Poppyland

by Raffaella Barker

  The rhythm in my head is saying, ‘It’s over. It’s already over.’ And the thing is that now I have to tell him which is awful, but beyond that the horizon is limitless because it’s already over and I know it is.

  We enter through the big wrought-iron gates that look like the balconies on this side of the park, and immediately I veer off the path, making an escape from the flow of human traffic. The park is the worst possible place to have come on a Sunday to end a relationship. The air is fresh, the sky bright with the flash of silver planes catching the sun as they float above New York and the sounds of happiness babbles like water over rocks in a stream. A jogging couple pass, just maintaining a conversation; the girl’s voice is breathy, his answers steady, her ponytail bobbing jauntily as they head across the open grass expanse beyond the trees, curving to avoid the soccer games. They join the moving pattern of talking, walking, playing families and couples. Everyone seems to be with someone. What will it be like to be one instead of half of two? I begin to feel terrified I won’t manage to say what I need to. My feet are wet in the long grass, Jerome is not paying attention, he is looking at his telephone, loitering on the tarmac, unwilling to get his shoes wet. It’s all going wrong. As usual. Oddly, because the feeling of having got it wrong is so familiar, it paradoxically bolsters my belief that it is all very much right. Taking a deep breath I swing round in the shrubs where I have managed to bring Jerome by linking arms with him. He’s still looking at his phone, and I know it’s a shield; his eyes flicker nervously and he keeps licking his lips. I do not like this apprehension. Tucking my hair behind my ear, I launch into a speech I haven’t thought about at all carefully.

  ‘I have thought about this very carefully, and I have taken a long time to actually be sure, but I am now.’ It’s quite horrible meeting his eye, but I must. I know I must. It’s more real if we are looking at one another, and I can’t bear it if he doesn’t take me seriously. The most unnerving hiatus of time happens when my voice simply peters out and grinds to a halt. I don’t know what to say next. Jerome and I look at one another and I send silent prayers to all the gods that Jerome will say something. Can he see in my demeanour and appearance what I am feeling? Will he understand? He shifts from foot to foot and keeps looking away and sometimes yawning. He’s apprehensive, and he’s already building a barrier to protect himself. He’s already escaping from the sadness. I blurt loudly, ‘And it’s over between us now, Jerome.’ I feel both lost and saved by these words.

  Jerome says nothing. I blunder on.

  ‘I mean, I am over you.’ It’s not supposed to sound so teenage and sulky, but there is another horrible well of silence. I fill that one, too. ‘I am sorry, Jerome, I can’t be with you any more.’ There is nothing else to be said. Is there? I haven’t got the manual for this, and Lucy, whom I suddenly long to ask for help, is a long way away. Jerome’s face is impenetrable. If I was a small child, I could now cast myself on the ground and sob. As it is, I dig my hands deep into my pockets and feel my mouth buckle. I can’t stop crying once I start. I knew this would happen, it’s a disaster. And of course, Jerome is really nice, kind and enveloping and he puts his arm around me. It feels wrong; I am betraying our time together already because when he does this I cannot respond, my body feels like stone against the stone of his body. How fickle and malleable is the human sensory system. Something can change from being comfortable and safe to being out of kilter and intrusive from one moment to the next.

  ‘You’ve met someone else.’ It isn’t a question, to Jerome it’s a statement of fact. Tears fall from my blurring eyes into the collar of his coat, but they are tears of frustration now. I am sick to the teeth with the frustration of misunderstanding.

  ‘No! That’s not it. It’s this.’ I grab his coat, yanking at his lapel. ‘This is what I can’t do, I can’t hold on to you and be rescued.’ I am yelling because I am so afraid I won’t say it otherwise. It’s like a nightmare where you open your mouth to talk and nothing comes out. ‘I have to look after myself, I have to be on my own and to stand up for myself. I am suffocating with you, Jerome, because you are so sure of yourself and I am not. Except in my work. And that is sending me crazy.’

  Jerome stepped back, not looking at me, looking over my head, past me, anywhere but at me. He takes my hand and begins leading me out of the park again.

