House of Straw

by Marc Scott

  Poppy could hear Matt talking on the telephone as she dried herself off in front of the bathroom mirror. He was clearly in high spirits and his boyish laughter echoed through the hallway. As she brushed through her freshly cleaned hair, she wiped over the steamy mirror. An image appeared. It was an unusual reflection, one she did not see too often. She looked content, she looked almost happy. It had been a good day for Poppy, a rare experience, a very rare experience.

  As Poppy entered the lounge she could see that Matt had opened another bottle of wine. The first one had been devoured almost as soon as they had entered his flat, the empty bottle lying somewhere amongst his sheets on the floor of his bedroom. She knew she would have to drive back to the flat that night and she already had more alcohol in her system than she should have done. But she felt at ease, so accepted Matt’s offer of a large glass of his prized Moobuzz Pinot Noir. It would round off a perfect day. Now those were words you would not find too often in Poppy’s diary.

  ‘Your hair smells nice,’ Matt said stroking some of the falling strands of her mane back behind her ears.

  ‘I used your shampoo,’ she replied. ‘The one in the red bottle. It was very rich, I used it all up. It is all gone now.’

  Matt was not fooled. ‘I only bought that last week, not even you would use that much shampoo in one go,’ he said. Poppy enjoyed a large mouthful of her wine. ‘Mmmm, I always think this wine tastes better when it’s stolen,’ she teased.

  Matt was quick to defend himself. ‘I told you before, Danny and I have an arrangement,’ he insisted.

  Poppy was in a playful mood. ‘If you say so, Matt. Oh, and I suppose that fresh salmon in your fridge is part of the same arrangement.’

  Matt laughed. ‘I like seeing you like this, Poppy. You know, relaxed, laughing, cracking ‘unfunny’ jokes.’

  ‘Are you saying I am usually a mardy bitch?’

  ‘Definitely!’ Matt said. ‘Boy oh boy you can be one stroppy cow when you want to be!’

  Poppy shrugged her shoulders and grabbed the bottle to fill her glass up. ‘So, I am just a moody bitch in your eyes now, is that right?’

  Matt laughed, he was in a playful mood. ‘I did think I saw you smile once, but that was probably just indigestion or something.’

  Poppy sneered at his attempt at sarcasm and gave him a playful punch in his ribs. ‘Watch it, Matt, you don’t want to upset me now, do you?’

  Matt felt his side. ‘Mind the bodywork,’ he said. ‘You may want to use this again later.’

  After running her brush through her hair, Poppy decided she needed a cigarette and opened the side door leading onto the balcony. She emptied the remains of the fine wine supplied by Chez Blanc into her glass and sat on the small chair outside. Matt busied himself, tidying up the trail of mess that she had left in the bathroom, before joining her. The sun was setting in the distance and it was peaceful. The happy-go-lucky northerner did not want the day to come to an end. ‘Are you pleased you came to the beach today?’ he asked. ‘I told you it would be fun.’

  ‘It was OK, I suppose,’ Poppy replied, not wanting to share her real take on their trip to the seaside. ‘It was OK if you like that sort of thing.’

  ‘It didn’t take long for the moody bitch to return, did it?’ Matt asked. He knew her well enough by now to know that her ungrateful tongue was somehow a cover for her insecurities. She rarely let her guard down.

  ‘Are you like this with, you know, with your boyfriend?’ Matt asked. Poppy said nothing, she took a long drag on her cigarette. The Geordie lad was not finished with that subject. ‘Why do you put up with it, you know, the beatings? Everyone knows he hits you, Poppy, we have all seen the bruises.’

  She took a large mouthful of her drink. ‘I suppose that I must deserve it sometimes,’ she said. ‘Other times, I don’t even think he knows what he is doing.’

  Matt was determined to give her his opinion on her violent boyfriend. ‘I think he is nothing but a bully, a thug, I don’t know why you just don’t leave him.’

  Poppy let out a loud laugh. ‘And what?’ she said. ‘And move in here with you?’

