Ryder looked back on that summer as a time when he was drifting in a slow-flowing current of intense and largely invisible energy, apathy loaded and laced with hormones. Slowly he was being propelled – in a haze of drugs – through the final bottleneck of confusion, until life as a dependent child was exchanged for life as a supposedly independent adult. The prospect was both alluring and alarming. Mostly, Ryder liked to shy away from it. It was amazing how days could follow on from one another and the biggest sum of his achievements would be rolling three joints and mending a bicycle puncture so he could get to the pub to meet Jack and Lila.
Bonnie was away a lot, principally because she was in love. Her boyfriend Mac was a third-year archaeology student. His finals were in June and in the autumn he would be embarking on his MA. She had never been so devoted to a boyfriend before and Ryder was conscious that something had changed for ever. Bonnie had someone else to share her dreams with now, and Ryder would not be the main recipient of her inner world any longer. Bonnie and Mac went to Greece where he was digging on a site for part of the summer. They came home after a month – brown, happy and skint. Mac got a job as a bouncer in a Norwich nightclub. Bonnie went to stay with him. Bill was quietly shocked and preferred to believe she was living on her own in Norwich, though this also offended him.
Jean was more loudly displeased. ‘What will become of her if she lives with him? She should be at home now the term is over.’ The voice of doom, Ryder always thought. Why would anyone want to be anywhere near Jean? She was a total killjoy.
‘Why? She’s grown up, Mum, and anyway, we don’t belong to you, you know.’ Ryder was speaking for himself as much as for Bonnie.
Jean twisted her wedding ring. Ryder could see her anxiety.
‘Yes, but I’m responsible for you. Your father and I are— well, I just don’t think she should be away all the time.’
Ryder gazed at her across the kitchen table as he slowly carved slice after slice of bread and spread it with peanut butter, ritualistically consuming the whole jar, reflecting that such was his hunger that this did not even touch the sides of it. He moved on to bread and cheese, and was on the third slice of that when enlightenment struck.
‘Mum, have you dyed your hair?’
The look she flicked towards him was classic – guilty, and at the same time weighing up whether or not to come clean.
‘No. Well, I mean yes. I haven’t exactly dyed it, it’s more of a rinse. Do you think it’s obvious? I was quite hoping no one would notice, you see.’ Jean patted her head on both sides, as if that might change something.
Ryder laughed and went over to hug her. His mother only came up to his chin now, and he felt protective when she wasn’t being annoying.
‘It’s nice, Mum,’ he said, and she laughed, grateful and pleased.
Ryder and Jack were hitch-hiking from Colchester to Norwich to see Bonnie and Mac that evening. Lila couldn’t come because she was taking part in a moonlit drumming ceremony in a wood just off the A12. Ryder was relieved he had already made plans and so didn’t need an excuse to get out of going to the drumming ceremony with her. It had been planned to coincide with the full moon. Ryder and Jack walked to the roundabout to begin their journey under a scumcoloured mass of clouds. In the late summer evening light, the fields stretching beyond the Colchester ring road were dusty brown. No rain for the past weeks had shrunk the grasses to thin blond straws poking out of the bare earth, and litter drifted like tumbleweed.
‘Doesn’t look like there will be much moonlight for drumming,’ Ryder said as they found their spot in a lay-by and he unfolded the cardboard sign he had made by using a strip of a shoebox and a marker pen for the word ‘NORWICH’.
‘What are you talking about?’ The question was rhetorical, as Ryder knew full well. Jack had no interest in him answering.
Jack lit a thin one-skin joint he had pulled out of the pocket of his shirt and inhaled deeply before passing it to Ryder. ‘It’s so short sighted of my mother to have given Tom the car this weekend instead of me,’ he groaned. ‘Tom’s not really going anywhere, so he won’t put any petrol in it, and look at us!’ He waved his arms at the surrounding trailer park gloom as a flattened polystyrene McDonald’s box flapped wearily across the road. Jack kicked it. ‘We’re putting ourselves at terrible risk from perverts by having to hitch. I told my mum, but she just squawked something about me being ungrateful and drove off, so I couldn’t even get a lift here.’ He broke off to sway the top half of his body out into the road, thumb up, as a small brown car accelerated past. The driver, elderly with pebble glasses, didn’t even glance in their direction. Jack slumped histrionically to his knees, groaning. ‘We need a girl with us. You and me have no chance of getting a lift.’
Ryder flicked the butt of the joint into the dirty long grass and stepped into the road, his new shades a shield creating an Easy Rider atmosphere. Or so he hoped. ‘Watch this,’ he said, with a lot more conviction than he felt.
A camper van slewed towards them and stopped. A puff of smoke and a riff of Jimi Hendrix greeted them as the window was lowered. Grinning at one another, they climbed in.
Ryder hadn’t much liked the idea of Mac at first. Bonnie was so into him it was disturbing, and Ryder felt excluded while also accepting that it was reasonable of her to exclude him. In fact, it would have been really sick of her to have wanted him to tag along the whole time.
