Poppyland (16 page)

‘Only if you call her Betsy,' Ryder replied, teasing his sister, who was talking to Jack and pretending not to listen. She immediately spun round, shoving him playfully.

‘Oh no – don't tell him that. He'll call me Betsy and it makes me feel about five years old.'

Mac laughed and stroked his hand up her spine to her neck, pulling his fingers idly through the hair falling down her back, a gesture full of quiet intimacy and love. A fragment of comprehension settled in Ryder. And acceptance. This was the real thing. He wanted this, someday, with someone.

Bonnie was leaning against Mac, laughing, and he was teasing, saying, ‘You make a great Betsy, you know. I think it's a kind of mafia stooge, in Italy – oh no, that's a Patsy, isn't it? or a pasty. I'm never sure which.'

‘No, a pasty is what you eat in Cornwall, if you're lucky and have any money left after the pub,' protested Jack through the laughter. Mac was impossible not to like. Mac and Bonnie together were like one being.
The closeness they had was potent and harmonious. Rare, Ryder thought as they walked through Norwich the next day, heading to the river where Mac had a friend on a houseboat. A girl who is loved, truly loved, is softer and happier. Ryder wondered if Jean had ever been like this, even in the early days with Bill. It was hard to imagine, but then she was young once, too.

‘What does it feel like, you and Mac?' he asked his sister.

They were on the houseboat. Mac and his friend were dangling over one side, trying to nail down a curling length of flashing, and Jack had wandered off to take photographs of a collapsing warehouse further down the river. Bonnie and Ryder lay down to sunbathe on a small deck where there was a potted willow tree and a tiny fountain with a mermaid spouting water from her curled tail. Sunlight sparkled green over warped diamonds in the water and the air was heavy with the sound of lazy traffic and the smell of dusty summer trees. The morning felt as though time would go on expanding for ever, though that could have just been the effect of the joint Jack shared as they crossed the Cathedral Close and made their way down the path to the river.

Bonnie shut her eyes and raised her face towards the sun. ‘It doesn't feel like anything else,' she said slowly, ‘so it's hard to explain. It's something to do with knowing that we belong together, so it's inevitable. It feels like a magnet.'

‘So what makes you know you belong together?' Ryder propped himself up on his elbow, squinting in
the brightness of the day at Bonnie. Her eyes were still shut against the sun; she looked foreign and exotic, her bare arms brown, her hair almost glittering black and the yellow of her dress like sulphur against the silver green decking. ‘Did you ever feel like this with any of your other boyfriends, Bonnie?'

She opened her eyes, and the look she gave him had a flash of fear in it. ‘No. I never felt this. And what makes me know it's different is that when I am with him it feels real. Not like some happy-ending fairy tale, just real. I feel safe, but not bored. Happy, not crazily elated. When I'm not with him, I'm missing something. I keep looking round with that feeling that something is missing, you know?'

Ryder nodded, even though he didn't, but he wanted to. ‘I think I've only had that when I'm hungry,' he said, needing to break the tension, and they both began giggling, rolling further into the sun.

Telling his parents that Bonnie was loving her life away from home gave Ryder a small sense of satisfaction. It was like opening a door to freedom, even though he was not quite ready to pass through it himself. He felt glad for his sister that she was away when he told them, and that he had done it for her, because Bill and Jean reacted with stiff resentment. In fact, when it was his turn to go, he thought he might get her to come back and tell them. Like startled cats they walked around Ryder in the kitchen where he sat at the table, staring at him, absorbing the tiny amount of information he felt was enough for them, with alarm.

‘Nothing's really changed, Dad, it's just the next stage.' Ryder was finally goaded into speech, mainly to interrupt his father's tutting, pacing and nose blowing.

‘We'll see,' said Bill grimly.

It was definitely the next stage, all right, when Mac came to stay. Jean's mouth folded like an envelope the morning after he arrived when she found Bonnie's bedroom door firmly shut, and the door into the spare room, where they had shown Mac the night before, wide open, the bed empty, the curtains not drawn.

