Seahorses Are Real Read Free

David – it was a ritual – as she bent over.
    â€˜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.’
    â€˜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, to participate 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!
    â€˜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.
    â€˜You’re a poor little thing,’ he said, smiling a little between forkfuls.
    â€˜I am a poor little thing. And the sooner you realise it the better.’
    â€˜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….’
    â€˜Caught a bit,’ scoffed David. ‘You had a lovely old time of it, sprawled out here with your feet up.’
    â€˜No I didn’t,’ indignantly, ‘I told you I was up the cemetery.’
    â€˜I know,