‘They’ve got big, haven’t they?’ Jenna flicked her head towards the dogs, who had been puppies the last time Poppy had seen them. She nodded yes, they had. Bloody enormous. One of them lifted his head and gave a loud, bassy bark that made Poppy jump.
‘Shut up, Prince!’ Jenna yelled in stereo with Ryan, who bellowed the same from his chair of power in the front room.
Prince glanced at the cat and Poppy wondered if they conversed about their woeful environment when they were alone.
Poppy grabbed an empty carrier bag, picked the food from the sink and deposited it inside. Jenna leant on the work surface and lit a cigarette, blowing smoke into the already stuffy atmosphere. Poppy then ran the hot tap, filled a sponge with water and washing-up liquid and rubbed it around a frying pan that sat on the work surface.
‘You gonna do the whole house, Pop?’ Jenna asked as she drew on her cigarette.
‘Hmmm?’ Poppy looked at her friend, distracted as though on autopilot. She laid the pan in the sink and put the sponge inside it. ‘Sorry, Jen… I…’ She couldn’t explain her desire for order.
With tea made, the four sat in front of the large TV screen in the sitting room. The walls were bare and a layer of dust covered the shelving unit and the saggy furniture. It made Poppy sad to think of the kids spending time in this depressing environment. She had grown up poor, but this was nothing to do with money; it was about laziness and neglect, and bore no connection to the size of a bank balance. She had to almost shout to compete with the commentary and cheers from the darts match.
‘Phil “the Power” Taylor, bloody legend.’ Ryan nodded at the screen.
Martin gave his first genuine nod.
‘It’s lovely to see you, Jen.’ Poppy smiled at her mate.
‘’Tis, mate. Been too long. Mind you, if you will live in the bloody sticks…’
Poppy smiled. Give her the sticks any time. ‘It’s not all bad, Jen.’ She reluctantly sipped at her tea.
‘I couldn’t stand it. Where do you go if you run out of milk or fancy a wander up the shops?’
‘We do have shops!’ Poppy laughed. ‘Just not on the doorstep.’
‘That’s the life you get if you want to play soldiers,’ Ryan piped up, then went back to licking his cigarette paper and rolling it into a skinny tube.
Martin felt his jaw tighten but said nothing.
Ryan wasn’t done. ‘I don’t know how you put up with it. Having to take orders: go here, go there.’
Martin smirked but kept his eyes fixed on Phil the Power. It always made him laugh, this reasoning from those who had never served, as though those that mocked had jobs where no one ever told them what to do, gave them instruction or monitored their progress, or lack of. He was pretty sure that even that Facebook billionaire bloke had shareholders to answer to.
‘And I bet there’s some right dickhead telling you what to do. I wouldn’t last five minutes.’
Martin looked Ryan up and down and thought of his mate, Aaron, who had lost his life serving his country. A better man and a great dad. ‘You’re right, Ryan, you wouldn’t.’
‘Thing is, Jen, I wanted to see you, not just talk on the phone.’ Poppy tried to deflect the men’s conversation and decided to say what she needed to and make their excuses.
‘Yeah, me too. Can’t hear on the bloody phone with that thing blaring.’ She used her cigarette to indicate the TV screen.
Poppy took a deep breath and glanced at Martin. ‘I’m not too well, Jen.’
‘There, I said you looked like shite. I bloody knew it! What’s amatterwivyou?’ She took a deep drag and let the smoke swirl from her nostrils.
‘I’ve got cancer.’
‘You’ve got what?’ Jenna twisted her head in the direction of her friend.
‘Cancer.’
Ryan sparked the flint and lit his roll-up as though the two were entirely unconnected.
‘Oh God! That’s terrible.’ Jenna clutched at her T-shirt. ‘Where is it?’ She didn’t try and stem the tears that brimmed in her eyes.
Poppy sighed. ‘Everywhere, really.’
Jenna cupped her head in her hand. ‘Oh Christ.’
The four sat in silence, listening to the whooping of the crowd as the tiny arrows landed with precision in the board.
