Poppyland (21 page)

Oh fuck. Maybe life would improve with some breakfast? Definitely life would improve if the drilling noise would stop. He felt vaguely omnipotent for a moment as, in answer to his wishes, the drilling stopped. It was immediately replaced by an episode of
Z Cars
turned on much too loud.

‘BEEEP – calling car 274 on the corner of Beechcroft Avenue, come in please – BEEP.'

‘Officer Blaine, have you located the household? Residence of a mister – BEEP.'

‘Turn off the sodding TV!' Ryder yelled, unable to bear the pain his parents' insensitive behaviour was causing him. In desperation he burrowed further into his bed and wondered for a moment if a cigarette would help. Probably not, but he may as well have one anyway. He reached an arm out, feeling across
the floor for the packet he hoped might be lying there. Before he found anything, he heard thudding footsteps in the hall and his father's voice outside his bedroom.

‘Ryder, the police are here.'

Panic tasted like metal, solid like a box in his mouth, ramming fear down his throat. In less time than any thoughts left his brain, he found he was upright, out of bed, guilt chasing through him like a flame. What did he do last night? No, not the stuff he had just been remembering, but what did he REALLY do? With whom? Oh fuck, how stupid. At least he didn't drive home. And he wasn't that drunk. Was he? Every nerve ending in his body was screaming panic. Ryder knew he was overreacting, but sweat broke out on his upper lip and he succumbed to the state of paralysis that shock brought. He could not retain a simple thought in his head. He tried to concentrate on suitable clothes to wear for meeting the police. Fuck. What sort of clothes could they be? And if by some miracle it wasn't him, who the hell was in trouble? Dad? Mum? Ryder was pulling T-shirts out of his drawer like a mad man, rejecting the Sex Pistols one, and the New York Dolls one, in favour of the one which said, ‘Jesus loves you, but I'm his favourite'. Pulling denim out of the cupboard he hurled all his jeans on the floor. Not a single pair without holes, and holes look criminal. Shorts might be more suitable as the uniform of the upright citizen.

Oh man, he could do with spending a minute brushing his teeth or his hair, but instead Ryder
grimaced, rubbed his head to try to boost some circulation, and headed downstairs.

The scene was more surreal than any late-night pub experience. Ryder stopped short in the hall and stared at the disruption of his parents' home. The doorway from the hall into the kitchen was full of people, his mother at the table in her dressing gown, his father standing by the window, and two policemen like cartoon cut-outs with curling wires exuding from their pockets, hairy arms sticking out of their short-sleeved shirts. Their colonisation had extended to the kitchen table, where their black hats sat awkwardly among the cups, milk jug and toast rack. The kettle was shrilling on the stove. No one turned it off. Everyone in the room turned to look at Ryder. Ice ran beneath his skin. He suddenly knew why he was scared. He looked wildly at each person in the overheated room, hoping for a way out. Reality was hurtling towards him and his head pounded. He had not done anything wrong last night; the police were not here because of him. Ryder was afraid because he had nothing to fear. He saw his mother was crying, and comprehension flared bright then dimmed to nothing, like a lamp extinguished inside him.

His voice came from a long way off and it was a whisper. ‘It's Bonnie, isn't it?' he said.

Nobody moved, his mother's face was blotched and red, frightening. Ryder walked across and lifted the screaming kettle off the hot plate. Then he turned and unlocked the back door and stepped out into the garden.

Everything he had ever felt in his whole life was jammed in his chest and his throat trying to come out. All the rage and joy, the hope and despair, the love and regret writhed and got stuck. Ryder's skin felt as if it was stretching over and no sound, no tears, no anything came from inside Ryder. The apple tree where Jean hung bags of nuts for the small wild birds was studded with small vivid green apples. And with the purple wig. Ryder walked under heavy branches to the smooth tree trunk and sat down. The dew-soaked grass tickled his bare legs and drenched his shorts and the tree dug into his shoulder blades. Moments passed. They were not real. Nothing was real for a long time again.

In the local paper the photograph they used, apart from the Miss Pears Soap 1970 one, with baby Bonnie looking cute sitting in some cow parsley, was one of Ryder's. Bonnie with her dimple and her eyes lit up, making a daisy chain in the garden with her friend Nicky. Ryder had taken it with his new camera, it was his first roll of film. He had dropped it off to be developed earlier that week. The local camera shop delivered it back free of charge, posting the envelope through the letterbox early on Monday with a note saying, ‘With our condolences to you and your family.'

