Poppy Day

by Amanda Prowse

  An hour later it was too late to voice this opinion. Rob walked in and shook his head. For Poppy it was another dad moment; he was pleased to see her, yet mockingly disapproving.

  ‘Come in, come in! What do you think of this?’ She swept her arm around the room.

  ‘I think it’s very you.’

  ‘It is, isn’t it? I reckon we could get used to it!’

  She pulled him over to the corner where Martin was sitting in a small chair behind a table, surveying the view. He looked distant. Poppy couldn’t tell by his expression what he was thinking, which bothered her. Prior to his capture, she could always gauge his mood, guess at his thoughts, but there was a new place in Martin’s mind in which he would wander and Poppy had no access.

  ‘Mart?’ He jumped slightly at the sound of her voice. ‘This is Rob who I’ve told you about…’

  He stood and pushed his chest out as though standing to attention. ‘Sir.’

  Poppy didn’t like hearing Martin talk to Rob like that. Not Rob who had drunk from their cheap cups and sat on the sofa that Martin had paid for monthly in their little flat. It made her feel awkward.

  Rob ignored the comment almost. He stepped forward and shook Martin’s hand. ‘It is good to meet you at last, Martin.’

  Martin blushed.

  ‘Good to be home, I expect?’

  ‘I don’t know. I haven’t been home yet.’ It sounded slightly aggressive, his resentment simmering.

  Poppy realised at that moment that she hadn’t thought things through from his perspective; he had been dragged all over the place, following instructions. She could see at that point that he probably just wanted to go home, have a pint and put his feet up.

  Rob understood this. He ignored Martin’s tone. ‘I’m sure it won’t be too much longer now until you can. Is this all a bit much for you?’

  Martin nodded and looked down at the floor; yes, it was all a bit too much for him. It made Poppy feel a big surge of love for her man, who was only ever an expression and a gesture away from being her little friend in the playground.

  Martin looked up at Rob. ‘I’m sorry, sir.’

  Rob placed his hand on his arm. ‘You don’t need to say sorry, son. You’ve been through a lot; and it’s Rob.’

  Mart sniffed his tears back up and nodded at the carpet.

  Poppy felt strange then; it was lovely to see her husband taking comfort from someone like Rob, but the way that he had called Martin ‘son’ sent a small quiver of jealousy through her. Maybe she wasn’t so special to him; maybe he was everyone’s dad.

  Poppy made them strong tea in dainty little cups with a band of gold painted around the top. They sat like three old ladies, perched on the edge of the overstuffed cushions, sipping tea from the bone china as they admired the view of the park. It was very The Importance of Being Earnest; it made Poppy laugh. They talked about nothing much, ordinary things, Tottenham Hotspur, the weather, the price of their room per night. They didn’t talk about Martin’s capture, Poppy’s adventure, the mental anguish, the future… keeping it light and trivial. They spent a lovely hour; it was like having an old friend to visit.

  ‘Right then, the next few days.’ Rob drew them into the present. ‘Tomorrow there will be a press conference in Whitehall. Are you both up to that?’

  They nodded.

  ‘Then straight after, the foreign secretary has invited you and Colonel Blakemore to attend a lunch hosted by him.’

  Again they nodded, they were MoD pawns.

  Rob took a deep breath and continued, ‘There have been several requests for interviews from just about every newspaper and news agency on the planet. The danger is that if we don’t give them a story, they have a tendency to create their own, which makes it very hard for us to control what gets published, factually. You have a number of options open to you; we will help and guide you through every one of them. For example, you could prepare a statement that we can distribute and someone from our end can fill in the blanks, or we can organise for someone from the press office to come over and interview you both and then we can distribute that interview accordingly…’

  Poppy didn’t wait for more options; she was already preoccupied with her own idea. ‘Can Miles do it?’

  Martin looked at her. ‘Can Miles do what?’

  ‘Interview us! I don’t think I want to talk to a stranger, but I’d be happy to talk to him and I know that you would be OK talking to him, Mart, because, in a way, it is his story too, or at least part of it.’

  ‘Would he want to do it?’ Rob asked.

  ‘I don’t know. I’ll ask him.’

