Poppyland (12 page)

Alone in the kitchen, I feel goose bumps rise on the back of my neck and prick me under the rumpled back of my shirt and up beneath my hair. I suddenly have a cliff-edge sense of what it would be like to step out of the safety of life with Jerome. I don't know if I can do it, I have traded so many absolutes to be with him that I don't really know who I am beyond the safe lasso of our relationship. Jerome's voice in the next room is a rumble; he has shut the door, he doesn't want me to hear. Most probably because he is talking about business and he likes the running joke that it drives me mad with boredom, and that I will think the less of him to hear him. But jokes only exist with some reference point, and here I feel that the foundations are set in truth. He is running the New York Marathon in November and is so fit his back actually looks as though he has the bubonic plague, so rippling and defined are the muscles strafing across it. He shouldn't have so many muscles, anyway, it's obscene. He's in his late forties, he should be slowing down. Something inside him is unresolved, though, and he is restless. He is obsessed with making money. I am absurdly irritated by this. It's time to move on, but being with Jerome is like being in the bath too long. Moving is uncomfortable, staying still keeps the temperature bearable. And hard as I try, I cannot take
the passing of time seriously. I must be a bit backward, I haven't quite lost the belief that I am immortal.

Ten years ago the first show I completed was sold to a New York gallery. At that point I was unswervingly certain that I was immortal. Which meant that it was fine to drink anything that came my way, most especially vodka Martinis in the red-membrane light of the midtown hotels which were enjoying a mercifully brief, fashionable moment. I was reckless, then, in all areas of my life, and I pushed myself to experiences and encounters as acts of defiance first, lust second, and which had nothing to do with love or intimacy. Loneliness settles like a skin of sweat on my body because I am suddenly secretly certain that whatever there has been between me and Jerome, it has nothing to do with love or intimacy now, and I am not sure it ever did.

With frenzied slicing, I have created an unnecessarily large pile of pink-gilled mushrooms. I slide them into melted butter and turn down the heat, reaching for salt, sloshing in a splash of wine. I love cooking when it's like this, and I feel sharp edged with energy. Though ideally I would be more suitably dressed. Imagining what that would look like is useful for suppressing my thoughts. Ungainly and black, the realisation sits like a boulder emerging out of an ebbing tide: I am selling out. I don't like the work I am doing at the moment, I am painting pictures I don't really care about, I am living with a man I don't love, in a country that is not my home. I have been
running for ever and getting nowhere because I am so afraid of what might happen if I stop. I have never once considered that it might be better. Everything might be better if I stop. I throw the wooden spoon into the sink and walk around the table to the window, reaching for a cigarette from the crumpled packet I left there when I got in earlier. Jerome hates me smoking. He often tells me it will make him leave me.

‘So leave,' I always say, and I never used to mean it, and he never did. But now I really do mean it. With the flare of the match, the green light at its heart, the man I met on the harbour in Copenhagen suddenly appears in my mind. He is here, and I can see him as clearly as if it was now.

I close my eyes and I almost feel him touching my hand, his voice in my hair, saying, ‘Come on, let me take you home.'

His name is Ryder James and I can remember everything about him as though he has only just left. His hand, the white ridge of the scar lit up by the moon, cupping mine. Holding my hand steady and protecting the flame.

Ryder
North Sea

Ryder is on the way to Holland to discuss plans for laying a new gas pipe between the Netherlands and the UK. Breaking up with Cara has left him feeling as if he is recuperating from flu, or rather not recuperating as the gloom and sloth are hard to shake off. And leaving his houseboat for yet another trip, even a short one, Ryder feels regretful. He would like to have time to cycle along the tow path all the way to Camden Lock, to pass the narrow boat village at Lisson Grove, where the world seemed to stop in the 1950s and where children play with hoops alongside the colourful boats with their tangle of hoses for gardens, and where dogs lie by the wall in the sun. It would be nice to be in London for long enough to meet up with his friends and to finish the bookshelf he started building on his boat last year. But on the other hand, another trip and another new project is always interesting.
This time the appeal lies in the prospect of tulip fields and windmills and big skies to blow some vigour into him. And the travelling, which up until now he had firmly believed was ideal for a man on his own. Ryder wonders how he had failed to notice before that being a man on his own was frequently uncomfortable and depressing. And when did his rootless state change from being a pleasure to a pain? Perhaps it was to do with the fact that he has spent more time at home on the boat than usual, to the extent that the couple on the next boat came to call on him, bringing a hyacinth growing in an old tea cup. Ryder was charmed.

