Poppyland (2 page)

I am a bit worried about seeing my work, a lot is riding on it – not least me getting all the way here from New York, and I always have a pre-show terror that I have been painting the wrong thing all this time. Anyway, I am going to focus right now on the cheerful and solid image of Jezebel and Ezra dancing, and it is appropriate, as they are the inspiration for one of the pictures in the show. When I do this, I know all of it is going to be fine.

I am by the sea now, on the quay by the harbour. Somewhere nearby is the famous mermaid. I can't see her, it is too dark beyond the street lights and although I am sure she is lit up, I don't know where to look, but
I can picture her supplicant pose, her head bowed, her naked grace. The only thing I know about her is that Eric Gill made her and he also designed the script that is used for the London Underground. Oh, and she is the Little Mermaid who lost her voice to the King of the Underworld. That's quite a lot to know about a statue, in fact. Especially one I haven't seen. The cab swoops out from among tall, coloured warehouse buildings and along the harbour. The street is wet with pewter skimming all surfaces, a dull grey gleam, too cold to evaporate and dry out, and not yet crystallising into frost. Beyond the fizzing street lighting, night begins to swallow roof tops and awnings, and needle-pointed church spires. Further along the harbour the opera house glows like a space-age pagoda out of the dark. In the cab the indicator ticks, otherwise all sound seems swallowed by the dark. Outside, above the invisible horizon, the moon is like a flower, purple shadow staining petal imprints on the solid silver disc, hanging as if nailed on to the flat, black sky. Looking at it, I can't help feeling it's hung a bit too low. My forehead is pressed against the cool window of the taxi, and I am so hot that my skin sticks to the smooth glass; my eyes flicker with a need to sleep and it is refreshing to look at something so clean and restful.

My brain chatters with rushing thoughts. What if my show is hung too low? What if my pictures are all drooping below the plimsoll line I carry in my head when I am painting them? What can I do? Nothing, is
the sensible answer. There is an hour before the doors of the gallery open to the public and the press, so I suppose I could get them all to help me and call it an installation. I'm about to arrive and at last I'll meet Hans Stettjens the gallery owner. When I realised I wouldn't be here to put up the show, he called me for an hour to talk about the hanging and said he would do it for me. He said to delay the show would have a drastic domino effect on me and the gallery.

‘But I can't come until after the funeral.' I was on the phone in London, sitting on the floor in my sister's bedroom overlooking the canal.

‘The funeral?' There was a long silence in which I heard him swallowing, then he said, ‘My dear, I am so sorry.'

‘It was my mum,' I said, and my throat swelled with the loss.

‘You poor child,' he said, and his sympathy was like a warm blanket around me.

‘It's really hard to believe,' I said. ‘I didn't used to see her very much, but I can't grasp that I will never see her again.'

‘You need time for your grief. Let me take care of your work. The paintings are beautiful and we will show them well for you.'

‘Thank you.' Once I began crying about my mother, it was hard to stop; all the regret I felt for not having seen her, and not having liked her much got muddled with the relief that she was not alive to drink herself to death now. Hans Stettjen's kindness and his interest and his capability all reminded me of what was
impossible between me and my mother. It's funny how much easier it is to express a whole range of emotions on a canvas than it is to sit face to face in a family and talk. Somewhere along the way I got scared of saying anything to my mother because I knew she was fragile and it might be too much for her. The small phrases people use can echo in a child's head and I didn't dare ask her what she meant when she shook me, aged five, after I had spilled ink across the whole of the sitting-room sofa, and said fiercely, ‘The trouble with you is that you can't keep still. You even got out of your cot on the wrong side and everything since then has been a struggle.' She had then stalked off and the door of her room had closed with a crisp click. I had told Lucy, my older sister, and she had looked very frightened. ‘Which is the wrong side?' she whispered.

‘I don't know,' I wept in reply. ‘Mummy didn't say.'

The next telephone conversation I had with Hans Stettjens was more businesslike: ‘Let's talk about how you would like them hung,' he said. ‘The nudes are very arresting; I see them as a triptych, no?'

‘No,' I almost yelled. ‘They don't go together at all. Well, not close together. They need space. Everyone needs space, Hans.'

