Poppyland Read online

  ‘Hey, how’s it been, Kid?’ Mac’s voice is hesitant, and achingly familiar. No one has called him Kid for a long time. Ryder walks out through the back gate of the garden and on to the golf course. It’s almost dark, the windows in some of the houses along the edge of the fairway glow, and the town looks cosy and safe.

  ‘It’s been good,’ he says, surprised to find that ‘good’ is the word that comes first from his heart. He rubs his eyes, and bends closer over the phone. ‘Well, you know, it’s been everything you can imagine, Mac, and some more, but from where I am at this moment, it’s good.’

  Mac pauses, Ryder hears his breath hiss, ‘Yes. I can imagine,’ he says. ‘Where are you at this moment, anyway?’

  ‘On the golf curse – sorry, I mean course – behind my parents’ bungalow in deepest Deepham, Essex.’

  They both laugh. Ryder goes on, ‘I had to call. I want you to know I am coming to your christening. It’s been a while, but on 25 May, I will be there in your lovely garden with you all, and lifting a glass to your baby girls. In fact, are they babies? I don’t want to sound ignorant or anything, but I am – how old are they?’

  Mac’s voice is full of laughter. ‘Not at all ignorant, how could you know? Bella is three and Catherine is nearly one. They can both walk all over me, literally and metaphorically.’

  Ryder grins too. ‘Yeah, I can imagine,’ he says, and as he says it, he realises that he can’t at all. ‘Actually, I can’t imagine, but I’d love to see you and meet everyone.’

  ‘Come and visit us any time, not just the christening,’ says Mac. ‘I am so pleased to hear you. I hoped you would come, I’d love Jean and Bill to come too. It took a while to find out their new address. When did they leave Foxley?’

  ‘Nine years ago.’

  ‘It’s a good thing, Kid, you know.’

  Mac’s voice full of empathy down the phone is like a big enveloping hug. Ryder takes a deep breath, and nods. ‘Yes,’ he agrees, ‘it’s a very good thing. They’ve got a life here they seem to like.’

  ‘That’s good,’ Mac answers. ‘And how about you, Kid? Married? Kids? Or life on the open road?’

  Ryder grins. ‘I live on a boat. Like that mate of yours in Norwich we visited all those years ago.’

  Mac laughs. ‘God, you mean Jules. I remember that boat. I’d be amazed if it’s still afloat, it was riddled with holes and stuck together with putty. Man, we had a good summer that year. You and me and Bonnie.’

  Ryder sends a silent prayer of thanks to somewhere that Mac has mentioned her, and even his posture relaxes now there is no taboo.

  ‘We did. I must say, I haven’t been in Norfolk much since, but your christening is well worth making the trip for.’

  ‘I hope so,’ agrees Mac, ‘but Ryder. I don’t think this is the moment, but when is the fucking moment – what the hell! I want to ask you if you will be Bella’s godfather?’

  ‘Bill and Jean may have to be chipped out of their concrete foot moulds to get them up your way—’ Ryder is in relief mode, on rollicking overdrive. But suddenly he stops, mid-air, free-falling into what he has just heard Mac say.

  ‘You what? What did you say, Mac?’

  ‘I said, Lucy and I would like to ask you to be Bella’s godfather. I hope it’s not an imposition to ask. We wanted to give you time—’ Mac stops, Ryder hears Lucy’s voice murmur something in the background.

  Mac comes back. ‘Yeah. We don’t want you to feel pressurised. Take a while and think about it. Please.’ He pauses then speaks again. ‘Perhaps I should have written to ask you, I don’t know. But it’s been a while, hasn’t it, Kid?’

  Ryder finds tears ache in his eyes. He doesn’t need time. ‘No. Yes, it has been a while. Too long, Mac. I accept, of course I do. I feel honoured. I would love that so much. Thank you.’

  ‘Hey, Kid, I’m glad. It means a lot to me, you know that.’

  ‘To me too,’ says Ryder. ‘I’ll see you then.’ He clicks the phone shut and walks back towards the night-lit houses.

