Poppyland

by Raffaella Barker

  ‘There is a screw-on chair,’ announces Bella, spitting an olive stone across the table. She could be a torturer, so emotionless is her tone of voice. A white pick-up truck slows at the gate to the road, the engine idling while another car passes on the narrow lane. Squinting in the dappled morning, I see the driver looking up the slope of the garden to where we are sitting at a table which appears to be floating on the long grass. The man half waves, or maybe he’s adjusting something on the open window of the truck, but a smile bursts out of me, unexpected like the sun wheeling out from behind a cloud. The truck is still hovering at the gate. As the man changes gear to drive off, the wheels spin a little on loose stones. He looks down and away. The angle of his head, the shadow of his temple, the shape of his jaw, all of these subliminally observed elements tell me he has seen me and I suspect he is smiling.

  It’s an infinitesimal non-exchange, but it feels like being given a bunch of flowers, or a glass of champagne. Stumbling back inside the house, I am blinded by the darkness of the kitchen after the sunshine in the garden. My head spins as I butter the toast. I have been told by Bella that it’s got to be soldiers, which completely confuses me.

  ‘What sort of soldiers?’

  ‘White ones,’ she says coldly. The toast is brown. Buttery cavalry soldiers? Artillery? Desert Rats? Humming a fragment of Lou Reed’s ‘Perfect Day’, which is definitely one for my desert-island disc list, I rummage in the bread bin and find some breadsticks. Perfect soldier material – bayonets, in fact. Balancing them next to the now overboiled eggs, I find I am absurdly buoyed up. Sunshine, a man in a truck, the beautiful day, all contribute to my sense of excitement, and the frisson of sex, and with it a sudden whiff of fantasy and fun which career through my veins at a galloping pulse. No longer interested in food myself, the focus on feeding the tiny nieces vanishes.

  I suddenly remember something I learned from a Native American on a trip Jerome and I made to a Reservation. The whole thing was deeply embarrassing, I felt like a crass tourist and was so ashamed of my white skin. I only spoke to one Indian elder, and he gave me a piece of paper with a prayer on it. I gave him a fifty-dollar bill and got lectured by Jerome.

  ‘He’ll only spend it on booze; they’re all alcoholic,’ he scolded, his palms somehow epitomising superiority as they rested flat and fat on his knees.

  ‘You know what? I’m sure you’re right, but it doesn’t matter what he does with it; that’s up to him.’

  Jerome smiled and hugged me. ‘You’re right, honey. It’s up to him, and everyone deserves their dignity. Show me the poem.’

  It was beautiful, and I learned it off by heart. A bit of it runs through my head now:

  It doesn’t interest me to know where you live or how much money you have.

  I want to know if you can get up after the night of grief and despair,

  Weary and bruised to the bone,

  And do what needs to be done for the children.

  I definitely feel weary and bruised to the bone, and it’s the children that have done it to me. This is not coming naturally to me. Plopping the eggs on a tray, the sulphurous smell of the hard orange of the yolks hits the back of my throat with a slug of nausea.

  Only Cat is sitting where I left her at the table, Bella is out of sight somewhere near, I can hear her humming.

  ‘Your eggs are done,’ I yell, and try to push the breadstick into one. It is not happening, the egg has morphed into yellow playdough. Mum always used to overboil eggs – that’s clearly where I learned my cooking skill, and I also remember that what she used to do was decant them into a cup and announce, as though delivering a huge treat, ‘Look, darlings, Irish eggs!’ I try this on the children, without much conviction in my voice. Not surprisingly, they push them away. Bella eats another olive, this one dipped in sugar. I decide I didn’t see.

  I am ridiculously disoriented by the non-encounter with the man in the truck. Desperate is the word that springs to mind. Though any link, no matter how tenuous, with a strange man is a welcome surprise. Jerome diverted all my pheromones for so long, and finishing with him stamped the last embers of them to ash. To find a whole fountain of desire and sexiness and possibility leaping into being at the sight of some bloke in a white truck is intoxicating and seems almost illicit. The way I was hooked by Jerome, who reeled me in from my low-rent life in my East Village apartment and took me to Brooklyn Heights where everyone moves in and lives two by two, ready at the drop of a hat to go forth and multiply like species from the Ark, involved no effort from me at all. Just a lot of gratitude. I was truly grateful to be looked after, and too busy working to think about making an effort for myself. Sometimes I just felt I was living out a script. I stomped around making mountains out of molehills and building castles in the air until the spool ended almost halfway through my three score years and ten. There doesn’t seem to be a script for the next bit.