For me, hanging an exhibition with my pictures in it is an act as intimate as the removal of my clothes. I had never imagined that I wouldn't do it myself, or
even be there for the final adjusting and changing of light and space between the work. And I hardly have the vocabulary for talking about them and how they should be. I can be articulate on paper or canvas, but not in conversation. I don't actually even know my right and left, which baffled Hans when he was hanging my pictures with me on the phone guiding him.

‘Yes, do it there! Do you see? I mean up a bit from the green one on the same side as her hair and the tree.'

‘The left, you mean?'

‘Do I?' I was waving my arms in front of me with the phone under my chin, mouthing at my sister Lucy to tell me which was left and which was right.

Hans Stettjens was unfailingly polite. ‘Yes, very good indeed, left it is,' he said as though I had performed a rabbit-from-hat miracle. I must say, it felt a bit of a miracle. I have never shown my work before without seeing the gallery space and the pictures hanging in it. And now I am about to arrive and they will all be there, ready and waiting for me. I was trying to explain to Lucy why it was weird, and the only comparison I could find was a bit random.

‘Well, Lucy, imagine if you had a baby and it wasn't with you one day and you went to a party and the baby was there all dressed and ready with someone else.'

I knew exactly what I meant and how I would feel; I could imagine a baby all dressed in a red satin outfit looking all wrong, but Lucy raised her eyebrows and nodded in a special ‘You are bonkers' way and said,
‘Mmm. Maybe, but I haven't got a baby, so it's hard to imagine any of it, Grace, and it's a lot of fuss to make when we've got to deal with all this business of Mum, you know.'

I groaned, then bit my lip. She wasn't going to understand and it didn't matter that she couldn't. Lucy has always been very down to earth, and she couldn't understand the battles I had with Mum.

‘Oh well, just believe me when I tell you that I need to hang my own show, it's very personal, I always do it myself.'

Lucy hugged me, ‘Oh, I'm sorry,' she said, and tears were swimming in her eyes.

‘And I'm sorry, too; the timing of everything is making this all so hard.'

So in the end, doing this show differently is only one of the myriad things that has changed in our lives, and it is nothing to do with Lucy, and it is no one's fault. Mum died. That's the thing that makes life different for ever more. And now is not the time to try to come to terms with it. I have to get through this evening in Denmark and then there will be time. I shiver, afraid of just how much time there will be from tomorrow.

I would have been in Denmark for a week by now if things had been different. I pull my knees up to my chest and hug my shins, making myself tightly small on the back seat of the cab. I wish I had someone who could have come with me, someone to talk to. Leaning back against the plumped seat back, I flirt with a wild notion of escape, of opening the door at the next traffic lights and stepping out into nowhere.

Three weeks ago in New York, when the paintings left, I wanted to call them back, to look at them again, to give myself another final chance with them. Shock and grief are playing havoc with my mind and I am scared to admit even to myself that I have no proper memory of Mum's face when I think of her now in the aftermath of her death, and in the same way, my pictures dissolve in bewildering chimera in my mind when I am trying to visualise them. I couldn't command any sense of them once they had gone, and I couldn't remember what I was trying to do with them. I kept expecting another chance, and it's the same with Mum. I did not expect never to see her again.

A year ago I won the award to be shown here in Denmark in a new amazing contemporary art gallery. I worked towards the show as a date, a deadline, an end in itself, without thinking much about Copenhagen or what it meant to be coming here all the way from the States on my own. To have a one-man show so far away from my life was a bigger deal than I could imagine, so I just didn't let myself think about it. I didn't really have time to think about anything else either; the show took a while to take shape and I was so wrapped up in the work that I didn't notice time slipping by until all the jumbled events that make up everyday life had loomed and cleared in methodical disorder, and when it was almost time for me to leave, my work was already shipped.

Mum was the last big thing in the way. Not Mum herself, but the way she and I could never get on,
even when separated by all the dark water of the Atlantic Ocean. It wasn't any different from how it had always been, the obstacles were the same. It had begun as small mutual childhood disappointments: hers that I was so chaotic and clumsy; mine that she couldn't laugh when I spilled a drink. Instead, she would purse her lips and sigh, and even from the beginning, neither of us knew how to say sorry. Silence is easy to live with, and to break it is as frightening as it would be to walk through a pane of glass. Mum and I had never managed to talk to one another. Both of us could talk to Lucy, both of us loved Lucy, and she was stuck in the middle willing us to get on. But she couldn't mend the fractured bond between us. In the end no one could.

