Seahorses Are Real (11 page)

‘THAT THAT THAT for his promises! THAT THAT THAT for his lies..!'

She saw, in her mind's eye, under all the yanked-up earth, the small china horse she'd been given as a child and her own squidgy fingers breaking its knees (that genie was shapeless, nameless, unpredictable as a bottled sun); and the thought of the china horse with its little broken knees and her very own father having to glue them back on made her for some reason even angrier and with a final sweeping arc (which could have been the arc of a rainbow) she brought the mallet down on the little tape's head.

‘THAT for running out on me!'

She sat back on her heels, a little calmer, and surveyed the wreckage. Black spools, like guts, glittered in the light of the gas fire and her own shadow, enormous, hunched above it like a hag being roasted in the flames. She felt a faint sense of pity for the broken object in front of her and a momentary feeling of shame overcame her. Still, she thought, with renewed indignation at his exit, if that's the sort of thing he's going to do, that's the sort of thing I'm going to do; and she lay the implement down beside her handiwork for all to see, as a serial killer might leave his calling card, or a cat leave rats like trophies for his master. In the sitting room. With a camping mallet. Miss Scarlet. As a child she'd only ever wanted to be Miss Scarlet, Barbie, or maybe one of Charlie's Angels.

Stretching herself out on the sofa, she toyed again with the idea of ringing up his mother, went so far as to reconnect the phone; then switched the television on quickly in a play for time. She flicked the remote aimlessly and licked her teeth nervously, rather as if she were thumbing through a magazine in a dentist's waiting room. Images shot out at her: a big black bear being thrown, like an old rag, onto a rubbish tip, somebody measuring its paw with a ruler, music in the background – mournful, melodious; a long blond-haired man walking up and down in the snow, then a close-up of his cell and an object (handmade, cobbled together, indescribably odd) of feathers and leaves. ‘To remind me of freedom and the passing of time,' he smiled, his face splitting open like a rotten watermelon. Marly licked the smooth edges of her teeth in dismay and sped rapidly past fast cars and washing powder to a clandestine affair going on in full view. Here was reality! Similar to her own yet not quite her own; and she sat glued to it for half an hour or so, allowing herself to be engulfed in a familiar miasma of tittle-tattle, intrigue, intimacy and enmity and the undeniable pleasure of watching human beings being human.

Sometimes she forgot that soap-opera characters were imaginary, and when she remembered felt almost cheated; other times she watched the news as if it were a film, waiting to see what was going to happen next. It was a world of many realities, they really should have said, the fizzy sweets and the fortune fish, where you could pick and choose from a pick n mix of imaginary facts. Jelly beans AND sherbet dip? You'll make yourself sick! I'm going to see America through the drive-in movies – and in the end all that was left was imaginary facts. I think therefore I am, someone had said, but you could think yourself into oblivion and then where would you be? There were not enough selves, that was the thing, to fit all those realities, unless you smashed yourself to smithereens with a camping mallet and sat about all over the shop – your lungs doing the bends in the bubble gum, your heart in the jelly beans, your feet in the sherbet dip, your liver laminating in acid drops and your soul wrapped up in a black jack (Is that what God did? Did he exist as a whole in pieces: as himself in all those realities? One in all, all in one. Jesus, your dad must be fucked, David had said.) – the only witness to your existence, a vivisectionist confectionist! Everyone needed someone to bear witness to their existence – that's why Helen rang her up all the time, imparting every detail of her fiendishly complex love life – to prove she existed, keep record, pass the memories on (in case she forgot and forgetting was like never existing). Memories: those arbitrary jostling moments like shapes through a glass darkly, the polyfilla of days; picking your nose up Jabba's house on a rainy afternoon; catching ladybirds in the playground with a girl called Jacqueline (who ate the whole of a tangerine, peel, pips, pith and all); a tea shop in Wales out of season; Stokesy shouting ‘parson's nose'; and a priest saying night when he should have said light or was it the other way round – that proved you existed in the past, that got you up to where you'd got to. Unless, of course, you didn't want to remember and that was another matter entirely. That was when you buried the nameless in numberless graves. (Dogs dig graves for bones too, and then they excavate them. You love resurrecting corpses, David had said, and it was sort of true.) Our father which art in heaven, hallowed be thy nameless souls on the point of departure by torture from the Khmer Rouge. You destroyed all photographs (for what hadn't lived, can't have died or been killed); converted old wedding rings from something purely symbolical to something purely functional; melted down old memories like skin to lampshade, tooth to coin; pawned the good clock that hid the mouse that wound you up that went tick tock tick tock TICK TOCK.... She wondered when the lovers would get found out. Any minute now by the look of things. That was the trouble with soap operas – everything was discovered, everything found out, every big or little secret inevitably revealed (whereas in real life you had to live with their concealment); and they focused on the consequences of the things people did as opposed to the consequences of the things they didn't do. Things you did got their own punishment or reward in time; it was the things you didn't do or the things you did too late, that held you accountable in your own head, they were the real terrors. Ghosts of if only setting up realities of what could have been, should have been, in place of a reality that was.

