Poppyland (7 page)

Having no answers, he gets up again, pulls the metal lid from a glass bottle of beer. He moves over to the desk and begins, for the thousandth time, his favourite displacement activity. He begins to draw the boathouse he wants to build. This time he finds himself drawing an actual house he might inhabit next to it. The house is on a chalk cliff. It sits facing the sea in a shallow bowl of grassland, framed by pine woods from behind, long and low and at a right angle to the sea; the rooms on either end of the house looking out at all aspects of the spectacular view. The diagram has ceased to be purely functional and is becoming an actual picture.

It is early in the morning, the sea is frilled with insouciant breakers, and the sun is rising on the horizon. With the chalky cliffs and the orientation, he realises this dream house he is conjuring could be in Norfolk. Ryder has hardly been back to Norfolk since Bonnie died. Maybe it's time for a visit now. Lying on
the bed in a strange hotel, utterly alone, Ryder is curious and anxious that his thoughts have gone to Bonnie. They often do still, though sometimes it is a fleeting flash of recognition, an unspoken acknowledgement that he has experienced something she would have shared and seen in the way he saw it. This more than anything is what has kept Ryder from forming a lasting relationship. Can there be someone whom he can know and be known by? ‘Why not?' is his thought when things are going well, but there are many more instances when he broods and thinks, ‘Why would there be?'

Maybe all siblings have the closeness he and his sister shared. There is no way of knowing, and Ryder recognises this sadness tugging his heart now, when he yearns to pick up the phone and call her, to hear the perspective he trusted all his childhood. Bonnie never let him down. Until she died. Ryder pushes back his chair and stands up to stretch, his spine curving his back like a full sail. He has learned now, thank God, that his memories will not overwhelm him any more. And that it is possible to keep the past at bay. Some natural filter – perhaps it is sanity – allows only what he can tolerate to shimmer into focus from the shifting currents and unnoticed patterns of all that has gone before and remains unresolved and shattered. God knows what is forgotten for ever. Sometimes Bonnie is in his head; he can imagine her voice, and hear her thoughts as clearly as his own. At other times, she is a distant figure, walking away; she is weightless and evaporating and he cannot talk to
her. Then grief tightens around his heart with the fear that he has lost her for ever. Even though this has happened more times than he can remember, and the sense of her has always returned, Ryder is still susceptible to the anxiety it brings. When he is not gripped by it, he knows that he has Bonnie and her memory tucked into his heart, and that she will always be there. The tie is blood. Can there be a stronger tie? Ryder has not found one. The family tie unbreakable, like being a parent; no matter how far a child goes, even into death, the place they occupy in their parents' hearts is theirs for ever. Or so Ryder believes from witnessing his own parents. For a long time he stayed away from them, from everything to do with his childhood and with children.

Norfolk, indeed East Anglia including Essex where he grew up, has exuded an anti-magnetic force for Ryder. Over the years any suggestions from his colleagues in marine engineering that he should go there have been met with ever more resourceful reasons not to. The job in Denmark was a useful diversion from a suggestion he might do some work on the gas platforms in the North Sea. It didn't take a rocket scientist to notice that working with the wind instead of fossil fuel was more ethical, too. Can man truly harness the sea? Ryder's work circles endlessly around this question, never accepting that the answer could be ‘No'. Generally, he believes that the answers to all the pressing questions about what the planet
can do for energy lie submerged in the ebb and flow of the tides. However, the route to finding them is as unfathomable as the depths of the ocean. Everything is possible and none of it happens, or so it seems after weeks of grey winter seas and too many sea birds smashed like exploded pillows in the blades of the wind turbines. Even then, the many projects that come up in Norfolk leave him cold. Secretly he knows he is afraid. Not of what he believes he will find in revisiting the backdrop of his childhood, but of what he fears he may not.

