Seahorses Are Real (16 page)

‘You're all the same,' she bawled out suddenly, making him jump. ‘You're all the bloody same. The problem is, you pretend to be different, but you're just like the rest of them. You're all the same, every single one of you.'

He tried to pinpoint the moment when the conversation had turned but as usual he could not; and he was almost too weary to bother racking his brains about it. Something had gone ‘ping' in her head, something had flipped in that subterranean little soul of hers and there wasn't really any point in trying to figure it out; he simply sat there waiting, metaphorically and resignedly fastening his seatbelt. In the old days, before the car had fallen to bits, she would have pelted off in it at a time like this like some sort of nutcase, revving up the gears, breaking the speed limit and screaming at him or out the window at anyone else who would listen: ‘You men like action films, don't you... but you can't take it in real life can you, you sick fuckers!' In the old days... in the old days. Strange but it seemed like only yesterday he'd heard her shouting: ‘You men can't take it in real life, can you!' It was always something to do with men. Men was a four-letter word for her and God help him when it suddenly dawned on her again that he wasn't simply a rather portly and jocular extension of herself but an individual in his own right and, worse than that, a man. He felt the sarcasm rising in his throat and he clenched down on it by staring out of the window with casual indifference, though inside his stomach was tight as a knot. It was unjust somehow the way he worked, loved her, and she sat there with her violet eyes brimful of hate. He watched the 376 rumble past en route to Bluewater and Gravesend; he wondered if the people on board were looking forward to going home, going to the pictures, after a hard day at the office or the factory. It seemed later than usual and he glanced at his watch, wondering where the time had gone and she, on the attack as always, came down on the movement like an eagle-eyed ton of bricks.

‘Well,' she shouted, flinging a rose in the air, ‘if it's so fucking boring why don't you go back to your reports.'

It would be so easy, he thought, to walk a straight line to the horizon, never looking back, to get on a bus and see where it took him (the way he'd done as a child – though he'd only got as far as Port Talbot and his Nana and Gramp had had to come looking for him).

The violet eyes flickered over him in tones of hatred, anger, disgust. He felt something choking up inside, some little thing inside choking to death. He loved her and she hated him. He loved her and she hated him. The roses were flying around the room now as she really got into her stride.

‘Be nice to get a bit of sensitivity for a change instead of these stupid things.... Sitting there like a stuffed dummy. Why don't you go back to your reports if everybody there's so
unique
.'

He saw her as though through the wrong end of a telescope, a tiny pink figure waving her arms in the air and stamping her feet; the roses falling over her like the snow that fell in the glass snow dome on the window ledge; and her voice came to him muffled, as though she spoke from the depths of a cupboard, from the realms of Narnia where a little boy looked on eating Turkish delight. He looked on – a little boy eating Turkish delight – as the film unfolded before his eyes. A horror film, he soon discovered, in black and white mainly, though sometimes seen through a red-coloured lens. Close up the girl looked quite terrified, her dark eyes swooning away a little as though she were genuinely surprised by something (a clue perhaps to the monster's identity), her long, delicate fingers shielding her face, her mouth opening wide with no sound coming out of it except in sudden bursts – like when you're swimming underwater then come up for breath. You never saw the monster's face though sometimes you heard his voice like vinyl on the wrong speed, caught a glimpse of a whitened knuckle, saw his shadow on the wall, giant, merciless, in pursuit. There was a lingering shot of one of her slippers flying through the air, then coming to land unceremoniously on the stripey settee: Exciting. Alaska. Snow Powder Land. The words jumped out at you like some sort of clue: Exciting. Alaska. Snow Powder Land.... There was a zoom in on her tangled hair in kidney beans and rice (kidney beans and rice all over the carpet), then a montage of lightning shots from topsy-turvy angles: trampled roses and the ceiling, bloodstained feet and tear-stained cheeks. That's when you saw his hands. His hands closing in about her neck, her shadow fluttering moth-like from wall to painted wall, helpless, aimless, out of focus.... The little boy ate the Turkish delight quicker and quicker until he felt quite sick.

