Poppyland

by Raffaella Barker

Hands deep in my pockets, I glared at the words on Mum’s headstone. I had no idea what would be right, only that this was wrong. A part of me could stand back and know that in the bigger scheme of things it didn’t matter a bit, but that thought only whipped the impotence into a bigger rage. What would have been right? What I knew, with aching clarity, was that nothing could be right when your mother dies of drink before she is sixty. I stared at the gold lettering in the flecked marble, my arms folded in front of me, rigid with pointless disapproval. The stone itself looked like a slice through a tin of jellied dog food, gleaming salami pink among the wrecked older stones at sea on the misshapen graves. Who ordered it? I had not known I had so many views on tombstone decor, or that it could matter to me so much. I had not really known that anything to do with Mum could matter to me any more. In a way I was glad. Not feeling anything had been so much worse. I sat on the grass and cried for Mum and the tears felt cleansing and good. There was nothing left to do now but learn to accept, and suddenly it felt possible. Back in the car, changing gear with gusto to speed my departure, I turned up the radio as piano music tumbled out, and I cried for all the losses and even more for the need to move on from them.

  Poor Mum, I could suddenly see her greatness, it tumbled into my consciousness like sunbeams from a storm cloud. She kept a roof over our heads, although admittedly there was the time when it almost caved in thanks to that tree, but we survived. She loved us even though she hid behind Adrian and alcohol until we could hardly see her at all any more. But in the distance between us and Mum, Lucy and I became so very close and stayed that way. It is poignant now to think of her, living alone, though Adrian was never far away, and separated from her daughters. In her silent sadness, she missed out on seeing the greatness in herself or the joy in having us.

  Returning to Lucy’s small house in London I felt my spirits lift as I approached and it was painful to think that in the morning I spent with Lucy and baby Bella, more love and happiness flowed through her house than Mum had in all the life I remember with her. If I could slip through a shaft in time to talk to Mum, she has been dead for five years, I could tell her I love her now. But it still isn’t easy. My adrenaline is pulsing, with memories and the feelings they bring up, so the prospect of a holiday in Norfolk, returning to the place at the heart of my childhood, even with Lucy and Mac, isn’t instantly appealing. I don’t want to think about it now, I want to lose myself in work instead. I stand back from the canvas. Sometimes this is not the ordeal I imagine it will be. Sometimes it is a pleasant surprise to find that the painting is more coherent than I am. At best, a painting can illuminate a diaphanous thought, revealing it to be more lapidary than it seems, with roots into the past and wings to take it into the world and the future. Sometimes the thought is a new idea, or a belief, and sometimes it is just a fake, a mock-up that will not withstand illumination.

  I often feel uneasy approaching something I have made. I never know what to make of it, and sometimes the work emanates a sense of having always been here, and it freaks me out that it is so permanent when I am not. Not every piece evokes this. More often than not there is a frustrating distance between my perception of what I am doing and what comes off the canvas in two-dimensional colour. Sometimes, though, if I keep going, allowing myself to observe whatever it is that is coming next, transformation can occur. The trepidation with which I come up against my work for the first time every day is not so much based on experience as the damping down of expectation – it would be too disappointing to come to it hoping to change the world every day. Better to believe anything might happen, and in that find a small glimmer of possibility or at least a dab of paint.