Marine engineering and, more specifically, energy conservation, requires a coastline. There is a lot of Norfolk on the sea, and increasingly a lot of Norfolk in the sea; Ryder had one reluctant trip there to photograph and measure an ancient wooden circle emerging from the shifting sands on the north-west coast of Norfolk. It was too extraordinary an opportunity for him to turn down – a wooden version of Stonehenge that conservationists were determined to remove from the sea, and Druids and the coastguards were united in believing should stay where it had been for thousands of years. Ryder saw it first at sunrise as the tide went out over the long shallow sand banks at Thornham Gap. The beach was silent but not empty, as grey dawn turned mauve and pink with the creeping arrival of the summer sun. Three figures loomed from along the shore beyond where Ryder stood at the water's edge, watching eagerly for dark shapes within the waves to transform into the circle. Two of the figures were fishermen, netting for sea bass. They
nodded a greeting and strode on, incongruous in wetsuits on this ancient shore. The third was a Druid with a carved stick and a mane of dreadlocks.

‘This'll show out in a moment.'

‘Yes, the tide is dropping now,' agreed Ryder, trying to overcome his surprise that the Druid had a strong Norfolk accent. What was he supposed to sound like? Someone from
Star Trek
? Or the Middle Ages? And how had they sounded then, anyway? Probably like someone from Norfolk.

The Druid rested both hands on his stick and waded in with his jeans rolled up beneath his cloak just beyond where Ryder stood, also with his bare feet under water.

‘That'll be a job to stop them moving it, but that'll be a job for them to move it, too. The tides at the summer solstice are big, and they've signed the papers to say they'll not move the circle until the next day.'

‘Blimey,' said Ryder, more to himself than in response, imagining the chaos the whole operation could cause. The Druid looked at him measuringly.

‘Are you from the conservation department, then?'

‘No. I've been sent by the British Museum.'

The Druid tossed his dreads. ‘Ah. Same thing. I'm part of a peaceful protest. We don't want this circle moved from the site. And we are concerned that in moving it, a whole lot of trouble will be churned up along with the sea bed. It's not a good thing to mess about with a sacred site. You don't know what spirits will be disturbed.'

Slightly dumbfounded, Ryder looked back at the sea, half expecting to see a serpent rise hissing and coiling towards the beach like the ones in the
Aeneid
which came in from the wine-dark sea and strangled Laocoön and his sons. Breathless with foreboding, he watched as something black and slippery emerged from the rocking water and, he saw, like Excalibur emerging from the lake, the bumpy tops of the circle rising as the waves fell. Black and ancient and extraordinary, it was more real every moment, and Ryder became lost in rapt contemplation. At last he put his hand on the Druid's shoulder and said to him, ‘I agree.' The site was astonishing. In his report, he absolutely condemned the removal of the wooden stumps, and when he and those who agreed with him were overridden, he took it as a sign that he should not try to get involved in anything in Norfolk again.

Recently, Ryder had read that the circle had begun to decay in the salt-water tank in Peterborough, where it had been moved to, and no one had visited it. In the end the consensus of the Heritage Board had been to return it to the sea whence it came.

Stretched now on the bed in the hotel room, his mind feels clear and uncluttered. He picks up the pencil and reaches for paper again, frowning at what he has on the page so far. How will the boat get up the cliff? God knows, but what is more important is his house is suddenly there in his imagination and it has a kitchen as warm and friendly and colourful as his
parents' one is cold. He begins to draw a room from inside, a low window, a deep window seat. He must be getting soppy in his old age, for now he is doodling a cat on a cushion.

He wonders if he should call Cara to see if she is all right. He can work up a bit of self loathing, and blame himself for leaving her, but the truth is she was moving on too. And today she was poised and accepting. He can give himself a break and just sleep for now. Respite. He has been looking for it for ever, or so it seems right now, and that is why he is habitually on the move. Buying time from his feelings, existing in a state of not yet. The timing of all this is surely no accident. The work in Denmark will be finished tomorrow. This chapter of his life is closing much more definitely than he imagined it would. And he is free. The trouble is, it feels more like a stay of execution than a state of joy.

The next afternoon, on the plane hurtling down the runway and up into the sky, Ryder's first airborne thought is that he wants to find a way to be free and yet connected to another person, and his second is that, given we can fly, surely anything is possible.

