Poppyland

by Raffaella Barker

  Recently, Ryder had read that the circle had begun to decay in the salt-water tank in Peterborough, where it had been moved to, and no one had visited it. In the end the consensus of the Heritage Board had been to return it to the sea whence it came.

  Stretched now on the bed in the hotel room, his mind feels clear and uncluttered. He picks up the pencil and reaches for paper again, frowning at what he has on the page so far. How will the boat get up the cliff? God knows, but what is more important is his house is suddenly there in his imagination and it has a kitchen as warm and friendly and colourful as his parents’ one is cold. He begins to draw a room from inside, a low window, a deep window seat. He must be getting soppy in his old age, for now he is doodling a cat on a cushion.

  He wonders if he should call Cara to see if she is all right. He can work up a bit of self loathing, and blame himself for leaving her, but the truth is she was moving on too. And today she was poised and accepting. He can give himself a break and just sleep for now. Respite. He has been looking for it for ever, or so it seems right now, and that is why he is habitually on the move. Buying time from his feelings, existing in a state of not yet. The timing of all this is surely no accident. The work in Denmark will be finished tomorrow. This chapter of his life is closing much more definitely than he imagined it would. And he is free. The trouble is, it feels more like a stay of execution than a state of joy.

  The next afternoon, on the plane hurtling down the runway and up into the sky, Ryder’s first airborne thought is that he wants to find a way to be free and yet connected to another person, and his second is that, given we can fly, surely anything is possible.

  Chapter 4

  Grace

  Brooklyn

  February

  Sometimes the need for air feels like a thirst. The temperature in New York has not risen above freezing for the past eleven days, or if it has, I was not present at the specified warm spot to enjoy it. Eleven days is a long time in a New York winter for the wind not to rise up howling from the East and hurl chaos through the wide grey winter streets of Manhattan, banishing moribund thoughts and this deathly cold. The air has been dense with ice particles moulding their shape on to the bricks of the buildings, swelling within the cracks in the sidewalk, containing the relentless chill which kicked in on Thanksgiving, changed gear with snow after Christmas and now seems set to stay for ever. The pressure drops in the atmosphere and is mirrored by the mood of mankind. No one is cheerful, and the small act of putting one foot in front of another is such a big deal that some days I don’t get round to doing it and I just stay in bed.

  The only way to breathe outside is through a scarf, for the chill damp of the air on the back of the throat is suffocating, and the whole population is coughing. It seems that the city has gone back one hundred years in time to the cloying, slow poison of coal-fuelled smog. I have been in a bad mood for weeks, and it shows no sign of lifting now as I let myself in to my studio, stamping my feet in pooled melting snow inside the main doors. The walk here from Jerome’s apartment where I live now takes about twenty minutes, long enough for the chill in the air to penetrate to my bones. As soon as I’m in the building the tension of my body in battle with the cold drops, and I begin overheating as I climb the stairs, peeling off hat and gloves, unzipping my coat, weighed down by bulky annoying layers and the sheer volume of all I am wearing.

  In the studio, a pale stillness sits like dust on every surface of the room, thick and untouched even on the walls. I haven’t been here for a few days, and my absence fills my work place. The studio is on the fourth floor of an old warehouse a block from the Hudson, and has a jagged view between buildings of a sliver of Lower Manhattan and the vast river. This has been my own space since I moved to New York more than ten years ago and it has made it possible for me to work no matter what else has happened in my life. I wonder sometimes what would have happened if I had lost the space; I might have given up painting and got a regular job. Things might have been different, but I found it in my first week here through Dorelia, one of the girls I shared my first apartment with. She was a dancer in a club and her boyfriend worked in this building, running a business making rubber fetish dresses. I sublet from him and his partner Stephan and I painted the catwalk for their mad fashion shows for a few years. Somewhere I’ve still got a black rubber dress, dangling in my wardrobe as shiny as a pod of seaweed but smelling of the talcum powder I had to dust inside whenever I was putting it on. Unlike the dress, the rubber business is long gone and most of the spaces around me are offices. I lost touch with Dorelia’s boyfriend after she split up with him, but Stephan and I stayed friends and he stripped every vestige of rubber out of his wardrobe, and his soul, or so I used to tease him, and started working in an art gallery. His boyfriend, Ike, and Jerome both work for the same oil company, so Stephan and I are in the same situation, as we often discuss. Stephan is always broke and relies on Ike to bail him out, and my rent for the studio creeps up and up and now I couldn’t afford an apartment of my own if I didn’t live with Jerome. It’s not an ideal situation, but this studio is my security and I love it here. I guess I could move in here if all else fails.

