Seahorses Are Real (9 page)

It was getting colder; and the park was almost deserted except for a few people walking quickly into town and a young boy with his hands in his pockets, obviously skiving off school. Marly pretended not to notice him and made her way, as she always did, along the little path beside the Darenth stream. Luckily it was brown today and full of debris so she couldn't see her reflection broken up and tumbling among the clouds and the trees; it must have passed invisibly beneath the stones and grey fish, silent as a secret. Her head ached with the wind and the fumes drifting like smoke above the trees from the burning tyres on the old Canterbury road; and as she made her way along the same old route she trod around the same old thoughts in her head, never budging an inch to the right or the left. Did he love her enough for her to love him back? Did he love her enough for her to take the risk? It didn't do to go left when she always went right and it didn't do not to stop at the old oak tree where no yellow ribbons ever decorated the boughs, only yellowing leaves which were flying now, like butterflies, to the ground. She wanted to catch one and make a wish and for a few moments she leapt about like a small child, her face breaking into a smile, here and there, up and down, hands out and eyes to the sky after the catapulting leaves; but a capricious wind blew them near then out of reach, like all wishing things, (what a lot of bellows the gods must have) or she guessed wrong and lunged in the opposite direction. Please may I be well, she whispered prematurely each time, her fingertips brushing the edges of discoloured and decaying things spinning down and down; and then, as the rain fell, she gave up and sheltered beneath the heavy old boughs. It must have seen all sorts, she thought, staring at the scaly bark ravaged and filleted by lightning and penknives, axes and naturalists. It must have seen the equivalent of hundreds of Oprah Winfrey shows: freaks and spiritual gurus, tramps and madmen, lovers and serial killers. Bohemia must have wrung her hands beneath these very boughs, bewailing and repenting her vows; even Waltzing Matilda may have squatted here just the other day in the hope of something better than ducks and broken bread. It sat there impassively and never moved a muscle, watching the world pass before its eyes like a giant TV screen. It must have witnessed the sublime and the ridiculous: bombs and hula hoops, hotpants and shooting stars, petty squabbles and Sunday fêtes (in the commercial breaks). Once it was an acorn and now it was very old, older than her grandmother – who was really quite ancient – older, even, than Tiresias. Its soul, if it had one, must be older than the hills. Did it feel the burden of having remained while everything else decayed, matriarch of the Dartford park? Did it creak down the middle and fart at parties? Had its heart been coppiced too many times to keep going strong; and did it rattle and shake in the breeze just for the sake of it, dead as a dead wood coffin inside too? What if he stopped loving her at fifty-two when she'd invested her life, her soul, her heart in him?

The thought didn't bear the thinking; and she circled round it as she circled round the park, letting the rain fall softly onto her face and hands, misting up her glasses and blurring her vision a little. The fair would be coming soon, as it did every year for Halloween and Bonfire Night, like some ancient pagan rite that signified the end of summer and the start of the crispy, crunchy, pinch-your-cheek months – the Ferris wheel a burnished god propitiated, in time-honoured tradition, with red-hot beating hearts and, depending on your ‘cool' credentials, muffled or blood-curdling screams. The town, at this time, acquired a faintly carnival air: the market stalls crackled with life – slasher movies were up for grabs; supermarkets abounded with scary masks and black trees, bats and broomsticks; even the little bakery at the top of East Hill binned its currant buns and elephant toes and brought out new lines in ‘petrifying pumpkin' muffins and sugar-coated ‘ghastly ghosts'. People hustled and chafed, bustled and brrr'd, vivid as autumn leaves or a sun that seems to blaze most intently the moment before it goes under a raincloud. They craned their necks for the floats that crept at a snail's pace round the ring road (even the boy racers in their souped-up jalopies and stolen Orions took a back seat that night, the night the clocks went back) and strained their ears for the drums and tambourines that sounded like far-off distant thunder. ‘IT'S SHOWTIME!' the mayor shouted into his crackling mike from his platform by the memorial for the dead, sucking on innumerable lozenges in case his voice went or, more often than not, having just got out of his sickbed. ‘LADIES AND GENTLEMEN, IT'S SHOWTIME' – miles before the first float appeared, like a tardy bride, decked out in flowers and colours and bright motifs, with her endless train of courtiers and clowns, jesters and majorettes swinging their batons out of step and shivering
in their miniskirts; t'ai chi experts who feigned and bowed to the cheers of an illuminated crowd; boys in their paper-made flying machines, faintly ridiculous, just sprouting beards; grannies in aid of Alzheimer's disease (unless they were waiting for the parade somewhere else); dragons who breathed a fairylight fire with slayers that came in their wake complete with fake, wobbly swords (manfully manned, of course, by a spinstered headmistress); and last but not least the little princesses, vacant, yawning, late for bed, who waved their little hands above the wrist like puppets on a sad production line or bona fide royalty doing the rounds....

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
Win
frey'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 what 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!'