Seahorses are Real E-Book

Zillah Bethell

• Herausgeber: Seren
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 372

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2009

Beschreibung

Marly's had enough of the cramped little rundown flat and wounded grey street where she lives with her fiance, David. If they could just move away, escape to a rose-covered cottage by the sea, she's sure she would get better and everything would be alright... Seahorses are real is a powerful debut novel of love and damage. Zillah Bethell tells the haunting tale of a relationship warped by depression, at once tender and destructive, where violence is not only perpetrated by men and love is not necessarily enough.

Leseprobe

Inhalt

The Little White Horse

Part one: Fairies, feathers and Quality Street

One

Two

Three

Four

Part two: Between Scylla and Charybdis

Five

Six

Seven

Eight

Nine

Part three: Larger than gods, louder than gods

Ten

Eleven

Twelve

Thirteen

Part four: Arwen and Elessar

Fourteen

Fifteen

Sixteen

Seventeen

Eighteen

Nineteen

Dearest David

About the Author

Acknowledgements

Zillah Bethell

Seahorses

are real

For Mark

She knew that one day, when she was a very old woman, she would dream this dream for the last time, and in this last dream of all she would see the little white horse, and he would not go away from her. He would come towards her and she would run towards him, and he would carry her upon his back away and away, she did not quite know where, but to a good place, a place where she wanted to be.

The Little White Horse

Part one: Fairies, feathers and Quality Street

One

At the edge of the town there are tulips and pretty cottages, bright fences and small dogs, foxes and wild rabbits. There is a quarry where boys fish and herons sit hunched like old men in overcoats or open their wings and fly in slow motion.On the hills towards Farningham you can sometimes see a horse silhouetted against the sky or a tractor going up and down the fields in pyjama stripes. There were orchardslong ago – before the motor­way – around the woods at Farningham. Apple trees and pear trees apparently. The boys would sit beneath the trees and watch the dogfights – they didn’t get much schooling. It’s a cricket ground now and a model aero­plane club on Saturdays. You couldn’t hear a sound in the orchards long ago.

St Margaret of Antioch rises up, like a medieval hat, into the flight path of birds and Boeings heading for Heathrow, dreams and prayers heading for God. There are many soldiers buried here and one Anna Czumak, who suffered much in this life. You can see the Dartford bridge on a clear day, straddling the Thames and the boats that have come from Gravesend, though they no longer sail for the Holy Land. At night it looks like a fairground attraction – a giant Ferris wheel or even a Christmas tree. If you followed the Darenth River to the Thames you would eventually come to the sea. If you follow the Darenth River through Sutton at Hone, past the tulips and pretty cottages, bright fences and small dogs, foxes and wild rabbits, you eventually come to the trade park where cars are dumped, like rusty old dinosaurs, for fun and for birds to make nests in. Crows’ feet lead along the track beside the lake where you have to beware of Bohemia’s ghost repenting poisoning her lover with agrimony and meadow saffron; of lines and mermaids’ hair full of fish eyes, hooks and cut-glass confetti; trees laden with graffiti (‘I like it firm and meety’); and last but not least the old Canterbury road where many pilgrims must have trailed in search of an ever-receding god. To the park where Leslie Finch sits watching the kids and waiting for a bus, though he never takes one; where Rasputin strides tall and tyrannical with his tiny pink haversack; and Pegleg Pete hops around collecting snails (He was in the war!) in plastic carrier bags. Gentlemen and old ladies congregate in the shrubbery per diem for a whiskey mac and a packet of nasturtium seeds while gardeners bend over hollyhocks, chrysanthemums, primulas and old bones and the library sits with its unkempt shelves next to the public lavatories and a memorial for the dead.

There are directions here for a Sikh temple that has never been found by its worshippers, Talk of the Town (How much can you handle, boys?), the Emmanuel Pentecostal and a Tudor church. In ancient times (mainly Tudor), so the saying goes, an old hermit sat with his back to the church and helped travellers across the ford. He was a pilgrim of a sort. He doused and sang and waited by his billabong – they must have washed their clothes in the Darenth too – and now Waltzing Matilda sits feeding the ducks and if you do not look at her too close or speak to her too long you cannot tell that she is mad. The Emmanuel Pentecostal is always full on Sundays and they park quite hazardously round the launderette on East Hill, where there was once a Peasants’ Revolt in 1382 due to unfair tax and impoverished conditions; where the cemetery sits above the steeple because ‘Dartford people are the strangest people and bury their dead above the steeple’; and Marly stood with her hand on Umfreville’s tomb, wondering at what bad luck people had.