Afterwards he saw it all through a violet-coloured lens; and he, a blundering fool, beating the life out of her. Afterwards he stood before her, his arms dangling loose by his side, astonished and bemused and quivering from head to toe like the giant peace-loving rat that he was.

Part three: Larger than gods, louder than gods

Ten

She pressed Terry's bell with a frenzy that startled her then stepped back to wait. Her head was all to pieces and every little piece was bouncing off something like a small rubber superball, the sort she'd played with as a child. Erasmo the Plasmo had been her favourite – a pink mottled one she'd bounced off chimney pots, flower pots, bus stickers and car windows, much to the distress of her mother, the lollipop lady and several green-fingered neighbours. Now it was her head that was doing the bouncing – off the sun, the walls, the screeching tyres along the road, Terry's far, far, far too red car taking up most of the driveway. He'd have an answer for it all no doubt, sitting there in his black leather chair, chewing on the dead wood in people's heads, cleaning up on all their shit so to speak; he'd say it was due to a lack of this that or the other (serotonin, oestrogen, endorphins – take your pick), that it was all part and parcel, that everyone was a pattern in the same evolving tapestry – as if the earth itself were jigging and jiving to the rhythm of one gigantic heartbeat. That would be a thing to be sure, if it were true, though it wouldn't do
her
much good and it didn't seem to explain why some people flew like eagles and other people groped like moles. Or perhaps it did. There were karmic obligations to consider apparently, according to the library book she'd been reading. Marly didn't know what a karmic obligation was exactly but it seemed a bit much that you couldn't start off with a clean slate, that you had to cart about all the baggage you'd kept from a life lived as Joan of Arc, a blue giraffe, Winnie the Pooh. One of Ivy's green-fingered friends had said that Ivy must have done something very bad in a previous life to have ended up the way she did – all tumours and missing bits. In the last few months of her life her body had taken on the appearance of a great fat creature sucking on different sized gobstoppers; or maybe she too had been filled with a hundred and one little superballs all desperate to escape, bouncing off her artery walls, ligaments, tendons and disease fractures. ‘What did I do wrong?' she'd said to Marly once, in the middle of a still, creeping night, her own life creeping not so gently to its end. Ah, then, what could you say? What could you begin to say at the end? That the life had been well done, the few mistakes easily forgiven, a daffodil grown, some roses pruned, a few good seeds well planted? ‘Nothing Mum,' she had replied, hedging her bets. ‘You did nothing wrong.' ‘To be continued' they put on gravestones in some parts of the world – and now in America, the latest trend. One life just a scene in an unfolding drama, a side character in a motion picture (though side characters, David always said, were by far the most interesting). But what if you never fulfilled those karmic obligations and kept incarnating in the same old torturous shell, the blood recycling for ever and a day in that one gigantic heart, while God looked on, killing himself laughing at all the energy he was saving. What then?

They'd tried valiantly to forget about it – after the initial and very bitter recriminations, shamefaced apologies, avowals and denials, realisations on Marly's part that she had nowhere else to go, they became excessively polite to one another. ‘Did you have a nice day?' she'd ask him when he came through the door, like something out of an American movie; and he would reply in conscientious detail that Anton the French teacher had been found drinking spirits behind the bike sheds, that Ross Newman's belching continued undiminished, that plans for the Christmas pantomime were a complete wash-out already because no self-respecting or disaffected student would dream of signing up for it. They spoke to each other like mature, sensible adults – no code, silly expressions, put-on voices or malapropisms. They even took pains to use each other's full Christian names – a sign that all was not at all well with them; they discussed the news, the weather, the world at large, and the tenant who was moving in to the downstairs flat bit by seemingly endless bit. ‘He brought a chair today,' she'd say to David over supper. ‘How much stuff d'you think he's got?' He'd already de-loused the hallway carpet, a little to Mrs M's irritation. ‘Fumigating the vestibule floor, if you please,' she'd sniffed at Marly, accosting her by the front gate on her way to the bakery. ‘No doubt he can see extra termites through those optical lenses of his!'

