Poppy Day (5 page)

He could see very little from within the dark space. The air was stifling. Each hot breath taken through his hessian mask left his lungs unsatisfied. With no means of cradling his head or protecting himself, his bones and skull were at the mercy of every bump or sudden brake that jarred him against the metal, which was hot where it touched against bare skin.

Martin closed his eyes, alternately cursing and praying to a God whose existence he had always been sceptical of: ‘Help me, Lord, help me, don’t let me die,’ ‘What the fuck is going on? Why are you doing this to me?’ and repeating, ‘This is real’ in his head over and over. He blocked out thoughts of Aaron. Martin was with it enough to know that if he let himself mourn, there would be no room left to think about his own survival and the one thing he had to do was concentrate on staying alive. No matter what, he had to get back to Poppy. At some point on the journey, he lost consciousness. Regardless, the car bounded along its dusty path in the midst of a convoy of
similarly
rusted desert run-arounds.

When Martin came to, he was lying on a mattress. His arms hurt; they were secured above his head, tied to a metal bed frame. His body armour had been removed. He broke into a sweat, knowing that having been transported and imprisoned he had very likely missed the best opportunity he had of escape. Getting away would be that much harder now he was
incarcerated
. The muscles on his arms and back were beginning to cramp. He had wet himself, the shame of which was acute. Despite the heat in the room, he was shaking. He reasoned that he couldn’t be cold and once he recognised that he was shaking with fear, was able to control it slightly.

His overriding need was for water. His spit was thick; his tongue, larger than usual, rasped against the roof of his mouth. The walls of his throat felt as if they were sticking together.

With the cover still over his head, Martin couldn’t see. He determined it was sacking by the texture. He tasted blood in his mouth, but didn’t know exactly where or how he was injured. Opening his mouth wide, he felt the unnatural pull of skin and the sting of a fresh wound. He remembered his face skimming the rim of the car boot, the rubber seal having long since
perished
. He pictured the deep gash that ran from mouth to cheek. The plastic strip that bound his wrists bit into the skin; he desperately wanted to rub the sore areas.

Martin’s head twitched from side to side in an effort to hear, to figure out his environment. The room was at least big enough to accommodate a double bed, it was hot and there wasn’t a single sound to break the silence. These were the three things he knew to be true. He felt dazed and so edgy that it was difficult to think about anything for a significant length of time. His mind flitted from one thing to another. He lay still, but inside his head there was panic. Conflicting suggestions leapt into his mind: ‘Shout, move, scream, get away, kick out, lay still, be quiet, listen, pray…’ He tried his best to ignore them. Martin gave up trying to get comfortable. There was so much wrong with his physical situation he didn’t know what thing to
concentrate
on first. Despite the silence, it was as if he was being bombarded with information, most of which he was unable to process. ‘Think like a soldier. You’ve been taken! What should you do? Shout now! Jump up, try and stand. Stay still, keep safe, be invisible, don’t antagonise. Help will be on its way, someone will come, Martin, someone will come. Reason with them, shout loudly, try something, anything!’

Martin tried to remember his training. The whole unit had been given a session on what to do if you were taken. ‘Conduct Under Capture’ was now, however, a dim and distant memory. The one element he recalled was ‘think about loved ones and the joy of reunion’; this was to help you focus on the thing that would give you mental strength, a reason to survive. His mouth twitched into a small smile behind the cloth. That was the one thing he didn’t need to be trained on; thinking about Poppy was automatic, like breathing. He mouthed a silent prayer, an apology: ‘I’m so sorry, Poppy, I should never have left you. I’m sorry…’

The sack over his head had been pulled back and held taut, causing his nose to press upwards; the prickly cloth irritated his whole face. It stank of old dust and cooking smells. He could blink, but as his eyelashes skimmed the rough hessian, tiny fibres were pushed into his eyes. He was unable to move his hands to scratch the itch or release the fabric.

His breath was warm inside the covering. Tiny drops of spit and sweat gathered in the space around his mouth. He could feel the fabric rubbing his wet jaw, causing a rash. He was
desperate
to gulp air unfiltered by the filthy sack.

It felt as if bugs, lice or similar were crawling down his face, over his hair and skin. It could have been something as
innocuous
as sweat trickling, but he was convinced it was the marching feet of insects. With his hands restrained and unable to bring his fingers up to his brow, he surrendered to a silent rage. With every muscle coiled in angry response, his impotence caused tears to pool, which ironically offered some relief. There was worse to come for Martin Cricket, but it was the first few hours that were the hardest to bear.