  Running the show here in Winterton for the next twenty-four hours is a little daunting. It is hard to imagine how the rest of the day will pass. Will it pass? Or will time just stick for ever? I have been much too afraid of losing out to time to ever think about what it might be like to come back home to England and marry someone. Nothing has yet convinced me that I want or am capable of spending my days with small children. At the moment, time is too precious and yet too ephemeral, and that is how I like it. Bella climbs on to my lap, leans back and sighs. Her body emanates warmth like a hot-water bottle and I love the way she has flopped on to me as though I’m an armchair. Kissing the top of her head, I wonder if it’s possible that her hair can actually smell shiny, it’s soft, spooled silk beneath my lips. Like a distant boiler firing up, a tiny adjustment occurs inside me; the difference between being lonely and loved seems as simple as putting my arms around Bella. She twists to look up at me, and waves a pair of goggles.

  ‘When can we go swimming?’ she asks.

  We are on the edge of Norfolk, there are miles of beaches, and I haven’t been to any of them since coming here. We will go where I went when I was small, and see how it has changed.

  Chapter 11

  Ryder

  Norfolk

  It’s the day before the christening, Ryder is driving to Norfolk. Mac had invited him to stay, but Ryder has some work further north on the coast. And he is nervous. Turning up tomorrow will be enough time there. Seeing Mac will be strange. Or maybe it won’t. Anyway, tonight he will stay with Ed, a guy he met a few years ago on a salvage project in Iceland. Ed is a boat builder, married with four kids, and he has a brusque exterior easily pierced with a joke. Ryder likes his dry, straightforward approach to life and his easy silences. He and Ryder have kept in touch, with boats as the common language deepening their friendship, and Ed has extended an open invitation to Ryder to visit. Now is the right time for sure, and seeing the four children will be a good warm-up act for the moment of meeting his god-daughter.

  Ryder leaves London early, he will probably make Red Lodge for breakfast. He is excited and the world is full of possibility. As well as the bracelet, now polished and wrapped in a box with a bow, he has a basket full of foil-wrapped chocolate ducklings and two Barbie dolls. He is especially pleased with the dolls, and grateful to Anthea, the secretary at the gas company headquarters which currently employs him, for giving them to him.

  ‘If you have god-daughters, you will need Barbies,’ she had told him at the beginning of the week, and the next morning he was in the office, she winked and pulled out a small floral bag from under her desk.

  ‘Here. My daughters are out the other side of this stage now, and they are much better handed on,’ she said. Bemused, Ryder peered into the bag, It was full of small explosions of nylon and plastic. Anthea leaned forwards across the desk on her elbows and her bosom filled the whole space between her shoulders and the desk top.

  ‘Little Mermaid Barbie and Fantasy Miss Barbie are in there,’ she said.

  Ryder raised an eyebrow. ‘Are you sure it’s suitable?’ He grinned. �
�And will they really like second-hand ones?’

  ‘Oh yes, they love quantity. They will already have hundreds, I expect, but they will like the kit from other girls, honestly.’ A colleague of Anthea’s walked past and paused to pick up a package. ‘Oh, Barbie, excellent,’ she said.

  Ryder was amazed. ‘Is it a secret code?’ he asked.

  ‘For little girls, yes,’ Anthea told him.

