Poppyland (15 page)

‘Either the weed is toxically strong or you are crackers,' he murmured, shifting on top of her, stroking her cheek with his thumb.

‘Though actually, you do have cheekbones like an Indian, don't you?' His mouth brushed her eyebrows, her lashes, her ears, before he cupped her head in his hands and kissed her mouth. ‘And I think it might be quite a turn on to fuck you in a past life, but I want to be me, not your twin brother.'

They both burst out laughing, quickly pulling off their clothes then diving beneath the heavy rug on top of the bed. In the dark under the blankets, laughter muffled, Lila's tongue was hot in Ryder's belly button, and hotter and so gentle running down the length of his cock. Ryder groaned and pulled her up to sit on top of him, arching his back to push up inside her, his hands on her waist pulling her hard down on to him. Fucking Lila was fucking great; he was deep inside her now and when she arched backwards her hair fell in a cool whisper right down her back, sweeping his thighs, tickling the soft skin between his legs. Ryder shifted position, turned her over so she was lying on her back, and looked into her eyes, pale brown eyes like an antelope. He took her hands, pressing them into the mattress, holding her down, loving her fast breath, the glazed desire in her eyes.

‘You're so hot, Lila, your legs wrapped around me are pulling me into—'

A shout penetrated the canvas walls of the tepee. ‘Lila, I've got Miss Reece, your old piano teacher, here to talk to you— OH!'

There was a blast of air and a stifled, ‘Oh, for heaven's sake!' and Ryder looked up to see Lila's mother in the door of the tepee along with another woman
who was wearing a hat like a tea cosy. The two women stared blankly across at Ryder and Lila, naked and making love on the rug.

‘It's summer,' was his first thought, ‘why does she need to wear that stupid hat?' He rolled off his girlfriend, who sat up, glaring, and pulled the rug up over them both.

Ryder knew he should feel embarrassed, but he didn't. A bubble of laughter floated out of him and he hid behind Lila, who was shaking with an anger which he hadn't known she could muster.

Lila threw one of Ryder's shoes at the two women. ‘Fuck off, Mum! You have no business in here. Please go away,' she yelled, but the flap covering the door had already fallen again, and two voices began a stilted and over-bright conversation outside the canvas wall.

‘Well, yes, I think we'll go and have a cup of tea. I've got a cake, I think.' Lila's mother was clearly trying to erase the vision in the tent as fast as possible from her memory.

Miss Reece went along with it. ‘Yes, of course. Isn't it a lovely evening? We've been so lucky with the weather this summer.' It was as if they were on a gentle garden stroll.

Inside the tepee, Ryder, still laughing, pulled Lila down next to him, stroking away her stiff anger, teasing her into laughing too. Nothing their parents did mattered very much. Nothing at all mattered, in fact. Life and laughter were as limitless as the long slow summer days.

To any outsider, it seemed impossible as time unfurled that Ryder or any of his friends would ever do anything except smoke and listen to music. None of their parents had any faith that they would manage to galvanise themselves to go anywhere, or do anything. But steadily, subtly, they were cutting their ties, unknotting the heart strings that kept them close to home and hearth. The thing Ryder noticed was that in order to do this, girls seemed to argue with their parents a lot more than boys. He was adept at keeping the peace, mainly because his parents didn't worry about him as much as they worried about Bonnie. He was both grateful for this and sad. They never seemed to care what he did at all. He found the best way not to mind this was to get out of the house and out of his head. Life was so much easier like that.

