Seahorses Are Real (6 page)

‘Ah, nice that!'

‘It is nice that. You likes giving me kisses!'

‘Yeah, yeah, I do and I don't.'

‘Eh? I thought you'd enjoy that bit.'

‘I did enjoy that bit.'

‘Anyway, you go upstairs, put Tippers to bed, give him a kiss and say goodnight little Tippers!'

‘Tippers!'

‘Goodnight little Snowers… give him a pat on the head, then you put your jim-jams on but before you hop into bed you stare out the window, see.'

‘Oh?'

‘Stare out the window up at the sky, the perfectly clear sky, looking up at the stars twinkling.'

‘Aaah.'

‘Looking for Ursa Major, Ursa Minor, Ursa Middle...'

‘What ones are they then?'

‘Eh? They're constellations ain't they, I don't rightly know do I? I don't know much about it. Anyway, you'll be looking up at them, watching their reflections twinkling on the sea.'

‘Lovely that,' Marly yawned.

‘Then you hop into bed and have nice dreams about fish… and... paintboxes... and…'

‘The kraken?' she murmured sleepily, turning onto her side.

‘No, not the kraken no,' David replied, moulding his body round hers and tucking the blanket up high about her long cold neck. ‘He's a bit frightening.' And he lay there listening to her drifting peacefully off though his own head, too busy for sleep, sang songs and watched the headlights of cars as they passed like searchlights across the curtains; and waited for the dawn.

Part two: Between Scylla and Charybdis

Five

Terry lived in a very white house with a very red car parked outside. Too red, Marly always thought, for a spiritual man. The inside was no better: lots of bright clean spaces and thickly, discreetly carpeted floors for souls, no doubt, to lay themselves down and almost, but not quite, bare all. It might have been a cross between a mosque and a tea shop with its strange blend of smells, wails and murmurings from behind closed doors, its spiritual mumbo-jumbo on the walls (Go-with-the-sunshine Dr H cures Mr Kwon's lumbago with crystals and acupuncture, love and light) redeemed in part by the certificate signed (by some meteorological society), sealed and under glass, of the ‘Terry & June' star. It twinkled above the rest like a saint bathed in reflected glory and Marly often imagined two stars in twin beds, one of them tall, grey and thin with wide, vitiligoed arms, the other short, fat, rotund with a pink rinse and pearls. Unearthly pearls the colour of amethyst, unearthly pink rinse the colour of candyfloss or coral before it bleaches, before the algae flee it. Or maybe she just ate too many raspberries, being a nutritionist; it was known, after all, that too much beta-carotene turned you orange – like something out of the chocolate factory, Augustus Gloop was it, or Verruca Salt? What you ate had a profound effect, especially in fairy tales: drink me – spinach – fairy-moonface cakes. Eat your greens, it said – above Hello! magazines and appointment cards – and you'll grow forearms like Popeye. Amazing what you believed in, thought Marly, stepping briskly up West Hill, her feet tapping out the rhythm of sea green mushy pea green jelly bean green greens, when you lost your faith in everything else. (Ivy chewing on pineapple skins, wrinkling like a crocodile; purple fingers mashing 'em up, smiling a crocodile smile.)