  Later, at Jerome’s apartment, I peel prawns for supper and try to suppress resentment. It’s not aimed at Jerome especially, and yet it is. He is not the love of my life, but that is not a reason to be angry with him. He is giving me a home and he loves me. My part of the deal is not hard, I just have to keep things on an even keel. So why do I feel suffocated? His key in the door makes me jump. Here he is, right in the middle of my thoughts, and I haven’t got them in order yet. Jerome is big and quiet like a panther when he lets himself into the apartment and puts his briefcase down in the living room, shedding his coat, letting it fall on to the sofa, walking around it, taking his tie off all without turning on the lights. Coming towards me in the small brightly lit kitchen his focus is scorching, his eyes intent on my face. My cheeks burn where I am caught by his gaze. We look at one another and there is welling excitement; the resentment inside me flares into something else, and I no longer feel invaded. Instead, I catch my breath with the thrill of being pursued. Neither of us speaks but the music has a bass line beating like my heart. I wipe my hands on my thighs and turn away from him. Pulling undone the strings of the apron I have tied over my jeans, I move towards the window to hang it on the back of a chair. Jerome blocks my way. Pinning me against the worktop he stands with one arm either side of me. It’s a game I can either resist or surrender to and my body is already playing with his, so resisting is only another part of it. My back arches, and to stay standing upright with him this close to me I wrap my arms around his neck. He looks at me, his eyes flicking back and forth from my mouth to the buttons of my shirt. He doesn’t say anything, I can hear blood drumming in my head, my breath a gasp in the silent kitchen, a song on a radio somewhere else. Still not touching me with his hands, Jerome bends his head and kisses me. I want to be turned on by him too, and I kiss him back. His tongue in my mouth is hot, he pushes one leg between mine, I am all up against him now, he presses against me right the way up my stomach and, through his shirt, I can feel his heart beating against me and the heat of his skin and the rise and fall of his breath. He pulls his body away and his fingers pull the ribbon fastening my top and it falls open. He unbuttons my jeans, pushing down the zip as he slides his hand down my stomach under my knickers. Still in silence, burning more and more electric, he strokes me between my legs. I feel liquid and my back arches more. He stops kissing my mouth and runs his tongue down my neck to my breast. He groans, or maybe it’s me, as he undoes the hook of my bra, stroking me softly though the thin fabric of my shirt. All my nerve endings flare and yearn, I lean on to Jerome from the counter top, sitting astride his thigh with his fingers deep inside me, his tongue circling my nipple, and I am melting. Melting. My fingers yank his belt buckle undone and I am so intent on him pushing down his clothes fast and urgent and he turns me around to lean over the table. He whispers, his mouth against my ear.

  ‘I’ve been thinking about fucking you. About touching your skin, your scent in your hair, your mouth, all of you. I wanted you all the time you were away.’

  And he tugs my head back, pulling on my hair and my breath comes faster, harder and I gasp and swallow and in my body a pulse hits the base of my spine and radiates through me and another and another. And we move apart so I can turn around and I am lying on the table, my legs are wrapped around him and he is in me so deep and it’s hot from the middle of me, intense wave following wave because he keeps moving and everything is electric, building up as we fuck, and the waves come together and we are both panting and breathless on the kitchen table. I open my eyes, smiling.

  Jerome pulls his clothes back on immediately, not even looking at me, and getting out his wallet he flicks a photograph across to me. It’s a coffee maker cut out of a magazine.

  ‘What’s this for?’

  ‘I couldn’t give up on you and your ancient bouillardière, so I ordered you an espresso machine and it’ll be delivered tomorrow. Look on it as a love token for Valentine’s Day if you can.’

  ‘Enchanting,’ I snap and I am angry. All the loveliness of sex has rushed away like sand in an egg timer and, disliking myself enough to scream, I do the only other thing I can and grab a sharp knife. Instead of acting like a crazy woman, which is incredibly tempting, I begin slicing mushrooms in a fast rhythm, my back turned to him, deliberately not doing up my top or putting on any other cloth
es over my knickers. It is all completely wasted on Jerome, because he has gone through to find his jacket in the next room, following the shrill command of his telephone.

  Alone in the kitchen, I feel goose bumps rise on the back of my neck and prick me under the rumpled back of my shirt and up beneath my hair. I suddenly have a cliff-edge sense of what it would be like to step out of the safety of life with Jerome. I don’t know if I can do it, I have traded so many absolutes to be with him that I don’t really know who I am beyond the safe lasso of our relationship. Jerome’s voice in the next room is a rumble; he has shut the door, he doesn’t want me to hear. Most probably because he is talking about business and he likes the running joke that it drives me mad with boredom, and that I will think the less of him to hear him. But jokes only exist with some reference point, and here I feel that the foundations are set in truth. He is running the New York Marathon in November and is so fit his back actually looks as though he has the bubonic plague, so rippling and defined are the muscles strafing across it. He shouldn’t have so many muscles, anyway, it’s obscene. He’s in his late forties, he should be slowing down. Something inside him is unresolved, though, and he is restless. He is obsessed with making money. I am absurdly irritated by this. It’s time to move on, but being with Jerome is like being in the bath too long. Moving is uncomfortable, staying still keeps the temperature bearable. And hard as I try, I cannot take the passing of time seriously. I must be a bit backward, I haven’t quite lost the belief that I am immortal.