Martin took a deep breath, and was trying to think how he could make his face more comfortable, when he heard a small cough. He realised for the first time that he was not alone. His body convulsed. The breath stuttered in his throat. Narrowing his eyes into slits, he tried once again to look through the sacking, but could only make out tones of light and dark. There was a stranger in the room, possibly several strangers. He couldn’t see them, but they could see him. He knew they wanted to hurt him, they had already hurt him and he had seen them… poor Aaron.

He spoke for the first time, ‘My name is Martin Cricket. I am a British soldier with the Princess of Wales’s Royal Regiment!’ The words sprang from him unrehearsed. The sound was muffled, uttered through dry, uncoordinated lips. He was aware that he should try to make contact, believing in the possibility that the whole thing was a terrible mix-up. Did they think he was someone of influence? Was it a simple case of mistaken identity? Surely they knew that he was only doing his job? He thought that maybe his captors would hear that he was a British citizen and let him go.

P
OPPY LOCKED HER
front door. The ceremony was familiar, turning the key and then pushing the frame with the heel of her palm not once but twice, to check it was secure. Having decided to go back to work, Poppy ambled towards the lift, figuring it would better for her state of mind to be immersed in an afternoon of nits, suds and gossip than to sit on the sofa in silence considering all the possibilities.

No one noticed her enter the salon; it was business as usual for everyone except Poppy, who felt ethereal. She donned her blue and white striped polyester tabard, the uniform of the menial. Its front patch pocket was sewn up the middle making two sections; the fabric sagged under the weight of curlers, combs and her emergency Polos. She had been issued with the garment on her first day, hating it on sight. Now, however, putting it on was an integral part of her working ritual. Without the scratch of the nylon stitching against her skin and the static crackle it created when she touched metal, she didn’t feel
physically
equipped to perform her role. She rollered and pinned Mrs Newton’s hair while her mind tried to sort through the various scenarios regarding her husband’s disappearance.

Option one, Martin was dead, she just didn’t know it yet. Poppy rejected this; her brain would not allow her to consider this or even process it as a possibility.

Option two, he had been briefly separated from his mates and was now safely back at the base, possibly injured, maybe with a broken arm or dislocated shoulder. She liked this option the best so far. Oh my goodness! If this were the case, then he would be coming home! Oh thank God! He would be coming home, her beautiful husband. She smiled at the prospect.

‘Y’all right, gel?’ Her customer could see she was miles away.

‘Yup, I’m fine, Mrs Newton,’ Poppy mumbled against the four hairpins between her lips.

The old lady nodded, lifting her ample bust with her folded arms. Mrs Newton did not want to be trotting off to bingo with a lopsided do.

Option three, he really was missing. What did that mean, missing? It was a bloody desert, for God’s sake! Where could he have got to? Poppy knew he had a crap sense of direction, like the time they had to go up West and ended up in Brent Cross, twice. All because of a dodgy roundabout and the fact that he refused to consult the A–Z or phone his mate who was a cabbie. Not even Martin could get lost in a load of sand, could he? If he had fallen off the back of a Land Rover or tumbled off a tank, surely his mates would have noticed and gone back for him… Unless… Unless…

Poppy felt her knees sway slightly; her head felt cold, the pins tumbled to the floor from her open mouth. The true picture of option three came into perfect focus; her breath lost its natural rhythm. She felt the instant covering of perspiration, chilly against her skin. What if they didn’t mean ‘missing’, what if they meant ‘taken’? An image flashed into her mind, Martin was wearing what she called his summer uniform. She thought about school, when in the summer term you were allowed to ditch your jumper and skirt in favour of a little gingham dress, not that she ever had one. Instead, her mum used to make her roll up her sleeves and go without socks… well, she always thought of the pale desert camouflage as the equivalent of his little gingham dress.

Poppy saw it clearly: Martin had a helmet on with a strange chin strap and what looked like a microphone sticking out. His face was more tanned than she had ever seen it and he was shouting, ‘Over here! Jonesy! I’m over here!’ He sounded
desperate
to be heard. His eyes were wide. She could see the whites around his irises exposed. He looked frightened. Was he
frightened
? He then made a strange noise as though he had been winded. It was a deep, short, guttural exhale, the like of which you sometimes hear on the sports field when someone takes a blow to the stomach; quite literally as though the breath has been knocked out of them. Then it went dark and quiet. The picture disappeared and there was only blackness.