Grace
Brooklyn
February

Sometimes the need for air feels like a thirst. The temperature in New York has not risen above freezing for the past eleven days, or if it has, I was not present at the specified warm spot to enjoy it. Eleven days is a long time in a New York winter for the wind not to rise up howling from the East and hurl chaos through the wide grey winter streets of Manhattan, banishing moribund thoughts and this deathly cold. The air has been dense with ice particles moulding their shape on to the bricks of the buildings, swelling within the cracks in the sidewalk, containing the relentless chill which kicked in on Thanksgiving, changed gear with snow after Christmas and now seems set to stay for ever. The pressure drops in the atmosphere and is mirrored by the mood of mankind. No one is
cheerful, and the small act of putting one foot in front of another is such a big deal that some days I don't get round to doing it and I just stay in bed.

The only way to breathe outside is through a scarf, for the chill damp of the air on the back of the throat is suffocating, and the whole population is coughing. It seems that the city has gone back one hundred years in time to the cloying, slow poison of coal-fuelled smog. I have been in a bad mood for weeks, and it shows no sign of lifting now as I let myself in to my studio, stamping my feet in pooled melting snow inside the main doors. The walk here from Jerome's apartment where I live now takes about twenty minutes, long enough for the chill in the air to penetrate to my bones. As soon as I'm in the building the tension of my body in battle with the cold drops, and I begin overheating as I climb the stairs, peeling off hat and gloves, unzipping my coat, weighed down by bulky annoying layers and the sheer volume of all I am wearing.

In the studio, a pale stillness sits like dust on every surface of the room, thick and untouched even on the walls. I haven't been here for a few days, and my absence fills my work place. The studio is on the fourth floor of an old warehouse a block from the Hudson, and has a jagged view between buildings of a sliver of Lower Manhattan and the vast river. This has been my own space since I moved to New York more than ten years ago and it has made it possible for me to work no matter what else has happened in my life. I wonder sometimes what would have happened if I had lost the space; I might have given up painting and got a regular
job. Things might have been different, but I found it in my first week here through Dorelia, one of the girls I shared my first apartment with. She was a dancer in a club and her boyfriend worked in this building, running a business making rubber fetish dresses. I sublet from him and his partner Stephan and I painted the catwalk for their mad fashion shows for a few years. Somewhere I've still got a black rubber dress, dangling in my wardrobe as shiny as a pod of seaweed but smelling of the talcum powder I had to dust inside whenever I was putting it on. Unlike the dress, the rubber business is long gone and most of the spaces around me are offices. I lost touch with Dorelia's boyfriend after she split up with him, but Stephan and I stayed friends and he stripped every vestige of rubber out of his wardrobe, and his soul, or so I used to tease him, and started working in an art gallery. His boyfriend, Ike, and Jerome both work for the same oil company, so Stephan and I are in the same situation, as we often discuss. Stephan is always broke and relies on Ike to bail him out, and my rent for the studio creeps up and up and now I couldn't afford an apartment of my own if I didn't live with Jerome. It's not an ideal situation, but this studio is my security and I love it here. I guess I could move in here if all else fails.

I kick off my boots and light the gas stove to put on the kettle, each action blowing life and movement into the stillness. The gas flutters, the kettle sits silent for a moment and then, quietly at first but in an increasingly urgent crescendo, begins its slow cacophony of grunts and wheezes.

The phone rings as I unpeel layer after layer of outdoor clothing. I am almost down to the soft stuff – my actual clothes, thin and light and relevant to the shape of my body. Although the studio is still chilly, I find it hard to breathe as the furnace of my blood rushes to the surface of my skin, turning it lobster-red like a smack on the cheek. The innermost layers of my clothing, normally lovely silky garments I get a thrill just from the joy of having next to my skin, feel loathsomely like fur. This is a truly disgusting sensation – matted, sweaty fur. God knows why this morning I chose to wear a thin V-neck jumper over the T-shirt next to my skin. It itches like a hair shirt. Anyway, wrenching the goddam clothes off I grab the phone in a strop.