  ‘Do we have to talk about this here, Grace?’ He raises his head and looks up at the sky, grey now, no blue between the clouds. ‘It’s cold, and I think it’s going to rain,’ he says.

  ‘Yes. Or snow. It said on the radio it might snow, it’s a freak low-pressure thing. Or high pressure. Oh, I don’t know.’

  I stop suddenly, desperate that despite all this, he’s not taking me seriously.

  ‘Please listen, Jerome. We DO have to talk about this here. Because I am moving out. I am going to go today.’ Jerome gets angry. We are in the middle of the road, the traffic is going too fast past us, and a crocodile of slow-moving old people shuffles past us, back from the park to their residential home on Park View. One of them spits mightily and a slug of white phlegm lands in front of Jerome.

  He swears beneath his breath, veins stand out on his smooth forehead, and he says, ‘Of course it won’t snow’ contemptuously. Then, more contemptuously, he goes on: ‘Look, Grace, you’re being self centred and hysterical. Of course you can move out whenever you like, but this is not the way to do it.’

  And it’s terrifying how readily I’m able to accept this. At this moment, I want him not to be angry more than I want anything for myself. I feel manipulated and powerless.

  ‘Well, how would you like me to do it?’ It’s as if I’m taking an order in a café – ‘Eggs easy over and bacon on the side, and would you like your life turned upside down too?’ What Jerome wants is usually what Jerome gets, and I am usually the one who supplies it. I am used to submitting to his will. We are halfway down the street and nearing the big brownstone house where Jerome’s apartment is. If we go back inside, I think I might capitulate. Once back there, I will lose all the ground I made in the park. It’s like a life-sized, life-altering game of Snakes and Ladders, and I am about to throw the dice that sends me hurtling back to the bottom of one of the snakes again.

  ‘No.’ I swing round to face him on the sidewalk. The flow of slow-moving Sunday families have to walk around us; or indeed between us: a child with a bobbing helium balloon darts through. ‘I mean it. I am not coming back inside your apartment with you.’ Gesturing across the street to Jerome’s front door I take a step back. It is too near, I back away a bit more. ‘I’m going to stay with Dorelia tonight. I’ll come and get my stuff tomorrow.’

  Jerome’s mouth is like a small box folding in on itself. ‘If that’s what you want,’ he says stiffly, ‘but I’m not going to molest you or anything.’ He knows how to yank me in. Every sentence is weighted. The only weapon I have left to help me is the frustrating strength about to explode within me because I can’t get him to understand my point of view. He puts a hand out to me but withdraws it as if he has been burned. He gulps. ‘And I think you owe me more than just walking out like this,’ he says.

  It is appalling that I find myself nodding in agreement. He is right, he is behaving well, and I am being a real bitch. The thought fans flames of shame.

  ‘I know.’ I drop my keys into his hand and slink away, feeling like a mangy cur dog, ashamed and guilty and not sure why I am leaving. I step off the sidewalk without looking and almost get hit by a car.

  Jerome reaches me back. ‘For Christ’s sake, Grace, get a grip, you fool,’ he hisses.

  ‘Oh leave me alone.’ I push him away and, desperate to escape, I shake his hand from my arm and run down the street.

  This is not how it is meant to end. Nothing is meant to end like this. Or maybe this is how everything ends – a slow murder of everything you ever loved about the other person, methodical and unstoppable. I can feel nothing.

  The next morning I am still numb, and it has
snowed. This hijacks some of the intensity and offers another focus. Dorelia, my flatmate of long ago, is no longer a dancer in a club and has left for Europe where she’s attending a conference for research to help her environmental project in the Bronx, so I have the apartment to myself for a week. I walk naked through the empty rooms and it feels illicit to be on my own, and soothing to have the sun pour warmth through the huge windows while I know it’s below freezing outside. There is a huge difference here from being at Jerome’s apartment because there I was somebody’s girlfriend. Now I am just Grace. Wondering if I am slightly perverted, I get dressed, but only in my underwear. Being here alone is charged and sensuous and I like that element of it. Also, I haven’t really got anything much else with me. Yesterday I waited here while Dorelia went back to Jerome’s and brought me what she could pack in five minutes with Jerome grinding his teeth and looking at his watch.