Somebody had fallen asleep in the lap of God, another had swapped time for eternity. Two or three were remembered in the grave while a party of six had tragically died yachting off Greenhithe. One more, unlucky man, had had a son die in the Darenth and another in the Tebekwe. Blessed husband, loving son, beloved wife, precious one and only... a jam jar upturned, two withered flowers, an evergreen wreath and a florist’s loopy card – each grave its own universe. What a story each could tell, Marly thought, and her fingers sought the tip of the shopping list she had come across suddenly, unexpectedly, in her mother’s coat pocket, like an odour blown on the wind: awakening long-forgotten memories, memories that haunt the edge of dreams, her mother’s ashes on the breeze. Milk, two bread, orange juice, fish. They would have had cod in white sauce for supper that night, for sure. Ivy, ever pristine. Between Scylla and Charybdis. Between a rock and a hard place. That’s what her gravestone would have said: Ivy, ever pristine, between Scylla and Charybdis, between a rock and a hard place.

Marly blinked away the tears and craned her long neck up at the horse chestnut trees. Horse chestnut treeswere trees of death, trees of death and varicose veins apparently, of conker fights and bonfire nights, supper and ashes, seeds and ashes. Seeds and ashes on the breeze. How beautifully, how perfectly they popped out of their prickly lime-green pods – a deep, rich, varnished mahogany – and yet how quickly they were tarnished or bashed in playground fights, hardened little warriors hot-roasting in the oven. Tough little pipsqueaks with grey socks and cold sores. Marly moved like an automaton along the concrete path, mentally ticking off the register – Ruth Kemp? Here miss. Charles Messenger? Here miss. Patience Penn? Here miss. Clara

Weaver? Here Miss – and a class of old bones grinned back at her, except for Ivy, of course. Ivy Smart? Absent miss. Absent due to death. Marly Smart? Absent miss. Absent due to her complaint. Her complaint! What a ridiculous word. What a limited dictionary those doctors had, to be sure.

She cracked her knuckles in the open air. To be sure, that was the thing. To be sure of being loving and beloved, unconditionally loving and beloved like the fairytale books of happy ever after, the childhood imaginings of tall dark handsome strangers, the fizzy sweets you sucked and read: ‘Blue Eyes’, ‘My Heart’, ‘Pretty Lips’.

They had lied, of course, the fizzy sweets and the fortune fish. The fizzy sweets had lied! The fortune fish had lied! You sucked and sucked and read and read and it didn’t get you anywhere. Might as well be back in the pram, her friend Helen had said; and it was true that life did not progress in a linear fashion nor was it predictable, though Marly read her stars each week and desperately tried to make them fit. You could regress way past the pram, way past birth, until you were seeing through the eyes of your father, your mother, even your grandmother. It was a horrible fact but true. Things shattered in through the wallpaper, breaking your world apart until you were on your knees, on your back, paws up and begging at the sky, like the fox she had seen on the motorway, dead and begging at the sky. It was a makeshift life, they should have said, the fizzy sweets and the fortune fish, a rickety thing built on the sands of disappointment, disillusion, even tragedy; a jumper of loose ends, knit on the needles ofterror and the French Revolution with wool the cat gothold of first. Ever shrinking, ever stretching, in colourco-ordinations even Ariel couldn’t fix. Lumping up likeporridge when you needed it most – home-made, no treacle – porridge even the bears would have left, let alone Goldilocks. Goldilocks was an imagined fact, for children. Adults and bears got on with the burnt leftovers, the bread and scrape of days.

It didn’t really matter, Marly thought, sprawled against the cemetery wall and watching two boys playing with a large yellow ball like a dirty full moon, that your eyelids got a little creased – she could cover them with iridescent blue shadow; that your hair became a little thin – she could sweep it over to one side; that your feet were worn and calloused – she could wrap them up in thick stockings and pink stilettos (she had always wanted pink stilettos); it didn’t even matter that your mind got a little strained now and again – she could dose it up with paracetamol and Oprah Winfrey shows. But when your head had left you for the body of a passing stranger, an uninhabited crow’s nest, a blue violet, then you were really in trouble, she decided, watching two boys kicking an old moon about, pointing, whispering, then eventually smiling at her. She smiled back, feeling jarred, embarrassed; almost fearful. Two boys with a ball like an old moon could do that to her now. It was unthinkable. She got up, pretending to look at a bowl of roses on a fresh grave – a visiting relative perhaps – and her eyes saw her mother’s body in the chapel of rest, statuesque in its white lace Edwardian dress, ice cold, frost-filagreed. One of her mother’s economy drives that dress – it had lain packaged up in the cupboard for years, along with the unopened bottles of Chanel perfume she’d been given – awaiting its purpose like the pink, sequined, honeymoon dress (meant for Marly) in the glory box above the boiler. No fear! ‘Damned sore. Had to lock myself in the bathroom all night.’ Ivy, ever pristine, between Scylla and Charybdis... Marly twisted the daisy ring on the silver chain around her neck, too big for her twiglet fingers. He loves me, he loves me not. A ring from Topshop, David had said. What more do you want?

