Seahorses Are Real (27 page)

‘What are you on about? What's the matter?'

‘Nothing's the matter. Nothing's the matter except for the fact you like looking at things.'

‘What things? What things am I meant to be looking at?' He sat forward on the sofa. ‘I always seem to be looking at things, I'm surprised I've got time to do anything else.'

‘Well, if you can't remember it means you don't even know what you're doing, which is even worse, you just can't help yourself.'

‘Go on then. Go on, tell me. What am I meant to have been looking at this time?'

She stood still, staring at the torn and tattered world map hanging off the wall. Would she ever get to Novorosysk, Corsica, Shangri-la? Of course she wouldn't. She'd end up at the Limes, feeding the likes of Rasputin, Waltzing Matilda, Pegleg Pete and Leslie Finch. How fitting! ‘That girl,' she mumbled at last, ‘by the badges.'

‘What girl? What're you on about?'

‘You know, that girl by the badges on the way out, after the horses.'

His brow creased. ‘I don't remember any bloody girl by the badges. I remember there were some silly buggers blocking the way.'

‘Tall, dark-haired, looking at the t-shirts.'

‘I haven't got a clue what you're on about. I know I was going to get you a badge of Siglavy Parhelion. That's all I remember. And then you buggered off.'

She stared at him for a moment. Could she be so wrong? Could she be so completely and utterly wrong?

‘You obviously don't know you're doing it then,' she repeated, ‘Which is even worse, you just can't help yourself.'

He laughed outright then. ‘You're mental, you are. Your head's playing tricks again.'

‘You obviously just can't help yourself,' she insisted.

‘Why do you punish yourself like this all the time?' His voice was almost pitying. ‘Why do you want to hurt yourself like this? Why do you keep hurting yourself?'

‘It's not me hurting myself,' she replied, feeling a little foolish. ‘It's you hurting me, not me....'

She went and sat back down at the table, pretending to look at her book. ‘Pervert,' she whispered, almost as if she were talking to herself. ‘Go and look at all the erotic films you want to. Go and look at all the women you want to, I don't care.'

In the time it would have taken him to answer, he'd jumped up and pushed her chair back against the wall so that she sat, tipped up, clinging on to the edge of the table with the tips of her fingers. ‘Is that what you want?' he shouted. ‘Would that make you happy?' She could see the saliva on his teeth. ‘Is that the sort of person you want me to be?'

‘So you admit it then?' she muttered, taking one hand off the table to push her glasses up her nose, her cheeks reddening.

‘Or do you want me to poke my eyes out? Should I? Should I? Should I poke my eyes out for you?'

Yes, she whispered to herself. See nothing but me. Wholly, solely dependent on me, though out loud she said: ‘Oh don't be so stupid David.'

He suddenly let the chair go so that she came crashing down, bashing her knee on the side of the table. She flinched, shielded her face, thinking he was going to hit her, but he sat back down on the sofa, put his head in his hands.

‘I can't do this any more,' he said in a voice Marly had never heard before. ‘It's no good... I can't do it.' He kept shaking his head. ‘It's no good... no good any more.'

She sat quite still, her knee throbbing, her heart racing, every fibre of her being intensely aware of his presence, the broken room, even the quality of the light. This little old room where they'd shared so many moments of boredom, love, tenderness, despair. She wanted to believe him. How she wanted to believe him. It was like groping in the dark for a light switch. If only she could believe him everything would be alright....

‘I'm leaving you.'

The words skimmed over her like three little arrows. I'm leaving you, I'm leaving you… and in her head she saw the musical repeat sign, two lines and two dots, two lines and two dots which she always saw, for emphasis, exaggeration, without repetition of the words themselves. I'm leaving you
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He went on into the silence, quickly and brutally.

‘I'll clear out tomorrow night… start packing later on. It's not like it's going to take long.' She stared at him in disbelief.

‘...probably best for both of us… this is killing us both.'

‘You can't.'

He looked at her as though he very well could and would.