  The road swings through a new chalk cutting, a scattering of feathery grasses and clumped thistles like old ladies’ hats have grown on the moon surface surrounding him. Yellow and pink smudges tint the sky ahead and the tarmac gleams blue-grey and empty. On through the early morning landscape. Ryder is listening to the radio. A song he doesn’t know comes on and the lyrics stir in him a longing for intimacy. Having no girlfriend is an unfamiliar state for Ryder, and he misses warmth, a female voice on the phone, the soft thighs in his bed. He misses sex and hot skin and laughing with someone you have made love to. It’s been a while. Apart from a brief and actually quite potent encounter in Paris with Sophie, the girlfriend in his life before Cara. She was married and it was never going to be more than a remembrance of things past, and they met by chance and of course he shouldn’t have done it, but he was lonely and so was she, and we all have animal needs and – oh, that’s no excuse and guess what – if he was trying to fix anything within him, it didn’t work. Ryder turns off the radio and pushes in a CD. ‘Sexual Healing’ by Marvin Gaye. Why not?

  It doesn’t take an expensive shrink in St John’s Wood to figure out that the long line of girls Ryder has not been prepared to love have been at best painkillers for him, at worst chimerised versions of Bonnie, doomed from the first moment he is attracted to them not to live up to the memory of his beautiful, beloved dead sister. Lila was the first casualty when she came back that autumn. Ryder could remember his sense of separateness when he saw her. He could not reach her.

  And now it doesn’t work for him any more. The emptiness of a random encounter, the low, creeping boredom that he has let come into all his relationships, killing them with stealth like mustard gas, is not what he wants. But what could there be instead? His unruly heart pounds. This is the big question. And speaking of a pounding heart, there is never a morning when Ryder can wake up without his heart leaping in his throat, hammering him awake so he starts from sleep. Will it ever be different? On the plus side, it means he gets up early. That’s when he runs, or walks, anything, but he has an urgent daily need to go somewhere and subsume his racing heart. Today it was into the car and on to the road. It’s still not quite eight o’clock, and he is sweeping off the Thetford bypass and into the Red Lodge truckers service station.

  It’s years since he’s been here, or, in fact, to a proper old-fashioned motorway café, though he remembers them from childhood holidays driving to Norfolk, and the noisy friendliness of the atmosphere after too many hours in the car with Bonnie hovering on the brink of vomiting and their mother fussing. There are not many of these places left now, most have been consumed by petrol stations with huge shops selling coffee and tea from machines and rubbery microwaved sandwiches. Ryder feels the passage of time in his own life suddenly and it is uncomfortable to find himself troubled by change and nostalgia, just like his father. Red Lodge is off the Newmarket bypass, and its strength is that it has been forgotten by everyone except the lorry drivers, and no one cares whether it is there or not. So, in defiance, it is. Thus it has not needed to modernise. Inside it is the same as it ever was. The steam from the espresso machine hisses, the windows are all shut, creating a good fug, and the walls are covered in black-and-white signed photographs of boxers, singers, glamour girls and Eurovision song contest winners.

  Ryder orders and sits down next to a window overlooking a field of horses. Buttercups glint like gold in the grass and a foal lies flat on its side, sleeping close to its mother, as she swishes her tail and grazes. Above the horses an oak tree is unfurling its leaves, and the shade from it spreads a purple blanket into the field. Ryder’s coffee arrives, and he sits in a daydream, staring out at the day. The foal’s ear twitches, it lifts its head, which looks like a big effort. Ryder wonders if horses have a lot more in common with giraffes than he had previously noticed. The answer would seem to be yes, as a moment later the foal begins to unpack lengths of limb and arrange them as awkwardly as possible in a bid to stand up. He makes it and immediately frisks off around the field as if on a lap of honour, prancing, half ungainly, half floating, and reminding Ryder of a seahorse. A golden sense of well-being pumps through Ryder as he watches the foal playing. Breakfast is good, too. And it slowly dawns on him that it is actually quite easy to feel happy. He heads back to his car. His meeting is in King’s Lynn at ten. Ed wants to show him a boat and to take him for a pint at lunchtime. The sun is shining and the day is his. The boathouse he is forever building in his mind needs a piece of ground. Or rather, it needs water. The house next to it needs ground. It could be on the marshes up near where Ed lives, on the footings of an old barn. Maybe today he will find what he is looking for somewhere in Norfolk. For the first time in a long while, Ryder believes that anything is possible.

