Seahorses Are Real Read Online Free Page A

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.
    â€˜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.’
    â€˜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…’
    â€˜Let’s just go,’ she interrupted, suddenly clutching his arm. ‘Anywhere. Away from here.’
    â€˜Anywhere,’ he agreed with a mock shudder, ‘to get away from that nutter. Honestly, he was shouting…’
    â€˜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.’
    â€˜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