I'll ring her up, she said to herself now. I'll ring her up! And the words flitted about her head like a Clouded Yellow. I'll ring her up in a minute. I'll ring her up right now. She even went so far as to begin dialling the number then changed her mind and put the phone down. She sat hugging her knees for a moment then leapt up and went through to the kitchen to fix herself some porridge and orange juice. She sliced an orange open with the bread knife and the juice spurted everywhere, like blood, all over the place, trickling down her chin and the speckledy-hen wall. Wasn't there a wailing wall somewhere in the world, stuffed full of prayers and oaths, curses and scarab beetles...? She waited for the porridge to ‘moither', watching over it like a broody hen with a wooden spoon. ‘If those walls could talk what a story they could tell' – that was a line from a play or the post office maybe. What about if they could wail? What did that say about the souls they protected? She scooped the porridge into a bowl, drank the juice in one full tilt, tapped the wall (just in case) and went back through to the sitting room. It was unforgivable! Leaving her to fend for herself in a freezing flat, a soul in limbo with nothing to do but wait for his return. She'd show him who was boss. She'd shake him down to his complacent foundations. She'd play cards; she'd play hardball if that's what he wanted (You play cards, he'd said once; and she would too: Queen of Diamonds, red and glittering, icicle bright and snow-queen deep, hard as nails, blood like orange juice, distiller of poisons – agrimony and meadow saffron if she had to....) She ate with her head bent over the bowl and wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. Right now. This minute. She would. ‘Hello Anne,' she practised out loud. ‘It's me.' No good. Try again. ‘Is that Anne? It's Marly.' I will too, she muttered, putting down the bowl and getting up to go through to the bedroom where she took a quick, vague, myopic peek in the round porthole of a mirror on the wardrobe, as if checking her appearance was some sort of prerequisite for a meeting on the telephone. She fiddled with her hair for a moment or two. No doubt Michael effing Angelo would be piping up in the background as usual, like some sort of flautist off-stage, behind the scenes. He never actually came to the phone, just sat there listening in, butting in like an old ram with lumbago, from the Sistine Chapel of his easy chair. She'd swipe him off it alright. Gout? No wonder. He thought his heart was packing up if he so much as picked up the Hoover. The only thing he was good for was a stew with brown sauce. She'd had a dream once, where she'd found him gobbling rosaries in front of the TV, slapped him in the face and confronted him with the words: ‘I suppose David gets his evasive tactics off you then?' (He had to get them somewhere.) Occasionally, when she really wanted to hurt, she asked David how long his father had been out of work; and he replied just as nastily: ‘About as long as you!' The difference was, her illness was real – invisible maybe, but real. (All really real things had to be invisible. It was the imaginary stuff you could touch.) She wasn't bald and she still had two tits, and people might imagine it was all imaginary; but it was real alright, as real as anything else you couldn't see, plain as a pikestaff if you cared to look. Michael effing Angelo, on the other hand, got the sack on account of Dai Melon's grouting and it was all over for him, finished, kaput – canticles, shining lights, incense and all.... He was practically glued, now, to the television set; he grumbled about footballers and he wouldn't do ‘women's work'. She didn't see why he couldn't apply himself to cosmetics with Revlon now in the valley. There wasn't much difference between paint for walls and paint for faces... wailing walls, wailing faces… Anne slaving away in the pharmacy all day…. There wasn't much difference, come to think of it, between her own mother and David's, though Ivy never wore nail polish or ski pants in the sitting room. The only time Ivy wore ski pants was on a trip to Switzerland as a young woman.