  The spare room in the bungalow is too hot. Ryder wakes gasping in the stuffiness and opens the window. A rush of birdsong and a breath of sweet air pour in. He lies in bed, the corner of the morning available to him through the gap in the small, stiff curtains is heavenly blue, and a lilac bush nods and rustles, scratching the glass of the open window and wafting in a scent of pure spring and a sense of stolen early morning time. Ryder yanks the curtain back without getting out of bed, and closes his eyes against the beating gold as the sun seems to double in strength and direct its efforts to warming him. The sunshine on his skin is blissful; Ryder floats into a trance, his body is a weightless vehicle for a syrup-like sense of well-being and, cocooned, he drifts away. When he next wakes, a breeze has got up and the cat has left a trail of give-away sooty foot prints on the windowsill and down the wall, and settled on the small of Ryder’s back with its purr on full throttle. Ryder surfaces from a dream about motorbikes to find himself the victim of a rhythmical kneading assault. The wellbeing has departed, he can tell he has overslept by the height of the sun in the sky, and is instantly annoyed; he resents the bloody cat’s assumption that he is a cushion. It seems to weigh a lot, it seems to weigh him down a lot. It gives him claustrophobia. He throws back the sheet and gets out of bed. The cat leaps on to the floor and sits by the door looking offended and meowing fatly. It bats the door, managing to make a lot of noise for something billed as stealthy. Ryder cannot remember its name, or rather he can, but he chooses not to, pointlessly making a stand of defiance which nobody will be interested in. At least he hasn’t kicked it or performed any other act of malevolence towards it.

  In the kitchen, he fills the kettle. No one is around, although the murmur of the radio suggests his parents are in the house. Piano music ripples, and Ryder could be seven again.

  His father always played Radio 3 loudly enough to avoid conversation while he made coffee for himself and cooked porridge for Ryder and Bonnie before school. This only happened on the rare occasions that Jean went away to visit her mother, but Bonnie and Ryder always enjoyed Bill’s moments of domesticity and the unchanging nature of his routine.

  The radio beeps on the hour, and Ryder wanders through the house with his cup of tea. Although he doesn’t recognise that he had a purpose, he stops when he comes to the door of the room at the end of the hall. He opens the door. The curtains are drawn and the room smells faintly of incense, a hint of patchouli oil and roses. The smell is utterly reminiscent of Bonnie and turns Ryder’s insides upside down when he breathes in. He sits down on the red velvet bed cover. It is scattered with embroidered yellow suns in the middle of which are tiny mirrors, and it used to hang over Bonnie’s bed, like the festooned ceiling of a harem. Or so he liked to tease her when winding her up. Teasing Bonnie never worked unless she wanted to play the game. Otherwise she just ignored him, rolling her eyes as she lit more joss sticks to hide the smell of cigarettes smoked furtively out of the window.

  It is suddenly clear that the reason he has come in here is to find a present to give to his new god-daughter – his only god-daughter, in fact – as a memento of her namesake. Not easy, as he has very little experience of small girls and their taste, but they can’t be hugely dissimilar to grown-up girls, and he likes to think he knows what they like, up to a point. He wonders if he needs to ask his mother if it’s OK for him to have something from here, something of Bonnie’s?

  For a moment he has a sense of seeing himself from above. Here he is in Essex with his parents at this soulless house of theirs. It’s not his home, it never has been, it’s a kind of holding station for their grief. It’s odd to realise that while his parents have kept everything that belonged to Bonnie, somewhere along the way he got left out. Perhaps it was because he has a house or rather a boat of his own that they, not unreasonably, didn’t make a room or even part of a room for Ryder when they moved here. It’s not that he resents it. At the time, he rose to the challenge that this brought, viewing it
as freeing and independent-making to not have any ties in his parents’ house but, with hindsight, it just seems oddly thoughtless, careless even, as though his feelings don’t need to be considered because he enjoys the luxury of being alive. He can make his own way in the world whereas Bonnie is only a memory and she needs them to sustain her. On the mantelpiece in the sitting room there are his football cups, and in the loo there are photographs of him in teams, but his stuff, his paraphernalia, his football boots and leather jacket, his posters and the big green bean bag covered in a red-cherry motif, even his books have all vanished, given to jumble sales, thrown away, just gone. The way things do in life. The only things Ryder has retained himself is his record collection. This room, which in everyone’s head is called Bonnie’s room though no one says it, has been haphazardly arranged. Arranged in that the bed, the dressing table and the wardrobe are all in the place they would be in if someone used it as a bedroom, but the reality ends there. Black dustbin bags and boxes spilling books and peacock feathers, rolled-up posters, necklaces, clothes and curling photographs fill the floor space. The dressing table is stacked with small boxes and ornaments, there is no room anywhere for a person; the room is too full of memories.