‘You can't just drop a bombshell like that. Everything's alright and then you suddenly say you're leaving like that. It doesn't make sense.'

‘You knew it was fucking me up.'

‘Well, you were always alright the next day… whistling... playing your guitar… never communicated the fact that you wanted to leave.'

He sighed. ‘I'm sorry, alright. It's not like I haven't tried. I just didn't realise the scale of the problem.'

Marly bit her lip. She'd feared man's betrayal and she had got it. This was it! She'd been right all along. Men were pigs, men were shits. Oh ho, she'd been justified alright... she'd been justified. ‘You knew I had problems… got depressed... I never hid that from you.'

‘We-ell. Look, I'm sorry for changing, alright. It's not like I haven't tried. I've tried for nearly six years.'

‘It's like you're not accepting me when I'm ill, because I get ill.'

‘But that's not you. It's not really you when you're ill.'

‘Yes it is, it's a part of me.'

‘Look, I'm sorry,' he repeated. ‘It's not like I haven't tried... but it's killing me. D'you know I check my watch every few seconds on my way back from work… in case I'm late.'

Marly laughed then, part nervously, part sarcastically. It seemed such a peculiar remark to make and hardly relevant to the argument. ‘Oh dear, oh dear, I'm so sorry... so why did you make all those promises if you can't see them through?'

He sat and stared out the window, lining things up with his eyes no doubt.

‘Why did you say all that stuff about loving me, looking after me, if you couldn't see it through? The slightest little problem and you're off like a blue-arsed fly. I was alright before you came along.'

‘No you weren't.' He shook his head vehemently.

‘Yes I was. I was doing alright. And then you come along and say all those things and I stupidly believe them. I should have known better.'

‘Okay, I'm a shit. You'd be better off without me.'

‘Fine,' she agreed. ‘You are. Go on then.' She kicked a letter on the floor that had obviously come from Anne and Michael effing Angelo. ‘Go back to Wales – it seems to be the be all and end all for your family. Go and sit in your valley where it rains and it's safe and you don't have any problems. Go and find some happy little woman – Bronwen or Myfanwy or whatever it is they're called over there – have your two happy little kids, grow your fucking happy rhubarb... it's obviously what you want.'

He sat, his head in his hands, and didn't respond.

She shut up then for a while, fidgeted with her pen, her book, stared into space, stared back at the desk. Her gratitude diary sat beside the lamp, overflowing with anticipation for the Lipizzaner concert. Oprah Winfrey would be proud of her… all those spiritual psychological gurus. Ha ha. What was it Terry had said? You're lucky you've got someone like David who's going to be there. Ha ha. How ironic!

(
Above us the stars will shine, Radames said to celestial Aïda. Ironic as it turned out – they ended up in a crypt.
)

The ramifications of his leaving were immense – her head went into a spin just thinking about it.... She wondered if Jason was listening in, down below in his underworld kingdom, listening in for all he was worth or cooking himself a pizza or peering through his optical lenses at Pandora's Box. The ramifications of his leaving were immense.

‘I know I provoke you,' she admitted in the end, tentatively, quite rationally. ‘There's no question that I provoke you… but the way you react... you're worse than I am. The problem is you don't communicate, you bottle stuff up and then you explode. You can't just bracket stuff off in your head and think it'll stay there.'

He looked at her, his eyebrows raised, as if to say ‘you can talk'.

‘You need some sort of counselling. Maybe you should go to Terry as well. Two for the price of one!' She flashed a grin in his direction and he smiled back weakly. There was no way he was leaving her. Love you forever, he'd said. Always and forever, he'd said. Just like one of those fizzy loveheart sweets. ‘I reckon you're worse than I am now. I'm getting better and you're getting worse.'

‘Yes,' he uttered despairingly and she turned to him in surprise. He had his head in his hands again; and he reminded her of a little boy at primary school – the toughest boy in the school – who'd sat for a whole day with his head in his hands. Nobody could get a word out of him. Everyone tried, even the headmaster. Something terrible had obviously happened at home and he sat the whole day with his head in his hands, without uttering a word, a cry, even a whimper. He'd ended up in Borstal a few years later, for nicking cars.