‘Phyllis here keeps all the old china for her bulbs,' the old guy told Ryder with a gappy smile. Ryder stepped back from the door, welcoming them in.

‘Pleased to meet you. I'm Ryder.'

‘Arthur and Phyllis. How d'yer do?'

Phyllis didn't trouble herself with talk, she just pottered in behind Arthur and gazed at Ryder's minimally furnished home.

‘You got a nice place in here,' said Arthur, ‘though you've not got much to call home in there, have yer?' He stared blankly at the empty table, the sofa with its neat cushions. Ryder placed the hyacinth cup ceremonially on the table.

‘No, but I think this might be the start of better things,' he said, and Phyllis nodded approvingly.

Landing at Schiphol Airport, standing in the green articulated bus and speeding off around the terminals, Ryder reflects that the magnetic force field around East Anglia has changed direction and has
begun to pull him like the tide. His bosses in Holland want him to compose a paper on the costs and the problems for their gas supply links caused by the coastal erosion in East Anglia. So far he has resisted the pull of Norfolk itself but he has agreed to go out to one of the North Sea gas platforms.

The project kicks off in a prolonged meeting in a hotel near the airport in Amsterdam. Sitting back in his chair, Ryder is hit by stomach-churning torpor, the legacy of too much travel. The hotel bar is windowless and over-designed; it is red-lit, the ceiling glowing pink, the chairs like huge doughnuts, frosted pink and brown. It could be anywhere. There are businessmen alone at most of the tables, and two expensively dressed, carefully made-up women at the bar. Ryder tries to stave off sleep as John Shaw and Sveld Hegel, his employers, bat their beliefs back and forth across the low red-leather coffee table. Ryder lost interest some time ago when the question moved from one of sustainability to that of profit. None of it is for him, his job is simply to make sure that the work is done safely and environmentally well. To keep sleep at bay he recites to himself a selection of things he knows off by heart. These are neither many nor various. There is the Periodic Table for a start. ‘Hydrogen, helium, lithium, beryllium, boron, carbon . . .' Boron should be the caption under these two guys. He could have saved them a lot of money and himself a lot of time by getting them to conference-call him while they sat together
and talked in this airless room. Neither of them is interested in anything except the finances of the project.

Ryder tries to bring in an ethical question, ‘But should we not be looking at some alternative energy forms that can travel? Volatility is the problem, of course, but then we're running into problems with transporting the fossil fuels we're using at the moment, and in getting them out. A lot of what we want in terms of oil is so deep digging for it is prohibited.'

‘We will just have to get gas here for the best possible price,' sighs Hegel, leaning back in his chair and stretching so that Ryder has the full effect of his plump cushion-shaped stomach billowing from behind the buttons of his white shirt.

‘It won't last long,' says Shaw, an anxious-looking man with, Ryder notices, a silver crew cut very like one of the older statesman-type space travellers on
Star Trek
. Shaw is still talking. ‘Ryder, here, is right. We need to get a step ahead in this game. What's it going to be?'

Ryder has got as far as ‘phosphorus' in his head. It is becoming increasingly difficult to get excited about money making for the sake of it. He wonders what else happens in the thoughts of these men. Hegel's most stressed button suddenly pops off. A blotched patch of stomach peeps out at Ryder. He rubs his hands over his face and wonders if he will manage to sit here for the rest of the meeting or if he will become possessed by the creeping desire to get up, walk out and never come back. Shaw is tapping something on to the key pad of his palm pilot.

‘There's a lot of investment in turning coal into gas, of course. But it's not there yet, and we need results.'

Shaw drums his fingers on the table. ‘It always comes back to the nuclear option. And the problem of decommissioning.'

The arguments float round and round and Ryder wonders if he could survive if he gave up this sort of work and got a normal job. Working in a garage, or being a postman. At the moment he seems to waste so much time discussing new ways of doing things and then continuing to do just the same. With this in mind, he leaves the meeting and is taken to the heliport, to the crew gate, to fly to the gas platform in the North Sea.

He is so near Norfolk he could spit and hit a breaker on the beach. The gas platform he is required to visit is a construction of steel and concrete six miles out to sea from Bacton on the windswept rump of the northernmost point of East Anglia. Coming from Holland makes him feel he is sneaking in, even though he has no plans for sightseeing in Norfolk today.

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.