‘I don’t want to be the third leg of the stool,’ he said crossly when she invited him to come up to Norwich to meet Mac. ‘I tell you what, I’ll come with Jack.’
‘OK, that makes us the four legs of a table,’ replied Bonnie.
‘Ha ha,’ was the best Ryder could muster.
‘He’s a boxer!’ Bonnie was trying to make connections, and Ryder was giving her no chance.
‘I thought you said he was an archaeology student.’ Tense with anticipation of dislike, Ryder could not allow his curiosity any small gleam of hope until he had met Mac himself.
Bonnie sighed. ‘He is. He’s both. Just come and meet him, I know you will like him. Oh, I mean I hope you will, Kid, I really do.’
They were to meet in a pub. ‘It’s called The Murderers,’ Ryder told their driver, a flute-playing hippie with whom they had smoked three joints and had travelled a lot further in their minds than the mere two-hour journey between Colchester and Norwich.
Mac bought the first round of drinks, balancing a handful of plastic pint glasses as he wove between the tables in the crowded bar. He sat down next to Ryder and raised a glass to him.
‘I am glad we’ve met at last,’ he said.
‘So, you box?’ Ryder wanted to kick himself for sounding not only aggressive but also stupid. He realised how much he would cringe if his father had been here and asked that question. Shocked at his own surliness, he gulped the beer, a cold, sleek belt of alcohol, down his throat.
‘Well, yep, but I’m a complete amateur.’ Mac was low key, and friendly. ‘I grew up in Lowestoft where there’s a great boxing club and I’m still a member.’ He grinned and Ryder liked his smile, felt himself warming up, and relaxed a little. Mac was still talking. ‘My dad used to box there, my brother does and all my family. In fact, my grandma has never missed a fight at our club. Watching, I mean, thank God.’
He looked at Ryder, then asked, ‘Tell me what you reckon for the European Cup line-up next week. Can I call you Kid, or is that just for Bonnie?’
‘Only if you call her Betsy,’ Ryder replied, teasing his sister, who was talking to Jack and pretending not to listen. She immediately spun round, shoving him playfully.
‘Oh no – don’t tell him that. He’ll call me Betsy and it makes me feel about five years old.’
Mac laughed and stroked his hand up her spine to her neck, pulling his fingers idly through the hair falling down her back, a gesture full of quiet intimacy and love. A fragment of comprehension settled in Ryder. And acceptance. This was the real thing. He wanted this, someday, with someone.
Bonnie was leaning against Mac, laughing, and he was teasing, saying, ‘You make a great Betsy, you know. I think it’s a kind of mafia stooge, in Italy – oh no, that’s a Patsy, isn’t it? or a pasty. I’m never sure which.’
‘No, a pasty is what you eat in Cornwall, if you’re lucky and have any money left after the pub,’ protested Jack through the laughter. Mac was impossible not to like. Mac and Bonnie together were like one being. The closeness they had was potent and harmonious. Rare, Ryder thought as they walked through Norwich the next day, heading to the river where Mac had a friend on a houseboat. A girl who is loved, truly loved, is softer and happier. Ryder wondered if Jean had ever been like this, even in the early days with Bill. It was hard to imagine, but then she was young once, too.
‘What does it feel like, you and Mac?’ he asked his sister.
They were on the houseboat. Mac and his friend were dangling over one side, trying to nail down a curling length of flashing, and Jack had wandered off to take photographs of a collapsing warehouse further down the river. Bonnie and Ryder lay down to sunbathe on a small deck where there was a potted willow tree and a tiny fountain with a mermaid spouting water from her curled tail. Sunlight sparkled green over warped diamonds in the water and the air was heavy with the sound of lazy traffic and the smell of dusty summer trees. The morning felt as though time would go on expanding for ever, though that could have just been the effect of the joint Jack shared as they crossed the Cathedral Close and made their way down the path to the river.
Bonnie shut her eyes and raised her face towards the sun. ‘It doesn’t feel like anything else,’ she said slowly, ‘so it’s hard to explain. It’s something to do with knowing that we belong together, so it’s inevitable. It feels like a magnet.’
‘So what makes you know you belong together?’ Ryder propped himself up on his elbow, squinting in the brightness of the day at Bonnie. Her eyes were still shut against the sun; she looked foreign and exotic, her bare arms brown, her hair almost glittering black and the yellow of her dress like sulphur against the silver green decking. ‘Did you ever feel like this with any of your other boyfriends, Bonnie?’
She opened her eyes, and the look she gave him had a flash of fear in it. ‘No. I never felt this. And what makes me know it’s different is that when I am with him it feels real. Not like some happy-ending fairy tale, just real. I feel safe, but not bored. Happy, not crazily elated. When I’m not with him, I’m missing something. I keep looking round with that feeling that something is missing, you know?’