Poppy knew then. She knew that he had been taken, she had seen it. She saw it then and she could see it whenever she needed to. It lasted no more than five seconds, but she knew that it was real; could
feel
that it was real. Poppy wandered out on to the street in a daze, not sure what to do next, who to tell or what to tell them. She doubted that even the
National
Geographic
would have taken her seriously. How could she explain to anyone what she had seen? She would be laughed at. She trod nimble-footed over the pavement until she hovered on the broken white line in the middle of the road, sandwiched between white vans and the speeding, Lycra-clad couriers on bicycles. Caught midstream, Poppy was oblivious to the abuse mouthed at her from road users, urging her to ‘get out of the bloody road!’

She stood at the halfway mark, having forgotten all about her customer and the fact that she had a shampoo and set to finish, when the phone on the reception desk rang. It became a focus for Poppy above the groan of the traffic. Christine answered it in her usual fake telephone voice. She had an
irritating
way of going up at the end and over-pronouncing the letter ‘s’, her voice an octave higher than usual.

She sounded to the uninitiated like little Miss Sunshine, permanently happy and sweet, but this was a false impression. The reality was that she was miserable and miserly. Christine would rather be counting the takings with a fag clamped between her lips while the dirty smoke swirled up into her hair, giving her fringe a permanent tinge of yellow. Her face would twist as she spoke through a mouth full of cigarette, the side opened slightly to allow the words to escape; her teeth were brown and crowded, with smoke swirling around in there too.

She had no children, which Poppy thought was a blessing. She would have been as crap as her own mother, if not worse, and that’s saying something. She was fond of telling Poppy, ‘You’re the daughter I never ’ad,’ and Poppy would think, thank Christ for that. The main difference between her mum and her boss was that Cheryl was as ingenuous as Christine was
divisive
. If Poppy had to choose between the two… They would both get nil points, a draw. In Eurovision terms they would be Luxembourg and Latvia.

Poppy stuck with it for one simple reason, it suited her. The salon was situated on the ground floor of the flats where she lived, making her commute non-existent. She was two roads away from where her beloved nan now resided and she used to be a short stroll away from the garage where Martin worked, until he made other decisions about his career.

Poppy’s whole world was within five minutes of where she woke each morning – fabulous. What’s the expression; the
best-laid
plans of mice and men?

Christine dropped fag ash all over the appointment book. On the wrong side of sixty, she dressed as though she still had the pert body that she was gifted with as a teenager; one of those women who had the makings of pretty if circumstances had been a little kinder, with a little less grime, a little more class, a little less poverty and a lot more fruit and veg (preferably organic).

Christine had a face and a voice that she used for customers, a different one for her staff and a COMPLETELY different set of faces and voices that she used when talking to a man, any man. Whether the male in question was sixteen or eighty-six, she spoke to them as though they were prey. Poppy had, over the years, watched burly East End builders, who came to pick up their wives from the salon, cower like baby girls as Christine made her move.

She carried with her an ingrained whiff of body odour that no matter how many showers she took or how much she scrubbed and sprayed, wouldn’t shift. It was the kind of smell you sometimes experienced at the end of the day, having worn man-made fibres while you laboured away. She disguised the grim odour with a liberal application of sweet scent, which did nothing to help, only adding to the heady cocktail.

‘Snipz Unisex Salon, Christine the proprietor speaking. How may I help you?’

It made Poppy cringe every time she heard the phone answered in that manner. She cringed without fail even though she knew what was coming. Christine answered the phone up to ten times a day. Having worked at Snipz for six years, an average of three hundred and thirteen days a year, meant Poppy had endured a little fewer than nineteen thousand cringes to date.

‘Poppyissforyou!’ she bellowed, her volume cutting across the road noise, confident the voice on the end of the line was not a customer.

Poppy wandered back towards the salon. Her boss’s dulcet tones had reached her down the street and probably half the people in the next street as well. Her client was still engrossed in a magazine with her hair half pinned up. Poppy didn’t think she had noticed her absence; she may even have nodded off, judging by her slumped posture. Either that or she was dead. Whichever.

Christine jabbed the phone towards Poppy, extending a painted nail in her direction, ‘’urry up!’

