Poppyland

by Raffaella Barker

  ‘But it’s important to have things to look forward to. Will you come? Please? Grace?’ Lucy’s inability to be silent chimes with her hopes.

  I move to the window, rest my head against the cool glass. Blocks of light make a modernist pattern across the façade of the warehouse buildings opposite, and beyond it, trickling between the sprawl of bricks and concrete to the Hudson River. Even the back end of Brooklyn in the snow – like all of New York almost all of the time – is familiar to me from films before it ever became familiar through my own existence there. One of the things that has kept me here is the unique unreality of living somewhere I know so well through other people’s interpretation of it. I sometimes feel I don’t even need to have my own experience of living in New York; someone is sure to have a better one which I can borrow, and I like the impermanence of that. I don’t belong here, and for now that suits me. Sometime, though, I hope I will find somewhere I do belong. And someone I belong with. A huddle of clothing steps out of a door and down some steps just across from my window. Once on the sidewalk the bundle develops limbs and begins mechanically to shovel a mound of snow, stiff at first, but warming to the task until movement takes over and the figure bends, scoops, throws and bends again in a graceful flow like the articulated illustrations in a flick book of an animated cartoon.

  ‘Grace?’ Lucy is too impatient to ever hold on to a silence. She can’t resist speaking first; she will always say anything to fill a gap. She isn’t moody, so she doesn’t need silence.

  Even playing Hide and Seek as a child she was always the first to say, ‘I give up, here I am.’ Lucy isn’t convinced anyone is listening if they aren’t talking. It makes phone calls a bit of a problem for her.

  ‘Yes. I’m here, I was just thinking.’ My reflection is visible in the window, faint like the moon when it is out in the day, my bare arm a wishbone on the glass.

  ‘God, I remember the summers in Norfolk when we were little. We used to go for tea with Aunt Sophie after picnics. I can remember going to pick cucumbers from those frames she made from bales of straw and panes of glass.’ Shutting my eyes takes me there and I am six years old again. ‘I can even remember the smell.’ And the smell of the house, a mixture of lime marmalade and some kind of wax floor polish which I don’t suppose anyone uses now.

  ‘I forgot about the cucumbers. We used to make sandwiches with her. Do you remember, Luce?’ The hall floor was made of wood bricks, or that’s what we thought they were called, and we used to slide in our socks on it when Mum was late, polishing the wood for Aunt Sophie as we waited for her to come to pick us up. It was nice at Aunt Sophie’s, she talked about Dad. Then we had to go home. I have a lump in my throat and it is everything I thought I had forgotten. The taste of my childhood; a mixture of toast and cigarette smoke, dust burning in the chimney and the salt of tears is in my mouth as if it were now. There is more than the lovely times with Aunt Sophie that I remember about being six. The rest of it is different and I was terrified. But with the terror I can also still almost taste my longing – a ceaseless, insistent yearning for it not to be frightening. I would willingly have gone through each day again in the hope that it might be different. And still now I have the same yearning; now it is to have had a happy childhood and a past I could love remembering. When I think about being little now, any salvage seems impossible. I see myself standing on the cliff with Aunt Sophie’s house behind me and I am tiny at the chalk-faced edge. Much too frightened to jump.

  ‘Oh Lucy, I just can’t go back there. I’m sorry.’

  Lucy is unflustered and unsurprised. ‘I knew you would say that. Come on, Sis, if I can bear it, you can. And anyway, everything is better if we both do it. That’s true, isn’t it? It’s always been true.’

  I am agitated now, and I feel nauseous from being on the phone too long.

  ‘Maybe. But no. Shut up, Lucy. You can’t force me to come, you know, I’m grown up now. You’ve got your life there, and that was always on the cards because you found someone who comes from Norfolk. It’s different for me.’

  Lucy’s reply is gentle. ‘Hey there, come on. Calm down, keep your hair on. I don’t want to make you do anything you don’t want to, I just miss you.’

  I press my fingertips against my eyelids and hot tears spill. ‘I miss you too. I’m sorry.’

  ‘Let’s think about it,’ soothes Lucy, and even though she can’t see, I nod, nostalgia flowing, narcotic and frightening, in my head. When I put the phone down I light a cigarette.