  Matt immediately began to backtrack. ‘No! I didn’t mean, I meant, you know, just…’

  She laughed at the sudden hint of panic in his voice. ‘Don’t worry, Matt,’ she said. ‘I think you are an OK sort of guy, but I won’t be packing my bags and turning up on your doorstep just yet, you can relax now.’

  Matt smiled at her comment. ‘You know what I mean, Poppy. He is a sick fucker, you can do better than him, you can have a better life than that.’

  Poppy thought carefully before speaking. ‘He is not really that bad, Matt, he can be alright at times. It’s all the gear that fucks him up. I don’t even think he knows what he is on half of the time.’

  ‘So, that is not your problem, leave him, there are plenty of places where he can get help.’

  ‘It’s not that easy. He was there for me, when I came out of prison, he looked after me. There were some nasty people that…’

  Poppy changed the direction of her conversation mid-sentence. ‘I guess I sort of owe it to him, to be there, maybe try to help him if I can.’

  ‘But not to let him beat you black and blue,’ Matt said. ‘That is not helping anyone.’

  Poppy refilled her almost empty wine glass. ‘You don’t understand, Matt. You really don’t understand.’

  She was right, Matt struggled to comprehend why she would defend her boyfriend’s violent outbursts. She tried to explain the best she could. ‘I have been there, just like Cameron. Years ago, I was hooked on everything. I know what it is like.’

  ‘But you got clean,’ Matt said. ‘You sorted yourself out, didn’t you?’

  ‘It was not easy, you can’t stop just like that. You don’t just wake up one morning and find that life is so easy that you can get yourself through it without any help.’

  ‘But you did?’

  Poppy pondered for a few seconds. She wanted to share a chapter of her life that she rarely discussed with anyone. ‘I had a friend, she looked after me, when I came out of prison for the first time. I had nowhere to go, I would have been on the streets, she took me in, she let me stay at her place.’ Poppy smiled as an image of Nikita appeared in her head. ‘She always had this crazy thing going on with her hair, and she was a funny girl, like a little pixie, she was so funny. She had her own thoughts about life, she used to say the craziest things, but I got what she meant, it all made sense to me.’ Poppy thought for a few seconds and took a long sip of her wine. ‘She had been on smack since she was sixteen, but she had got clean, she needed to get off that shit to get her little boy back.’ Matt was intrigued, he had never heard Poppy talk about her past. He let her continue. ‘Her sister had looked after her little boy while she was in rehab. She had to prove she could stay clean before she could have him back.’ Poppy looked at the setting sun as it disappeared into the distance.

  ‘Go on,’ Matt said. ‘So was it her that got you off the drugs?’

  Poppy bit the corner of her lip, very hard. It was obvious that this was not an easy conversation for her. She took another large swig of her wine and sat back in her chair to continue her story. ‘Zain, her son was called Zain, cute little fucker, he was just one year old. One day the Social Services turned up at the high-rise where we lived. Nikita had gone to the shops, to do a bit of thieving, we had no money. But I was there, I was looking after him. They were very angry, the social bods, angry that Nikita had left him with me. I wasn’t even supposed to be living there. I told them she wouldn’t be long, I told them that, but they were still angry.’ Matt thought he knew the reason why, but still asked the question. ‘Were you on something, is that why they were angry?’

  Finishing her drink and swiftly filling her glass again, Poppy answered, ‘I was on sunshine or some sort of methadone shit, I can’t really remember, I was sort o
f halfway down. He wasn’t in any harm, Zain, he was playing with some toy bricks or something. God, she had fought so hard to get him back and I fucked it up for her, it was all my fault.’

  Matt was intrigued now. ‘What happened?’ he asked.

  Poppy looked down into her glass. She could see a reflection of Nikita’s angry face looking back at her. ‘They took Zain away, put him into care until they had a chance to assess her again. She was in bits, he was her whole life. She blamed me, told me that I should never have opened the door. I had never seen her so upset, so down. She wanted to score that night, she needed to get rid of the pain. I told her not to go to the Marfield.’ Poppy looked down at the floor, her lip became to tremble. ‘I fucking begged her not to go there.’