They circled each other as intimate strangers – a strange little dance of sidle and sidestep – like some tribal display from Papua New Guinea in which, by all accounts, there is a great deal of hot air and inebriation, a lifting and lowering of paradise feathers and a ferocious drumming of sago skin drums. ‘The lifting and lowering of paradise feathers is,' according to her library book,
Fond Recollections of a Gentleman Traveller,
‘a kind of now you see me, now you don't affair where the true personality is glimpsed for a moment beneath the mask of betel nut juice and zephyr flower petals (though these are more commonly used by the women in nail decoration), the sago skin drumming a potent if rather tedious reminder of the ever-threatening thunderclap, the wrath of the gods.'

They felt their way through every moment, pressing and testing it for strength and elasticity, made polite noises, said please and thank you, peeped from behind their paradise curtains, then retreated. They spun and danced, circled and fanned, still peeping and retreating, as the sago skin drums pounded hard in their hearts like far-off distant thunder.

The rain had helped – it gave them something to talk about. It had rained and rained every night until dawn and then it had rained some more. People were up in arms about it; the government, it said, was looking into it, poring over satellite readings and meteorological forecastings, even the Prime Minister had come out and looked about. Homes in Kent were flooded by the dozen, the Cotswolds were covered and the Thames that kept rolling from Bluewater down to the mighty sea was almost fit to burst her banks. There were dire warnings of natural disasters, ‘Revelations' chapter sixteen, greenhouse gases and Noah's Ark. A student who signed himself ‘9T9 Flake' covered the pale blue tower where David worked with jaunty, colourful umbrellas; a skull and crossbones and doom-laden slogans, which the class felt morally obliged to discuss. ‘Forget impending doomsday,' David had had to chastise them, ‘and get back to Calculus!' Leaves blew the tracks quite clear of trains and those who ventured onto the buses found themselves stuck in the early hours in the middle of Land's End, having finished
War and Peace
for the first time in their lives. Sea winds got up and, finding nothing interesting to do out there in the Atlantic, picked up speed and gave the cliffs an almighty wallop. Chimney pots toppled off, windows shook in their panes and the nights were the sort of nights when past lives came back to haunt you. Seagulls screamed inland from the edges of waves, took over Piccadilly Circus and Trafalgar Square, and laughed their secret laugh in the Dartford park. Marly kidded herself she was living on the coast and David smiled for he loved the rain, no matter what, with or without an umbrella – it reminded him of the hills and valleys of Wales. They called a truce in all that rain (where hidden things emerged and other stuff got washed away) though inside she still raged.

The ‘may our wishes come true this month this week this afternoon' receptionist ushered her in with that dreadful smile of hers and the words ‘Terry won't be two ticks'. Marly went into the empty room, shook the droplets off her raincoat, prised a few wet tendrils from the sides of her cheeks and wiped her glasses. There was a smell of ginger and garlic drifting in through the walls and open doorway and she imagined June's blueberry head bent over her wok, frying up shallots and noodles for Terry's lunch. She'd heard her say to him once, a little sharply: ‘You've only got to add the dressing, Terry, while I take the dogs out.'

He'd seemed a little put out – as if he didn't much like the thought of having to do the dressing while she took the dogs out and Marly had wondered if he was as much a gentleman in his private life as he was in his professional. She didn't really care what he was as long as he helped her; she'd found him in the
Yellow Pages
and blindly put her faith in him: this thin vitiligoed figure at the end of the bar in her last-chance saloon, the only visible raft – apart from David – in the middle of her shipwreck. And she clung on to him through misgivings and paranoia, hell and high water; something more primitive than hope kept her clinging.

‘Lovely weather,' he smiled, looming in the doorway like an angular lamp post before coming forward to greet her, his thin arms open wide. She was always a little embarrassed by these embraces, fearing that up close she might be somewhat repulsive. ‘Where does it all come from, this rain? The mountains, the sea?'