  There is no going back to rewrite the past, nor to repaint it, which, for a long time, I thought I could do. Instead, the pictures come like they always did, and some are wild and dark, with the wind pulling apart the neat little winter house we once lived in. Mum and Dad lived in the Old Bake House in a little market town in Suffolk when they met. It looked as though it was working between them from the outside; Dad caught the train to London where he was an auctioneer in a big art firm and Mum looked after her babies. But she was lonely, and she didn’t like being stuck at home with two tiny children. She was too young herself, and she didn’t know how to change her loneliness into domesticity. She slept a lot, and Dad came home late and some nights he didn’t come back at all. Mum slept with us when Dad wasn’t coming back. We had a big sofa in our room and she would bring a quilt and her book and read there in the evenings. Often in the morning she would still be there on the sofa, her glass empty by the open book.

  Dad changed jobs and moved to Norwich and we moved to a gaunt house on the cliffs at Overstrand with a giant pine tree outside it and walls that looked as though pebbles had been thrown on to them by the sea. Doors banged and the wind howled through that house, and Mum was jumpy and sad even though Dad was home most nights. I really only liked home when Dad was there, then Mum could disappear upstairs and it didn’t matter. At weekends he used to take me out into the garden where we would make bonfires and find insects for the aquarium I kept full of twigs and foliage. Once, when I was five, Dad found me a tiny jewel-green frog, under the water butt by the tap in our cliff-top garden.

  ‘He may be a frog now, but that will change,’ I said to Dad, squatting next to him looking at the small creature, jewel-bright on the ground.

  Dad’s eyebrows went up. ‘Oh yes?’

  ‘Yes. He’ll change in my tank and become a lizard.’ I very much wanted a lizard at the time.

  Dad took me seriously; he nodded and picked up the tiny frog on a leaf and said to me, ‘Look carefully, though, at this frog; he’s already changing.’

  I looked and saw a tail and, for a moment, I thought my dad had done the magic and was turning him into a lizard.

  ‘Wow,’ I breathed. Dad was smiling as he put the frog down gently and pulled me towards him.

  ‘But he’s changing into a frog,’ Dad said, and he led me to our small pond and showed me swarming tadpoles. ‘He used to be a tadpole.’

  I looked at Dad and he looked at me and it seemed the funniest thing in the world to my five-year-old sensibility. I capered about, chanting. ‘He used to be a tad – pole’, and Dad dipped a net in the pond to find another almost-frog.

  One day Dad came into our room very early before it was light and he whispered to me to wake up. His eyes were shiny in the half-light. Lucy climbed in next to me as he sat on the bed with his coat already buttoned.

  ‘I won’t be back tonight, girls,’ he said, and his voice was gruff. ‘And Mummy and I will still be friends, but I’m not going to live with you any more now. I’ll see you on Sundays, soon.’

  He said a lot more I didn’t take in, about people changing, about loving us no matter what, but he was going, and then he went. And we didn’t see him on Sundays, or, at least, not often, and the gap he left was jagged and painful. Mum said he was working in London again. That was her only explanation for him leaving. In his absence I floundered. Lucy was cheerful and uncomplaining and Mum’s bitter sadness was a wall between us.

  On the day of the storm, Mum picked us u
p from school in a bad mood, her coat flying like a purple kite and her hair tangled in her big hoop earrings.

  ‘There isn’t any electricity at home, so we’re having fish and chips for supper and we’ll have to light the fire and lots of candles,’ she said.

  Lucy danced in through the swinging gate. ‘I like adventures,’ she said, and in the shadowy grey kitchen she began gathering candles on to a tray and laying the table for supper. Mum didn’t like the adventure at all, neither did I. Outside the kitchen window the great pine tree was bending wildly back and forth as if a giant had got hold of it and was trying to shake every needle off it.

  I began to cry. ‘I’m scared,’ I whimpered.

  Mum lit a cigarette and puffed on it fast then stubbed it out. ‘Me too,’ she said briefly and went up to the bathroom.

  Lucy and I looked at one another. Lucy smiled bravely and went on pushing candles into candlesticks.

  ‘Shall we call Daddy?’ I whispered.

  ‘Yes,’ agreed Lucy, and we held hands to walk into the kitchen where the telephone sat on the windowsill. Daddy’s number was written on the wall. Lucy dialled, and I held the receiver to my ear. The phone was heavy and cold next to my skin. It rang and rang but Daddy didn’t answer.

