Seahorses Are Real by Zillah Bethell

of the Blue Danube? My piano teacher used to get very close and talk about murders and bargains. ) She took off her glasses from vanity or habit, folding them up in her lap, and everything became very vague like an impressionist painting. She knew there was a book of dreams on the table in front of her, described and interpreted Victorian style and a variety of cards from well-wishers and grateful patients; somewhere to her left, a suitcase filled with pills and poisons in differing potencies with strange names like Belladonna, Pulsatilla, Sepia and Natrum Mur; and best of all, on the wall opposite, a picture of a woman with a row of children behind her, all in the shape of a cross – the woman being the stem of the cross, the children its arms. Marly liked the picture very much. The woman had green eyes; and it reminded her of something out of a dream or a memory.
    â€˜How have you been?’ Terry asked, settling himself into his black leather chair and smiling kindly.
    Marly hesitated, staring at his bad gangster face with a myopic eye and wondering what to say. Sometimes she told him things quite unconnected with her illness, though never the whole story, never the full picture, despite his air of having heard it all before. She had a feeling he was more interested in affairs of the heart than in bowels and stools, headaches and depressions, his own having been quite broken as a young man near Wormwood Scrubs. He had an unflurried ease about him, as though he’d been surprised long ago, many times, and had now grown calm on a surfeit of wonderdom. And yet, she always thought, he also gave the impression of regarding the world with a perpetually raised eyebrow, like a newborn, as if to say that although he’d been here countless times and knew his way around the block, he was willing, even eager, to try it again by another route. ‘I’m learning too,’ he sometimes said, much to Marly’s dismay.
    â€˜Alright,’ she replied a little reluctantly. ‘I’m thinking of moving.’
    â€˜Oh?’ He sounded surprised. ‘When?’
    â€˜After Christmas. Somewhere by the sea.’ And she added inanely into the lengthening silence, as if it might make a difference: ‘I love the sea. I was born by the sea.’
    â€˜Have you discussed it with David?’
    â€˜Oh yes. He knows I love the sea. He’s always known I wanted to move.’
    â€˜Only, if you don’t discuss it properly,’ Terry went on mildly, ‘it could cause devastation.’
    Marly smiled at the word. ‘Oh, he doesn’t like the idea of course, but he’ll go along with it for my sake. He’s very supportive. He just wants me to be well.’ The implication being, of course, that she would be well far away from the noise and traffic, fumes and pollution. I even had a dream, she wanted to say, where I was skiing down the slopes at Val d’Isère, in a bikini made out of sugar and exhaust, my hair different every time – though she’d never been skiing in her life before.
    â€˜Well, just so long as you talk it through together.’
    â€˜Oh yes.’ Marly dismissed it as a given.
    â€˜I nearly went to New Zealand,’ he confided suddenly, the way he did sometimes, ‘but I got married and moved to Orpington….’ He shrugged his shoulders. ‘Sometimes I think I’d like to retire to the country but my wife says it’s a bad idea, we have our friends here, our work. What’s the point? Seems a shame, after building something up for twenty years, to let it all go and start again somewhere else.
    â€˜Yes,’ Marly nodded, a little uninterested, thinking he was an idiot to stay twenty years in a place like this and thinking, too, that June, his wife, was evidently a meddler, too busy with her candyfloss and wok.
    â€˜How about having a holiday by the sea?’ he suggested then. ‘It’s not so