Ryder felt really sorry for his sister. No one did that sort of crosspatch face at him when he brought a girlfriend home, or if they did, he had managed never to notice it. They were over-protective of Bonnie and it was suffocating to observe, let alone live through.

‘I'm twenty, for Christ's sake, Dad,' Bonnie screamed at Bill when he began the tutting, nose-blowing routine over the fact that she was going away yet again. Mac was outside by the gate, his head under the bonnet of his car, which was making a high-pitched sound like a steaming kettle. ‘I've left home. I live at – at – well, I don't live anywhere right now, but I will live somewhere next term. I'm going to look for wherever it'll be this weekend. Mac's found somewhere that sounds great.'

Jean hovered near her husband but kept close to the kitchen counter so that she could watch Mac out of the window. Two red blotches bloomed on her face as she noticed Mac, already quite unacceptably flamboyant on account of his long hair and suntanned torso, suddenly putting himself fully on show by
pulling off his shirt and using it to protect his hand while undoing the radiator cap.

‘How can you think that you know what you're doing with him?' she hissed at Bonnie, her eyes narrow slits of spite. ‘It's all about sex, and you'll grow out of it and have so much to regret.'

Bonnie turned white. Even Bill stopped in his tracks and stood open mouthed, his spectacles and handkerchief studies of stillness in his hands as he gaped at his wife.

‘Jean, really,' he muttered. ‘I don't think you can say—'

Jean's knuckles gripped the edge of the sink, and if she hadn't just been so completely vile, Ryder would have gone to hug her, she looked so forlorn and frightened.

‘I can say what I think,' she uttered in the same tight, high voice, her eyes on the floor in front of Bonnie's feet as Bonnie walked up to her and challenged her to look her straight in the eyes. Bonnie and Jean stood face to face for what felt like a thousand years, then Bonnie spoke.

‘OK, Mum, it's true. You can say what you think. And you can think what you like. But I'm telling you that you don't know anything about me, you never have and I don't think you ever will. I'm going with Mac now and I don't know when I'll be back.'

She wasn't yelling, she didn't even seem to care if Jean took her words on board. She picked up her bag, overstuffed and open with clothes falling out of it, and left.

Grace
Brooklyn

It happens on a Sunday in April. Jerome is reading the Japanese stock market reports for the week on one of his many small beeping pieces of electrical equipment, and I clear away the breakfast dishes and put on my coat to leave for the studio. And as I lift my arms to pull the weight of my hair out of the collar of the coat, I look towards the window and see myself in pale reflection. I am almost not there. And that is how it is in life. At this moment the floating uncertainties that have been bumping about in my mind for months all slot together. Together they make something huge and certain. A reality. My life with Jerome, my five-year-old relationship with him, is over. It is like the end of a play, or a film you were just sitting through not especially enjoying but not hating, and then suddenly, irrefutably, it's the end.

With absolutely no finesse, I place myself right in
front of Jerome and stretch out a hand to him. ‘Please can you come with me outside? I want to walk somewhere with you.'

The look he gives me over his glasses shows me that he knows this is not just a walk in the park. Without saying a word, he takes off the glasses, reaches for his coat and his keys, and follows me out into the spring sunshine.

The street is bright and smells of diesel and cinnamon thanks to the baker's van passing towards the river. A pair of kids with a soft ball come by, their sing-song voices snatched from the background roar of the traffic. Jerome and I walk up the slope and across the road to Prospect Park in silence. I can hardly feel my feet I am so disembodied, but in my head I have a thrumming rhythm, pulsing with life. All my senses are heightened and I am aware of everything that I encounter. Wondering if this is how Sleeping Beauty felt when the Prince kissed her and she finally woke up, I am surprised to find that I want to run and do cartwheels because I can suddenly taste freedom.

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.