A vacuum bomb, she whispered, climbing over the wall when the two boys weren’t looking. Hoovering stuff out and sucking stuff in. That was her complaint. Someone had opened her head with a rusty tin-opener, she was open to the ether, and the traffic in and out was worse than the M25, though no one paid her a quid at any tollbooth. (Cross my palm with silver, pretty lady.) They just walked in, wiped their feet, had a dump and went out saying thank you very much. Things flew by, fell in, got stuck and lay putrefying: a few twigs, an old leaf, somebody’s face, a bad day, a daffodil maybe or a dead cat, scraps of conversation, even the shape of a tree. They all got stuck in that little garbage can, stinking, overflowing, emptied sometimes but always refilling. A little garbage can that ran across zebra crossings so the cars didn’t have to wait so long. Smile, smile and the agony abides, someone had said and it was true. Apologising almost for being there, for having to cross the road at that particular place, impeding their speeding progress, their mobile machines. How ridiculous! I feel like a piece of trash, she said to David in her worst moments; and he would put on his tender eyes and say in his wise old Gandalf voice: ‘You’re a little piece of stardust if only you could see it.’ She could kick him then, for not understanding that at that moment, ever before and ever after, she really was a piece of trash, a piece of trash that ran across zebra crossings so the cars didn’t have to wait so long.

‘No fear, not me!’ sang a voice in her head as she walked down the road to their little flat, the ring thumping against her chest, her backbone jutting out (an abnormality inherited from her mother) almost through the skin so that her neck reached forward like a delicate, etiolated plant making a bid for the sun. Lovely boy and all that. ‘A real brick,’ some horsey woman in a book would have said. ‘A real brick, by Jove!’ But wife didn’t quite feel right. It didn’t envelop her tongue the way fiancée did. Wife was a life of soapsuds and dishcloths, daydreams and under the thumb. Wife was merging with the sealed-up things in the cupboard. Put away. Done and dusted. Wife was a life between a rock and a hard place – Ivy had taught her that. Fiancée, on the other hand, had a pretty-sounding ring to it, but not the heavy, dark, gold thing that made you, like Frodo, a little more invisible every day. Oh no, fiancée was flashing daisies on silver chains. Loving me, loving me not. Completing but never completed. Fiancée was promising to give yet ever withholding.

It suited Marly perfectly.

Two

David was waiting for her in the kitchen and cooking pasta, which he did when he was worried about her or got home early. His pasta meals had developed over the years from a simple cheese and tomato affair to a gastronomic extravaganza full of bits of old vegetable he’d found in the fridge – mushrooms, peppers, courgettes, potatoes – thrown into the pan and let sizzle seemingly for hours on end while he sang and clicked his fingers to any old tune in his head, jumping onto the magic carpet, as he put it, when he got to the good bits. In response to Marly’s refrain that the life was boiling out of her as well as the vegetables he would say that it was love grub, practical love – it took great time and care – and she had come to understand, as she waited for her supper in an old pink dressing-gown, that in every buttered mushroom, skinned potato and deflowered tomato there was love, painstaking love. Sometimes, however, when faced with a steaming mound of vegetable and pasta, she would have preferred a simple I love you.

‘I love you,’ he said now, in greeting, a questioning note to his voice.

‘And you,’ she returned, homing into his outstretched arms, her eyes avoiding his.

He sighed and kissed the top of her head. It had taken her two years to let him touch her face. She was a bottomless pit and sometimes he could shout in frustration. Sometimes he did shout in frustration.

‘Guess who,’ she said after a while, disentangling herself and looking at him now, almost expectantly, ‘was painting the door all day in a pair of purple trousers and a little kerchief?’

‘Oh no, not the purple trousers,’ he joked. ‘Mr Ratty?’

‘Has he been out?’ Marly cried in alarm, her toe nudging the porridge and peanut butter-filled trap that lay against the wall beneath the table. ‘Humane Dead Cert’ it had said on the box.

David shook his head. ‘Not a squeak out of him. I’ve been dancing about on the floorboards: he thinks I’m some sort of voodoo fella! I’ll put poison down when you’re gone,’ he added.

Marly half smiled. She was always on the point of going, leaving for a new life in the countryside, by the seaside, somewhere nice away from this hellhole, but she never did, would or could without him. It was simply a threat she used to keep him precariously balanced, on his toes, never quite settled in the relationship; and it was not for him to be telling her she was going but for her to be telling him.

‘No,’ almost angrily, ‘Mrs M. All day she was on that stupid stepladder. I went up and down three times and in the end I thought I’ve got to come in for lunch. She said all the snails were coming from the bin, you know, nicely, but it was obvious she meant we should clean it.’

‘Fuck it,’ said David. ‘Don’t worry about it.’