She swept in through the stained-glass porch, past the receptionist who stank of scent and always said: ‘May our wishes come true this month, this week, this afternoon'; and went to sit on the one remaining chair in the hallway, the other being occupied, astonishingly, by a delicate little dark-haired girl reading
Black Beauty
. Marly felt like saying, as she perched, clumsy, old and ridiculous, beside her, that the remainder bookshop in town sold hundreds of horse books – the
Black Stallion
series for a start. She knew because David brought one back for her each week wrapped up in a brown paper bag.... Only a quid, they were brilliant… about a boy who got stranded on an island with a horse; he fed him carrageen (it's a seaweed) and learnt to ride bareback, his arms straight out like an aeroplane, into the waves.... But instead she sat there silent and staring at sunshine messages through superglued glasses, trying not to sneeze at all the scent in the air and listening to Terry's voice coming from one of the darkly, discreetly, closely kept doors. What a danger his soul must be, she thought, privy to a hundred-and-one little secrets. What did he do all day with those fears, anxieties, sores and complaints? Did he feed off them in the thick, foetid air, a vitiligoed mushroom in a dark space; or did he leave them there, a shadowy mantle to be put on, put down and passed along, like some modern day Elijah or John the Baptist, his burden the psyche, sciatica, haemorrhoids, the curse.... She blinked at the sunshine through blue-tacked glasses, a migratory bird, twitchy, wanting to be off; overly conscious of the girl at her side and wondering why the longer the silence, the harder it was to break. The girl coughed and turned a page; and Marly shuffled uneasily around in her seat, trying to catch her eye so that it wouldn't seem so abrupt when she asked, a little stupidly: is that
Black Beauty
?

‘Is that
Black Beauty
?' at last, out loud.

‘Yes.' The girl seemed quite unsurprised to be asked, totally composed and at ease with Marly's proximity.

‘Oh, that's a good book.' How easy it was. ‘I love that book.'

‘I've only just started reading it,' the girl explained, indicating the page she was on.

‘It's a good book,' Marly repeated. ‘The
Black Stallion
books are good too. Have you read any of them?'

‘No.' The girl's eyelashes splashed against her cheek. The tip of her nose, Marly noticed, was freckled.

‘They're very good as well.... Have you got a horse?'

‘No... but I have riding lessons.' Her eyes lit up. ‘I ride a horse called Tarka.'

‘Oh,' smiled Marly. ‘What's he like?'

‘He's a chestnut with a sock,' the girl announced proudly. ‘He can jump as high as three foot six!'

‘That's brilliant,' Marly enthused; and was about to get into a good old discussion of dapple greys, blue roans, cavaletti and palominos when the door opened and Terry came out saying ‘You'll feel like a new woman,' to a little, old, sad-looking woman in a grey suit who disappeared through the stained-glass porch. He beckoned Marly in.

Smiling an apology at the girl, she went into the bay-windowed room to her seat in front of the old piano, wondering, as she always did, if he ever gave anyone a tune, for healing purposes of course. (
Give us a tune, said the old Dad. Can you play Chopsticks, Érotique, the Waltz of the Blue Danube? My piano teacher used to get very close and talk about murders and bargains.
) She took off her glasses from vanity or habit, folding them up in her lap, and everything became very vague like an impressionist painting. She knew there was a book of dreams on the table in front of her, described and interpreted Victorian style and a variety of cards from well-wishers and grateful patients; somewhere to her left, a suitcase filled with pills and poisons in differing potencies with strange names like Belladonna, Pulsatilla, Sepia and Natrum Mur; and best of all, on the wall opposite, a picture of a woman with a row of children behind her, all in the shape of a cross – the woman being the stem of the cross, the children its arms. Marly liked the picture very much. The woman had green eyes; and it reminded her of something out of a dream or a memory.

‘How have you been?' Terry asked, settling himself into his black leather chair and smiling kindly.

Marly hesitated, staring at his bad gangster face with a myopic eye and wondering what to say. Sometimes she told him things quite unconnected with her illness, though never the whole story, never the full picture, despite his air of having heard it all before. She had a feeling he was more interested in affairs of the heart than in bowels and stools, headaches and depressions, his own having been quite broken as a young man near Wormwood Scrubs. He had an unflurried ease about him, as though he'd been surprised long ago, many times, and had now grown calm on a surfeit of wonderdom. And yet, she always thought, he also gave the impression of regarding the world with a perpetually raised eyebrow, like a newborn, as if to say that although he'd been here countless times and knew his way around the block, he was willing, even eager, to try it again by another route. ‘I'm learning too,' he sometimes said, much to Marly's dismay.

‘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.