  More than anything, it looks like a film set; it has all the props to create a student’s room, but none of the personality that inhabits it and brings it alive. Not sure what he is looking for, but trying to focus on something, Ryder opens the wardrobe door. Inside there are dresses and a long dark green coat; they have hung there for years without being looked through, without being pulled out, tried on, chosen or rejected. They have a look of inauthenticity about them and, pulling a flounce of a black-and-white-striped dress, he remembers Bonnie wearing it to his football team’s ‘Graphic’ party. It was one of many parties held in that long-ago last summer. Parties given to mark the end of the lives they had all led as teenagers. Most of the football team was going to university, and Ryder and two team-mates had made an invitation they were very pleased with, showing graphic sex. Or bits of it. Of course, in the end, it wasn’t at all graphic, but they had a lot of fun doing it nonetheless. Most people had taken this, not art as the theme. Bonnie was just about the only girl with clothes on, the rest were wearing skincoloured bikinis. Lila had come to stay that night. She didn’t often come back to his house, because he found Bill and Jean too embarrassing. ‘What about my parents?’ Lila countered. ‘They only pretend to be laid-back hippies; underneath they’re probably more uptight than yours are.’ Lila had drawn a very pretty nude body on to a suede dress. And even better, as Ryder knew, she had a very pretty body under the suede dress too. In the living room, before Lila, Bonnie and Ryder left for the party, Bill hardly looked up from the news on television when they walked in to say goodbye. Jean, however, leapt from her chair as if she had been scalded, and threw her handkerchief at Lila.

  ‘Oh, thank you.’ Lila was surprised, but she took the handkerchief and held it. Ryder looked at his mother in astonishment.

  ‘You’re mad, Mum. You were trying to cover her up, weren’t you?’ Lila and Bonnie burst out laughing at the absurdity of the idea, but Jean blushed. Ryder felt a pang of sorrow for his mother’s unease. Bonnie drove them home after the party, chatting to Jack all the way, until they dropped him at the end of the track where his parents’ farmhouse was. Bonnie was on form. She was always quite happy driving and not drinking, and, Ryder honestly felt, though he never said so, she was not suited to drink – it made her maudlin and seemed to erase her judgement entirely. He sighs now, nostalgic for a time when life was effortless.

  All the dresses hanging up in this room were put here by Jean, though they once belonged to Bonnie, but it’s not surprising that they look so uninhabited. Can that be the right word for a dress? It’s certainly the right word for the room. A whiff of the dry, acrid smell of mothballs curls into the gentle muskiness in the air. Ryder shuts the wardrobe door again. As it swings shut he sees his mother’s reflection in the mirror on the door. She hovers on the threshold of the room, the fingers of one hand clasped in the other, anxiety driving lines up her forehead and on through her hairline. Staring at her, Ryder notices the ripples in her hair carefully created by the local hairdresser. He reckons they are more a manifestation of his mother’s state of mind than personal adornment.

  ‘Darling, there you are.’ She has a way of speaking to Ryder that comes across as if she’s from a parallel universe and very surprised to have bumped into him in this life at all. Her eyes meet his briefly, but she doesn’t come into the room or invite an embrace. Ryder feels a rush of sorrow. He has never thought of his mother as small before, and now she seems to hardly fill the doorway, and her expression is fearful.

  ‘Morning, Ma, I thought I’d find something of Bonnie’s to give to Mac’s daughter for her christening.’ There is no point in beating about the bush, Ryder feels caught with his hands in the till, and frustrated enough to be direct; it is his mother who has created this set-up. Last night when he mentioned Mac’s children’s christening, his mother had said, ‘I just don’t see how we can go,’ in a voice of such practised martyrdom that he decided not to discuss any of it further.