‘Well, it was a bit embarrassing.’ Marly chewed her bottom lip. ‘She said, “It’s very auspicious I caught you because the new tenant Jason’s moving in on Saturday.”You know how she speaks. He’s been commuting all the way from Hampshire if you please.’ Marly grinned, being Mrs M. ‘“All the way from Hampshire if you please. He’s an optical technician apparently.”’

‘She’s the sort of person,’ David reflected, stirring the seething red mass on the stove, ‘who’d talk about condiments. And utensils.’

‘Mmm.’ Marly started to unlace her muddy old trainers.

‘What an arse!’ cried David – it was a ritual – as she bent over.

‘I know, I know. People’d give their eye teeth for this arse.’ Hovering barefoot on her way to the sitting room she added, ‘There was this little kid in a buggy like a dodgem car with a stick thing up the back his mother was pushing him round with. It was dead cute. He was pretending, you know, to steer the wheel. He had little goggles on and a gas mask thing for asthma.’

‘Pollution,’ David corrected, smiling at the image of a begoggled baby in a bumper car, gleaning what he could from her mishmash of words. Her sentences got worse – strange to think she’d once been Ophelia – as if her brain were disintegrating or moving too fast for her mouth. She made stuff up half the time to fit her own reality, swapping meanings, pouring words out all jumbled up, all mixed up like vomit. She set no store by the things she said, calling him all the names under the sun, not caring whether they hurt or pleased. And yet she set great store, a squirrel’s store by his words, hoarding up something he’d said unthinkingly years ago and bringing it out like a ripe nut in every argument, her bright eyes twitching. ‘That thing you said to me in Birmingham, two years ago.’ She was a squirrel for hoarding that sort of thing. ‘What thing? What are you on about?’ And yet, he thought, softening, she’ll be sitting right now on the settee with that wretched book of hers, staring at the Moses basket and the brightly coloured nursery – how she loved the brightly coloured nursery – reeling off the things you should eat when you’re pregnant: sardines, broccoli, raspberry leaf tea. (He knew them off by heart. He even knew the weight a six-month foetus should be.) It was a crazy addiction she had, a craving to know, toparticipate vicariously in a process she might never experience. He congratulated himself on the phrase – to participate vicariously in a process she might never experience – not bad for a dim, narrow, weak-minded mathematician! Still, he thought, frowning, any phrase was better than stealing a begoggled baby in a bumper car!

‘No, but anyway,’ Marly continued as they settled into their food, ‘it’s like I’m a fugitive from my own lies, my own life. I sat here for ages waiting for her to go and then I thought, you know, I’m meant to be at work – she must have thought I was a right mess – so I went up the cemetery.’ She didn’t tell him about the boys with a ball like an old moon. At first she’d told him everything – it’d been like a burden being lifted from her shoulders – babbling away the stored-up years, every little secret, every last dream, until she was emptied, serene, ready to be filled again with his love. Now their communication was deeper, less tangible – an intimate code of intercepted utterances, delicate tappings, invisible springs and hieroglyph smiles that affirmed their knowingness, their habitual togetherness. Marly sometimes felt that the code half stifled them and it was then she babbled away as in the early days while he, puzzler that he was, took refuge in trying to decipher her heart.

‘You’re a poor little thing,’ he said, smiling a little between forkfuls.

‘I am a poor little thing. And the sooner you realise it the better.’

‘I do realise it,’ he said, sadly this time.

Marly stiffened. Poor little thingedness was all very well for getting sympathy but not pity. Self pity was alright but pity from others she didn’t like. ‘I caught a bit of Oprah,’ she said, changing the subject. ‘It was terrible….’

‘Caught a bit,’ scoffed David. ‘You had a lovely old time of it, sprawled out here with your feet up.’

‘No I didn’t,’ indignantly, ‘I told you I was up the cemetery.’

‘I know, I know. I was just having a laugh with you.’

‘Well, anyway,’ Marly went on, irritated a little by his effervescence, ‘there was this kid who’d been attacked. It was ninety degrees apparently and the puppy had a seizure. It was so bad they couldn’t show the pictures – he was just skeleton and teeth.’

‘Jesus,’ David muttered appropriately, not yet having a clue what she was on about.

‘They made a face for him out of his arms and legs – like me mam, d’you remember, when she had her neck grafted with fat from her bottom. She said her backside afterwards looked like a wrinkled elephant’s. Oh dear.’ Marly lapsed hysterically into a giggle.

David nodded, remembering. ‘It’s alright, my love.’

‘They’ll be transplanting faces soon apparently. They had this monkey – it was horrible – with a transplanted head. They said, “It’s so exciting, his eyes are tracking us.” They kept going on about how marvellous it was they’d saved this kid’s life and everything with this miracle surgery but... I mean... you should’ve seen him. He looked terrible.’