Poppy ignored her. Sometimes this worked best for both of them. She knew it was Sergeant Gisby before he spoke.

There was a silence. It was as if the two verbally danced in silence, skirting the issue, unsure how to begin, twisting and passing each other in well-choreographed moves.

‘How are you, Poppy?’

‘I’m…’ She felt lost for words quite literally; not knowing how to describe what she was feeling or how she was. Poppy Day had, her report said,
a fourteen-year-old reading age despite being only six, and an excellent grasp of the English language and its vocabulary
. She didn’t have the words because she didn’t have the understanding, ‘… fine.’

‘Good. I am glad that you’re all right. No more news, I’m afraid, but I’d like to come and see you when you finish work. Would that be convenient?’

Would that be convenient? It wasn’t as if she had other plans, or that anything she may have planned could have been half as important as anything he might want to tell her, like whether or not her husband was alive or d… d… not.

‘That would be fine, Rob. I’ll be home at about sixish.’

‘Great, Poppy, I’ll see you then.’

Christine pounced. ‘Oooh, Rob is it? See you about sixish? And what, might I ask, would your Mart think about you entertaining gentleman callers of an evening while he’s off fighting for his country, God knows bloody where?’ She
delivered
the whole speech without drawing breath. She did that a lot, talked until she ran out of air rather than pause, as though she was on a timer.

Poppy looked her squarely in the eye. ‘What would Mart think? Mmmn… he would think, thank God my Poppy isn’t like Christine and, therefore, not likely to shag the first thing that she sees in trousers the moment her husband’s back is turned.’

‘Oh Poppy love, I was only joking!’ She patted the girl’s thin arm with her talons, attempting a girlish giggle.

Poppy continued to look her in the face, her expression stony. ‘So was I!’

Christine chose to swallow the lie. Both glad the
conversation
was over.

It had been a very long day. Poppy sat on the sofa in the dark. The silent gloom suited her, enabled her to think without
distraction
. She replayed the five seconds of vision that she had encountered earlier, trying to see around the corner, to hear more, feel more. There was nothing else, but it was enough.

It wasn’t often that she wished she had someone to talk to, but this was one of those times and her mate would not have sufficed. Jenna had been in Poppy’s life since junior school, they looked and sounded similar. Jenna was her surrogate family; in fact not surrogate, she was family.

She had always been there for Poppy when things were bad at home, helping in the small ways that children can. She was still there for her now, not that Poppy was so afflicted or inept that she needed constant care and attention. There was no rota, but Jenna was protective, knowing what she had been through. In this instance, however, Poppy wanted to talk to someone who had life experience, like a mum, ha! Or more specifically a dad – Poppy wished that she could talk to her dad. Having never spoken to or met her father that would have been an interesting inaugural conversation.

Poppy’s biological father was a ‘No Hoper’. For years she thought the ‘No Hopers’ were followers of a bizarre religion, like the ‘Jehovah’s whatstheirname’ or the ‘brethren of the thingy’ that you see on the High Street. The ones with the scarves and the kids that look too old to be wheeled around in buggies.

Every time her dad was mentioned or asked after, her nan, quick as a flash, would say by way of excuse or justification that he was a ‘No Hoper’ and came from a family of ‘No Hopers’.

Poppy used to wonder what the significant behaviour of his sect was. She recognised that the Jews had their particular Sabbath; the Latter Day Saints didn’t do Christmas, or was that the other lot? Anyway, she figured that her dad’s particular religious group must have been against having anything to do with daughters, illegitimate or otherwise, because she had never seen him, heard from him or had so much as a birthday card in her whole life. As her mother was fond of pointing out when questioned, ‘Your dad? You wouldn’t know him if you shat him. In fact, I’m not sure I would!’ Nice.

Poppy rather liked the idea of her dad being a bit mysterious, living in his unusual sect. She even learned a hymn, ‘Onward Christian Soldiers’, thinking that if ever she was to go and live with him, she didn’t want to turn up completely ignorant.

She saw exactly how it would happen in her mind, thinking about it before she fell asleep some nights. He would live in a huge church, obviously, and when she walked in he would say to her, ‘Do you go to church, Poppy?’

‘Only at Christmas and Harvest Festival, but I do know a lovely hymn.’ She would then break into a tuneful rendition of the above and bang! She would be in, a fully paid up
scarf-wearing
-buggy-pushing member.