That was the day the police asked for a photograph of Bonnie. But it was worse than that. They asked for a photograph of ‘the deceased'. Numbly biddable, Ryder gave the one on top in the envelope. Bonnie was looking up at the lens, her face heart shaped, enquiry in her clear eyes. The colours of the picture,
the blue of her eyes, the red of her mouth and the pale gleam of her skin were vivid like a stained-glass window. Her immediacy, the lustrous life shining out of her, was at once both uplifting and stomach churning. Ryder felt his heart clawing up in his chest and up to his throat and a sob trying to escape with the urgent need to rebalance the lopsided wrongness of life without his sister in it.

Staring at the photograph, his tears falling on it, brushing them off angrily, kicking hard fury against the kitchen door, all made not one jot of difference to what had happened.

Ryder couldn't look at the rest of the pictures yet; the first one had swirled into his senses and swallowed up all the courage he hadn't realised he was holding on to. He was still staring at it when the police telephoned. There was no time for him to put up any resistance; he was malleable and compliant.

‘Yes. I've got one. Yes. It's here. They're coming now? They're outside? Oh. OK.'

Opening the door to police officers was becoming more normal than anything else. Ryder's aunt Felicity, widow of Jean's brother, had come to stay expressly to prevent the family from suffering these domino-effect experiences, and she clasped Ryder's arm with her small cold hands and shook her head.

‘Dear me, let's see,' she fluttered.

Neither she nor Ryder thought to ask what the photograph might be used for. Plump yet delicate in her white dressing gown, Felicity reminded Ryder of a dandelion clock. He never really felt she was there,
even the next morning when she stood, stepping back and forth, one arm across her bosom, the other hand pinching the bridge of her nose, her eyes shut but her head bowed over the newspaper. Bonnie was on the front page. Ryder's picture of Bonnie was staring out from the front of the newspaper.

‘TOO BONNIE TO DIE' was the headline. And yet she had died. And the local newspaper had all the details.

In a freak accident last week an American car, a Mustang, hit a stag on the A1065 near Brandon, killing outright the passenger Bonnie James, 19 years old and former Miss Manningtree and Colchester Beauty Pageant winner two years in a row. The stag was also killed, and the driver, Tony Mail, an aviation worker at the nearby Lakenheath airbase, was concussed. Darren Parden, 22, from East Tuddenham, was the first witness at the scene. He reported no passengers. Miss James was not found immediately. Her body had been thrown from the car by the impact, and it was not until later on the same evening when Tony Mail regained consciousness in hospital and told the nurses that he had been carrying a passenger, a hitch-hiker whom he had picked up in Ipswich, that a search party returned to the scene of the accident and her body was recovered from the forest.

Reading it, Ryder's mind whirred through the information like a football rattle, juddering loudly to cover
anything he could not bear to imagine or did not like. Most of it. Flicking his restless eyes across the printed words, he ended up obsessing about the stag. Where was the dead stag when the car was found? It was unacceptable and impossible that a stag crossing the road on a summer's night could provide the brick-wall ending to a life. Ryder had not believed it was true from the moment he was told. But now he knew better, and he knew that every local hospital has a mortuary, and that Bonnie was in the one in Thetford. Thetford, for God's sake. What the fuck was she doing dying anywhere near Thetford? Why did she hitch when she knew she shouldn't? What happened with the train connection? Why the hell had he not gone with her?

Ryder had not realised how many imaginary conversations he had always held with his sister until he was having them for real with no follow-up. When she was alive they were echoes of things they had talked about or reminders to himself to bring something to her attention. Especially once she was away at university. Ryder always remembered better if he said things out loud, and it was more likely that someone else would hear. Even if they are dead. She needed to know, for example, that the ribbon on the key was just right for putting over his head. She needed to know he wore the key round his neck, she needed to know Ryder had talked to Mac.

They met him at the mortuary. He had asked Ryder by telephone to ask Bill if he could come too. Bill had cleared his throat, looked up from the newspaper he
had been staring at. ‘Mm? Yes, of course he can come,' he said mildly.

There were stilted discussions about what she should be buried in, but it was just conversation, painful and halting, something to fill the screaming space. It had no practical purpose, as the truth of the matter contained no Sleeping Beauty corpse to mourn and kiss goodbye. ‘Are you coming, Mum?' Ryder asked Jean when he was off the telephone. Jean shook her head. Her smallness in her chair made Ryder shiver. He wanted Lila to come back from Europe, but even more he wanted Bonnie to come back from wherever she was now. She must be somewhere surely?