David rolled his eyes in mock despair. Here we go, he thought.

‘I mean it’s hard enough for most people to live, to exist, let alone a kid with a face made up of arms and legs. What sort of life’s he going to have?’ He’ll miss out on the adolescent vitamin for sure, she thought. ‘I don’t know, it should be wonderful, the fact that he’s alive and that but… it might’ve been better... people have such terrible lives.’

‘That’s true,’ said David tonelessly.

‘It’s like the bit of an end of a documentary I saw…’

‘Yeah, yeah, bet you saw the whole…’

‘No, seriously, when you were at your evening class. There was this Russian woman who had to sweep the streets from ten thirty at night till four in the morning and she only got paid three quid for it. We don’t know we’re born,’ Marly added.

‘That’s true,’ agreed David and then quickly, ‘I love you,’ because it was his job, he felt, to nip things in the bud, to bring her back before she was anywhere near close to the brink. ‘I think you’re marvellous.’

‘Am I?’ she cried, falling as always – childishly eager – into the trap. ‘In what way am I marvellous?’

David put his finger to his chin as if pondering the question for the first time. ‘Every way. Ironing shirts, washing socks…’

‘Horrid!’

He laughed and opened his arms wide. ‘You’re beautiful and soft and gentle and,’ stupidly, ‘you’re a poor little thing.’

‘I’m alright,’ Marly pushed back at him, sealing up the vulnerability, pleased to hear she was such things yet feeling none of them.

He put the television on then, flicking through the channels with a cumbersome grace, his arms still close about her.

‘You don’t care do you?’ she remonstrated, breaking free, feeling there was still some point or other to be made, that the depth of their discussion wasn’t up for grabs, didn’t warrant the usual crisp-packet-in-the-cinema routine which he employed for effect in moments of high seriousness. ‘D’you want a crisp?’ he’d whispered once, loud and rustling into the dark, tense, tenterhooked silence, much to Marly’s amused embarrassment. ‘D’you want a crisp?’ She eyed him suspiciously now but he was innocent enough, his face sad, angry even.

‘It’s because I care. To distract you. Stop you moping about.’ And it was true he’d turned it on to distract her, as well as himself, from her misery, her unrelenting misery that brought him down, sometimes, as low as she. I work hard all day, he thought, and come back to this.

‘I’m not moping,’ she muttered sulkily, sitting very straight on the sofa and opening her book at ‘Lilian’s Caesarean Section’, tears welling up in her eyes. He’ll never understand, she thought, it’ll never work, and she read a sentence blurrily over and over: ‘I felt I’d missed out on the real thing, having a Caesarean. I felt I’d missed out on the real thing, having a Caesarean. I felt I’d missed out on the real…’

David chuckled and nudged her. She focused even harder on the sentence though her ears, in spite of herself, were listening. ‘I felt I’d missed…’

‘In a tropical jungle like this one,’ came an excited little whisper from the television, ‘bright colours signify genuine nastiness.’ Marly looked up and saw a man in shorts and a Panama hat. ‘But this little humdinger of a treecreeper’s got everything he wants right here under his very nose, a veritable cornucopia right under his nose. Figs! It’s all he eats. He relishes them, can’t get enough of them.’

‘Relishes ’em,’ spluttered David. ‘I bet he’s sick to death of them!’

Marly giggled and put down her book. ‘You’d be off for a slap-up curry,’ she teased, sarcastically enough to sound as if she hadn’t quite given in yet. ‘With ketchup,’ she added.

‘What, what!’ David obliged, being the proprietor of Mariners where he – she never let him forget – had had ketchup with everything. Mariners, where they’d stayed two nights for one of his interviews, where Marly had laughed and smiled at the sea view, the little sachets of hot chocolate, the bourbons and custard creams; and the proprietor who’d looked like a toad, made his own clocks and gone about saying ‘what what’ all the time. ‘“Full English breakfast is it again sir? With ketchup? You’re a brave man sir. What what!”’

‘You scoffed all the custard creams,’ she reminded him delightedly. ‘Remember that china dog on the mantelpiece you said looked like it had worms!’

‘Well, it was the position of its legs,’ David explained for the umpteenth time, knowing how much it amused her. ‘It was uncannily like our old dog Rosie when she slid her bottom….’

‘Yes yes, thank you very much. I think we’ve heard quite enough about that. Mind you,’ Marly’s eyes glimmered, ‘I had a worm remember, when I was little.... It kept sliding back up my…’

David leapt up and ran out of the room, pretending to be horrified at the story.

Marly giggled and he came back in. They sat together in happy silence, holding hands beneath the red sleeping bag and watching television. ‘At least he’s passionate about it,’ Marly said after a while, meaning the man in shorts and a Panama hat. ‘I bet you wouldn’t mind a few students like that.’

