Seahorses Are Real by Zillah Bethell Page B

Irrational my foot! Well, of course, she was a woman wasn’t she, they were bound to be; men, on the other hand, were deeply logical – David had taught her that – with their statistics, their percentages, their little Venn diagrams. Women were weathercocks, chameleons, what about daggers at dawn – how rational was that – for the hand of a fair lady? Men! Huh! The word was a joke. She spat on it, rolled it into a ball, then flicked it somewhere for someone to tread on.
    â€˜Not so many. I still look at my cheek a lot – I feel most of the time like a piece of trash – and the kettle has to be switched off.’
    His mouth twitched again but his forehead frowned. He consulted a book for a moment in silence then jotted one or two things down while Marly stared blankly out of the bay window, feeling a bit like a goldfish. Then he got up, went over to the suitcase and tapped a few pills from a vial into a small brown envelope; she didn’t bother asking what they were any more, she just sat there accepting, taking her medicine, hoping, despite all, against hope that they would help. ‘These’ll make you feel bright and shiny,’ he told her, licking up the envelope.
    She gave him the money David gave her to give him.
    â€˜Now remember,’ he admonished her, helping her on with her raincoat, ‘don’t make any rash decisions. Take a holiday!’ His arms waved airily like twigs in a dry wind. ‘Enjoy yourself! That plant of yours,’ he added, ‘is flowering again, after a barren patch it’s got some blooms.’
    Pushing her arm through the elasticated sleeve, she eyed him suspiciously, not trusting him an inch, thinking he was saying it to make her think she would be flowering again, blooming again after a barren spell. ( To a Wild Rose, Romance sans Paroles. Flowers for a flower, he said; and his heart went like a piccolo. )
    â€˜I am glad,’ she said with nervous animation, fingering the brown envelope in her pocket; and she made her way to the stained-glass porch, reminding the little girl (who was still reading Black Beauty ) as she went, about the Black Stallion series, with a faintly ridiculous waggle of the head.

Six
    It was cold outside; and a yellow wind blew hard from the factory, or was it Littlebrook D, Marly didn’t know exactly. All she knew was that the sharp east wind brought the smell of burnt toast along with it and now, ridiculously, the echoing sounds of ‘Yankee Doodle Dandy’ from an ice-cream van. It stopped a little short of macaroni. It always did. You never heard the whole thing; only snatches of ‘Greensleeves’, ‘Doodle Dandy’ and sometimes ‘Danny Boy’ – what a tiny repertoire they had, to be sure – as if the van had come to a halt in the fog and yellow wind and the song had melted away into the ice creams. She thought about the girl with the little freckled nose and wondered if she played the recorder. That was probably an irrational thought. ‘Enjoy yourself’ she muttered, kicking a few leaves off the pavement and wanting to shout ‘Bloom’ at them. It was alright for him with his blueberry muffins, his peppermint tea, his bright red car and his very own pet star. Didn’t he realise she was on the verge of suicide? Didn’t he realise she could kill herself in a trice? It was no laughing matter, his mouth twitching away like that. Did he think she hadn’t seen him? She pulled her hood close and shuffled on down Miskin Road, past her landlady’s house – what a monstrous spectacle of extension and accumulation and they couldn’t even provide a decent Hoover – and peering up now and again through the half-hearted trees at the pale blue tower where David worked. She imagined him leaning out of his pale blue tower and waving at her; but of course he wasn’t. He was probably hidden away in the prep room off the maths