Poppyland (14 page)

Ryder and Bonnie were born one day less than a year apart. Irish twins, such children are called, and even in the last third of the twentieth century, the community takes it upon itself to disapprove, Their parents are regarded as morally slack and unpleasantly fecund, unlikely epithets for Bill and Jean, whose efforts to be ordinary were only surpassed by their children's inability to be so. Ryder and Bonnie, both dark and curly haired, barely took a step apart from one another, before they went to school.

The inevitable question, ‘Are they twins?' Which was answered wearily by Jean, ‘No, she is a year older. Yes, they are very alike', caused raised eyebrows. Jean felt judged whenever their closeness was remarked upon, whether she was taking her babies for checkups with the health visitor, or enrolling them in school. Every coo of surprise whipped her sensibility and left a welt of shame. She felt branded with visible disgrace. If she could have left Ryder at home, she would have done. Instead, though, he went everywhere his sister did and did everything she did. They shared an infant language, they shared their toys, and they rarely spent a moment apart until Bonnie went to school. Ryder could not accept being left behind. Not for school and not when she died. It was the same feeling to him. The desolation he felt at four years old seeing her go in to her classroom, looking back to wave, her smile, came back with renewed intensity at nineteen, forever playing back the last time he saw her.

There is no making sense of the twisting turns anyone's life path takes. As infants, Ryder and Bonnie
tumbled right in the heart of each other's existence like puppies in a litter. With every age and stage the nature of their closeness changed, and their lives ran a little more parallel, a little less interwoven as they became children, then adolescents. But the essential thing about Bonnie and Ryder, as their mother observed with an ache of deep jealousy, was that they adored one another. They wanted to be together and they didn't really need anyone else. When they got older, became teenagers, and went to different schools, they remained determinedly close. Ryder played football for the local youth team, and Bonnie came in the car with Bill every Sunday to watch him play, and would hide her face and giggle at the admiring glances of Ryder's team-mates.

‘Come on, Kid, you can do it,' she would yell from the edge of the pitch.

‘Thanks, Betsy,' he would whisper, teasing her if she stood nearby at half-time. Ryder always called her Betsy as her cheerleading name, and she always called him Kid. They liked to tell their parents that they were the inescapable presence of the American dream brought to sleepy Essex by mistake. On the way home in the car, Bill smoked his pipe and drove, while Ryder and Bonnie talked, finishing one another's sentences, swapping absurdities, making one another laugh, symbiotically attuned to mood and moment. Bonnie had the use of a pony in the summer, loaned by a local riding school, and she rode to village gymkhanas in the neighbouring loveliness of the Dedham Vale. Occasionally, she persuaded Ryder to come with her,
and they would set off early, when the shadows beneath the trees lay moon-blue until the sun poured through, and the leaves sparkled with early morning dew. Ryder was a little embarrassed to be trailing after his sister, but he was thirteen; it was dull at home with Jean and the small garden and the whole summer stretching luxuriously in every direction. It was better to go with Bonnie and, anyway, he was curious to see what the world she enjoyed so much held. Girls, was the gratifying answer. On one occasion Ryder sat on a bale of straw holding Bonnie's pony while she went to pay her entry money at the show office, an old green pony trailer with brown matting lining the ramp and inside the secretary, a woman like a human mountain, balancing a small table on her knees.

‘Shit, we nearly landed on that! Is it your bike?' A girl on a tall chestnut pony bounced to a halt next to Ryder. He stood up, uneasy at the proximity of this snorting, prancing creature. The girl was pink cheeked and smiling. She looked sideways at Ryder, and her eyes sparkled with curiosity. Ryder rubbed his hand in his hair, ‘Err, yes, it is. Shall I move it?'

‘No, but I wondered if you would help me practise that jump?' She was blushing now and waving to one side. ‘This is great,' thought Ryder, ‘they want to talk to me.' Bonnie teased him later. ‘Hey, Kid, I can't believe you were just all over Jenny like that. You're such a pushover for horsy girls. You be careful, they're fearless. Look at the mothers.'