  Jean moves forward into the room, she puts a hand out, twisting the edge of the curtain, and glances again at Ryder, her eyes moving ceaselessly on around the room. ‘I just didn’t know what to do with all her things. I thought when we moved they would somehow be dealt with, and they never have been.’

  Ryder shuts his eyes, he doesn’t want another anguished conversation. There have been too many over the years and they add up to nothing. No one goes anywhere except round and round in confusion.

  ‘I know,’ he says, and waits for the next bit apprehensively. But suddenly he is opening his eyes in surprise, as Jean goes on, her voice level, not unhappy or strained, and even a tiny bit warm.

  ‘You know, Ryder, I haven’t been stuck in the past as much as you might think. I’ve accepted that Bonnie’s gone. A long time ago in fact.’

  Ryder waits, Jean looks at him openly at last, and he sees that the distance in her eyes, a shifting unapproachable element that he has always known, has changed. She is still talking. ‘And yes, I think that’s lovely – find whatever you think would be – would be – well, yes, take whatever you want for Mac’s daughter. And it’s time for me to go through this room properly.’

  ‘Don’t do it on my account.’ Ryder says the first thing that comes into his head. Jean sits on the bed next to him; she smells of china tea and lemons. He thinks of Leonard Cohen suddenly, and the lines where Suzanne feeds him tea and oranges. On a houseboat, come to think of it. He sighs and wonders why he has to be such a fucking idiot to throw back something so fragile, so long awaited as his mother’s attempt at building a bridge between them.

  But Jean squeezes his hand, her touch is soft and giving, not brittle as he expected. Then she takes both his hands. ‘I don’t quite know how to say this to you, and I’m very ashamed I didn’t say it before, as it’s so important.’ Her eyes swim, she bites her lip. ‘I don’t think I’ve ever told you that I’m glad you didn’t die. And I am. Very glad.’ Jean gets up and leaves the room, closing the door behind her. Ryder slides down to sit on the floor and his head lolls back against the bed. He has believed the opposite for the last eighteen years.

  It takes him a long time to get up off the floor. Long enough for the cat to come back, climb insolently over him and settle with its thrumming purr on the red velvet bedspread. It sounds like a pneumatic drill; Ryder scrambles up and takes the box in front of him over to the window. He knows what he wants to find, and it is just as well he has a specific purpose, for ten minutes of sorting through the folders and notebooks, Bonnie’s letters and photographs, is bewildering and transporting. It becomes hard not to see all that there is in her room through his own, very young, grieving eyes from almost twenty years ago.

  Beneath a slide of records and an old record player decorated with stickers of rainbows and hearts, is a w
ooden box inlaid with an intricate mother-of-pearl pattern. Bonnie bought it at a hippie fair in Suffolk, the first time she and Ryder went off on their own together. Ryder was seventeen, and it was for him an initiation festival – he ate hash cookies, learned how to roll a joint, and drank magic mushroom tea. Thanks to Bonnie, he did not make the mistake of doing all these things at once, but over the three days they were there he seemed to be always putting himself where drugs were, thus rendering himself increasingly depraved. He got into trouble on the first night with his sister for having forgotten the ground sheet for their tent. They had to find somewhere else to go in the middle of the night. Ryder remembers trying unsuccessfully to lie on the sharp golden straws of the stubble field, mud clods in his ears, while Bonnie tried to stamp down the stalks of corn, cursing crossly.

  ‘We’re giving up. Come on, we’ve got to find somewhere else to sleep.’ She yanked him out of his sleeping bag.

  ‘You’re like the bloody Princess and the Pea,’ Ryder muttered to his sister as they stumbled out of their tent and across to the lighted tepee further along the campsite. Bonnie somehow decided that the lost ground sheet was directly linked to Ryder’s soft-drug consumption, and she lectured him all the way home in the car the next day on the evils of addiction.

  ‘Fair enough,’ Ryder pointed out to her, ‘except you’ve got three ready-rolled joints from that astrologer bloke who fancies you.’ Bonnie giggled, and tried to look innocent, but Ryder knew they were stashed in the wooden box Ryder had at his feet in the car.

  Now the wooden box is on Ryder’s knees. He opens it, his head full of what he will find in it. He knows it with some conviction as he had put Bonnie’s trinkets in it when she died. What else was he to do with her jewellery when it was given back to the family by the police?