  ‘Maybe he’s on his way,’ said Lucy.

  I wished I dared to ask Mum, but I didn’t, and he didn’t come. The wind was shrieking by bedtime, and the windows rattled in their frames. Mum was less scared after supper, sipping her gin and tonic and folding paper for us to stick in the rattling windows.

  ‘Come on, girls, I’ll sit with you tonight,’ she said, and we went up to our room with the wind booming through the roof tiles. Mum curled up on the sofa under a big knitted blanket, trying to read with a candle, her drink balanced on the sofa arm, and my picture of her there that night is the cosiest memory I have of her.

  In the middle of the night I sat bolt upright and found my mouth was stretched wide in a scream. I didn’t know what had frightened me, but I was terrified. I was six, but I can still remember the abject awfulness in my heart as I became aware of hot pee creeping from under me across my whole bed.

  ‘What’s happened?’ quavered Lucy’s voice next to me in the dark.

  Mum sounded as though her mouth was full of cotton wool. ‘Dunno, I think something hit us. Hush, darlings, let me get a light.’

  The flare of light in the darkness was shortlived, but as the match guttered and died in the draught, I screamed again. The window was full of glistening spikes and needles, and a shattered branch of the huge pine tree was wedged in the frame, the loo paper stuffed so thoughtfully by Lucy floating like a banner on the breeze. As Mum’s match went out, I began to cry and, stumbling out of my bed, I climbed on to Lucy’s, craving her closeness. Mum lit another match and then her candle, and the sound of her crying was more frightening than the wind that night.

  Chapter 5

  I wake early in Brooklyn, secretly enjoying the peace while Jerome is away. It’s a double-edged sword without him here; I feel guilty because I can so easily adapt to life without him and yet I am living in his apartment, supported by him, and he is kind and generous to let me, and I take it for granted. Or I sometimes do. It feels like a role. My life as his girlfriend has slipped from a mutuality of desire and intention into me feeling constantly pursued and guilty. He hasn’t changed; I have. That’s all. And it’s sad. I walk to the studio soon after dawn. Today is a Copenhagencoloured morning; this sky grey like duck down and snow is threatening to fall. Jerome is back today and I want to be pleased about it. Maybe if I can get my painting to go right, it will give me a sense of satisfaction that will follow on into seeing Jerome.

  The painting I am working on is in limbo right now. I began it with an electric, tingling feeling two weeks ago and when I look at it now I can’t resurrect the shimmering sense of vitality that lit me up and that I wanted to express and capture in the figure of the woman I am painting. Every mark I have made, every colour I have put down, looks just like that, marks and colours, stiff and superficial and no conduit of emotion or sensuality. Sometimes it gets like this, and the thing to do is just to lighten up. Walk away. If I’m alone, I put on some music and dance in the studio. I wish my friend Stephan was in town to meet up and muck about with. He never takes me too seriously, and although he works for my gallery, he teases me and laughs about my work and it is such a relief. Last time he was in the studio he nudged me, after walking around the pictures, and said, ‘Look at that body you’ve painted, give her a make-over, lift her face and give her a Brazilian lifeguard as a boyfriend. That’ll put the swing back in her step.’ This morning, face to face with the painting I am stuck on, and with Jerome about to arrive, I don’t dance, but I could scream with frustration. I want to run around madly like a headless chicken, doing a stupid dance like we did at primary school with a puppet and a rubber glove for a cockerel’s comb. But Stephan is away with his boyfriend this weekend. Thankfully, before I start really panicking, a ripple of laughter runs through me when I think of what Jerome would say if he saw me freaking out like this, running in small circles. He definitely likes the idea of me as a sensitive artist, not a demented neurotic.

  My phone shrills with a message: ‘Hi, honey. I’m in the office, my plane landed early, and I’ll be with you for coffee.’ He had already left for Florida when I got back from Denmark, and I haven’t seen him for over a week. It’s like grains of sand crumbling in warning at the beginning of a landslide to realise I have not missed him. He must have got let in by someone downstairs, for suddenly there is a knock on the studio door. Then he is here, in my space, and his big, expensive smoothness rolls in with him. He gathers me in his arms, hugging me. I hug back, but it is like the painting behind him, it is just bones and flesh pressed together, the magic isn’t there right now.