‘Bend ze knees, Ivee,' the ski instructor had shouted. ‘Bend ze knees!'

Her friend had joked: ‘It's like slipping on perpetual banana skins'; and they'd drunk
Glühwein
in the evenings.
(It was a memory she'd treasured and passed on.) After that she'd got married and gone downhill for good. Ivy ever slipping on perpetual banana skins, between Scylla and Charybdis, rocks and very hard places, with knees that never bent underneath the weight, toes that never curled up (or saw paint) though they were the very last thing to go cold.

She studied her face in the mirror with a certain amount of critical detachment, peering this way and that in order to catch a glimpse of every single crack and cranny, gleaming like diamanté from the planes and surfaces of her skin. ‘I love myself,' she practised out loud, a modern-day Narcissus with a modern-day mantra culled from spiritual gurus on spiritual TV shows. ‘I am perfect,' she uttered, knowing how powerful words could be even if you didn't believe them and struggling with the yawning gap between what she said and what she felt. There seemed to be nothing but gaps. Gaps between the world inside and the world outside, the internal world and the world of the mirror; and the little word ‘but' linking the two. I love myself but… I'm perfect but….

(The world inside did a sort of macabre dance when you said out loud that you were perfect.) ‘But' was the bridge between what you were and what you wanted to be, what others thought and what you knew, what you did and what you said, what you thought and what you felt, what you thought you should think and what you really did... nothing but gaps and the little word ‘but'. ‘But' was never-ending. ‘But' was the bit of skin between pork sausages in a row, separating one from the other, yet linking them all together. ‘But' was the point of struggle, place of resistance, hesitant, fragile, easily ripped. ‘But' was a woman (of a passive disposition), a tug of war of unequal sides, an unbalanced equation. ‘But' was guilt, fear, duty, doubt. ‘But' was the spot between a rock and a hard place and Ivy should have been Ivy But…

‘It's about accepting,' Terry had muttered, but how did you accept the unacceptable? Like David running off for hours on end, leaving her to fend for herself with nothing to do but peer in the mirror... she'd show him. She didn't need him. Men had wanted her before; they would do again, as soon as she was back on her feet. She might be full of buts but she didn't have a single gap between her perfect teeth; and she had a goblet neck, so Imran had said. She hung on grimly to the compliment like a trapeze artist losing his nerve. It was worth something, surely, to be told you had a goblet neck. Unless, of course, he'd meant goblin. Gobbling even. His English had never been that good and then again it might very well have looked as if she were gobbling when he presented her with that cashew nut and the peculiar remark about their genitals becoming friends.

‘What d'you think about sex?' he'd asked her the first day they'd met, his bulbous eyes bulbing, shiny shirt shining, tight trousers tightening.

‘Well, I don't see anything wrong with it,' she'd replied, grimacing, ‘if people really love each other.'

And then that business of dropping a nut down the back of her neck as a pretext for undressing her and she hadn't really wanted to but… she didn't really like him but… men were half order, half cajole (‘give me your lips,' he'd cried in the heat of the moment) and women were nothing but gaps and buts.... She pressed her forehead against the cold glass and her breath cut off the world of the mirror. Let him drink himself silly down there at the pub. She couldn't care less. Let the shrouded outside scream and shout. It didn't affect her now. She would float like a balloon to the top of the room and watch him down below doing his little thing. Let the blackbirds sing a chorus of buts. Let the stars brush their pearly whites and the moon yawn discreetly behind the back of his hand. Let Felix the next-door (and very conceited) cat clean his whiskers under the window and prink for pilchards in the dew. She wouldn't wait up. She would remain quite calm, get on with her life; and simply go to bed.