On occasion, things got a bit out of hand. Ryder sometimes woke up with a shamefaced sense of being fetid. There was an evening at a pub up the coast and he and Lila and a group of friends were all staying the night with someone's granny in the local village on the sea. Of course, the granny wasn't there, but a whole lot of them were in her house. Ryder woke up early with pins and needles in his legs. In the half-light he could see someone lying on the bottom half of his sleeping bag and therefore on him. Moving any part of his body was impossible – the sleeping bag was one of those ones that tapers at the end – like a wedge of parmesan cheese, or so Ryder had joked when he got in it last night. It must have been a strong spliff because in the cold light of day the sleeping bag seemed more like a
wind sock. Oh, what the fuck. It was Lila on his legs; curled up with hair all over her face, flopped forwards, her arms wrapped around her folded legs, and her hair like a pony's mane. There were ten people crashed in this cottage for the night. God knew where Jack's granny was. Playing golf, perhaps. Anyway, she definitely hadn't been there when they were in the kitchen making a bong and Lila smoked too much and went into a kind of trance that Ryder found very confusing. Frankly, it put him off drugs for a while. Well, a short while. Half an hour, to be exact. He had to keep waking her up and taking her out into the garden, and giving her orange juice to stop her shaking and crying. Someone said it was better if you drank it upside down, so they made her do a handstand which, even now, many years later, makes Ryder wince in sympathy for the poor, drugged girl whom he loved. He was sure she would feel better if he could get her to drink the orange juice. A straw was essential, but the sight of poor Lila, doing a handstand and frowning as she furiously sucked at one of those curly straws, tickled him and he got the most terrible attack of laughter. It was really infectious and everyone laughed except Lila. When she got better she threw the orange juice at Ryder and said the sight of him made her sick. That stuffy morning in the hot bedroom in a mysterious grandmother's house, Ryder also felt a bit sick. He put it down to the purple scratchy carpet right next to his face. It was nailed down to the boards, and Ryder must have still been stoned, because he found himself absorbed by speculation. Did the granny lay this awful carpet herself? Oh,
for fuck's sake, did he have nothing more interesting to think? It was another morning, time to get up, but his head was wedged up against the wall. Propping himself up in the curtained gloom he could just about see that there were at least four people asleep on the floor. The big question was, which one of them had the weed?

Ryder looked back on that summer as a time when he was drifting in a slow-flowing current of intense and largely invisible energy, apathy loaded and laced with hormones. Slowly he was being propelled – in a haze of drugs – through the final bottleneck of confusion, until life as a dependent child was exchanged for life as a supposedly independent adult. The prospect was both alluring and alarming. Mostly, Ryder liked to shy away from it. It was amazing how days could follow on from one another and the biggest sum of his achievements would be rolling three joints and mending a bicycle puncture so he could get to the pub to meet Jack and Lila.

Bonnie was away a lot, principally because she was in love. Her boyfriend Mac was a third-year archaeology student. His finals were in June and in the autumn he would be embarking on his MA. She had never been so devoted to a boyfriend before and Ryder was conscious that something had changed for ever. Bonnie had someone else to share her dreams with now, and Ryder would not be the main recipient of her inner world any longer. Bonnie and Mac went to Greece where he was digging on a site for part of the summer. They came home after a month – brown, happy and skint. Mac got a job as a bouncer in a Norwich
nightclub. Bonnie went to stay with him. Bill was quietly shocked and preferred to believe she was living on her own in Norwich, though this also offended him.

Jean was more loudly displeased. ‘What will become of her if she lives with him? She should be at home now the term is over.' The voice of doom, Ryder always thought. Why would anyone want to be anywhere near Jean? She was a total killjoy.

‘Why? She's grown up, Mum, and anyway, we don't belong to you, you know.' Ryder was speaking for himself as much as for Bonnie.

Jean twisted her wedding ring. Ryder could see her anxiety.

‘Yes, but I'm responsible for you. Your father and I are— well, I just don't think she should be away all the time.'

Ryder gazed at her across the kitchen table as he slowly carved slice after slice of bread and spread it with peanut butter, ritualistically consuming the whole jar, reflecting that such was his hunger that this did not even touch the sides of it. He moved on to bread and cheese, and was on the third slice of that when enlightenment struck.

‘Mum, have you dyed your hair?'

The look she flicked towards him was classic – guilty, and at the same time weighing up whether or not to come clean.

‘No. Well, I mean yes. I haven't exactly dyed it, it's more of a rinse. Do you think it's obvious? I was quite hoping no one would notice, you see.' Jean patted her head on both sides, as if that might change something.

Ryder laughed and went over to hug her. His mother only came up to his chin now, and he felt protective when she wasn't being annoying.

‘It's nice, Mum,' he said, and she laughed, grateful and pleased.