Jenna spoke first. ‘D’you remember the day we saw the news when Mart got taken? I’ll never forget it, we just kept watching Sky, didn’t we, on a loop, waiting for him to come on again. And they kept saying your name, Mart, and it was like it wasn’t real. And you had to run up the old people’s home to stop your nan seeing the paper cos you knew she’d freak out.’ She shook her head as her tears fell.
‘Long time ago.’ Martin stared at the carpet, sticky underfoot.
Jenna sniffed loudly. ‘So what are they doing, Poppy? Are you having chemo and all that?’
‘I have had treatment – chemo and stuff – but to be honest, Jen, there’s not much point.’
Jenna let her head hang against her chest and she sobbed without restraint. Her nose ran and her eyes streamed.
‘It’s okay, Jen.’ Poppy rubbed her back.
‘No, it isn’t, nothing is. Everything’s a fucking nightmare,’ Jenna managed between bouts of crying.
Ryan seemed oblivious to his partner’s distress. He took a long draw on his cigarette and twisted his earring as he addressed Martin. ‘So have you, like, ever killed anyone?’
Martin stared at him. Death was not a topic he was comfortable with at the best of times. ‘No, Ryan, but I’ve felt like it once or twice.’
And in spite of the horrible atmosphere in the miserable house in which they sat, Poppy laughed.
Half an hour later, Martin drove past the parade of shops beneath the flats where they had lived in Walthamstow. The hairdresser’s where Poppy had worked was still there, only it was no longer Snipz Unisex Salon but The Cutting Station and now had trendy stainless steel fittings and a neon-lit reception desk. There wasn’t a tray of perm curlers in sight.
‘Blimey, that Christine,’ Poppy said. ‘I haven’t thought about her in a while.’
Martin gave a shudder. ‘Your old boss? She was a right old sort, wasn’t she. Bet she’s chasing the male nurses around her care home.’
‘Oh look, Sonny’s has gone!’ The two craned their necks to look at the mobile phone shop that had taken over the premises of their favourite café. The number of times they had sheltered from the rain there as kids, made a Coke last all afternoon in their teens and nipped in for a restorative cup of tea and a fry-up as adults. ‘Good old Sonny, he was a big part of our lives, wasn’t he? I didn’t think about it at the time, but he was just always there, making life a bit better.’ Poppy pictured him – enormously fat and always in a white apron spattered with food and drink, holding court from behind the counter. He always used to greet her in the same way – ‘’Ello, my darlin’! Long time, no see. How’s my gel?’ – and she could only ever remember him smiling.
‘You’re right,’ Martin said. ‘I used to just sit in that café sometimes because it was warm and he was so friendly. It was good to have somewhere like that to go.’
Poppy beamed, remembering the day Sonny had made her a birthday cake. It had been a crisp, blue day, but a day like any other. She had poured herself some cereal and as they had run out of milk, she’d eaten it dry in front of the telly. Spying Sonny outside the café, she had shouted at him, ‘It’s my birthday, Sonny! I’m nine!’ He had smiled at her. ‘Get away, I’d say you look at least ten! Happy birthday, darlin’.’ It had made her smile all the way to school, the fact that she looked ten. By half past three she had quite forgotten it was her special day and as she sloped past the café on the way home from school, wondered why he called her inside. With her bag slung over her shoulder, she trod the small step and walked inside. There on the counter was a big fat coconut sponge with icing on the top and nine pink candles. She could see it now. How she had beamed, reluctant to blow the candles out and spoil th
e effect. It was the first birthday cake she ever had, and the best.
‘He was a lovely man.’ Poppy smiled. ‘Wonder what he’s up to now?’
‘Dunno.’ Martin shrugged.
Martin reversed the Golf into a tight spot between two vans. He looked up at the light shining in the kitchen window of his parents’ home.
‘Are you going to go up and see them?’ Poppy asked, following his gaze.
‘Nope,’ he snapped. ‘If I bump into them, then that’s one thing, but I’m not about to start trying to win them over at my age.’
Poppy saw the twitch under his eye.
‘Seeing them kids today with Ryan and the way he spoke to them, it made me feel sick. He’s a bully, Pop, just like my dad, and there’s not a day, not one single day I don’t think about the way he treated me.’
Martin heard his dad’s words, loud and clear as if they had been spoken only yesterday: ‘Do what, you useless little poof? How would that work? You bloody idiot!’