  I kick off my boots and light the gas stove to put on the kettle, each action blowing life and movement into the stillness. The gas flutters, the kettle sits silent for a moment and then, quietly at first but in an increasingly urgent crescendo, begins its slow cacophony of grunts and wheezes.

  The phone rings as I unpeel layer after layer of outdoor clothing. I am almost down to the soft stuff – my actual clothes, thin and light and relevant to the shape of my body. Although the studio is still chilly, I find it hard to breathe as the furnace of my blood rushes to the surface of my skin, turning it lobster-red like a smack on the cheek. The innermost layers of my clothing, normally lovely silky garments I get a thrill just from the joy of having next to my skin, feel loathsomely like fur. This is a truly disgusting sensation – matted, sweaty fur. God knows why this morning I chose to wear a thin V-neck jumper over the T-shirt next to my skin. It itches like a hair shirt. Anyway, wrenching the goddam clothes off I grab the phone in a strop.

  ‘Hello? What?’

  It’s Lucy, my sister, five hours ahead in England. She’s a year older than me, and although I like to think of her as my inspiration and my mentor, the truth is that nothing she has done has rubbed off on me, and actually the dynamic between us is more that she glows and I try to shut my eyes to it. When she got married, I was meant to give a speech, but I couldn’t find the words, and I burst into tears. I could not express what she meant to me, or how fabulous she is at all. It was so important and I couldn’t do it. She could have done it for me, that is what I love about her; she will try anything and make a success of it. She could plait her hair and tie her shoelaces when she was five. She did mine too, so I didn’t learn until I was embarrassingly old. I wanted to say that although I try to ignore her loveliness as much as possible, she is like the sun, and even when my eyes are closed, her golden warmth emanates through my eyelids, permeating my being, and that is what she is like with everyone who comes across her. In the end that was just about what I did say, and she stood up and gave a speech back that I wish I could remember about how she could not have been her without me being me beside her. On her wedding day it was a loving and inclusive thing to do, and that’s Lucy. She is sunny and the world smiles with her. While I love that about her, it is sometimes hard to bear, and so is her unswerving belief that I will soon be experiencing what she is, in the way that she is experiencing it. It is nonsense, we are way too different, but she needs to think of me following the path she cuts through life; it’s too big a deal for her to be doing it just for herself. Just now she sounds tired.

  ‘Hey, Sis, how are things? I just heard on the news that they’ve closed JFK, your snow looks unreal.’

  ‘Oh Lucy, hang on a sec, I’m so hot. How are the tiny girls?’ With a gasp, I tuck the phone under my chin and wrench off the next layer, a dark
green T-shirt, hurling it down. Even the way it floats to the floor is infuriating.

  ‘Oh they’re lovely, full on, but they’re asleep now. God, I’m jealous you’re hot.’

  Now I am topless apart from my bra. ‘God, it’s so unhealthy to be living like this. It’s wrecking the planet. We should get back to nature a bit and use fires instead of central heating. Then we wouldn’t find the cold so freakingly COLD!’ I am puffing now, and trying to put a different T-shirt on with the phone cradled somehow on my shoulder.

  Lucy laughs. ‘Yeah, you’re not wrong, we should get used to the weather we have instead of trying to set ourselves up against it.’ She pauses and sighs. ‘But the reality of doing that is hellish, let me tell you. We’ve got no heating in this cottage, and in Norfolk by the sea there’s nothing between us and the North Pole and boy, can you feel it.’ The phone clatters as she chats on, I imagine her tucked up in bed in the wild weather of Norfolk, and it’s sweet, like a children’s story.