Ryder and Jack were hitch-hiking from Colchester to Norwich to see Bonnie and Mac that evening. Lila couldn't come because she was taking part in a moonlit drumming ceremony in a wood just off the A12. Ryder was relieved he had already made plans and so didn't need an excuse to get out of going to the drumming ceremony with her. It had been planned to coincide with the full moon. Ryder and Jack walked to the roundabout to begin their journey under a scumcoloured mass of clouds. In the late summer evening light, the fields stretching beyond the Colchester ring road were dusty brown. No rain for the past weeks had shrunk the grasses to thin blond straws poking out of the bare earth, and litter drifted like tumbleweed.

‘Doesn't look like there will be much moonlight for drumming,' Ryder said as they found their spot in a lay-by and he unfolded the cardboard sign he had made by using a strip of a shoebox and a marker pen for the word ‘NORWICH'.

‘What are you talking about?' The question was rhetorical, as Ryder knew full well. Jack had no interest in him answering.

Jack lit a thin one-skin joint he had pulled out of the pocket of his shirt and inhaled deeply before passing it
to Ryder. ‘It's so short sighted of my mother to have given Tom the car this weekend instead of me,' he groaned. ‘Tom's not really going anywhere, so he won't put any petrol in it, and look at us!' He waved his arms at the surrounding trailer park gloom as a flattened polystyrene McDonald's box flapped wearily across the road. Jack kicked it. ‘We're putting ourselves at terrible risk from perverts by having to hitch. I told my mum, but she just squawked something about me being ungrateful and drove off, so I couldn't even get a lift here.' He broke off to sway the top half of his body out into the road, thumb up, as a small brown car accelerated past. The driver, elderly with pebble glasses, didn't even glance in their direction. Jack slumped histrionically to his knees, groaning. ‘We need a girl with us. You and me have no chance of getting a lift.'

Ryder flicked the butt of the joint into the dirty long grass and stepped into the road, his new shades a shield creating an Easy Rider atmosphere. Or so he hoped. ‘Watch this,' he said, with a lot more conviction than he felt.

A camper van slewed towards them and stopped. A puff of smoke and a riff of Jimi Hendrix greeted them as the window was lowered. Grinning at one another, they climbed in.

Ryder hadn't much liked the idea of Mac at first. Bonnie was so into him it was disturbing, and Ryder felt excluded while also accepting that it was reasonable of her to exclude him. In fact, it would have been really sick of her to have wanted him to tag along the whole time.

‘I don't want to be the third leg of the stool,' he said crossly when she invited him to come up to Norwich to meet Mac. ‘I tell you what, I'll come with Jack.'

‘OK, that makes us the four legs of a table,' replied Bonnie.

‘Ha ha,' was the best Ryder could muster.

‘He's a boxer!' Bonnie was trying to make connections, and Ryder was giving her no chance.

‘I thought you said he was an archaeology student.' Tense with anticipation of dislike, Ryder could not allow his curiosity any small gleam of hope until he had met Mac himself.

Bonnie sighed. ‘He is. He's both. Just come and meet him, I know you will like him. Oh, I mean I hope you will, Kid, I really do.'

They were to meet in a pub. ‘It's called The Murderers,' Ryder told their driver, a flute-playing hippie with whom they had smoked three joints and had travelled a lot further in their minds than the mere two-hour journey between Colchester and Norwich.

Mac bought the first round of drinks, balancing a handful of plastic pint glasses as he wove between the tables in the crowded bar. He sat down next to Ryder and raised a glass to him.

‘I am glad we've met at last,' he said.

‘So, you box?' Ryder wanted to kick himself for sounding not only aggressive but also stupid. He realised how much he would cringe if his father had been here and asked that question. Shocked at his own surliness, he gulped the beer, a cold, sleek belt of alcohol, down his throat.

‘Well, yep, but I'm a complete amateur.' Mac was low key, and friendly. ‘I grew up in Lowestoft where there's a great boxing club and I'm still a member.' He grinned and Ryder liked his smile, felt himself warming up, and relaxed a little. Mac was still talking. ‘My dad used to box there, my brother does and all my family. In fact, my grandma has never missed a fight at our club. Watching, I mean, thank God.'

He looked at Ryder, then asked, ‘Tell me what you reckon for the European Cup line-up next week. Can I call you Kid, or is that just for Bonnie?'