‘So, no. I won’t be going up to see them.’
Poppy looked around at the buildings, taking in the familiar surroundings of the estate where they had both grown up. ‘I feel very close to my nan here. I can picture her everywhere I look. It’s lovely.’
Martin took her hand. They trod the same path that Dot and her new husband, Wally, had walked more than fifty years earlier. Poppy closed her eyes and felt the ghost of Dorothea walking by her side, young, anxious and with a heart full to bursting as she twisted the fresh gold band on the third finger of her left hand and tried to take in every detail of the featureless, concrete landscape. Poppy smiled, remembering suddenly her nan’s outpouring that one afternoon, at the time meaningless: ‘My secret, my lovely little secret. My Simon, my little boy, my beautiful baby.’
Poppy’s history was all around her. ‘Poor old Nan,’ she mused.
‘In some ways,’ Martin interjected. ‘But Dorothea’s face always lit up when she spoke about you. You made her so happy.’
Poppy smiled. ‘And her me, mate. I don’t know what I would have done without her.’
‘All those times I’d walk into the flat and hear you both roaring over something stupid!’ Martin grinned. ‘It used to make me chuckle, it was infectious. And I’d find you sitting in that little kitchen with the kettle whistling and the windows steamed up and bacon under the grill. I thought it was the nicest place I’d ever been. Cosy.’
Poppy squeezed his fingers inside her own. ‘It was, sometimes, before she properly went downhill and Cheryl pissed off. When Nan was on form, I could forget about all the other crap. Do you remember at our wedding, when she went to the wrong ceremony and only realised at the end?’ Poppy bent over and held her stomach at the memory. ‘Oh God, only her! And she even cried during the vows and fluttered her hanky like any good nan of the bride, only to realise when they turned around that it wasn’t us!’
‘Bloody typical.’ Martin smiled.
In the darkening twilight, Poppy scanned the blocks of flats that surrounded them. They formed a square of sorts. Each block was identical, each balcony or walkway faced the other, meaning there was little variation, sunlight or privacy. Many of the original front doors had been replaced and the mismatched façades made them look scruffy and dated. On the walkway outside one door sat a large plastic tub in the centre of which was a gnarled, stubby brown root. Poppy found it sad that someone had tried planting something pretty but either through lack of know-how or effort had failed. She found it more depressing than if they hadn’t bothered.
She let her eyes wander over the tarmac apron on which they stood, mostly now divided into parking spaces. Abandoned untaxed vehicles and the dented vans of working men sat squashed together, forming a multi-coloured metal herringbone in what used to be an open space.
She studied the grey concrete slabs daubed with graffiti and the generous stains of chemical discolouration where it had been half removed, leaving just a shadow of the anger spewed from a spray can. Many of the windows had bars over them and no amount of fancy scrollwork or bright turquoise paint could lift the gloomy message that they conveyed. One flat bore the scorch marks of a recent fire; blackened wisps snaked from behind the metal panels that had been secured over the doors and windows.
‘Look at it, Mart. It’s run-down, isn’t it? And so dirty.’
‘It always was, love.’
‘Not in my mind.’ She shook her head. Even the unhappiest of days would be cheered by a trip outside to the playground. The way she remembered it, the hours she’d spent sitting on the swings or hanging around the slide were always in sunshine, never in the rain or winter. As if this dingy space existed in permanent summer. She could only picture herself wearing a vest top and shorts, with brown legs and her hair shining with coppery highlights. Poppy drew an arc with her gaze. ‘It all looks smaller, more cramped.’
‘Maybe you just got bigger, fat arse.’
‘Oi, cheeky! I was here only ten years ago, don’t think I’ve got that much bigger.’ They were both pretending, neither wanting to acknowledge her weight loss, the way her hip bones jutted against the denim of her jeans, and her jaw that now looked overly large for her face.
Martin gripped his wife’s hand as they tripped across potholes and skirted crisp packets that cartwheeled ghostlike in the breeze. Martin sidestepped a blob of chewing gum and narrowly missed a pile of discarded beer cans.
He looked up towards the third-floor balcony. ‘Blimey, the times I stood here and called up to you.’ He brought his hands up to his mouth, curling his fingers to form a cone. ‘You comin’ out, Poppy Day?’