  Ten years ago the first show I completed was sold to a New York gallery. At that point I was unswervingly certain that I was immortal. Which meant that it was fine to drink anything that came my way, most especially vodka Martinis in the red-membrane light of the midtown hotels which were enjoying a mercifully brief, fashionable moment. I was reckless, then, in all areas of my life, and I pushed myself to experiences and encounters as acts of defiance first, lust second, and which had nothing to do with love or intimacy. Loneliness settles like a skin of sweat on my body because I am suddenly secretly certain that whatever there has been between me and Jerome, it has nothing to do with love or intimacy now, and I am not sure it ever did.

  With frenzied slicing, I have created an unnecessarily large pile of pink-gilled mushrooms. I slide them into melted butter and turn down the heat, reaching for salt, sloshing in a splash of wine. I love cooking when it’s like this, and I feel sharp edged with energy. Though ideally I would be more suitably dressed. Imagining what that would look like is useful for suppressing my thoughts. Ungainly and black, the realisation sits like a boulder emerging out of an ebbing tide: I am selling out. I don’t like the work I am doing at the moment, I am painting pictures I don’t really care about, I am living with a man I don’t love, in a country that is not my home. I have been running for ever and getting nowhere because I am so afraid of what might happen if I stop. I have never once considered that it might be better. Everything might be better if I stop. I throw the wooden spoon into the sink and walk around the table to the window, reaching for a cigarette from the crumpled packet I left there when I got in earlier. Jerome hates me smoking. He often tells me it will make him leave me.

  ‘So leave,’ I always say, and I never used to mean it, and he never did. But now I really do mean it. With the flare of the match, the green light at its heart, the man I met on the harbour in Copenhagen suddenly appears in my mind. He is here, and I can see him as clearly as if it was now.

  I close my eyes and I almost feel him touching my hand, his voice in my hair, saying, ‘Come on, let me take you home.’

  His name is Ryder James and I can remember everything about him as though he has only just left. His hand, the white ridge of the scar lit up by the moon, cupping mine. Holding my hand steady and protecting the flame.

  Chapter 6

  Ryder

  North Sea

  Ryder is on the way to Holland to discuss plans for laying a new gas pipe between the Netherlands and the UK. Breaking up with Cara has left him feeling as if he is recuperating from flu, or rather not recuperating as the gloom and sloth are hard to shake off. And leaving his houseboat for yet another trip, even a short one, Ryder feels regretful. He would like to have time to cycle along the tow path all the way to Camden Lock, to pass the narrow boat village at Lisson Grove, where the world seemed to stop in the 1950s and where children play with hoops alongside the colourful boats with their tangle of hoses for gardens, and where dogs lie by the wall in the sun. It would be nice to be in London for long enough to meet up with his friends and to finish the bookshelf he started building on his boat last year. But on the other hand, another trip and another new project is always interesting. This time the appeal lies in the prospect of tulip fields and windmills and big skies to blow some vigour into him. And the travelling, which up until now he had firmly believed was ideal for a man on his own. Ryder wonders how he had failed to notice before that being a man on his own was frequently uncomfortable and depressing. And when did his rootless state change from being a pleasure to a pain? Perhaps it was to do with the fact that he has spent more time at home on the boat than usual, to the extent that the couple on the next boat came to call on him, bringing a hyacinth growing in an old tea cup. Ryder was charmed.

  ‘Phyllis here keeps all the old china for her bulbs,’ the old guy told Ryder with a gappy smile. Ryder stepped back from the door, welcoming them in.

  ‘Pleased to meet you. I’m Ryder.’

  ‘Arthur and Phyllis. How d’yer do?’