  ‘Hey, baby, we missed Valentine’s Day,’ he says, pulling a cookery book from an airport bookstore bag and placing it on the table between us.

  ‘Thank you.’ I try to force my eyes down to it, and my lips into a smile. Bloody hell, I’m angry. What’s sexy about a cookery book? Of course, anything can be loving if it is brought with love, but somehow, today, this is EXACTLY what I don’t want. I wish I could rewind to the way he used to make me feel. Being with Jerome has been life saving and I know it, and even if I didn’t he tells me and so do my friends. Especially Stephan. Jerome kisses me, and his mouth tastes reptilian. I bite my own lip until it bleeds, using willpower to stay within his embrace, his arms around my shoulders, while my instincts are screaming for me to leap back and wipe the taste of him away. I wonder how long before I know for sure if this is what it feels like – a lukewarm existence I can’t face getting out of because moving brings the chilly discomfort of change.

  The kettle begins its urgent shriek and I use the excuse to back away from Jerome, placing the scalding item between us while I search for cups and coffee. Jerome paces back and forth, eyeing the kettle with suspicion.

  ‘It could be time for an electric kettle, honey,’ he says, ‘it would make everything a lot easier.’ God, it sounds as though he is talking about much more than the coffee. I am fencing in the dark as I slowly answer.

  ‘Easier for who?’

  Unwrapping the croissants I bought on the way over, I decant spoonfuls of ground coffee into a jug.

  ‘You mean “whom”.’ Jerome raises an eyebrow and smiles at me for a moment before returning his attention to the kettle. I find this so irritating that I could throw the coffee at him. In fact, I am twitching with the urge. And then I do what I always do and put it all away under a smile. I don’t want Jerome to know he has the power to make me really angry. My best plastic smile is sugar coated. ‘No, I don’t mean “whom”. I mean you. It’s easier for you if I have a new kettle, because you are scared you might catch second-hand Weil’s disease or something from this one.’

  He has an incredibly annoying ability to raise one of his eyebrows. I used to find it sexy and now it�
�s exasperating; it reminds me of the headmaster at primary school and it reduces me to being in the playground again.

  ‘I come here every day, and you don’t, and this is the place I work; it’s my studio, not yours, I can choose the kettle I want. And I want this one. If I didn’t, I wouldn’t have it.’ I have finished. I stalk away from him and open a window. Amazed and faintly appalled at having started a row, and half seeing the absurdity, I shake my hair back and raise a smile. The February fog-filled air seeps in from the street. Jerome looks at the window, at me, and raises both his eyebrows quizzically. He is not fazed by anything. He sits down, the picture of control, his elbows on his knees, hands loose in front of him, looking at me calmly. He is both provocative and reassuring, and we both laugh now, uneasily but at least it’s broken the tension.

  ‘Tell me about Copenhagen,’ he says. ‘Tell me what it was like to go back there as a national monument?’ He is imperturbable. Like the Colossus at Rhodes. A wonder of the world. The ancient world. He is the monument, not me. I feel better, calmer, more cheerful.

  ‘Oh, it wasn’t like that, it was a huge show. Loads of people are in it. I wasn’t unveiling a statue or receiving the freedom of the city or anything.’

  Jerome’s eyebrows look like caterpillars, curled at the ends with small knots of perplexity. He smiles, showing big canine teeth and moves the chewing gum in his mouth.

  ‘So what are you kicking off on now, babe?’ He strokes my hair. ‘Did Denmark inspire you? I’ve got a boardroom which needs a new Grace Hart painting. Something big, with a sexy woman in it and a lot of yellow. I know you don’t paint to order, but would you have time to show me an etching or two?’ He is teasing me, and I smile and say something noncommittal, but the truth is I really don’t want him to be here. I know I can be overprotective of my work in the studio. I feel exposed when someone comes to see the work here; it’s easier to take slides to show people or to put the work up in a neutral space. It doesn’t matter whether it’s my boyfriend or a collector, I don’t want to talk about the processes of doing it, I like presenting a finished painting as just that. It shouldn’t be necessary to have people inspecting the way I go about it.