her laugh when she'd first heard that. He was about as deep as suet pudding, fizzy pop, lemon meringue pie. There was nothing deep about David; he just didn't know how to communicate.)

She ran over a few choice lines in her head, rehearsing an eloquence she didn't feel and yet, as she did so, she found herself getting angrier and angrier; the more she justified it all in her head (in an imaginary conversation with his mother) the more irate she became; and all the long-forgiven memories (or so she thought) of things he hadn't done, should have done, promised to do, promised not to do, popped up one by one, fresher than daisies, yanking up the well-settled earth of her head. She stuck her tongue in her cheek in alarm – a rash would come up now no doubt or some sort of boil with all the stress he was putting her through.... The blood, trapped inside so long, seemed to race around her body, chock-a-block with poisons, toxins, evil little nasties... she got up, went over to his collection of tapes and CDs piled up on the floor, selected one with a discerning eye (one she didn't much like) and, taking the camping mallet kept in the corner of the room (from their one unfortunate camping expedition to Pembrokeshire where they'd been kept awake all night by a dog called Guinness), she hit the tape quickly with three fierce knocks.

Violence, as always, was heady, unstoppable, like wine or a dam bursting. He is grovelling, she thought, and smashed the tape again harder, one, two, three times… turning her face aside so as not to get splinters in her eyes, though it might perhaps have looked as though she couldn't bear to look.