  Dorelia’s apartment is in an old storage warehouse down under Brooklyn Bridge, near my studio. The snow is dazzling – whitened light bouncing off the river, warm and insistent on my skin. It feels erotic because I want it to, not because of anyone else trying to turn me on. There is a packet of cigarettes in the fireplace and I smoke three of them in a row. They are stale, so the taste in my mouth is filthy. I make some coffee and eat a tomato. Dorelia only has vodka, lemons and this tomato in her fridge. I find some peanut butter and have a spoonful of that too. Single-girl life is very different from being half of Jerome’s household. I feel unstable and fragile, but excited and alive. And very ashamed. I can’t stop believing I am wholly ungrateful. Jerome was a perfect boyfriend and I am spoiled and will have a lonely life now. To escape this feeling, I go down to shovel the snow off Dorelia’s steps. It needs to be done this morning. Dorelia left me a note asking if I would mind, and it seems like the perfect antidote to obsessing about breaking up with Jerome. I put on several layers of proper clothes, mostly belonging to Dorelia, and my coat and boots.

  As a reward, when I finish, I will take myself to a diner for pancakes and bacon. It’s important to have something to look forward to. There is a shovel propped by the main entrance, dripping water on to the door mat. Someone has been there before me. But outside it is evident that they have been extremely solipsistic. The dug path through the snow is one shovel wide and goes to a nearby parked car and then around it. Well, around the front of it. The earlier morning digger has scuffled about at the front of the giant pile of snow in which the black car is embedded and given up. The air is so cold it is like swallowing a frozen ribbon when I breathe. Raising and dropping my shoulders my skin rubs warmth into the fabric of my clothes. I think I will start on the bottom step. The spade scrapes down to the stone surface of the step and judders to a halt in the pile of snow. It is incredibly hard work. Snow is heavy and inert. Gasping, fingers frozen, the tips now without feeling, I try to remember about inert substances. Inertia. That’s what has kept me with Jerome. Even the thought is like an injection of energy, and I have a few more heaps of snow off the steps. My nose has become a separate entity and my cheeks are steel plates on my face. There are ten more steps. It might have been a good idea to start at the top, not the bottom, then at least it wouldn’t be so daunting. It would be a better idea to move up there now. Pushing my hat back on my head, I start again. I am becoming obsessed with the snow. It is heavy and recalcitrant, and the job in hand feels like a labour of Hercules. I start trying to remember the twelve tasks of Hercules and find this more frustrating than snow-digging. There was cleaning out the Augean stables, there was stealing the Mares of Diomedes, there was obtaining the girdle of Hippolyta. Oh God, why are there so many? At school I perfected methods for remembering things that were much more complicated than the list of things I am trying to remember. The methods were usually visual, so the twelve tasks of Hercules became a rainbow and the Augean stables were turquoise and the horses were yellow. By the fourth snow-stacked step I am in full flow and I can remember the first task – slaying the Nemean lion and bringing its hide back – and the second, which was another killing, this time a Hydra, and I feel very exhilarated. I am just trying to summon the brain power to recall a few more when I notice two small beings have manifested on the top step while I have been travelling through the possible tasks for the green part of the Hercules rainbow. They are both cocooned in layers of clothing, but between their hats and their collars, bright eyes peep out and big enveloping smiles are visible.

  ‘We live here,’ says the larger one, whose pink coat and purple gloves suggest to me that she is a girl. ‘Mom said we have to come out and dig snow with you.’

  ‘No,’ pipes the other one. ‘Mom actually said, “Get out from under my feet, you two, or I’ll go spare.”’

  ‘Same difference,’ says the girl with excellent deadpan timing, but she is unable to resist giving him a spiteful push anyway. He wobbles like a skittle on the top step. Unconsciously, I drop my shovel and am ready to catch him. Ah yes – the pink task of Hercules; the tenth is stealing the apples of the Hesperides. Or something like that.

  ‘Well, that’s what I meant,’ says the girl, looking at me. ‘So what’s your name?’ she asks.

  ‘I’m Grace, and if you feel like helping me, that would be wonderful.’ I put out a gloved hand to shake theirs. ‘What are your names?’