  The meeting in King’s Lynn this morning was both brief and successful, neither of which Ryder was much expecting, and Ed sounded relieved and slightly manic when Ryder called to say he wanted to drive along the coast for a bit.

  ‘Sure, I’m scraping Susannah’s underbelly and looking for leaks,’ he shouted into the phone, and Ryder could hear the whine of a drill in the background and the jaunty metallic pulse of a pop-radio station.

  ‘Is Susannah enjoying it?’

  ‘Well, she bloody well should be. She’ll sink like a stone if I don’t sort this, and if I do, I’ve got a buyer who’ll hand over thirteen grand for her tomorrow.’

  ‘Why, what is Susannah? I thought she was an old crock?’

  Ed gave a crack of laughter. ‘She’s rare,’ he said. ‘I’ll show you later.’

  It is mid-afternoon, Ryder is sitting outside a café on a cliff in a seaside village where time has done no marching on at all. His sketch book is open, but he puts down his pen and looks around him. Everyone seems to be asleep, and the café awning flaps blue and white, shrimping nets and windmills in a basket by the door. Ryder has bought two of the windmills for Bella and her sister, and he goes back in now to buy a whole lot more for Ed’s children. In the café he orders another cup of tea and chooses a postcard for his parents. The picture on the front is a tinted photograph of a ruined tower, poppies flickering around it and along the edge of the cliff like flames. The lack of space more than anything is what drew Ryder to the card, and he reads the small-printed paragraph on the back:

  Clement Scott brought popularity to the Cromer coastline when he christened this area Poppyland and wrote his famous poem ‘The Garden of Sleep’, which contains the lines:

  O! heart of my heart! Where the poppies are born,

  I am waiting for thee, in the hush of the corn.

  Sleep! Sleep!

  From the Cliff to the Deep!

  Sleep, my Poppy Land,

  Sleep!

  It’s an Ealing comedy. He wonders what his mother will think of the appalling whimsy of the poem. It’s nice to have a joke with her, that’s for sure. It may be slight, but it’s a beginning.

  Dear Mum and Dad,

  You will remember this place, I think you told me you came here when you were first married. It may have been a resort then. Frequented by poetry lovers, perhaps? Now it is not. Back to see you later this month and find out what on earth you did here. On second thoughts, maybe not. But seeing you for sure.

  Love R

  His mother will remember Poppyland; will his father? Ryder realises with a pang that he doesn’t really know them at all. He would like to change that. Voices float up from the beach; it’s the family he saw down there earlier, little girls playing with their mother. Their voices ripple and flutter towards him on the breeze and he lights a cigarette and
moves over to the railings. Without thinking, he flicks the cigarette away over the cliff. He has leisure to regret this as it plummets inexorably towards the woman and the children kneeling in the sand beneath him. He closes his eyes.

  ‘Oh,’ she cries, and Ryder forces himself to look down. She lunges at the baby, rugby tackling her away, as the burning ember lands next to them. The woman picks up a stone and grinds it into the sand then sits up, brushing her hair away from her cheeks and glares at him from behind her sunglasses.

  ‘Bloody hell. You threw your cigarette at us. And it was alight.’

  Why had he thrown it? Why didn’t it get blown off course?

  He opens his mouth to apologise as she takes off her sunglasses and her face becomes visible.

  It’s her. Ryder’s heart crumples. It’s her with small children. Grace. The girl from Denmark. She’s got children. If Ryder could step back at this moment to observe his reaction instead of churning with it on the edge of the cliff, he would notice that while he has accepted her presence in this remote spot without a blink, but has focused keen disappointment on her circumstances, she hasn’t recognised him. He feels as if he has been shot, without knowing what that feels like, but his heart is pounding, his mouth full of the metal taste of adrenaline. Has she forgotten him? Or is it the sun in her eyes? God, is it not really her? She is not looking friendly; her eyebrows curve like a question mark and she has pulled the children towards her in instinctive protection. He wonders if he should introduce himself, but it doesn’t seem like the right moment. She is looking a little like a mother tigress protecting her cubs. He rubs his hand through his hair. The only thing to do is to admit responsibility and apologise.