I was all set up to go to London on the way to Denmark, dropping in from another continent just to have a stilted pre-Christmas lunch with Mum. I had talked to Lucy and we had agreed it would work best if she came too.

‘I'll go and get her and bring her to meet you,' Lucy had said. ‘That way there can be no ducking out.'

‘I want to duck out,' I had blurted down the phone to my sister, but she wasn't having any of it.

‘Oh no you don't. Just remember, you live far away and you only do this once in a blue moon. I am here all the time and it's not always easy.'

‘But you're good at it, Lucy, you always have been.' A childhood memory floated past me containing Lucy with neat hair and clean hands brushing the cat, kneeling on the floor in the hall with sunlight shafting
on to her hair. I was there, sitting next to Lucy, my favourite toy, a one-eyed doll named Blue in my arms, waiting for her to finish with the brush. Maybe it's not a memory, just a bad dream, but I think the next thing that happened was that the front door opened and Mum walked in. In my memory I held my breath, but I doubt I did in real life.

‘What are you doing?' she asked.

‘Nothing yet, but I am about to brush Blue,' I answered.

‘Blue's got fleas, she'll ruin the hairbrush.' Mum picked up my doll by the head and, opening the door, flung it out into the garden. She turned and smiled, a small, sharp flash in her eyes as she looked at Lucy and me and sighed.

‘Find something nice to play with, darling,' she urged, and walked briskly past us into the kitchen. I waited until she turned the radio on before I opened the front door and tiptoed out into the garden to find Blue and bring her back in. I hid her from Mum after that.

Lucy had sighed on the phone. ‘Maybe one day you and Mum will sort it out,' she had said.

‘I'll try when I come this time. I want us to get on, Luce, I really do.'

But Mum pre-empted my plan to see her, and let slip the vestiges of lucidity, sinking into breathless death behind her kitchen door on the day before I was to arrive. Lucy telephoned early. A call before seven in the morning can never be good news. Climbing out of sleep I heard the phone and I swallowed, a dry
lump in my throat. I think I knew already when I heard Lucy's voice, brittle and tight, staccato with confusion and strain.

‘Oh Grace. Oh God. Oh shit. The thing is, Mum died.'

‘Oh.' I felt my heart stop for a beat too many, then race away, while a desolate bell chimed in my head. ‘Good timing.' I realised I had said it out loud. Accidentally. Me and my big mouth. I found myself staring into the earpiece of the phone as if hoping my words would come back unsaid.

Luckily Lucy was still talking, she knew I hadn't meant it as it sounded. ‘Yes, but the thing is, they found her all folded up and crumpled like she had fallen off a towel rail behind the door into the kitchen. She was very thin.'

My ear was hot. I pressed the telephone tighter to it, wanting to feel something solid no matter how insubstantial. I couldn't tell if the quaver in Lucy's voice was grief or laughter.

‘Like Peter Pan's shadow,' I said.

‘What?' said Lucy. ‘What are you talking about, Sis?'

‘You know, he kept it rolled up in the drawer.'

Lucy gasped. ‘Oh, I see. Yes, I suppose so.' She began to laugh, I began to laugh as well, and somehow we were both giggling and gasping across five hours of time difference and our shock. Even when we stopped, the energy of laughing stayed inside us, propelling the first untested steps we had to take to begin our lives without our mother.

* * *

The taxi pulls up in an industrial part of the harbour. The sea glitters and slaps against the keel of a dark ship and the skimpy petals on the moon unfurl to cover it fully. It is as if a fall of soot has dropped through the cavern of a vast chimney and blanketed the surface of the sea. A moment of darkness exists, then a thin ribbon of light from further down the harbour brings back the dancing movement of the water. In that unlit moment, my skin crawls, and I shiver, the impenetrable blackness of night hooking me out of my reverie of displacement. On the street a taste of salt in the air hits the back of my throat, and the damp night is like a splash of cold water on my skin. Knotting the belt on my coat more tightly makes me feel pulled together. Better. Gazing around and stamping my feet to prove I am actually here in Copenhagen, I begin thinking randomly about corsets. Surely more should be made of the improvement to self-confidence that wearing them must bring? It is true, those women who wore them long ago didn't have to cross half the northern hemisphere, or at least eighty degrees of longitude, alone, so maybe they were never fully aware of how very good it is to stand up straight, take a deep breath in and walk tall. If—