  There was a long pause, this was clearly hard for Poppy, but she continued. ‘Some joggers found her the next morning, in an alleyway at the back of the estate.’

  ‘Dead?’ Matt asked.

  Poppy nodded. ‘She overdosed, she overdosed on brown and it was all down to me.’

  ‘Shit! That must have been really tough.’

  ‘So I did things that…’ Poppy clearly didn’t want to finish the story, but she did. ‘So I ended up back in prison. You don’t really need to know the rest, Matt. I got clean in prison and stayed clean. You didn’t really have much choice in Bronzefield. I haven’t taken anything, not even weed, for nearly five years.’

  ‘But that’s a good thing. You should be proud of yourself for that.’

  ‘She was twenty-one years old, Matt, she was only fucking twenty-one years old, she was just a little kid herself, in a woman’s body. I can never forgive myself, never!’

  He felt like putting his arms around her to comfort her, but instead, Matt opened another bottle of wine and topped up her glass. Poppy was still in deep thought. No doubt remembering that painful experience had played on her emotions.

  ‘But you did the anger management course in there as well. I remember Danny said you used to have, well, like, problems. They helped you, there in Bronzefield, didn’t they?’

  Poppy laughed. ‘Anger management, more like dig out the fucking psychos!’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘The colours, Matt, you must have heard about the calming colours bullshit?’

  ‘Colours?’

  ‘So, every time you lose your rag and you feel like you want to belt someone, you think of other things to take your mind away to a better place.’

  ‘Colours?’ Matt asked again.

  ‘Yeah, you know, the sky is so blue, the sun is warm and yellow, the grass is so fucking green, the water is so calming. The bods in white coats tell you to think of a place where you feel safe, then think of the colours and ‘Hey presto!’ you don’t feel angry anymore.’

  ‘Did it help?’ Matt asked. ‘Did you remember a safe place?’

  Poppy thought for a few seconds and then shook her head. ‘No, I have never really felt safe anywhere. Everywhere I have ever lived has been like a house of straw.’

  Matt didn’t understand. ‘A house of straw?’

  ‘You know, like the first little pig, I was always in the house of straw, just waiting for the next big bad wolf to come and take everything away.’

  ‘So, there was no safe place at all?’

  The conversation was now beginning to take its toll on Poppy. The excessive amount of wine she had consumed in such a short space of time was beginning to affect her emotions. Matt could see she was becoming a little agitated by his questions now and decided to lighten the conversation. ‘So, in true gung-ho Poppy style, you told them to shove their colours up their arse, and that there was no safe place.’

  ‘The boating lake!’ Poppy replied, shaking her head. ‘I told them that the boating lake was my safe place. I had to tell them something.’

  Matt looked puzzled by her remark, but Poppy explained. ‘If I had said there was no safe place they would have done more of their crazy tests, so I told them that it was the boating lake. My ‘dad’, if that’s what you can call him, he used to take me there, every month, when I was six or seven years old. I told the assessors at Bronzefield that I could see the lake and that it was very peaceful there. I could see all of their fucking calming colours, right in front of me.’

  ‘And did they believe you?’

  ‘Yes, of course they did. They patted themselves on the back. They thought, Hey, she gets all the shit about the colours and the safe place, don’t put her in a straightjacket, not just yet anyway.’

  Matt laughed. ‘If I didn’t know you better, Poppy, I would think you really were insane.’

  Poppy pulled a couple of faces at him and finished her drink. ‘I have to go for a wazz,’ he said. ‘There are some snacks in the fridge if you are still hungry. Let’s keep talking, Poppy, I want to hear more about you and those men in the white coats.’

  Poppy checked the time on her mobile phone. ‘I will have to go soon,’ she said.

  ‘Sure,’ the cheeky northerner replied. ‘I guess you will need to get some rest after today.’

  Poppy was quick to respond. ‘Ha fucking ha,’ she said. ‘You really think that you are some sort of stud, don’t you, Matt?’

  The beaming smile returned to his face as he headed for the bathroom. ‘I don’t get many complaints!’