They stared at the space where she would appear, wearing her grubby school jumper, her forearms cushioning her chest as she leant over the concrete edge. ‘On me way!’ They both heard the reply that had echoed a hundred times around the walls. This little square of concrete had been a welcome escape from their grimy, oppressive flats, a pocket of joy in an otherwise joyless life.
‘Peg and Maxy are so lucky, aren’t they?’ She thought of Malik and Adil and then pictured the wide-open green spaces where her children ran, the back garden in which they built dens and splashed in their paddling pool, and the sweet, clean Wiltshire air that flowed through their lungs. ‘It’s what we always wanted, wasn’t it? To give them better than what we had?’
‘Yep.’ Martin nodded. ‘And we have. But I was often happy here, especially when I was with you. You were all I needed, always. I didn’t notice anything else.’
‘Me too.’ She squeezed his hand.
‘Fancy a swing?’ He smiled.
Poppy tucked her hair behind her ears. ‘Well, we could hardly come to our playground and not, could we?’
She gathered her coat at her throat, ignoring the throb in her chest and the waves of sickness that threatened to wash over her as they quickened their pace. They edged past the clutch of cars and the row of industrial-looking wheelie bins. Despite their size, the bins still couldn’t contain all the rubbish: the overflow was piled in slimy bin bags and stuffed into leaky cardboard boxes that gathered at every corner.
They paused and stared at their old playground, which was now fenced in by knee-high metal railings painted a garish shade of orange. Martin pushed open the gate and Poppy followed him in. The ground underfoot was black and spongy and had the outlines of puzzles painted on it, so worn they would only make a game frustrating, like hop without the scotch.
It was in this little square that Poppy and Martin had been free to laugh and fall in love. Childhood games, illicit smoking and teenage kissing had all taken place in this playground, their refuge. And, when he was eighteen, it was where Martin had proposed.
He walked to the centre of the space, breathing deeply and with his arms outstretched as if to confirm what his eyes were telling him. He turned a full circle. ‘They took away the fucking swings!’
Poppy saw the unmistakable glint of tears in his eyes. Walking forward, she placed her hand on his chest. ‘They were always
dangerous. It’s a miracle we never lost a finger or worse! They were old and creaky even then, Mart. It doesn’t matter.’
‘Doesn’t matter?’ He blinked as his distress spilled down his cheeks. ‘It matters to me. This was our place, our swings! Why can’t anything stay the same? Why does everything turn to shit?’ Martin sank down to his knees and Poppy, with her arms now wrapped around his trunk, sank too. ‘I don’t want the swings not to be here, Poppy Day, and I don’t want you to leave me. Please, please… don’t… leave… me.’ He stuttered through his sobs.
Poppy cradled her man-child into her chest and stroked his hair from his forehead. ‘Ssshh… Ssshh… It’ll all be okay. It’ll all be okay.’
Martin gripped her a little too tightly. ‘It won’t be. I’m losing you and it hurts so much that I can’t even think about it. My stomach is twisted into a knot and I can’t swallow properly. I don’t want to be in this world without you. There’s a big ball sitting in my throat and every time I look at you… I want to go hysterical I want to punch every single bloody door off its hinges!’ He spoke through gritted teeth. ‘And keeping it all in, Pop, it’s really hard.’
‘I know, baby. I know.’ She sighed and kissed his forehead, relieved to finally see the emotion that he had been battling against for weeks.
They were both silent for a second or two. Poppy felt a deep sadness on his behalf. It was the first time she considered the fact that if it hadn’t been for the kids, it would be better to be the one leaving, not the one left behind. She looked up to see a lady in a dark blue mac and headscarf walk past. She was carrying a red-and-blue-striped shopping bag, the kind Poppy hadn’t seen in years. The woman scuttled past and the smell of hot fresh chips slathered in salt and vinegar wafted in their direction. Poppy inhaled the aroma. The woman turned on the path and smiled at Poppy. Poppy jumped a little and held onto Martin. The woman looked like her nan, only younger. Poppy blinked and the woman was gone.
‘I don’t think you will be in this world without me. I’ll always be close to you. And Peg and Max, they are me and you, and they aren’t going anywhere.’
Will You Remember Me? Page 15