  ‘I’m Brad Gallagher and I’m six and she’s Tyler. She’s my sister and she’s nine,’ says the boy, and he staggers down to the step where I’m standing to shake my hand.

  ‘We don’t have school today because the classroom has too much snow on the roof and we might sue the school,’ he says, beaming at me. I beam back. He is so adorable. ‘Shall we help you?’ he asks. ‘We’ve got stuff for digging.’ He waves a small red tin spade. I reach out, but pull my hand back, and contain myself to just admiring it.

  ‘Yes please. Gosh, I like the look of that shovel, it’s the right size and not too heavy. Let’s clear the steps and make a snowman.’

  ‘Where are you from?’ Tyler has plaits and the same shining brown eyes as her brother.

  She slides a scoop of snow off the wall and holds it up heaped on her glove. ‘Mmm, snow candy,’ she says, sticking her tongue out to lick it.

  ‘I’m from England.’ I tip a big pile of snow down the steps, satisfied to see it puff and spill like icing sugar, enjoying the exertion.

  Tyler runs down and, stretching her arms, falls back into a drift built up by the steps. ‘I’m making an angel,’ she shouts, flat now and flapping her arms up and down. ‘Come and get me up so I don’t spoil it.’

  The last task is something to do with Cerberus. Maybe it’s poisoning him with a bit of steak. If they had steak then. But of course they did because there was the cow task where he had to get hold of the cows of Geryon.

  ‘Let’s make a snow leopard,’ yells Brad, flinging a snowball at his sister. Her plaits are bound with pink plastic hair elastics in the shape of wrapped sweets.

  ‘You missed,’ she taunts, and Brad sticks his tongue out. He has lost a front tooth.

  ‘It happened last week, on my sixf birthday,’ he explains in an impossible yet inevitable lisp. ‘But it sucks because I lost the tooth and I never got to wish on it.’

  I grin at him, ‘Do you know what you would have wished for?’

  ‘Sure,’ says Brad. ‘I would first have wished that I hadn’t swallowed it. The rest is top secret.’

  Tyler hums while she digs, and when she catches my eye, she peals with laughter. ‘It’s my snow song, I don’t know the words yet, but if I hum it enough I might think of some.’

  I hum too and feel like Winnie the Pooh with Piglet.

  ‘Do you know the “Tiddlypom” song from Winnie the Pooh?’ I ask them.

  In an hour the steps are clear and we have remembered every verse about cold toes and the more it snows and sung them loudly, heedless of passersby. The snow leopard sits like a sphinx on the bottom step. Slightly in the way, but once it was started in the middle of the step, there wa
s nothing the three of us could do about it. Pulling off my hat, I lean on the spade and contemplate our art.

  ‘It’s more like a dodgem car,’ says Brad gloomily. ‘Or a lying-down steer. It only looks like a snow leopard in my head.’

  ‘But that’s where it really matters.’ I ruffle his hair and a catch in my throat sends tears to my eyes when he reaches his gloved hand into mine.

  * * *

  When Lucy calls that afternoon, I am in a mood to be won over by children.

  ‘Anyway, we’re having the girls christened in May and you’ve got to come over. It will be a lovely party, do you remember I said we would have a party? It’s the twenty-fifth, I think. If nothing else, we need you to entertain Bella’s long-lost godfather.’ I’m lounging on the sofa in Dorelia’s apartment, semi-naked again. All my belongings are scattered around the sofa in plastic garbage bags. I have just been to get all my stuff and now I’m back and alone. It is a low moment. Jerome’s apartment still looked complete when I left, and these six bin bags contain all I own in the world apart from my work. It fitted into one taxi. How can I be thirty-two and still only own things that go in garbage bags? Why have I cared so little that this has happened? And what would I like to own? Lolling on Dorelia’s sofa, with the phone, it strikes me that a large piece of furniture such as this would be a very good first purchase.

  ‘How do you choose a sofa?’ I ask Lucy, not wishing to commit myself to appearing at the christening or not.

  ‘Well, before you choose the sofa, you need somewhere to put it,’ my sister sounds unnecessarily tart. ‘And you need to know which country you want your sofa to live in.’