  Martin once again felt as if he was being swept along, but had to admit that after speaking to Rob, he did feel better. Poppy was right, he was a nice bloke. Even though it was relaxed, he kept thinking in the back of his mind about what he had been doing that time last week; strangely he could only picture himself as if he was a character in a book, or that he was watching himself in a film. It looked like someone else, unshaven, incarcerated and wearing traditional Afghan clothing. It wasn’t him, it was someone else.

  The next day or so seemed to have been mapped out. Martin nodded in all the right places, agreeing to go with the flow. Words like ‘Whitehall’ tripped off their tongues as though it was an everyday occurrence. They had been through so much that was bizarre and unimaginable, that having lunch with the foreign secretary was no stranger than anything else they had experienced.

  That evening the two fell into a deep sleep. They slept through the night, which was unusual for them both of late, but they were completely exhausted. It certainly wasn’t down to an ordered mind and clear conscience.

  The next morning Martin woke with a start, feeling confused; his breathing irregular. He didn’t know where he was. It was a foggy few minutes until he understood that he was safe, in London, with Poppy by his side. He decided to watch some football, wanting to see if doing something mundane and everyday, something that he always used to do, might make him feel more normal, but it didn’t. He had been desperate to watch a match while he was away, but found that he couldn’t care less about what he was seeing and hearing. It felt unimportant, irrelevant. How could he raise enthusiasm about a little ball being kicked around a patch of grass when Aaron had been killed and his life had turned to rat shit? His experiences had changed his perspective on what was important, on what mattered in the world and it wasn’t bloody football. These thoughts confused him because it used to be a big part of his life.

  Poppy watched his agitated awakening and his thoughtful expression; she could tell that things weren’t right. That’s when everything began to unravel. She saw how he avoided the news and didn’t want to know what was happening anywhere in the world, especially anywhere that he had been recently. He could only cope with things that were neutral and safe, things that wouldn’t remind him. Poppy sat next to him on the bed as he watched the match.

  ‘What’s going to happen to us, Poppy?’ He continued to stare at the television as though the answer to his question might jump out of the screen.

  She stroked his arm, which he pulled out of her reach. Poppy didn’t know if he did this as a deliberate or subconscious act; her gut twisted just the same. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I mean. What will happen to us? What will happen to me when we go back out into the real world?’

  Poppy didn’t know how to respond. ‘We will go home and we’ll gradually get back to normal. We will learn to get back to normal, Mart, but I don’t know how long it’ll take. The one thing that you can be sure of is that I will be right by your side and we will do it together.’

  He turned his face towards her and stared for a little while before he spoke, ‘I can’t remember what back to normal is, Poppy.’

  She cried then, instantly and noisily, his words were so very sad. She understood that he had been through too much for her to understand, and knew that it couldn’t be fixed with a liberal application of tea and a few good jokes for distracti
on. She knew because it was the same for her.

  ‘Why are you crying?’ His words were threaded with hostile overtones. She read between the lines, ‘Why are you crying? Because you have no right to cry – it was me that was taken, me that was beaten, me that watched my friend killed and me that is having the nightmares.’

  Poppy was trying to think of how to answer him when he started firing more words at her, ‘For God’s sake, shut up, Poppy Day. Stop crying! You have dragged me here into this bloody pantomime. This fancy hotel where I’m too nervous to leave the bloody room, with my head totally messed up. And you sit there crying as though it’s you that have been through all the shit, but it’s not, Poppy, it wasn’t you, it was ME! I feel like I am the only one that remembers that, it was ME!’ He was shouting. ‘I have given press conferences and sat there like a spare bloody part. I’ve played tea parties with you and your mate while my head’s spinning, and I have had enough! I saw them cut his head off, Poppy; they cut his fucking head off! It fell on the floor. I swear to God, before they made that first cut, before they put that blade to his throat, he was looking at me! He was looking right at me as if to say, help me. But I couldn’t help him, I couldn’t do anything and they killed him, Poppy. They fucking killed him!’