Ryder nodded, even though he didn’t, but he wanted to. ‘I think I’ve only had that when I’m hungry,’ he said, needing to break the tension, and they both began giggling, rolling further into the sun.
Telling his parents that Bonnie was loving her life away from home gave Ryder a small sense of satisfaction. It was like opening a door to freedom, even though he was not quite ready to pass through it himself. He felt glad for his sister that she was away when he told them, and that he had done it for her, because Bill and Jean reacted with stiff resentment. In fact, when it was his turn to go, he thought he might get her to come back and tell them. Like startled cats they walked around Ryder in the kitchen where he sat at the table, staring at him, absorbing the tiny amount of information he felt was enough for them, with alarm.
‘Nothing’s really changed, Dad, it’s just the next stage.’ Ryder was finally goaded into speech, mainly to interrupt his father’s tutting, pacing and nose blowing.
‘We’ll see,’ said Bill grimly.
It was definitely the next stage, all right, when Mac came to stay. Jean’s mouth folded like an envelope the morning after he arrived when she found Bonnie’s bedroom door firmly shut, and the door into the spare room, where they had shown Mac the night before, wide open, the bed empty, the curtains not drawn.
Ryder felt really sorry for his sister. No one did that sort of crosspatch face at him when he brought a girlfriend home, or if they did, he had managed never to notice it. They were over-protective of Bonnie and it was suffocating to observe, let alone live through.
‘I’m twenty, for Christ’s sake, Dad,’ Bonnie screamed at Bill when he began the tutting, nose-blowing routine over the fact that she was going away yet again. Mac was outside by the gate, his head under the bonnet of his car, which was making a high-pitched sound like a steaming kettle. ‘I’ve left home. I live at – at – well, I don’t live anywhere right now, but I will live somewhere next term. I’m going to look for wherever it’ll be this weekend. Mac’s found somewhere that sounds great.’
Jean hovered near her husband but kept close to the kitchen counter so that she could watch Mac out of the window. Two red blotches bloomed on her face as she noticed Mac, already quite unacceptably flamboyant on account of his long hair and suntanned torso, suddenly putting himself fully on show by pulling off his shirt and using it to protect his hand while undoing the radiator cap.
‘How can you think that you know what you’re doing with him?’ she hissed at Bonnie, her eyes narrow slits of spite. ‘It’s all about sex, and you’ll grow out of it and have so much to regret.’
Bonnie turned white. Even Bill stopped in his tracks and stood open mouthed, his spectacles and handkerchief studies of stillness in his hands as he gaped at his wife.
‘Jean, really,’ he muttered. ‘I don’t think you can say—’
Jean’s knuckles gripped the edge of the sink, and if she hadn’t just been so completely vile, Ryder would have gone to hug her, she looked so forlorn and frightened.
‘I can say what I think,’ she uttered in the same tight, high voice, her eyes on the floor in front of Bonnie’s feet as Bonnie walked up to her and challenged her to look her straight in the eyes. Bonnie and Jean stood face to face for what felt like a thousand years, then Bonnie spoke.
‘OK, Mum, it’s true. You can say what you think. And you can think what you like. But I’m telling you that you don’t know anything about me, you never have and I don’t think you ever will. I’m going with Mac now and I don’t know when I’ll be back.’
She wasn’t yelling, she didn’t even seem to care if Jean took her words on board. She picked up her bag, overstuffed and open with clothes falling out of it, and left.
Chapter 8
Grace
Brooklyn
It happens on a Sunday in April. Jerome is reading the Japanese stock market reports for the week on one of his many small beeping pieces of electrical equipment, and I clear away the breakfast dishes and put on my coat to leave for the studio. And as I lift my arms to pull the weight of my hair out of the collar of the coat, I look towards the window and see myself in pale reflection. I am almost not there. And that is how it is in life. At this moment the floating uncertainties that have been bumping about in my mind for months all slot together. Together they make something huge and certain. A reality. My life with Jerome, my five-year-old relationship with him, is over. It is like the end of a play, or a film you were just sitting through not especially enjoying but not hating, and then suddenly, irrefutably, it’s the end.
With absolutely no finesse, I place myself right in front of Jerome and stretch out a hand to him. ‘Please can you come with me outside? I want to walk somewhere with you.’
The look he gives me over his glasses shows me that he knows this is not just a walk in the park. Without saying a word, he takes off the glasses, reaches for his coat and his keys, and follows me out into the spring sunshine.
The street is bright and smells of diesel and cinnamon thanks to the baker’s van passing towards the river. A pair of kids with a soft ball come by, their sing-song voices snatched from the background roar of the traffic. Jerome and I walk up the slope and across the road to Prospect Park in silence. I can hardly feel my feet I am so disembodied, but in my head I have a thrumming rhythm, pulsing with life. All my senses are heightened and I am aware of everything that I encounter. Wondering if this is how Sleeping Beauty felt when the Prince kisse
d her and she finally woke up, I am surprised to find that I want to run and do cartwheels because I can suddenly taste freedom.
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