They both collapsed sniggering as, perfectly on cue, a sharp-faced woman with blond wisps of
shoulder-length hair strode past, a whip in one hand, the bridle of a white-eyed pony in the other. ‘Come on, Sophie, for heaven's sake. Show some bloody phlegm!' she bellowed to the pale grey child on top.

Ryder shuddered in mock horror. ‘Phlegm. Yuck, that's sick. Is she the mother? How can they be like that? She's meaner than our football coach by miles.'

Bonnie swung up on to her pony and bent down to whisper, mock serious. ‘It's the cutting edge of competitiveness here at the gymkhana, Kid. Don't worry, I'll look after you. They're not all scary, I promise.' And she cantered off towards the practice jump.

In reverse, and more as they got older, Ryder looked after her. At the parties they went to through their teens, he was watchful over his sister. His nonchalant stance leaning against a wall, often late at night, was a safety net for Bonnie, who once kissed four boys in the same evening and blamed it all on vodka.

All these memories were never meant to have any more significance than their fleeting existence in the flow of passing time. Experience, hard won though it might be, is just experience; it contributes to growth, it harbours the capacity for reflection, but it doesn't wholly prescribe thoughts or behaviour. No one needs their past to become bigger than themselves, but sometimes it happens. There is no way of knowing when life will be overtaken by events.

Returning to London, Ryder cannot dispel a sense of emptiness and torpor. As spring moves forward, he broods daily upon the merciless quality of the sunlight as it pours in through the small round porthole by his bed on the boat, illuminating more than a few cobwebs. With Arthur and Phyllis determinedly guiding him, Ryder decides to paint the outside of the boat.

‘It's a dirty job,' observes Arthur. ‘This one hasn't been done in years, I think it was Edwin who last painted it and he's been dead this last nine years.'

‘Or nineteen,' adds Phyllis, her voice muffled as she scrapes a curl of red paint off the window frame. It was Arthur's idea to paint the boat. He was smoking a cigarette with Ryder on the tow path, listening to the roar of traffic on the Edgware Road the morning after Ryder returned from Holland. Neat in his blue overalls, he narrowed his eyes against the light bouncing off the water and scanned Ryder's deck.

‘It's been too neglected. Time it got a coat of paint and some care,' he had said, and Ryder, who had been gloomily not looking forward to anything, agreed, pleased to have a diversion.

‘Yes, let's do it. Would you be able to advise me, Arthur? I'm new to this.'

Ryder had bought the boat from a friend who used it as a painting studio and, apart from furnishing it and building a bookshelf, he'd never got round to any decoration.

In the end it takes two weeks to scrape down the boat and repaint it, during which time Ryder and Arthur find a mutual interest in cricket, both of them
Wisden
disciples, and at the end of it Ryder feels that not only does he have a shipshape ship, but he also has two new friends. Returning from a trip to a hardware shop for yet more brushes, Ryder finds Phyllis on his deck, a radio murmuring Kiss FM next to her as she plants red geraniums in a pot by his door.

‘I was potting them up and we always have too many and Arthur kicks them when he's getting his boots off,' she explains, clambering to her feet and wiping her forehead with the back of her hand, unwittingly spreading a smear of earth over her temple.

Ryder is touched. Having neighbours and being part of a community is something he thought only happened when you retired. His parents have it in Essex, where his mother does the flowers for the local church and his father does whatever he does with
other old codgers, but Ryder had never looked for it in London.

Phyllis dusts her hands together and picks up her trowel. ‘I'll see if I've got any more later,' she says, regarding her work. ‘They do look nice here.'

‘Yes,' Ryder agrees, ‘they do. Thank you.'

At dinner with an old university friend and his wife later that evening, Ryder finds himself noticing the details of the room they are eating in; the photographs with curling corners tucked into the edge of the mirror over the fireplace, a sbag of pink knitting, clearly belonging to a child, spilling in festoons under a chair. Mike, now a publisher, has thinning hair and half-moon glasses behind which he wears an expression of dazed merriment.