‘Anyway,' she went on quickly, ‘you can't leave... cos I'm just starting a job!'

‘What job?'

‘At the Limes… a week on Monday. I'll probably be getting Rasputin's grub on for him.'

‘Poor bastard!' David smiled grimly. ‘You want to ask him why he goes round shouting all the time!'

Marly gave a wild exaggerated laugh out of nervous relief. Every argument they had was The End and they always began again. Why should this one be any different?

‘Oh yeah, I'm really going to do that aren't I? Hey Rasputin, my boyfriend wants to know why you go around shouting!'

‘You've never called me that before,' David remarked wistfully.

‘Well, you are aren't you... my boyfriend?'

He turned away and looked out the window again, lining things up with his eyes no doubt. ‘And you want to ask him why he wears that tiny pink haversack. I mean it's not like he can get any shopping in it!'

She giggled uproariously. Everything would go on as always, the two of them together in their little rundown flat. Everything would be alright. She jumped up, ran over and knelt in front of him, grasped his hand. ‘You're not really leaving are you,' she pleaded. ‘I'd die without you... I'll be well soon, I'm sure of it. You're not really leaving are you?'

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After what seemed like an eternity, he squeezed her hand and shook his head; the grim little smile still playing about his lips.

Eighteen

It had all gone very wrong. He didn't know how exactly or why, but he knew it was out of his control. He lay, his arms wrapped about her, staring at the stars she had pasted to the ceiling: some of them clumped together, some of them all alone. No spatial awareness, she had no spatial awareness at all. The cars zoomed past the window, their headlights criss-crossing the pattern of the curtains like laser beams. He counted the space between them. On average it was thirty seconds. He saw by the alarm clock that it was a quarter to two.

The world had spun on its axis. Everything was topsy-turvy and for all he knew he might as well have been in Timbuctoo. What was life, after all, but a series of geographical locations in your head. Marly was right. There were places to be happy, to be sad, places to visit, places that existed, whether you wanted them to or not, like Manchester or the Arc de Triomphe. You might be on safari in Kenya, she had said, and suddenly find yourself marching under the Arc de Triomphe in your camouflage jacket. Or boarding a plane to Tahiti and suddenly there you are in the middle of Manchester wearing a bikini! Was this the dark tunnel she had spoken of? This feeling that life would go on and on, stretch on into the distance like a Sunday afternoon, that if you disappeared down a manhole no one would care, notice, miss you.

This feeling of dread, of shame. Was this life? Is this how life felt? Home? Where was it? Was this it? Was this how home felt? As a child it had felt like warmth, noise, safety, frustration; so safe, in fact, that he had declared his bedroom to be an independent state, much to his father's bemusement. Those who enter, he had written on the door, do so at their own risk! Now he might as well have written on the door: Nation at War – each of them in their own place, their own geographical location, defending it for dear life. He saw by the alarm clock it was just gone two.

He got up, gently lifting her delicate arms from about his waist. She slept soundlessly, other than the occasional whimper, like a small defenceless animal. Marly! A wave of love and pain shot through him as if someone had stabbed him right in the heart. He pulled the blanket up high around her long cold neck, left her sleeping under her bottle-top stars; and went out into the kitchen. It was cold, dark, eerily silent in the flat. He helped himself to some chocolate and an apple, munching stolidly in the pokey room. He wandered through to the sitting room and stared out of the window. The cars were going past on an average of thirty-five seconds. Slowing down. A man walked by under a street lamp, holding a beer can, and he thought for a moment it was his old friend Christopher Prosser from school. Surely not! He looked again, moving quickly to the other side of the window. Of course it wasn't! Christopher Prosser was back in Wales, never left for that matter, married with kids, had gotten very fat (according to his mother), worked in Peacocks on the managerial side. That guy was just a guy going home from the pub. Home! This was it... Christopher Prosser married with kids! Christopher Prosser who'd pissed in the hatstand at primary school and danced round the schoolyard singing: