Poppyland

by Raffaella Barker

  Ryder arrives by helicopter with the lads on the new shift. They will be here for four weeks, he will be here for two hours. No matter how bad it gets he would not trade his life for any one of theirs.

  He suddenly thinks of Cara, and in an impulse of nostalgia, calls Interflora to send her some flowers. It’s her birthday, and he is glad he remembered. Maybe he will visit her next time he is in Copenhagen. Out here in the middle of the sea is a lonely place. Ryder feels a need to have friends, and he would like to be friends with Cara. He suggests lilies to the girl on the phone then changes his mind. Lilies. The funeral parlour. What a bad idea.

  ‘No, not lilies. Make that something more cheerful – bright.’ At the church they had red and orange and pink dahlias for Bonnie, ranked in gaudy banks. They reminded Ryder of cancan girls in silk bloomers.

  ‘Yeah, something colourful Oh well – yes, tulips would be great.’ Fuck. More cancan dancers. Oh well, it’s done now, and flowers are nice whatever they are. He switches off his phone and heads for the office block on the eastern corner of the rig. Fucking crap. Staring across mile after mile of iron-blue sea, Ryder’s ears fill with the roar of the sea as its surface boils around the legs of the gas platform, and the vastness of it rises and falls in ceaselessly changing waves and troughs, and the notion of a bunch of flowers seems tiny as a token of friendship. He pinches the bridge of his nose, heaves a sigh, and mentally kicks himself. He must get on with the work he has been sent to do. Flowers and the bittersweetness of love have no place here.

  This business is way beyond romance, even the romance of literature, though it might be interesting for a latter day Hemingway to write a rigger’s novel – ‘Gas Platform’. Ryder can almost see the gilt typeface on the cover. On second thoughts, maybe not. Why would anyone ever want to read a book about life on a giant Meccano set in the middle of the North Sea? Certainly, he will not be the one writing it.

  There is no one in the office, the blinds are drawn and the desk is empty, tidy and unmanned. There is no one around to give him the information he needs until the platform manager returns. Outside Ryder moves to the railings. The sea snaps foaming jaws and seethes like a drooling mouth far below. From the platform he can make out the mauve fuzz of the coastline. The sky is clear blue with clouds floating like dropped flowers and the sea is fresh and navy blue beneath the steely breath of the east wind and the rugged energy of the elements is tangible. Ryder reckons any marketing man could bottle the optimism and sell it to an aftershave company. He can see the giant golf ball poised on its tee at Mundesley, the early warning system which twenty years ago looked sinister, but now is just part of the landscape. It reminds him that the human heart can adjust to anything with time, and it brings a fragment of the past hurtling into his mind.

  A summer weekend when he and his sister and a car full of friends drove from Essex and camped in the dunes at Waxham. There were seven of them, high on the excitement of an adventure in a car of their own – Jack, who passed his test before anyone else, had borrowed it from his parents. Bonnie was in her last year of school and she and all her friends were bursting out of life in the suburb of Colchester. Ryder rode along on the back of their wave of discontent.

  ‘Actually, my parents don’t know I’ve got the car. They went to France. On a sailing boat,’ Jack confessed, tapping his fingers contentedly on the steering wheel in the beach car park. ‘I thought they had enough to think about with the sailing so I didn’t tell them.’ A blue haze of smoke from a joint formed a loopy halo around his wild brown hair. ‘Does that make it borrowed? Or stolen?’ Jack had a slow delivery and a laconic way of speaking that hit the nerve every time, especially once the spliff was circulating. They drove down a narrow slipway at Mundesley first, and parked the car on a small tarmac shelf cut into the cliff and a little above the beach. The air in the car was fetid; too many people in a small space on a long drive, but they were all accustomed to being squashed up against one another, and were reluctant to move and break up the single entity they had become. With every inhalation of Jack’s mind-bendingly strong Sinsemilla, Ryder for one became more and more convinced that he could not really get out of the car unless Jack, Bonnie and the others came with him, preferably glued to him.

  ‘Did you know that a crab is exactly opposite to a human?’ he announced during a sound break while James was trying to find his favourite Leonard Cohen track.

  ‘How?’ yawned Nat, pushing the front passenger seat back down hard so something gave way and it sagged almost flat on to the knees of everyone in the back and Nat’s head was suddenly in Fran’s lap. She stroked his face absently, and Bonnie traced the shape of his eyebrows and the outline of his mouth with her fingers.

  Ryder thought he really might get out soon. ‘Well, they have all their bones, which are actually made of shell, in their case on the outside and the soft stuff like the flesh and skin on the inside, and we have it the other way round with our bones inside our skin.’

  Bonnie began laughing and the car became a pile of giggling bodies, arms and legs flopping over one another, skin touching skin, sensuously golden in the shafts of evening sun. No one was actually capable of getting out. Unable to get to the point where bracing air licked their soft bodies. They sat in the car, smoking, stroking one another, listening to Leonard Cohen and Lou Reed until the sun was almost down.

  By positioning himself strategically in the right place in the car, Ryder achieved a long-standing ambition when he casually kissed Nicky Staples. Bonnie’s best friend and the most prized trophy – an older woman by all of a year. This kiss, which he kept going for about half a Velvet Underground song, gave him the jolt of adrenaline needed to get him out of the car. He and Jack, who was also ramped up with testosterone over Fran, cast off their stoned lassitude and, throwing off their clothes, with much shouting and chest beating, ran naked into the sea. Diving under the first wave was a shock, heart stopping for a moment, and then exhilaration kicked in and blood raced around his skin, tingling against the cold water. Within a few minutes all the others were in too, their clothes strewn on the beach in a trail from the car, the music carrying on the still air off the cliffs and over into the water where they were lolling and splashing like seals.

  Any song by Lou Reed can take Ryder back to that time in a flash, and now the memory has brought a song to him instead. In the North Sea now, on the bleak stage of the gas platform, wrapped in warm layers of clothing, Ryder shuts his eyes, his senses electric with the memory, ‘Perfect Day’ playing in his head. He remembers diving under a rolling wave, leaping up out of the spray, tossing back water-logged hair, his eyes and mouth and ears and nose all tasting of salt, all of him burning with the absolute physical realisation that he was alive. That was the night that he lost his virginity. To Nicky. A dream come true. It may not have been so great for her, of course, but it can’t have been that bad, she stuck around with him for a few months – in fact, they only split up when she went to America to take up her place at university there. Ryder was heartbroken for at least a month – he even planned to go and visit her for weekends, ignoring the fact that the university was in Texas and it would take a weekend just to get there. In the end he got distracted by life and met Lila. Another story, but all of it is still so alive in his memory. ‘Big summer,’ he thinks wryly.

  The platform manager, Geoff, is a dynamic, diminutive Glaswegian with a barrel chest and a Roman nose; he reminds Ryder of a bull terrier. Smoking a chain of un-tipped cigarettes, which he extinguishes by hurling them, red tipped and glowing, off the platform down into the sea, he rattles through his projections and observations without once looking Ryder in the eye. His eyelashes are pale, his skin a healthy pink. Very similar to the white bull terrier Ryder’s grandparents used to have. Rose was her name.

  Geoff is in full dynamic bull terrier flow. ‘So you’ll find the budget strained around here and, I’ve got to be honest with you, for me’ – and he jabs a thumb towards himself – ‘the erosion is NOT, repeat NO
T a priority. It’s a nothing. Zero. OK, so a bit of Norfolk is falling into the sea round to the east, but it gathers in silt further west and what the hell – it’s a big place.’ He snaps his fingers and thrusts a folder of papers into Ryder’s hands. ‘You’ll be taking off in a few minutes, I’d get your arse back in the chopper if you don’t want to be spending the next stage of your life here with us.’ He grinds his jaw, which Ryder finds a bit menacing until he notices that Geoff has exchanged his mouthful of cigarettes for chewing gum in a subtle sleight of hand in the last few minutes. ‘So you can see the damage for yourself, we’ve arranged for it to take you right along the coast now, and then back to Holland.’

  ‘Which coast?’ Ryder has a sense that he is being thrust into someone else’s schedule, and he hasn’t got what he needs from this godforsaken giant hairgrip in the middle of the sea yet. Though actually, now he is thinking about it, what can he possibly need here?

  Geoff the Glaswegian’s flung arm is all encompassing and in no way clarifies anything.

  ‘Where am I going?’ Ryder asks again.

  ‘The whole fucking East Anglian coast, the one that’s falling into the sea, mate.’ Geoff grins and, shaking hands with Ryder, he whisks himself back into the office and snaps the door shut.

  Climbing back into the helicopter, Ryder dons the headphones and figures out the topography as the pilot floats the machine up and they turn north. He wishes he had someone to tell that he is looking at Norfolk from the sea, he wishes there was someone in his life who would care. These are the moments when Ryder feels lonely, time he previously filled with work and plans is now a space for someone to come into his life and share it with him. More than he allowed Cara to share it, which, in fact, was not at all. He went to see her when it suited him and otherwise she was in his thoughts, but she didn’t disturb his life one bit. And now it is too late with Cara. But she wasn’t the answer.

  In the helicopter, Ryder has an eagle’s view and an unearthly turn of speed, his body thrums with adrenaline. Although he has frequently travelled by helicopter, this is like being in a ride in an amusement arcade, or in a dream. Suddenly they are swooping around the haunch of Norfolk, where dregs of the North Sea end up in the Wash and Lincolnshire abuts, and the helicopter arcs like a falling shooting star and now they are flying lower. They have turned and for a moment are travelling straight towards the red and cream stripes of Hunstanton cliffs and the brighter red and white lighthouse on the western end. There is the caravan park, a few permanent residences huddled at the back hedge, other single caravans parked in random areas. None of it looks nice, which is just as Ryder remembers it from the childhood holiday when his parents took him and Bonnie to Hunstanton for one rain-drenched and never to be repeated week in a borrowed caravan when they were five and six. No one in the family had the practical skills required for caravanning, and his parents Jean and Bill did not have the sensibility to rise above this, and make it fun. From his bird’s-eye view, above, and almost past already, Ryder cranes his head back to see the dark-fronted hotels and the rash of shops above the beach. He can hardly remember the town, he just remembers his mother sniffing, his father sighing and he and Bonnie whispering in their narrow bunks at night, too afraid of their parents’ silence to be quiet themselves.

  But now on, on in the rushing omnipotent bird’s-eye view. On past the end of the cliffs, and suddenly the demarcations between land and sea blur and the past is heralded once again in the wooden druidical circle at Thornham, eerily confused, if the eye is untrained, with the twisted fuselage of the Spitfire aeroplane that nosedived into the sand during the war and has been left there as a solemn memento. Actually, neither the Druid circle nor the plane wreck are visible as Ryder passes, but he knows exactly where they are, and has a vivid recollection of the reed-edged path from the village and the pub to the beach. Well trodden by him and his friends on drunken summer days when they pitched their tents at different points right the way around Norfolk. They were carefree and hedonistic and completely stoned most of the time. It seemed to always be hot, which can’t possibly be right, but no rain figures in Ryder’s memories – maybe he has erased it because he needs it to be perfect. But what is certain is that with Nicky and Jack and often Bonnie and a couple of others too, he spent endless summers drinking and swimming and, whenever possible, getting laid on every Norfolk beach, every night.

  There is nowhere without a memory. The blond expanse of Holkham, the inky blur of the pine trees, Gun Hill, Scolt Head, Stiffkey Freshes, Blakeney Point. He realises he has not returned all this time because it brings back too much of the past for him. It is not so much the pain of what he lost when Bonnie died that keeps him away from this place, it’s the unbearable abundance of what he had, what they all had. It suddenly makes sense to him that his parents have closed down and hardly seem to live at all now, just existing within a small routine of daily life. Living fully is high risk. No one cares when they are young, and that heedless optimism is wonderful. Despite the black despair of living through Bonnie’s death, and the unbridgeable gulf between before and after in his family, Ryder knows absolutely that he would not exchange the happiness he and his sister shared growing up together for a different outcome. Would she? Unknowable. And does it matter? Does it make him inhuman to wonder this? It is futile speculation, something he knows well, he has indulged in so much of it over Bonnie, and it brings him in a downward spiral to nowhere. Jean and Bill would trade any past happiness for Bonnie to be here now. Their longing for life to be different, for something to change that they cannot control, keeps them locked in sorrow.

  The pilot has taken the helicopter incredibly low now, pounding over the waves only a tree’s height above the surface. The churning sea mirrors Ryder’s restless state of mind. New chapters seem to be coming at him at breakneck speed, or is that just the effect of a helicopter ride around his past? In it, though, he is aware of a glow of recognition; this is a place he loves. Not allowing himself back here for all these years has not dimmed his affection for this coast. He wonders what his parents would say if he told them that he, who has refused to live anywhere more permanent than a houseboat on the Thames, is thinking of putting down roots and living in Norfolk.

  Not that this part of Norfolk is looking very permanent right now. As the helicopter swerves over towards Salthouse from the sea, the shingle shelf of the sea defence, usually a solid and visible land mark with a ribbon of beach between it and the tide line, is almost submerged by eddying, foaming water. In some places jagged gaps have been gouged out and the sea blasts through like a giant bucket of water thrown through the gap into the marshes behind. The salt marshes are peacefully green, cattle graze on the flat lowland towards the village, while beyond them cars glide along the narrow coast road. The sun floods golden light over the church and the village houses studding the hillside up to scrubby heathland a few hundred feet above the sea. This tranquil scene playing out on the inside of the sea defence is an opiate parallel universe to the maelstrom energy battering beyond the shingle wall. It is March, the tides are often huge, and it is for this that the dykes have been dug out, and the drains cleared in the marsh. The sea defence, built after the 1953 floods, is not a strong enough barrier any longer, and it never will be again. Ryder has studied this area enough to know that drainage is the only solution for now, but eventually the sea will reclaim parts of Norfolk. It makes the idea of living in a boathouse a lot more practical than Ryder ever imagined it to be.

  The journey continues east. Ryder makes notes and from time to time trains his binoculars on the crumbling cliffs at Weybourne and Sheringham. A row of cottages at right angles to the sea have lost their gardens and a tumble of lawn dangles as if by a thread, over the edge of the cliff near West Runton. Beneath the dirty yellow of the cliff, boulder-sized stones clatter against one another and a snapped washing line festoons like tangled knitting wool. Further east caravan parks proliferate, forlorn, untidy rows in ragged fields. The countryside here is sullen
and neglected, with scrappy woodland and a few churches the only elements breaking the monotony of flat farm fields.

  It is not a place anyone is glad to come from, but here, in a white-timbered former sanatorium, Jean, Ryder’s mother, gave birth to both her children, taking the old-fashioned view that a nursing home by the sea was the most appropriate venue. In many respects she was right – she was alone, her own mother and father had both died. Bill her husband was working, and anyway, Jean would not have dreamed of having him involved. What good would he have been? Better by far to go away alone, and bring the baby home to him a week or two later. Jean liked to be in control, and Bill liked Jean to be happy. It had worked like a dream for years.

  Jean had never expected to have children. Ill health in her childhood and an historic family pessimism contributed to her belief that such a joy was not for her. She was a librarian in Colchester Library and heading resignedly for spinsterhood when Bill James came in asking for a copy of the Collins Field Guide to Mushrooms. It was April, not the season for mushroom hunting. The air of faint apology with which he excused this lack of synchronicity with nature, pleading an engineer’s ignorance and need for help in the living world and the gleam of laughter in his eye won an answering, reluctant glimmer from Jean. They were married in the autumn. It was five years before Jean became pregnant, and when Bonnie was born, Jean was so delighted and dazzled by her baby girl, she entered her for the Miss Pears Soap competition, advertised in the highstreet chemist. Uncharacteristically for Jean, who was an unassuming woman, she fully expected her lovely baby to win. She did.

  Jean put the £1000 in a bank account for Bonnie to receive when she was twenty-one. After Bonnie died, only the priest in the local Catholic church where Jean’s conversion took place knew how Jean blamed herself. She believed she had cursed her daughter, shortened her life with too much love and expectation; she didn’t make the same mistake with her son.