‘I don't know how to fit living into my life right now,' he says to Ryder in a tone of mock despair, when Ryder mentions getting tickets to the Oval for the Test match this summer. ‘Solstice Books is about to be taken over by some huge American deal, so I'm going to have a crazy amount of work on, and Max and Nancy are turning five and they're a joy and I'd like to see them more. I'd love to go to the cricket, but can it be in a parallel life?'

Ryder walks home along the canal from Harrow Road to his boat at Little Venice and the silence echoes in the empty space. He wonders when he took the path that led him here rather than where Mike is. And, with a shiver of anxiety, whether it's too late, and he has missed the point of life.

* * *

It was the end of another summer, Ryder was just nineteen. Beaten-gold fields, drifting dust motes, and pigeons calling sadly to young already flown. Everything in the world had paused sleepily on the edge of autumn and he was restless. He had finished his exams in June, and had spent the summer loafing at home. Bonnie was there occasionally. In theory, she was back from her first year at university in Norwich; but in practice, Ryder knew she was always going to be somewhere else. No one truly comes back once they have left home to live somewhere else. She was changing now she had gone. She was full of her unique life and energy in her frequent long phone calls to Ryder and occasional one-night flying visits to their parents, where she talked ten times more than anyone else in the house, lit up with new-found independence and the myriad possibilities ahead of her. Ryder felt left behind, but he was not ready to go with her or to make his own way just yet. Like swallows gathering on telephone wires, all of Ryder's friends were near at hand that summer. They hung around, half poised for leaving home and half scared. Although nobody would admit it, there was not one among them who did not secretly wish they could turn back the clock and be children again. Of course, it was a luxurious wish, made in the full safety of the knowledge that this could not happen.

No one in their gang ever had to go to school again, with the exception of Ryder's girlfriend, Lila. She was a sliver of a seventeen year old from the year below with a curtain of palomino-yellow hair which she let
fall, like Rapunzel, when she wanted something. She was not especially demanding, something Ryder liked about her, so the hair was tied up a lot of the time. She was exotic to look at, with pale brown eyes and creamy skin like a native Venetian, or so Bonnie, who was studying the painters of the Renaissance, said.

‘You should ask her if she's got Italian blood,' said Bonnie to her brother after he'd dropped Lila home one evening.

‘I have,' said Ryder, ‘but she swears she was born and bred in Essex.'

‘Like us,' said Bonnie,

‘No, Betsy, we're the American dream, remember?' teased Ryder and they drove home talking in fake Californian accents and laughing loudly at their own feeble jokes.

Lila's parents restored violins in their higgledypiggeldy cottage on the edge of the estuary. Lila hardly ever went home that summer; she had found a circus teacher through a small local festival and was training as a trapeze artist. This was another thing Ryder liked about her: she didn't expect him to make decisions for her. Her parents didn't know she was determined not to go back to school, and that she planned to join a circus in France in the autumn. They were expecting her to join an orchestra and were investigating having her impossibly flexible fingers broken and reset to make it possible for her to hold down the strings of a violin with her fingertips. Ryder was
appalled that such mild and charmingly eccentric parents could be planning this degree of medieval torture. It awoke a wisp of chivalry in him, which grew into something like love. Lila put her hands together and the fingertips splayed out almost horizontally. He couldn't bear the thought of them being broken, it was inhuman. He could not let that happen to her. Never intending to have a big relationship, he found that he loved the air of ethereal peacefulness around Lila. She smoked roll-ups made of liquorice paper and when she did make rare trips home, lived in a tepee in her parents' garden, deaf to their entreaties for her to return to her bedroom.

‘It's the endless creaking of cat gut,' she explained to Ryder when he first came back home with her. ‘I can't live next to them sawing away with it all day, it twangs my nerve endings.'

‘Sure,' said Ryder, having no idea what she was getting at, but fascinated by how she lived. In the tepee, Ryder lolled on Lila's bed, rolled a joint and toyed with the idea of asking Lila to marry him. It was the kind of thing that flitted into his mind when he was stoned.

Lila lay next to him, closed her eyes, and announced that she had been a squaw in the American Indian Blackfoot tribe in a past life. ‘And you were my twin brother,' she announced dreamily. Ryder took her hand, gently pulling her impossibly bendy fingers.