‘Well, I don’t know,’ David grimaced. ‘It’s not normal to be keen at their age. I think I prefer Ross Newman’s belching. Honestly, that’s all he does: leans back on his chair with his can of coke and belches!’

‘He doesn’t!’

David perched himself on the edge of the sofa with a dopey expression on his face. ‘“Do we need our books today sir?” Every bleeding lesson he says it. “Do we need our books today sir? Do we need our books on Friday sir?” I said: “Bring ’em anyway, it’ll keep you fit!’’’

Marly rested her head on his shoulder and listened to his anecdotes, knowing he was making an effort and grateful, too, for every last detail of Ross Newman’s belching, of Anton the French teacher who always said ‘Bonjour Class’and whose students ran amok and sent messages to each other on their mobile phones, because these were things that connected her back to a world she was drifting away from further and further each day, swinging out into orbit; and only David’s arms, she sometimes felt, (he being the only one she trusted) could clutch her back.

They read their books after that, drifting off into other worlds yet side by side beneath the red sleeping bag, shoulder to shoulder, thigh to thigh, heartbeat almost to heartbeat, nodding off now and then like an old married couple or stopping just to peek at where the other was at. This was Marly’s refuge, her retreat from a world that lay beyond the confines of their cramped little rundown flat, where the rats played and the green mould grew. She sat reading books amidst the refuse of her life, books she’d read as a child over and over, dear and familiar like a pair of old shoes, the woman who lived in a shoe. Trying to regain a part of herself she’d lost, a part that had burnt out, died. Striving to resurrect herself, ghostly, in those ridiculous too-tight shoes. Whittling time away to bone washed up on ancient beaches, to daylight dimmed in the eye of an ant. There was no need for any other, no world to let in here. If I could shoot the world to bits, she sometimes thought, we might just make it.

She wrote that night in her gratitude diary:

Saw a ball like an old moon.Slept ok.Didn’t check cheek.D told me about R. Newman.I am alive.

She always wrote ‘I am alive’ for number five, not because she was always grateful for being alive, but because she thought that if she didn’t, something worse might happen.

Three

She had one of her nightmares that night. It started off pleasantly enough – they always did – with her and David skimming stones from the pebbly bank of a swollen river, the softly slanting rain dribbling down their noses and between their toes. The river was brown and swirling bric-a-brac, dead wood and submarinating trolleys; and on the sandy bank opposite was a little forked set of bird-prints, like arrows. (When you saw only one set of prints, came a voice in her head, that was when I carried you.) ‘Here’s a good flat one,’ said David. ‘Try that.’ And she flung the stone bouncing – once, twice, thrice – across to the sandy shore, like an India rubber or little superball. ‘What must we be to the fish,’ she decided, all knowing and omnipotent, ‘in their watery mirror but glowing ghosts or wide-awake trees’; and she spread her arms wide in an arc to encompass the small green field by the pebbly bank and said to David with great serenity or was it solemnity: ‘I shall grow vegetables here. It will be like a garden of Paradise. There will be birds and flowers and all beautiful things. All bright and beautiful things.’

‘You’re a bright and beautiful thing,’ he replied, holding her, before turning into a small flat stone in her hands which she flung bouncing – once, twice, thrice – across to the sandy shore, like an India rubber or little superball.

And then she turned, herself, into a short fat farmer from Idaho and said to herself (for she was both the short fat farmer as well as the painted lady hovering in front of his nose in search of cabbages): ‘you’ll grow no watermelons here no more. I used to grow 30lb Jack in the Beanstalk watermelons afore the river changed its malignant course.’

And she saw, with her own eyes, that the top of the precious field, where she was to grow all the bright and beautiful things, had been nibbled away by the hungry river, great clods and chunks of earth – still growing grass and golden buttercups – sitting halfway down the animal’s throat; and the beach where they’d skimmed stones was really the great naked pebbly belly revealed as the beast swerved out again. ‘How disgusting,’ she said as the sweet-toothed Ivy sped down with the current on a little dead wood tree, her arms flailing. ‘You, you,’ she pointed and screamed. ‘Left mammary. Your fault.’ And her father’s purple fingers curled up through the dead wood branches, like some maleficent river god making a grab at its pretty queen.