  Phyllis didn’t trouble herself with talk, she just pottered in behind Arthur and gazed at Ryder’s minimally furnished home.

  ‘You got a nice place in here,’ said Arthur, ‘though you’ve not got much to call home in there, have yer?’ He stared blankly at the empty table, the sofa with its neat cushions. Ryder placed the hyacinth cup ceremonially on the table.

  ‘No, but I think this might be the start of better things,’ he said, and Phyllis nodded approvingly.

  Landing at Schiphol Airport, standing in the green articulated bus and speeding off around the terminals, Ryder reflects that the magnetic force field around East Anglia has changed direction and has begun to pull him like the tide. His bosses in Holland want him to compose a paper on the costs and the problems for their gas supply links caused by the coastal erosion in East Anglia. So far he has resisted the pull of Norfolk itself but he has agreed to go out to one of the North Sea gas platforms.

  The project kicks off in a prolonged meeting in a hotel near the airport in Amsterdam. Sitting back in his chair, Ryder is hit by stomach-churning torpor, the legacy of too much travel. The hotel bar is windowless and over-designed; it is red-lit, the ceiling glowing pink, the chairs like huge doughnuts, frosted pink and brown. It could be anywhere. There are businessmen alone at most of the tables, and two expensively dressed, carefully made-up women at the bar. Ryder tries to stave off sleep as John Shaw and Sveld Hegel, his employers, bat their beliefs back and forth across the low red-leather coffee table. Ryder lost interest some time ago when the question moved from one of sustainability to that of profit. None of it is for him, his job is simply to make sure that the work is done safely and environmentally well. To keep sleep at bay he recites to himself a selection of things he knows off by heart. These are neither many nor various. There is the Periodic Table for a start. ‘Hydrogen, helium, lithium, beryllium, boron, carbon . . .’ Boron should be the caption under these two guys. He could have saved them a lot of money and himself a lot of time by getting them to conference-call him while they sat together and talked in this airless room. Neither of them is interested in anything except the finances of the project.

  Ryder tries to bring in an ethical question, ‘But should we not be looking at some alternative energy forms that can travel? Volatility is the problem, of course, but then we’re running into problems with transporting the fossil fuels we’re using at the moment, and in getting them out. A lot of what we want in terms of oil is so deep
digging for it is prohibited.’

  ‘We will just have to get gas here for the best possible price,’ sighs Hegel, leaning back in his chair and stretching so that Ryder has the full effect of his plump cushion-shaped stomach billowing from behind the buttons of his white shirt.

  ‘It won’t last long,’ says Shaw, an anxious-looking man with, Ryder notices, a silver crew cut very like one of the older statesman-type space travellers on Star Trek. Shaw is still talking. ‘Ryder, here, is right. We need to get a step ahead in this game. What’s it going to be?’

  Ryder has got as far as ‘phosphorus’ in his head. It is becoming increasingly difficult to get excited about money making for the sake of it. He wonders what else happens in the thoughts of these men. Hegel’s most stressed button suddenly pops off. A blotched patch of stomach peeps out at Ryder. He rubs his hands over his face and wonders if he will manage to sit here for the rest of the meeting or if he will become possessed by the creeping desire to get up, walk out and never come back. Shaw is tapping something on to the key pad of his palm pilot.

  ‘There’s a lot of investment in turning coal into gas, of course. But it’s not there yet, and we need results.’

  Shaw drums his fingers on the table. ‘It always comes back to the nuclear option. And the problem of decommissioning.’

  The arguments float round and round and Ryder wonders if he could survive if he gave up this sort of work and got a normal job. Working in a garage, or being a postman. At the moment he seems to waste so much time discussing new ways of doing things and then continuing to do just the same. With this in mind, he leaves the meeting and is taken to the heliport, to the crew gate, to fly to the gas platform in the North Sea.

  He is so near Norfolk he could spit and hit a breaker on the beach. The gas platform he is required to visit is a construction of steel and concrete six miles out to sea from Bacton on the windswept rump of the northernmost point of East Anglia. Coming from Holland makes him feel he is sneaking in, even though he has no plans for sightseeing in Norfolk today.