  Lucy is still chatting, ‘I seem to find every reason and fantasy not to get used to it – like telling myself this is only an illusion of cold and actually it’s really boiling, or so Mac tells me all the time.’

  ‘Is it?’ I wonder what the geology lesson is leading towards. ‘What are you on about?’

  ‘The earth is actually soft centred. It’s molten deep within, you know – but, speaking of boiling, how can you be hot for even a moment? How can you be hot in New York? It feels like the dawning of a new ice age.’

  ‘I’m wearing too many clothes, that’s how.’ I am over my suffocation now and am gulping water from the bottle on the table.

  ‘I wish I was hot here,’ says Lucy, ‘Mac is away and I’ve got three hot-water bottles to replace him, and they don’t do the job when the draught is wafting the curtains. But anyway, we want to have a party and I really want you to come.’

  ‘Yeah? I will, of course – if I can. When is it? What’s it for?’ My heart bumps at the thought of going back to England, and I know it’s something I have been avoiding thinking about. But I should go. ‘Sorry, Luce, it doesn’t need to be for anything. When is it?’

  ‘Oh, not for ages. I want to have it when the bluebells are out.’

  This is a long-term thing, the panic recedes a little. I don’t have to go just yet. ‘Wow. That’s months away. You are amazing, Lucy, I haven’t even planned next week. Or tomorrow.’

  ‘Oh, I know, but you’ve got a career. How did it go in Denmark this time, by the way? Aunt Sophie sent me a cutting from the local paper in Norfolk. You were a headline on the front page, you know. Local girl makes good. She said the staff in her home had kept it for her so that she had two copies, one for her and one for me.’

  I have a lovely cosy feeling thinking of Aunt Sophie. She is the only person I know who ever reads about me on the occasions where my work is mentioned in a newspaper, and she always keep the articles. It’s a truly motherly act from my father’s sister.

  ‘That’s nice. God, I must write to her, it’s been weeks, I think. She’s learned how to email, though, which makes things much more immediate. But yes! Denmark was good. I loved being back there. I can’t believe it was five years ago that I had that show. What have I done with my life? But seriously, it was great to get away from here in the winter. Over there, they didn’t even have a Valentine’s Day theme, it was such a relief.’

  I’ve got one leg over the sofa arm and I sit there astride for a moment then tip myself over into the cushions just for something to do. Then I slide down to the floor, flexing each foot, leaning forward over my outstretched leg, giving myself the illusion that I am doing some exercise while talking on the phone. Forward bends are beatifying, according to my yoga teacher.

  ‘You know what, Luce, I’m really proud I’m in their National Gallery, but it’s also a bit embarrassing, I feel a fraud. This visit was very different from last time. It was all so grand. I had to sit next to the Mayor. His name was Ginseng Jensen.’

  She giggles. ‘It wasn’t! I can’t imagine being so grand as to sit next to the Mayor, I have enough trouble getting books back to the library.’

  I close my eyes, trying to feel Lucy’s calm energy in the room with me. Her acceptance of life is one of her most restful qualities. I realise I haven’t talked to anyone properly for ages. Jerome and I seem to pass one another on the stairs at the moment. Actually. I’m not sure that that’s true; he’s away and I’ve been away, so we haven’t set eyes on one another for over a week.

  ‘How’s your love life, Sis?’ she asks suddenly, and I know I can’t get out of it with a flip remark. But it doesn’t stop me trying. ‘On holiday.’

  ‘Is that good or bad?’ Lucy is genuinely caring. She is so different from my mother; I can never understand where she got it from. Now she has children, she’s even more loving. She also has a good memory. ‘Does that mean you had a holiday romance? Wasn’t that what happened in Copenhagen last time? Do you remember? It was when Mum died, and you were in a real mess. You hardly showed up to the opening of your own exhibition. Some man waylaid you. What happened to him? Is it him?’

  ‘Don’t be daft, I never heard from him again. I meant Jerome’s away right now and it’s all just bundling along as usual.’

  Lucy is still talking. ‘I remember you really liked that guy. What was his name?’