She screamed in her sleep and woke up sweating and clinging on to the last few shreds of the dream. How ridiculous to feel such agony in such a thing as a dream. How ridiculous the mind can be, she thought, and lay trembling and watching the headlights of cars as they passed like illuminating beacons across the curtains. ‘I hope it is cancer,’ she remembered herself saying so many years ago in a similar room, enraged little fists pumping the pillow of a toy bed by a toy chair, toy bookcase, toy Tobermory lamp. How she wished she could get up now, touch every last poster – Duran Duran, Blondie, Adam Ant, Spandau Ballet – and make it alright again. That magical sequence of cause and effect and that perfect little ego at the core of it. Believing, in those days, that touching posters, watching magpies and stepping on lines could alter an iota, a destiny; a life even. Stranger still to think that these things lingered in the adult mind, mushroomed, even though no longer believed in; the ego so battered by cause and effect that it clung on to the slightest, littlest, remotest hope that it still had control of cause and effect through the arbitrariness of magpies, posters and stepping on lines – though Ivy, of course, had died. No amount of stuffing cushions into covers could keep her soul in place. Bleak news, I’m afraid, the doctor had said. (They were always afraid.) She’s got five years at most. What a lot of rot they talked! She’d gone on for ages after that – the everlasting Ivy, the sweet-toothed Ivy, the one-breasted Ivy. Stuffing marshmallows into her neck until they oozed out of her globulous eyelids. Biting into her marshmallow arms, even her marshmallow legs. Delusional, hallucinatory; sinking slowly in fits and starts – a death of agonising slowness bit by bit – into that banquet of bluebells. Better to go, Marly decided, touching posters in her head, in one fell swoop; and the cells proliferated like the fungi in the bathroom, the rats in the kitchen, giving each other a leg up. UB40. What am I gonna do? Sign on. See Terry. What am the fuck I gonna do?

She woke David up then, before her thoughts spun too far out; and told him about the dream, exaggerating details here and there to justify having woken him.

‘Typical!’ he muttered, smiling sleepily, the tip of his aquiline nose (how like her mother’s) and the whites of his eyes just visible in the strangely illuminating darkness. ‘That’s all I am to you, a stone, to be flung across a river.’

‘Don’t be stupid,’ she replied crossly, sitting up. ‘It was horrible.’

He kissed the top of her head to show that he under­stood and said: ‘I had a strange dream too. Rasputin was after me – I was running like a maniac round the launderette – and then I had this brilliant idea of hiding in his havers…’

‘Let’s just go,’ she interrupted, suddenly clutching his arm. ‘Anywhere. Away from here.’

‘Anywhere,’ he agreed with a mock shudder, ‘to get away from that nutter. Honestly, he was shouting…’

‘No, really. We could, you know. Somewhere by the sea. I’d be well, I think, by the sea. I could work again; you could find a job.’

‘What, like Bonnie and Clyde,’ he suggested with a touch of sarcasm. ‘Start robbing banks?’

Marly sighed and felt herself detaching from the man at her side, the man who loved her, cared for her, did almost everything for her, except go along with her dreams; and her mind dropped (as it too often did) like an injured animal, into its cold, dark, lonely lair while the rest of her carried on with the daylight. ‘It doesn’t matter,’ she said impassively. ‘You’ve got no soul anyway.’

‘And you’ve got no head,’ he responded lightly, kissing the top of it again before adding in a softer tone: ‘I love you, you know, Marly stole some barley Smart! I think you’re magnificent.’

She lay without responding in the comforting warmth of his arms, listening to his words in the soft cocoon of his weaving, snug as a bug in a small green rug; and her mind crept bit by bit, almost reluctantly at first, out of its cold, dark, lonely place until all at once she was there back with him, her wounds wide open for him. ‘I can’t take any more. I can’t… really can’t… take any more,’ she sobbed.

‘I know, my love, I know.’

‘It’s like I’m on this road,’ she babbled, ‘and I can’t turn back. I’m trapped, cornered at the end of it. That’s what it feels like now, that I’ve come to the end of the road – I really have. I can’t see any future,’ her voice trailed off, ‘any future at all….’

‘Yes you can,’ almost sternly. ‘You’re in a tunnel at the moment, that’s all – it’s a blip. It doesn’t mean,’ he added in what Marly called his wise old Gandalf voice, ‘it isn’t daylight outside.’

‘Maybe not; but I can’t see it. That’s the business of the tunnel, not believing there’s anything else, however many times you’ve been through it. People say get help, but you can’t, you’re a vegetable, you can’t even pick up the phone – you’ve seen me. And even if,’ she went on, drilling it in to him, ‘I did believe I could get through it, even if I did believe that, I still know I’ll be back here again and again and again like some sort of stuck record, some sort of sick joke. That in itself,’ she added wearily, ‘is enough to kill me off, the fact that I’ll be here again, that it will go on like this forever.’

It kills me too, David said to himself, clinging on to her as if he might hold her up with his own arms, seeing you like this, dying away a little more each day, no matter what I do. But aloud he said: ‘You don’t know that,’ lightly, gently, because he knew she knew or at least thought she did; but he wanted to hold out a little piece of hope for her to latch on to if she would; and surprisingly, tentatively at first, hands out and palms towards the ceiling in an almost prayer-like gesture, she did.

‘We-ell. I suppose I might be alright, one day. It’s not impossible.’