  Poppy could not resist the chance to bring down his ego a notch or two. ‘Five out of ten, Matt,’ she shouted. ‘Six at best!’

  * * *

  Alone with her thoughts Poppy began to regret talking so openly to Matt that evening. Maybe it was the excessive alcohol or the fact that she had just felt so at ease after such a good day out. The sex had been incredible. Maybe she trusted him with her darkest thoughts because he had made her feel so good in bed. A crazy notion went through her head for a few seconds – maybe Joe Manning should try that technique, giving her an earth-moving orgasm before each weekly session. That might loosen her up, she would finally answer all those awkward questions he kept asking her. But then an image appeared in her head, a picture of an overweight and ageing black man clambering up and down on top of her whilst reciting verses from the Bible. Suddenly, that idea did not seem like such a good one after all.

  She was pleased that Matt had left the room, she had been finding it impossible to find the pause button to lock in her emotions. She felt that she had already said far too much, she began to feel slightly vulnerable. Deep down she knew that she had not been lying about the boating lake, that it really had felt safe there. She thrived on those regular trips with her dad. He had been a proper father in those days. The sun was always shining when they visited the lake. The sky was always blue when they were floating around in their small boat, sometimes for hours and hours at a time. He would make up funny names for the people in the other boats. ‘Captain Stripey’ and ‘Captain Hooknose’ were her favourites. Those two characters always seemed to be at the lake when they were there. Their boat would race against every other vessel on the water. Her dad’s big strong arms and determination meant that they never lost a race. At the end of the day they would always go into the pavilion at the side of the lake. She would laugh loudly at his crazy impressions of the ladies serving in there. ‘Treats for the winners,’ he would shout when they entered the pavilion and she would be allowed to pick any ice cream she wanted. She always chose the same flavour, mint, smothered with chocolate sauce and covered with hundreds and thousands. They would laugh all day at the lake. She felt she could have stayed there forever. Yes, at the boating lake the sky was always blue, the sun shone all day, everything was peaceful, she really did feel safe there. But now that all seemed like it was so many years ago, she never knew why everything had to change.

  When she was first placed into the care home he promised her that everything would be OK. He told her that he needed a week or two to ‘sort himself out’. There were always excuses: he had a ne
w job lined up, he would be getting a new house for them to live in, he had a hospital appointment. He assured her that her mother would come back home and soon they would all be a happy family again. She was only eight years old, he was her dad, she believed every word he said. But he never kept that promise, it was one of a thousand promises he never kept. He visited her, every week at first, then a couple of times each month. He was always late, but that was her dad, she knew that he never turned up on time for anything. But before long he only visited every other month and then just on her birthday and at Christmas. He usually brought gifts, a few badly wrapped cheap bits and pieces that he had found in a discount store, usually meant for a child much younger than she was. She often asked, but was never allowed, to stay with him. He used to say that things were ‘complicated’. He always said it was best to wait until he had sorted out the new home, then everything would be good again.

  As time went on Poppy realised that there was no new home, she realised that there would be no more trips to the boating lake, no more ice cream, and as for her mother, she was afraid to even start thinking about what had really happened to her mother. The clearest memory of her childhood would always be the day that the Baxter brothers locked her in that small dark cupboard in the kitchen at the Bluebridge home. How she thought she would never get out, she thought she was going to die in there. She screamed and screamed so loudly, but nobody heard her. She remembers being so frightened, terrified of dying, that she wet her knickers. All she wanted that day was for her father to come, to grab her in his arms and take her out of that terrible place. They could go to their boating lake and he could use those big strong arms to row and row and keep rowing. To row to the other side of the world, just anywhere, but not that place. She never ever wanted to go back to that cupboard, never to go back to that home, not to that life, ever again. But he never came, and soon after that day, he never came back at all.

  That was the last time Poppy could ever remember crying. What was the point of getting upset and shedding all those wasted tears when there is nobody there to hold you tight and tell you that everything would be alright? After her terrible experience at Bluebridge, Poppy knew that her life would never be alright again.