  Poppy held him as they both shed tears of frustration and sadness for what they had lost. Poppy thought the time had arrived for her to tell him, because she did have the right to cry; Mart was wrong. She had been through shit too. She babbled, crying so hard that most of it was unclear. Poppy should have planned what she was going to say but didn’t. She just started talking, ‘Mart, it’s not only you! You have to help me, Mart, you have to help me and we have to help each other. I can’t do this on my own. Please, Mart, make it all go away, make that picture go away! Don’t let anyone touch me, don’t let anyone near me. Please, Mart!’

  She verbally jumped all over the place. Her nerves were infectious, making his panic rise; tension seeped from his pores. He held her by the tops of her arms and, despite his anger, his anxiety, his hands felt weak around her muscles; the strength had gone from his arms. He wanted to hurt her because she was hurting him by not talking, by not giving it to him straight. He wanted to hurt her because he was angry and confused. His heart was racing, his breathing was out of sync, but of course he didn’t hurt her, not because he wasn’t capable of it, but because he would never and could never hurt her. He loved her.

  Her babbling was unnatural, it scared him. He looked her in the eyes. ‘Tell me, Poppy, and tell me now.’ He said it through gritted teeth. He looked and sounded aggressive. She had never seen him like that.

  He felt her shrink inside his grip; she visibly deflated as her head hung forward. It was as though her neck had gone floppy; her hair fell over her face. She couldn’t see him; didn’t want to see him. Maybe it made it easier to talk without having to see the look on his face. He could understand that.

  ‘Tell me, Poppy, please.’ His tone was softer now. He knew that frightening her wouldn’t help and hated the idea of making her feel like that. They were both quiet for a minute; she was getting ready to give him the information, mentally preparing, and he was getting ready to receive it, or so he thought.

  When she eventually spoke, her voice was small. Martin held his breath so that no other sound got in the way of his hearing. She sat, slumped forward, reminding him of a rag doll, ‘I didn’t have a plan, Mart. I didn’t think things through, so I didn’t know what to expect. I didn’t know what would happen. I wanted to get you back. I was so frightened that no one was looking for you and I know that you would have come and got me…’ Her tears muffled her voice, dripping down her nose. She did nothing to stop them, or mop them, as she wept.

  He held her close to him then, her head was still hanging down, but he held her tight. ‘Yes, baby, that’s right. I would have come and got you too.’

  He held her tightly to him, squashing her face, but she didn’t care. She wanted to feel him that close, wanted his arms around her to make her feel safe. She knew that she had to keep talking because if she stopped she probably wouldn’t be able to start again. ‘I know I tell people how clever I am, Mart.’

  ‘That’s because you are clever, darlin’.’

  This made her cry even harder, she shook her head. ‘No, no I’m not. I won’t ever think that I am clever again because I should have thought; I should have thought things through. How many people would jump on a plane and go to Afghanistan with only a notebook and a packet of bloody Polo Mints? That was really stupid.’

  ‘That wasn’t really stupid, that was just you were desperate to get to me and doing it in a hurry without thinking. The fact that you managed to get there and survive with a notebook and a packet of mints makes you very clever indeed, Poppy Day. There are grown men, trained soldiers that could not have got as far as you did and managed to survive in the way that you did.’

  Martin felt relieved. He thought she was telling him that she shouldn’t have gone. He thought that maybe Major Helm’s words and criticism were finally getting to her, but he felt overwhelming relief because he knew how to cope with that. It wasn’t the big bad thing that he had been half expecting, it was just his lovely Poppy wobbling, over-analysing, probably with a bit of shock thrown in for good measure. He could cope with all of that; he could make it better…

  Poppy hated him being so nice to her, not when she was trying to tell him something so terrible. ‘I also didn’t think about how I was actually going to get you home, how I was going to get you released. They could have killed me, Mart. They could have taken Miles and I deep into the desert, killed us, and no one would have been to blame but me. I put me and I put you in terrible danger and that was stupid.’

  ‘… but they didn’t kill you, Poppy Day. You are here and you are safe, we can carry on just as we were before. In fact, not just as we were before, but better because you did something amazing and brave for me. I knew that you loved me before, but now! Bloody hell, Poppy, how many husbands can say that their wives have ever done anything so incredible for them? Eh? How many?’

  ‘… I let you down.’

  ‘No, no you didn’t, Poppy, you could never let me down, never…’

  ‘I did. I let you down, Mart.’

  ‘… don’t talk like that, please, Poppy, you didn’t let me down, you couldn’t. You are wonderful and I love you, I love you so much…’

  ‘I am not wonderful; you don’t know what I did.’

  For Martin it was as if the world stopped. Time stood still while he held his breath. He could feel the blood rushing in his temples, waiting, waiting for her to speak, waiting to hear the big bad thing that for a moment he thought he had escaped from, evaded, dodged. He hadn’t, it was only a reprieve and it had been there all along, hiding, waiting to jump out at him. Martin stared at the tears rolling down her lovely face, which magnified her freckles. His fingers twitched with the temptation to stroke them away from her skin. Neither of them spoke for a while, each hoping for a change of direction, but neither knew the coordinates. When Poppy finally spoke, it was with a quiet voice that he had to concentrate to hear. She looked just like Poppy Day in the playground when they were little, the Poppy Day he used to have to look out for and protect from the whole world, including Jackie Sinclair.

  The next voice that he heard wasn’t Poppy’s; it was his own, ‘What did you do?’

  Poppy lifted her head and looked into her husband’s eyes. She tried to find the words to tell him that another man had touched her skin, kissed her neck and seen her naked. Her heart felt like it would break in two, at the damage that she was about to inflict. ‘Mart… Mart…’

  Martin heard his name, it sounded as though she was begging him to understand, but he couldn’t understand because she hadn’t told him anything. He went back to the words he had used earlier. The dictionary in his head had dried up, he couldn’t think of how to phrase want he wanted to say, so he repeated, ‘Tell me, Poppy, and tell me now.’
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br />   Poppy knew that she had to; she knew she had to tell him the secret that was destroying them both. She exhaled slowly and stopped crying instantly as though someone had figured out how to turn the tap off. She sounded calm, in control. ‘I didn’t want to do it, Mart. I want you to know that I didn’t have any choice, no choice at all. I also want to tell you that I love you very much, I always have and I always will. It has always been you, Mart, always you and only you, you know that, don’t you?’

  Martin tried to guess what was going to come next: ‘but I have changed my mind and I want my freedom’ or ‘having had the chance to travel and have an adventure by myself, I want to do some more, I am leaving you…’ His heart leapt in anticipation of all the terrible possibilities. He was absolutely transfixed by her mouth, watching it quiver with emotion, listening to the syllables that would tear him in half.

  What came next did tear him in half, but it wasn’t what he was expecting to hear. He stared at her though his eyes were screwed almost shut, his mouth twisted into a pre-crying pose, waiting for her to deliver the words, permission for the distress to start. She didn’t keep him waiting too long. ‘Zelgai made me spend the night with him and in exchange he set you free and he set me free.’ Her voice was cracked and wavering. It was a strange voice that she hadn’t used before, the result of trying to speak when her vocal chords and every muscle in her body were pulled taut with fear and anticipation.

  Questions flew around his mind, stupid, naive questions that found their way out of his mouth, none of them logical. ‘You spent the night with him where? What did you do? Where was I? Did he touch you?’

  He fired questions one after another. Poppy knew that he wasn’t grasping the reality of what she was trying to say, the facts wouldn’t sink into his mind and become truth.

  She made it clear for him. She wanted to spare herself the horror of having to slowly explore each aspect, figuring it was better to say it out loud and be specific, rather than answer one question after another until the details had been wrung from her. ‘Pretty soon after we arrived at the house, they sent Miles away and I thought they were going to kill him. Zelgai told me that you were in the house and that he would set you free. I was so happy, Mart, and so grateful, I even said thank you! But it was a trick, he let me show him how happy I was that you were to be set free, then he told me that if I didn’t sleep with him he would kill us both. He told me how he would do it and it was… horrible, terrible, even the idea of it was terrifying. I had no choice and that is why I am so bloody stupid, because I walked into that house completely innocent, thinking I could appeal to his better nature. He made me have sex with him, Mart! You know how I can’t stand anyone to touch me! He touched me and I can still feel his vile beard against my skin, no matter how much I scrub myself. I can still smell his breath just before I fall asleep. It was the worst thing that I could ever have imagined, Mart, but I didn’t imagine it, it really happened! It happened to me!’