‘Course you will,’ he leapt in, sensing his advantage. ‘You’ll be fine, one day, see if I’m not right.’

‘I’ll always get depressed though.’

‘Ye-es, you’ll always have that tendency, but you’ll deal with it better, that’s the thing. It won’t happen so often and you’ll have better coping mechanisms.’

‘Maybe I’ll have children,’ she cried then, almost wildly, hands clutching the sheet. ‘Live by the sea?’

He kissed her warmly. ‘Course we will. Think of some names,’ he added, knowing how much she liked thinking of names.

‘John,’ without hesitating. ‘John’s a good, strong, masculine name.’

‘I’m rather keen on Neville myself. Neville’s got a good sort of ring to it.’

‘Neville!’ she spluttered.

‘And Petunia. Petunia’s a good name…’ but he had lost her again to the stillness – that strange stillness that came over her when she was leaving him – and the faraway look in her eyes. ‘Petunia,’ he repeated, nudging her.

She gave a bitter little laugh. ‘Who am I trying to kid? I can’t even look in the mirror.’ And she added, as if suddenly remembering, though he knew she’d simply been resisting the temptation to ask: ‘How’s my cheek?’ and thrust her face, tongue stuck out to see if it hurt, towards him.

‘It’s fine,’ he assured her. ‘Perfectly fine.’

‘You can’t see in this dark,’ she reproached him; and he thought for one horrible moment she was going to take him round to the landing light where he stood, often for minutes on end, squinting, staring, straining his eyes to see some imaginary or minuscule growth or blemish that had suddenly come up on the side of her cheek. (Was it like that yesterday? Is it worse than that thing I had in Birmingham? Will it go?) ‘I’ve got magic eyes remember,’ he smiled.

‘Will it go?’ she insisted.

‘Course it’ll go. It’s saying‘Au revoir la monde’ this very moment!’ He waved his hand in a comical gesture above the sheet.

‘La monde.’ she half laughed. ‘You sure?’

‘Hundred per cent.’

‘Positive?’

‘Posidrive. Your Uncle Dave’s got magic eyes remember.’

‘I remember,’ she sighed; and he, trying to steer the impatience out of his voice (for fear, at this time of night, of the endless and inevitable recriminations and accusations on her part, cajolings and reassurances on his if he didn’t), said quite firmly, ‘Honestly, it’s fine,’ but some nuance must have escaped or betrayed him, at least in her imagination, for she turned quite suddenly and violently away from him towards the wall, childishly dragging the blanket along with her.

He lay there, partially uncovered, gazing a little abstractedly at the stars Marly had pasted to the ceiling and arguing the toss whether to turn round and comfort her. It flickered through his head that he had GCSE coursework to mark in the morning, and he thought for the first time how oddly the stars were arranged: great clusters then nothing, great clusters then nothing and he began systematically to straighten them out in his mind’s eye, each and every one, until they lay more evenly spread. She was making little mewing noises now, strange huffs and snorts that meant (at least he always thought they meant) he should turn round and comfort her; but he lay quite still, cold and gazing at the stars. How stupid that little one looks, he thought angrily, alone and peeping over the wall like that. No spatial awareness, she’s got no spatial awareness at all; and he thought, at that moment, how close he came to hating her sometimes with her proud little head turned away and her little legs thrashing to keep herself warm. (Cold hands, warm heart, he’d said to her once, but it wasn’t true. She was vicious and pitiless as ice inside too, a splintered, fractured chip off an old, hard, glinting and very dangerous glacier.) But he knew, at the same time, that this feeling close to hatred was simply the obverse of his love for her, the same coin, the same feeling. It never went, it never went, stubborn as mud that love never left him, that feeling. It would go on, he thought now, to eternity, until his bones were dry; and it boomed suddenly in his head, reverberating like the acoustics in an empty room, that he loved her, that she was suffering and, that being all that mattered, he turned, enfolded her in his arms and said fiercely in a challenge to the dark and the doubts that surrounded them: ‘I love you Marly. I love you terribly. I always have and I always will.’

And she, hearing the echoes in his mind, spun round almost as violently as she’d turned away from him and nestled her head to his chest, her voice coming up strangely muffled, as muffled as his had been echoing: ‘How much?’

He pondered a while, drawing inspiration from the ceiling. ‘See the distance from the earth to every single star in the galaxy?’

‘Yeah?’

‘Multiply that by infinity and you’ve got it!’

‘That’s not much!’

‘Why I oughta just…’

‘Will it be alright?’ she interrupted him eagerly.

He cradled her gently in his arms, seeing her now soft, shy and fleeting as a robin or a drop of rain. ‘It’ll be perfect,’ he smiled.

‘Tell me how it’ll be,’ she pleaded, ‘in our cottage by the sea.’