  ‘Ryder.’ Saying it out loud still makes my heart race – even now, when I haven’t seen him or heard from him since that night, and probably never will again.

  ‘Ryder. Nice name. Yeah, I always thought that if he had come to New York and found you again, that would be it. You’d be married with kids like me by now.’ Lucy giggles down the phone and I laugh too. God, what if she was right?

  ‘I wonder if I would? But he didn’t, and here I am with Jerome.’

  ‘How’s it going, Grace? Did he go with you to Denmark? My God, did another guy turn up like before?’

  ‘If only,’ I sigh. ‘No, Jerome didn’t come; he was working, and I didn’t ask him.’

  I have a splash of cold-water realisation that I didn’t ask him because I had secretly hoped subconsciously that I would meet someone else there – and I had wanted it to be Ryder. It’s too crazy to share with Lucy, so I interrupt myself: ‘But he’s away and I haven’t seen him since I got back. He’ll be home tomorrow.’

  ‘Are you looking forward to seeing him?’ Lucy’s questions are like arrows, they hit the bull’s-eye and quiver there. I feel I’m under such scrutiny that I could be a laboratory mouse under microscopic surveillance. The only good thing – and it is exactly the opposite of what I felt a few minutes ago – is that she is on the phone in Norfolk and not here in New York. I hedge a bit by repeating her question.

  ‘Am I looking forward to seeing him? What sort of question is that?’

  ‘Not a very taxing one under ordinary circumstances,’ says my sister gently. ‘What’s up, sweetheart?’

  Oh God, it’s always the same. These days, any human heart reaching out to mine makes me want to cry. I don’t answer and she changes her tone, trying to make me laugh, and I know she’s doing it because she’s too far away to comfort me, and that makes me feel even sadder. Then she switches again and she does make me laugh.

  ‘You didn’t have sex with anyone this time you were away, did you?’

  ‘Lucy! No, I did not. I didn’t have sex with anyone that time either, actually.’ I really miss my sister. No one teases me in New York.

  ‘But you could have done?’ No matter what the subject, the dynamic of Lucy and me has always been the same: she drives, insists and pursues, making the suggestions, while I hesitate, back off and remain non-committal, running away to avoid the spotlight of her caring.

  Like now. ‘Yes – no. Oh! I don’t know. Of course I couldn’t this time. Not that I could the other time, I never even gave him my number, he just vanished at the private view. Well, he said goodbye, but then he vanished. You are just winding me up and anyway, he— oh whate
ver. It’s a long time ago now and I’m with Jerome.’

  ‘Mmm.’ Lucy doesn’t need to be in the room or even on the same continent for me to know that she knows my feelings and thoughts better than I do. She is still on the trail and I can’t bear it, so I try to create a false scent to divert her.

  ‘I really loved being in Copenhagen, Sis, it’s got so much. You know, fabulous architecture, artisans still working, and mournful poets all in a special bohemian area.’

  ‘And cows,’ interrupts Lucy dryly, in case I thought for a second that I had fooled her. I am more up for this now and I take the comment as it comes.

  ‘Yes, and cows and such a richness of culture, but it’s all quite undiscovered. At least, that’s how it feels to me.’

  ‘Mmm. Fish and silver is what it makes me think of; a bit like Norfolk, if you add some mud and sugar beet.’

  ‘No silver in Norfolk. Just fish and fields of potatoes. Fish and chips, actually.’

  Lucy laughs now. ‘Oh God, I miss you, Sis. You’ve got to come over when we have this party to christen the girls and welcome everyone to the house. I need you to come. Come and have a summer holiday with us.’

  ‘But the summer is a million miles away.’

  I am so relieved that the conversation has swerved away from my private life. I need to look at the wounds I didn’t realise were still so open, and to mend them in private before I can share my feelings with Lucy or anyone else. I left home a long time ago, and I have done my best not to think too much about what it is in me that has kept me away. I know Lucy wishes I lived in England, and when Mum died I thought I would feel some tug to draw me back to where I came from, but I didn’t. Maybe one day I will move back. And maybe pigs will fly. I twist the telephone wire and lie back against a big cushion.