Bonnie was not laid out pale and perfect in a glass casket to be mourned tastefully. She was smashed to pieces on the A1065. ‘
A bracelet of bright hair about the bone
.' The line was all Ryder could think of. It had to be metaphysical. Reality was unspeakable, unthinkable.

The police gave the plastic sack with Bonnie's jewellery and the clothes from her overnight bag to Mac. They couldn't give it to Bill because he had walked back out to the car and shut himself into it. He had gone into the hospital morgue alone to identify her.

Ryder wanted to go too, but a doctor met them when they arrived, and after pushing his spectacles up, shoving his hands into his pockets, twisting back and forth on his heel as if stubbing a cigarette into the shining floor of the room, he beckoned them into a room and said, ‘Of course, there's no rule to apply
here, and you're free to see the – umm your – your sister, I mean.' Small beads of sweat appeared on his forehead. Ryder, who could feel nothing except a creeping numbness, glanced at him then stared at the floor. The room was insufferably hot. ‘But I must inform you that the body has suffered considerable trauma.' The small, muffled noise that Bill made was like a red-hot spear to Ryder's soul.

Bill reached a hand out to Ryder and squeezed his arm. ‘Ryder, you stay here. Doctor, I'm ready to come with you.' Bill stood by the door, his glasses reflecting the pale green of the floor. Ryder was glad not to see behind them to his eyes. He had a knowing hollow in his stomach, a permanent unease and a sense that something was missing. And the person he needed to get through this with was Bonnie. Left alone, Ryder felt as if he was melting into the ground. He went back outside to the car park with Mac who had been waiting in the entrance lobby. Beside him was the bag of clothes. Neither of them spoke as Mac picked up the bag and carried it to the car. The car was locked, Bill had the keys. Mac and Ryder stood waiting, one on either side of the bag. Ryder shivered in his T-shirt, Mac lit a cigarette. The air held the first bite of autumn though it was still only late August and the sun shone. Pigeons clattered their wings as they moved branches and settled again, cooing in the summer afternoon. A passing car engine on the road swelled then drifted away in pursuit of ordinary business.

God knows how much time passed before Bill returned. He walked towards them and Ryder could
not bear to meet his eyes so he shoved his hands into his pockets and moved back from the car, praying that Bill wouldn't speak. He didn't. He fumbled in his pocket for the keys, and when he found them he stood for a moment looking back towards the mortuary building.

‘Would you like me to drive, Bill?' It was Mac who spoke, mildly. And out of the corner of his eye, Ryder saw Bill's face shining with tears. Bill nodded.

Ryder stared at the bag of clothes all the way home, terrified of what it contained. And of what it did not. There was neither the yellow T-shirt nor the black skirt Bonnie had been wearing when she left. He was glad he hadn't seen her body, but his thoughts returned to her face smiling at him, and tears poured down his face as they drove home, and he let his desolate mind linger on his memory of Bonnie waving from the train the last time he ever saw her.

‘I want to know if you will risk looking like a fool for love, for your dreams, for the adventure of being alive.'

‘The Invitation'
Oriah Mountain Dreamer

Grace
Norfolk

Although it is May, and I left New York in a heatwave, here in Norfolk an early morning breeze plays and the smell of the sea is uplifting. Diamond raindrops flutter and chime against the glass of the window and the tiled roof, and small petals of white blossom whirl like wet confetti in the air. This house is developing by stages into Lucy and Mac's home, but the bathroom is still more like something from a Barbie Doll set from 1955. If they had Barbie in the Fifties, which I don't suppose they did. Apparently the whole house was a hymn to coloured plastic and wipe-clean wallpaper when Lucy and Mac moved in, but they have been stripping it back to an older state – more of a cow byre, to be honest, with whitewashed rough walls and huge exposed plank-like floor boards; wonky and curved as if reclaimed from ships' hulls. The bathroom is the last outpost of kitsch. The bath
and basin and loo are all made of sky-blue plastic and the floor is the same colour, as though the whole thing came out of one giant mould. The mirror, mounted in a frame of yellow bakelite shards, like plastic razor shells, reflects my eyes. Huge pupils flaring like ink. Something to do with jet lag, I suppose. It is four o'clock in the morning.